Outer

Hollis Joel Henry

Part I

Toozen remembered Auntie Heather, sitting hunched on the sand, retreating under her beach towel.

“Auntie, come swim nah,” he’d said that day, still a small boy.

But even at that age he could feel the waves of her anxiety and anger lapping up against him.

She steupsed like she was peeling skin between her teeth and her bitter voice was muffled from below the towel.

“You not seeing what going on? You too blind, boy. You too frigging naïve.”

Hard words, but Toozen understood. He’d been with her all day. He’d been part of the beach posse. But he wasn’t like the other children. Toozen had a thing for people. It mattered more to him that the beach made them happy. Auntie Heather had started the day happy. And she hadn’t been too happy these days.

It was an effort for her, he saw that morning, to put on the swimsuit over her crooked body, to look at herself in the mirror through her crooked eyes. To put the longer arm on her hip and pose and smile like a playful flirt. To shake her bam bam to the dancehall music on the kitchen radio, crooked hip bone protruding.

Toozen saw, when the white and green regional corporation maxi stopped at the beach and the doors opened, Auntie Heather’s bony, twisted chest rise for a mindful breath. “Come along, children,” she said like a big woman. And she led them onto the beach.

The others couldn’t see, like Toozen could, how with each step she was sinking. They were children so all they cared about was the hot sun and the water and the bright beach colors. But walking beside her, he felt it all, everything she felt. He felt her hearing the whispers and seeing the looks. Toozen felt Auntie Heather pull back as the beach crowd pulled back from her. “Stay close,” she said, big woman voice now small. All the energy her bent body had whipped up in front of the mirror at the center wasn’t enough to protect her from that crowd. So she ran beneath the beach towels and a cold rage.

“Auntie Heather, don’t be sad,” Toozen remembered telling her.

“Sad? I not sad. Who say I said?” the beach towel beast barked at him. “I don’t care about them. I hate them. I hate all these shitty shitty people. People are shit.”

All of them? His small boy self had wondered. What about the nice people at the center? What about Nurse Rajkumar who gave them Kiss cake when they went for checkup? What about Constable Antoine who would come on weekends in a jersey and jeans and drive them in the regional corporation maxi to the play park or the old recreation grounds, or for chicken and chips, or to the beach?

“No, Auntie Heather,” Toozen said that day. “People nice.”

And he remembered the snarl building up from deep down in her belly. He remembered waiting to receive it. But she stopped. And she sighed. And she spoke like a big woman again—not a bold woman striding onto the beach, but a woman who knows more than a child.

“No Toozen. People not nice. You nice, too too nice. And ah frighten for you. You don’t look like me but you are September too. They go hate you too. They go come for you too. You have to get hard, Toozen. They go mash you up.”

Auntie Heather, he smiled and his eyes filled up. “Big woman”—she was 16 at the time. Toozen wished he could go back and protect her, protect all of them. That was one ability he did not have. He had many others but he couldn’t go backward. Still he wished he could go back, if just to tell her they had not mashed him up.

Yes he was a September—the child of a child of a child born in late September. They had a big accident, Constable Antoine told them, the “science men and them,” he said. They were playing with light. All the children loved the idea, science men and them down in the cities making footballs and swords and giant butterfly wings from light. But it wasn’t anything nice. The accident made people sick and killed them. It gave women bad bellies and the children came out twist-up, incomplete or with too much.

The Septembers lived at the center. It wasn’t good but they didn’t know any better, and children make do. They knew they didn’t look normal. Some of them couldn’t do normal things. But they could still laugh and play, even if they had to drag their bodies across the floor. In small communities the Septembers grew up, started families, and had their own children.

And then a funny thing happened. The babies started being born normal. They had two legs and two arms, ten fingers and ten toes. They had normal Caribbean skin, black and brown and cream. Everything worked, their lungs and eyes and bawling baby voices. So they thought they were normal.

Toozen was one like this, a brown skin boy, miraculously normal. His hands were a little small, his head a bit big, but that just made him a small hand, big head boy, nothing strange. When he learned how to walk and his infant face developed into a toddler face, they saw the difference. He had big black eyes set back deep below his big forehead with fat, wild, and writhing eyebrows. That’s how you could tell them, the third generation, they all had it. They all looked like brothers and sisters, family of the wise and wild faces. The farthest thing from normal.

And it wasn’t only them. A transformation had taken place. This very beach, the long coast, had gotten it rough from the work of the science men and them. The giant coconut trees collapsed like addicts, trunks too weak to hold them up. The coconut shells turned soft and foul and sick yellow. The community of crabs came out with fused legs or less legs or shells without space for eyes or holes in their backs for insects to feed off their open flesh.

Even this sick beach had healed, but it healed strange. Now the tree trunks wrapped round and round like a brass horn and the giant coconuts gleamed. The crabs had brilliant purple, blue, and red shells. They had carapace gowns and carapace capes. When Toozen walked past them they turned to look at him and he turned to acknowledge them.

He had no fancy clothes, an old jeans and an old football league jersey. But he was important in his own way. One could say he was the master here, of the empty beach, the vacant coastal settlements beyond the forest, and the nearly abandoned town itself, where the few people that remained were hiding.

That day so long ago, the beach was packed with people. And they were beautiful to Toozen. He saw them in a way no one else could. That was the biggest difference, the thing that was not normal at all about him. Even Septembers like Auntie Heather didn’t have it. He could see and feel and touch without his eyes or hands. When he stood close to a person he felt what they felt, their fear, their sorrow, hope, and love. His little self wondered how could people be shit when you could feel them so?

And when they were far and he closed his eyes he saw them in his head, lights in the darkness like single candle flames, so that the crowded beach looked like it was covered in deyas; a sea of lights before the sea itself. Toozen couldn’t see the coldness or cruelty in their faces when the Septembers came on the beach. He just saw the light. And he was enchanted. He loved people. Auntie Heather was right.

Part II

When the bush changed, as the bush always changed, traveling down through the forest, Muradali was frightened. It wasn’t the first time they had come down this way. It wasn’t the first time they had to pass through the strange bush, September bush, flaring and distended and deep, deep green. The whole bottom half of the forest was affected. The forest creatures made September sounds, hollow and humanlike. Like they were talking or pretending they were people, trying to set a trap.

But Muradali was a veteran in this thing. He was a hunter. So he was accustomed. His rifle wasn’t fancy, not like Gomez’s. She had the best gear. She was a red woman1 who came from money. So she had everything nice. He didn’t like her. He tried to smile for her the first time they went on a hunt together. Gave her a sweet eye, but she pretended she didn’t catch it. Haul your ass, yes woman. He thought to himself.

No he wasn’t handsome. Yes he had a soft and sagging belly that made his dirty brown shirt flow over his belt. Yes he was married. But he was a damn great hunter. One of the best. She shouldn’t have blanked him so. And she was so friendly with Chainani—not a handsome man by any means. A good tracker and a good shooter, but no kind of dude’s man with women.

The three of them had been a team for about two months now. They were working hard. A week before they took down three—a 25 year old and two teenagers—hiding in Charuma woods. Gomez made her best shot yet with the fancy rifle, burned a hole right through the boy’s chest. Dead one time,2 he didn’t have a chance to drop and he was gone. That’s how you had to do it. You never knew what a September could do. Satan business. Once they were still breathing they could hurt people. Muradali knew many stories about them. He knew hunters that had survived. Septembers could really hurt people.

But he was a veteran. He had been moving through September bush for years. It didn’t frighten him anymore, not until today. And now he knew why. Down on the beach, strolling along, was the fucking monster of monsters, Outer himself. They passed Gomez’s fancy zoom lens between the three of them to make sure it was him. Then they passed it around to check again. No mistake, he was in a jeans looking like it belonged to his father it was so big for him. He was wearing an old green jersey. It was him. They knew his funny face well, the eyebrows wild like September bush. They knew the eyes, big and expressive. “Don’t get fooled by Outer’s nice eyes” the warning was shared down in the lodge and at church.

Lying on the ground, Muradali passed the lens back to Gomez and they watched each other. There were no more petty thoughts between them. Truthfully, she wasn’t a looker herself. It didn’t matter. They might be dead already. Outer might have them already. They didn’t know his limits. No one knew how September power worked. But they knew he was the strongest on the island. He could be reading their minds. He could be walking around on the beach while his mind was standing over them in the bush. He could be hearing their hearts beat. And their hearts were beating hard.

Muradali nodded at the other two hunters, closed his eyes, and began the prayer; the Lord is my shepherd, saying it in his mind. It’s what the pastor said to do to protect themselves. That’s all they had against Septembers this strong, faith. This was God’s work they were doing. They were cleansing the nation. Satan had tainted the land with these creatures. And more of them kept coming. So many bad womb women. And they were getting stronger.

Down in Siparia there was Khaki Pants Susan, who set people on fire when she looked at them. There was talk of a real monster in Delta Amacuro, hiding in the swamp, using his mind to make people slaves. He had a kingdom in the swamp, the Spanish said.

Outer was the worst of all. He left people dead, so many people. You knew where he’d been from the bodies. Bodies on the street, in houses and in stores, there was not a mark on them. Their eyes were still open. He was a walking epidemic, passing3 people out.

Many hunters had come for him. That’s how they knew his face. He’d been captured on many a device. The problem wasn’t getting his image. It was getting out with your life. No hunter ever did. Muradali himself had come to collect the bodies of friends. He’d said prayers over them while they stared empty into nothing. The same thing could happen to them now.

Chainani was the first to find his courage. He checked his rifle. He nodded to the others. He crawled southward, weapon in his left hand, stomach flat on the ground. Chainani was always the left side of the cone. Muradali was the right and Gomez the center. The idea was, if the September’s attack was a wave they would not be packed together. He might miss one or even two of them. This idea was hope and faith. Nobody knew how this Satan business worked.

But they were still alive. They had a chance. Once they could take their shot they were taking it. Maybe he had not seen them.

Part III

Toozen saw the hunters long time, three flames creeping through the forest. Everything alive had a light, even the bush. But from people it was different, brighter, jumpy. Like it wanted to run. Like it wanted to feed. People light always stood out. So he saw them way off and he knew they would have to be dealt with. It made him breathe heavy. He wanted to walk the beach today and think about the old times. He didn’t want to have to go inside the muck, head deep, with these people and their thoughts.

Let them come, he told the crabs and coconut dreams. Ah go deal with them just now.

He was a lover of peace. That’s where the name “Toozen” came from, Uncle Brian had told him. Like Auntie Heather, he was one of the older Septembers at the center. He was born with arms and legs frayed like the roots of a plant. So he couldn’t walk or work. But he could talk. He was a storyteller like Constable Antoine, with even more jokes.

“Toozen boy, you know how you get that name?” he said one time. Uncle Brian appreciated the youth’s willingness to listen to any story from anybody—and even better, he was gullible as hell. “You get it from the Chinese! ‘Zen’ means peaceful in the Chinese language, and you real real quiet. So they named you ‘Too Zen,’ get it? ‘Too Peaceful,’ you see?”

Toozen laughed at himself. He was really a dotish child. Not stupid, but he would believe anything. Or maybe he just wanted the people telling him stories to feel good about themselves. It made him happy that Uncle Brian was happy. It was a hard thing having roots for arms and legs. What did it hurt, believing his stories?

You too blind, boy.

He missed them all from the center. He missed the days by the long mirror and the kitchen radio playing dancehall. Maybe that was dotishness too. Because as he got older it all changed. No, those were good times then. It was the circumstances that changed. Too many Septembers like him were being born. He remembered the first time he saw one on a screen during the news. It was a little girl lighting matches by looking at them. Toozen thought it was magical and wonderful. Not knowing people, he couldn’t see what it would mean. Septembers were no longer just ugly and unfortunate wretches. They were now threats. They were doing “Devil thing.” People were frightened.

When they were of age, they sent Toozen and the others to the government secondary school. It was like throwing crabs into predator waters. And the Septembers, they just wanted to belong. They were not ready. Toozen remembered his friends, cornered and beaten. He remembered a girl like his sister, school shirt open and bra lifted, in a ring of boys, terrified but not fighting, trying even to smile. In remembrance he touched his head and felt the knobs and knots from the many beatings beneath his curls. He remembered his friend, a September like him, punching him along with the others. It was that bad, the need to belong.

How could he judge? Toozen would try as well to be friends with the bullies. They would beat him Wednesday and he would smile at them on Thursday. One time he even tried to explain to a girl about the flame. He told her, “you don’t understand. I see light in you.” And she smiled and snarled, and ran to get the boys for him. And they slapped Toozen, and they beat him and they left him on the ground.

He thought that if he could show he was not so different, not a threat, not bitter from the attacks, they would accept him. That wasn’t how it went. There was only fear or disdain, no compassion in between. That’s how people were, Toozen began to see. He could smile big until his jaw burned. He could talk soft until his voice disappeared. He could give everything—his labor, his love, and the little small change in his September poverty pockets. He could change everything except what he was, and that was all that mattered to them.

Then they started attacking the center. Not school children, grown people. They threw big stones at the windows. They sprayed ugly words on the walls. Constable Antoine got into a fight with one and knocked him out with a hard cuff. That made the children happy for days. But he had been punched as well in his stomach and it made him sick. For Toozen it was strange because in the shows people got into fights all the time and they were alright afterward. Constable Antoine got more and more sick.

Toward the end they had to take the long maxi ride north on the coastal road to visit him at the Sangre Grande Hospital. It was terrible, the ugly glares they received. At least in the village they were accustomed to Septembers. Grande was a massive town overflowing with hostile eyes. Toozen, by that time, was old enough to recognize them. He was wise enough to see the danger in dwelling in the dreamy land of lights.

But he went to visit Constable Antoine anyway. Even when the others wouldn’t come, Toozen went. He sat by the old man’s bedside and listened to his troubles and his stories. Despite everything, he was still a listener. Constable Antoine had been a big man, not in height or build, perhaps not even in ways. Perhaps he was only a big man in the mind of the children he cared for on weekends at the center. He cooked souse and pig tail soup for them. He taught them how to play football. He told them footballers never said “sorry.” They said “hard luck.” It wasn’t bad manners, it was “man thing.” He taught it to the girls as well.

Toozen visited him as often as he could. He did his best to smile and listen and update him on life down at the center. Most times the updates were lies. He didn’t want the constable to know how bad it was. Most times Toozen had to fight away the tears. He could see the constable’s flame, dimmer and dimmer.

“Aye, what I tell you about the soft man thing?” Constable Antoine told him once. Toozen thought he’d been holding it in but the old man had seen it anyway.

“I’m not! I’m not!” the boy said.

Constable Antoine reached out to push his shoulder as he’d often done down at the center in the old days. He couldn’t make it, so he had to lie back. But still he told the boy, “Toozen, you are a big brother down there now, you know. You are an uncle now. You have to be strong for the rest ah them.”

“I know, I know,” he said that day. It seemed to him all his life people had been telling him to be strong.

“You know? It don’t seem like you know, eh,” the constable winced when he chuckled. “You have a fighter in you. You have what you need. Why you think they named you Toozen?”

This, he knew for sure, “Because I am too peaceful.”

“What?” The old man nearly found the strength to stand up on the bed.

“Zen means peaceful in Chinese. So I am too peaceful.”

And the ailing man produced the healthiest steups. “Who tell you that shit? Brian nuh? Boy your name is Toussaint! You are named for a warrior who fought for his people. Down in Martinique or one of them islands. Brian again with his damn wrong information.”

Toozen stopped his beach stroll. He closed his eyes to see. He looked over his shoulder without looking. The hunters were close enough. He would have to deal with them. No peaceful day on the beach for him.

Constable Antoine, like Auntie Heather, like Uncle Brian, and so many more, were dead now. The shitty people killed them. Sometimes they used violence, sometimes neglect. The people got shittier and shittier, so that the Septembers had to run and hide in the bush. And in the bush Toozen finally stopped being so dotish. In the cold night forest he finally understood.

The flame was beautiful, but it was just a flame. It meant life, like a beating heart or a rising chest. But the harshest heart still beats. What mattered wasn’t the flame, but what was done with it. And he could feel with his mind, listen with his mind, for everything ugly and small and ruthless in a person. In truth the light was nothing more than the flame on a stove, like the old gas stove in the kitchen at the center, cooking a pot of hunger and fear. And bubbling like foam were the lies, lies to protect themselves from the truth of themselves.

And Toozen realized as well, sitting starving in the forest, going over every cuff, kick, and snarl he had received, remembering everyone from the center that was now gone, contemplating teenage Heather defeated on the beach, that his own pot was bubbling. It was bubbling awful.

And most importantly of all, Toozen learned that in the same way he could see people’s light with his mind, he could touch it. He could reach out with two fingers of the mind, and clamp over it like a candle flame. Out. He could take a deep breath with lungs of the mind, make a tunnel with lips of the mind, and blow out a whole birthday cake of candle flames. Out. And when he did, finally it was quiet. Finally the assault of stares and words and weapons ended. The boiling pot of ugly thoughts that spilled from shitty people no longer scalded him. Finally it was peaceful. And this was the only way, he realized, to make it peaceful. So he went through the town and made it peaceful. He turned it into the most Zen place.

And these three that had come for him were interrupting his peace. They were shitty people. Their work was shooting Septembers. They were professional shitty people. He was picking up their broadcast now. They were frightened. They felt weak. It made them murderous with rage. One of the men was reciting prayers in his head. The other man wanted to show them who was the best by shooting Toozen in the face. The woman felt disrespected by both of them because she was a woman. She wanted to prove she was just as good by blowing out Toozen’s heart.

None of them even considered him a person. He was a dangerous thing made to collect bullets and hot light. All of them felt they were righteous and doing God’s work. They all lied to themselves this way. They hid from themselves the hunger for the money they were going to collect for murdering him. And down deep were the images, Toozen saw, of shots splashing like red water balloons into Septembers, many of them children. So many splashes and they felt each one in their chest and down in their sex. Each eruption was an eruption.

People not nice. You nice, too too nice. And ah frighten for you. You don’t look like me but you are September too. They go hate you too. They go come for you too. You have to get hard, Toozen. They go mash you up.

Toozen remembered the words of Auntie Heather, poor Heather. And he smiled and shook his head. He chuckled like Constable Antoine used to do at the dotishness of the young boys of the center.

“Mash me up? Nah.”

And he sent three sets of two fingers, projections of the mind, up to the candle flames hiding in the bush. Out. Out. Out.

Footnotes:

1 - A “red” person is a Caribbean term for mixed race people, usually of African and European heritage.

2 - “One time” is often used in the Caribbean to mean “immediately” or “at once.”

3 - “Passing out” is a slang term for killing.

About the Author

Hollis Joel Henry is a writer living in Trinidad and Tobago. Born in the US to Trinbagonian parents, he has spent his life between both countries, giving him a strange accent and even stranger approach to writing. A lover of fantasy, science fiction and horror from early childhood, he later became enthralled by the themes, wit and craftsmanship of Caribbean, Latin American, African and South Asian storytelling. He does his best to reflect these influences in his work.

Currently he is the editor of the official news magazine of The University of the West Indies (UWI) St. Augustine Campus, UWI Today. This is his first published short story, the product of a long journey back.

Eyes of the Crocodile

Malena Salazar Maciá, translated by Toshiya Kamei

My return to our ancestral roots began with a crocodile’s eye that sprouted on my right breast. It felt like a grazing kiss from a razor-sharp bamboo tip, or the sting of the cold current of a river that once flowed on the ruined Earth. I chewed on bitter, nameless herbs to soothe my pain. Still, I wasn’t bleeding.

I’d spotted the eye when I undressed to bathe. The bump was still swollen and tender to touch. It stared at me from my shivered, erect areola. Another eye hadn’t yet appeared. It was a matter of time.

Our memory nanobots were programmed to instill in us the traditions handed down from our ancestors many millennia ago. Our rituals survived even humanity’s hunger for technology.

Years ago, I’d have been delighted to have obtained, by chance, modification nanobots, because it meant that the history of my people was going to live with me. I’d have worn our past with pride. Even better if the nanobots had carved into my skin geometric shapes that exalted my feminine traits.

However, I wasn’t supposed to have a crocodile’s eye. The ritual scarification was meant for men. Besides, in recent years, the ceremony had come to bear ominous tidings.

The nanobots originally designed to watch over the meager remains of humanity no longer kowtowed to their creators.

Thus, when I found the crocodile’s eye on my right nipple, I knew the universe had condemned me. My husband, Chioke, was a crocodile man. His scarification ceremony took place at the shelter where we’d taken refuge. When it was complete, he bled to death.

I broke the rules. As Chioke bled, my tribemates turned away and bit their lips, their arms pressed tightly against their sides. Nobody tried to stop the blood spewing from his scars. I laid him on my lap and sang for him until every trace of warmth had vanished from his body.

The following day, another eye sprouted on my left breast. This time, I didn’t bleed either. The swelling on my right breast had gone down. The skin looked darker, showing signs of necrosis. The nanobots didn’t mark my skin as fast as they did with Chioke. They seemed to have woken from hibernation because of the radioactive contamination in the domed shelter.

I put on an airtight suit and left behind the place I called home, albeit briefly. Home? I wasn’t going to need it anymore. I made my sentence public and unleashed panic among my tribe.

“Your sentimentality will get us all killed!”

“You could’ve said goodbye to Chioke without touching him.”

“I wouldn’t trust that suit. It may have a leak!”

“Who else had physical contact with you, Mandisa?”

“Sacrifice! Before it’s too late! Sacrifice! For the rest of us! For our survival!”

“You shall have that,” I declared, as the infrared lenses on my visor revealed the nanobots creeping under my skin. They began carving scales on my shoulders. “I need to leave here—before the nanobots evolve and infect all of you. Give me a hovercraft and let me go to the Tree. After all, I’m already doomed.”

“If you succeed, you’ll survive,” a woman shouted as her mouth twisted in contempt. “But you’ll be scared. You won’t be able to get rid of the nanobots. What if everything starts again? You’ll tread among us with that dormant curse! The death-bearer!”

“On Earth, the ceremony was the highest honor a warrior could receive.” I raised my hands, like the mother goddess in the files we kept during our flight. “It’ll be a mark of triumph! I’ll find a way to remove the nanobots from my body. The Tree will do the work.”

I didn’t need to insist. They didn’t want me around the shelter, where anyone could touch me by accident. I needed to go somewhere else, a place where no one could see me and recall the fall of civilization. The nanobots pricked my shoulders like a pin. They grazed my nerve fibers for a fraction of a second, long enough to spread numbness through my body. None had torn my skin. They refined their technique after doing a botched job with my beloved Chioke.

In a hangar located on the edge of the shelter, my tribemates left everything I asked for: provisions, a hovercraft, and a chip with the new program for the Tree. When the sensors confirmed that there was no biological form near the limits of the dome, I was allowed to leave. I didn’t look back, but I heard the gates creak shut behind me.

I snuck into the part of the planet abandoned to its fate, a pasture of runagate medical nanobots. The bones of biological forms, cloned from terrestrial DNA reserves, populated the wasteland in large numbers and in great variety. Below me was a whitish forest of rigid structures. The earth began to crack, affected by the toxic chemicals mishandled by the nanobots. Puffs of dust rose beneath the hovercraft.

The disaster that led the planet to ruin broke out because alarms didn’t go off until it was too late. The Tree was corrupt and didn’t detect the danger harbored by the free-rein nanobots: swimming through our bloodstreams, plucking small genetic traces, nibbling tiny bits of discarded food. They created, for the sake of perpetuating themselves, copies of themselves. Each copy contained several corrupt lines, errors from its original program.

The ones that controlled the flu rebelled. The insulin generators and psychoactive drug liberators followed suit. They released, with immediate effect, more medicine than necessary, without limits. What was supposed to be salvation became death. The antivirus was too late. The nanobots had rewritten themselves to become immune. The only way to eradicate them from the human body was to undergo a risky electroshock session to fry the circuits.

Calm descended upon those of us who survived. But not for long. The nanobots took shelter in other biological forms. They analyzed. They rewrote themselves. And they started invading their original hosts again, determined to take their lives away. We humans gave up ground. We lost contact with animals. We now interacted without physically touching each other. The nanobots didn’t spread by air or land. Only through physical contact.

When the star of this planet slid beneath the horizon, the darkness of the night engulfed me. Spending so much time in stress took its toll on me. I missed sleeping under open skies.

I stopped the hovercraft and stepped onto the ground, on a path carpeted with bones that once belonged to a herd of mammals.

I felt no fear. It no longer mattered what would happen to me. I crawled out of the airtight suit and remained naked. A faint breeze caressed my thighs, hardened my nipples, and fiddled around the crocodile’s eyes. The dormant nanobots on the skeletal remains woke up. A swarm of them started snaking between my toes, producing a sharp pinprick pain.

A sudden shiver shook me. I was alive. My entrails trembled. I took a deep breath and stretched my arms above my head, reaching into the vastness off-limits to us. After all, leaving the planet meant spreading the disease to the rest of the universe. We, the scarified ones, were doomed to solve the problem on our own.

Now wide-awake, the memory nanobots shot a mixture of rituals into my mind, into my mouth. I mumbled and hummed a tune.

“Omi omo Yemayá!” My body trembled, twisting in elegant, haughty gestures. I looked back over my shoulder, turned my head, and mimicked the flow of the current, rivers, and the seas. Of Earth, which was long ago my ancestors’ home, so lost in time.

I stroked the invisible waves with my hands. My fingertips touched the wet foam. I shook my womb and watered fertility over the bones scattered along the path.

“Odò Ìyá!” I changed the rhythm of my dance, surrendering myself to a euphoric ecstasy, to join the thousands who came before me. I rowed a boat. I raised my arms. I shook them, covered with imaginary copper bracelets. I thought I heard the rattle of copper.

“Ore Yèyé o!” I was a tapestry of history. My skin was embroidered with crocodile scales. The eyes on my breasts glanced over the dying planet.

The following morning, I woke up shivering with cold. I curled up on the pile of crushed bones. I rose and felt burning pain in my joints. The nanobots kept up with their task of carving my back. My scarification was almost complete. I didn’t want to know how close they were to making a fatal error. They could certainly tear my scales open and make me bleed, like what happened with Chioke. I didn’t know what to make of the new nanobots, which, eager for a new biological organism, had seeped through my feet.

I slipped into the airtight suit just as the fever began to curl up in my head. I returned to the hovercraft and continued on my way to the Tree. When we fled to the shelter, we began developing programs to find a way to prevent codes from being corrupt. We did it. I took part in the creation of a patch. The one I carried on the chip.

The city was silhouetted in gray against the clear, decaying sky. Ruins of buildings were more serious obstacles than pieces of bones scattered across the wasteland. An aborted terraforming station was swallowed by the natural environment of the planet. Nature recovered, little by little, what once it possessed. Gray moss spread wherever green vegetation would have proliferated.

I ditched the hovercraft when the path narrowed. The nanobots crawled across my back, tireless weavers. For a few minutes, I forgot them and recalled bamboo cane tips. Together with their co-conspirators, the memory nanobots plotted a deceptive farce. The cramp in my thighs let me know how close they were to completing their task. How close I was to death. Fear lodged in my chest.

Hobbled by pain, I trod among the ruins of the city. I had to reach the Tree and place the chip. Saving my tribe. Saving myself. Shutting them up. Becoming a crocodile woman in honor of my Chioke. Showing that we wore our scales with pride. Carrying history in our skin, the future of the human race, so dispersed through the known universe.

The building that housed the Tree soared tall and straight in the middle of the city. It was the only one with no signs of degradation, as if hosting its own swarm of nanobots that kept it unpolluted. The place looked anachronistic in the midst of chaos.

It was locked. I thought I might have to kick the door down, but a tingling sensation gathered in my fingertips resting on the structure. The glass door slid open silently.

When I lumbered into the deserted hall, the hum of auxiliary photovoltaic generators reached my ears. The Tree had to be asleep, just as the modification nanobots were in my blood.

The elevators were out of commission. When I trudged up the stairs, the first scale tore and blood began to trickle into my airtight suit. The same thing happened to Chioke. Despite the cramp, anxiety, sweat, and nausea that threatened to tip me over, I dragged myself along the railing until I reached the Tree.

It stood tall in the middle of the room. The trunk looked like a pillar of smoked-gray glass. The branches, whose thickness varied from an elephant’s leg to a strand of hair, intertwined with the ceiling, held it, swarmed it, and grew throughout the city, veins of dormant technology.

Pain stole my breath. I was bleeding as if bamboo tips lacerated my skin ceaselessly. Thick liquid gathered in my pants, inside my rubber boots. I splashed at every step. The nanobots seemed to feel choked. Crushed. They surely conspired to develop a new line of code to go beyond the limits of biological forms. Seizing hold of dust motes, embedded in grains of sand, they would ride the wind. To the domed shelter. And they would herald death through the crocodile’s eyes.

As my breath fogged on my clear plastic visor, I activated the auxiliary generators and redirected the energy on the control panel. The Tree began to wake up with a humming noise. Erratic lights signaled the increasingly accelerated processing. I took the chip from the sterile container and inserted it into the processing slot before my body buckled in a seizure.

The crazed memory nanobots stimulated my mind with a barrage of disjointed images as I crumbled to the ground. I was inside the mouth of a mystical snake, next to a being who was neither man nor woman. I carried a child in my arms and hid it next to a ceiba tree. I brandished a double-axe, invoked lightning, and healed a father. I was a woman born from an ostrich egg. I broke a vessel against the ground and from it a river was born. It took me to the sea. Along with my thousands of faces that began to sink into the darkness, a proud tree proclaimed to reach heaven, and it was punished by the gods to have its roots above and its branches underground.

When the darkness left my mind, the taste of iron filled my mouth. I feared I didn’t have much time left. The crocodile would devour me alive, bursting from my back in dozens of bleeding lacerations, just like my Chioke. Yet I was still alive. I looked up and stared at the Tree, an artificial baobab. It was plagued with paths of neon. They flickered as data were processed.

The cramp caused by the bamboo tips had ceased. The correct dose of sedative ran through my body, my skin, between my fingers, across my cheeks.

I ripped off my airtight suit. The crocodile’s eyes, which turned into metal implants, watched me from my breasts. I examined my iron nail fingers. I slid my fingers over my scarified thighs, covered with silver, armor made from the inside of my being. With each move, I felt the rigid inlays on my back. The code transmitted to the nanobots had reprogrammed them in a strange way. Humans had to endure, be saved. No harm. No destruction. No killing. Serve. Protect. Preserve.

The blood had dried inside my rubber boots. I tore off the last piece of my airtight suit and left the Tree. I was no longer Mandisa, Chioke’s wife. I was no longer the human who needed the memory nanobots to remind her where she came from. I left the building as a crocodile woman.

I’d returned to my roots.

About the Author

Malena Salazar Maciá was born in Havana, Cuba, where she still lives today. A winner of multiple literary awards, she has authored several books, including Nade (2016), Las peregrinaciones de los dioses (2018), and Aliento de Dragón (2020). English translations of her short stories have appeared in venues such as The Future Fire, Mithila Review, and Selene Quarterly Magazine. In addition, her work has been translated into Croatian, German, and Japanese.

Mandorla

Cooper Shrivastava

It took Old Plant twenty generations to understand their language, and another twenty generations to figure out how to speak it back to them. Generation—that was their word, a word that Old Plant never applied to itself, a word that Old Plant, when it relayed its conversation back to the others, didn’t even bother to translate from the Kelp’s convulsive and glimmering lightlanguage back into Slow Speak, the master-language of the trees.

“Hello,” was the first thing that Old Plant said to these strange beings in the water.

“Wonderment! Awe! If only the scientists of bygone eras could see us in this moment, unfurling the first lamina of contact, sharing among us the sacchariferous currents of friendship!” was the first thing one of them replied to Old Plant.

The Kelp then did something for which Old Plant had no reference, in that first meeting, but later came to understand was one of their many, many underlanguages: it danced.

Old Plant watched the slither and flutter, the countercurrent twisting of white blades in the red, bromine-rich waters, the inflating and deflating of the pneumatocysts. While it was struggling to understand, a seasonal wind scraped across the shore, bringing the cold, oxygen-poor air from the dark to the light side. One by one the tender young leaves Old Plant had sprouted to talk to the Kelp defoliated. They were delicate things, gentle, an experiment in absorbing and deflecting frequencies of light that had sprouted from the realization that the Kelp had been bombarding Old Plant with light-based signals for generations.

So those delicate branches defoliated, and by the time it had put out those special new leaves, that lace train draping over the shoreside branches, an age had passed for the Kelp.

“I am pleased to be able to communicate with you as well,” Old Plant said, stretching its roots back down into the soil of their previous conversation.

The one it was speaking to was dead, Old Plant discovered. The ribbons of others slid about beneath the waves urging through glimmers and reflections to await the arrival of someone they called the Warden. Old Plant sighed out a gust of oxides through its open stoma. It was so tiring to deal with shorter beings.

Before long, a grand Kelp floated up to Old Plant’s position over at the shore. This one was much longer than its fellows. Old Plant’s many trunks spread out across the coastline, and it had spent all of warm water season talking to the Kelp and putting out its new leaves, but it didn’t seem to realize that Old Plant was a single organism with a single root network and many trunks. It could have stopped at any point along the shore and spoken to Old Plant. Instead it waited until it was right beneath the same white-leafed bough as the others had been.

“I am the Spore-Warden, the Tidal Memory,” the large Kelp said.

It lifted the length of its body on floating air bladders and pulsed out in slow, sinuous waves. After a season of talking to the smaller Kelp, Old Plant could recognize some of their underlanguage. “Status,” the large Kelp was saying in dance, “status,” and “respect,” but for whom, Old Plant could not say.

Old Plant found itself drenching the mycorrhizal network with congruent compounds in response—Plants only had the one underlanguage—even though the Spore-Warden would not be able to sense these chemicals seeping from its roots. The fungi on Old Plant’s root network perked up like morning glories, and Yellow Plant, Old Plant’s nearest neighbor, sent back a sleepy ping.

Then the Spore-Warden drifted right below Old Plant’s closest boughs, showing off a living Kelp at the head, and behind it, yards and yards of inert blades trailed in a feathering spiral.

The Spore-Warden was mostly what in Slow Speak they would have called “stone stemmed.” But these weren’t stone stems like a Plant with a dead sprout or a branch struck by lightning. This Kelp was attached to the blades and bladders of its dead forebears, and dragged them behind it like a tangle net.

A crawling shiver ran down a high mountain ridge in Old Plant’s grove. Just the wind, it told itself.

“These are my previous generations,” the Spore-Warden said of its stone stems, during their conversation that lasted late into cold wind season. It said this with a ripple of “pride,” another piece of underlanguage that Old Plant learned to recognize.

There was that word of theirs again, generation, and it was hardly ever said without an underlanguage reference. It didn’t just mean that a plant had released viable spores and also died. It had its own seasonality, peer group connotations, and cultural references. The Kelp hardly ever said generation without specifying in the underlanguage which one.

Old Plant hesitated to apply the word to the shorter beings on land, even the seasonal ones, even the sequential ones, because its mute landlocked charges had no society, or even sentience. The ability to say generation in the underlanguage relied on the ability to recognize a peer group and to see limits imposed upon it by time. Old Plant wondered if maybe the Kelp did know about the life cycle after all.

To test this theory, Old Plant asked:

“How long of a life do you think the land has?” The question flashed across a coastal mile of white leaves.

“I don’t think we know, do we?” the Spore-Warden asked, speaking at least partly to itself. The chromatophores it used to speak lightlanguage were also part of the biomechanism it used to think, and Old Plant could see that the musing had originated from deep within the Kelp itself. “Many, many generations.” It shrug-danced.

“The year is ending. We will be drifting east soon,” the Spore-Warden said. The Kelp had a measure of time they called a year, which spanned several seasons and was something to do with the position of stars. Stars were tiny bright specks in the sky, which you had to cross over into the dark area to see, something the Kelp did with exhausting frequency. They believed that stars were something like the sun, just seen from billions of acres away. Old Plant was not very interested in their religion.

Old Plant wondered if there was a way to wave its leaves that would mimic their underlanguage, but before it could figure it out, heavy rain season was upon them and the sea was empty.

Time passed. Now that Old Plant understood the Kelp migration, it could see them sometimes, toward the end of the year, drifting east. Sometimes a Kelp would float up to the coastline and ask it a question or deliver a message. The messages were redundant. Old Plant could tell how the Kelp society was growing by the changes in atmospheric balance.

Over the course of the next hundred seasons, Old Plant defoliated and refoliated fourteen times. When fifty thousand seasons had passed, not a single trunk over its vast acres was the same, each having died, eroded away, and resprouted from its root network. After a hundred thousand seasons, Old Plant had expanded its grove by twenty thousand acres, and then lost the entire windward facing side of the mountain to a forest fire, and then recovered that territory, where it met with Yellow Plant, first intermingling, then grappling in the rhizosphere, and finally redrawing their million season old boundary.

In fact, Old Plant was spending the seasons simply enjoying the sensations of its new topology, exploring a glacial lake now within its grove, adding a strange new hyphae to its fungal network, when the entirety of the Spore-Warden sloshed itself back to the rocky coast.

“You’re back,” Old Plant said.

“Yes, it is I, Sporewarden Tidalmemory. One of my predecessors came here before—” a ripple shuddered down its stone stems “—and met one of your ancestors.”

“I remember you,” said Old Plant. “We met on this coast, over a thousand seasons ago.”

“Then you are a longer being than I knew.”

“I am the longest of my people,” Old Plant said. Wind was blowing through the grove. Old Plant absorbed the sun and drank the water, and considered the other being.

“I have come to speak with you about the Isthmus of Aragonite,” said Sporewarden. That was their name for the Acacia Isthmus. “We are planning to erode it.”

“Erode the isthmus,” Old Plant said, and all across the grove its roots tensed up in sympathy. “I would advise against it.”

But Sporewarden laid out their plan anyway.

“We will approach from the southeast, coming in on the gyre and spore early. We will anchor our holdfasts to the loose sand and let the gyre wash us away with chunks of the Isthmus. It will take five generations.”

It went on in that vein for some time while Old Plant listened, and while it listened, it conferred with its fellows in the underlanguage. Their technique was well thought out, and Sporewarden had an answer for every question Old Plant asked.

“Well, at least wait for four years. The cedar wheat is having its mast season, and the pollen cloud will blot out the sun.” Then Old Plant had to explain to the Kelp that a mast season was when land plants devoted all their resources to producing seed. The Kelp thrashed once when it heard this suggestion, then went back to serene floating.

The Plants were also planning a mast season of their own, right after the cedar wheat, but Old Plant did not say this. The long hours of darkness under the pollen cloud would wilt parts of the underbrush, and the Plants would take advantage of the opportunity to reseed a long-abandoned valley. Old Plant had been planning it for nearly thirty million seasons.

“We know of the pollen cloud. We understand that you are the custodians of the cedar wheat, and we would like you to stop their mast year.” It used the same lightlanguage word for custodian as it had for “warden” in its name, but the underlanguage was radically different.

“You can’t wait four years?”

“In four years everyone planning this visionary project will be dead,” said Sporewarden.

“Then let it be the project of your future generations.” If the Kelp, like the Plants, knew about the life cycle, they should be resigned to the shape and timeliness of their world. Perhaps they did not understand it after all, being so short-lived.

“If only it were that simple. There are many of us and we are not all of one mind. I could leave a project to my children, but I won’t leave them a war.”

“This is complex. I must confer.” And that would take time—time by Kelp standards, though hardly a moment for the Plants—because Old Plant needed to use Slow Speak, the nuanced and alchemical language of phytohormones awash in the air. It was a much more precise and flexible way to communicate than the underlanguage, but it took time, and favorable winds, to speak to the whole range of Plants spread across the continent.

The Kelp was very patient for such a short being. The forget-me-nots had almost started to bloom by the time Old Plant answered them.

“I know that there are complexities about your society that I don’t fully grasp. But this kind of disunity is going to lead you into a shaded patch. You want to expand, and that’s a natural drive, but too much expansion will be dangerous. First you erode the isthmus and fill the Scarlet Sea. It’s far larger and deeper than you realize. You may be prosperous there, but that has consequences. At the rate you reproduce, within ten generations you will have reached the capacity of the atmosphere to absorb your by-products. Within twelve you will start to die off. At that point the atmosphere will become saturated with oxygen, and it will begin to affect the land plants. We are the custodians of the land plants, and we will have to cull you.” The Kelp lived in the water, but the Plants had their ways.

“We wouldn’t let that happen,” Sporewarden said finally.

“You might not let that happen, but as you said, there are many mixed sentiments among your people. In ten generations, can you promise me what you will and will not do? That you would act against your natural ways?”

“We want your help with the mast season, but we will drift this current regardless.”

“You poor things,” Old Plant said, which made the Sporewarden visibly bristle. “You do this because you can’t see the full life cycle. Come back here in a hundred and forty seasons, and we’ll negotiate the decline of your population.”

“Then you won’t help us.”

Old Plant sent a second burst of conference. Particulates rippled out across the continent. The forget-me-nots bloomed and withered.

“We have to drift east,” the Sporewarden said, as the weather turned. The air was heavy with phytohormones. “Do you have an answer for us?”

“No. We are conferring.”

“Then I will leave a deputy.” The Sporewarden’s long tail started to float away from the cliff face of Old Plant.

Old Plant barely noticed. The Plants were still discussing, and the thick cloud of pheromone that covered the continent was intricate and layered and deserved time and energy to interpret.

Old Plant opened its stoma wide and took in the layers of discourse. Yellow Plant’s input reached it first, an intricately argued string of phytochemicals wafting up on the thermals, indicating its skepticism that Kelp were capable of planning. {How long do they think the life cycle is?} Yellow Plant wanted to know. Already each warm water season was shorter and shorter than the last.

Broad Plant composed a long chain of chemicals, a whole ode to the cedar wheat, which it cared for like beloved pets, even though everyone knew they weren’t sentient. {What do we need more Kelp for anyway? Let the cedar wheat have their mast season,} it said.

{Caution,} others advised, their warnings attached by new peptide chains onto their earlier speeches. {If we need to cull the Kelp, the best way is to release certain phosphates into the ocean. We should withhold those compounds from the cedar wheat in case we later need them to poison the Kelp.}

{That will only encourage them,} Quaking Plant added on to the chain of opposition it had constructed. Quaking Plant was intelligent and eloquent and even the tenth, twentieth, thirtieth reaction phrase formed a poetic whole.

Lightning season drew to a close, and the cedar wheat came out of their dormancy and began tillering. The air grew thick with speech. {We need not use a chemical solution; the Broadstep Geyser can be redirected to the sea beyond the Isthmus.} {They don’t tolerate heat well.} {Ask them how many will cross on the first wave.}

Old Plant asked the sentry Kelp.

“Eighty thousand. Half from each faction, if the peace talks are successful,” it responded. Old Plant passed this on to its fellows, and by the time it was able to explain to the rest of the Plants that both factions were factions of Kelp, this civil war was over.

{Keep to the plan,} Broad Plant insisted; it had already begun nitrogenating the soil on the south coast by itself. {First the cedar wheat, then us.}

{Let’s be cautious. Allow the cedar wheat on the southern continent to spring up, and pare down the wheat in the north. And postpone our mast season until the conditions are ideal.} Old Plant said at last.

{Is that how you came about?} Yellow Plant asked with a burned flavor, and then that compound was on the end of every phytochemical string Old Plant took in. {Is that how you emerged?} {Is it?} {Is it?} {Is it?} they wondered in synchronous. Old Plant ignored the questions about its own origins.

In the end, the others allowed themselves to be convinced by Old Plant to pare down the cedar wheat’s mast season to allow just a few billowing clouds of pollen, but nothing would convince the Plants to stop their own mast season. Their time wasn’t boundless, after all.

And then the mast season was upon them, and Old Plant felt young again. There was no room for a new grove to grow there on the northern side of the continent, so it had only grown male sex organs. It waited until it saw grains in the air floating east, and then let the pollen sacs swell and burst, all at once throughout the grove. The wind carried its granules across the continent, mixing and colliding with the pollen that the other Plants released. They weren’t as numerous as the cedar wheat and their pollen did not come close to blotting out the sun, but it was so thick and heavy in the air that Old Plant felt lulled, stupefied even, felt the urge to burst forth with heavy, drooping catkins and collect the pollen from its fellows; to bear a seed and drop it upon the ground knowing that its progeny would grow with their roots entangled.

Then came a season of waiting, hoping, holding each other, roots clasped beneath the earth. Three Plants had fertilized and dropped seeds, a wonderful new crop—generation as the Kelp would say—and Old Plant and the others waited, tense, feeling each shift in the earth with their roots as they waited for a healthy germination.

But the earth had changed in the past dozen seasons. Starting along the west and flowing south, the massive geomorphic erosion event caused by the Kelp migration was becoming impossible to ignore. The Isthmus had roots just like the Plants, and when those roots were worn away by the earth-shaking efforts of the Kelp, aragonite sediment below the continent was exposed to groundwater, and washed into the sea. As the critical germination seasons passed, the groundwater drained through a rapidly expanding subterranean karst network, flowing outwards away from their roots and into the sea.

The groundwater sapping meant of their three seeds, two lay quiescent in the ground, in a state of dormancy. The third, a new seed, young and tender, was shielded from the sedimentary changes by an ancient volcanic ridge, and took hold along the southern seaboard.

This became Short Plant. The Plant whom they had germinated in the lowland planes when they reclaimed the soil after the landslide gave over the name Short Plant to this new seedling, and had no name itself for eleven thousand seasons. That nameless one crept its way off the plains eventually, an explorer, a grove that continually expanded and contracted to adapt to the world conditions, and by the time they began calling it Equator, the Atlas Plant, Old Plant felt sure it itself was one of Atlas Plant’s direct progenitors. Plants loved their descendants enough to bring them into the world although their time would be limited. But then, they were all limited by the life cycle. The storms of lightning season were starting to tear up whole clonal colonies each year now, destroying river deltas and draining epishelf lakes.

“Which side won the war?” Old Plant asked the Kelp, when they had their promised meeting, less than a hundred and fifty seasons later. It had thought many times of summoning the Kelp leader in the preceding seasons, when the Plant seeds near the coastline had failed to germinate.

But in the end it hadn’t; there was no use arguing with such short beings. They had no ability to conceptualize the timescale of Plant life. The only way to grow was outwards.

The majestic Kelp that floated past it had less than half the stone stems attached as its predecessor had, and had introduced itself as Sporden, Arch Memory.

“My great-great-great-great-great-grandancestor’s side won the war. The revolutionaries,” said the Memorarch.

Sure enough, the acidity had risen, and the waves were weighted down with the heavy taste of halocarbons.

“You have been alive since my ancestor’s time,” the Memorach said. “And you are a powerful being with control over land and sky. We would not have been able to expand into the Scarlet Sea, if you hadn’t controlled the pollen haze, all those years ago.”

“You have not reproduced beyond the limits of the atmospheric balance,” Old Plant said. “The Memorarch of that . . . era, was true to its word.”

“No,” said the Memorarch, writhing in the underlanguage, “We the revolutionaries were true to our own vision, one of enduring prosperity not unending expansion. And so, we are no longer the ‘revolutionaries.’ We are now the ‘regime.’”

“The atmosphere remains in balance,” Old Plant continued, “but you have made permanent changes to our world. You are the inheritors of your great-grandancestor’s oceans, which are now filled with lime and runoff from deep below the continent.”

“We like lime,” the Memorarch said. “We use it to build up the Kelp beds.”

Old Plant had lost the ability to feel frustration millions of seasons ago. It had seen many Plants bloom and wither.

“You have failed in your duty of custodianship,” it said to the Memorarch, who didn’t take it kindly; the alderkelp along the coastline began to drift closer to the shore.

“That’s something only my future generations will be able to judge,” the Memorarch told it, before washing back to the deep ocean.

Old Plant began monitoring the balance of the atmosphere closer than it ever had before. The regime was involved in many struggles over the following generations, it surmised from the chemical content of the south wind. One was clearly a reprise of the old internal war; the rest, fights against the natural limiting factors of the seas.

Time passed. Short Plant grew and spread. The morning glories trended sap green, then teal, then slate blue until after hundreds of thousands of seasons they forgot that they had ever been green in the first place. Atlas Plant put out a new growth of exploratory white leaves, the broad-spectrum leaves, and Old Plant swelled with secret pride.

It talked very occasionally to the Memorarchs of the Kelp in those days, and slightly more often to the rotating alderkelp that floated along the shores. Their internal strife weighed so heavily upon them they soon forgot their history with Old Plant, and each generation spoke to it with a fresh voice.

“We’re taking on a new project, and we’d like your help,” one of them said to Old Plant, after the passage of tens of thousands of seasons. It was calling itself Sporen these days, like its title had sloughed off somewhere over the years along with an old memory. Old Plant’s memories did not slough off like shed bark, but stayed buried within like old growth rings.

Old Plant had been about to start a seasons-long rest cycle. But it was rare these days that they sought out Old Plant, and for the sake of the growing things on the continent, Old Plant wanted to know what they were planning before it slept.

“We want to learn to hibernate.” Sporen said. “Specifically, we want our gametophytes to hibernate until they sense a trigger condition. Do you have gametophytes? That’s what your pollen is, isn’t it? That’s what our scientists have always assumed about you, but we’d love to look into it more if you are willing to answer some questions!”

Old Plant did not want to exchange questions and answers with the Kelp scientists. It had no use for idle chat about fluid dynamics, or coral polyps, or the movements of the stars.

“What do you want us to do?”

“The method we’ve devised for guided evolution is pretty complex,” Sporen began. Old Plant wasn’t a scientist and so its mind began to drift.

“ . . . with this method the life span of a single spore could stretch out for thousands of years! But we will need a period of adversity to test the trigger conditions. I remember that once long ago you threatened to release corrosives into the oceans. Could you still do that, under controlled conditions, in a purposeful way?”

“No, I don’t think we can,” said Old Plant sleepily. A wind was racing up the marshland corridor, and it was already allowing its highest branches to defoliate. How risky for the Kelp it would be, and for so little reward. Even if the Plants did release corrosives, they wouldn’t be able to stop it or take back the chemicals, should their experiments fail.

“Appeal to Atlas Plant,” it advised them.

“Who is Atlas Plant? You’re not the leader of the Plants anymore?”

As much as I ever was, Old Plant thought, but it was already beginning to drop its white leaves and could barely control its chromatophores anymore. And anyway it didn’t particularly care, because by the time it woke up Sporen would be a different Kelp.

Old Plant fell into rest before it was able to watch Sporen drift away on the burgundy tides. For the first time the Kelp felt a little less foreign to it. Old Plant could understand better than anyone the desire to experience dormancy. But it wasn’t the same for the Kelp as it had been for Old Plant.

No, not the same thing at all, it thought as its trunks stiffened up and its roots rested, melting deeper into the earth. Old Plant slept.

It dreamed of the beginning, of renewal, of the reason that the Plants of the continent called it “Old” Plant and never “Long” Plant. When they said that name in Slow Speak, an olfactomimetic language, they built the word “Old” with an enveloping protein that broke open on contact, a prefix meaning “belonging to.” Inside this casing lay a single primordial chemical, an abbreviated version of the germination trigger. The “Old” in its name was a word that meant “belonging to the beginning.”

The beginning to which Old Plant belonged was very different from the world of today. For one thing, the groves that now spread across all parts of the continent were at that time each no more than ten or twenty trunks, and those trunks were squat and their branch pattern spread wider, leaves reaching out in every direction for sunlight, which shone weakly through a thick layer of cloud.

The trees barely spoke in those days; they needed all of their resources just to continue growing. They didn’t wait for a mast season, for the perfect conditions, to make a seed; they had to strive every season to reproduce or they would die out. They didn’t have an underlanguage. They just put out their roots and drank the sandy soil dry.

Then one day—back then there were days, though the planet’s slow rotation had long since stopped—the world ended. Subterranean vents rumbled, molten rock spilled across the continent, methane bubbled up through the deep hypoxic waters at the poles, making the sea look like it had come to a rolling boil.

The seeping, killing ash clouds passed over the continent. The oceans filled with bloom after bloom of strange new sulfidogenic bacteria that ate the water-dwellers of the old age and belched hydrogen sulfide into the atmosphere. The nautiloids died. The sky was dark. The protective layer of ozone that had cradled their planet for so long was seared away.

Into this dying world, one of those small, short prehistoric Plants released a seed, which fell from the catkin into a freshwater lake. The lake was so warm it germinated, and under the water, safe from the hydrogen sulfide, and protected from the ultraviolet radiation scorching the continent now that the cloud cover had been washed away, that Plant from the beginning grew.

It wasn’t meant to grow under water. It had to force a trunk up to the surface and keep it alive long enough to sprout leaves and pass precious elements to its developing root system. The air was laden with acidic aerosols, and the ultraviolet radiation at the surface was feverishly mutagenic. Its trunks reached up, then died, then reached up again. And when finally—after what would have been millions of seasons, had the Plant been able to tell what seasons were forming above it—it had built up a robust root network that spread the length and breadth of the pond, it fell into dormancy, and it waited.

Time passed, and the Plant did not know how much because it slept deeply.

Then light came back to the earth, bright and yellow, warm on the muddy ground where the lake had dried up, clear because it was filtered through ozone and not through the ash clouds. The Plant, which now was really Old Plant, found itself in the most ideal circumstances: no struggle for sunlight, no interminable cold nights, just vast acres and acres of land free and clear of other competing organisms. It spread its grove far and wide and put up a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand trunks in between each lightning season.

And when there were other seeds to be had, Plant seeds, that had been trapped in gravel, or stewed in saltwater, or simply not germinated under the harsh conditions of the earlier era, it nurtured them. Soon the Plants were masters of the continent.

So it understood why the Kelp wanted to hibernate, why they might want their spores to wake up in a different era. After all, in some sense, Old Plant was itself living in the afterlife of its people.

Being so short, Kelp seemed to lack the capacity, or the foresight maybe, to understand that there were certain limiting factors. After waking up in that glorious sunshine so many millions of seasons ago, Old Plant and its people had kept a careful watch over the planet on constant guard against the conditions that had caused the first extinction event. They drilled their roots deep and they learned to read earth tremors and tectonic shifts, and in this way they knew that eventually, the life cycle would end. Eventually, the earth would no longer be hospitable to any lifeform at all, and their clonal groves, which regenerated fresh new trunks as the old trunks aged, would be around to see it.

The second extinction event, the final one, was coming soon now. Soon by Plant standards, soon even by the measure of the shorter beings, maybe within a hundred generations. It was hard to tell exactly when the effects of the methane clouds would overwhelm the ecosystem, but Old Plant had woken up to be there at the end.

Each east wind season brought a citric tang, and the sea level had risen as it took in more dissolved gas. The seawater flogged itself on the coast at Old Plant’s roots. Methanogenic bacteria lurked under the ocean surface. The Kelp would enjoy this change, it thought, right up until the climate ate them. Their ocean territory was eating away at the shore, and they thrived in the longer cold-water seasons.

One of them was coming up to it now.

“Hello, I’m Sporen,” the Kelp said. Sporen was its surname now, its given name only given in one of the Kelps inaccessible underlanguages.

Its trail of stone stems was much longer than its predecessor Sporden.

“Sporen. I have not spoken with your kind in quite some time.”

“Yes, well. Things are changing now.”

Old Plant’s branches quivered.

“We could have been a good resource for each other,” Sporen said. “But we failed to share our resources, and so in the end we failed to take advantage of them.”

For a moment, Old Plant thought that Sporen was talking about their two species. It thought of all the ways in which the oceans guided the ecosystem, and what the Kelp might have had to bargain with if it had not dismissed them all those millions of seasons ago. If Old Plant had spared the energy to keep up with their exhausting and constant generational cycles, then the Plants could have had a deeper understanding of the ocean and forewarning of weather patterns.

It almost felt a moment of remorse, but then it saw the pronouns; Sporen meant we the Kelp failed to share amongst ourselves. And anyway, what good were a few seasons of forewarning of a flood or an algal bloom, when they knew that this had been coming all along? The rain, when it rained these days, was heavy with dissolved methane.

Sporen was still talking.

“—a system of rules, laws, it’s a type of technology really, and our species has always been innately competitive with each other, while at least from the outside, you appear to be competing only with other kinds of plants. And doing so from the top of the ecosystem.”

“And you want my . . . advice?” Old Plant asked.

“Yes, if you’ll give it.”

Old Plant thought about this for a while, but Sporen didn’t lose patience and drift away; it just waited, watching, as the sun reached unprecedented temperatures above them. Fatalistically, this lulled Old Plant.

“It’s probably not worth it,” Old Plant finally said.

“What is that supposed to mean?” Sporen asked.

“You may not realize this, but the conditions of the world have been changing. Maybe it happened too slowly for your people to realize. But each year, warm water season gets shorter, and heavy rain season becomes more violent. These changes are only going in one direction. I’m sorry to say it to you, but the tide is coming in. Our seasons are numbered.

“Your people compete amongst themselves for resources, and this is a part of your natural strategy. Even if you change that now, within a few generations, you will all be extinct. We will as well. Let us live out our last days in peace. Let us finally rest.”

“No,” said Sporen. “No, I don’t think we will.”

“You will,” said Old Plant. “I’m sorry to tell you this, if you cannot see it yet. This earth might be habitable for you, and maybe for your progeny, but there it will end. There will be no great-great-grandspawn.”

Sporen had used the in-group pronoun again. “No, I don’t think we will,” it said. “And I wouldn’t bet on this planet lasting until the methane has a chance to take its toll.”

“It is taking it now,” Old Plant said.

“We look up into the stars from the dark side of this planet. There is an asteroid coming that will make impact within my lifetime. It’s large.” Sporen thrashed its tail of stone stems. “It’s large enough that I won’t see my grandspawn. That, not the methane, will be the real extinction event.”

They both paused. Old Plant reached up into the sky with its newest shoots, one last golden burst of growth before the end.

Could it be true? Did it matter if it was? Old Plant was ready for extinction, and the difference in time was no more than the blink of an eye.

“The impact site will be on the horizon of the dark side. Just on the other side of the Aragonite Sandbar, in the Scarlet Sea,” Sporen said to no response. “We’ll go there together to produce our gametophytes.”

They had changed their ecosystem all those years ago to give themselves easy access to the Scarlet Sea.

“They’ll be crushed, your spores,” Old Plant said.

“Some of them. Some of them will be thrown out into space, where conditions will trigger dormancy until they land on a habitable surface.” Sporen waited calmly.

“It’s the wrong season for a trip to the dark side. You won’t be able to drift back before the impact,” Old Plant said.

“I’m not doing it for me. None of us are. We’re doing it for our progeny and not for ourselves.” Sporen sank a little deeper below the waves, its equivalent of a long sigh. “I feel bad for you, long-lived as you are. You can’t see anything beyond this life cycle.”

Old Plant remembered its first conversation with the Kelp. It had thought almost the same thing of them, then. But it had been wrong; it had missed something fundamental about their community, a difference not of strategy but of society. Old Plant reached down into the rhizosphere to where its roots clasped Yellow Plant and Atlas Plant and Quaking Plant, and soaked their roots in a simple message of love and support.

“Go then,” it said. “Go. And flourish.”

The season was turning. Sporen went.

Old Plant turned its broad-spectrum white leaves, its “seeing” leaves—the ones it always thought of as young—away from the ocean for the first time. Toward the sky.

It waited for a long while. No, for a short while, in fact, but for the first time since it was a seedling, every second felt long to Old Plant. It didn’t want to miss this.

The sunlight was ever harsher, and Old Plant waited out a season. A cloud boiled across the sky. The world sank into twilight.

Far away, barely breaking their horizon line, a gray orb appeared like a new bud.

About the Author

Cooper Shrivastava grew up in Pennsylvania and now lives in New York City with several houseplants she is hoping will one day develop sentience. She works in finance by day; by night she writes short stories, and the first halves of novels. She is a graduate of the Clarion 2019 Writers’ Workshop.

The Host

Neal Asher

Something hit on the way in. Ivebek Cloon felt the weird distortion of the ship surfacing from U-space, which to him was like the hangover from a neuro-enhancer packed into a couple of seconds. A resounding crash ensued, along with the sensation of someone trying to drag the world away, like a rug from under his feet. Grav went off and he floated up from his bed, turning over, then it came back on hard and deposited him on his face, mostly on his nose. He lay there gasping, wiped away blood and pinched his nostrils closed, stood up and stared at the door, which had opened. He tried using his aug to talk to the AI, Mobius Clean, but, as ever, it didn’t bother replying. Just so long as he remained intact and alive was all that mattered to it—it knew that a little damage wasn’t worthy of note. He tested his nose with his fingers, the pain fading under his touch, the bleeding already stopped.

Ivebek grimaced. He still healed unnaturally quickly—faster even than someone running a military nanosuite—and still it took several impacts or stresses to damage him, and still he did not know why. He peered at the smear of blood on the floor. His nose should be broken now, his face swelling, yet all he had was a little blood on his fingers. After a moment, he returned his attention to the door.

He had no way of escaping his situation. If the door was open that probably meant it really didn’t matter if he wandered about. Maybe it hadn’t been locked all this time—he had never thought to try the damned thing. He stepped out, looked up and down the corridor and noted smoke toward the rear of the ship, and headed towards it. Even as he reached it, fan filtration began droning loudly and a breeze whipped it away. The smell of burning led him through a bulkhead door, then another and another. Finally, he came opposite an inspection window and peered inside, recognizing the U-space drive, only it didn’t look like a drive anymore, just scrap.

“You are at the wrong end of the ship,” said a voice via his aug. “Head to the bridge and strap yourself into the acceleration chair there. This is going to be rough.”

“What happened?”

“Some automated defense,” Clean replied, though it sounded doubtful.

“Why rough?”

“Grav engines are at minimal function. I am holding them together.”

“Are we landing somewhere?”

“Do as instructed.” That ended with an emphatic click—conversation over.

Ivebek turned around and headed to the front of the ship. The standard bridge contained two acceleration chairs before consoles and a slanted screen revealing starlit space but nothing else of note. He sat down and strapped himself in, assessing what he had learned from his brief exchange with the AI. They were landing, but it seemed someone might not want them to. That Clean, knowing Ivebek’s ruggedness, wanted him strapped in told him the landing would be rough. He tried to relax and, as ever, returned to the memory—his key to understanding all that was happening to him.

The desert had been hot, almost beyond the insulation and cooling capacity of his armored suit. Organic toxins filled the air but it contained enough oxygen to sustain him, just so long as the filters held up. He’d found the entrance in the side of a sandstone butte—a tunnel of nacreous mother-of-pearl delving inside, as if erosion had revealed a giant mollusk from some ancient sea here. He walked inside, checking his weapons as he did so. Light amplification through his HUD created the illusion of a bright place as he moved into darkness. Then . . . nothing.

It seemed such a small and inconsequential fragment of memory, but it had kept him alive. When Earth Central Security grabbed him on the Polity side of the Graveyard—that borderland lying between the human Polity and the alien prador—he was sure that would be the end for him. He’d committed theft and murder in the Polity while smuggling alien artifacts—Jain stuff supposedly, but he wasn’t so sure that was true, but it paid. He’d done worse in the Graveyard, hooking up with a crew selling cored and thralled humans to the prador. He had been a career criminal with more than enough marks against him to warrant a death sentence.

They’d questioned him, of course, first in a tiled cell. The agent concerned got all old fashioned on his arse with brass knuckles and a shock stick, then became puzzled and intrigued by how he absorbed damage. Perhaps that was why he had not executed him then and there, but passed him on. Aboard the ECS stealth ship they’d scanned him intensely, then used an interrogation aug to observe his mental responses to questioning and copy memories out of his mind. After that he had expected them to give him a short tour of an airlock, but it seemed something didn’t add up.

“Here,” the woman had said, placing a pulse gun on the table before him.

He’d stared at the thing. He should pick it up, shoot her, and do all he could to escape, though that seemed unlikely. What had he got to lose? He picked up the gun, pointed it at the wall, and triggered it. It surprised the hell out of him when it actually fired, and he dropped it like a poisonous insect.

“I thought so,” she said. “Something’s fucked with your mind as well as your body.”

He sat there baffled when she took the gun away again and left.

The stealth ship docked at an outlink station and troops carted him inside to deposit him in a garden, on a synthetic stone seat. They took off the manacles and left. He didn’t have a clue what was happening until the thing rose out of a pond swimming with multicolored fish. It looked like a crinoid six feet across, rippling feather tendrils attached to a central point.

“I am to examine you,” the forensic AI explained.

He ran of course, but had nowhere to go. The thing descended on him and grabbed him to begin its examination. A thousand worms seemed to writhe over his skin, then it abruptly released him and he thumped on his back in the grass. It retreated. He lay there feeling strangely heavy and solid, as if after a particularly hard workout, and that feeling had stayed with him since.

“They scanned you in the ship and found you impenetrable,” it said. “You are also impenetrable to me.” It sounded affronted. “You are opaque—a form of chameleonware has been inlaid in your skin. Can you explain this?”

He wanted to, he really wanted to. He knew what forensic AIs did to people like him. In pursuit of answers this thing could take him apart both physically and mentally and, if not satisfied with the results, put him back together and do it again. Painkillers, apparently, were not an option during this process, pain in fact being a necessary encouragement.

When he could find no reply it came at him again. He fought it this time, but its tendrils had as much give as braided towing cables. It inserted nanofibers into the interrogation aug still attached to his head. He felt all his memories rising for examination and then that memory. The AI simply dropped him again, backed off and folded into a ball just a few feet across. It stayed that way long enough for him to search the garden for a way out, drink from the pool, and wonder what those fish would taste like raw. Then it unfolded.

“We are going on a journey,” it told him.

And here he was. It did tell him a little of the circumstances. He had encountered an alien and that was integral in his memory of mother-of-pearl tunnels. It had tampered with his body and mind, altering it in ways the AI could not parse, though some of the results were plain: as well as unusual physical ruggedness he was no longer a killer—he possessed empathy. The AI had decided not to continue its examination because that memory would be of interest to her. He had no idea who she was, and the AI had not considered it worthwhile to tell him.

The ship shuddered and the star field began to swing to the right. A sun slid into view, the reactive screen damping its glare, then a world. He gazed down upon the yellow and white swirls of cloud over pastel terrain and could see no sign of oceans. The seat kicked him in the back as fusion flung the ship forward. Acceleration ramped up and up, and that he was feeling it confirmed problems with internal grav too. He felt himself sinking deeper and deeper into the seat, his arms turning to lead and an invisible stone coming to rest on his chest, and somehow it slid inside him—a solid core. Then he blacked out.

Ivebek regained consciousness to the roar of atmosphere over the hull. Misty claws of cloud reared up to grab at the ship. Piss yellow rain hit the screen and slid off its frictionless coating. Sun glare, a green-tinted yellow, briefly blinded him. The ship dipped into thicker cloud, snow swirling in view, then through—the cloud a gray-green ceiling above. He could just make out the features of mountain chains, valleys, and perhaps rivers. Lower still, with the ship shuddering alarmingly, he felt sure he could see jungles or forests, but with little green in them. With some time yet to pass before landing, or crash, he decided to try something.

“Almanac data,” he stated.

To one side, in the laminate of the screen, a long menu scrolled up with an arrow blinking beside the first entry. He lowered his gaze to the third entry, the arrow tracking his vision, and blinked deliberately. The aug connection flashed up in his visual cortex and he permitted it, then enabled a full download while speed-reading the introduction to a world designated X349. Until that moment he had not known the interrogation aug would respond like a standard version. A lot had been redacted from the data presented while, on occasion, a warning appeared telling him to avoid this proscribed destination.

Now he could see actual jungle down there, mainly purple and blue with minor swirls of green. The ship turned, flinging him from side to side, and now he had a view to the rear up toward the rumpled quilt of cloud, just before deceleration sank him into his chair again. This more than anything else told him how many drive systems were down—the AI forced to use the main fusion drive to decelerate. The pressure pushed him close to blackout then came off with another turn. Again he saw ahead, now low down over the vast jungle. The ship began hitting the treetops, then debris covered the screen as it sank lower and deceleration flung him against the straps. The ship vibrated so hard it felt like the muscles were being shrugged from his bones. A steady roar grew in volume until it hurt his ears, crescendoed with a crash that nearly put him through the floor, then another and another. The roar diminished, and finally the ship hit earth and stayed there, deceleration still forcing him against the straps, but then finally coming off with a thump. The debris slid from the screen and he gazed out at a blast field—jungle leveled and burning all around. He swallowed dryly, reached down, and undid the straps.

“Return to your cabin,” said the AI, via his aug.

Ivebek paced in his cabin—a ten-foot box with the minimum of facilities—listening to the creaks and groans of settling metal and a susurration that sounded like wind. His body felt tighter and harder after the buffeting in the bridge, while he felt as if he had pulled a muscle in his torso, and the nag wasn’t going away. He sat on the bed to read the almanac download again. He was gazing at the gap, where any information about intelligent life or previous civilizations on X349 had been redacted, when he felt it.

Someone was calling him and he felt an odd déjà vu, a nostalgia, as if this might be his mother summoning him in from playing in the ducts of the arcology where he grew up. This lasted for just a short time, but it seemed the wrong key to his mind. Next he felt hunger and thirst that would be relieved if he just got up and went over there. He turned his head, gazing at the wall of the cabin. He got up and went to his fabricator and input his needs, returned to the bed with a tray of printed pork and black beans and a beaker of blue banyan juice. These quelled the feelings only a little, but enough for a change of approach. He now felt withdrawal from the many addictive substances he had tried pulling at him, trying to get him to head to some destination where all his needs would be satisfied.

“There’s something in my mind,” he said.

“It is her, calling you,” replied Mobius Clean.

He pondered that for a long moment and realized he did not agree. It felt far too personal, intimate even. But perhaps that was how, whatever this was, operated. He suspected something like an induction warfare beam had been pointed at him. It wasn’t telepathy, couldn’t be that since Polity science had long ago disproved it . . . unless of course the AIs were lying.

“What the hell does this female want with me?” he asked.

Instead of answering the question, the AI said, “We are some distance from the site. You are to proceed alone. It will be necessary for you to defend yourself.”

A hatch opened in the wall and he gaped disbelievingly at what it revealed. His armored suit lay there, and his weapons. Rising from the bed, he walked over and peered down at it, noting as he did so that the gravity of this world sat just above Earth normal. He took the suit out and put it on, linking into its systems via his aug. He holstered his sidearm—a pulse gun—picked up his Brabeck Multigun, and jacked the combined optic, power feed and ammo tube into his pack, which he pulled onto his back. He then stood there checking diagnostics in his HUD, along with ammo and power levels. Everything had been topped up. He felt the urge then to never get out of this suit until he was either free or dead, but then acknowledged it likely Clean had put in some way of shutting it down. The weapons, he realized, were irrelevant, since he could no longer use them against others.

“Come outside,” Clean told him.

The suit gave him a little bit of assist in the higher gravity, but he cancelled it since he’d gone long enough without exercise. The nag in his torso was now a dull ache as he headed to the cabin door and it opened ahead of him. Remembering how he had come aboard he went to the hold, found the airlock standing open and the ramp to the outside down on smoking ground. The hold had been packed with equipment when he boarded, but appeared half empty.

Reaching the bottom of the ramp, he gazed back along the length of the ship to where a large section of armor had been debonded at the back end to open access. That was quick. A grav-sled he had originally seen in the hold stood beside this, the equipment piled on it swiftly disappearing as black spider mechs with clawed forelimbs and dodecahedral bodies carted it into the open section. He walked over and gazed inside, recognizing the compartment for the ship’s U-space drive. It was much changed in there now.

When he had peered through the interior inspection window the drive had been a blackened and twisted wreck. The two cylinders of complex technology supported in the middle of the compartment by glassy struts had been mashed as if giant hands had reached in and twisted them like someone wringing out a cloth. Most of the struts had been shattered, optics charred, s-con broken. Somehow braided meta-material had been turned into chunks not dissimilar to wood charcoal. Now the cylinders were straight, some of the struts back in place, coils of optics hung around the walls, and spider mechs were clearing out debris and stringing new s-con. This had all happened in less than an hour.

“I thought this kind of a repair of a U-space drive was supposed to be impossible without heavy infrastructure,” he commented. “Where are the vastly precise machines, intense energy sources, and gravity presses?”

“Now you know better.”

Wrapped around the drive cylinders, Mobius Clean bore the appearance of a tangled mobile sea fern, working so fast its limbs were a blur to the human eye, while the packed technology of the cylinders deformed, shifted, and changed shape.

“You could have likewise taken me apart and examined me,” he stated dully. “I still don’t really know why you stopped.”

“It was necessary,” was all Clean supplied.

Or had the AI stopped? Sure, that’s what he remembered, but the AI could have taken him apart and, putting him back together, implanted any memories it chose. Probably some way of tracing him would remain, some way of seizing control of him, some way of manipulating him. Polity AIs lied, manipulated, bent things to the shape they required, and the truth of that lay before him now.

Throughout the history of U-space travel the AIs established the myth that U-space engines could only be built in AI-controlled facilities using hugely complex and energy-hungry machines, and that some components could only be forged on the surfaces of brown dwarfs. The resulting engines, because of the complex interdimensional math involved, and the mental gymnastics in dealing with a continuum supposedly without conventional time or dimensions, required an AI to run them. All lies. The prador made such drives without AI and ran them with the transplanted and flash-frozen ganglions of their children, while here before him the forensic AI was practically rebuilding a drive that anywhere else would have been consigned to recycling.

Now Clean pulled away from the drive and rolled out of the hole in the side of the ship, coming to rest before him.

“I just scanned you to try and confirm what I have been told,” said the AI. “Apparently you are capable of breathing the atmosphere here and are immune to the viruses, microfauna and allergens of this world, so have no requirement for a suit. I, however, pointed out that unsuited you would be vulnerable to the macrofauna here. She agreed that this was the case.”

“And who is ‘she’?” he asked

Disregarding his question, yet again, Clean continued, “Whether you wish to open your suit to the air here is a matter for your own discretion.”

“Who is ‘she’ Clean? Why am I here?”

“You are here because your life is forfeit and an entity with which we wish to open larger communication showed an interest in you. You will go to her and what she does with you is of little matter to us. You may even survive it, in which case, bearing in mind that your propensity to kill has been removed, you may return to the Polity as a free citizen.”

“Entity? Some sort of alien?”

“Of a kind, according to a fragment of memory in your mind, you encountered before.”

“That memory.”

“Precisely. She will open communication with you once you set out. I have given her your aug code.” He wanted to argue, but before he could say anything, Clean added, “Of course you can stay here, in which case I will examine you.”

Ivebek turned away and began heading toward the dense jungle, glancing back along the path the ship had cut through it as it came down. Fires were still burning there because, he discovered on checking the almanac, they were fueled by the oxygen nodules in the roots of the plants, which they had extracted from the atmosphere to make this world uninhabitable for unadapted humans. An atmosphere he could now, apparently, breathe. He paused at the wall of tangled plant growth. Again he felt scanning from Clean, brief this time but more intense. In response something dense and leaden inside his torso seemed to tighten, and he felt a stab of pain. He walked on. Both the scan and the brief pain felt like threats or intentions to propel him forward. The pain he simply did not understand, but the scanning made him feel like a victim in the sights of a molester. But Clean did not want to touch him until he had served his purpose here. He was a bargaining chip being played by the AIs to open access to something alien.

His aug now signaled to him a connection request. He gazed at it blinking in his HUD—relayed there through the suit link. He winked at it to activate it.

“Come here to me,” she now said, the voice female and seductive. A moment after this a direction arrow appeared in the bottom of his HUD.

“Why should I?” he asked.

A long pause ensued while he considered how the classifications male and female might well not apply here. The voice the entity chose to communicate indicated nothing. It might not even have vocal cords or a mouth, or maybe it had a mouth he would not like to see.

“Personal survival,” she finally replied, utterly factual. “If you do not come, Ivebek, all protections will be rescinded and Mobius Clean will have you.” Oddly it didn’t sound like a threat. It sounded like mechanics: “If you drill a hole in a bucket, Ivebek, the water will run out.”

“Plain fact,” he replied. “But what do you want with me, and what are you?”

She ignored the question: “Tell me about your encounter.”

He stepped into the jungle, pushing between ribbon vines like faded plastic, worming between thick white trunks and half-burned debris, finally stepping out where the jungle had not been compacted and burned by the crash, to where he could walk easily between the plants. He thought about his past and felt something shift in his mind. Suddenly he realized he wanted to talk about everything that had led him finally to that encounter. On other levels he realized his mind had been given a firm prod.

“I was born on an arcology on Colouron,” he babbled, “and grew up with all my needs met by our post-scarcity society but for purpose and solitude.”

“Did you feel the ruling AIs should have supplied these?”

“They should have made it known that they were possible.”

He felt very uncomfortable with the question. The AIs had met the physical needs of a population that had, for no clear reason, grown much more than on other worlds. A large anti-AI sentiment had grown there too concerning AIs engineering and interfering with their society, and as a result of that it became a hive of Separatism. Only once he gained perspective from the outside did he discover that the AIs’ touch on Colouron was as light there as anywhere else, and that the problems there had been generated wholly by the society humans formed.

He continued, “I found out it was possible to leave once I officially became an adult and did so by runcible.”

“Why?”

“To find a purpose and give myself space to breathe.”

“Did you find these?”

Something was moving through the undergrowth over to his right, and he wondered if the distraction of this conversation was a good thing. Using his suit’s scanners in that direction he got an infrared image of a winged creature like a small pterodactyl feeding on an object like a large fruit or egg. He ignored it and moved on.

“I found solitude when I wanted it, which wasn’t so easy on Colouron, then through contacts I made a business venture.”

“Smuggling armaments back to Colouron itself as I understand it,” she said. “This purpose was satisfactory?”

“You know about me, so why are you asking?”

“I want to understand you and, through you, more about the Polity.” She paused for a second, then continued, “You became a smuggler because of contacts in your home arcology—it was something to do.”

“I made money at it.”

“Why did you require money, if the AIs could supply all your needs?”

“Some things lie outside the AI definition of ‘human needs,’” he replied tightly.

“Like the ‘purpose’ you mentioned?”

“Yeah.”

Again he wasn’t comfortable with this.

“From smuggling arms to Separatists you next proceeded to smuggling them to the Graveyard, and there you joined another organization that sold cored and thralled human beings to the prador.”

“More risk more revenue,” he said.

“And killing people.”

“Look, where is this going?”

“It was you who chose to start telling me your life story. I do not think you can object to me commenting on it.”

“You did something to me. You made me talk.”

“Are you sure? Or do you feel some need now to justify yourself?”

“Fuck you,” he said without heat.

“Has it not occurred to you to wonder if what you were truly seeking was not purpose, or revenue, but distinction from the crowd and power over other people?”

He now wanted to make a heated reply but could not find one beyond repetition of his last words. That was the thing, on Colouron you were one of billions with nothing to make you stand out. Societal structures existed, like the Separatists, and with effort you could climb to the top of any particular heap. But still you were a meat mechanism under the AIs to be fed, housed, and cleaned up after. He could see now that this did drive many from that world and to excellence, while his way of excelling had been through crime. The money had just been a way of keeping score. Simple as that, and he hated the clarity.

“I will now leave you to your thoughts while you deal with the exigencies of survival, which will be upon you shortly,” she finished. The link closed.

He halted and looked around. The jungle had grown thinner now, so he could walk a straight course for more than just a few paces. He became aware of movement behind him and turned. The creature humping between the trunks bore some resemblance to a huge armadillo, though its head possessed three stalked eyes. Below its piggish snout its mouth had far too many teeth. The central eye was focused on him while the other two were checking to either side before they too turned in. It opened its mouth and squealed like a pig, then charged.

Ivebek froze. He could not kill! The pig—for so he named it—came straight at him. At the last moment he threw himself aside into a shoulder roll, and it thundered past. Tearing up earth at the end of its charge, it turned. With shaking hands Ivebek selected thermite shells and fired into the ground before it, throwing burning jungle detritus into its face. The thing took this for a moment then veered aside and went crashing into the jungle to his left. He tracked its course, watching it disappear from sight. He sighed shakily. This should be no problem if the creatures here spooked so easily. As he turned forward again something slammed into his chest to send him staggering, closing numerous legs about him. He got a look into a collection of revolving mandibles as mobile antennae smeared yellow liquid over his visor, then felt a muted punch against belly and a fluttering pain in response. He had just been attacked by a creature like a giant ichneumon wasp.

He grabbed the thing in one hand and tried to pull it off as its lower abdomen flicked out then drove in again, trying to push a barbed sting through his armor. It clung tenaciously and he just did not know what to do, because again he could not kill. Then, not even conscious he had chosen to do so, he used assist, driving his fingers into his body with a crunch. Now managing to pull it away, he held it squirming before him then threw it to the ground. Perhaps it was organic memory, for he fired a single shot and blew it in half. Staring down at the still-moving creature he searched himself for a reaction, but found none. Perhaps his empathy did not extend to oversized insects. He went to step over it, then paused and looked back down at the thing.

Hadn’t he seen that before? Behind its head clung an object like a metallic worm cast. He prodded the thing with his toe and the creature made a desultory attempt to bite his boot. He looked up. Yes, he had seen it before.

The pig now stood ahead of him and there, on the armor behind its head, was another one of those casts. Some kind of parasite? The creature charged again and this time shots into the ground did not dissuade it. Reluctantly, he raised his aim, but then felt a stirring of joy when this elicited no reaction inside him. He shot it in the head and it crashed to a halt before him. Glancing ’round he could now see other movement in the surrounding jungle.

“Come on!” he said, hoping for more kills, but next felt a sudden self-disgust. Was this all he was. He lowered his weapon. The nagging pain in his torso arose again, almost rhythmic. He felt sure now that Clean had lied and that it had interfered with his body, because something was driving him to his destination. Sure as shit the pain would increase if he delayed.

He broke into a steady trot in the direction of the arrow in his HUD, meanwhile calling up an ammo inventory. He had used up twenty-three explosive shells out of five hundred and had not yet used the pulse gun option of his main weapon. However, he had no idea how far he had to go or how many more attacks there might be.

Another pig charged in from the right, its head down so he could not get a clear shot at it. He riddled its body with explosive shells, blowing away chunks of the thing to expose yellow flesh, squirting green blood, and bones like polished oak. He ran as the thing circled ’round and came back at him, trying to keep his distance and putting more and more shots into it until it came down. When he ceased firing he was able to hear a growing hum. The big wasps appeared, flying between the trees, abdomens hanging pendulous. He brought up targeting, keyed to his suit’s motor assist. Putting a crosshair on one of them he blinked for acquisition. The motors moved his arms, correcting where he could not, and he fired, blowing the creature apart with one pulse shot. But this lengthy procedure allowed others to get closer and they were coming in all around. They were sneaky too, taking fast flights between concealments, like they knew what his weapons could do. He began firing short pulse gun bursts where they seemed thickest, blowing many apart and bringing down steaming foliage, but still they drew closer. Turning to where fewer of them flew, he ran in that direction. Sticking his main weapon to a pad on the front of his suit, he drew his sidearm for closer shooting, his free hand on assist to beat the creatures away.

Abruptly he found himself stumbling down a steep slope. Tall trees shrank to dwarfs, cycads bloomed, and low greenery and blue-ery tangled his feet. He fell, struggled upright tearing one of the creatures from his back and slamming it into a tree. A few more steps, batting the things away, brought him to the edge of a slow deep river. He turned his back to it, holstered his sidearm, and detached his main weapon, firing short bursts again, shredding the flying creatures. The third pig hurtled downslope at him. Even the explosive shell annihilating its head did not stop it, and it crashed into him, hurling him and itself into the water.

Ivebek sank, just for a second until his suit compensated. Expanding around him as it filled gas pockets, it began to bring him to the surface again. His visor gave him a clear view all around as the water filled with giant snakes a foot in thickness, but seemingly without heads or tails. He surfaced to see one of the things looped up over him, the head now visible, a mass of stalked eyes and a letterbox mouth. It snapped down, closing that mouth over his main weapon, snatched that away and tossed it. It came down again and grabbed his shoulder even as he drew his sidearm. Hauling him up it shook him, then discarded him. He crashed down on the other side of the river and lay there on his back expecting further attacks, but none came. In retrospect, he realized there had only been one creature in the river. And reviewing memory, he saw it had one of those metallic casts on the side of his head.

He stood up, rubbing at his belly but hardly able to feel his hand through the armor. Counterintuitively the pain had receded—his torso just heavy and tight now. Next, using suit scanning, he located his main weapon in the river, which was now boiling with the coils of that creature’s body. He knew with utter certainty that it would not allow him to retrieve it, and that disarming him had been the purpose of its attack. Looking across to the other side he saw the wasps bobbing there as if from a disturbed hive, but they weren’t crossing. Two of the pigs were even now heading back into the jungle. Turning in the direction indicated by the arrow in his HUD, he saw a creature, like a manta ray with legs, appear from between the taller trees. When he raised his sidearm to aim at the thing it began to make its way down toward him, opening and closing a toothless mouth that did not seem designed for predation. Noting the metallic cast behind its four black button eyes, he lowered his weapon and tossed it down in the dirt beside him. The creature halted, turned clumsily, and headed back into the trees.

“You didn’t want me to have weapons,” he said, after opening the link.

“Even I can die,” she replied.

“Are there any creatures here you do not control?” he asked. “I really don’t want to abandon my last weapon if there is something that might attack me.”

“You are more intelligent than I supposed.”

“Many have made that mistake.”

“There are only two creatures on this world I cannot choose to control,” she said. “You and the AI Mobius Clean.”

“Who, it is apparent, doesn’t know that you can control the wildlife here. Else you would have told him I had no need for weapons.”

“Precisely.”

He stepped away from the sidearm and continued up the slope from the river. Pausing by some rocks, he flipped one over. This revealed creatures like woodlice, but white and circular. On closer inspection he saw more of those worm casts on their shells. She wasn’t lying. He flipped the rock back and continued on.

“You asked if what I sought was distinction from the crowd and power over others,” he said. “A hundred days ago I would have sneered at the question but now, I think, I can give you an honest answer. I delighted in power over others and exercised it whenever I could. I took cruel pleasure in the terror of those I cored and thralled. I enjoyed being the big man able to order others to kill. I was someone who did not deserve to live.”

“And why do you have that perspective now?” she asked.

“Because something changed me.”

“Perhaps you would like to tell me about that?”

The memories weren’t clear, but still he tried to put them in order.

“I met a man in the Graveyard who gave me the location, on a world, of an alien weapon and I went there to seek it out.”

He could clearly see the bar in his mind, the drink on the table before him, and Grayson Trada sitting opposite.

Trada was both excited and scared. “It’s real Jain stuff—you see the data.”

He certainly had and it really looked genuine.

“Why don’t you go after it, then?” he had asked.

“I trade information—too many agents in the Graveyard now and I really don’t want to be noticed by them. That ship has sailed as far as you are concerned.”

He had nodded agreement. He knew about the reward for his capture or proof of execution of sentence against him. Only recently he’s upped the count to four of those who had sought to claim the reward and failed. He slid a pack of etched sapphires across the table. Trada verified them and swiftly departed, glad to have such dangerous information off his hands. The coordinates Ivebek had loaded into a storage rod were detailed, and he felt much excitement about going after the items the data detailed.

“I landed and went to the coordinates given.”

Again he saw the desert and that mother-of-pearl entrance, but nothing of what happened in there. He told her how afterward he had paid off his crew at another location on his way out of the Graveyard. But all he could remember was his intense desire to head to a location in the Polity—a place he had avoided for a long time because of the warrants out for him. Necessity forced him to stop at a space station for his ship was old and required primitive deuterium fuel, and that’s where the Polity agent grabbed him.

“And what was that destination?” she asked.

He broke into a sweat as he tried to recover it from his mind. His torso ached in sympathy and gave him a couple of stabs. But he just couldn’t find the memory.

She now added, “It is almost as if your conscience was driving you, and that the destination was in fact the Polity, and the purpose was your capture.”

No, that could not be right, surely? Again he tried to excavate memory, but now began asking himself some pertinent questions. Why had he paid off his crew? Had it been entirely necessary to stop for fuel? Had it been necessary to leave his ship and board that space station, knowing the dangers? In retrospect, it did seem he had been seeking capture, but somehow that did not feel right at all.

The jungle thinned out around him while across the blue-green firmament the cloud began to fragment. On occasion he got himself a clear view to the horizon and a mountain chain there, the sun setting. He felt suddenly hot, feverish hot, and checked the internal temperature of his suit. Its setting had not changed, but still he felt uncomfortable.

“I think Clean has done something to me,” he said, but she did not reply.

He came out onto a clearing on a downslope, now seeing the mountains more clearly. The rock formations looked odd, rather more like they had been deposited in worms by a deposition welder than pushed up from below. Lying between him and them lone massifs of the same wormish construction stood up out of the jungle. He paused, eyed a boulder lying at the edge of the clearing, then went over and sat down. His guts gave him another stab, but he ignored that and, without thinking, reached up to the neck control on his headgear. The visor slid down into the neck ring while the helmet softened and rolled off his head and down to the back of the ring. Cool air hit him and he reveled in it, only a moment later realizing what he had done. He was capable of breathing this air, yet no human should be. He had opened himself to local biologicals to which, apparently, he was immune. He left the helmet undone, an odd spicy taste in his mouth and a smell like mint in his nostrils.

“Why am I here?” he asked.

“You would be more comfortable without your suit,” she replied. “There is nothing here to harm you and the path is easy from now on.”

On the one hand her observation seemed utterly reasonable, but abandon his suit? It was his only remaining defense against this world, and, besides that, it had been damned expensive. Still, he opened the side seam down his torso and felt some relief, like he had been wearing particularly tight clothing after a heavy meal.

“You didn’t answer my question,” he noted.

“Why are any of us here?” she replied. “To live, to continue, to consume, and to breed. Life continues to find its way forward.”

“You are being general when I was being specific.”

The nagging started up again and he stood. He no longer had the direction arrow in his HUD to follow but found he did not need it. Setting out between trees like giant flowering papyrus he trudged toward those mountains.

“Those are our base desires, written into our genomes,” she said, “but we build structures on top of them with our intelligence, and call them purpose. However, their bedrock remains the same. The power you sought over others, the uniqueness you craved, in the end were based on survival and the old impulse to display your fitness for breeding.”

“I don’t agree,” he said, abhorring the idea that his drives were so simple. “We are intelligent creatures who have outgrown our ancient programming.”

“How nice for you.”

“And what about you? I don’t even know what you are, but I’m guessing you’re not even remotely human. What about your impulses?”

“You would recognize them for they have their twins in the life of your original world, that is, if you know much about that original world.”

He halted, suddenly irritated by how sweaty and enclosing were his garments. Thumb controls on the wrist of each glove released them and he hooked them on his belt. His hands now felt cool and free and somehow less dirty.

“Try me,” he said.

“Consider the impulses of a mollusk that spreads its seed in the sea,” she said. “There is no need for it to display its fitness to breed, just the drive to relieve itself of that seed and let the currents carry it where they will.”

“You’re a mollusk?”

“Such definitions are not suitable for the alien.”

“Then what?”

“Consider such a creature were it to spread across worlds but was still driven to spread its seed. An intelligent creature, a moral creature.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will.”

One of the massifs now lay ahead and he knew at once this was his destination, not the mountains beyond. He felt his eagerness to be there, though the passing thought that the eagerness might not be his own quickly died.

“The creature would send its seed out in ships or use other technological means,” he tried, but knew he wasn’t thinking clearly.

He really did feel feverish now, and his suit seemed to hang leaden on him. Why was he keeping it on? Its value to him now, in this situation with an alien ahead and Clean behind and him utterly powerless, was nil. Comfort and freedom seemed a better goal. He halted and disconnected the sleeves at the shoulders, stripped them off and simply dropped them. The relief was intense. Section by section he removed the rest and then, in a nod to the garment’s value, carefully stacked it on a rock. Now clad only in a thin shipsuit and slippers he felt free, and moved on.

“We are old,” she said, “and have grown far apart. The urge to spread our genome has remained, though muted, even as we lost or otherwise abandoned the technology that enabled its spread. Some believe this a willing retreat from our nature, for it did not sit well with our growing and, it has to be said, unnatural morality.”

Ivebek felt a sudden surge of horrible knowledge, but it lay just beyond his grasp.

“Consider the parasite that lays its eggs or some other form of genetic transfer in a host, a carrier,” she continued. “The natural way would be to take those carriers with it to the stars.”

“The technological answer,” he tried, knowing it was wrong.

“No, not if you are programmed that way by evolution, and then have little regard for the creatures you use, for then another option becomes available: hosts who themselves can travel, other star traveling races. Unfortunately, such races are inevitably intelligent themselves and, if your growing morality does not permit this, your survival becomes abhorrent.”

“And then what happens?” he asked, the horror of it beginning to impinge.

“Then you retreat and your society collapses. You begin to die out and, at some stage, there are few of you scattered across vast stretches of space.”

“And you no longer breed . . . ”

Gnarled wormish stone now lay before him rising up in a slope, and he hardly remembered the intervening miles. He chose a path leading to a point up above. He wanted to turn and run, but climbed. His torso felt thick, hard, and heavy and there were no more nags of pain for they were no longer necessary.

“Unfortunately, the urge to breed continues and, in many cases, becomes stronger. It is as if, with extinction threatening, the urge to racial survival increases. Some of these then set lures for the required host—lures they feel will bring them a morally acceptable carrier. Others fight the urge, but when a carrier wanders within their compass, instinct becomes difficult to fight.”

“You isolated yourself,” he said.

“I did, and I allowed only limited communication with other races. I retained some of my technology, but it wasn’t enough to stop Mobius Clean coming here. He made the moral argument that you are a killer, I discounted it because the other of my kind had changed you. I tried to damage his ship to prevent him landing, but he did, by which time I could fight my instincts no longer.”

“What is going to happen to me?” he asked, it almost coming out a sob.

The mother-of-pearl tunnel lay before him, and he crawled inside. He didn’t have to go far before she rose up to meet him, mussel flesh and frills, groping tentacles with their barbed bone-like blades.

“I’m sorry,” she said as she drew him into soft velvet warmth and split him from sternum to crotch. “My mate gave you some durability and I will try to keep you alive.”

Ivebek screamed, then screamed again as the fringed pod wormed out of the split, shrugging off ropes of his intestines. He gazed at stalked eyes inspecting him, other appendages trying to push him back together as the pod inched into a hot pink cavity. Then the world went away.

Ivebek returned to pain. He lay on his back gazing up at the sky, turned his head slightly to take in the slew of organic detritus spilled from the mother-of-pearl hole above. He started gasping—didn’t want to look down at his body.

“The one you first encountered lured you with the promise of something illegal in the Polity, sure this would bring it a suitable carrier,” said a voice it took him a moment to recognize as Clean. “It ameliorated its feelings of guilt by making you rugged enough to survive the process, and made the changes that drove you toward her.”

The AI now slid into sight above him. Feathery tendrils wrapped around him and hauled him from the ground. It wasn’t gentle and he bit down on a scream, but then groaned when he saw his guts hanging out. Sharp stabbing pains all over his body ensued and he felt the paralysis spreading from those points. The tendrils blurred over his injury, detritus flicked away, antibacterial and antiviral foam boiled. He felt his guts going back in and couldn’t scream. He blacked out for a second, then woke to the thrum of cell welding. Sharp stabs faded and he felt movement return to his limbs just as Clean dropped him. He landed with a thump, his torso aching but intact. He lay there in fragments of nacre, bones, and compacted worms of leaves, then he sat up.

“The biology . . . ” he managed.

Hovering above him, Clean writhed in green sunlight. “The first was, nominally, male, and she female. The requirement for genetic mixing is a facet of her kind as yours. The thing inside you was a sperm carrier.”

“And now?” He pushed down against the detritus and stood. In the jungle down at the bottom of the slope he could see the ship he had arrived in.

“She will produce young, thousands of them, and they will spread around this world and no further. We will watch and assist and learn and perhaps help them with their moral problem.”

“I didn’t really understand that.”

“Morality ceasing to act in concert with biology you should understand. Many humans have often ceased to eat meat because of their abhorrence of killing. These creatures”—Clean waved a tendril toward the massif behind—“grew and spread and preyed on other intelligent races. They then came to detest their own biology, their method of breeding, because their carriers were intelligent. It spelled racial doom for them, which we have now halted.”

Ivebek wanted to ask now about his own doom, but instead asked, “Why did the male change me as it did? Why am I no longer a killer?” He paused for a second, remembering those creatures in the jungle, and added, “Of intelligent creatures?”

“Because you had to survive more than being a carrier of the male’s sperm for its conscience to be satisfied.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You had to survive me, Ivebek Cloon. Return to the ship now, we are leaving.”

Ivebek nodded, thought about his armored suit down there in the jungle, his abandoned weapons.

Really, he didn’t need them now.

About the Author

Neal Asher was born in 1961 in Essex, Great Britain, and divides his time between there and the island of Crete. He’s been an SF and fantasy junky ever since having his mind distorted at an early age by JRRT, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and E C Tubb. Sometime after leaving school he decided to focus on only one of his many interests because it was inclusive of the others: writing. Finally taken on by a large publisher, Pan Macmillan, his first full-length SF novel, Gridlinked, came out in 2001, and now in total he has over twenty-five books to his name, also available in translation across the world.

Jigsaw Children

Grace Chan

Hong Kong, China—2098 AD

I was nine when my second-mother’s mother died.

Shortly before her death, Schoolteacher Shumin took me to visit her. We took the monorail and got off at the last stop, on the northern outskirts of Hong Kong. The sky was gray and low. Damp air drew beads of sweat from my neck.

I sniffed.

“It smells like leaves up here, Shumin!”

Shumin didn’t reply. She waved down a car. Gripping my hand painfully tight, her ragged nails digging into my skin, she ushered me into the back seat.

“Tuen Mun Hospice for the Elderly,” Shumin told the car.

She pressed me close to her side as the car wended through dusty streets. I tried to lean as far away from her as I could. Shumin was too warm and smelled like mothballs.

The car let us off in front of a set of white gates embossed with the name of the hospice. Shumin spoke to someone through a speaker. I ran my fingers along the edges of the hard gold characters. Traditional Han Yu and English, one on top of other: the same thing, written two ways. I closed my eyes, memorizing the sharp, unwavering shapes, mouthing the words as I touched them.

The speaker replied to Shumin, and the gates rolled back. We struggled up a steep driveway to the entrance.

The hospice smelled like bleach and urine and flowers. A man in a white gown came forward to shake Shumin’s hand, and mine too. He gave us plastic gloves and plastic shoe coverings, explaining that they were to protect us from infections.

“Is he a nurse?” I asked Shumin in a loud whisper.

“Yes. Shh.”

“Why do we need protection? Aren’t we supposed to be stronger than them?”

“We keep our germs with us, and they keep their germs with them.”

She tugged me along impatiently.

We walked through a common room. The far wall was lined with square windows that let in big beams of wan light. There were old people slumped on couches wearing augmented reality visors, old people sitting in wheelchairs staring at the wall, and old people sitting at tables being fed by nurses. I looked down at the floor. The wooden boards were speckled with hundreds of little whorls: black, beady, unblinking eyes. I tried to tread on as many as possible with my squeaky plastic-covered sneakers.

We went down a darkened corridor. Ambient lights flicked on and off as we passed. The nurse touched a panel on the wall and a glass door slid back with a hiss.

A gush of stale air fanned my face. The room was stifling.

My second-mother’s mother was almost invisible beneath a mountain of blankets and pillows. In the dimness of the room I could only make out her small, clawlike hand, and the outline of her broad nose. She was snoring gently.

“Lian,” said Shumin. “Go and greet your Erma.”

I walked to the side of the bed. Now I could see that there was a plastic tube running into her left nostril, and another tube plugged into her arm, and several stickers on her temples and chest. All the tubes and lines ran into an electronic console on the far side of the bed.

I bowed my head. “Good morning, Erma.”

She didn’t stir.

I looked at Shumin. She was standing against the far wall, her back stiff, her mouth in a flat line. I turned back to my Erma and touched her hand. Papery skin, a sallow ash-brown, stretched over bird bones. I remembered my Erma as I’d seen her last year, at my second-mother’s fortieth birthday dinner. Then, she had been a stout woman in brightly dyed linens, her skin like roasted chestnuts, her gray hair braided away from her crinkled face.

I rubbed the back of her hand with my gloved fingers. “Good morning, Erma. It’s Lian.”

Her eyelids lifted, and milky irises found my face. A light lit them from within. “Lian,” she said in a hoarse voice. “How good of you to visit your Erma here.” She dissolved into a fit of coughs. I filled a cup of water from a jug by her bedside and lifted it to her lips. She could only manage one sip before she lay back, wincing, and shook her head. “No more.”

“Are you in pain?” I asked nervously.

“Just a little, Lian.” She exhaled through cracked lips, fanning my face with the smell of sour plums. “It’s good of you to come. Does it frighten you to be here?”

I shook my head, even though the hospice did make me feel uneasy. “I know everyone must fall sick and die.”

“Everyone must die one day, that is true,” murmured Erma, her eyes flickering under drooping lids. “But I think you will never have to know this sort of pain. This deep pain that only comes from your body betraying itself. That’s why they first started making jigsaw babies, you know, Lian. To cut out the cancer genes and stop us from passing them on to our children.”

She had used a taboo phrase, but it seemed insignificant in this stale, dark room where everything was slowly ending.

“You are different from me,” I said, tentatively. “You are not a . . . a . . . you were born the old way.”

“Oh, yes. My parents made me in a bedroom, not a lab.” A brief cackle escaped her lips, and I caught a glimpse of the old Erma—the Erma who hid lollies in her sleeves and pulled funny faces behind her husband’s back. I didn’t like this withered, sour-smelling Erma. My eyes grew hot with unshed tears, but I fought them back. Shumin would scold me later if I cried.

I tried to imagine Erma’s conception. We’d learned about it in elementary science. Her father would have put his sperm inside her mother, and a baby would have seeded and formed naturally, spontaneously.

Some of the other kids at school said the old ways were wicked ways, but I didn’t think Erma’s parents or the rest of the old generations had been evil—just different. Primitive. Clumsy.

“Did you grow up with your mother and father?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. We lived in an apartment in Kowloon, with my older sister and my two younger brothers. Children’s Centers hadn’t been invented yet.” She glanced at Shumin, who was a statue in the corner. Erma had always been vocal about her dislike of Children’s Centers. She’d even sent a couple of letters to the local newsblog. Children should be raised in homes, not reared like mice in labs and churned out like spare parts on a production line . . . !

My second-mother had tried to explain to her the benefits of the Children’s Centers—healthcare, nurturance, socialization, education. It took the role of parenting away from amateurs and gave it to professionals. “Besides,” my second-mother had added, “Who would raise a girl like Lian? Her first-mother, second-mother or third-mother? Or one of her fathers?”

“They’re all gone now,” Erma continued. “My father died of throat cancer when he was eighty-nine. My mother’s brain faded, and we took her off life support the day after her one hundredth birthday. My sister had ovarian cancer—she died in her sixties. One of my brothers died of an antibiotic-resistant infection, five years ago. The other committed suicide. Do you know what that word means?”

“Yes.” Some of my classmates would shout “suicide!” when they were too tired to run any further in a game of cat-and-mice. I saw a stern look pass between Shumin and Erma.

Erma’s fingers fluttered against my plasticky palm. “Are you learning lots of things in school, Lian?”

“Yes,” I told her. “I got into Advanced Programming this year, because I scored really well in Basic Programming. I’m second out of all the nine year olds at the Center. I can’t beat the number one guy though. Someone told me his primary donor is a robotics professor—she programmed the latest generation of splicing machines!”

Erma was staring at the ceiling, so I pushed on.

“In Applied Tech, we’re learning about bioengineering. Did you know they’ve made trees that can grow into the shapes of tables and chairs, really fast, so you can grow a whole table in one week? Also, we’re watching a program about the Mars missions. Once we finish, we get to design our own spaceships! I don’t like Social Studies—it’s boring. We’re studying the European Union. Did you know there are some countries that choose not to use modern technology? Why would anyone do that?”

Erma continued to blink up at the ceiling. I thought maybe I’d said too much and she’d stopped listening. But then she wet her lips and said, “I’m not sure, little pea. Maybe they thought they could be happier that way.”

I nodded, but I didn’t really understand. How could they be happier if they didn’t have the technology to fight off dangerous infections, or to make themselves smart enough to understand the world? They would always be one step behind everyone else.

“You’re a very clever girl, Lian,” Erma said softly. “Cleverer than I ever was. You’ll become a very clever woman, and you’ll achieve great things. But do not be proud. We are clever for many reasons: our genes, our nutrition, our caregivers, our schools. Sometimes, our hard work.”

I frowned. Confusion and hurt knotted in my chest. “I’m not boasting. Second-mother always says I can be anything I want to be, if I work hard enough.”

“Yes,” muttered Erma. “Just remember to be humble.”

Spittle pooled in the corner of her lips. She was pushing words out of her crumbling body, trying to leave something of herself in this world. Suddenly, I loved her and pitied her and reviled her, all at once.

I stepped back from the bed.

“Are you ready to leave now?” asked Shumin, her voice cutting through the bloated air.

I nodded.

“Soon we will all die.” Erma’s thin voice piped up from her nest of blankets. “All of us old, foolish folk. Why do I feel so afraid?”

My shoulders shook.

“Quiet, old aunty,” said Shumin. “You’re upsetting the girl.”

“Can’t an old granny speak her mind? She’s my granddaughter, not yours. Let her hear something different from her lessons. Lian, come back and see me again, and I’ll tell you even more interesting things.”

Shumin led me out of the room, her fingers digging hard into my shoulder. Then she ducked her head back in and said a phrase, sharply.

A sour taste stayed in my mouth all through the car ride back to the monorail station. My head felt hot and dizzy, as though I was still standing in my Erma’s stifling room, breathing recirculated air.

Shumin talked and talked. “There’s a rule of human nature, Lian—and you’ll see this—that the older generation always thinks their way is best. My grandmother lamented the good old days to me, and I’ll no doubt sing the same tune to my grandchildren. This is an evolutionary flaw that I’ve never understood, for it impedes progress. We must rise above this instinct. We’re told that we must listen to our elders, but no one ever said that we must do what they say.”

I was hardly listening. I sat with my hands clasped in my lap, watching the nav-screen on the dashboard flicker with quiet intelligence, selecting the least congested route back to the Center. A short, sharp phrase echoed in my ears: “You are a disgrace to China.”

My second-mother’s mother died two weeks later. I never spoke to her again.

I have three mothers and two fathers. I’ve examined my genome sequence, on the supercomputers in the National Laboratory in New Beijing. The computer shows you exactly which gene belongs to which parent, and where the DNA was cut and reattached. You can analyze your risk profile for diabetes, cancer, dementia, addiction, and mental illness. If you want, you can look at the genomes of your mothers and fathers, too. Privacy law forbids you from looking at just anyone’s, though. If you want to examine other genomes, you must put in an application to the National Laboratory, citing research, legal, or procreation purposes.

I think I’m reasonably lucky, only having five parents. I guess my donors didn’t have too many risk mutations. Some of my classmates have been spliced together from eight, nine, even twelve donors. I don’t envy them the task of juggling their Chinese New Year dinners.

I grew up in the East Hong Kong Children’s Center. Since the expiration of the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 2047, political and economic boundaries between Hong Kong and the People’s Republic of China have dissolved. The Chinese government places a quota on how many babies are born in the country each year. Too many and the population trends toward unsustainability. Too few and the workforce won’t be strong enough to support its elders.

At my Children’s Center, there were roughly eight thousand children under the age of sixteen. Once you turn sixteen, you’re expected to apply for university or work. If you don’t get a placement by the time you turn eighteen, your future is looking dim. Some of those left behind simply stay on in the Children’s Center for years, eventually taking on menial roles like kitchen worker, or toilet cleaner, or birth mother.

My Erma used to say, “Remember your family.” But the word itself is nebulous and nonspecific. My genetic ancestors are my family. So are my nurses, schoolteachers, and classmates. We refer to royal families; a family of peptides; a family of biological genera; a family of mathematical curves. If you stare at the word long enough, you realize it’s redundant.

From the moment of creation, we were given every chance to succeed. Our birth mothers imbibed a cocktail of folate, thiamine, calcium and magnesium. We were nurtured on a formula of breast milk and immune-boosting supplements. Our nurseries played classical music; our toys taught us colors, numbers, characters and letters.

Sometimes, I pass a nurse in the corridor and a strange feeling wrings my gut, and I wonder if he might’ve been one of them. Had he ever pressed me, as a baby, to his chest, and hummed a wordless song? I’ve combed my memories for any trace of my early caregivers, but all I can cling to is that tuneless, calming hum that makes all the world seem safe.

When we turned five, the nurses passed us on to the schoolteachers. We didn’t like or hate school. It was more that we couldn’t like or hate it, because we didn’t know anything other than it. This was our world: the Center, the teachers, the classes, the supervised breaks.

I wouldn’t say the environment at the Center was cold. There was love there. A restrained, practical love, but not any less for being so. The sort of love that a Chinese father has toward his daughters: unaffectionate but steadfast. A moon orbiting a planet, always keeping a measured distance from what lies at the true center of its movements.

In the same way, we, the children, were the sole purpose of the Center. Everything was done in order that we might prosper, flourish, and become greater than the preceding generation.

2101 AD

Suyin was the first girl in our class to get her menstrual period. We were eleven years old.

It was the middle of world history class. Schoolteacher Pang was explaining that in Japan, today was a special day. The 12th of August was Hana Day, to commemorate the creation of the first genetically spliced baby in 2028.

A laboratory at the University of Tokyo had designed the experiment to overcome a homozygous autosomal recessive trait carried by both parents, explained Pang, drawing a genetic tree on the projector. A third individual donated a gamete with a section of healthy genome, which was stitched by nanorobots into the DNA of the parent sperm and egg. The birth of a healthy baby girl astounded and terrified the world.

“I thought splicing started in the United States,” said Chao, one of the confident boys.

“You’re partly right,” said Schoolteacher Pang. “The US bought the nanotechnology from Japan, but it wasn’t until the 2060s that genome splicing became a proper form of reproduction. Does anyone know why?”

“All the oldies had to die out,” said Chao, and a snicker went around the room.

Pang suppressed a smile. “Yes, there were a lot of dissenters. Religious groups warned that this unnatural reproduction was blasphemous and tragic. Conservatives called it grotesque. Politicians argued about whether it might lead down a slippery slope of genetic enhancement. Sociologists wondered about the impact of genetically engineered humans on parenthood and class systems. Philosophers debated whether Hana could be truly regarded as homo sapiens, or whether she represented the next branch of the evolutionary tree.”

“I don’t think cutting out diseased genes is the same as evolution,” piped up another girl. “It’s just getting rid of the bad stuff, like cancer and diabetes.”

“Tell me how that’s different from evolution, Meixiu.”

Meixiu shrugged. “It’s even better than evolution. It’s not random.”

Pang nodded. “Yes. That’s what many thought too. The mid twenty-first century was the Scientific Golden Age. Research was shared freely amongst the global community. Soon, scientists in the US, China, Japan, Australia, India, Scandinavia, and Canada were setting up programs for genome splicing.”

As Schoolteacher Pang talked, I heard someone sobbing. I glanced at the desk beside me. Suyin was hiding her flushed face in the crook of her elbow.

I whispered, “What’s wrong?”

Suyin gazed miserably down at her lap, but I didn’t understand. Before I could ask again, a nurse entered the classroom and took her away.

“What happened?” I murmured to Jingfei, who sat behind me and always knew what was going on. But Schoolteacher Pang banged a ruler on his desk and threatened us with extra homework if we didn’t stop talking right away.

Fifteen minutes later, the nurse brought Suyin back. She had a gauze bandage around her upper arm, and her cheeks were pink. When the lesson ended, we gathered around her desk.

“So you really got it?” Jingfei demanded.

Suyin nodded.

“Did it hurt?”

She shrugged. “A little. The implant hurt more, but it was very quick.”

“Can we see it?”

She obediently unwound the bandage. In the soft part of her inner arm, there was a small red mark, shaped like an asterisk. The skin puckered up like a kiss.

“Does it really last for five years?”

“Ten years,” said Suyin. “That’s what the nurse said. When the hormones run out it squirts a blue dye under your skin. Then you go to the doctor, and they take out the old one and put in a new one.”

“Do you feel different?” I asked her.

She screwed up her nose. “Not really. It was a bit scary. It felt like a tummy ache, and then I thought I wet my pants. And I had to change into spare underwear in the nurse’s station—yuck.”

“You won’t bleed again, though,” said Chao. “The implant stops that, right?”

Jingfei jumped away from Suyin’s desk and flicked her ponytail. “I don’t want to have an implant. I won’t let them put one in me.”

“Why wouldn’t you want one?” another girl said incredulously. “Do you want to bleed every month?”

Jingfei shrugged. “So what if I do?”

“You’re so weird,” said another boy.

“It’s for the best,” said Meixiu, in her falsely mature way.

“What if I want to have a baby the old way?” Jingfei declared.

A chorus of voices shushed her, mine included. “Don’t say things like that! Don’t you know that’s forbidden talk? Do you want to go to court?”

Jingfei giggled and leaped up onto a chair, a skinny little figure of impudence, and flicked her school skirt to give us a flash of her pink briefs. “Maybe the old ways were the good ways!”

A few of the girls shrieked, and the boys yelled at her to get down. “That’s gross, Jingfei! Get down! Stop being so dirty!”

Jingfei got down, smirking to herself.

“They’ll make you do it,” I told her, shaking my head. “Even if you say no.”

She put out her lower lip. “We’ll see.”

I was right, and Jingfei was wrong. Over the next few years, we all got our periods, and one by one we were taken to the nurse’s station. I remember taking my school shirt off and sitting on a medical bed covered with a plastic blue sheet, legs dangling, shivering in my thin singlet. I remember the lurid yellow antiseptic rubbed onto my inner arm, and then the wide-bore needle, pushed under the skin. A sharp pressure; a small ache. The nurse asked me if I felt dizzy.

I shook my head.

The nurse didn’t ask me anything else. There must be a mountain of unsaid words, in the corridors of the nurse’s station.

Jingfei was one of the last. She came to my room one night, crying. I’d never seen her cry before, or again. She didn’t say anything, just crept in sideways through the door, and stood there, trembling and sobbing, mopping her face with her pajama sleeves. I watched her for a moment, unable to reconcile this Jingfei with the brazen, snarky Jingfei who jumped onto desks and flashed her panties. Then I pulled back the corner of my blanket.

She lay down next to me on the narrow bed. I put my arms around her and felt the gauze bandage chafe against my cheek. The smell of antiseptic filled my nostrils.

In the morning, I woke to see Jingfei standing at the window, arms pinned to her sides, hands balled into fists. Against a backdrop of gleaming skyscrapers, she was a flat silhouette. She let out a short, furious howl and slammed her fist into the windowsill. It must have hurt like hell, but she didn’t even flinch.

When she finally turned to me, all the anger was gone. Her expression had become calm, renewed—beatific.

“I’ll see you in maths class,” she said, and left my room.

Gene splicing changed the definition of family.

Most countries tried to preserve the nuclear family by imposing rules. For instance, the two main donors had to be in a relationship and had to agree to raise the child in their home. Homosexual couples and heterosexual or homosexual trios and quartets had already been accessing the technology surreptitiously for years before their partnerships were recognized.

Negotiations about privacy laws and donor visitation rights grew into a complicated legal system based largely on precedent. As surrogate mothers were used more often to carry the baby to term, the working rights of these women had to be carefully established. Even language was affected: some chose to forgo the words “mother” and “father,” replacing them with variants of “primary donor,” “secondary donor,” et cetera.

China was one of the first countries to relinquish the family unit. It had become too complicated; surely there was a better way. The first Children’s Center was founded in New Beijing in 2075, by a group of doctors, psychologists, and scientists. This gave donors the freedom to become parents whenever they wished, individually and autonomously, through an application to the government. Government scientists would examine the genomes of applicants and match them up to create embryos with low levels of risk mutations. The embryo would be implanted in the womb of a surrogate mother, or birth mother, in the Children’s Center closest to the primary genetic donor.

Many other countries followed in China’s footsteps when initial psychological and physical testing demonstrated the well-being of children raised in the Centers. These children were humanity’s future: remarkably healthy, persistent, bright, and inquisitive. The main issue, now, was how to maintain this upward trajectory—how to keep humanity from falling back into old ways.

2102 AD

When the boys were thirteen, they all went on a special excursion.

“What’s going on?” Jingfei asked the teacher. “Why is it so exclusive? Why can’t we go too?”

Schoolteacher Leng, whom we secretly called Lucky Ears, for his impressive earlobes, told her to sit down and start working on her planetary orbits. The boys were going to the hospital for a day procedure, he explained curtly. That was all he would say of it for now, because it was time for physics, not chatting.

A hospital procedure! Jingfei turned and raised her eyebrows at me and Suyin. We both shrugged.

“Well, if that’s the case, we should get a day off lessons too—that’s only fair,” said Jingfei cheekily, but Lucky Ears ignored her.

It was a stale day in the middle of summer. Hong Kong was suffocating beneath a thick blanket of smog. Even after sunset, there was little relief from the heat. I pushed my bedroom window open. Nothing stirred. The air was a warm, stagnant kiss against my face, dense with the smells of fried food and exhaust fumes. I lifted my damp hair, coiled it into a bun, and knotted it at the nape of my neck.

The hum of an engine floated up to my ears. I put my palm-computer down and poked my head out of the window. My room was on the seventh floor. The boys looked like toy figurines, filing out of the omnibus. As far as I could tell, they didn’t look any different. None of them were missing limbs or sporting extra growths.

I thought about calling her using my wristband communicator, but I suspected those conversations were recorded by the Center. If I went in person, they might be able to see me on the cameras, but they could only guess what I was saying.

I padded down the corridor to Jingfei’s room. She answered immediately.

“I’m going to Chao’s room,” I said. “I want to know what happened.”

“I’m coming.”

We knew the hidden paths to the boys’ dormitories. Chao wasn’t alone in his room. His friend Gen was sitting on his desk, swinging his legs wildly. Chao lay on the bed, still fully dressed in his linen trousers and shirt. Jingfei pushed Chao’s legs aside and sat on the bed too. Her pajama top barely hid the shape of her growing breasts, and her loose hair tumbled in a sleek fall to the small of her back. I felt a stab of jealousy. She was becoming a pretty young lady, and she still had the brazenness of her childhood. She crossed her slim legs on top of Chao’s and prodded him. “So, what happened? Where did you guys go today?”

Chao glanced over to where I was leaning against the wall. I slid to the floor in an awkward perch, hugging my arms around my knees.

“Thought they would’ve told you,” piped up Gen, a small-sized boy who liked to wear a cap pulled low over his brow.

“No,” I said. “They didn’t say anything, except you had to go to the hospital for a procedure.”

“I guess we got old enough,” said Chao. “I thought they wouldn’t do it ’til we turned sixteen. I mean, do they really think we’re going to be having sex here in the Center?”

“I’ve heard stories,” said Gen.

“Oh—they sterilized you?” Jingfei gasped.

“God, don’t say it like that,” said Gen. “They cut our vas deferens.”

“Oh.”

Jingfei and I looked at each other, wide-eyed. She started giggling uncontrollably.

“Shut up, Jingfei.” Chao rolled away from her. “Basically, we can still do it without accidentally making a baby. And we still make sperm. All men in China have it cut nowadays. And in heaps of other countries too. It’s fair. It’s not just on the women.”

“That’s true,” I said, thinking of the asterisk-shaped scar on my inner arm. “Did it hurt? Was it scary?”

“Nah,” said Chao. “They inject a local anesthetic, and a machine does it. The error rate is less than 0.02 percent, and the whole thing took less than a minute. A human surgeon would take fifteen minutes,” he added, and I caught a glimpse of the debrief they must have received before the procedure.

We were silent for a while. I looked around Chao’s room. His desk was piled with empty packets of fish crackers. In one corner loomed an ominous heap of unwashed socks and T-shirts. His room smelled like mud, sweat, and food.

I ventured, “It’s permanent, right?”

“Yeah, more or less. I’ve heard there is a procedure to reverse it, but it wouldn’t be available at any reputable hospital.”

Gen pulled off his cap, rubbed his hands through his hair, and replaced the cap more firmly.

“You never think about what it would be like to make a baby the old way?” asked Jingfei, breaking the mood with a mischievous grin. She prodded Chao again, several times in the thigh, until he yelled and pushed her away.

“Nah, I don’t really care about that,” he replied. “You can still have all the fun. When I have a baby, I’m definitely applying to be a spliced donor. I don’t want my baby to turn out a freak.”

“Our grandparents weren’t freaks,” I said bluntly, and although I hadn’t meant it as a joke, both Gen and Jingfei chuckled.

“True.” Chao rolled onto his side and propped his head up on one arm. “But they wouldn’t be able to survive in our world, you know? Our brains need to be faster and sharper, to process all the information that comes at us. Plus, it would be unethical to bring a natural baby into the world, when we have the tech to get rid of diseases.”

Unethical. That was a strong word. A moral judgment. Had he come to that conclusion himself, or was he spouting an opinion he’d heard on a webcast?

“Maybe,” I said. “Are you saying that jigsaw babies have better lives?”

“Yeah, of course. Think about what Schoolteacher Mun was saying in biology class last week. Life without things like Fragile X and Down Syndrome is better than a life of illness. Just look at the studies done on the Children’s Centers. Every other country wants to copy China.”

I shrugged and put my chin on my knees. “I don’t know. You sound sentimental, Chao. We’ve grown up in a Center, so of course we want to think that our way is best, and that we’re the best. Who knows what sort of studies they show us? Don’t you ever think about the countries out there that do things differently? Maybe there are natural-born children living in family homes, just as happy and smart as we are.”

“Well, why don’t you travel overseas and look at these other places, and come back and tell me what you see? I’ll bet you a thousand yuan that in a few years, the splicing tech will be everywhere. Other countries just haven’t caught up to us yet, Lian. You’d be blind to deny that genetic engineering is the future.”

We were both irritated.

“Relax, both of you,” said Jingfei.

I went to the window, breathing heavily. The city looked so big. We were four little people in a little box of a room, inside the bigger box of the Center, in a city of boxes. Suddenly, it seemed so funny that we no longer bled or ejaculated, and we could reproduce with our minds rather than our bodies. An odd laugh welled in my belly, bubbling like broth from my lips.

2106 AD

I was seventeen years old when I left the Children’s Center.

Shortly before I moved away, they arranged for me to meet with my birth mother. I did not really want to do it, but it was customary: a chance to say thank you, to hand over a token gift. It seemed garish and meaningless. Here, have a jade figurine, to repay you for carrying me in your womb for nine months, letting me deform your body, and pushing me out of your vagina.

I’d seen the birth mothers around the Center, although they usually kept to their own wing. Simple women, some Chinese, some immigrants from the Philippines or Indonesia or Bangladesh, they drifted around in groups of two or three.

My birth mother’s name was Deepa. She was Pakistani, and thirty-six years old. She would have borne me when she was nineteen. She looked nothing like me. She sat across from me, her coarse black hair pulled into a braid, her deep-set eyes gazing hesitantly at me from above a high nose. Her hands, which were the warm brown of coffee, were folded tightly on the table. I realized she was nervous.

I glanced over my shoulder helplessly as the office administrator closed the door, leaving the two of us alone in the meeting room. There was a pot of tea on the table, and two china cups. I sighed.

Deepa continued to glance at me, furtively and wondrously, in a way that made me feel halfway between a princess and a specimen.

I reached for the pot of tea and filled the two cups. I lifted mine to my lips—too hot. I blew on it impatiently.

Deepa took the other. “Thank you,” she said, in a foreign lilt. Her Cantonese intonations were all wrong. “Congratulations on your university placement. I’m very proud of you.”

I suppressed an automatic thought: you had nothing to do with it. “Thank you, Deepa.”

“What will you study?” she asked.

“Anthropology.” Seeing her perplexed expression, I searched for simpler words. “Studying the different ways that humans lived, in the past and the present.”

“That sounds very interesting,” said Deepa. “Will you study in Hong Kong?”

“Yes, the university campus is on the northern outskirts of Hong Kong, not far from Shenzhen. In our final year we have the chance to study overseas.”

“That’s very exciting.”

We sipped our tea. It was a rich Tieguanyin tea from Fujian province with complex, nutty layers. I noticed that Deepa was struggling with the tiny cup. The fingers on both her hands splayed outwards, and her knuckles were swollen and knobbly. She had rheumatoid arthritis. Immediately, I wondered if she was a jigsaw baby or a natural-born. Almost as soon as the question came to me, I knew I could never ask her.

The silence became unbearable.

“Your dress is beautiful,” I said, gesturing. Her garment was made of thick silk in a brown hue, edged with gold embroidery. “Is it from your home country?”

Her face brightened. “Thank you, but no. One of my friends here at the Center made it for me.”

“Oh, I see.” I wondered briefly what sort of friends she had. Then my mind raced ahead to other matters—I had to move out in a week, and I hadn’t found furniture for my new dormitory; I was already behind on pre-reading for my course; and Jingfei wanted me to help her with an overdue assignment . . .

Deepa was saying something about her hometown. “ . . . rural area in the northern part of the country, north of Islamabad, close to the border with Afghanistan. It was a long drive to the nearest city. Big mountains looked over our village. In winter, the mountains wore gowns of ice. The boys in our village grew up to be either farmers or soldiers. The girls . . . ” She hesitated and trailed off.

I tried to recall a map of Pakistan, to place Islamabad somewhere on it. But I only knew it as a shapeless land, somewhere southwest of China, beyond the Himalayas.

“Do you miss your home country?”

She finally met my gaze. Her eyes were thickly fringed with lashes and oddly flat. “No,” she replied.

Was she lying? I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to ask. I didn’t want to sit in this tepid room with a strange woman, pretending to share a bond with her. She didn’t understand me, nor I her.

I glanced surreptitiously at my wristwatch. Less than ten minutes had passed.

I withdrew a velveteen pouch from my pocket.

Deepa’s face fell for a split second, before she concealed it behind a soft smile. Handing over the gift signaled the end of the meeting.

I’d chosen the jade and gold bracelet with care, visiting two merchants before selecting one that was simple and tasteful, with high quality stones. It had cost nearly two thousand yuan.

My birth mother accepted the pouch without opening it, aware that it is impolite to examine a gift in front of the giver. Our fingers touched. I flinched involuntarily from her gnarled hands. I noticed that she had several large paper cuts on her palms, and I wondered what sort of work she did, now that she was likely too old to bear more children without significant risk. Packing boxes? Sorting files?

We stood and bowed to each other. Deepa wished me success in my studies.

“Thank you,” I said, and hesitated, wondering if I should clarify what I was thanking her for. But I didn’t. I bowed my head again and slipped out of the room.

My second-mother was an entrepreneur; my third-mother, a professor of linguistics. My first-father was a tax accountant. My second-father was a homemaker.

My relatives often commented that I was most similar to my first-mother, who was a chemist. Secretly, I relished the comparison. My first-mother was coolheaded, brisk and practical. Whenever we spoke, she would tell me exactly what was on her mind. She did not mince words.

After I left the Children’s Center, I saw less of my mothers and fathers. I moved onto the university campus near the border of Shenzhen. Once a year, at Chinese New Year, I would catch the monorail back to Hong Kong City, and go about my duty of dinners. Five family dinners, one after another, with five different parents. Updating my mothers and fathers on what I’d achieved in the previous twelve months. Mingling with siblings that weren’t really brothers or sisters.

I eventually lost touch with Jingfei. She moved to Wuhan University to study history. We stayed in contact for a while, chatting online for the first few months. We spoke about taking a holiday together: a tour of England and Scotland, to learn Western history. Gradually, our chats grew further and further apart. Jingfei had a new group of friends and a series of boyfriends. I, on the other hand, tended to make only professional contacts at university. We never took our Western holiday.

Sometimes, I replay the last video chat we had. We were twenty years old. It was a mundane conversation. We discuss Jingfei’s boyfriend’s physical flaws and which instant noodle flavor is the best. Jingfei gets a phone call from a lecturer, so we end our chat. There’s a note of melancholy in our voices as we say goodbye, as though we both know the end of our friendship has arrived.

Much later, someone tells me that Jingfei left China, had a child with a white man, and lives on the coast of Ireland. I’m not sure if these are anything more than rumors. From time to time, I’m taken back to the night that she came to my room sobbing. The memory has an addictive quality to it: one of those that you relish, because it’s both familiar and unsettling. I remember her face, in the glow of the hall light, sunken with grief, twisted with wrath. I remember the bed cocooning us from the world, and her thin body shaking against mine. I can still feel the strange mixture of terror and anticipation that settled over us in a quiet web.

2115 AD

I am twenty-six, and in a bar.

The air stinks of sweat and beer. A cacophony of noise washes over me. They are playing twentieth century American music videos on the holoscreens. A woman in an astronaut costume dances on a stage illuminated with candy canes and rainbows. The subtitles are nonsensical.

I wrestle through a sea of warm bodies to reach the bar. Somehow, I have collected a piece of chewing gum on my shoe and a sticky patch on my elbow. A man in a gray suit with gold-capped teeth grins at me and asks me if I want some raff. I shake my head.

“Drink?” the bartender yells.

I glance back at my table, where my colleagues are waiting, and hold up two fingers with a questioning look. One of them cheekily puts up three fingers in reply. I smile and order two jugs of a crisp, pale Japanese lager.

The jugs are pushed across the counter. Now for the treacherous return journey. I have already come to terms with the fact that my silk shirt will not survive the night. I detour around a pack of girls who are gyrating to the American beats, and dodge a tall fellow arguing with someone in his earpiece. I’ve almost made it to the safety of the table when a voice calls my name.

“Lian?”

I turn around, beer sloshing. A man about my height stands a few paces away. A red Bayern Munchen cap shades part of his face. I don’t recognize him at first. Then, his lively eyes meet mine from beneath the cap’s brim, and something in the mannerism jogs a long-buried memory.

“Gen?” I say incredulously.

The last time we saw each other was at graduation. By then, we weren’t close friends, and we didn’t keep in touch throughout university. I’d heard that he went overseas to study. He certainly looks like a foreigner now. In that bright hat, with his shaggy hair curling over his ears, he stands out from the crisp, restrained Chinese men around us.

“I thought it had to be you,” he grins. “Here, do you need a hand with those?”

“No, no.” I turn and put the beers down in front of my colleagues with an apologetic smile.

“Who’s he? An old boyfriend?”

“A childhood friend,” I say, unsure if I’ve chosen the right words.

“Hurry up, then. Don’t keep him waiting.”

“Buy him a drink, too! Something strong!”

I walk over to Gen and he holds out his arms. I’m surprised by the warmth of his hug. Is this a Western thing, to hug without hesitation, without thinking about the end of the hug? I pull away.

“What the hell are you doing here?” I say, exactly at the same moment he says, “It’s been, what, ten years?”

We laugh.

“It’s too noisy in here,” he says. “Let’s go outside.”

We escape the fog of pounding music and sticky air, into the brisk, neon night. We stand in an alley, leaning against brick walls, facing each other. The noise of honking cars comes to us distantly. Behind Gen is a vintage comic shop, decorated with posters of busty cartoon women. The white eye of the moon looks down at us. I relish the sensation of goose bumps rising on my skin.

“Nine years,” I correct him. “We graduated at seventeen.”

“That’s right.” Gen pulls his hat off and runs his hand through his hair. I must have seen him do the same thing a hundred times as a child. His hair is parted in the middle and so long that it almost reaches his collar. “God, nine years. What luck, running into you on my first night back in Hong Kong.”

“This is your first night back?”

“Mm-hm.”

“In nine years? You didn’t come back once, to visit your mothers and fathers?”

He shrugs. “No, I guess I didn’t.”

“Where did you go? Europe, wasn’t it?”

“Germany. I studied social sciences, then worked as a teacher in different schools, in a few different countries. It was a good time. I saw a lot of new places, met a lot of new people.” He turns his lively eyes upon me. “What about you?”

“I’ve been here,” I say. “Plodding along.”

“Anthropology, right? At graduation, you said you wanted to learn about people.”

I’m surprised he remembers. I stare at the poster behind him. A curvaceous woman with blue skin and orange hair stares back at me. There is a fierceness and seductiveness about her that sends a shiver of fear through my body. “I changed degrees.”

“Oh, what happened?”

“I transferred to biology in second year.” On the tip of my tongue is the reason I give everyone: I prefer the sciences to the arts. But then I say, “My first-mother wanted me to do something more grounded.”

“Did you like biology?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“What do you do now?”

I smile at him. “I’m a geneticist.”

“Lian, a geneticist.” A mirror-image smile spreads over his face. “Do you like it?”

“I do.” I picture the clean surfaces of my laboratory and the methodical pages of my notebook. “My research group searches for risk genes related to intelligence. Each gene we identify allows the next group of children to be smarter. It’s exciting, you know, to be doing something that makes a tangible difference.”

He nods.

“Sometimes I think about how mad it is that I went from being a jigsaw child in a Children’s Center, to a jigsaw adult making more jigsaw children.”

Gen laughs. “It is a little mad. Everything’s a little mad.”

“I’m jealous of you, Gen.”

“Why?”

“Seeing other places.”

“Where have you traveled?”

“I haven’t.”

Gen blinks. “Not at all?”

“I haven’t left China.”

“You’re kidding,” says Gen, leaning back against the wall. “That needs to change.”

I study him covertly. In his T-shirt and jeans, he exudes ease. I search for the subtle paunch around the tummy sported by many Chinese businessmen, but Gen’s torso is lean. He looks like he’d be as comfortable foraging in bushland as he would in a classroom. I imagine him running a cross-country ultramarathon, from Germany back to Hong Kong. Next to him, I feel soft and stagnant.

“Why’d you come back, Gen?”

A siren blasts, somewhere in the city. Gen crosses his tanned arms across his chest, and then uncrosses them. “I missed China,” he says. His voice is thick with defeat. “I didn’t want to admit it. I wanted to live somewhere else, to forget this place. But as soon as I stepped off the plane today, I felt it in my bones. Even though the buildings look bigger and stranger now—this is still my home. I can’t escape it.”

I absorb his sadness, observe it, but don’t quite understand it. “It’s good to know your roots,” I offer.

He nods. We both look up at the latticework of city lights, and the moon beyond.

“How long will you stay?” I venture.

“I’m not sure yet,” he says, and he gives me an intent look that sends another shiver of fear down my spine.

I remember walking back to my university dormitory one evening after a late class. It was the middle of winter, and the sun had already set. A young student, about my age, darted out from behind a building and spat on me. “Alien jigsaw,” she hissed. She wore a thin red armband that marked her as a protester, one of those people who rejects new technology out of a misguided and backward morality. I don’t think the incident affected me too much, but I always wondered how she knew I was a Center child. Perhaps it was something in the way I moved.

It was a tense time. In 2105, thirty years after the first Children’s Center opened in New Beijing, an international research group published an epidemiological study. The study looked at crime rates in countries that had adopted genome splicing and Children’s Centers, such as China, Japan, Norway, Sweden, and the Korean Nations, and compared them to countries in the European Union and the United States, where genome splicing was widespread but social regulation was minimal.

The group found that crime had decreased in countries that adopted both splicing and Children’s Centers. Crime rates were not much changed in countries with less regulated genome splicing. The authors argued that highly regulated social structures were necessary for social progress with such rapid developments in genetic nanotechnology.

But then, a second research group reexamined the data and published additional findings that unsettled the global community. Although crime rates were lower in countries with socially regulated genome splicing, the crimes that did occur were remarkable for their high levels of premeditation, bizarreness, and violence.

Academics, policy makers and laypeople pounced on these secondary findings. Perhaps tailored reproduction focused its attention too heavily on eliminating physical illness, without sufficient consideration of mental illness. Perhaps impulsivity as a trait was downregulated by the splicing and socialization process, leading to criminal acts that were more premeditated. Psychologists began to study the characteristics of children in Centers, looking for signs of callous and unemotional traits, decreased empathy, and disordered attachment. Initial results were inconclusive, which only generated further speculation.

It was in this climate that I graduated from the East Hong Kong Children’s Center. We were the new version of human, patched with an upgrade that hadn’t had all the bugs ironed out. We were a little different, a little special. A little scary.

2122 AD

“Do you think you will ever cook claypot rice without burning it?” I ask, peering into the bowl of charred tofu, pineapple, vegetables, and rice.

Gen elbows me aside. “Hey, hey. Didn’t I order you out of the kitchen? It tastes better when it’s crispy. Now out. You’re supposed to remain horizontal until the food is ready. You’ve had a long day. Put your feet up.”

Smiling, I refill my glass of white wine and retreat to the couch. I’m only a few paces away. The apartment is a typical Hong Kong space: twenty meters square, a single room subdivided into corners for cooking, eating, lounging, and sleeping. It’s enough for the two of us. I kick my shoes off and tuck myself in amongst a pile of cushions. Within a few minutes, Gen joins me, carrying two bowls of fragrant rice.

We eat silently, watching the day’s news flicker across the projector. World leaders convening at an emergency environmental summit in New Delhi as an extreme heat wave mounts over South Asia. The summit was stormed by farmers begging for more resources to sustain their crops. A violent shooting in Malaysia, thought to be driven by genetic discrimination, the perpetrator targeting natural-born protesters who resisted government-mandated sterilization. A video update from one of the Mars colony celebrity families, holding a second birthday party for their son James, a genuine Martian.

Gen turns the projector off and pours us another round of wine. We lie on the couch for a long while. I play a little game with myself, where I try to make no noise, no movement, and think no thoughts, for as long as I can. I’ve played this secret game ever since I was a child. I sometimes wonder, if I’m not doing anything, then what’s to say I still exist? Then, of course, I catch myself thinking this thought, and I lose the game.

Gen strokes my hair, starting at the top of my forehead, to the crown of my head, and down to the nape of my neck. Warmth fills me from the top down.

“Gen,” I say.

“Hm?”

“Can you hum a tune?”

“What tune?”

“Any tune.”

“Anything?”

“Mm. Something gentle and low.”

“OK.”

He starts to hum a sort of lullaby. I burrow into his voice. The dips and eddies wash over me, tugging me into a swelling tide. I close my eyes, trying to find that elusive place where the whole world seems safe and peaceful. But Gen’s humming is too brisk, and his melody too lively. It’s all wrong. I squeeze my eyes tightly to fill my vision with squiggly lines.

“Lian?”

“Mm?”

“It’s my birthday next week.”

“Yes, I know. I haven’t forgotten.”

“I’m turning thirty-three.”

“A significant number,” I say, with dramatic flair. “A lucky number. Life upon life.”

He wriggles out from beneath me, so that he can look me full in the face. “Lian, I’m ready to have a baby.”

“Oh, what?” I sit up, almost knocking him off the couch. “I didn’t think you’d—really? You want to submit an application?”

He licks his lips and pushes his long hair behind his ears. “I want to have a baby with you.”

“You want us to submit a joint application? I guess I could do that. I hadn’t really thought about becoming a mother yet. But you know the National Lab doesn’t guarantee joint parentage.”

Gen looks at me.

“Oh, Gen. No. No way.”

I know where this has come from. He’s been hanging out with odd acquaintances from overseas, people on the fringes of society, discussing controversial, anti-government topics. Over the past few months he’s talked about finally taking me to Europe. Once or twice, he joked about booking a one-way ticket.

“Lian, I thought maybe we could think about it.”

“That’s not something I would even consider.”

Disappointment darkens his face.

“It’s hardly even feasible,” I say. “I’d have to have my implant removed. For you, it’s even more extreme. You’d need surgery to reverse the procedure. No surgeon in China will do that for you. And that’s only the beginning. What happens during the pregnancy? Where will I live? What doctor would look after me and deliver the baby? Do you want me to fly to Egypt or Bangladesh to pop out our baby? Do you want to have a Chinese baby in a third-world country? Have you even considered this?”

“I just wanted to talk about it with you,” says Gen. “I thought you’d be a bit more open-minded about this.”

“It’s not about being open-minded. What you’re suggesting is illegal!”

“In China, yes.”

“We are Chinese,” I say flatly.

Gen rolls his eyes and sighs. He says nothing for a minute. Then, in a lower tone, he says, “Do you remember the stuff you said when we were thirteen?”

“What are you talking about?”

“That day us boys came back from the surgery. We were in Chao’s room. Remember? It got a bit heated, and you brought Chao down from his high horse. You said, ‘There are countries out there that do things differently from China. There are natural-born children living in homes, just as happy and smart as we are.’”

“That was twenty years ago, Gen. I hardly remember what I said.”

“Your words really stayed with me, you know, after that night. They stuck in my head, and I haven’t been able to shake them, even twenty years on.”

I lower my glass. “Well, that’s a bit silly. I was thirteen. I had no idea what I was talking about. I hadn’t even left China—and I still haven’t! Chao was probably right, and I was wrong.”

I can’t stand the way Gen is looking at me now—like I’ve peeled off a mask to reveal a devil’s face. I turn away from him. There’s nowhere to escape to in this tiny box of an apartment.

“So, you don’t believe what you said back then?”

“I think it’s selfish to have a natural-born baby when tailored reproduction is offered to us on a silver platter.”

“I don’t see a platter. I see gruel being forced down our throats.”

“There’s no need to be melodramatic.”

“It’s about choice, Lian! Freedom. For fuck’s sake.”

“I choose not to have a child peppered with risk mutations.”

“Our grandparents were fine.”

I stand up and pace around the cramped space. Four paces, left turn. Four paces, left turn. Four paces, left turn. There’s nowhere to go. I’m assaulted by memories of my grandparents dying of cancers and infections, racked with pain, shriveled to bags of bones. I remember my Erma, in that stifling room in Tuen Mun Hospice, overrun with tubes, exhaling her life in slow, sour breaths. I don’t want that sort of death for anyone, let alone my child.

“I can’t talk to you anymore,” I say. Without looking at Gen, I open the door of the apartment and walk out, slamming it behind me.

After that day, I begin spending more time at work, obsessing over the next breakthrough in identifying risk mutations. Gen begins spending more time with his anti-government friends, drinking and talking until late in the night. I wonder if he’s met another woman, but I can hardly muster up the appropriate jealousy.

One night he doesn’t come home. I watch the news on the projector. There was an anti-splicing protest in Shenzhen that afternoon, and fourteen protesters were arrested by the Chinese police. The protesters are being held overnight for questioning.

I go to the wardrobe and take out all of Gen’s belongings: clothes, shoes, palm-computer, earpieces. I put everything into a suitcase and leave it in the hallway outside the apartment.

When I get home from work the next day, the suitcase is gone. In its place is a red cap, propped against the door. Gen doesn’t return. I put the cap in the bin.

2126 AD

My failure is plastered across the newsblogs for all to see.

HORIZON GROUP BLUNDER: THREE YEAR OLDS FAIL IQ TEST

Private research giant Horizon Group’s genetic modifications at the East Hong Kong Children’s Center have backfired in an embarrassing turn of events. The three-year-old children with Horizon’s upgrade have tested nearly 4 IQ points lower than comparable cohorts. The modification was designed to increase children’s intelligence, but appears to have had the opposite effect. This news has shocked the Hong Kong community and the Chinese government.

“This grave mistake will jeopardize the comfortable advantage that Horizon Group has held in winning government contracts over the past decade,” says scientific adviser Professor Xi.

My name is not mentioned in the article, but it’s enough to make me burn with humiliation. I can’t read on. I dig my palms into my eyes, hard enough that white flashes of light sear my vision. Shame crackles on my skin. How could this have happened? We’d spent a year reviewing the literature, a year running computer simulations, and another year testing the modification in simians. It was supposed to be another triumph for Horizon Group.

One of my research assistants has already scrutinized the study and sent us a deflated video message. The results of the intelligence test are unequivocal. On average, the three year olds with the modification introduced by Horizon Group tested 3.7 points lower than children at the Northern and Western Centers, and 3.4 points lower than children in previous cohorts. Our only hope is that they might make up the lost points later in childhood. It’s a thin hope.

The receptionist is doing her coffee rounds. She pauses over me. “Lian? What will you have today?”

I pull my face out of my hands. “It’s the same fucking order every day, Ming.”

A colleague at the desk next to me glances across, her lips pressed tightly together. I say nothing. Is there anyone here who isn’t incompetent? Ming stands still for a moment, eyes shining with hurt, and then moves on. When she delivers my coffee ten minutes later, she plonks it down hard enough that foam scatters all over my desk.

I open the folders that contain our simulations and play them, one by one. I scan the permutations and combinations until my eyes are dry. I compare the code to the prototype derived from the research literature. I examine the stitch-points where the spliced codons are brought together.

I’m not sure what I’m looking for. It seems impossible that we could’ve made a mistake. Each of the doctorate students checked the sequence a hundred times. The outcome has to be an anomaly: a completely unpredictable culmination of multiple interactions. A stroke of fucking bad luck.

As I load another simulation, the computer freezes. A fragmented tangle of code spasms on my projector. I can’t believe it. I’m working at Horizon Group with the latest model CPUs and displays. We’re not supposed to have glitches. Blinding heat floods my body, and I’m transformed into a being of light and color, without sound, without thought.

A moment later, I return to my senses. My hands are sore, and my colleagues are staring at me. I glance down. The computer keyboard is broken: the middle split by a crack, and several buttons artfully sprinkled around it. I flex and curl my fingers, unsure if they belong to me.

A chime sounds in my earpiece, followed by a gentle, automated voice. Lian, please attend Project Director Song’s office.

The wary eyes of three dozen scientists follow me as I walk toward the Director’s office. Their fear and pity sicken me. No one says a thing.

Director Song tells me to take the rest of the day off.

My cheeks burn. Leaving work early is a sign of weakness. “I’m not sick, Director,” I say. “And I hope I can prove to you that I’m not incompetent.”

“No one here considers you incompetent, Lian. We all know you’re one of our most dedicated researchers. But you’ve worked hard enough today. There will be more work in the next few days, as we come under increased scrutiny. Rest and prepare yourself.”

“I don’t need to rest.”

“Lian. You bit off poor Ming’s head, and you smashed a computer. Right now, the office is terrified of you. You are not a charged battery. You’re like a six or seven percent—and that’s being generous. Take the afternoon off. Here.” The Director swipes at an icon, and a brief melody sounds in my earpiece. “I’ve given you two vouchers for a nice meal in Tsim Sha Tsui. Take someone out for dinner. Eat, drink. Relax.”

“Director, I’d much rather—”

“We’ll talk tomorrow,” says my boss, and turns away to answer a call on her earpiece. I’m dismissed.

In the end, I eat alone. The vouchers are for a lavish restaurant on the eighth floor of Millennium Tower. The diners are a mix of local businessmen and white tourists. I’m seated at a cloth-draped table, on a plush chair, in front of a floor-to-ceiling window that overlooks Victoria Harbour. Late afternoon sunlight coats the water with sparkling diamonds. Cargo ships move ponderously through the dock, bleating in low tunes.

I order a banquet for myself and my imaginary date. Savory snake soup, roast goose with crispy skin, lobster noodles swimming in sauce, chewy phoenix talons, and delicate dumplings bursting with oily soup. Suddenly, I am ravenous. I can’t remember the last time I ate such flavorsome food. The indulgence feels seductive, hedonistic, primal. I imagine how I must look to the other diners: a lone Chinese woman, tearing meat off the bone with her hands, crunching tendons between her teeth, slavering and licking her fingers, spilling sauce down the front of her satin shirt.

After lunch, I walk the old streets behind the glamorous new buildings. Here, the sidewalks carry cracks from a century ago, and loose garbage blusters in forgotten alleys. I have a vague memory of walking here as a child with my classmates, parading in two neat lines, shepherded by schoolteachers. I remember eating fresh egg tarts with Jingfei and Chao and Gen—the bliss of that first bite into the sweet, gooey pastry; the warmth of the last swallow sitting in our bellies for the rest of the day.

A handful of people walk past me hastily, in the opposite direction. Two women pause. “Don’t go that way,” they say. “There’s a protest in the square.”

“OK,” I say, and keep walking.

In less than a minute I’m at the square. A crowd of thirty or so people with thin red armbands are marching around, waving homemade signs. REPRODUCTION IS OUR RIGHT. FREEDOM FROM SPLICING. REAL BABIES NOT JIGSAW BABIES. HORIZON GROUP VOLIATES OUR CHILDREN.

They’re protesting tailored reproduction. I feel a rush of embarrassment for them. What a hotchpotch of characters: young and old, in scruffy clothing. One of their signs has a spelling mistake. Some of them have brought children, who scamper around with little signs. I suspect these are natural-born children, and I observe them with fascination. They each orbit their own adult. The parent-child bond is surprisingly easy to pick out.

It won’t be long before the police arrive. Most of the time, the police let protesters go about their business as long as they’re peaceful.

The protesters light a fire in a metal trash can. One of the leaders, a man in a checkered shirt, tears up articles and newspapers and feeds the fire with scraps of paper. He yells out broad sentiments that make little sense to me. I suspect he is destroying printed copies of scientific studies. I almost laugh aloud at the irony of trying to destroy something intellectual, electronic, and abstract, with a physical act.

A group of young men and women, university students by their demeanor, enter the square. One of them must have made a remark to the protesters, because suddenly the two groups are facing each other. Fists tighten and lips curl. The man in the checkered shirt pushes one of the young men in the chest. There is a scuffle.

“Hey!” I shout, walking over. “Break that up or I’ll call the police!”

The man in the checkered shirt rounds upon me. “Back off, mutated bitch.”

“How dare you speak to a lady like that!” says a young man.

Checkered-shirt peers at the pin on my collar and spits at my feet. “She’s one of them mad scientists fucking up the next generation. She gets no respect from me.”

“Don’t think she cares about the respect of mongrels,” sneers the young man.

A young woman casts her eye over the scrappy mob of protesters. “Disgusting. Bringing natural-born babies into the world. I hope we breed you out in twenty years.”

Another protester, a man with a bulbous nose, lunges at her with fists outstretched. His face is a contorted, ugly mask of fury. A friend pulls the young woman out of harm’s way just in time. Two more friends leap at the bulbous-nosed man. Screams erupt. The two groups have melded into one. I spin around, disorientated. Where did all these people come from? There must be a hundred people in the square!

Someone barrels into me, knocking the air from my lungs. I’m on the ground, knees scraping the concrete. Winded, I drag myself to my feet and search for a way out. I’m surrounded by crying children and wrestling adults.

“Don’t let them get away!” A young man in a university sweater points across the square. “That one tried to punch Yu An.”

“Police will get ’em.”

“Don’t see police here, do you? Come on!”

I’m caught up in the chase. The protesters scatter, but we pursue a handful of them into the darkening streets. I’m running elbow to elbow with the young people, like a pack of wolves, cold wind in our faces. We’re on the heels of three of them, but they split up. We corner one in a blind alley.

It’s the man who lunged at the young woman. He looks to be in his forties, with a leathered complexion. He wears a woolen beanie and a T-shirt that’s too long for his stocky frame. I marvel at his nose, which is swollen with tumorous growths. It’s large enough to be two noses. No spliced child would have such a defect. A wave of repulsion sweeps over me.

“What’s this?” he sneers. “A citizen’s arrest?”

“Prison’s too good for you,” hisses a young man next to me. “You’re a natural-born, no doubt, judging by that beautiful face.”

The man sticks his chin out. “Proud to be. What’s it to you?”

“Scum,” the young man snarls. “No wonder you’re violent and crude.”

“You animals should be exiled,” another says. “You want to drag China back into the dark days.”

He shrugs, but his eyes are wary. “We just want to be free to have our own families.”

“You really want to pass your genes on to a poor child?” someone snaps, and I realize it is me.

Beneath that ridiculous woolen beanie, his expression remains lofty. “Better mine than yours.”

A woman slaps him across the cheek. He stumbles back against the wall, more out of surprise than pain. Before he can react, someone else kicks him in the gut. He drops to his knees. The beanie falls off, revealing a patchy head of hair that reminds me of the simians in our laboratory. Suddenly, he seems such a pathetic and useless creature. A glitch in the course of humanity.

White heat floods my body, the color of euphoria or rage.

I stumble backward. Around me, the youths are shouting, but I can’t make sense of what they’re saying. My hands sting and throb. The smells of tinny blood and sour urine fill my throat, and I retch.

The man is crumpled on the ground. A patch of urine stains the front of his trousers. Bloods pours from a gash on his brow and from his slack mouth. I can’t remember if he was missing teeth before. I notice, with an eerie clarity, that his shoes have fallen off and his socks do not match. One is navy and one is black.

“Get out of here!” someone shouts, and my legs obey. I flee through the narrow streets, terrified to look back. My face feels frozen, like the painted wooden masks used in opera shows. I find a subway entrance and stumble down into its tunnels. Everyone is staring at me. They must know what sort of person I am, and what I’ve done, and what I’ve become.

On the train home, all I can see are the man’s mismatched socks, poking out from his trouser legs. Navy and black, alike but not identical. I cover my face and begin to cry—harsh, hard sobs that shake me to the core.

It’s funny how things from your childhood look older and smaller when you come back to visit.

The East Hong Kong Children’s Center has always been a vast, impenetrable presence in my mind. But now, the square building peppered with hundreds of square windows seems forlorn rather than forbidding. The walls are weather-stained. The once-red sign cresting the tower is bleached to a salmon pink. As I step through the revolving doors, my shoes trace a threadbare trail in the rug.

The foyer hasn’t been updated since its inception. On the walls hang photographs of Hong Kong’s cityscape in 1920, 1980, 2010, 2065. The lemony smell of air freshener wafts to my nose, and the scent makes my heart ache. Is this stagnant, faceless place really where I came from? I imagine myself, framed and hung on the wall: Hong Kong, 2089.

The receptionist seems kind. I give her my name, and the reason for my visit, and she flicks a moving map onto my palm-computer.

“Follow the yellow line,” she says.

I walk down gray corridors that are both strange and familiar. Unease fills my bones, a quiet itch on the skin of my soul. The place feels haunted. The childhood spirits of myself, Gen, Jingfei, Chao, Suyin, still dwell here. I try to remind myself that I don’t believe in ghosts.

Children’s chatter reaches my ears. As I turn the corner, I see a class of seven or eight year olds in a courtyard garden, studying plants through their augmented reality glasses. Four schoolteachers guard them like lampposts. I watch them for a while, wondering about their genetic heritage, wondering if anyone has told them that, in a few years, they will be taken into nurses’ offices and doctors’ surgeries for unspoken procedures. The children clump into groups, heads together, chatting eagerly, then break apart and scamper around, only to reform in new clusters. They look happy.

I take an elevator to the third floor and walk across to the staff wing. The yellow line leads me to an empty cafeteria. The noise of clanging pots echoes from the kitchen, where the chefs must be preparing lunch. I pick a path between the scattered tables and chairs and reach the glass doors on the far side of the cafeteria.

The doors open onto a neatly tended garden balcony. Sunshine presses vibrant warmth to my face. Between potted hibiscus and flowing moneywort, a woman in a brown silk dress sits with her back to me, gazing out over the sprawling, steaming city. Her gray hair trails in a braid down her back.

As I approach, I see that the woman is carrying a baby in her arms. She sways, ever so slightly, and hums under her breath. The tune freezes me in my tracks. I stand still, absorbing the low, soft notes. The melody wraps me in a bubble of safety. Suddenly, everything falls into place. The bright sun, drawing life into my skin, drawing color forth from the pink hibiscus. The clanking city, shrinking into smallness beneath me. My birth mother, within arm’s reach, aged and beautiful.

I must have made a noise, because Deepa turns around. Her face has grown thinner in the last twenty years; her body has grown softer and plumper. The baby is a tiny thing, swaddled in cloth and nestled firmly in her arms. On her left wrist is the jade bracelet that I chose in a perfunctory manner from a vendor twenty years ago.

“Lian,” she says at once, her face full of astonishment.

She never expected to see me again. She didn’t believe that I would come to visit her. None of the others returned to the Center. For the first time, I glimpse the sort of grief a mother feels when a child abandons her. The sadness is a punch to the gut.

I kneel at her feet. Deepa watches me, a question in her eyes, saying nothing. I remember my coldness and condescension at seventeen, and I’m ashamed.

I want to confess my sins, but I don’t think she would look at me with love if she knew the person I am now. I wonder if she once held me as tenderly as she is holding the infant in her arms. Then, I realize that she must have. Quiet tears trek down my cheeks, and a strange peace spreads within me.

With trembling fingers, I touch the bracelet on her wrist and grasp her arthritic hand. Her fingers curl gently around mine. Her knuckles are swollen and stiff. I press my forehead to the back of her hand.

“I’m sorry,” I say, unable to meet her eyes. “I’m sorry.”

I wonder if I should explain what I’m apologizing for, but I can’t put it into words. It doesn’t seem to matter, anyway. Deepa rests her gnarled hand on my brow, smoothing away my sins.

The taxi car is stuck in traffic.

I don’t mind. I lean back against the leather seat and gaze out of the window. Glassy skyscrapers climb into the clouds. Animated billboards proclaim the wonders of a new skin revitalization cream, and the ecstasies of the latest virtual reality game, and the necessity of purchasing authentic sapphire jewelry for your loved ones. Pedestrians weave through the traffic, glued to their eyepieces and earpieces, guided by their internal autopilot. Hong Kong has a mad, busy beauty to it.

The dashboard chimes. “Apologies for the delay, Lian. Would you like me to search for an alternative route?”

“No, it’s fine.”

“Staying on course,” says the car. “Would you like to listen to music or a webcast to pass the time?”

“No, I’m fine. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, Lian.”

My palm-computer is buzzing with messages. From Director Song: Lian, call me ASAP. We need to talk. I’m sure we can iron out whatever issues have prompted this. From my research partner: Lian, what the fuck? We’re two months away from Stage Four trials. Why didn’t you give me a heads up that you were pulling the plug on us? From my doctorate students: Hi Lian, sorry to hear you’ve resigned so suddenly. Can you let us know who will be supervising our projects from now on? From my first-mother: Lian, what’s going on? I heard a crazy rumor that you quit your job? Please tell me this isn’t true.

I skim the messages, but they only fill me with exhaustion. I switch off my computer and my earpiece and enjoy the sounds of traffic.

An hour later, the car drops me off at Hong Kong International Airport. I pass through glass doors into a light-filled chamber with vaulted ceilings. People walk briskly in all directions, barely dodging one another to make a beeline for their destinations. A 3D projector displays a boggling diagram of upcoming flights. A robotic trolley zips up to me, scans my ID, and offers to take my luggage. I decline. I only have a backpack.

I approach the departures counter.

“Where would you like to travel to today?” the attendant asks.

“What’s your earliest flight into Europe?”

“We have a flight into Frankfurt in two hours, or London in three.”

“I’ll take the Frankfurt flight.”

“Great. Will that be one way or return?”

I hesitate, but only briefly. “One way.”

My feet tap out a brisk tune on the shiny floors. Adrenaline thrums in my chest. Is this what is feels like, to defy expectations? It’s terrifying and intoxicating. I picture the faces of my mothers. I line them up. First-mother, second-mother, third-mother. I see their mothers, too. My Yima, Erma, Sanma. And above them, Deepa. I see the utterly perplexed faces of Director Song, my research partner, my students. I see Jingfei and Gen, as I knew them, years ago, young and bursting with passion and determination. I carry them all within me now.

I’m shepherded into a queue to pass through security. Beyond the scanners, vast windows allow a view of the runway. A silver jet rises with a roar into the sky, and a second one follows close on its heels. The roar shakes my bones and fills me with life.

As I take off my jacket for the security scanners, I notice the asterisk-shaped scar on my inner arm. It’s stained with blue dye.

About the Author

Grace Chan is a Melbourne-based speculative fiction writer and doctor. Her family immigrated from Malaysia to Australia before her first birthday. She completed a medical degree in 2012 and is currently working and training in psychiatry. In her downtime, she enjoys coffee, space operas, and thinking about where we come from and where we’re all going.

Her writing can be found in Australian publications such as Going Down Swinging and Verge 2019: Uncanny. Her novella, The Ship of Theseus, was shortlisted for Viva la Novella VII. She tweets sporadically @gracechanwrites.

Generation Gap

Thoraiya Dyer

It’s not reaching my forever-height that frightens me.

It’s the decisions I’ll have to make when I’m Tower.

Did I stop growing at the right height? Is the timing right for the new generation?

Am I doing what’s best for the family, or are we all going to die when the Kurkavea swarm up Greenhill with their oyster-shucking knives to cut the throats of our dogs?

Being Child is easy.

But as the current Tower keeps telling me, that’s not a good enough reason to stay Child. It has to be because my family, the Hapkui, needs me to be taller.

I slouch beside the entrance to Greenhill, pulling on my wading boots. They’re made from foodbeast leather and even in the dim glow of the smallest moons, you can see where the annoying puppies have chewed the sinew stitching.

Luckily, the pups are locked in the den and can’t betray me with their yipping.

I’m sneaking out to meet my best friend, Fea, the Kurkavea Child.

The Kurkavea might be the mortal enemies of the Hapkui, but their territory includes Oyster Flats.

And, God’s Eye in Her Head, I cannot resist oysters.

All I want to do is eat oysters and forget about childhood maybe being over.

Fea will understand. She’s the same age as me. I know because when I was eight years old, and my digging claws were slow to grow, Tower took me to see the grave of her favorite dog, Mouther.

Tower told me the story of Mouther.

Tower, who never talks to me, or at least not kindly.

Mouther, Tower said, had been a smart, loyal dog who was strict with the foodbeasts. But on the morning of my birth, while the whole family had been busy in the birthing room, some of the foodbeasts escaped from their pens. They trespassed on Kurkavea land.

Mouther and the other dogs tried to herd the foodbeasts back to Greenhill, but the Kurkavea killed both dogs and foodbeasts. They threw the dogs’ corpses over the border, but kept the meat from the beasts. That’s why I had a slow start in life. That’s why my claws were yet to grow.

Tower admitted the Kurkavea were being paranoid and overprotective because their new Child was due, too.

I wondered if the Kurkavea Child had her claws yet. I wanted to see what she looked like. In my imagination, she was doglike, with fangs and hair. I didn’t have wading boots, then, so I ran barefoot through the razor grass at the edge of the swamp and cut my soles to shreds. Before I could find the entrance to any tunnels, she found me swearing and crying in the fork of a tree, trying to keep flies from sucking my blood.

Fea had been shocked to see my hairless face and lack of fangs.

We looked almost identical.

After that first meeting, Fea asked her Tower careful questions about what other families looked like. I didn’t dare ask mine. She relayed to me that in the cities, people give birth to litters, like dogs and foodbeasts. Not like in the territories, where Tower gives birth to Child, Child gives birth to new Child, old Child becomes Tower, and so on.

Fea said both of our lineages had come from the Foothill City, Kashwhurr.

If we went there, she whispered, we might discover we were both the same family, once.

Her digging claws had grown in, though, and mine hadn’t.

They looked funny, Fea’s huge Tower-sized claws on her tiny Child hands. So, instead of feeling jealous, I laughed cruelly at them. She threw mud at me. Then, when the mud went in my eye and I cried, she washed it out with stinging, salty water. She brought me oysters to eat and sent me back to the border before our families found out we’d spoken.

Now I’m twelve. I’ve got big hands to match my big claws, and my boots have foodbeast hooves glued onto the bottom so if anyone sees the prints, they won’t know it was me.

It wasn’t me, stealing the puppy with one black ear to show Fea.

It wasn’t Fea, stealing oysters for me.

It wasn’t me, eavesdropping on the Kurkavea Storyteller, drinking in her words, imagining the crowded streets of Kashwhurr and memorizing stolen rhymes.

It wasn’t Fea, ruining my furs with her mud flinging, convincing me against my better judgment to learn to swim, showing me how much easier it was to float in saltwater than fresh.

Running, imagining the taste of oysters, I almost crash into Ancient, who squats with her skirts up at the edge of Greenhill’s manure pit. Her white hair shines in the moonlight and she grunts like a birthing foodbeast.

Will I grunt like that, when I give birth?

Ancient gave birth more years ago than I can count. Once you have your Child, you can’t have another, and you can’t grow any taller. Ancient probably can’t even remember what giving birth was like. Everything seems harder when you’re Ancient, poop included.

I hide behind a bush until she finishes her squat. She wanders, skirts still gathered, to the path of the spring where its waters flow down Greenhill. I stay silent until she’s finished slapping cold water at her bum. I wait until she lets her skirts fall and starts her slow amble back up the slope.

There’s no need to ask if I’ll look like that when I’m Ancient. Fea might be almost identical to me, but my ancestors and I are completely identical. By the time I’m Ancient, my name will be forgotten, just as this Ancient’s name is forgotten. The family’s Child will know me only as Ancient.

Fea calls me by my name.

“Wipwai,” she says gloomily from the shadow of the meeting tree. “Look at this.”

It’s too dark. “Fea,” I say, “all I see are silver puddles.”

She steps out, standing side-on to me, and her shape is all wrong. Instead of going straight down from her chest to her feet, there’s a bulge.

“What is that? Are you sick?”

“It’s a belly.” She tugs at my layers of fur and leather. “You have one, too.”

It’s colder on Greenhill than at Oyster Flats, and the Hapkui wear foodbeast skins as a mark of wealth and pride. Not like the Kurkavea, who wear strings of pearls and cockleshells. I was taught this was nakedness and ignorance, before Fea insisted it was fearlessness and invulnerability.

Even before she finishes stripping me down, I feel the queasy realization that my balance has been off for weeks because of this thickening. Wearing only my boots, I stand self conscious in the mud in the moonlight with razor grass all around.

“Foodbeasts get bellies,” I say, on the verge of tears. “Dogs get bellies. Are we Towers already? Did we choose without knowing? Why doesn’t my Tower have a belly?”

“Because she gave birth to you,” Fea says. “My Tower doesn’t have one either. It just means we can be Towers if we want, Wipwai. After we give birth, our bellies go away.”

“I want it to go away right now,” I say fiercely, but I haven’t thought it through. Before I can, Fea grips my palms and says, beaming,

“Yes, I am going to stop growing, too. It’s the best thing for my family. We don’t need to be tall. There’s no foodbeast herd to protect, no predators to watch for, only oysters.”

“Oysters,” I repeat forlornly. I need them. I came here to forget my responsibilities but she’s talking too fast.

“Oysters don’t run away,” she continues. “The Kurkavea don’t need long legs, we just need as many hands as possible, on account of our lands being so large. Fitting ten generations into a lifetime makes more sense for us than five, and this way you and I will rule as Towers together, we can speak openly—”

“I’m not ready to be Tower,” I interrupt, pulling my hands away from hers. “I’m still a Child!”

My blood bounds.

Children talking together is transgression enough. Towers talking together? Unheard of. And there’s no escaping the brutal facts.

She’s the next Kurkavea Tower. The next ruler over my enemies.

A Kurkavea Tower gave the command to kill Hapkui foodbeasts and dogs, the morning I was born. A Kurkavea Tower left us defenseless against predators on the day of our greatest vulnerability.

Because a Tower births only once.

A family has one Child.

If Child dies, the lineage is ended. The survivors, or the victors if there are no survivors, send news to officials of Kashwhurr. Those officials send a new family to care for the vacant territory.

Fea looks confused.

“But you just said—”

“Fea, don’t you understand? Once we become Towers, we can’t talk anymore. Hapkui cut throats as punishment for betraying the family. They can’t cut the throat of their Child, that would be the lineage’s end, but they can kill a Tower for treason. Especially one who isn’t very good with a knife.”

“Don’t be ashamed about not liking to bleed foodbeasts!” Fea exclaims.

“I’m not ashamed!” I bleat, giving the lie to it.

“But you should be,” comes a sinister whisper from the shadows.

I recognize my Tower’s cold sibilance.

“Run, Fea!” I shout, first, before remembering the Hapkui Tower has almost double Fea’s length in stride. “To the water, and swim!” Fea splashes into a wide pond, somewhere a few steps distant, my furs and leathers heaped behind her like shed skin left by a viper.

Tower cannot swim.

She cuts. She commands.

I can’t let her kill my best friend, even though Fea’s death will become my aim, when I am Tower.

Tower cuffs me and I fall in the razor grass.

“Put your clothes on, fool,” she hisses. “You could have ended us!”

My clammy tunic and cloak are on backward when Tower throws me over her shoulder and begins loping for home. She’s tireless. I lie limp and let the tears fall. I should have been more loyal to my family. I should have been more loyal to Fea. I should have eaten oysters, but now I’ll never get any.

When we reach the border, Tower’s new favorite dogs, Biter and Fighter, fall in at her side.

“The dogs stay with you, now and forever,” she commands. “If you try to leave Greenhill, they will bring you back, the same way they bring the foodbeasts back. Do you hear me, Child?”

“Yes, Tower,” I snivel, even as I inwardly rebel. I’ll get good with a knife. So good, no mangy dogs will be able to stop me! Or, I’ll start growing a Child. Before the year’s out, I’ll become Tower, and Tower will become Worker, and I’ll boss her around, and make dogs guard her, too!

But I don’t know how to train dogs.

I’m not good with a knife.

I’m Child, and my family needs me to be taller. They need me to be as tall as Tower, who was a threat to Fea.

They need me to be taller than Fea.

So she can never be a threat to me.

Before the year’s out, Fea gives birth to Child, and becomes Tower.

I know, because Tower and Worker unveil a secret dog pack Worker has been training to sniff out Fea and rip her to shreds. Our Worker can’t speak. She accidentally bit off her tongue in a Kurkavea attack when she was Child. But Worker survived, and the dogs will be her revenge.

The dog pack pours out of the underground training ring, thirty strong. The smell of dog milk, moldy soil, and old blood follows. Worker must have butchered many, many foodbeasts to feed a pack this size.

They are thin.

Scarred.

Hungry.

“How can you be sure they’ll only savage Kurkavea’s Child?” Ancient asks nervously, kicking at any dogs that come too close to her.

“Thirty dogs,” Tower says, cutting her eyes at me. “Thirty meetings between our disobedient Child and theirs before I had enough scent to be sure.”

“These dogs will turn on us,” Ancient insists. It’s the role of the oldest in the family to always make the worst suggestion. To follow the darkest threads.

“They’re beautiful,” says Sun, letting the dogs lick crumbs from her fingers. Second oldest, it’s her role to point out the positives. To brighten the home with optimism and warmth. “We should sell them at Prominence, before making them killers.”

“I am sure,” Tower tells Ancient. “They won’t attack us.”

She whistles to the dogs, then opens the door.

One by one, tufted tails streaming behind them, the dogs vanish into darkness.

Normally, I’m too afraid of Tower to question her to her face, but the thought of Fea and her Child being pulled to pieces by dogs is too terrible for me to stay silent.

“Why do we have to kill each other?” I shout. “Why can’t we be friends?”

“You don’t know why?” Sun asks gently as Tower looms over me, ready to strike.

“No,” I answer Sun, cringing back from Tower. “If you kill Fea and her Child, Kurkavea lands will go to a new family. A new enemy. So what?”

“It’s true a new family will come to Oyster Flats if the Kurkavea Child dies tonight,” Tower says. “But how do you think that new family will know where the borders are, between Greenhill and Oyster Flats?”

“It’s on a map?” I guess.

“There’s no map!” Tower snaps.

“The borders move,” Sun says.

“They move?” I repeat foolishly.

“The borders will be where I say,” Tower commands, brandishing a handful of razor grass stained with blood. My blood, from the first time I ran through razor grass and ended up crying in the meeting tree. “The tree where you met our Kurkavea enemy used to be part of our lands, not theirs. Sweetgrass grew there, not razor grass, and foodbeasts grazed it. Dogs guarded it.”

“Impossible,” I say, gaping. “You can’t even see that tree from Greenhill. That’s too large a country, impossible to protect!”

I snap my teeth shut when I realize what I’m saying.

“Exactly.” Now Tower holds something else. The skin of a puppy with one black ear. She throws it at my feet. “You can learn, after all. That’s good.”

It’s the puppy I took to show Fea, who loves puppies. I don’t love puppies, but I know you shouldn’t kill them and skin them, just to have a scent to train your hunting dogs with. Hatred for Tower fills me, but I’m helpless.

In the morning, only one of Worker’s thirty secret dogs comes back.

It’s blue around the muzzle, and its mouth is full of foam and rotten fish.

“Poison,” Sun whispers. “They anticipated this.”

“You should’ve sent knives in intelligent hands instead of easily tricked teeth,” Ancient says.

Tower stands tall, like a lightning-struck tree, throwing a long morning shadow over Greenhill, and says nothing. But I know what to say.

“You can’t send five knives against ten.”

The Kurkavea temporarily number eleven, if Fea’s Child is born safe.

If Fea is the new Tower of the Kurkavea.

And I’m ashamed, and relieved, to think of her, safe, outnumbering us.

There’s a revolution in Kashwhurr two years later, though I don’t know what that means.

I hear about it in the Prominence marketplace, where families trade in the shade of awnings over pens for the foodbeasts and cages for the dogs. Other cages hold hens and hawks. Baskets hold oysters, fish, and eels. Gold changes hands, and foodbeasts are killed and cut on the spot, or pushed into wagons to be taken on the long road to Kashwhurr, somewhere at the western horizon where tiny purple peaks meet the plain.

Children aren’t allowed at Prominence on trade days. It’s too dangerous.

But Tower’s dogs, Biter and Fighter, haven’t been trained to keep me away from the market. They only know to keep me away from Oyster Flat.

I sit cross-legged under an overturned basket, peeping out the handle-holes, proud of my deviousness, until a person’s bottom sits on the basket, trapping me.

God’s Eye in Her Head, it must be Tower. I’m in big trouble.

But the legs dangling over the edge of the basket are too short. Tower’s muscular tree-legs would reach the ground and more.

“Stop, Fea,” I hiss. “Get off my basket!”

She doesn’t answer, and for a long, terrifying moment I think she has trapped me to put an end to my lineage. Tower was right. I’m a fool, and the final Hapkui to prove it.

“Your dogs,” she hisses. “They’re so obvious!”

“Why don’t you kill them?” I ask hopefully.

“I should! They tried to kill me!”

“Not these ones,” I say, but I’m cringing in shame. “I told them not to send the dogs, Fea, but I’m not Tower.”

“I am.”

“What’s it like?” I can’t be Tower yet, but maybe Fea has some good hints.

“Hard work. There’s so much to learn, Wipwai. So many tiny details make a wall between me and what I have to know. I have to know the fresh water and the salt as intimately as if they’re family. I’m afraid my Instructor and my Storyteller will die before I learn all I need to be a good Tower.”

I grimace where Fea can’t see. My family doesn’t have an Instructor, or a Storyteller. Those roles are a luxury a small family can’t afford.

“Did your Instructor or your Storyteller tell you about the revolution?”

“Oh, yes,” Fea gushes. “Can you believe it?”

I hesitate.

“I don’t understand it,” I say in a small voice. “What does it mean?”

It’s Fea’s turn to hesitate.

“It means we can’t attack other families,” she says at last. “Not until we know what the new rulers in Kashwhurr are like. What if they aren’t like the old rulers? What if the rules have changed?”

“What were the old rulers like?” I ask, but daylight abruptly streams through the holes in the basket.

Fea is gone.

Maybe she’s telling the truth because she wants me to know I’m safe from her.

Maybe she wants me to let down my guard.

I hate that she’s Tower.

And I think of her Child, growing up alone on Oyster Flat, with no other Child to talk to. I pat my belly but it’s too soon. Yes, Fea is allowed to walk around Prominence, trading, without having to hide under a stupid basket. Yes, she has a Storyteller and an Instructor to teach her. But I can learn from my Sun and my Ancient, and I’ll do it before I become Tower, not after, so my decisions will be better than Fea’s.

God’s Eye in Her Head, whether Fea is trying to trick me or not, I will know Greenhill, its spring, the foodbeasts, and the dogs as intimately as if they are family, and I will be prepared for whatever the Kurkavea are planning, revolution or not.

Biter and Fighter almost tip the basket over. Any second now, I really will get caught by Tower.

Dogs are so annoying.

At the next trade day, I watch the muddy road from the bushes, but Fea doesn’t come. Oyster Flat is flooded. Later, Sun speculates that all hands are needed to dig drainage, to save homes. To save the Kurkavea Child.

Ancient guesses the Child is on a boat, floating out in the salt, safe from Hapkui dogs, but not safe from swimmers.

Tower murmurs that the Kurkavea Tower once foolishly taught the Hapkui Child to swim.

But as much as Tower wants Fea’s lineage ended, she can’t risk me on such a mission, because I am still Child myself.

I hope fervently that Fea and her Child aren’t drowned. Not just because I miss the taste of oysters. Fea’s Child will be too old to be friends with my Child, by the time my Child is born.

Fea’s grandchild, though, will be just the right age.

“Our people were diggers,” Tower says, “before they were farmers.”

We stand, eye to eye, our naked feet bathed by frigid spring waters. The stream pops and squeaks down the rocks, carrying earth and ritual oils from my freshly washed head toward the sea.

Carrying the news of my ceremony to the Kurkavea, if they only had the noses to scent it in the swamp. In the razor grass. On Oyster Flat.

I can keep growing. Legends tell of childless giants, taller than trees.

I can be taller than Tower, my nemesis. Though she says it’s time for me to leave childhood behind, this is the one thing she can’t command me to do.

I’ve waited so long I’ve lost all urgency. Fea’s elevation to Tower is twelve years gone. Her survival of the floods a whole decade past. I haven’t seen Fea since the day she sat on my basket in the market.

Sun’s my best friend, now, for her subtle kindnesses and her bright outlook despite seizing hips and aching teeth, but soon Ancient will die and Sun will become Ancient, forced to whisper poison and suggest horror by centuries of immutable tradition.

This morning, my crown brushed the keystone of the entrance to the dog training tunnel. At its end, a dry moat of clay, caked with the blood of forgotten generations, surrounds an island of stone.

I’ve been training the biggest, blackest, wildest dog of all. Not the kind that has progeny, but a kind of dead end to life called male. He was named Darkness by the Kashwhurr miners who bred him.

Tower couldn’t train Darkness. Neither whipping him nor starving him earned his respect. Tower doesn’t know how I tamed him, and I’ll never tell.

The dog’s secret is he pines for oysters just as much as I do.

I told Worker I needed oysters to train Darkness to kill the Kurkavea, so she traded for a string bag of them without telling Tower. The freshwater oysters were inferior in flavor and went rotten quickly, but Darkness liked them even better that way, and then we were friends. I’ve never whipped him.

I’m not training him to kill Kurkavea. Nor am I training him to kill Biter and Fighter; those senile sentries died of old age years ago. He’s a miner’s dog, with claws almost as big as mine, bred to rescue their Workers when earthquakes collapse the tunnels around them.

Darkness is trained to sniff out oyster beds. To dig them out, break them up, and bring them to me. The moment I’m Tower, I’ll let him loose, and my family will think he’s going to bring me back Kurkavea heads, and when he brings back a mouthful of oysters instead, I’ll laugh ’til I cry. They’ll be powerless to reprimand me, and I won’t share the oysters with anyone except my dog.

I’m not as resigned to being responsible as I thought.

That moment of transformation is coming.

When I hit my head in the tunnel, disturbed soil rained on Mouther’s grave, exposing the rootlets of the ring of fruit trees lightly crowning Greenhill.

Now the dirt’s washed away, dawn sunlight gilds the stream, and Tower lowers a heavy, eyeless stone helmet onto my head and shoulders.

I can barely manage its weight. The darkness is terrifying. Soon, the air inside grows close and hot.

“I’m dying!” I gasp, putting my claws to the edges of it, but Tower slaps my hands away.

“We’ve all worn it,” Sun says, rubbing my back between my shoulder blades. “We all lived.”

“Cast your mind back,” Tower says, “to a time when the trigger for the next generation was a Child too tall to fit in the tunnels. A bruised head and neck signaled the body to change. Bruises and stale air. Too many relatives crowded together, until they could barely breathe.”

“My head does touch the roof of the tunnel,” I say. “Can’t we do it the old-fashioned way?”

“This is quicker,” Tower says. I hear her footsteps splashing away, echoing inside the God-blinking helmet. I try to follow, but I’m scared I’ll fall face-first into the spring and be drowned by the life’s blood of my family’s lands.

Sun takes my hand. Her breath is on my shoulder.

“You’ve been a good Child, Wipwai,” she whispers, leading me from the stream one shaky step at a time. “You’ll be a better Tower than our last two. Listen carefully. When my own precious Child was born, I sacrificed a hundred foodbeasts to hire Kashwhurr hands with knives to protect her from the Kurkavea. She grew up spoiled and pampered, and when her childhood ended, she blamed her own Child for usurping her. In a rage, she threw that Child into the tunnels with the dogs. She endangered the family, leaving her Child to suckle from bitches and fight for raw foodbeast offal.”

My grip on Sun’s hand tightens. I’m shaking, and not from the weight of the cursed helmet. How can my trusted Sun be telling the truth about poor, silent Worker and cruel, cold Tower? I’d like to exclaim, or question, but to be heard I’d have to shout, and Tower might hear.

“What could we do?” Sun continued. “She was Tower. Her commands were law. We could have killed her, but I’d squandered the family’s wealth on the guards and we would have been only four. Three, really, with a helpless newborn.” She sighed deeply. “More, I had to hide the pain in my hips, which meant I could hardly walk. I was Worker, and I could barely work. If my offspring knew, she would have ordered me killed, and then who would have done the work? And if we killed her, who would have been Tower? I couldn’t have walked to Prominence to trade. In the end, the jealous, neglectful mother had her tongue torn out by her own offspring, as soon as today’s Tower ascended. Now Worker’s half mad, and only takes pleasure in cutting foodbeast throats. Soon she’ll take my place as Sun, but how will she speak sweetness with no tongue? And it’s the Sun’s task to prepare food for the family.”

My feet find the solid bank. I grope with my free hand toward the shade. The sunlight’s too hot. I want the coolness of the tunnels, with the horrible helmet cooking me in my own sweat. Or is it the truth of Worker’s silence making me sweat?

“These words are a warning,” Sun whispers. “I haven’t spoken before, because it was my honorable task to surround you with light, but you were Child. You were safe. As Tower, you mustn’t trust her. But you must already know that. Why else send Worker to buy the oysters for you? You wanted to remind her what kind of hell-beast you were training. Darkness will slay your enemies, guard your sleep, and sniff your food for poison.”

Darkness is no hell-beast and he’s terrible at guarding. He looks fearsome but he falls asleep as soon as he’s tired. All he can sniff for are oysters.

I’m starting to think I should have followed Worker’s example and trained a pack of bloodthirsty killers, not a useless, dopey monster to feed my un-Hapkui-like appetites. Fea told me the revolution meant the families had to treat one another peacefully, and since then we had, but what would the new government care about families fighting within themselves?

No rulers would object to a family’s Sun killing its Tower.

That’s when I realize I can attack the Kurkavea Child, if I want to. Sun’s story about Worker leaving her Child to the dogs is key.

All I’d have to do is make it seem like neglect from within the Kurkavea.

Dogs couldn’t enter into the equation.

Drowning, however, always threatens those who live between freshwater and salt.

“How long do I have to wear the helmet?” I ask Sun, sprawling on my back on the hillside, giving up on finding the tunnels. If I cook to death, Tower will only have herself to blame.

“You’ll feel it,” Sun says, her voice receding, “before sunset.”

“Feel what?”

There’s no answer.

God’s Eye in Her Head.

I wait a few hours before trying to get the helmet off, just for a break and maybe a sip of water, but Tower’s dog-whip cuts my hand. Like a dog, I yelp and desist.

Then, before sunset, I feel it. Heaviness in my belly. Fluid building there, as if I’ve taken a thousand sips from the spring. Itchy thickness in my skin. Like it’s solidifying.

I’m a stone statue, now.

I’ll never get any taller.

My bones hurt.

All of them.

I shed enough tears inside my stupid heavy helmet that they run down my neck. A soft cloth wipes them away.

“That’s enough,” Sun murmurs. All together, they lift my helmet off. Tower, Worker, Sun, and Ancient. All my family, singing softly together, as they did when I entered this world from between Tower’s thighs. Worker can’t sing, but she hums.

In the den beneath Greenhill, Darkness and the other dogs start howling.

When Child is born, there’s no grunting.

No effort.

One evening, I’m standing by the fire, accepting a bowl of grilled foodbeast and spiced greens from Sun. Ancient sits on the floor, already eating, and Worker washes blood and dirt from her face over a bucket in the corner.

In a split second, I feel something inside like a bubble bursting in a bath, and Child slides out of me onto the straw-covered floor, slick as a fresh fish.

“God’s Eye in Her Head!” I shriek.

Sun scoops up the Child and pops her in the serving bowl on top of the greens.

“Blessings,” she says, laughing.

“Wasn’t that supposed to be difficult?” I’m incredulous. All the stories about births I eavesdropped on in the Kurkavea tunnels spoke of blood and pain. Just like foodbeasts, who shudder and bellow. “Is there something wrong with her?”

“There’s nothing wrong with her,” Sun coos, not even looking at me. “Small people struggle with birth. Not the Hapkui.”

I take Child and marvel at everything in miniature. No hair, no teeth, and a head disproportionate to her arms and legs, yet Child is unmistakably me.

She is us. Warmth surges up into my face. Giddiness follows.

I am smitten.

“She needs a name,” Sun says.

“A foolish custom,” Tower says darkly, but I don’t think her eyes are really seeing Child; instead, perhaps, she sees the end of her reign. Now that Child’s arrived, all of us will move one link further along the chain.

One step closer to death.

Ancient will take her turn wearing the terrible helmet, and this time it really will kill. What must Ancient have thought while I wailed and flailed under the helmet? I take Child over to her.

“Ancient,” I say, ashamed, “what is your name?”

“My name is Nayr,” Ancient says, touching Child’s tiny mouth with a gnarled knuckle, careful to keep her cracked claw from the smooth new skin. Child’s eyes will not open for a month, but she squirms.

“May I have your name for this Child?” I ask.

“Yes, Wipwai. You may.”

We all sing as Child suckles for the first time. Except for Worker, who hums. The song turns mournful while we lower the crushing stone helmet over Ancient’s head, shutting out the last light of her life.

I had planned to send Darkness to fetch oysters for me, as my first act as Tower, but instead I command him to sit and stay beside the salad bowl where baby Nayr sleeps, sated.

Worker watches the monstrous black dog warily.

“I need to wash,” I say. “I’m going to the spring. Stay here with Nayr.”

I leave the tunnels alone.

The moons are as cold and distant as Tower.

No. I am Tower.

God’s Eye in Her Head, I am commander of the Hapkui.

Pulling my boots on, panicked, I begin to run, birth fluid flecking away with every step. My stride is enormous, my boot prints impossibly far apart. Sweetgrass-covered hillside, stream and razor grass fly past in a blur of bleating foodbeasts, swaying stalks, silver ripples and moon shadow.

I run for hours. I’m not tired.

I’m faster than a dog. I’m as tall as Tower was, that day she tried to kill Fea.

My boots leave wide-spaced prints, terrifying to the Kurkavea, if they could see them, across the pale sand of Oyster Flat.

If my Child is born, so is the Child of Fea’s Child. Which means Fea is no longer Tower, but Worker, and in a household with plenty of extra hands to care for the newborn, Worker will have been tending the oysters since the low tide of early evening, when the small moons are in the sky but the biggest moon stays below the horizon.

My long strides begin to sink into the moonlit silt of the Flat. I smell rotten seaweed beneath the freshness of an approaching storm. White crabs scuttle away as I come to a halt at the edge of the water.

The smiling curve of a reed boat is anchored to a sandbar offshore. It’s too far for me to see the boat’s occupant. I make a pile of my furs on top of my boots, and slide, naked and shivering, into the stinging surf.

My swimming stroke is longer than it was.

I’m uncoordinated at first, and choke on the wavelets lapping at my face, but before long the rhythm returns to me.

When I stand up on the cold sand of the bar, Fea flinches from her crouch behind the boat. She’s the same as she always was, except for the fresh oyster cuts on her hands.

So tiny.

Still a child.

No. Only Worker must labor with the tides, ignoring such trivial matters as light and dark. Change is terrible and irresistible.

“Wipwai?” she whispers, straightening with a small bronze hatchet in her hands. “Is it you? You’re a giant. From the stories.”

“The tide’s so low,” I say, grinning. “I’ve never seen this part exposed. Are there many good ones?”

Fea pulls a huge chunk of oysters out of the sand. They’re cemented together, the large living ones with the shells of the broken and dead. She hits the dead ones off with her hatchet and hands me the rest.

“Congratulations,” she says, “on the birth of your Child.”

I’m strong enough to break them open with my bare hands.

God’s Eye in Her Head. Nothing has ever tasted so sweet.

“I want them to be friends,” I say loudly, moved by passion to raise the oysters over Fea’s head, and she shrinks back slightly before she comprehends what I’ve said. “My Child, whom I have named Nayr, must befriend your grandchild, Fea. I don’t want my Child to be lonely, like I soon will be. Is it possible? Since I lost you, I’ve had my Sun to be my friend, but she becomes Ancient tonight and the new Sun is mute.”

Fea sighs.

“I’m not the Tower now, Wipwai. It’s for my Child, I mean the Kurkavea Tower, to decide.”

“Did we ask our own Towers for permission, when we first met? Besides, I am Tower. I give permission to Nayr to have a friend. I give permission for your grandchild to have a puppy. You always liked dogs more than I did, Fea, but now I’ve got a digging dog called Darkness. He’d never harm a gnat, but he can find oysters. I want you to meet him at the next trade day.”

She sighs again.

“Help me get the oysters picked. You’ll be twice as fast as me. And Tower or not, the government’s mandated peace is holding. I’ll do as you ask. Listen, we met when we were eight. In eight years, let’s agree to bring our families’ respective Children to the tree.”

She turns back to the task, but I hesitate.

“What else, Fea? What else do I need to know, to keep Nayr safe from the world?”

The lines deepen in Fea’s little face. Her eyes shine.

They’re wise. Not a child’s eyes.

“Be kind to her, Wipwai. Be gentle. For what use is keeping the world from breaking her if you break her yourself?”

By the time I finish helping with the oysters, swim back to the shore, and run back to Greenhill, it’s almost sunrise.

I discover I’m anxious about Child.

Child is fine. Child is sleeping.

But in my absence, mute Worker, who is now supposed to be Sun, has killed my dog, Darkness, and laid his corpse out for me like a carpet for my feet.

“He was aggressive toward Child,” Tower explains indifferently. “Worker had no choice but to cut his throat. He was ill-trained.”

I glance at the container where Nayr slumbers. There are no dog footprints in the dirt. I feel empty, as though Darkness was an ember in my chest, now grown cold.

Ancient’s body, too, has grown cold.

I hide my distress.

The new Ancient, who was my friend Sun, crouches in a corner, pale-faced, saying nothing.

“She’s not Worker anymore,” I say, pointing at the mad-eyed mute. “She’s Sun. You are Worker. Come with me now, both of you. I have work for you.”

I lead the conspirators to the dog training tunnel, where the black stone stands in the middle of the dry moat.

They can’t kill me yet. They need me to feed Child for six months at least. We don’t have any freshly whelped dog to give suckle. Only me.

They can’t kill me at all, ever. I won’t let them.

“I hoped you had gone to kill the Kurkavea Child,” newly-named Worker says, “but I should have known you would come back empty-handed.”

“Peace,” I answer, abruptly furious. “The city insists on peace. It’s too late for killing. The borders are fixed.”

“They are not fixed,” Worker shouts, but before she can argue more, I push her between the shoulder blades so she sprawls in the clay of the dry moat. The new power of being able to lay a hand on her surges through me, intoxicating. Is this why she bullied me for so long?

I’m sobered by the idea that I, or anyone, might lay a hand on Child.

Be gentle, Fea advised.

“Dig through to the underground portion of the spring. You know where it lies. It’s close by. Isn’t that why our ancestors lined this room with clay?”

Sun draws her lips back from her teeth, as though a dog’s spirit has possessed her.

“The moat will flood,” Worker objects, crawling to her feet to face me. “We’ll never be able to train dogs here in secret again. Mouther’s grave will be flooded.”

“I want the moat to flood,” I insist. “That is my command. Get started. I’m going to feed Child.”

When I return, water from the spring enters the moat from the north. It’s shallow. Barely ankle deep.

“Dig the outflow here,” I instruct, holding Child in the crook of my left elbow, marking the south cave wall with a slash of my right hand.

“The moat will be deep,” Worker observes sourly. “The water will be over our heads.”

Exactly.

The black rock will be my safe sleeping place.

Only I will be able to swim to it.

“If it rains heavily,” Ancient grumbles from the tunnel entrance, “the water level might rise higher than expected. Our new Tower might drown in her sleep. Child must not sleep in this dangerous room.”

I lock eyes with her, bereaved by this testing of her new role.

The sun always sets, or so the Kurkavea Storyteller used to say.

I force a smile.

“Ancient is correct. Nayr will not sleep here. She’ll stay with you, Ancient. Guard our future well.”

But the future never goes as planned.

As Nayr approaches the final evening of her eighth year, our spring runs dry.

There’s nothing so horrifying as water one day, nothing the next.

At first, I assume it’s a plot by Worker and Sun, stopping up the inflow to see if I’ll notice the water level’s gone down.

I notice.

Everybody notices, with varying degrees of panic. Except for Child.

Not wanting to look at the emptying moat, to think about what it means, I stride out of the tunnels and stand in the shade of the fruit trees on Greenhill, staring down the slope at the grazing foodbeasts and their long, odd, morning shadows.

“Lift me up,” Child says, reaching for the trees. “I want fruit.”

She loves fruit as much as I ever loved oysters. I lift her, one-handed, above my head, and ignore the twigs and leaves that rain down with her harvest. Her claws haven’t grown in yet, so there’s no risk of impaling the fuzzy globes. When I lower her to the grass, she sits with her legs in a circle, corralling the fruit as if they were foodbeasts that might stray. Watching her eat with messy relish is soothing.

But not for long.

“We have days at best,” Worker says crisply. “Our sweetgrass will die without water. New sweetgrass must be planted at the edge of the swamp to keep the foodbeasts alive. You cannot delay. The Kurkavea Child must die today.”

Sometimes, I imagine the ghost of Sun speaking, before she became Ancient. I try to think of what positive thing she could possibly interject with in this instance.

Perhaps she would have suggested carrying water from the river. It’s polluted with excrement from Kashwhurr. Yet even if it were clean, how could four people with buckets carry enough to keep all our wide grasslands watered?

Impossible.

Foodbeasts can’t graze close to the river for fear of crocodiles. Crocodiles are the reason most Hapkui can’t swim.

I taught Child to swim, in secret. In our moat. I counted the sunrises, anticipating the moment when Hapkui Child and Kurkavea Child would meet, and now God has blinked, the spring is dry, and I must have the Kurkavea razor grass fields at the edge of the swamp, or else Child will perish with the rest of us.

“You’ve tried to kill me half a hundred times,” I say, not even looking at Worker. “You and Sun. You’ve both tried. I could have put you to death at any time, but I didn’t, because we’re too few. Four can’t survive if the Kurkavea have ten. Yet you’d have me plunge into their midst. One against ten, with no dogs, and only you two to protect Child should I fail.”

“If you fail,” Worker snaps, “Child won’t need protection. Starvation will claim her!”

“What about the peace?” I demand. “The Kurkavea haven’t attacked, even in reprisal, during my lifetime. It must be true, the ban on families feuding.”

“And why should the Kurkavea feud? They have everything. We have nothing. Barely our own Greenhill, our own spring, and it’s dried up. God’s Eye is closed to us.”

Sun stands there, saying nothing.

There should be brightness, but there’s none, because Sun’s own Child ordered her tongue torn out.

And here comes Ancient at last, a wooden staff in each hand, using them both to walk because her hips can’t hold her up. Dripping with blood and drool, because of her rotting teeth. If we had our old wealth, she could have gone to the city for a cure.

“Ancient,” I ask desperately, “is there anything in our family stories about the spring running dry?”

“Nothing,” she says. But how would she know? Our family has no Storyteller to carry its memories and myths. All we have is our terrible height, from which to see danger coming, but this danger was unforeseen. Ancient comes close to me, gripping my arm tightly, and Worker and Sun move away, because Ancient stinks, but her foul breath carries whispers. “You’re not safe, Wipwai. You’ll never be safe, and you can only eradicate the internal threat to your person after you have eradicated the external threat to Child, do you understand?”

I understand.

No cutting Sun’s throat until I’ve cut the throat of the Kurkavea Child.

But I’ve always hated throat cutting. There must be another way.

“I’ll go,” I say grimly.

“To Prominence?” Worker insinuates I’m off to buy oysters. I resist the urge to cuff her. I don’t want Child to see family members hurting one another.

“After dark, I’ll go. Pick these fruit and build a fire to dry them. Then cut as much of the grass as you can, to make hay for the foodbeasts while it’s still green. Then slaughter the oldest or most unfit of the foodbeasts. One in three.”

“As you say, Tower.”

Fea waits by the meeting tree with a Child achingly similar to mine.

Although, the Kurkavea Child’s head is a little flat on one side.

“It’s because of the long, crushing childbirth,” Fea explains. “You can bring your Child out of the shadows now. I’ve told Aia the Hapkui Child’s name is Nayr, and that she doesn’t have horns. Or a tail.”

I laugh, remembering.

“Nayr has a round head,” I say. “Childbirth was easy. She just came out.”

“Because you’re so big.”

Aia looks up at me, silent and wide-eyed.

“Yes,” I say. “Because I’m big.”

“There’s no way our Tower would have agreed to this, so I had to sneak Aia out of the tunnels by an entrance I made when we were Children. Where’s Nayr? Is she terrified? What horrific stories have your family told her about the Kurkavea?”

I sigh.

“Fea, I haven’t brought Nayr. I have to talk to you.”

Fea’s oyster-scarred hand twitches, as if she’d like to gather Aia closer to her. Instead, she waits for me to speak again.

“Listen. Has the Kurkavea Storyteller ever told any stories about the spring on Greenhill going dry? Your memories are longer than ours, I know. You’ve lived on Oyster Flat for much longer than we’ve lived in Greenhill.”

I think, but don’t say: You lied, and told us where the false boundary is found.

“Oh, Wipwai. God’s Eye in Her Head. Is your spring truly failing?”

I can’t bear for her to pity me.

“The stories, Fea,” I say impatiently. “Have you heard any stories?”

“No.”

All the air leaves my chest and I collapse against the tree.

When my own family failed me, Fea always had the answers.

Now I don’t know what to do.

My claws sink into the soggy earth all around me. I clench my fingers, making fists of fertile soil.

“I need this land then,” I say hoarsely. “I need it to plant sweetgrass. It’s the only way for our foodbeasts to survive.”

One moment, Fea is by my side, soothingly tracing my brow. The next, she’s several steps back from me, and I hear the sound of the Child, Aia, running through the razor grass and plunging into the same seeping freshwater pond that Fea used to escape from Tower, twenty years ago.

“You can’t have it,” Fea says.

“No?” I don’t understand why she’s sent Aia fleeing to safety. I am not like Tower. I’m here to talk.

“This swamp is a nursery for tiny fish,” Fea says. “The fish grow up to join the shoals in the sea that the Kurkavea catch to eat when there are no oysters. Don’t you remember the floods, my first year as Tower?”

“I remember,” I say stupidly.

“Without those fish, we wouldn’t have survived. We need this land.”

“But we’ll starve, Fea.”

“Better the Hapkui starve than the Kurkavea.” I can’t believe what I’m hearing. My childhood friend couldn’t have uttered such a thing. She shared oysters with me.

“Is that right?” Somehow, I’m looking down at her. Looming. “You’re so tiny. How much food could you possibly need?”

“You’re so big,” Fea says softly. “You eat so much. We can’t share our oysters with you anymore, Wipwai.”

My pulse races, but my muscles feel hard. It’s as though I’m wearing the stone helmet all over again. This time, though, it’s not my skin turning to armor.

It’s my heart.

I can’t let my Child go hungry.

And Fea taught me how to find oysters for myself.

Water.

I’m wet.

I swim after the enemy Kurkavea, my stroke longer and more powerful.

“Come back,” I shout. “I’m not here to hurt you. I’m here to talk.”

But the Kurkavea Tower might be more inclined to listen if I’ve got their Child in hand. I can’t take Fea’s grandchild to Greenhill. I can’t trust our Sun and Worker not to cut her throat. They like throat cutting.

But not me.

I’d never do it.

I have to hope the Kurkavea Tower doesn’t know that. We’ll strike a bargain between the two families. Child for food. Nobody has to die.

But I’m standing on the muddy bottom of the pond and there’s no sign of the Child. How can I be angry at a Child for not knowing not to run? Nevertheless, I am.

“Leave her!” Fea cries, launching herself from the razor grass shore. “She’s scared, she’s hiding under the water. She won’t surface while you’re standing there. Get out!”

I feel around with my feet; there are fallen trees and branches on the floor of the pond. The Child must be clinging onto them. I begin clawing them out of the mud, until I feel other claws. Fea grabs and pulls at me, but she can’t move me; she can’t reach any higher than my arms, and her feet can’t touch the bottom; she has to tread water.

“Come back to the shore,” she shouts.

And I have no choice but to do as she says, bowing my head. What was I thinking? I wasn’t made to take hostages.

It’s over.

I’ve failed Nayr.

I couldn’t stand to be like my mother, so I went to find her enemies, and although my friendship, my difference, the use of my very name, gave me my own identity, this isn’t a land where the lone giant survives against the smaller swarm of the tightly bound family.

The Kurkavea, who have everything, will have Greenhill, too.

“Peace,” I say bitterly, pulling my boots out of the suctioning mud and standing on the razor grass. “Peace has betrayed the Hapkui. My friendship with you has ended us.”

Fea doesn’t even hear me.

“Aia, where are you? Aia, come, now!”

And then a small, limp form floats to the surface of the pond. I think: For a Kurkavea Child, she’s a poor swimmer. She isn’t moving.

Then I’m aghast to realize she’s drowned.

She stayed under the roots too long.

Frightened to death.

“No!” Fea screams, splashing back into the muck, rolling the body over, cradling it.

The moons bathe the face of the dead Child in light.

And my heart turns soft again, and breaks, because Aia’s face is my Child’s face.

“God’s Eye in Her Head,” I gasp.

Fea cradles the beloved face in both hands.

“Fea,” I shout across to her, “I didn’t kill her. It’s her own fault, for staying down too long.”

“You’re a giant—”

“I never touched—”

“A monster!”

“Am I a dog? Do I have fangs? Am I hairy—”

“You’re the Hapkui Tower, Wipwai,” she cries. “If you hadn’t chased her, she would have lived. You can’t avoid responsibility for this. The government will know you’re a killer. I’ll tell them. Your family will lose their land. To conceal the crime, you’ll have to kill me as well. Go on!”

Yes. I am Tower. My stride is long and I can run forever.

But I can’t outrun this disaster. My land is worthless. I should have left it long ago, or else learned the lessons my family tried to teach me.

“I can’t kill you.” Tower isn’t here, but she is here. She’s in me. Rebellion or no rebellion, the old Tower trained me, as surely as she trained Biter and Fighter. All the times she punished me for hesitating to kill, all those times I held foodbeasts over the butchering stone. Her shadow is over me, goading me, hating me.

But even she couldn’t train me to kill my best friend.

Even though my best friend has killed me.

“No? Why not?” Fea cries and laughs. She looks at me and she looks at the moons. She sobs and curses.

She pulls Aia’s body into the razor grass and collapses over it, weeping.

I can’t run. I can’t leave Nayr in the hands of Worker and Sun, for whatever time we have left before we starve, or the government representatives come. Even though it’s only hours since I left her, I ache to see her.

What a terrible Tower I’ve been.

It wasn’t reaching my forever-height that was the worst.

It was second-guessing the decisions I’d have to make when I became Tower.

Did I stop growing at the right height? Was the timing right for the new generation?

Did I do what was best for the family, or are we all going to die when the government representatives come to banish us from Greenhill, to send us to slave or beg for food in Kashwhurr?

Perhaps no new family will come. Perhaps, without the spring, Greenhill is untenable as a family holding, and my beautiful, innocent Child will die in the mines when earthquakes collapse the tunnels around her.

But I know one thing for sure. She won’t be killed by the Kurkavea, swarming up Greenhill with their oyster-shucking knives to cut the throats of our dogs.

We have no dogs. The Kurkavea are no more. And, accident or not, it’s because of me.

Both lineages are finished. Two moons will set.

With hindsight, I could have stayed Child until I was tall enough for my fingertips to brush the stars.

The moat isn’t deep enough to protect me anymore.

So, on my return to Greenhill, I cut the throat of our tongueless Sun as she’s sleeping.

She wakes, bleeds, shudders, but I don’t stay to see her die.

I greet Worker, who stands guard deeper inside the tunnel system, outside the sleeping place of Ancient and Child. Worker smiles at the smell of copper death.

Then I greet her a second time with a swift thrust of my bloody claws under her chin. She can’t form any words after that, and she dies slower than Sun did, striving to reach and murder me, but I step back easily.

And again.

I step back again.

Eventually, her cruel strength bleeds out. Her opening and closing lips fall finally slack.

“I killed the Kurkavea Child,” I tell her sprawled corpse.

Triumph shines in her eyes even as the light leaves them.

I don’t clean up, and I don’t wake Ancient. I’m too tired.

I fall asleep beside Worker’s body, and if predators or the Kurkavea come after us, so be it.

Ancient wakes me some time later.

“Who will do the work, now?” she exclaims. “We need extra hands to carry water from the river.”

“What work is there?” I ask. “The foodbeasts have hay and won’t need to be moved. The fruit is gathered. We eat. We wait to see if the water returns. And you’re free to say what you truly feel, hopeless or hopeful. You’re Sun and Ancient, now, as I am both Worker and Tower.”

I go into the sleeping room and gather Child in my bloody arms. On my knees, I crawl with her out into the open. Though I’m wrung of feeling, a smile forms on my wretched face as sunrise paints her cheeks. When she wakes, she blinks rapidly and giggles.

“Outside?” she asks. “Tower, you haven’t sneaked me outside since I was a baby.”

I think of Fea sneaking the Kurkavea Child outside, and choke.

“We live outside now,” I say. I’m not going back into Greenhill again. Let time and crumbling tunnels bury Sun and Worker where they fell.

“What if it rains?” Child gathers herself, yawning, and sits cross-legged beside me.

“If it rains, the Hapkui are saved,” I say, but it doesn’t rain.

The sweetgrass dies.

Flesh falls rapidly off the foodbeasts until a dog wouldn’t look at them twice. I slaughter the last of them and smoke the flesh.

Yet my three-member family is genial and peaceful. I should have killed Sun and Worker years ago.

Thirty-three days after the drowning of the Kurkavea Child, three government officials and thirteen soldiers arrive at Greenhill.

Oblivious to their purpose, Nayr offers them dried fruit. She exclaims at the muscular soldiers’ filmy violet robes, feathered masks, and gilded boots.

Ancient, propped on her paired sticks, proclaims the formal welcome from her raw, painful mouth. As Tower, I bow my head for the official’s spokesperson to pour bottled rainwater from Kashwhurr on my crown. She doesn’t need to bend for me to pour stagnant spring water from Greenhill over hers.

“Is Greenhill forfeit?” I hear myself ask, as coldly as my mother ever could, the formalities concluded.

The hostilities opened.

“No,” the official says, giving hope that is dashed in her next sentence. “Your Child is to go to the Kurkavea. To be adopted by them.”

“Adopted?” I turn the word over between my teeth. “What is that?”

“Their Child is dead. Yours will replace it. According to our archives, the Hapkui and the Kurkavea were sisters, once.”

“Sisters?”

“Forty generations ago, your forebears both belonged to a single Kashwhurr family. The lineages are barely distinguishable to this day. Rather than call for your extinction, the Kurkavea Tower is willing to accept this compromise.”

“No.” The word emerges unthinkingly. Ancient gasps. The official’s lips curl.

Because I haven’t thought it through.

“I see. You prefer your Child to be put to death also.”

Thirteen soldiers slant thirteen gilded spears in unison.

“No!” Ancient begs, crumpling before me. She who was my friend, my Sun, my only safe harbor, now begging, blubbering through her bloodied maw. “You must let them take Nayr to the Kurkavea. Wipwai, most wise and noble Tower, please, let her live.”

Nayr starts crying, finally cognizant of what’s occurring.

But of course she must go to Oyster Flat, the playground of my childhood. As Kurkavea Child, Nayr will have a Storyteller. An Instructor. A Worker who knows far too much of the Hapkui lineage. Fea will love Nayr as she loved Aia.

All the oysters she can eat.

God’s Eye in Her Head.

If no family comes to replace the Hapkui, Nayr will also have her own heritage. Greenhill. The fruit trees may survive, if enough of the spring’s stagnant seep remains to water them, and without foodbeasts to drink from it, it surely will.

“Child, dry your eyes,” I say gently. “Go with these people. I’m not your Tower anymore. The Kurkavea Tower is your Tower. From this moment, you are the Kurkavea Child.”

Nayr’s brow furrows in fury, deepening to hurt, and I turn away, taking first Ancient’s arm and then her weight across my shoulders, before I can see any more.

“Put on your boots,” I call back over my shoulder. “They’ll protect your feet from the razor grass.”

She won’t be Child for long. The Kurkavea are a short-statured family. Nayr will struggle to give birth. There’s nothing I can give her to equip her for that.

“Come along, Ancient,” I murmur. “Without water, Greenhill might as well go to the Kurkavea. I’ll work in the mines, even though I’m too tall. It’s time for us to adventure to Kashwhurr at last.”

As one, we make our way down Greenhill. The sun, behind us, stretches our already-too-tall shadows, showing us the way.

About the Author

Thoraiya Dyer is an Aurealis and Ditmar award-winning, Sydney-based writer and veterinarian. Her short science fiction and fantasy stories have appeared in Analog, Clarkesworld, Apex, Cosmos, Nature, the anthology Bridging Infinity and boutique collection Asymmetry. Thoraiya’s novels Crossroads of Canopy, Echoes of Understorey, and Tides of the Titans are published by Tor books. Find her on Twitter @ThoraiyaDyer.

Jules Verne and a Journey Through Genre

Carrie Sessarego

Before science fiction was called science fiction, a hybrid category existed called scientific romance. Combining elements of fantasy, realism, and futuristic or alternative technologies, this genre formed a bridge between the medieval and the modern. In this essay we’ll explore the role that French author Jules Verne played in scientific romance and in the development of science fiction, with a focus on his novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas.

The term “romance” as describing a literary genre has a long history. Today, it’s applied to fictional stories that center on romantic love (as in “romance novel”). However, initially, a “romance” was a piece of fiction that included adventure and chivalry, with attention to the psychology of the characters. This naming tradition began during the 1100s and essentially continued through the Victorian era, with less focus on chivalry and more on imagination. Some of these romances included futuristic or fantastical elements, including Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627), and Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666). Later examples of romance include the works of Sir Walter Scott, who defined the romance as “a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvelous and uncommon incidents.”

The first science fiction novel in the modern sense was Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, published in 1818 and in a revised form in 1831. At the time, the book was classified as a romance (specifically, a Gothic romance). In Frankenstein, Shelley expresses concern about what happens when science is used unethically and what happens when one person is in control of a scientific development that gives them unchecked power.

In 1844, Robert Chambers published a book of speculative natural history. Critics called it a “scientific romance.” It was not a compliment, but the term gradually became used for fiction with a scientific angle, written by authors including Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. The classification was still in occasional use through the 1940s, although it was gradually replaced by the term “science fiction,” coined in 1926 by Hugo Gernsback. Scientific romances had an emphasis on science as well as the discussion of social ideas, such as imperialism, evolution, and both the adventurous and cerebral aspects of exploration. Above all, it had a tone—a fascination with science matched only by a thirst for adventure and for marvels both actual and fictional.

Jules Verne was born in 1828, in Nantes, France. Nantes includes artificial islands in the Loire River, and Verne grew up on one of them, reading books about castaways and longing to be a sailor. Verne left Nantes for Paris in 1848. He wasted no time in meeting prominent authors, including his hero, Victor Hugo, as well as Alexandre Dumas. Verne became fast friends with Dumas’ son, known as Alexandre Dumas, fils, and they collaborated together on plays.

In 1862, Verne met Pierre-Jules Hetzel. Hetzel became Verne’s publisher, and remained his publisher for the rest of Verne’s life. Hetzel committed Verne to a contract that promised a steady salary in exchange for three volumes a year. Initially the relationship was a friendly one, but the two battled over many core aspects of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas.

It was Hetzel who commissioned Verne to write The Voyages Extraordinaires, which eventually resulted in fifty-four books, including fiction and nonfiction, that shared a common goal. According to Hertzel, the goal of the series was:

 . . . to outline all the geographical, geological, physical, and astronomical knowledge amassed by modern science and to recount, in an entertaining and picturesque format . . . the history of the universe.

The most famous titles today from the series are Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Around the World in Eighty Days, Around the Moon, and The Mysterious Island.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas was published serially and then as a book in 1871. It is about the Nautilus, a submarine famously captained by the mysterious Captain Nemo. The narrator, Professor Aronnax, his servant, Conseil, and a harpooner named Ned Land become the prisoners of Captain Nemo after the Nautilus strikes their ship. While Professor Arronax enjoys being able to pursue his life’s work of studying sea life from the windows of the submarine, Ned longs for freedom. Along with the crew of the Nautilus, they fight sharks and giant squids. Meanwhile, Nemo pursues vengeance against all humankind for an unspecified wrong.

Modern readers may picture the Nautilus as a futuristic device, but for the most part it was not. Not only were real submarines in existence when Verne wrote the book, there was even a real submarine called The Nautilus. The main technological marvel of The Nautilus is that it runs on electricity. However, this technology was already under development, and the real-life 1885 submarine, Goubet I, ran on electricity as well.

Verne spends a great amount of time explaining the technology of the Nautilus, but tellingly, he seems more interested in the journey taken—one which “outline[s] all the geographical, geological, physical . . . knowledge amassed by modern science” that Verne can possibly cram in. The tech makes the journey possible and the characters keep it entertaining and emotionally haunting. Still, an awful lot of the book consists of lists of fish species. As Verne said about another of his books, Five Weeks in a Balloon, “I wrote Five Weeks in a Balloon not as a story about ballooning, but as a story about Africa.” In the same way, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas is not a story about a submarine, but about the ocean.

However, there are some truly visionary elements in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, including the size, strength, and diving capacity of the Nautilus (not to mention the interior decorating!), the discovery of Atlantis, and the journey to the South Pole. Mary Shelley is lauded as the mother of science fiction, and Jules Verne and H. G. Wells are lauded as the genre’s fathers, with Verne winning his place largely on the basis of this book. Even though the point of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas is the journey, not the tech, Verne is still fascinated by how the tech works. In fact, Verne appears in this novel to be fascinated by EVERYTHING.

It’s this sense of fascination, wonder, and curiosity that truly makes Verne a father to science fiction, more so than any specific futuristic quality of his work. Verne loves to tell us how things work, what things look like, how things taste and smell and feel. He explores the undersea world in the same manner that one might explore another planet, setting the stage for many literary voyages to come. He also uses technology to tell a story about people and society. The events on board the Nautilus serve as metaphors and illustrations of alienation, vengeance, loyalty, freedom and imprisonment, and the thin line between freedom fighter and terrorist. The Nautilus is both admirable and ominous, as it can further exploration or be a terrifying weapon, depending on the whim of its captain. The dangerous science theme ties this book to its predecessor, Frankenstein. The focus on exploration ties it to later stories like The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. There is a direct line from the Nautilus to the Enterprise.

It can be deflating to the modern reader to realize how many of Verne’s works either had no futuristic technology or had very little. It’s also frustrating to see an author who during his life was lauded as a serious writer confined in the United States to horrible translations located in the children’s section—not because this book can’t be enjoyed by children, but because with the improved translations that exist today, it can be enjoyed by everyone.

Some of Verne’s books have no science fiction aspects at all, in the sense that they are either nonfiction or they only use technology and science that was well-known at the time that he wrote. For instance, Around the World in Eighty Days is a book that explored the technology of Verne’s day with no futuristic advances. Others, including Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas and Around the Moon, contain enough speculation to be at least arguably science fiction. All of his books share more than enough fascination with science and an abundance of imagination to serve as examples of scientific romance. By centering wonder, exploration, and social themes in a story made possible by slightly imagined technological advances, Verne ignited the imagination of future authors who took the idea of imagined technological advances further while continuing to explore natural and social phenomena through science fiction.

Author’s Notes:

The novel by Jules Verne is properly titled Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, although most publishers use “Sea,” singular. The Disney movie from 1954 is 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

I am indebted to William Butcher’s biography of Jules Verne (Jules Verne: The Definitive Biography) and his introduction, notes, and translation of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas, published by Oxford University Press, 2009.

About the Author

Carrie Sessarego is the resident “geek reviewer” for Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, where she wrangles science fiction, fantasy romance, comics, movies, and non-fiction. Carrie’s first book, Pride, Prejudice, and Popcorn: TV and Film Adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre, was released in 2014. Her work has been published in Interfictions Online, Pop Matters: After the Avengers, The WisCon Chronicles Vol. 9, Invisible 3, Clarkesworld Magazine, and two volumes of Speculative Fiction: The Year’s Best Online Reviews, Essays and Commentary. She spends her time wrangling her husband, daughter, dog, and three cats.

Nanobots and Braincases:
A Conversation with Tochi Onyebuchi

Arley Sorg

The future is always closer than we think: Star Trek’s communicators to smartphones; Aldous Huxley’s soma to Prozac; Ray Bradbury’s seashells to earbuds. Tochi Onyebuchi is a science fiction author with a head full of visions, from automated police response to brains used as media storage to mechs piloted by vengeful women. A master of dystopia, his visions encompass the fantastic as well as the all-too-possible.

Riot Baby is a powerful, compact novella about siblings Ella and Kev, one with growing powers, the other thrown in prison. They must negotiate their fragile relationship with each other as Ella grapples with how she should use her increasingly dangerous abilities. The narrative journey moves through a visionary America grounded in the realities of our time, delivering both effective social critique and good science fiction.

War Girls Onyii and Ify are young sisters caught in the Nigerian Civil War—in 2172. They scavenge and fight when they must, until they are separated in an attack. What follows is an action-driven but complex story about culture, conflict, and identity. It’s also a harrowing tale of survival and family in a postnuclear disaster world.

Born in Massachusetts and raised in Connecticut, Tochi Onyebuchi is a consummate New Englander and “proud member of the Toonami Generation.” He graduated from Yale University, New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, Columbia Law School, and L’institut d’études politiques with a masters degree in Global Business Law. He lives in Connecticut, where he works in the tech industry. His fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Lightspeed Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, Omenana, Obsidian Journal, and more. Novella “Dust to Dust” and short story “Screamers” both landed on the Locus Recommended Reading list. His debut novel, Beasts Made of Night, won the Ilube Nommo Award for Best Speculative Fiction Novel. War Girls (Razorbill, October 2019) is a 2019 Cybils Awards finalist. Riot Baby (Tor.com Publishing, Jan 2020) is featured on a host of “must-read” lists, including Book Riot’s and SyFy Wire’s.

Both Riot Baby and War Girls blend science fiction with anime motifs, while still pulling off narratives that comport serious gravitas. How do you strike that balance?

That’s a really good question. For me, it comes down to narrative logic. Dreams and nightmares, no matter how much their thermodynamic laws may differ from that of our lived reality, bear an internal logic, and it’s an internal logic I see in the speculative fiction I read and watch, so my aim (subconsciously, at least) has been to create a story with internal logic.

As a kid, I watched X-Men: The Animated Series, and in maybe the second or third episode, Magneto tries to break Beast out of a prison cell after Beast has been captured during a failed operation on a Sentinel facility. And Magneto’s hovering in the air, surrounded by a sphere of sparking electricity, and this hairy blue man is crouching on his haunches, and they have this whole discussion about separatism versus integration. Gundam Wing introduced me to the concepts of pacifism and total war. So, it never struck me as strange or absurd to have fantastical elements of a story as vehicles for dealing with serious issues. I mean, Gundam pilots average, like, fifteen years old! It all had a narrative logic that I grokked early on in life.

Much of my early diet as a storyteller was manga and anime. Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo and Blade of the Immortal by Hiroaki Samura. It never occurred to me that self-reattaching severed limbs and cities falling out of the sky couldn’t be vessels for human drama. There’s so much imagination there, and that has always been among the most important elements of story to me.

Can you talk a bit about the process of breaking into the publishing industry? What was it like, how did it happen; were there lows, and if so, how did you deal with them?

I’ll start by saying I am SO happy I’m not breaking in during the Age of Twitter. I was neurotic enough during my own analog era that I would’ve gone mad doing it now. I probably started trying to get published in the early 2000s or so. And back then, it seemed the model in the specfic world was 1) write short stories, 2) pub those stories in places like Abyss & Apex or Ideomancer or Asimov’s, 3) use your short stories to get the attention of an agent, 4) show that agent the novel you’ve had cooking this whole time.

That was the process I witnessed at that age and with what limited exposure I had, but I was very impatient. I wanted a book on a shelf. So, instead of learning how to write short fiction and developing material and creds there, I spent most of my time on novels, writing book after book after book, averaging a novel a year for probably a decade and a half. My thinking at the time was: instead of work on the novel that got rejected, let me just write a better novel.

Before websites like AgentQuery came along, I would peruse the Acknowledgements page of books I liked to see which agents got thanked. I would then look them up either online or in the annual Writer’s Market Guide to Literary Agents that I would save up every year to buy. (Them joints were like $26 a pop and I didn’t have that kind of money as a kid!) I’d research their submission guidelines, put together a query letter and synopsis, and mail them out with a self-addressed stamped envelope. I chuckle now at the fact that I was paying for my own rejections.

But while I was slogging through novel rejections, an idea for a short would occur to me and I’d dash it off and sub it. “Dust to Dust” started out as a short story in John Crowley’s Intermediate Fiction Writing class in college. I think I subbed it at a few places, then let it collect . . . well . . . dust. Then, years later, I saw some novella-length sub requests on a website that served as a compendium for short fiction markets. So, I decided to expand the story, in part because I’d run out of short fiction markets to sub it to.

Did a ton of research on the Cold War in Eastern Europe, and I workshopped the novella in pieces through the Online Writing Workshop for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror (I’d been a member since middle school when it was sponsored by Del Rey and I was basically writing poorly-disguised Robert Jordan and Hiroaki Samura fan fic). Subbed it to a few places, and struck gold with the editor of the Panverse anthology series. Dario requested a round of edits and I happily obliged (the story was much stronger for it), and that was my first specfic sale. Before that, I’d sold a spy story to Crimespree Magazine (good luck finding it) and payment was two contributor copies that I never received.

“Zen,” I wrote to procrastinate for my Constitutional Law final, then sat on it for a while before subbing, and I couldn’t believe it actually sold. It felt like an anomaly.

“Place of Worship” was a sort of redo of an earlier short story that I couldn’t sell, and I wrote it more as an exorcism than anything else. I’d been going through some personal trials and tribulations in film school and going into law school, and writing that story served as catharsis. It seemed too literary for most specfic markets, and its novelette length seemed to make an even more difficult sell. But I shot my shot with Asimov’s, in part because they’d made things much easier with the move to online submissions, and, by God, Sheila said yes. That was the biggest check I’d received for my writing at that point and I nearly broke down in tears in the law school student service lobby.

The first draft of “Screamers” was written in 2010. It sold in 2016.

I started trying to get my stories published in maybe 2003 or so, and by 2014, I’d sold four stories, been paid money for three. And all this time, I’m picking up novel rejections. I’m easily past one hundred at this point (One book picked up nineteen rejections, another eighteen, another twenty-six, another picked up fifty-eight, and on and on).

Beasts Made of Night came about as a result of a chance meeting with Tiff Liao, who would later become my editor on the project. She was a law school classmate’s college roommate and we met at a party my first semester of law school and began our friendship. This was in 2012. In 2015, after graduating from law school, I was struggling to sell Goliath, which I’d written that spring, and she offered to take a look at it. We chatted and Goliath didn’t sell but she opened the door to YA for me, and I started writing Beasts Made of Night and the rest, as they say, is history.

There was never a time when I said to myself I’d hang up my cleats, but I did tell myself that if I didn’t sell a book by a certain age, I’d at least slow down a little. I’d been writing like my life depended on it, but as the realities of a legal career began to solidify around me, I told myself that I’d start to prioritize that and background the writing a bit, but there was never any thought given to pressing pause or, Heaven forbid, “stop” on my ambition to be published. I loved writing too much. Loved writing for writing’s sake. It was my favorite thing in the world, and still is. I couldn’t dream of a life where I didn’t have that. And that’s what kept me going through all the rejections, that and the fact that while I was querying, I was already working on the next, better thing. And I was always in love with what I was writing, even if none of the decision makers were yet.

Does SF/F do something or work in some way that is different than non-genre fiction? Or are the definitions arbitrary and meaningless?

I get that there’s a marketing impetus behind genre definitions. People need to know where in the bookstore to put all the books. Problems abound, however, when those distinctions become imbued with moral or intellectual judgments or when taxonomy becomes hierarchy. Personally, I appreciate the distinctions, in part because genres tend to operate with their own internal logic. Thrillers and detective fiction have their tropes and the subversion of those tropes works most powerfully when there’s an awareness of the tropes to begin with. Romance novels offer very specific contractual terms to a reader. Science fiction and fantasy novels are constantly in conversation with each other, in a much more concentrated fashion than what’s found in what we call literary fiction. It isn’t so much that classification is useless (I think it’s helpful to know exactly what is meant by “magical realism,” for instance), so much as I think the imbuing of any qualitative judgment on the basis of that classification is repugnant and meaningless. Mystic River the movie won Oscars, but Mystic River the book would’ve been laughed out of any Pulitzer conversation, which is a crying shame, because that is a beautiful fucking book.

SF/F is powerful, for me, because it operates as reality and metaphor at the same time. All our stories are about us. Stories about androids and aliens are stories about us. Stories about time travel and Terminators are stories about us. You can use SF/F to make a point, a warning, a premonition and Trojan horse it with lasers or underwater cities or what have you. You can also have fun. That’s a thing I have to keep reminding myself with SF/F, is that it enables what few other genres offer, which is what I saw Elizabeth Bear once call sensawunda. We even got our own word for it.

I don’t think sense of wonder should always come with the adjectival “childlike” before it. At all ages, we need and deserve it. And SF/F is the only genre I know that has a definitional mandate to provide it. I have yet to read the work of literary fiction or crime fiction or romance fiction that’s shown me what it’s like when a city falls from the sky.

Do you feel like genre is seeing significant changes in attitudes toward publishing POC and, in particular, African voices/works?

It feels particularly fortuitous to be asked this question days after Orbit Books acquired a magnificent trilogy inspired by ancient West African empires from Suyi Davies Okungbowa. Dr. Nnedi Okorafor has been in the trenches fighting battles for those of us who’ve come after for a long, long time now, and it fills me with such joy to see her getting the roses she’s getting now. And in the diaspora, you have Nisi Shawl’s Everfair (2016). On top of that, Tade Thompson wins the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Rosewater and Marlon James lands on the National Book Award shortlist for Black Leopard, Red Wolf, so it’s definitely an interesting and exciting time for stories of/by Africans.

Whether diasporic or continental, authors are reaching a prominence we haven’t seen before, which is particularly heartening. And this isn’t even to mention the monster success that was Tomi Adeyemi’s Children of Blood and Bone, that being an excellent example of what it looks like when a publishing house actually puts its money behind a title and actively works to see it succeed. The Black Panther movie certainly served to convince decision makers and those holding purse strings that stories connected to the African continent could prove profitable, that there’s a market for them. Also, too, we can’t forget the work that Nalo Hopkinson and Tobias Buckell have been doing, Hopkinson for more than two decades.

But there is a ton of complication in the above part of my answer. Because the majority of the authors I just named are diaspora, whether based in the US, the UK, or the Caribbean. The vast majority of speculative fiction by continental Africans still hasn’t made it to the US, not because it doesn’t exist, but because of structural barriers domestically and a veritable lack of interest in stories from them on the part of USians. Penguin Random House has a South Africa branch, but they don’t accept science fiction submissions. And what other Big 5 house has a presence on the continent?

On the other side of the Atlantic, Cassava Republic (Nigeria) has an office in the UK but, to my knowledge, hasn’t been able to set one up in the US. NB Publishers is largely limited to South Africa’s book market as far as I can tell. So, if a continental African author like Helon Habila or Jennifer Makumbi wants a Western readership, they have to go through New York, London, or Paris. Now this opens out onto a larger discussion about whether to make more space for continental African writers in Western literary spaces or whether to contribute to the building of a more robust and versatile and adaptive publishing apparatus on a continent that houses about 1.3 billion people and about 3,000 ethnic groups speaking 2,100 different languages.

I will say that, as far as genre spaces in the US, what I’ve noticed shares a bit of DNA with silkpunk and much East Asian-inspired specfic, is that it has rushed into a long-gestating hunger for non-Western fantasy and science fiction. Which is so refreshing after techno-orientalist fare like Blade Runner and Firefly and, arguably, Star Wars. As much as publishing likes to lose money, I do hope they recognize the opportunity presented by continuing and expanding opportunities for writers of non-Western backgrounds to tell stories inspired and influenced by those backgrounds.

Is it important for fiction to discuss social issues—is it a necessary part of fiction? Or is it possible to write stories that are just “fun” stories, without a social or political stance?

I think it’s a thing that happens whether the author intends it to or not. No work of fiction is apolitical. Strip a first-person shooter of any markers of religion or nationality and you’ll still have an interactive experience that tells you repeatedly that the only way to solve this puzzle is to shoot at it. Social issues may not be explicitly discussed in a particular work or alluded to, but voice is as much about what you leave out as it is about what you leave in.

However unconscious your decision, if there are no queer people included in the future you’ve imagined, that is a statement. If the only people who can be heroes and major antagonists in your stories are descended from familial lines, that too is a statement. There’s no escaping it, because there is no escaping the reader who will read that in your story. So, you might as well be intentional in setting up the terms of the discussion.

There’s the perception (largely from doom-mongers) that stories that make statements can’t also be fun. It’s either tentpole action flicks or ponderous Oscar-bait. But, as being a Millennial has taught me, we can multitask. As a writer, I write the stories I want to read. Also, my existence is a politicized fact in America. Being a Black man has a say in my experience at school(s), on the street, on Twitter; it flavors my interactions with classmates (especially being on scholarship), literature, police, the ballot box, everywhere. And it’s always cool when a story can meet me there. Also, too, a lot of this boils down to the reader. You can choose not to engage in the anti-war messaging of The Lord of the Rings or the gender politics of The Wheel of Time or ideas of genetic determinism in Star Wars. That doesn’t mean that those who do are less right or correct or valid than you. For the most part, there is no score being kept regarding our reading experiences.

Discussion of social issues doesn’t need a work’s permission to happen. It is out of the author’s hands at that point.

There’s nothing Hajime Isayama or Yasuko Kobayashi can do to prevent an anti-Semitic reading of the second half of season three of Attack on Titan. Doesn’t mean that’s the only reading, and it doesn’t mean that the reverse reading, a reading that sees in that very same story a condemnation of Nazism, is any less valid.

You have an MFA in screenwriting from Tisch. What was your “learning to write” process? Did you simply adapt what you learned in screenwriting to the novel form? Did you take more classes, workshops, do critique circles? Was Tisch a good environment for speculative works?

It was largely emulation. When I was in high school, I think, I bought this book whose title was, I think, How to Write a Damn Good Novel, and it picked specific books and gave a pretty cosmetic analysis as to why they were good and what they did right. Among those books were The Godfather by Mario Puzo and John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. I remember nothing from that book, but the books it chose as examples were highly instructive. So I learned how most painters do, by emulation. I saw what I liked and I tried to emulate that in my own fiction. I studied the craft through its products, reading and reading and reading, but I wouldn’t really learn story structure or any of its building blocks (at least, in the Western tradition) until film school. Before then, I had no idea what a three-act structure was or how central it was to the Western storytelling tradition.

Film school taught me stories’ building blocks re structure of the larger work but also within scene. Film school is why I’m always hunting for the conflict in a scene and it has helped me more easily discover who in my story is meant to be the protagonist. I started asking questions like “who has the most to lose in this situation” and “how do these characters’ desires and purposes collide in this scene” and “where is the friction here.” Learning how to write plays taught me scene breakdowns and how to play with rhythms, and I then applied all of that to my prose (though I still write stage plays and screenplays). Most of the speculative I wrote during that period was on my own time, not because of any restrictions in the program, but because I also wanted to use that period to stretch my wings genre-wise. In my last semester, I ended up writing a Civil War-era Western, a family drama, and a crime thriller about a Kosovar Albanian arms dealer, all feature-length screenplays. So many things I learned during the course of that semester made their way into my fiction, in ways both explicit and implicit.

Are there aspects of storytelling/writing that you feel are more challenging for you, things you struggle with? And how do you deal with those elements?

My Act III’s are HORRIBLE! At least, during the first draft, they’re always too short and, though I know the very, very last part or line, I’m always stumbling toward the finish line.

For me, your characters are stunning. How do you write interesting, compelling characters that feel grounded in the real world?

Thank you! I try to choose who I think is, situationally, the most interesting character. Who has the most to lose or who’s at the bottom of the pile, so to speak? One reason I’m less interested these days in stories that foreground white characters is that in white stories there is categorically less conflict and drama than in a story with a nonwhite protagonist or with non-white characters. In True Detective’s third season, Mahershala Ali’s character was originally white. He auditioned for the part nonetheless and lobbied for the character to be changed, and that change made for a much more interesting show because now, during the course of the investigation that runs through the season, there are all these little interactions and gestures and expressions of a dynamic that wouldn’t have been there if his character were white.

One moment when Ali and Stephen Dorff’s character go to interview a disappeared child’s father, the father instinctively turns to Dorff’s character, believing he’s the lead, and there’s a moment when he realizes Ali’s character is running point on the investigation, and that is such a small, powerful moment. The show isn’t a story about race per se, but it’s always there, an added level of drama that allows for particular moments of high tension. Story-wise, it’s magnificent. Imagine if Buffy were a hetero cis white male. So many of the inter-relational dynamics of the show would have been rendered less compelling.

So, there’s situational thinking to my choices, but I also want characters who struggle internally and who enter the story with that struggle. Taj is the best at what he does, but that thing is literally what will kill him, and being good at it exacts a physical and spiritual tax on him. Onyii loves Ify more than anything in the world and knows some measure of peace with her, but she self-identifies as a proficient killer. Also, she’s, for all intents and purposes, a child. So not only are these characters spinning against the way the world turns, they’re spinning against the way they turn. That friction makes for compelling characters. Keeping them firmly planted in their worlds is a result of me constantly chasing that conflict and drama in my stories.

You have also commented that the forthcoming Goliath, a book you wrote before Beasts Made of Night, was the first book you wrote with a Black protagonist. Does this mean there are other unpublished books and stories you wrote that do not have a Black protagonist? More importantly, what happened or changed that made you start writing with Nigerian viewpoints and Black protagonists?

Everything I wrote before Goliath featured a white protagonist. It’s simply what I was reading. One book has, for its hero, a tortured former Mossad agent, and that stemmed from my much-abated obsession with Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon novels. (The virulent Islamophobia that started to appear turned me off greatly.)

Goliath was actually the outgrowth of a short story I wrote in 2013, “Still Life with Hammers, a Broom, & a Brick Stacker” that was published in Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora in 2016. I was living in Palestine at the time, working with a prisoners’ rights organization, and I found myself in the midst of an imagined short story collection, of which I’d envisioned “Place of Worship” and “Zen and the Art of an Android Beatdown” to be a part. All the stories would feature characters on a single space colony, and the stories would be intertwined through the use of recurring characters. A mosaic novel. I thought, why not have a story about the people left behind on Earth, playing with the idea that all the people in space are generally white. So I wrote “Still Life” . . . and couldn’t sell it anywhere.

I sat on it and, a few years later, thought I could build the world out a bit and expand the story. I thought to write a sort of slim, amorphous book reminiscent of Tinkers by Paul Harding where every sentence would hold its own crystallized beauty. It was going to be a literary novel with a speculative premise (back then, I still held those demarcations in mind!), and it came out at a cool 57k words, WAY too short for the speculative market but just right, I figured, for a literary novel. I got my longest, wordiest rejections for that book, which meant I was making progress. Small press publishers were asking if I had anything else; that sort of thing. Goliath was the best thing I had written and it was the first story I wrote to feature Black characters. I don’t know which way the causal arrow points, but I do believe the two things are related. I was writing into experience in a way I wasn’t before.

As far as the Nigerian element, Tiffany Liao, my initial editor for Beasts Made of Night, was the first to push me to really take ownership of my story like that. Beasts was initially a little more generic in its setting. A lot of the main elements were there, but the culture in the book wasn’t terribly specific. Tiff encouraged me to make the story mine in that respect, to imbue the place and the story with more of myself, and it blossomed as a result. I felt like I’d unlocked a new superpower. That gave me the encouragement to make my next project so specifically Nigerian, so Nigerian in fact that it would tackle one of the most verboten topics in Nigerian society: the civil war.

In a neat bit of circularity, one of the markets that rejected “Still Life” will be publishing Goliath.

War Girls puts female characters up front, with two main POV characters: Onyii and Ify. Riot Baby switches between Ella and Kev and actually opens with Ella, although Kev becomes the more prominent viewpoint. Is centering female points of view a deliberate choice, or is it more a matter of what feels right for the story?

The initial choice is deliberate, and the rest of the story spins out from that choice. I want to write things I haven’t seen before or haven’t seen enough of, and these stories with Black female characters front and center are foremost among them. I think, with a lot more stories than people think, you can make the choice to have your protagonist be from a certain demographic, whether the choice is about race or gender or religion or disability. And the task of the storyteller is to make the story make sense from that choice. The rocket ship can be whatever shape you want. And you have the power to alter the laws of physics however you need in order to ensure that ship’s safe launch off the launchpad.

On your website you say, “Short stories are tough as hell to write.” What is the biggest challenge for you in writing short fiction? What is the short story you are most proud of, and why?

For a long time, my short stories would spin out into novels, as though it were all out of my control. When I was a kid, I wrote this short about an assassin with a metal arm that blew up into a whole novel (that borrowed HEAVILY from Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty) that then exploded into a four-book series. So, for me, the challenge has always been in having a full world exhibited within the confines of 7,500 words or less, which requires a lot of writing-by-implication and, usually, tight focus on one character. Almost all of my earlier work was multi-POV. That was actually a super tough thing to deal with while writing Beasts, staying within Taj’s POV for the entirety of the story. So, it’s kind of heartening to see my longer published work start to expand, viewpoint-wise. Beasts Made of Night and Crown of Thunder were limited to one POV. War Girls and Riot Baby each sport two POVs, and Goliath promises a few more than that.

As far as the short work I’m proudest of, I vacillate between “Place of Worship” and “Still Life.” I love both because I’m obsessed with prose styling. John Crowley’s Little, Big is an ideal I’m constantly reaching toward. It’s actually unfair how beautifully that whole-ass book is written. Every sentence sings. “Place of Worship” might edge ahead because 1) “Still Life” grew into a whole, new thing and 2) “Place of Worship” was and remains to this day the most personal story I’ve ever written. I wrote into my fears for that story pretty hard, and I was always worried that it wouldn’t be considered science-fictional enough for professional markets, so the payoff when it sold was particularly huge.

What is important or special to you about both Riot Baby and War Girls, what do you really want readers to know about these works?

I want readers to know that these works sell, and I want them to buy more (into) stories about Black people by Black people. Editors who read, agents who read, publicity departments that read, publishing house presidents who read, cover designers who read, I want them to know that stories like War Girls and Riot Baby sell and are a net good for the literary ecosystem. And I want them to buy more of these stories and to pay more for them. (Especially if I’m writing them :: wink :: .)

I think what’s special about these stories is that they don’t center the white experience and they weren’t written for the White Gaze. Some days, that sounds like a small thing. Some days, it sounds like the loudest thing on the planet.

What can you tell us about Goliath? What is important, special, and different about it? Do you have other stories or projects coming up?

Oh, it’s such a special book. The most structurally daring thing I’ve written. I really feel like I was firing on all cylinders writing it. Ostensibly, it’s a postapocalyptic saga about a group of brick stackers trying to make a way in New Haven in the face of . . . some changes. But it’s got so much of America in there. And there’s one bit in there (that I hope survives edits) that is the most titanic thing that’s ever come out of me.

And it’s set in a city I know and love that isn’t New York.

As far as what I have coming up, later this year is the sequel to War Girls from Razorbill. Then confirmed for next year is my first longform nonfiction outing, a book called (S)kinfolk, which is, on its face, a critical analysis of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah but also does triple duty as memoir and sociocultural inquiry. It’s about my mother’s journey to this country as well as my own sentimental and political education regarding Blackness in America, and I’m super proud of it. That’s forthcoming from Fiction Advocate.

What have you read in genre lately (short or long) that really excited you, that you want everyone to read?

This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone turned me inside out. It felt, for the first time in a long time, like a book written specifically for me. And it felt, perhaps more importantly, like Max and Amal had so much fun writing it. They truly gave us a gift with that book.

I also have to say, I’m jonesing hard for Hao Jingfang’s Vagabonds.

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.

Faith in Vision:
A Conversation with Ken Liu

Arley Sorg

With “100+ short stories, novelettes, and novellas,” the collection The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, a debut novel The Grace of Kings and second book in the Dandelion Dynasty Series The Wall of Storms, a Star Wars novel Journey to Star Wars: The Last Jedi The Legends of Luke Skywalker, and many translations (including Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem, Hao Jingfang’s “Folding Beijing” and Vagabonds, as well as Chen Qiufan’s The Waste Tide), you have probably heard of Ken Liu. He has been nominated for and won multiple awards, including the Hugo, Locus, Nebula, and World Fantasy, as well as international awards such as the Premio Ignotus, the Seiun, and the Grand prix de l’Imaginaire. “The Plantimal” won the 2015 Asimov’s Readers’ Poll and “The Clockwork Soldier” won Best 2014 Clarkesworld Story.

Liu’s official bio will tell you that prior to becoming a full-time writer, he worked as a software engineer, corporate lawyer, and litigation consultant; that he “frequently speaks at conferences and universities on a variety of topics, including futurism, cryptocurrency, history of technology, bookmaking, the mathematics of origami, and other subjects of his expertise.” Perhaps more importantly, his fiction has a reputation for breaking hearts. Thought provoking and thoughtful, many of his stories are known for both pushing boundaries and an emotional gut-punch.

Your first short fiction sale was published in 2002: “Carthaginian Rose.” But looking at your publication history, it seems like your fiction really gained traction in 2011. What was the journey to your first publication like? Did you sell that story and the subsequent ones right away or did you struggle through rejections? And what happened or changed in 2011—was it your style, your skill level, the market, or something else that essentially shifted your writing career?

I almost failed out before my career even got started.

Before I got my first pro-rate publication, I wrote a ton of stories to learn the craft and collected hundreds of rejection letters. That part was fine; everyone goes through them. Because I was so focused on getting published, however, I never thought through how I ought to change my approach to writing (or not) after I got that sale.

The first couple of pro sales made me think I had it all figured out—probably the most foolish thing I could have thought. I finished one particular story that I was very proud of, but unfortunately it was rejected by every market that I submitted to. Rather than just moving on to write another story (as I would have done in the days before I had any sales), I became obsessed with it and kept on tweaking it and sending it out again. The story became a referendum on my worth as a writer. I felt that I had to get it published to prove that the previous sales weren’t flukes. I went through all the pro markets, the semipros, the token markets . . . and when I ran out of places to submit, I concluded that I was just not meant for the writing life and stopped.

Years later, when Sumana Harihareswara and Leonard Richardson put out the call for submissions for Thoughtcrime Experiments, an anthology that specifically looked for stories that had been rejected multiple times by pro markets, it felt like a message aimed at me from the universe. I submitted my story, and it was accepted. That one acceptance ended up changing my life, as I began writing and submitting again.

The lesson I learned, if there was one, wasn’t so much that I should never give up on a story; rather, it was that I had been, as explained by Tobias Buckell, confusing goals and milestones. I had no control over whether an individual story would be accepted by pro markets (or whether it would win an award, be read by lots of people, lead to a novel deal . . . ), and I shouldn’t have put all my sense of worth in external validation. When that story kept on getting rejected, I should have simply moved on to things I could control: write another story, start a novel, finish a novel, experiment with a new genre. I should have focused more on my own sense of satisfaction with the art I was creating.

After that, I turned inward and sought self-validation, rather than external validation. I wrote many more stories and experimented with different techniques, genres, plots, story structures, and so on. I no longer cared about whether stories were accepted; I only wanted to see if the next story I wrote would be more interesting to me than the last one.

Paradoxically, I started selling a lot more stories from that point on. Apparently not caring about whether my work would receive the kind of recognition I used to crave was the best thing I could have done for my career.

One of the things I really like on your website is that you list personal favorites: “Stories that I personally like a lot that didn’t get much attention.” Do you feel like those favorites have certain things in common or do you feel like there are specific reasons why these stories didn’t receive the attention other works did?

As I mentioned earlier, I tend to experiment a lot and focus on my own sense of satisfaction. I feel whether a particular story would receive critical and reader attention is entirely out of my control, and I have to ignore that as much as possible.

So I don’t ask myself questions about why something didn’t get much recognition. There are so many random factors influencing the reception of a story that I find the exercise to be counterproductive to maintaining a creative mindset. As long as I think there’s something in a story that strikes me as particularly interesting, and the final result fulfills my aesthetic vision, then I’m happy. If not, then I want to do better in the next attempt.

Whether anyone else likes the story or talks about it is less than an afterthought—it’s a no-thought.

I don’t think there’s much that unifies the stories that I like the most—my interest in various subjects has waxed and waned over time—but they do tend to embody my aesthetic vision most clearly.

How do you make a story emotionally effective?

Ultimately the only reader I want to please is me, so I try to tell stories that I don’t see anyone else telling and tell them in ways that only I can. It’s difficult for any author to write a story that is affecting for the author because there are no secrets, no tricks, no sleight of hand, no way to fool yourself. The only way to tell a story that moves the heart doing the telling is to dig deep and stick to the Truth and only the Truth.

That stories that stir me deeply sometimes also move others feels rather miraculous—and gives me hope that communication and intersubjectivity are in fact possible and not mere wishful thinking. The belief that the human can also be Human, the individual defined by the community, the self a part of Us . . . these are recurring themes in my fiction, and it’s no wonder that they ultimately determine my metafictional approach.

Are there aspects of storytelling/writing that you feel are more challenging for you, things you struggle with? And how do you deal with those elements?

The biggest challenge has always been to maintain faith in my own vision and to stick to my aesthetic vision. When you’re an artist working in a market economy, there are always a thousand-thousand voices telling you that what you’re doing is wrong, unpopular, deviating from the “rules” and “standards”; many are happy to tell you, often without you soliciting advice, that you’d be better off doing it this way or that way; plenty of people who know much less than you about topics important to you would profess to be experts and give you “guidance” (I’ve grown less tolerant of this last vice over time, and now I simply cut off such people mercilessly—I encourage all of you to do the same; you’ll be much happier).

It’s very hard to learn to ignore these voices, and though I’ve gotten better over time, I still can’t claim to have completely transcended the craving for external validation or the skill to bat aside all voices of doubt. I can only strive to do better with each new work and to disregard even more completely the unhelpful opinions of others.

Your first collection, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, came out in 2016 with Saga Press. The title story, “The Paper Menagerie,” is a heart-wrenching tale, one that feels very personal, and focuses on issues around the immigrant experience and generational relationships. Your second collection, The Hidden Girl and Other Stories, is due out February 2020. Are there important similarities and differences between the two collections, in terms of themes, moods, styles, or other aspects?

I think the biggest difference between the two collections is just the degree to which I’ve grown as a writer. When the first collection came out, most of the stories were still to various degrees trying to follow conventional “rules.” By the time my second collection came out, I felt that I was focusing more on my own internal compass: Do I feel this story does something unique to me and does it well? The second collection is more difficult to classify, and I like that it resists being pinned down.

But ultimately my stories are still my stories, and I think both collections reflect the same thematic and aesthetic concerns: skepticism about easy answers; the importance of empathy; technology as essentially an amplifier of human nature, both noble and base; refusal to accept generalizations and categorizations; rejection of labels; faith that reason is useless without the guidance of heartfelt emotion; and so on.

When you think on the new collection, what are the one or two standout stories for you, the ones you hope everyone reads, even if they don’t read the others; and why?

The author may write the text, but stories only come alive in the interplay between the text and the reader. Before a text is decoded, it is first translated and filtered and transformed by the experiences and expectations of the reader. Because every reader is different, every story is also different when interpreted through each individual consciousness. The story I write is not the story that a reader reads—not unless the reader is me.

All of which is to say: I don’t think it matters much which stories stand out to me (they all do, because I wouldn’t have put them in the collection unless they did something special to me).

Readers will make their own judgments, and the more divergent readers’ opinions are, the happier I am—for it shows how incredibly different each of us is from everyone else.

How boring the world would be if we all felt the same way.

You also have the conclusion to The Dandelion Dynasty series coming out, expected in 2020. Book 1, The Grace of Kings, came out in 2015. What has the overall journey of writing this series been like? Were there importantly different challenges to writing the conclusion? Has the experience changed your writing in any specific ways?

I started writing this series almost a full decade ago, and before I wrote the first word of the first book, I already had in mind the final scene of the entire series. This meant that I had the overall shape of the journey, the grand landmarks, but not the precise path. It took me ten years to discover the route from start to end, but I did get to the end.

It’s bittersweet. On the one hand, I’m about to say goodbye to a world I’ve lived in and dreamed in for a very large part of my life; on the other hand, I’m about to realize a vision that has lived only in my head for the past ten years.

Writing the conclusion to the series has been the most fun I’ve had as a writer. The silkpunk epic fantasy series is heavy on technology (though that word is never used in the books), so I’ve had to do a lot of prototyping. My favorite part involved building models of electrostatic machines (such as Ben Franklin’s motor) and wiring together circuits to be sure that my fictional designs would work (at least close enough for fantasy engineering purposes). (Pro tip: Wimshurst generators are great for charging up Leyden jars.) I also used 3D-printing to make some models to make blocking and describing battle scenes easier. And writing software simulations of the “instructible” engines in the novels was challenging but very enjoyable.

Since I’m wrapping up the series, there was no need to “save” anything for future books. I just put all the ideas I cared about into this installment. It was really hard to keep everything straight and to make sure all the loose ends were tied up. My little wiki for the world of Dara has now grown into a beast, filled with all sorts of material that would never make it into the books, but which make Dara more substantial.

I feel so blessed to have been able to work on this series. Not many people can say that they’ve devoted a decade of their life to the creation of a single world, living in it, and telling its story. And now the narrative is finished; I just need to put in a few finishing touches before sharing it with the world.

What has been the hardest or most challenging aspect of writing the conclusion?

Witnessing characters make decisions that are true to themselves but heart-wrenching to me, as their author.

I knew that I succeeded in accomplishing what I set out to do because even knowing all the literary techniques and narrative devices I deployed to evoke the world and the characters, even with every move and countermove on open display, I still felt myself taken up by the magic. I was moved by the deeds of my characters.

What is important or special to you about the series overall, and what is specifically important or special to you about the conclusion?

The Dandelion Dynasty isn’t about any specific culture or history; it is about all the things I care for as a human being living in this moment on this planet. It’s about politics, technology, faith in ideals; it’s also about being a link in the endless chain of generations, the resilience of evolving traditions, the expression of individuality through relationships, the importance of doubt in self-definition, the need to cling to hope in the face of overwhelming oppression and violence; it’s a love song to the diverse classical traditions of our species, an ode to our potential for empathy and grandness of spirit, as well as a philippic against the less noble aspects of our inconstant nature.

It is, in some ways, the purest expression—up to this point—of my aesthetic vision. I believe it’s the best thing I’ve ever written, and that makes me so happy.

Where does the story go next that is important for readers to know?

The concluding installment for the series is long and grand—in some sense, everything that has happened before is merely a prelude to the heart of the story.

Looking back on the industry overall, from when you started selling stories in 2002 to now, do you feel like the industry has changed in any significant or important ways?

The longer I’ve been in this business, the less I understand it. I now view any sort of generalization about publishing with skepticism because there are so many ways to “succeed” and no advice seems universally applicable to everyone. If I could give the younger me any sort of advice, it would be to pay less attention to what others say, to focus on the inner voice, the yearning to tell stories that no one else is telling, and to ignore the doubters as much as possible. Please the only reader that matters: yourself.

Do you feel like you are where you have always wanted to be in your writing career? Do you have career goals, hopes, and dreams? In other words, what is the next level for you?

I said earlier that The Dandelion Dynasty feels like the purest expression of my aesthetic vision to date, which means that I still want to go on and get even purer. I believe my next book and next story will be even closer to the ideal, and I will be able to care about external validation even less.

But as much as I want to be able to focus solely on execution, I’ve found it so encouraging and helpful to hear from readers all around the world who felt their souls stirred by my visions. My fiction has taken me around the world, and I’ve heard from readers in person as well as through the ether, across languages, cultures, borders, divisions visible and invisible. I cherish these messages so much. As I mentioned earlier, every time I experience one of these moments when the author’s and the reader’s souls vibrate in sympathy, when consciousnesses touch and share a moment of intersubjectivity mediated by the text, it feels like a miracle. I feel so blessed to have experienced many such moments. Of all my measurable accomplishments, these messages from the reader, when they saw what I saw, heard what I heard, felt what I felt . . . these are the moments when I am most joyous as an author because they affirm for me the beauty of our species and our potential for infinite empathy.

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:
2019 Reader’s Poll Finalists

Neil Clarke

I’d like to start this month by thanking everyone for their support and understanding during my surgery and recovery over the last month. The procedure went off without a hitch. I’ll admit that I was nervous about the whole lasers-being-fired-in-my-heart thing, but I had an amazing team of doctors and probably the most space-age operating room I’ve ever seen. Recovery has been slower than I expected, but the pain levels are finally down and almost all of the doctor-mandated restrictions on my activities have been removed. It will likely be a few more weeks before the bruising, swelling, and remaining restrictions—mostly on the use of my left arm—are gone. In the meantime, I’m taking it easy when I can and staying home. It means I’ll miss Boskone this year, but it’s for the best. I hope to see everyone there next year!

In late January, we held the nomination phase for the annual Clarkesworld Magazine Reader’s Poll for best story and cover art. As in previous years, we went with a shortened (roughly one-day) nomination phase. We’ve found that this approach minimizes attempts at ballot-stuffing without any significant impact on the total number of participants. It was a close race from the start and once again it ended with ties. The story category was particularly close, with a six-way tie for fifth place. That’s more than we wanted, but the readers have spoken. If it doesn’t work out well, we’ll update the rules next year.

Finalists for Best Story

“Such Thoughts Are Unproductive” by Rebecca Campbell (December)

“The Sun from Both Sides” by R.S.A. Garcia (May)

“Annotated Setlist of the Mikaela Cole Jazz Quintet” by Catherine George (December)

“Give the Family My Love” by A. T. Greenblatt (February)

“East of the Sun, West of the Stars” by Brit E. B. Hvide (February)

“Your Future is Pending” by Matthew Kressel (November)

“Shattered Sidewalks of the Human Heart” by Sam Miller (July)

“Dave’s Head” by Suzanne Palmer (September)

“The Painter of Trees” by Suzanne Palmer (June)

“Insaan Hain, Farishte Nahin” by Arula Ratnakar (May)

Finalists for Best Cover Art

January
“Ghostship” by Pascal Blanche (January)

March
“Alien Abstract VI” by Arthur Haas (March)

May
“Vertigo” by Matt Dixon (May)

October
“Adaptation” by Beeple (October)

November
“Pizza Break” by Tomas Kral (November)

December
“Halo” by Derek Stenning (December)

Congratulations to all our finalists!

Now it’s up to you to pick the winner in each category. Go to:

www.surveymonkey.com/r/clarkesworld2019

Voting will close on February 20th at 8PM EST and the winners will be announced in our March issue.

Speaking of awards, CoNZealand—the 78th World Science Fiction Convention—has opened the nomination period for this year’s Hugo Awards. Since there are still a few people who continue to nominate Clarkesworld for Best Semiprozine, I’d like to once again remind you that we haven’t been eligible for that award for a long time. Give your nomination to one of the many fine semiprozines out there instead. You can find a list at semiprozine.org. At present, there isn’t a category for professional magazines, but you can nominate me for Best Editor Short Form if you are so moved, and of course, all our original fiction is eligible in their respective categories. The list at neil-clarke.com/2019-clarkesworld-stories-and-cover-art can be helpful in determining what category each story is eligible in.

That’s about all for this month. I wish you all the best!

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:
cattleDrive

Colie Wertz

About the Artist

Colie Wertz is a freelance concept artist for hire working out of SanFrancisco, California. His interest in vehicles comes from an architectural background and a love of motorsport and aviation. He has worked in the film Industry for over twenty years as a modeler, viewpainter, mattePainter, compositor, and illustrator. He has worked on films from Star Wars:Episode 1: Phantom Menace to Rogue One: a Star Wars Story and The Mandalorian. Throw in some Transformers and Marvel movies to boot! He has drawn all his life, and continues to do so every day.