Time Reveals the Heart

Derek Künsken

Guo Lei mounted the stairs to his mother’s apartment at seven in the morning. He hadn’t visited in two weeks; he never knew what he would find. It was early, but he had a launch today, maybe several, and no matter what, he tried to see his mother before every launch, just in case. When silence answered his knocks, he used his key.

The curtains were drawn. The air was close and humid over an obstacle course of food delivery bags. Spilled huangjiu laced the air with the scent of dried alcohol. Rumpled clothes seemed to have rained on the floor and bed in his mother’s room. He found her on the kitchen floor. He shook her softly. She smelled of millet wine.

“Mother.”

She mouthed a sound of sleeping annoyance when he turned her over. Her lip was split. Dried blood spattered her chin and the floor. He sat her up.

“Mother.”

She pushed at his chest with the irritation of a resentfully waking child. Her skin was cool. They staggered to the sofa and laid her down. He wanted to leave. The senseless figure wasn’t the woman who’d raised him. He owed a duty to his mother, but he didn’t know this woman.

He unlocked his phone. In cloud storage, he had an AI emulator linked to an icon with his mother’s smiling face. The frozen image grew to fill the screen and came alive, smiling. He always knew who he would see when he touched the icon.

“My beautiful Lei,” she said. “Happy New Year’s Eve.” This was the woman who’d raised him, fed him, taught him, fixed his cuts, helped him climb when he’d been small and unsure.

“I’ve got a launch today, so I wanted to see you quickly.” He looked at the woman on the sofa.

“You’re such a good boy,” the uploaded woman said. “I’m so proud.”

He didn’t have enough time to wait for her to wake up. She was usually sober in the morning.

“What’s wrong?” said the woman in the phone.

“You didn’t get anything ready.”

The face in the phone, the mother he remembered, reacted as he knew her. A moment of surprise preceded an expression of hurt.

“What kind of a thing is that to say to your mother?” she demanded. “Have I ever missed a New Year? Did I ever offer you anything but the best?”

The woman behind the icon, uploaded a year ago during a brief few months of sobriety, had not missed any New Years. She’d hidden a lot of her drinking over the years, indulging when he was at school or interning, usually with friends, but gradually on her own. Still, each New Year’s Eve, her apartment had been clean, hung with red banners, laid out with joss sticks, table set for them and ancestors with rice cakes, oranges, and noodles, a poster of the door god mounted outside.

She didn’t react to the accusations. The upload only preserved the woman of the past. The memory devices holding the vast database of all her potential reactions could react to moments of the present, but the algorithms had been established before she’d deteriorated so much. The woman groaning on the sofa and the woman in the phone screen were barely the same person, and neither truly engaged with the present.

“I remember your first violin recital,” she said.

He smiled. They’d practiced together every night for months.

“I’m as proud of you now as I was then, Lei.”

He closed the app. His mother snored unevenly on the sofa. He covered her with a blanket and surveyed the gloomy apartment from the door.

“Happy New Year,” he said.

Lei entered the office at seven thirty with an eager step. The Chengdu Archaeological Portal Project occupied the top four floors of the Tongwei International Center. From here, they could reach thousands of years into the past to study their world as it had been. Wen Zuodong was waiting for him, lab coat off.

“I thought I was going to miss you,” Zuodong said. “They’re switching out my shift early so I can catch my train to Chongqing, to be with my family. I hope you finish on your first jump so you can too.”

“Yeah,” Lei said.

“Hey! Did you see the new recordings on textile dyeing? The Shu had a whole palette of colors we never knew about!”

“Not yet.”

“The raw photos are in the work-in-progress folders,” Zuodong’s excitement was infectious. Ancient textiles were exciting, but some of the equipment Lei had set up had photographed previously unknown wood-and-gut musical instruments. He still hadn’t managed to record the music, but he dreamed of soon hearing songs of three millennia ago. “Take a look once you’re done. I’m heading home soon.”

He followed Zuodong to the staging area. No other jumpers were scheduled today. The monitoring stations were shut down, but for Zuodong’s. He put the mission profile in Lei’s hand, took his temperature, checked his ears and reflexes.

The mission was simple. Another jumper, while setting up archaeological cameras and microphones in the past, had lost one. Lei wouldn’t be setting up anything today, just finding and recovering a camera no bigger than a piece of gum. He wondered how much trouble the other jumper was in. The Archaeological Portal Project picked only the best for their jump teams. The thought of making a mistake and losing access to the past made him queasy.

He didn’t make mistakes though. He was disciplined. And although history could change, it was often only in small ways. Societal and technological forces had their own inertia. And a lost piece of equipment or the death of a single person rarely influenced them. But even small changes carried risk, because no one knew quite what would change history, so they were all careful.

The more personal danger to jumpers was accidentally surprising or frightening locals in the past. But the risks were worth it. To breath the air of millennia ago was moving. Seeing the ancient cities, hearing the linguistic variations, smelling millennia-old recipes and tracking architectural and technological developments inspired. It was like being an astronaut traveling to an alien world.

Zuodong’s pills were open now at his workstation. Lei’s palms itched at the sight of the gel capsules. The pills were the key to navigating time, but at high doses could become addictive. Zuodong put one in Lei’s palm and inserted two others into a pocket on Lei’s gear. He swallowed the pill and waited eagerly.

The workstations . . . shifted, bent, as if upending. Zuodong examined his pupils.

“It’s hitting you?” Zuodong said. His voice sounded like falling drops of water, shapeless, wobbling in free fall, transparent. Lei nodded, causing the staging area to change colors, bluing and purpling.

“Synesthesia started.”

“Let’s check out your pilot AI,” Zuodong said, guiding Lei to the launch plate in the room beyond the bulletproof glass. The walls seemed to be melting, solid to liquid, but never running down. Disconnected from gravity. Zuodong patted Lei’s webbing and straps. “Your AI is ready. Thirty seconds. You ready?”

“Yes.”

Lei’s head felt swollen, weightless, expanding, perceiving the world in transcendent ways Zuodong couldn’t imagine. Lei floated in a euphoric perceptual kaleidoscope. At the mark, he hit the green button.

The world clenched, compressing into a tight, tiny swirl. Then naked stars orbited Lei, cold and white, stars of now, stars of tomorrow, stars of yesterday, a filigree of diamond dust splashed over the stacks of black velvet he sped through.

The project had nearly automated travel into the past; machines injected and mediated the energy. But no rational mind could navigate all of it, nor any AI. No data set could teach an AI to see all the years in a stack of three-dimensional sheets, to find in all of them the right landing site. The human mind couldn’t either, not without a psychedelic drug that distended the mind. But under the influence of the drug, Lei’s mind twisted out of shape, distended into swirls of logical eddies, expanded and folded like dough so that he could see through that miasma of unnatural simultaneity to find the pathway to a single year.

The pilot AI followed Lei’s thoughts to that year and ended their hurtling. Then Lei stood in tall grass, catching himself on the rough bark of a looming tree. The air tasted of winter-dozing laurel and oak. Everything smelled electrically alive, resonant, meaningful. The stars slowed their pinwheeling. He felt . . . extraordinary. Big. Connected. At the edge of some immense realization.

He had to take the antidote. To come down. He waited a moment longer, feeling the world in a way no one could ever feel it: tilting in nonsensical directions, brightly colored in darkness, silent scraping of grass stalk against grass stalk in a damp breeze that tasted of honey. He drew the antidote gel capsule from a pouch and swallowed it grudgingly.

He lived for these moments of transcendence and waited out the last of them, mourning the shrinking of his consciousness as all of time and space, so clear moments before, became opaque, pitiless, hard as tree bark. He became small and the warm world became cold. Nothing naturally metabolized the navigator drug, so its effect could last two or three days, but extensive neurological damage could happen in just a few hours. The jumpers had to be disciplined enough to take the antidote on time.

Lei rested against the tree and took a long drink from his canteen.

His dark vision goggles turned the black of the nighttime Chengdu plain into a low patchwork of farmers’ fields, dirt tracks, and wood and rammed-earth buildings. A sliver of moon hung high among the stars. A winding strip of the Jinsha River glowed a false green relative to the cool of the January evening. Dozens of kilns and ovens, banked for the night, throbbed a hotter green. The excitement of being here, of having been transported to a world of ancient wonder crept into him. The sleeping city in the distance was the capital of the Shu kingdom, 708 BC.

“Happy New Year,” he whispered.

He hugged himself as he ran his security check of his surroundings. He was alone. No thermal signatures, just the peace of ancient nighttime. The comedown was hitting him hard. It felt like ants crawling on his skin. He rubbed his arms, trying to shake off the creeping feeling.

His palm brushed against the pouch containing two more pills, one to navigate the way back to the present, one as a spare. He thought of swallowing the spare and enjoying another high. A kind of expanded world beckoned in each of those pills, a world that was hard to let go. The pills tempted every jumper, but they all resisted.

Lei began his search, walking a raster pattern, probing the tall grasses with sensors. In ninety minutes, he’d covered the entire mission area, but didn’t find anything that wasn’t supposed to be there.

Lei landed back on the launch deck of the project. Mosses crawled the walls in his warped, euphoric perceptions. The deck was corrugated into waves. His jumper training already had the antidote in his hand, but he didn’t want to take it. Not yet. He loved this surreal world. He loved belonging to this vastness of strange colors and sounds and shapes, to a place where time didn’t matter. His training brought the antidote pill to his lips, and for long moments, he hesitated, drawing out the feeling, if only for a second or two. But even deep under the effects of the navigator pill, he knew waiting was wrong.

He swallowed. Time contracted. Color drained from the world. Sound lost its richness. The walls were not covered in moss. The floor wasn’t a wave pattern. The world became plain. He became plain.

He plodded off the launch deck. Normally the stage crews met him here. A woman swore in the staging area. Lei came around the protective wall. A young woman hunched forward in her chair, headset on, controller in her hand, playing a video game on two of three big monitors.

“Get him! Get him! Your six! Your six!” she said into her headset.

Lei neared. “You’re my stager?”

“Hold on,” she said, firing at a bunch of monsters.

Reluctantly, he took out the spare navigator pill. “I have to give you this.”

“Leave it on the console,” she said. “No! No! No! Now your nine!”

Her on-screen character swiveled and ducked and fired.

Lei put the pill in its box. Other boxes were there too. He might have taken one or more of the navigator pills and she might not notice.

“Who are you?”

She half-glanced, and grimaced as she twisted her controller. “Kù Yong. How was the past?”

“Shouldn’t you be watching me?”

She maintained a stream of fire with her left hand while tapping the right-hand monitor. The third screen showed his telltales. All green.

“I skipped out on my family today because of your emergency jump,” she said. “Bosses said I could play my little cousins online if there wasn’t any work. They told me you don’t need much. Do you need anything? Shoot left! He’s on your five!”

A monster burst in a flash of color and treasure.

Kù Yong turned to him, smiling. “We done? Can we go home now?”

“I couldn’t find the camera. I scoured the whole mission area.”

“Ugh!” she said in exasperation. “Four more hours! I’m supposed to be at home with family.” She took off her headset and pushed past him. “I’ll reset the launch platform.”

She bustled past the protective wall and he was alone with the pills. They were supposed to be controlled, counted, but she’d just left them out. Anyone could take one and expand their entire vision of the world, perceive its unseen dimensions, understand how space and time knit together. He picked one up and for a moment imagined slipping it into his pocket.

He put it back and turned away abruptly.

He stripped off his webbing and launch equipment and collapsed into one of the rest chairs. In theory, another launch could happen right away, but biochemistry held them back. It wasn’t safe to climb back into navigator perceptions while the antidote ran its course. Kù Yong came back.

“Do you need anything?” she said, putting on her headset.

“No.”

“They could have done this another day and not ruined New Year’s Eve,” she said, restarting her game.

Lei leaned his head back, closing his eyes. Glimpses of that space-time vastness teased in visual memory. He used breathing exercises to come down, to bring the mind to rest. She was wrong, of course. It had to be now because of the location of the Earth. Time travel worked, but they couldn’t go anywhen. It had to be a time and a place, and the hardest part of time travel was finding the Earth in the immensity of space-time.

The Earth hurtled around the sun at almost thirty kilometers per second in an elliptical orbit that precessed. If Lei jumped back six months in time, the Earth would be at the other side of the sun and he would suffocate in space. And the sun traveled around the center of the galaxy at two hundred and fifty kilometers per second at an odd angle to the solar pole. These motions made a wide, misshapen helix line through four-dimensional space-time. Jumpers navigated that uneven spiral. In theory, the launch equipment could precisely push a jumper through space as well as time, but the navigation became unsolvable. So they jumped in units of a year, like leaping from wave crest to wave crest. Whenever they’d sent the first jumper, perhaps one or two years ago, it hadn’t been New Year. But the lunar calendar had made finding the lost camera a New Year problem.

He thumbed open his phone and swiped to the icon with his mother’s smiling picture.

“Hello, darling!” she said.

Just like video chatting.

“Hi, Mom.”

“You look tired.”

“Navigator drugs up, navigator drugs down,” he said. “I’ll feel better in a couple of hours.”

“They work you too hard.”

“It’s okay.”

“Are you eating enough?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Eat more noodles. If you don’t have time to cook, you can always make noodles quickly.”

They’d lived variations of this conversation before. The algorithms running his emulated mother were already set, like the pasts he visited. She wasn’t reacting to new things, only to the stimulus of him, now, but it felt like the real her.

“I should go get some food, Mom.”

“Call soon.”

“I will.”

Her icon shrank to a thumbnail among many. Kù Yong’s video game rushed in colorful, tumbling, exploding battle.

“I guess you’re missing family too, eh?” she called back.

Lei had dan dan noodles with minced pork delivered. As he ate, he stared out at the Chengdu skyline, low clouds gray over splashes of red and gold decorations in apartment windows. The city had transformed the river plain, erased the past he’d walked just two hours ago. Concrete and steel and alluvial silt and millennia of time obscured the solution to finding the lost camera.

It wasn’t in the mission area. Previous scouting missions had already figured out how to get the most anthropological knowledge in the least intrusive and detectable ways. Risking detection recklessly wouldn’t teach them any more of their ancient ancestors. There was no reason to take a camera or microphone outside the mission area.

No reason.

What if he’d left without any reason? The navigator drug expanded the consciousness, stretched it beyond reason. Thoughts in that state existed above rational thinking and also in the intuitive layer beneath the rational. That was the only way for the human mind to find a way through the movements of planets and stars and perturbations of distant suns in four dimensions.

Finding the way was exhilarating, sublime, like surfing starlight and cosmic dust, and it was hard to leave. Swallowing the antidote was an act of discipline. What if the other jumper hadn’t? What if he’d waited as long as he possibly could to take his antidote, staying in that higher state for twenty minutes, maybe half an hour, and then rushed through his setup mission with the remaining time? The project would never know. Unless he’d made a mistake, like losing a piece of kit.

It was chilling.

He hadn’t told Kù Yong his theory of the lost camera. She barely noticed him as he took the three pills he needed to jump: one to go pastward, one to return, and one spare. He slipped the first into his mouth with a trepidatious eagerness and put the other two into the special pouches. The first touches of the navigator drug prodded at the edges of his perceptions. Colors switched. Shadows brightened. Sound Dopplered. Touch tingled. The air tasted of steel and pepper. The world swelled, inflating like a balloon, in all the dimensions he knew and in directions the human mind could not imagine without help. And riding over all of this, euphoria.

“Launch sequence clear,” Kù Yong said through a speaker.

Her voice seemed far away, as distance became flexible and time came into sharp focus. On the platform, his hand hovered over the green launch button. He realized that he hadn’t called his mother. He’d spoken to the upload instead.

“Launch sequence clear,” Kù Yong repeated.

Lei pressed the button and catapulted through the cosmos. Space was hot and bright, the sun hanging in the black, apparently unmoving while the Earth appeared and vanished like a strobe light. Sometimes the Earth came close. Sometimes Lei was underground. Sometimes he hovered in blue sky. The pulsing throbbed like part of the cosmic heartbeat. His altered state of mind saw a pathway through the strobing, through the dizzying choices, in a way an AI could not, all the way to the ancient Shu kingdom of 708 BC.

He appeared in the night’s dark. In the three hours since he’d left, clouds had jammed together, occluding the stars. The air chilled his lungs and smelled green, alive. So beautiful. So much more than real. He wanted to just experience it, but he needed these moments to try to understand what the other jumper might have done if he hadn’t taken the antidote. Lei turned slowly, arms wide, head high, feeling the ancient night.

The unwalled city lay a kilometer away, filled with sleeping people who fired ceramics and shaped bronzes and carved jade and ground millet, who existed and loved and laughed in this time and no other. Had the jumper sought them out in a whim of expanded consciousness? The quiet city was a small thing, a transient wink in the vastness.

Lei’s slow turn stopped to face low mountains at the edge of the river valley. In this feeling of connectedness, of imagining the world through time as well as space, the mountains seemed steadier, more meaningful. He’d never noticed it before, maybe because he’d never stayed in this state for long. The mountains possessed a weight beyond their hardness and size. They existed . . . differently.

Unlike the winking, vanishing city, people, river, and trees, the mountains possessed an invariant solidity through time. Not just forward in time, but backward, before humanity. Their temporal immensity struck him in a way that few things had in the navigator’s perceptions. He’d never looked, because of his diligence, his duty, his discipline. He’d always taken his antidote right away, done his security sweep, and verified his location in space-time. The busyness of mission had prevented him from seeing something far more beautiful.

Dewy grasses brushed his boots and pants, appearing to leave iridescent droplets. He came to the edge of the mission area. The mountains that would midwife Taoism beckoned with a kind of eternity. That timelessness was beautiful and meaningful in ways humanity hadn’t the tools to articulate, an art form of the very universe itself.

Lei activated the search sensor on his webbing and left the mission area, heading toward Mount Qingcheng. The euphoria strengthened. He’d never let the navigator drug go so long in his system. His heart beat like he’d drank several coffees and he sweat in the cool air. In the compelling, surreal perceptions of the navigator drug, a meandering pathway seemed to be guiding his feet. His boots didn’t seem to touch the grasses. They walked toward new states of being, each grander and more marvelous. Time swirled, pushing his legs like a river eddy. A sensor ping interrupted the dreaminess.

His ocular implants formed an augmented reality halo around something in the grass, about eighty meters leftward. He followed the ghostly light and knelt in a darkness that frustrated his questing fingers. He risked a low red light. It revealed a snail-sized camera tangled under last season’s grass. He brushed off the muck. So much trouble for such a small thing. And the camera hadn’t even revealed the past. It had revealed the present, showing the weakness of a jumper who had decided to push into an altered experience for longer than he should have. For longer than Lei should have.

He was still connected to the world and cosmos in ways he could barely understand, veined into information so strange that in his wild imaginings he felt the heartbeat of the cosmos. And yet, he wanted this. He wanted this experience to continue, and he understood with a visceral certainty why the other jumper had concocted this plan. The temptation in that other jumper mirrored Lei’s.

He withdrew the antidote pill, dreading the smallness that would follow. He should take it, but when would he again be this deep into the truth of the world? Could he wait a few more minutes?

The mountains in the distance, black against predawn clouds, extended in four-dimensional grandeur, three-dimensional moment by three-dimensional moment. Lei could see them all the way forward and all the way back, all the slivers of all the presents stacked one against the other. And he wept with the ecstasy of knowing something so sublime.

And yet even within that euphoria, fear slithered in. He shouldn’t have seen so far, gone so high in this transcendence. He was afraid he wasn’t strong enough to stop. And maybe he didn’t need to. He filled his lungs with the cool, moist air of the living past, feeling the colors and sounds hidden in the synesthetic smells, experiencing a kind of transfiguring godhood.

The antidote touched his lips, on a trembling, uncertain palm.

He swallowed.

He descended. He diminished. He shrank.

He hugged his trembling body and mourned for the world draining out of him.

Lei came into the staging area, loosening the straps on his webbing. Kù Yong half-stood, half-sat, her shoulders canted forty-five degrees, matching her tilted video game controller. “Take it! Die!” she said into her microphone.

“Hi, Kù Yong.”

She grunted, twisting her body the other way as she maneuvered her character. “Be right there . . . ” she gritted. She growled in frustration and tapped frantically at the firing controls until she swore and dropped the control in disgust. “So close!” She yanked off her headset. “How did it go?”

He held out the dirt-encrusted camera. She took it. He also handed her back his spare navigator pill.

“I didn’t report something I should have,” he said.

He felt like he was at his first jump again.

“Like from the launch?”

He took off the webbing and handed it to her.

“My mother . . . drinks. I never told the project in my medical forms. And I’m . . . ” He took a big breath. “I’m tempted by the navigator pills.”

Kù Yong seemed unprepared and gaped for long seconds. “That’s heavy. I . . . umm. I probably . . . you know, have to ground you, right?”

“Yeah. You do,” he said, a kind of lost resignation in his chest, like he was giving up any chance to hear ancient music again, to see vanished cities, people of the past living and breathing.

She shook at the webbing, pouring her nervous energy with it. “Are you sure? I mean, is this a big deal? Do you want to wait a few days and report it to someone more senior? Maybe your mom just got into the holiday season. And you. I mean all the jumpers say they think about the pills.”

He tried to smile reassuringly.

“You better log it,” he said. “My mother’s problem isn’t new. By contract, I should have reported this a long time ago.”

“That really sucks, man. I, uh . . . Good luck.”

Kù Yong shook his hand awkwardly. He hadn’t imagined he’d be happy now, but maybe he’d been hoping for relief. But a single step, even a giant one, could not leap the whole journey.

Small firecrackers popped in the street just after sundown, delighting the children who were too small to stay up late, but crackling against Lei’s still-sensitive perceptions. His heart felt brittle too. The temptation of the navigator pill had shone a light on his weakness. He didn’t know who he would find in his mother’s apartment: the mother who’d raised him or the stranger she’d become. But yielding to temptation had shown him his own fear. Who would he be when he next took the navigator drug? A moment of carelessness might set him on a journey to a place he couldn’t leave.

And he didn’t know what inside him made him want that journey. Was he trying to be larger than he was, growing into some belonging that had eluded him? Or was he fleeing something? He didn’t know how his mother had started her journey. Had she slipped? Or chased something down a path whose end she couldn’t see? Or had she run away from something she thought worse?

His mother opened the door at his knock. She swayed slightly, but beamed a blurry smile. Maybe she hadn’t thought he would come back today. Or maybe she didn’t remember seeing him that morning? The door snow-plowed bags of garbage she’d collected. The lights in the apartment had lifted some of the oppressiveness.

“My treasure,” she said in a carefully precise slur. She stroked his cheek with a hand smelling of rice wine. He pulled awkwardly away, moving to the kitchen. She noticed the boxes of food in his grocery bag. “Oh. Darling. Are you making us a New Year’s dinner?”

The woman’s smile wasn’t his mother’s, nor was the slow swaying as she stood there. Rather than watching a stranger smile dully at him, he said “I’ll wash the dishes.”

He laid the grocery bag in an uncluttered spot of counter and listened to her soft footsteps shuffle to the sofa, displacing bits of paper and recycling that ought to have been tidied on New Year’s Eve. He used his breathing technique; his heart still beat too fast. It might be hours before his body came down properly. But the world had already shriveled.

He’d told Kù Yong part of the truth. He’d said the navigator pills tempted him. He hadn’t said the conclusion out loud, and maybe she wouldn’t connect all the dots. He was already fighting temptation, and he didn’t know how long it had been going on. He’d traveled partway down a path that might lead to places he couldn’t leave. Today, he’d stopped and turned, and begun to look for the way back. Could he lead his mother back too? He and she stood on distant hilltops, seeing each other, but separated like the years in space-time. Neither could see the way through the gloomy valleys that separated them.

“Do you want some baijiu?” she said. “We should celebrate the new year.”

His phone was close. It would be easy to return to the mother in the icon, like leaping across time to a sleeping city in the past. But the mother behind the icon wasn’t his mother at all. The upload was a simulation built of data arrays and prediction algorithms. The mother in the icon didn’t feel anything, didn’t love, couldn’t be the subject of love, couldn’t be owed a son’s duty. Nor could Lei simply walk to the mother on the sofa. He couldn’t leap from one peak to another, crossing whatever psychological geography lay between. That was a magic of the pills.

“Oh!” his mother said from the sofa. “I should order something for dinner.”

The face in the icon, that portrait in electrons and magnetic fields, lived in a server, a painting in computer code of one of her best days, hyperreal and not real at all. Lei had worked in paradoxes. He had navigated through time by temporarily accepting some paradoxes, but that didn’t make them real. Paradoxes were a scaffolding, a temporary step to get from one piece of solid ground to another. Present to past. Past to present. Truth to truth.

“I brought food,” he said without turning.

“You’re a good boy,” she slurred. A glass touched the table with a clumsy, sliding clink.

His throat felt tight, but he thumbed away the icon of the mother-who-had-been and put his phone on the counter. The mother in the past was perhaps gone, but some form of her existed in the present, like the alluvial plain beneath the city. He’d let himself avoid both their problems, until here they were, reunited as strangers. He’d traveled at great risk into the past to learn about people who had vanished millennia ago, but he’d lost sight of his own mother. He was afraid of how much he might be like her, but maybe if she was like him, she could also take steps back. He sat beside her.

“I left my job,” he said.

“What?” She turned half-lucid eyes on him.

“It’s a hard job.”

“A prestigious job! With good money.”

He picked up one of the fallen empties and set it on the table. Another had rolled under the sofa. He set it beside the first.

“Leave the recycling!” she said with a tone of drunken irritation she’d perfected while he’d been in university. “Why did you leave your job?”

Her hand was warm under his. He squeezed it, seeking something.

“The pills I have to take for the job can be addictive,” he said. “I think about them when I’m at home. I think of them when at work. I want more, even though my job says I shouldn’t.”

“That’s not right. You should talk to labor inspectors. You shouldn’t have to leave your job over conditions like that. They should make the job safer.”

He found another empty beside the sofa and put it on the table. Her apartment was a study of her sickness. Like seashells and pottery, glass left traces that archaeologists could reconstruct into past lives.

“It’s not the job, Mom. There are people who are good at resisting the temptation. I might not be one of them. I should have told them about this a long time ago. I didn’t. I wanted the job. I wanted to be one of the jumpers strong enough control it.”

“You are!” she said, gripping his arm tight.

“I just cleaned up the mess of another jumper who thought he could control the urges.”

“You’re not him. My boy is better.” Her anger spilled out as tears on reddening cheeks. Her voice grew loud and accusing. “I didn’t raise you to be afraid!”

She rose. He followed. He couldn’t reach her now, through her armor-hard pride. She wouldn’t hear that she was sick.

“I haven’t been as attentive a son as I should. The evenings and weekends I gave to the project . . . some of those were yours.”

“That’s what a son does! He works hard. Don’t worry about me!” She waved an arm emphatically, upsetting her balance and catching herself on the window as firecrackers popped in the street below. Happy popping. Delighted popping.

“I’ve been worried about you, Mom. This morning I found you on the kitchen floor. I don’t know how long you’d been there.”

“No, you didn’t!”

“A good son would have taken care of his mother right away, and not worried more about his job.”

“I’ll take myself to the doctor!”

He stepped closer.

“We didn’t mean to, but we grew apart. I want to know you again. Know you really.”

Anger still reddened her neck and cheeks.

“I’ll get another job. Maybe a better one. It won’t take long.”

He came close and put a hand on each shoulder. This intemperate, furious stranger seemed fragile and small and it would have been such a relief to back away, to open the icon of the mother preserved in amber, petrified in glass.

“I miss you,” he said.

About the Author

After leaving molecular biology, Derek Künsken worked with street kids in Central America before finding himself in the Canadian foreign service. He now writes science fiction in Gatineau, Quebec. His space opera heist novels The Quantum Magician and The Quantum Garden were published by Solaris Books. The first was a finalist for the Aurora, the Locus and the Chinese Nebula Awards. Solaris will also be releasing his “Godfather in the clouds of Venus” novel The House of Styx in August, 2020. He also writes a fun girl-jetpack-Flash Gordon adventure comic called Briarworld at Webtoons.com.

Coffee Boom: Decoctions, Micronized

D.A. Xiaolin Spires

It’s just a small bean, really. Just a tiny pinky nail-sized small bit of organic matter, roasted then crushed, soaked, and drained. Don’t throw away the baby with the bathwater, but in this case, really, do. Chuck it out, totally discard the baby, but keep the bathwater and drink it all up. Pour it into your mug, watch the steam rise up, and sip. It shouldn’t be a big deal.

People like to think they’re in control of their lives, but deprive them of a bit of this bean soup and they’re useless. Millions of people, around the world, brain-dead without the dark juice.

Brain-dead’s how Ava Chen feels as she throws her apron down. A few customers are asking for the check, but she sends one of the busboys. She’s had it, working at a diner’s worse than her past ten barista jobs, and she’s done with complaints of the fish (you don’t order seafood at a diner, hon), the seniors who tip pennies (she would feel sorry for their empty pension plans if it weren’t for her own vacant pockets), and babies and their spills (sure they’re cute, but they’re less so when sweeping up their dozens of Cheerios they’ve sent flying like the god of rain). The drizzle patters at the window for the fifth day in the row, always ready for her right when her shift ends. As she watches, the drizzle turns fierce and she shifts in her precision sneakers. Not walking, she decides. Can’t stand squishy socks. She calls up a self-cabbie with a flip gesture.

Heading home in five, just after she counts her tips. Her headache pangs. She pours herself a mug of joe from the pot, takes a gulp, and spits it out. Burned, stale. Awful. She’d rather chew on the grinds.

They’ve got precision patty-flippers, everfrozen cubes for soda, and temperature rigor emulsifying creams for the sauces, but they can’t get even a damn cup of coffee right? Diners used to be about getting a nice warm mug, but now it’s more about getting gossip, being seen, making an appearance so people can tell you have a physical existence outside of the holowaves. For once, she’d like that perfect cup of joe, kind of like the one her fiancé used to make for her every morning before he decided to head out, coffee machine and all. Good riddance. It was a shame, but not entirely. The sex was mediocre and the coffee was good, close to awesome, but not divine.

Right now, she wants divine. She wants that perfect buzz to settle on her, that pure mix of sweet and bitterness that passes through the lips, reaches the tongue, and slides down the gullet. Hot and aromatic.

As she counts the measly digits of digicash that her customers leave behind, she catches the sound of holowaves. Manager Martin’s watching his reality show again, Grub Howls, Food Champs on the Prowl. His eyes glued to the bubblescreen. He’s supposed to be scheduling or doing something, but she hears the waves with Chef Carl, the current gastrochamp railing at the employees, in his gruff accent. No, not like that—did you grow up on a pig farm? Used to splashing around liquids everywhere? Pea soup’s a delicate thing, not slop for the trough!

Martin wishes he were like that, running the modern equivalent of a gulag, but he doesn’t have that tyrannical bent. He’s just a bit obnoxious. And lazy. And may as well throw in incompetent while she’s at it.

Chef Carl was lucky that the event he competed in was for Philadelphia pilaf and it was new enough to not have many competitors. Last season was all P’s: pizza, Peking duck, pecan pies, perogies, pig’s feet. This season was C’s: cottage cheese, coffee, carrot cake, chana masala, coconut water, chocolate—and Ava’s heart skips a beat when she considers the coffee competition approaching.

Now, I, I could do it, thinks Ava. Be that tyrant. Get back at all those terrible bosses and persnickety coworkers at all those hoity toity cafés. She knows it’s not the first time she thinks that, nor will it be the last. All the cafés in the past six years of her life, moving and moving, where she quit before they could fire her. She’s not going to admit her coworkers are wrong, because they never are. She’s just more right. She’s got taste buds and the discerning tongue to back her up.

She hears the booming voice, You idiot, you don’t know how to use the sonar wash for the china? Celebrity Chef Carl and his barrage of vitriol. The screaming champ who tells the restaurants how to get better. It’s not just a pipe dream to become that guy. It’s her calling. Every time she tries to improve something in any establishment, they blackball her. How great it would be to get the title, march into all those flailing businesses she worked in, and give the management a bit of what they deserved. She smirks and her wrist blinks.

Time for her home gastronomic trials.

Every so often Ava gets something in her head that fixates her. An image she’s crafted that’s more than just vision; something that makes her limbic system roar with its gut-hitting beauty. The perfect salted nut. How many granules? How dried? The ideal bowl of steamed rice. How chewy? Steaming for how long?

For six years, she’s been jumping ship, coffee shop to coffee shop, trying to figure out that perfect bit of that murky bathwater. She likes the pursuit. She likes the irony.

One of the mysteries of coffee. The grinds get tossed, the derivative salvaged.

She’s been hunting this best derivative, scouring all of the states. Her mind tells her she should stay in one place, rake up enough cash, but her quick mouth and exacting sense of taste are impatient, yearning to move on.

When the car finally stops, she flips the tab to send the tip to the self-drive corporations (why she has to use her hard-earned tips to impart to faceless corps she doesn’t know, but this bot slid without bumps so who is she to complain). She lands on her sofa and doesn’t spend more than ten minutes there before a beep interrupts the quiet.

She groans, reaches for her arm in slow-mo, and pulls up the 3-D image of her sorority sis, in her bob and lab-friendly white blouse, smiling back at her. It remains frozen, her teeth shining, and Ava takes a moment to lower the lights, as to not blind Denise Kam with the glare through the projection.

Denise used to be so young and naïve back in college, but now she’s matured into a physics lab assistant—way too smart for the job. Ava’s almost regretful that she coerced Denise to apply for the assistant position. Ava probably should have pressed her to apply for a better job, but well, at least this is better than nothing. Without Ava, Denise just sits around, figuring out stuff. She’s an excellent hacker, too, and if she had a more conniving bone in her body and stickier hands, could probably retrieve results from other labs. Not that Ava would promote that.

If Ava were still her acting big sis mentor, like back in the good ol’ days, she would push Denise’s too complacent self to apply for other positions and move upward, but she knows Denise would just say that she’s content with the way she is and she’s not like Ava, always moving on to the next thing. Ava can see in Denise’s eyes a kind of hunger. This look’s even present now through the holowave projection as Ava mouths an “accept.”

“What’s that you got there?” Ava says, even before Denise gets to sneak in a hi. Greetings unneeded for her closest—who is she kidding?—only friend.

“Oh, no, nothing,” Denise says, her arms still hidden, and rattles on about the physics conference right outside XCERN that she just came back from. About the experts in superconductivity of muons and charge transport she’s rubbed elbows with. When it comes to physics, she’s abound with energy and seems half Ava’s age rather than just a few years younger than her. Must be one of those scientific anomalies, Ava figures.

Ava scours her sofa, finds a half-eaten bag of chips tucked in the folds, and starts popping chip after chip in her mouth. Their sog-resistant savory coat lets out a satisfying crunch and Denise doesn’t seem to notice or care that her account of the weekend is punctuated by Ava’s symphony of salty attainment.

Once the bag’s done, Ava tosses the bag on the ground and the vac sweeps by, scans it, orders another, runs over it, backs up, does it again three more times and finally locates a pull point, plucks it up into its bod before it retreats. Ava’s been meaning to get that thing upgraded.

Denise starts talking about swag, whisper ID lanyards, and choptalk ear clips when she pulls out the dish. It’s a small petri dish with some powder on it. “I was wondering if you could smell it.”

“I knew something was up,” Ava says, sitting up. Something perks up in her olfactory receptors. Earthy, but bitter.

“Is that . . . ?” Ava begins to say.

“Let me bring the specimen closer,” says Denise, pulling a bendable polymer in the shape of a horn closer to the piece. Through the screen, Denise wafts with one hand. The aroma from the dark dust travels straight into Ava’s nostrils.

Instinctively, Ava moves her nose closer to the emitters.

“Ah, that is the best smelling coffee I’ve smelled in years!” she cries.

Coffee. Real, non-stale, non-rip ’em out of the package coffee.

“Isn’t it?” says Denise. She gives out one of her easy grins, before wafting some her own way, inhaling deep. “I thought you’d appreciate it more than me. But, if you think this smells good, you should try a cup.”

“How? What? Why?”

“Swag,” she says and Ava’s all ears.

Some people like to build things. Others like to smash things. Victor Lang is the kind of guy that likes to build things to smash things. Watermelon catapults. Greenray disc pelting guns. Release hammers. Last time on his contemporary art show, “Smash ’em Squat,” he took five defunct self-drivers, stacked them high, and brought them into a gigantic trash crunch maw that took five weeks to build. In twenty minutes the cars were gobbled up. Two weeks ago, he flaunted demolishing skills by creating the world’s tiniest optic hammer and split open a dot-sized holowave battery. The whole thing was filmed using a magnilens. People like commissioning him for his flair and performative skills. Need a splash? Victor’s got an ostrich egg ready for your launch.

“Satellite companies,” says Denise. “Ever since they got their sticky hands on the cesium standard, entangled photons, and hyperplexity, they’ve been itching to get their hands on more. ‘Embracement of the sciences,’ they call it. Always trying to see what breakthroughs they can implement.”

“Curry favor with you basement tinkerers, huh?”

“Yeah, get us physics lab hands and others on the bottom rungs to divulge our latest results before they’re published or something. Not sure that ever works.”

“But, I’m sure they have enough money to try,” Ava says. “Not like my broke self.”

Denise laughs. “They got tons of money.”

Ava’s not surprised about this. Denise has been talking about these companies calling up her lab, offering them discounts on communication packages, and passing out freebies at least a couple times a month.

Still reeling from that powerful whiff of coffee, Ava opens up her collection of coffee beans she’s bought from auctions and collectors, safe in her climate-controlled pillbox. She picks one up and sniffs. Fruity smells linger in her nostrils. “So, what? They send in a miniature of one of his gadgets? Promotional junk? Swag to ingratiate you beggin’ lab assistants?”

“Better, they sent him. The satellite companies gave him a gig. And you know what he made?”

“A bunch of money?”

“Yeah, for sure. Digidollars up the wazoo, well in stock money, which you know they won’t see for years. But, he made a mini-collider.”

“Cute,” says Ava. She picks up another bean. This one has a darker roasty smell.

“Cute and compact. Crushed a bunch of stuff for us. That thing was cataclysmic.”

“Says the person who works with banging particles together.”

“Yeah, so you know it must’ve been impressive if I’m telling you this.”

“I’m listening.”

“Better, I’ll show you.”

Denise sends her a holoclip, which lights up in her apartment. It’s way too bright in the conference hall and all those white jackets, designed to be halfway between lab coat and suit, blind her. She’s about to complain when she sees a skinny dude, black hair slicked back, behind a table decked out in moving 3-D projections of his art, things going boom and smashing. In his hands is the collider. The collider’s just a small ring, maybe the size of a Cooktune pot lid. Ava leans in as the artist starts explaining. His voice is nasal, reedy.

“A charge whips around and moves this plate, which gives whatever that’s in-between a crunch. It’s not any charge—we’ve got a specialized chip in here, with its network system transferred over from a genetically enhanced breed of eel.”

Denise’s voice cuts through the holoclip: “A little collider, kitschy and adorable. But, it’s extremely powerful, more than he knows. He smashed up marshmallows, flat as discs—always nice to give out some sugar to these bleary-eyed academics. The best kind of swag. And then he adjusted the settings. Someone gave him the spare button from their shirt. Pulverized the thing. I don’t think anyone realizes how powerful that thing is. If you scale it up . . . ”

In that instance, the button smashes to bits.

Denise continues, “Well, that’s another matter altogether. I’ve been working on the computation for that and it’ll be big. But, it got me thinking of you, of your—”

“—hobby,” Ava says.

“—obsession,” says Denise.

Ava sticks her tongue out at her, which Denise ignores or doesn’t see.

The holoclip fizzes away and shows Denise again at her office, flipping through some of the floating orbs that contain her files. With info too precious to upload onto the waves, which would be a lot less clutter.

Denise, through the holowaves, rearranges the data orbs, stroking one of them. “I struck up a conversation with him.”

“Bet the satellite reps were glad about that.”

“Yeah, they didn’t get any info from me. But, I told him to wait and pulled out a few coffee beans from that stash you gave me. The ones you said I could crunch on during a down day. We tried smashing them. They pulverized okay. A little too charred. So I figure I’ll pull out one of those not-yet roasted specimens that’s just a keepsake.”

“And . . . ?” Ava is nearly salivating.

“You’re smelling it.”

Denise puts the sniff horn back next to the ground coffee dust, blown to bits in a tiny collider. Ava takes in another inhale and it blooms all around her, the full notes, the fruity tang. “This has got to be Argentina,” says Ava.

“That’s right,” Denise says.

“Dark roast, bold bouquets.”

“Yeah, the heat toasted it right up.”

Ava leans in, excited and knocks over a few beans, like the baby with the Cheerios. They scatter. “You know what this means, right?”

“You’re coming over to get a brew?”

“Not just coming over. I’m coming and scheming. I gotta get my hands on that collider.”

There are two echelons in the world. The ones where you can demand for things and feel like you got a high probability of getting them, and then there’s the ones where begging just makes you seem more pathetic. It’s not like Ava can just go marching up to a contemporary artist hired by one of the big corps and just demand they hand it over. It’s not even theirs at this point, the rights are bought by the corps.

Slick, that’s what she needs to be. She’s gotta be subtle about it.

The mini-collider’s kept not in Victor’s workshop lab, but in an offshoot of the satellite corp. In their cultural outreach center. Sounds pretty tame, but it’s flanked by security. They have some pretty valuable pieces of art in there. Valuable as in hefty price tags. Satellite corps commission atmospheric-entry-proof decals that are worth tons of money to be slapped on their satellite bodies for commercial purposes. Some say they engage in a not-too-shabby trade of space travel antiques, alongside the snazzy pop art pieces, too. To be socially relevant and keep their brands in peoples’ minds, but it’s pretty lucrative.

They’ve got whole tons of stuff in storage, too, so talking heads say, but luckily Denise found out the mini-collider will be on display. It’ll be trapped behind glass, waiting for sticky fingers, one of the thirty pieces at their current on-site rotating exhibition.

Good Denise. Smart enough to ask enough pointed questions about the art piece. Just enough to sound engaged and curious.

Denise plucks a data orb from her desk and passes it into her computer’s frame. She must be doing work as she’s talking. “Is it really worth it?”

“To make the best coffee ever alive? Is there anything more perfect?”

“String theory and the vibration of threads in harmony?”

“Fine, that and the coffee.”

“Worth break-in and entry?”

“It’s not really breaking in if you’re invited right? And besides, I’ll be the one doing the dirty work.”

“Alright, well, I guess it’s better for me to be arrested as an apprentice than a perpetrator.”

“Now, there’s the spirit! Glad you’ll be my backup.”

“Anything for my sorority sis, right?”

They do a cheesy hand slap through the holowaves and laugh.

Ava doesn’t like to talk about her past bosses. The ones that verbally abused her, called her know-it-all punk, and used so many strings of curses, you’d think they run out of air. Tony at Everfresh, Jazz at Calmorn, the infamous Jenny at Pour-Me-One. And the rest of them. Sure, she provokes them, but can she really help herself? Some of those faux beans they pass off as real have no taste complexity at all. Just generated blandness with pumped in acidity. And don’t even talk about the rancid so-called fresh grounds. Those are just vile.

Bosses don’t like to hear that. They like to hear that you’ve earned more sales. They want to hear how many inches your smile increases when you approach the customer and that you’ve input the spelling of their name right on the engraving zap for their cup. They would get robots if they could, but to get the kind that perform like, well, actual service folk and not like dummy vac here, would be more than most of these wanna-be-bohemian-but-actually-franchise joints are interested in investing.

When Ava takes out her store she’s been building up, the collection of singular coffee beans, flavor profiles of different years, she’ll win it big. Be the Prime Aggressor, the know-it-all expert that doles out the insults. Retribution, while knowing she’s got the upper hand. Her trophy would say so. Show them she was right all along.

She can’t wait.

Ava has on the brown vest and the green cap. She looks the part, the appraiser to assess the art’s value. With Ava’s goading, Denise pushed out a rumor not affiliated with her lab about an upcoming discovery. Now the physics-related artwork prices are in flux, climbing, and acquirers are lapping eagerly at these pieces.

Art follows innovation and social trends. It wasn’t always like this—art used to be a place for a break and dissension. Now it’s all come together. The companies are always eager to enumerate their assets and to upgrade their financial standing as to win over investors into their savvy businesses. Corps thrive on money, power, and a sense of prestige, and they’re always trying innovative ways to marry art and business and capitalize off their cultural relevance to get more of those three things they’re always pining after. They commission and buy art, and artists seem all too happy to be their puppets. After all, some of this new tech art isn’t cheap, needs a wad of digidollars for production.

The satellite company, K-Squared, invited Ava in right away, as Denise helped her forge the ID of their typical appraisal company.

Ava’s hand is sweating over the orb and she wipes it in her pocket. The orb’s data file’s been purged. She gulps, envisions her goal—holding the food champ trophy—and walks over to the guard.

“I’m here to see the management. I’m the appraiser you called in.”

For a moment, she hesitates, but collects herself as they do a skinscan. Ava had the skin files printed over her and she’s standing in it, in some made-up employee’s skin that Denise dumped into their system, fighting the urge to squirm, feeling out of sorts. The machine beeps a yes and she’s ushered into the exhibition.

Ava hasn’t been in an art exhibition for a while and is surprised to see that the same aesthetic is still in. For all the changes in tech art, you’d think there would be more drastic changes to display. But, nope, a quick assessment confirms. Museum-like exhibitions are still the same. White walls, glass. As if that was the only way to present things.

It turns out that the Munchkin Collider, as it’s called, isn’t the pièce de résistance. The real jewel of the exhibition is a reconstruction of a model of K-Squared’s main satellite, but cloned and spliced with bee genes, where tiny satellites buzz about in a multi-holed hive-planet model of a world. A friendly reminder of a future or alternate world where the satellites are all too relevant.

Ava works her way over to the corner, where she’s spotted the piece. Exactly as she saw it on Denise’s encrypted holowaves film. A loop, just a small cooking pan lid, but what it represents is much more remarkable. Even if she’s disappointed that the piece isn’t getting the limelight, she’s glad it’s not the main display. It’ll attract a lot less attention and the less fidgety the administrators, the better.

She’s got her flexisack open, full of scanners, surface assessors, and intel checks when she hears footsteps behind her.

“Hi, I’m Yumei, the curator.” Ava curses under her breath. Wasn’t there a talk she was supposed to be giving today, like right now?

Must’ve been cancelled.

Ava makes a few hand gestures (hidden away from the cameras that she’s spotted) to activate the alert to Denise. Denise must have stepped away from the control center of her apartment’s living room. Ava could’ve used a warning.

And some alcohol to loosen her nerves.

Ava smiles the way she does when has to confront a customer. Reassuring. She hopes it’s convincing. Yumei is a tall figure with hunched shoulders as she peers down at people like she peers down at her art subjects. She has high arched brows that appear as if they’re constantly questioning. It’s hard to tell what she’s thinking.

“I’m the appraiser, Song.” Ava flashes a security wave that brightens the room and then dims. With that, the voltonic light extinguishes, so Ava knows she can’t pull that stunt off again.

“You’re here early.”

“No, we had a change in the scheduling. My company sent the update a week ago.”

Yumei walks up to the glass stand and lifts the case. An alarm goes off and she says the safe string of numbers and letters along to tonal cues, which silences it.

There it is, the model particle collider that makes a perfect ground bean.

Ava feels goose bumps under her fake skin. She’s glad the appraiser outfit is equipped with long sleeves.

“This is a beautiful piece we commissioned from Victor Lang. Titanium-lelum alloy, true-to-scale with some artistic reinterpretations. This year, so it probably hasn’t accrued worth from sitting around. But, well, we’ve heard the rumors . . . ”

Yumei pauses, her arched brows directed at Ava as if fishing for more.

“Well, can’t comment on the rumors in the physics realm, but let’s just say that the particle collider types are doing quite well.”

Ava picks up the piece delicately, with the smart fabric lighting various colors as it takes in the weight and attributes.

“Let’s hope so. We paid fifty-five mil for it.”

Fifty-five mil! Ava’s hand shakes and slips. And she catches the piece with deft diner-experienced precision before it falls further.

Yumei eyes her warily. “Are you really—”

“Yes, Munchkin Collider passed the gravitational pull test,” Ava lies. Her hand is steady now, as she collects herself. “Now, to do a few more. If you don’t mind, I’d like to undergo some more innovative appraisal checks. Some of these are harmful to the eyes and I have my reflectocontacts in, but it looks like you don’t.

Ava turns her eyes blue with cerulean stripes. The world around her becomes monochrome.

Yumei says, without a hitch, “I would be happy to oblige. But, for precaution’s sake, I’d like another appraiser security wash just to be sure.”

Ava’s heart thumps in her body. She’s got no more juice left in the security wave that guaranteed her ID. It was exhausted in one go. She was lucky to even be able to procure that much of the industry-specific light.

“Okay, I’ll emit that in a second, after I finish this test,” says Ava, her voice steady and calm, as she practiced. She pulls out a second layer scanner and runs it past the object. “Don’t want it to disrupt the results of this one. The surface looks freshly done, but there are a few nicks I see that might detract from the final value.”

“Undoubtedly from the trial runs of smashing at the conference,” says Yumei. She looks deadpan, like the idea of hitting things together doesn’t bemuse her the least.

Ava breathes out. At least this scan bought her time. “Undoubtedly,” Ava repeats. “Comes with the territory, I suppose. All the collider models have to be constantly re-detailed.”

She’s sending out a sneak comm to Denise, now. Where is that girl? She can’t stall much longer, and the air is starting to get stuffy. She is getting hot under this second faux skin.

A vibration goes up her hand. Denise reassuring her that she’s back. Ava says quickly, “I’m getting some interesting genetic signals. I’ll have to match that with my database. It will only take a minute or two.”

Yumei narrows her eyes at Ava. Something she said didn’t jibe. Ava can tell. In her head, she groans. She remembers the other holoclips that Denise sent. Ones where Victor Lang is winking, smug. Maybe the eels weren’t genetically enhanced after all. Maybe Victor Lang was just coming on to Denise, making up lies. Maybe . . .

“I’m not sure if we ever checked your bag. Did we scan—?”

“Yes,” says Ava, implying that she herself was scanned, and not her bag. That’s not a lie.

In her bag is a replica. They tried to get it as true to form as possible, hiring black market for imposter pieces that they put together themselves, so there will be no trace of the whole thing intact. Ava used the same payment methods for some of her more difficult to collect coffee beans that faced border restrictions.

Outside there’s a commotion. They start and look out through the windows. One of the foam security hydrant’s gone off, sending foam everywhere. Sometimes the electric net frames that power the city get a glitch and require the foam to prevent the glitch from spreading, but it’s a rare sight. Passersby pull up their wrists to film it.

“Continue your tests. I’ll be right back,” says Yumei. She heads out, probably checking to make sure the glitch hasn’t spread to the front of the K-Squared quarters.

Thank you, Denise, Ava whispers under her breath. Denise must have worked her charm with some other hacker to get that done, since Ava’s pretty sure the city grid is out of her league, but Denise has some discreet friends in high places. Ava slips out a small needle from under her faux skin. It releases a variation of the security light that short-circuits the cameras and feeds them false footage.

She executes the exchange—her fake for the real Victor Lang—and makes a quick calculation of value from an algorithm Denise threw together. Ava sends out a message to Yumei with the information. The good thing is, they’re probably right about the value. Ava just couldn’t get the numbers before the scans were complete and the estimate came in. The fifty-five mil took her by surprise—something that should not have happened. The figure highlighted on her wrist screen tells her it’s worth almost double now, with rumors spreading of the physics discovery abound. The physics and art worlds were abuzz with hearsay.

While the repair drones fly in for the glitch, filling the air with their helicopter buzz, Ava takes her leave. The guard is only half paying attention, his head twisted at the scene outside, and he makes some comment about it. That works in her favor as the empty data orb is now filled with a physical object—the irreplaceable Victor Lang. They weren’t totally sure if this last part would work, but the scan pauses at Ava’s data orb. A red so quick and imperceptible flashes to green and the guard is still chatting away with Ava about his son’s allergies to the foam they use for purging the electric net, completely oblivious, and Ava nods, not daring to wipe away the cold sweat running down her real neck. The faux skin that’s over it is so hot she can’t wait to peel it off.

The last thing Ava sees is the security guard stepping outside, locking up the exhibition for the moment. He’s watching the foam spurt and spurt and Ava runs the opposite way, sweating in skin that’s not hers, away from the repair drones, away from the satellites that gather way too much data, and the sterilized world of art display, where all the backdrop are white and glass.

Ava and Denise celebrate with virtual cheers and hugs. Denise is still strapped with her lab so she can’t get away, so they settle with breaking champagne and experimentation. Ava plays around with it, exploding beans she’s been collecting for years, ones that she didn’t dare roast conventionally with the unevenness of the heat-infusion tech. She really does think there’s an electric eel splice in there somewhere, the seared pulverized result is perfectly roasted, and smooth to the smell, reminding her of the sleek agility and full body of an eel swimming around in a fish tank, a site she witnessed as a kid at an aquarium long ago.

Ava pulverizes enough beans for a cup and places them in a tiny data orb that she zaps clean. She takes it to a specialized centrifuge in the dead of the night, on a holiday so there is no peep of a researcher. It’s a food lab she has connections with through her multiple jobs, the ones she worked when she used to be a food taster for mechanical production and quit (so sick of tasting fake foods that she went in a blaze, telling her supervisor the foods were really all bland) and took on her many barista jobs in her pursuit for the best coffee. Ava incorrectly assumed that the real service world would provide real food that would animate her appetite-yearning soul. But, it was still chock-full of mediocre, and often worse. The lady who works the centrifuge facility owes her one, a colleague who does accounting. Ava had helped her son get into the right institution for specialized sensory assessors, giving him tips on how to really smell things and compose quantifiable data from the qualitative nose. Now all those experiences feel a lifetime away, as she trudges over, the only real delightful smell she’s smelled in what feels like decades safely tucked in her bag.

Ava disinfects and polishes the centrifuge herself. A sound stops her work. Again. There it is. She stops breathing.

In the hallway. The sinking shuffling of footsteps. They stop at the door. No one’s supposed to be here.

She waits for them to pass, but whoever it is doesn’t. She uses her smell vac and pulls in the particles of the coffee, praying for the machine to finish quickly. At least the smell vac is dead silent.

The footsteps move on. Ava drops her shoulders in relief, but she knows she’s not in the clear, not until she gets out of there.

The centrifuge’s no ordinary one. It’s got calibrators that focus on speed and pressure, while it maintains all the olfactory particles intact with a vacuum seal that’s near-impenetrable. All the research for her java creation pays off. As it finally finishes and the seal opens up, she can smell it—liquid, cascading like a trickle of a waterfall, that beautiful, dark cup of joe dripping into the container orb. She wafts the aromas away from the door.

The liquid swashes about in the orb in her bag as she tidies everything up and vacs the aromas so there’s not a trace. She leaves as silent as she came, deploying the noise cancellers that she installed on the surface of the container orb, so they move quietly along like criminals in the night. The noise cancellers should last until she gets out of the facility, or so she hopes.

“That’s some damn good smelling coffee,” says Denise. She’s still fussing with data orbs. It turns out there really was a breakthrough at some other lab and she’s trying to keep up with the news.

“I think the words you’re searching for are ‘divinely fragrant, with touches of cranberry and a hint of the acidity of lemon, though far from overbearing,’” says Ava.

“Like I said, ‘damn good,’” says Denise.

“Okay, good enough for me.”

“How’s it taste?”

“It’s so ridiculously marvelous, I can’t bear drinking more than a sip,” says Ava. “It’s silly, just a cup of joe, right? But, it’s the absolute best cup of joe there is. Half of me wants to just gulp it down in one go and laugh and cry from the buzz. But, another part of me knows that it’s staying in my keeppouch until the submissions open for Grub Howls.”

“ . . . Food Champs on the Prowl!” says Denise. “You think the aromas will stick?”

“In the keeppouch? Nothing degrades, not even the smell. You can trust me on that one.”

“I trust your nose,” says Denise, laughing. “You know, Ava, sometimes I think you’re really twisted, but sometimes I think that twistedness comes from a one-track mind that just does what it wants.”

“And sometimes I think that you deserve a lot more than you get—like your own principal investigator funds, some minions of your own. Maybe the incompetent ones that work with you . . . ” Ava trails off as Denise stops her.

“Yeah, yeah, but then I’ll be too high-profile to go scraping around the muckier side of things for a celestial sip of coffee.”

“Touché,” says Ava.

“Oof,” says Denise as Ava watches an unmarked drone carrier that passed through Denise’s lab window drop a package in her lap.

“Is this what I think—?” cries Denise, ripping it open. The drone flies away.

Inside is a marble, full of a deep brown liquid.

“Your cut of the share. Not enough to sustain you day after day, but it’ll sustain your soul knowing that this exists. I’ll get you more when I can.”

“Should I drink it?”

“Hell, yeah? Get that down.”

She opens it, takes a whiff. Even without the enhancing functionality of the sniff horn in place, Ava can smell the waft of that powerful liquid coming through the holowaves.

Denise calls out the password, which opens up a slit. She places her lips against the marble, tilts her head back, and she looks as if she’ll just melt into her chair.

Ava smiles. “Damn good?”

For a moment, Denise doesn’t respond. Her eyes flutter open as she shuts the lid of the marble. “I see it now. Why you go to great lengths just to get this. It’s transcendental.”

“A quantum ecstatic state,” says Ava.

“Sure, I think it just atom smashed my heart,” says Denise. And they both laugh.

K-Squared exhibition doors still remain open. Ava manages to dig up information about the exhibition, especially on details like when they’re moving out the exhibition. She marks the date and when it comes, she strikes again, this time doing a switch-back. No one needs to know she took the machine, and besides, the newest version she crafted and tweaked from its specs works even better than the original. So back the original goes and she’s going to collect the dummy before any new scientific achievements crop up to pitch the artwork toward another appraisal.

She poses as one of the workers, slipping in and out, using deft hands and a number of blinders to scramble the signals as she works. The other workers are too busy handling the pièce de résistance satellite beehive and other notable works of art more high-profile than hers.

Nobody has figured out the switch.

There’s someone new in Denise’s office when she calls. A supervisor, who constantly provides encouragement for Denise’s work. Even now, Ava sees a holomessage highlighting Denise’s contribution to the team. Ava doesn’t know if this is the reason, but recently Denise has been talking about applying for some fellowships, voicing interest in testing out some experiments she’s kept on back-burners.

Ava chats with Denise as usual, but inside she’s mystified as to why all these years her nudging hasn’t worked, but now all of a sudden, Denise’s open to change. Maybe Ava spent too much time belittling her rivals. She always thought she pointed out Denise’s strong points, but perhaps it wasn’t obvious in her disparagement of her competition.

But, Denise looks happy.

Maybe, just maybe, it’s the miracle of that sip of coffee.

It’s no surprise that Ava gets the coffee award. A giant holographic bean beaming out of a 4×6 crown-shaped trophy. The award is accompanied by contracts for her appearance on Grub Howls and tasting notes that beg her to make public her recipe, offering her grand payments for its divulgence.

Not going to do it, Ava decides, but the grand prize isn’t too shabby. No more waiting on tables and being the on-the-fly pourer of terrible coffee for the customers.

Starting next month, she will shine.

Ava scrawls out a few diagrams of how she’ll approach the show. She’s still trying to figure out how to rain terror on these baristas effectively so that they’ll change their recipe. At least try something that’ll come close to the actual aroma of coffee. A public persona of showering insults is how she’s always imagined it, but now her view’s starting to change.

Denise’s blowing up. Getting big. It wasn’t her team that had the big breakthrough in physics during the whole appraisal fiasco, but Denise keeps hinting there’s good news coming her way.

And one day she makes the announcement.

She got the fellowship and her review comments are all exceptional.

Ava takes a tiny sip of that original drink, making sure to siphon out the sip without exposing the rest to air. There’s still some of it left. The original “true coffee” coffee. She’ll make more, she knows. She’s improved on the design of bean collider. Tinkered around with the acceleration speeds and the materials. Also added a collection vac to it all, so all the aroma and ground debris can be retained for the final brew.

Ava smiles as she hears Victor Lang announcing on the holowaves a not-insignificant sum donated to his person. Coffee money, she thinks. He deserves it. Most of Victor’s money he gets from satellite art commissions gets locked up in stocks, and there are stipulations on how long he needs to hold them before sale. Even with the crazy high value of the artwork, very little actually shows up in Victor’s pockets. If commissioned artists pull out the money, they’re coerced into redirecting them into the foundations that K-Squared set up. All these exploitative practices that Ava looked up. She knows with a sense of satisfaction that Victor is probably pretty happy with this money not associated with the company that owns his life with all those signed contracts.

Ava stays awake late every night still collecting, tinkering. Making the centrifuge and collider better. Setting up contacts across oceans for better beans and stretches of land growth. She’s never revealed that the micronized coffee grinds are all done by collider, but she has mentioned that she explodes the bean into a powder with a secret technique.

Even Food Blink holomag calls her “The First Great Female Molecular Gastronomic Celebrity Chef.” With a photo of her on the front cover, her hands covered in brown pulverized dust, her lips blowing it at the reader. They say she’s “the one” everyone’s been waiting for, the one who broke into the boys’ club of food, gadgets, and geekery. On the timeline scroll-through, they show the parade of male chefs throughout the contemporary culinary sphere: masters of sous vide, foams, dehydration techniques, flash-freezing, spherification—then her, breaking the tradition of males, with the caption of her method: maximum pulverized centrifugal drip (for brewed drinks and decoctions).

At her first shooting of Grub Howls, she shouts and screams at the personnel. But, behind the scenes, they laugh and drink coffee. Her resentment starts to dissipate; even old grudges slowly fade as they share sips of incredible coffee. The magazines must be on to her—café staff must be leaking that there’s an angelic side to this food snob demon with her hair-raising outrage, since they’re looking past her dark side and highlighting the bright. “The Golden Face to a Dark Brew.” “The Sparkly Java Guru.”

Ava puts her feet up in the back alley where they’ve stacked chairs. The video crew is taking a break, puffing out some e-smoke. She sits with some of her old coworkers, friends from years ago. (Were they friends? They sure seem like it, she thinks. Even good ol’ Manager Martin shows up to do a pretty spot-on imitation of her celebrity persona.) They sip and sip—the aroma of bittersweetness fills the air. And she’s reminded of the time they took her shift or went out to pick up more stirrers when she was running busy. It wasn’t all bad, she concedes, letting her mind drift as the steam hits her face.

Someone refills her mug with some of the crap from the kitchen. Bitter, burned, and bland, all at once. One day it’ll be great, she thinks.

It will totally be great. Already her coffee boom takes off—starting literally with that sweet redolent glorious boom of an aromatic collision.

About the Author

D.A. Xiaolin Spires steps into portals and reappears in sites such as Hawai’i, NY, various parts of Asia and elsewhere, with her keyboard appendage attached. Her work appears or is forthcoming in publications such as Clarkesworld, Analog, Nature, Terraform, Grievous Angel, Fireside, Galaxy’s Edge, StarShipSofa, Andromeda Spaceways (Year’s Best Issue), Diabolical Plots, Factor Four, Pantheon, Outlook Springs, ROBOT DINOSAURS, Mithila Review, LONTAR, Reckoning, Issues in Earth Science, Liminality, Star*Line, Polu Texni, Argot, Eye to the Telescope, Liquid Imagination, Gathering Storm Magazine, Little Blue Marble, Story Seed Vault, and anthologies of the strange and beautiful: Ride the Star Wind, Sharp and Sugar Tooth, Future Visions, Deep Signal, Battling in All Her Finery, and Broad Knowledge.

She can be found on Twitter: @spireswriter.

Leave-Taking

M. L. Clark

1

Hey Silv, Leni here—

I ever tell you about the time I made first contact after one of our breakups?

I didn’t, I’m sure I didn’t, because, stars, is it ever embarrassing, and you know how I get when I’m embarrassed. That was, like, Reason #3 for most of our breakups, and we both know I never got around to working on it, because, well, path of least resistance, right? Why bother changing when it’s slim pickings out here—Drasti Prime, the whole damned Partnership frontier—so I can just wait until you’ve cooled off instead?

Yeah, so I could go on about how much of a winner I’ve been, but you remember that time you airlocked me for Reason #2? I knew I’d screwed up. Like, existential, is-this-just-who-I-am screwed up. So after I saw your shuttle off, I took a skiff out just to be alone for a while. Not the brightest idea, maybe, leaving the protective barrier while our allotment’s still so unevenly explored, and mining ops aren’t even up and running yet, and we’ve got a casualty rate that’s been, stars, like something back on Doro, eh, Silv? Except without all the cold.

Anyway, I just needed a breather, Silv. Not as much as you did, clearly, flying off to study ancient tech around the sun, but still. One afternoon out couldn’t hurt, right?

Except that at some point I must’ve gone down the wrong stream on this plateau of ours. I knew enough not to veer hard right from our front gate, or I’d reach that oblong canyon beside our allotment, and come tumbling down a waterfall into the Spinners’ feeding grounds. I know, I know, they don’t think of us as food, but we’re still not much larger than what they do eat down there, and you know how crazy they get at feeding time. No point taking the risk.

I wasn’t paying much attention otherwise, though, because suddenly the water stopped being water, and all the chittering and whirring of insect life around me fell away, and then there was this . . . this terrible groaning and rubbery shifting of what turned out to be a field of fast-growing fungal fronds. Scared the hell out of me, the idea that I’d landed in a new kind of Drastian trap, until I saw some of the spores twine together, trying to emulate my form.

Okay, no, fine, I admit it: that scared me, too.

But then this spore-form started babbling at me in clipped phrases, not Partnership Standard but not entirely unfamiliar. A bit like Saludon, actually, which made me think that maybe this thing had met our other neighbors first. And so we talked for, like, six minutes, me and this giant fungus with the liquid-dexterity of a slime, just confirming that we were both sentient through the usual: you know, mathematical proofs, local astronomical knowledge, and a couple melodies that just came to mind for the hell of it.

So far so good, eh?

But then it asked me if I was alone. Okay, no—“asked” is the wrong way of putting it. Suddenly it grew a dozen more spore-forms like me, all packed together, all happily chattering, and then it exploded the rest to leave the first Leni-look-alike slack-jawed and small, exhaling something like the Saludon word for empty?—and . . . I dunno, Silv, I guess I got a bit dramatic.

All right, Silv, I cried.

And not like those big cries I used to do to make you feel sorry for me and take me back—I mean, how in the stars would that help me here? Nah, I cried more like it had just hit me that you had left Drasti Prime, that you were off to do more analysis on those massive mechanized mysteries from millennia past, and that I wouldn’t just be able to come up to your door and talk to you until you felt so tired of listening to me outside you’d give up and let me in. This time, Silv, I’d actually have to wait to hear you again. Or to see that sliver of a smile you sometimes can’t help but have, even when you’re clean worn out by my nonsense.

Stars, I’d give anything just to see that sliver right now again, too.

But, I mean, bad timing for the grief to hit me, right? That’s what I realized, at least, when the remaining spore-form reached out to touch me, then mimicked my shuddering shoulders and my head buried in my hands.

Oof, and the sounds it made, Silv, trying to emulate my voice . . .

So I had to stop crying right away. I had to. Plus, then I had to explain why I’d been crying, because I couldn’t just let it go on thinking that this was what humans did all the time. Imagine, though, trying to explain a romantic tiff to a lifeform that’s just one big network of fungal blooms with maybe a thousand different interacting sexes, when you’ve only just met it.

I mean, you’d think it would have the lock on being weird, right? But the way its fronds kept growing and reacting to my ridiculous statements, the way it kept touching me like it was trying to process my emotions by taste or through something deeper, you could tell it was utterly baffled about human love. Like, there’s a sentient being you just know went back to its point of origin after our conversation and flung out spores on its home soil to communicate to the rest of itself just how messed up the new neighbors are.

Come to think of it, I’m guessing the Feru didn’t order an immediate counterstrike on our colony only out of . . . pity? Because oh, for sure, that species has the power to wipe us out, Silv, with or without clearance from the Spinners. And I sure as hell made for an annoying first example of the crap it might be in for if it didn’t do a little pest control nice and early.

I bet you’re even thinking right now, “Ah, so that’s why the Feru always act like we’re one big joke. And here I thought they were just a naturally arrogant species.”

Nah, Silv, I’m sure they were a pretty humble bunch until I came along. Then they used me as a baseline for all of humanity—and by extension, the Partnership, because what kind of intergalactic compact lets the likes of me wear a uniform, right?—and the rest is history.

I bet you’re wondering now, too, what I told it about you. Yeah, that’s fair. You know how breakups go. We either go around twisting the facts to make ourselves seem more like the perfect victims, or go overboard insisting that we totally understand why someone else couldn’t stand to be with us anymore, until that makes us look pathetic and pitiable—which, if you squint hard enough, is . . . kinda like being a victim, too?

Oh, and sure, there’s always Keegler as a counterpoint, I know, but I’m still putting chits on him being a sociopath. No one can be that cheerful about every break-up, always going on about how blessed he was to get even a little time in the cosmos with someone he loves.

Sociopath, Silv. Either that, or he’s tripping on some special breed of Chigger.

No, seriously—that’s the only other possibility I can figure. Maybe one of those invasive nanobots here carries the blueprints for, like, a psychedelic beetle, and Keegler slips out from the construction site to get bitten by it, then comes back to the main compound for regeneration only after his DNA’s been rewritten enough that he can lick, say, an exoskeletal forearm, and get a decent high. Maybe that’s where he gets his bizarrely euphoric calm.

Stars, we’ve both seen way weirder since we set up camp here, Silv, and you know it.

But yeah, either way . . . I guess I told the Feru that I thought you expected too much of me, and that I just couldn’t change as fast you wanted me to. Like, if there was a Chigger for that kind of miracle, let me have at it, right? Then, after that stellar start to things with the Feru, I went into this long, rambling story of why I figured I was the way I was, and how much of a disappointment I was always going to be, and how maybe the whole colony would be better off if I just dropped dead right then and there and became food for the Feru’s fronds instead.

Oh—but don’t worry, Silv. You should’ve seen how its fronds recoiled at that last.

Apparently, even a giant sentient fungus that’s sprawled every which way to inhabit all the land and waterways in its territory can still have a decent sense of taste.

And apparently my own body—yeah, real shocker there—just wasn’t up to snuff.

2

Hey Silv—

Sorry, that last audfile cut off kinda abruptly. Yeah, see, I wasn’t even sure I should be sending you these recordings, not when you’re still in that damned bio-chamber, recovering. I kept going back and forth, like: Should I wait until you wake up to tell you all this in person? Or would that be even more exhausting? Maybe it’d just send you back into a coma?

And then I realized that I was just scared, maybe too scared to finish what I’d started, so I told myself, go on, Leni, send out at least the first audfile. Then you’ll have to record the rest. Reason #1, am I right? Everything I do, even the good stuff, I do out of fear most of all.

But enough with the self-pity—I was telling you about my public breakdown, when the Feru had only just met me, and humanity, and the whole Partnership, too. Stars, I think I heard once of an officer making first contact while they were disposing of ship’s waste, just chucking biohazardous material right onto the new species’ heads by accident—but I bet even that officer had the presence of mind not to start dumping out all his emotional garbage, too!

Luckily, though, the Feru at least had the presence of spore-colony mind to call for local assistance when it realized how weirdly bent out of shape I was. So then a Spinner showed up, freakily tic-tic-tic-tic-ing its massive spidey legs as it conversed with the Feru before taking me home, and that’s when it first really clicked for me: Stars above, those crazy sentient fronds weren’t just another part of this planet’s natural ecosystem. They were aliens, too! They had their own Spinners, for stars’ sake, wandering about in another version of those creepy Uranian-blue masks over those giant mounds of gleaming red eyes.

(I mean—as if any of those masks could ever really cover the horror of arachnoid biocomputers, eh, Silv? And the breath on those big buggers, too!)

So when I got back, I asked one of our own Spinners for more intel about these other colonists, and that’s when I learned that our freaky-big bio-servants, on behalf of their absent planetary masters, had given permission for four colonies, total, all around the massive canyon at the limits of our territory. And yeah, sure, that’s common knowledge now, but can you believe that just half a standard ago, the Partnership only knew about the Saludons? I mean, it’s not like we’d ever asked if there were any others, but then again, why would we? We’d just assumed we knew what a colonizing force looked like, because the Saludons more or less travel the galaxy like we do—so if nothing else was showing up on Drasti Prime that acted like the Partnership or Saludons, probably nothing else was colonizing the same joint, right?

Stars, it’s crazy how some things just become the new norm—almost overnight it feels like—and how quickly we forget what life was like before them.

But also, to be fair, the Saludons did take up a lot of our time and attention. How could they not, when they descended in those massive military vessels to start mining their desert allotment for the same microbial engine straight away? You just can’t be too careful when a potential enemy pops up in the neighborhood belting “UNITY OF STRENGTH” on all channels and shared languages. Even with those unallotted honeycomb caves between us and those obnoxious squadrons of conquered soldiers from other intergalactic compacts, you know as well as me that the Saludons are always just a bit too close for comfort.

The Feru, though . . . Well, they were something new, weren’t they? Something it had never occurred to us to think of as meaningfully sentient when we set down here last year. So that was kinda cool, I guess: getting to file a report that would change the way the Partnership thought about, oh, all the possibilities for intergalactic travel, and different frameworks for sentience, and other sorts of cross-species networking across the known universe.

Not too shabby for an afternoon’s walkabout, eh?

(And also, I guess . . . thank you, Silv? I mean, if you hadn’t been so furious with me for my stupid life choices and packed up early to start work on your solar-mech research, someone else might’ve taken that skiff the wrong way ’round outside the compound, and run into the Feru first. Ugh. Okay, and now I’m just imagining Keegler being the one to do it, and all the “blessings” he’d have crammed into his report after, about being the first to meet our fungal friends on Drasti Prime. Thanks on behalf of all of us, then, Silv, for a Partnership record that won’t make future historians want to pluck their eyes from their eyestems!)

Also, listen . . . You were already off-planet by then, so don’t be surprised that this is the first you’re hearing about my involvement. It’s really been forgotten everywhere, because I downplayed the hell out of my interaction on that initial report, once I had sense enough to realize how much I’d mucked our first contact up. And yeah, okay, maybe that’s bending the whole Partnership-playbook a bit, but at the time I figured, hey, better for HQ just to know that the Feru existed, and to send someone else to make what they’d all assume was the first real conversation between humanity and a sentient fungus. Maybe no one would be the wiser. Maybe it’d all work out in the end without any need for further embarrassment.

And . . . it did work out, more or less. Upper-orbit sent a crack team of diplomats, the Partnership formally met with the Feru, and later that month the Partnership encountered other weirdo colony, the nebulous Esh—all while continuing to keep a super healthy distance from the Saludons. Then you came back, a couple months after the whole revelation, and we made up . . . and broke up . . . and made up again, just before you headed out for another crack at ancient mysteries around the sun. Happily ever after, more or less, here on Drasti Prime.

Except for one little detail, Silv.

An accident, let’s call it.

Because, remember: The Feru didn’t know any better either. For it this was first contact with something bipedal and meaty, like most of the Saludons, but otherwise ridiculously different than anything it had seen before. Was I Saludon, too? Not really. Not enough self-discipline. A malfunctioning Saludon, maybe? That might explain why it tried broken Saludon with me at first—maybe my damage extended to my language, too?

But mostly I think it treated me like a confused spore, far-flung from its colony, so it was doing what it would have done with any foreign spore-form while trying to assess if it should be neighborly or not. It started crafting new protein chains on a cellular level, trying to communicate by replicating all my movements and constituent parts. And it wasn’t just on the macro level that it was making these changes, like with that crazy spore-form spectacle of a dozen new Leni-look-alikes exploding all around the first. It was on the microscopic, too. The Feru spore-form “tasted” me, if that’s the right word for it. And replicated. And emulated. And waited for my responses before “tasting” and replicating anew.

And, stars, Silv, even just in that brief interaction, did it ever figure me out well.

Because after a few months, just as I’d let myself believe that my mess of a first contact scenario had been forgotten—not only by the Partnership but by the Feru, too—apparently the Feru had given up on trying to reintegrate this one, baffling episode with the rest of itself. And how do I know that? Well . . . because a couple weeks after you were sent back in cryo, to finish your treatment in the bigger bio-chambers here, it was the damnedest thing, Silv.

I thought I’d become, like . . . a parent?

Or gained a clone?

I mean, something that looked like me showed up outside the compound walls: fungal for sure, but also completely cut off from the rest of the Feru. What would you have called it?

Oh, and as if that wasn’t freaky enough, listen—I’ve got the recording right here with me. This is what it called out when it showed up, just pounding on the Partnership’s front gate:

Hooooooome!

Hooooooome!

Hooooooome!

3

Yeah, Silv—crazy, right?

You know, I’m picturing you laughing as you listen to these audfiles once you wake up. And I’ll have deserved your laughter, too—because this has gotta be one of the worst first contacts ever. First I burst into tears with a giant alien, then I whine about my failed relationship and messed-up childhood on a far-flung world, then I accept its baffled attempts at interspecies reassurance, and finally, months later, I wake up to this me-sized baby dumped at my front door. I mean, an all-out war after botched first contact’s gotta be easier to explain, right? This . . . this was just uncomfortable.

And you have no idea how much side-eye I got here for it, too.

I mean, at first it was just Zeph staring at the front gate surveillance footage, then staring back at me, then staring at the monitor again. Then he laughed and said, “Stars, Leni! I know it’s been rough since Silv left, but are you going strange on us?”

Then Manoush got in on it too, telling Zeph, “No, chasing strange. Big difference.”

Which, I mean . . . with friends like these, you know? So I told them, “Mates, it’s not me, and I didn’t consent to whatever that is out there looking like me.”

But all Zeph did was shrug and say, “Well, we don’t know much about it yet, but the Feru does seem to like its jokes.”

And, yeah, fair enough. I probably made it that way when it came to us humans: the biggest jokes of all, from the Feru’s point of view.

Still . . . this didn’t feel like a joke, Silv. That spore-form, it really sounded like it was in pain. Or in trouble. But when I asked about letting it in, Manoush got super serious with me. Which, after all, is his job—protector of the compound, and so forth.

“That’s a hard neg on entry,” he said. “We still don’t know this species well, and we can’t limit its propagation. Plus, it’s not like we can just call the Feru up to see what’s going on. That’s the damned downside of meeting a species that never needed tech to expand—no easy comms system. So, I guess we need to send someone out to see what it wants.”

“Someone.” Right. But you just know who everyone was thinking of, eh, Silv?

I even tried to tell them, I said, “Mates, this is like a shitty B-plot vidfile. Come on now—think: You send me out and maybe that thing takes my identity. You’ll have no idea who you’re letting back in.”

But they just looked at each other, grinning.

“Who says we were gonna let you back in at all?” said Zeph.

“Two slingshot maneuvers with one course-correction,” Manoush added. “Win-win!”

And yeah, Silv, I see what you mean now about sticking with friends who choose to mock your openness when something’s really got you down. About how who we surround ourselves with shapes the forms we take on. Okay, sure, it’s slim pickings out here, too—but it was the same back on Doro, wasn’t it? So where’s the real agency in any of this? When do we get to choose—I mean, really choose—whose behaviors we’re going to learn from as we grow?

Super easy to get philosophical when you’re just talking into an unresponsive comm-screen, though. In that moment, though, in that control room . . . I was stuck, you know? I was stuck with what I’d built up for myself to that point in my life. And hey, Silv, for the record, they’re not a bad crew, overall: Mani, Zeph, and me . . . I’d say we’ve held each other up at least as much as we’ve pushed each other down. Only, that day, it was more of the pushing-down than the building-up, and I was shaking, Silv. I was scared. I mean, I think anyone would be, if a mushroom-double just showed up moaning outside the front gate, banging to be let in, but it really had me thinking pretty dire thoughts. Like, this is it, Leni—this is gonna be the end of you. If you go out there and meet that thing, you’re done for. You’re facing a void where your future was supposed to be.

 . . . Oh, and stars, Silv: I just realized—I never left you an audfile before heading out.

What if something really had happened to me, and I’d never even gotten a chance to . . . ?

Wow.

Wow, yeah, what a winner I’ve been.

So, okay, who knows: maybe a clone version of me wouldn’t’ve been so bad after all.

Even one that smells a bit mulchier than I usually do.

4

Hey Silv—

If you’re wondering about the gap in time stamps, I had to finish some admin tasks before I went on. Counting down the hours left here, I suppose. Had a good wander around the colony, too—saw the sunrise and its incineration plumes in the upper atmosphere. Listened to some of the local wildlife through the monitors, nice and safe from Chigger bites, and helped the last construction crew debark and sanitize. Apparently, we’ve cut down burn-rates from long-term exposure to the microbial engine, too, so hey—there’s a plus for you, eh?

Stars, it’s hard to believe you’ve been in that bio-chamber for so long. I can go see you whenever I like, but I haven’t, you know. I can’t even lie about that now: it’s not a pretty sight, your skin still recovering from that power surge, and I guess I’d just rather remember you as I last saw you, about to take off: full of righteous fury and a pretty solid work ethic, too.

Did you know the Partnership’s considering sending down a counselor to help with trauma recovery here on Drasti Prime? I mean, I kinda think it’s a great idea, what with all the casualties we’ve been taking trying to get the construction site up and running. Those Saludons just cracked the whole mining thing, didn’t they? Meanwhile the Esh and Feru are naturally suited to seeping through the slightest terran openings, so they’ve been having good hunting, too. But here we sluggish humans are, still fighting Chiggers and other natural disasters just to keep the Saludons from laying too much of a claim on this vast world with so many mysteries to it. And I mean, that’s crazy, too, isn’t it? How with the Spinners and the Chiggers and that bewildering solar mech, there’s so much about this place we don’t know yet. So much about its ancient rulers we can’t access—and which’ll probably take ever so much longer to figure out, just because we’re all trying to learn what we can about them on our own.

A counselor, though—whew!

You ask me, Silv, that’s being mighty confident that a lot of our mates’ll even talk to another officer in a professional capacity about what’s eating us—even if, stars above, some of us really need it. You know, a few months back, one of the perimeter guards got to drinking and told us that he actually liked to go outside the barrier and get bitten, just to see what would happen, what he might turn into next. Damned foolish thing to do, we told him. What if he got bitten somewhere vital, and turned too quickly? Plus, didn’t he have any respect for the impact on the rest of us, while he was off regenerating in medbay? The colony’s still too small and fragile for any of us to spend most of our time healing.

But he shrugged it all off, Silv. All our complaints, all our fears, all our reprimands. Told us that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, wandering off and becoming one of those lizards or insects instead. That maybe that was the real reason the Partnership had been drawn to this world in the first place: like, a cosmic calling. Like maybe the endgame for all of us here was to change, to be reborn, and to transform into something incredible and new.

His words were generic spiritualist pap, of course, but that shrug stayed with me, Silv. Waiting, deep inside, for the right moment to strike. And I guess that moment, for me, was when I first saw that giant fungus on the monitor, just . . . crying out in so much pain from a body so much like mine. My memory of that guard’s shrug, his complete indifference to fear of transformation, shot up inside me like some of those fast-growing fronds on Feruvian territory, and then I took that mental image with me, when I went to meet my look-alike outside.

FG, I’ve started calling him.

Get it? A “Fun Guy”—just like me!

Ah, it’ll grow on you, Silv.

That thing sure did on me.

5

Hey Silv—

You remember when we were serving on the River of Courage together, both of us taking positions there to escape shitty childhoods on Doro mid-freeze, and you used to make all these references to parts of The Sunmaster’s Journey that I probably learned as a kid in the eastern colony, but definitely did my best to binge drink away?

It took me so long to realize that you weren’t just trying to show me up. Reason #2, right? That defensiveness. How I treated everything like a competition and everything you did, even more so. Like that time you wrote a poem for the annual Partnership call for membership modifications to The Sunmaster’s Journey, and I went around for weeks after you got an honorable mention, just telling everyone bored enough to listen about how I’d been planning a full rewrite of the text myself.

Oh, I know, Silv. I know. If you’d actually wanted to be in a threesome, I’m sure you’d have picked a better third than my damned ego.

I think I get it now, though: why you love the Partnership’s core text so much, and why the Partnership loves it, too. Because it really is a decent template, isn’t it, for teaching the culture behind our language, the sort of partnership to which all of our intergalactic relations supposedly aspire. Either way, “teaching the culture” is exactly what I ended up doing to find common ground with good old FG. Teaching it our ways, our hopes, our words.

Emphasis on “trying,” though, because for the first couple sols the most that FG would say was a howling, anguished Home! Home! Home!, and when I tried to get more out of it, FG just repeated bits back to me, or reverted to Saludon. So I wasn’t sure what to do here, really—take it back to the Feru? Report it to the Spinners and see if they had any ideas?

At least, being around FG in the wilds of Drasti Prime, I got a little bit of the Feru’s immunity against the Chiggers, which definitely can’t handle the spore dust as well as it can our suits, slipping even through our masks with the visors down to insert those nano-protocols. As long as I stayed in FG’s sphere of protection, then, I knew I didn’t have to worry about turning into a giant lizard or beetle or crustacean. But for how long, I wondered. What did FG want? Why did it even exist? Was it one last little Feruvian joke, crafted just to get at me?

I hadn’t the slightest idea, Silv, which is why I thought so much of you, when you were trying to bridge the gaps between us with the right tale or two. Those first sols off-compound, I told FG anything that popped into my head, but nothing about me—because, stars, Silv! Of course I knew better than to make it easier for it to steal my body in my sleep.

So, I told it Sunmaster stories instead.

Your versions, to be precise, since I couldn’t remember most from my own readings. Mostly, I just remembered you referencing a line or a story beat as it suited the occasion between us, and I tried to spin together the whole of each tale for FG from those fragments.

Like, do you remember the one where . . . I mean, of course you do, you remember everything, but humor me here . . . Do you remember the one where the Sunmaster kept trying to escape itself in a long series of disconnected lives? Like, first it was doing recon work on a scout ship not far from Europa, then served as a line cook on a waystation, then lived as a cartel enforcer dumping criminal evidence into the sun, and at some point even as a snail—a rare snail, found only in the gardens of Morau Prison, out on an outpost circling the Restuvian Black Hole, where its only task was to nibble at the prison garden’s toxic leaves?

That’s the story FG liked the most, as far as I could tell—the story of a being who kept waking up in different forms and destinies, which I guess makes sense, the Feru being what it is—so I kept telling that story, and making up more lives for the Sunmaster to go through until it discovered why no number of disparate lives could bring it closer to true mastery over it all.

And as my look-alike listened to my increasingly tenuous version of this story, FG started to get more adventurous. First it stopped whimpering all the time, which was a great start, and then it started saying different words—words in Partner that I couldn’t fully understand, but were still a welcome change from all the tedious Home! Home! Home! business. Even a mysterious run of Seedpod! Flightshell! Spaceshelter! was a step in the right direction.

All that time, though, I was also thinking: Stars, Silv should be here telling this story.

Because you always did tell the best stories. You know that, right?

Or at least, you told the same story over and over, no matter how many times I’d come along to knock it all down, and you’d try to make it that story the best it could be.

The story of us, Silv—as if we’d somehow done the impossible, the thing that even the Sunmaster couldn’t do. As if we’d cycled through all the shitty versions of ourselves, and at last arrived at the right version, so that now, finally!, our perfect life together could really begi—

6

Oh, shit, Silv—

Sorry, that last audfile cut off before I was finished. Pressed the wrong button, I think, but—hah. Probably for the best. I was getting into one of my moods there, wasn’t I?

Look, the point is, I told FG our Sunmaster stories while hanging out with it beyond the protective barrier—and it didn’t eat me; and I didn’t turn into a crustacean. Hell, I didn’t even get adopted by the Spinners and taken to the secret caves where they spin all their solutions to the toughest problems we give them to resolve—much as I’d still super like to have seen those deeper Drasti Prime structures while I could!

(Stars, and maybe we should’ve asked them to spin on us, too, eh Silv? I wonder if there’d’ve been enough cave space for all of the calculations that little problem would’ve involved!)

But like I was saying, in the middle of telling FG some of the Partnership’s core stories to build a common vocabulary, FG got a little too excited, and after a few of those failed bursts in Standard Partner, it tried to get through to me in a way that made more sense to its species. And stars, Silv—are those fungal forms ever strong! No wonder Chiggers don’t stand a chance of seeding them with all their rogue DNA.

So there I was, right in the middle of one of your stories I’d actually forgotten the middle to, when FG wrapped some of its fronds around my arm (so tight that I thought for a moment it was just going to seep into my vascular system and take me over from the inside out), and then it hauled us off toward the Feru. Which, fair enough, okay: maybe it was ready to go home, like it had been saying all this time?

Except that it didn’t even pause as it entered Feru territory, not even when other fronds rose up in friendly greeting—although they didn’t do so for long, if you can believe it. Yeah, no: apparently the sight of a lone human shouting and kicking as a look-alike spore-form marches them both along the marsh doesn’t warrant the Feru’s further attention? Stars, Silv, I know I’ve done the whole manipulative silent-treatment thing myself from time to time, but now I know it definitely feels shitty on the receiving end. When, like, a whole damned field of gold-green frond-stalks chooses to rustle indifferently in the breeze instead of paying you any mind while you’re out there just . . . just screaming for aid. It’s the worst.

Oh, and get this—even the local Spinners, four large clumps of dark furry legs with those damned blue masks over their beady red eyes and salivating mandibles, took their cues from the Feru’s indifference, so they just stood in silence, barely moving about, except to emulate the faint swaying of the Feru, while my mimic hauled me along.

If FG had decided to absorb me right then and there, would any of them have so much as flinched at my death cry?

 . . . Probably not.

So, ah, yeah—best not to dwell on that part right now.

Eventually, though, FG and I ended up on the far side of the Feru territory—which, as you know, meant we were about to engage with the Esh. Crazy things, all those scattered, sentient nebulae: like giant floating jellyfish, if each jellyfish contained a brewing electrical storm under its gelatinous cap. But the Esh weren’t alone, either—if ever an Esh could be called “alone,” even in their more dispersed states. Rather, one of the bigger Esh-clouds was busy conversing with a Saludon squadron, which left me feeling like FG and I were crashing one of those parties where no one wants to be the one to point out that, technically, nobody invited you, but everyone still looks at you like you should just know you don’t belong.

We were all there, actually: the Esh, the Saludons, the Feru (well, its cast-off), and me, Leni—just this mess of a Partnership officer who’d no business being involved in any major interspecies negotiations (if that was, in fact, what was going down in Esh-land at the time).

To top it all off, too, that’s when Manoush’s face popped up on the viewscreen looming over my right-arm console, asking me to explain why I was late with my quarter-sol check-in.

“Ah, sorry, Mani, I, uh, got caught up in something.”

Literally caught up in something—FG’s tendrils—and then carried away.

“What’s that I’m hearing, Leni? What’ve you got going on around you?”

“An interspecies jamboree,” I said, more or less truthfully.

“We’re just picking card games right now,” I added, more or less untruthfully.

But Manoush wasn’t in the playful mood I’d expected, considering how he and Zeph had treated me before sending me out, four-and-a-half sols back. “Leni, listen carefully,” he said. “I need you to quit messing around, get that thing with you to tell us what it wants, and get the hell back here. I don’t have time for this shit—none of us do, back on base.”

And, well, that was an unexpected tone from Manoush, but you know how it goes with the gang, Silv: we’re all fun and jokes until something really serious goes down, and then we snap at each other like we’ve never cracked a joke before in our lives, we don’t even know what a joke is, and most of all, how dare anyone else not already have their full attention fixed on this crazy new problem that’s just shown up in our lives?

So my heart was in my boots, Silv, because when Manoush gets like this, things are bad back on the compound. Like, really bad.

“Loud and clear, Mani,” I said. “But why, what’s the damage? Don’t hold out on me.”

And Manoush worked his jaw before grinding out, “We’ve got casualties, Len. Another microbial plume surged along the latest the rigging. Multiple casualties just this morning.”

“Casualties? Mani, are you talking injuries or, like—”

“Mostly burns, but bad ones. Zeph’s in a bio-chamber.”

“Zeph’s in a—?!”

“Look, that’s all I know right now, Leni. So get back here, and fast.”

“Affirmative.” I felt my skin go cold to the touch—and since FG was still wrapped around my other wrist, I’m sure it could feel the same.

But then I was acutely aware of the Esh and that Saludon squadron staring at me, and realized they’d heard every word, too.

7

Ah, stars, Silv—

Look, I’m trying to get all this out the right way, the way where I’m honest and up-front about how shit makes me feel instead of going off on another wild tangent until I’ve worn us both out, but sometimes it’s not “feeling” that’s the matter, Silv.

It’s . . . it’s momentum, you know?

Like, there I was in Esh territory, this spore-form locked onto my arm—probably with the strength to take over my body on a whim if it wanted to—while a lightning storm flashed before me in sentient bursts turned to thunderous proclamations (all in Saludon, by the way—which didn’t make things a bit easier), and a whole, stony-faced line of Saludon soldiers stood to the right, and I was still trying to process that Zeph was in danger—Zeph was in a bio-chamber, for star’s sake!—and I didn’t know if I’d be back in time to tell him what an absolute blockhead he’d been for getting banged up in the first place.

Oh, and speaking of that mining site, Silv: To hell with it. To hell with the whole damned project. You know how many we’ve lost since it all started, while trying to access Drasti Prime’s microbial engine without it bursting through in unpredictable ways. But why?—that’s the real question. Why even bother trying to stabilize a colony on a planet that’s always trying to kill us or turn us into other species if we so much as step out of our zone?

Right, right, I know: Because of the Saludons. Because the Partnership needs to stake this claim, even if it kills us, just so it doesn’t automatically fall into the hands of a militia that assimilates whatever the hell it wants, when it wants it—and otherwise bides its time, looking down on free species with something between pity and contempt, because we haven’t proven worthy enough yet to engage it in battle, lose to it in battle, and be consumed by it in turn.

That moment out on Esh-land, Silv  . . . while thinking about Zeph, and Partnership geopolitics, and oh, just the futility of it all, I just wanted to storm over and clock the Saludon squad leader. Lucky, I guess, that FG still had me fast by the arm—but it was the Esh-cloud, really, that put me in my place. After both the Saludons and the Esh-cloud heard me talking to Manoush, the Esh-cloud switched to its freshly acquired Partnership Standard to boom at me, WHAT. WANT. TERRITORY. OURS. FLIMSY. FLESH.

And I just . . .

Stars, Silv, I just laughed. I mean—“Flimsy flesh!”

I’m not even kidding; that’s exactly what the Esh said. Now there’s one we could’ve used on nights when I was just feeling a little too beat to perform, eh?

And, oh, I was ready, Silv; I was going to give it a zinger of a retort for sure, but before I could answer, FG was trying out my voice again: its mushroom-flap of a mouth not quite matching its internal vocal patterns—as if it hadn’t quite connected how the human mouth related to speech—but still managing to produce sounds that were close enough.

“Need! Seedpod! Flightshell! Spaceshelter!” it said, like a rubbery version of me.

And blow me over a debris field, Silv, but that was the context I needed: A ship! FG wanted a ship!

But had it always been looking for a spaceship, or was this new? Had the stories I’d been telling it these past few days given poor old FG a case of wanderlust?

Maybe I’d broken it twice. That sounds like me, doesn’t it, Silv? First, I busted it at the moment of its conception, when it sprang into being as this . . . mess of emotional damage that couldn’t reintegrate with its colony after first contact with me. Bad enough, right? But then I go on encouraging the little weirdo to run off even further from everything it comes from, out from family and community into the distant stars. But to go—where, exactly? Where was Home?

The leader of the Saludon squadron had similar concerns. He flipped open his visor and asked, “What’d you do to that bit of Feru?” Reading my damned mind, Silv: just one more reason I can’t help but hate the whole, creepy lot of them.

“Nothing!” I said—which clearly wasn’t true.

“It just showed up outside our colony’s protective barrier, and I was sent to figure out what the hell it wanted.”—which, okay, sort of was.

But this last part confused the Saludon squad leader even more. “Why you? Did your leader want you to be replaced by a Feruvian replicant?”

And I laughed in spite of myself. “Ha ha—yeah, that’s what I said.” (More or less.)

“Maybe they were trying to get rid of an inferior soldier,” offered one of the other Saludons, pointing to me and then FG with his weapon. “Kind of a two-for-one.”

Which, oof, is also what Manoush and Zeph had said, pretty much.

Damn it, Zeph, I was also thinking at the time. You bio-chambered blockhead.

“Yes, that scans,” the squad leader agreed, before giving me a pitying once-over. “Do you want us to eliminate the replicant, or do have you enough self-sufficiency for that task?”

“No!” I said, startled.

And a pause descended on our ungainly grouping, before the second Saludon officer whispered to his leader, weapon raised: “Was that . . . ‘no’ to the first part, or to the second?”

“The first!” I snapped—though hell if I knew why I was resisting the offer. FG was wrapped so damned tightly around my wrist that I didn’t know if I’d ever get my arm back. But before I could explain, the Esh-cloud—clearly annoyed by all the clutter and non-Eshian cacophony—boomed at everyone: LEAVE!

And then it didn’t even wait for any of us to try to comply. With a furious plume of pent-up nebulous energy, the sentient storm blew me and FG—hard—out to the edge of its territory. In the direction, as it turned out, of the cliffs overlooking the centralized canyon.

The canyon in which the Spinners, mind you, come daily and horrifically to feed.

8

So, Silv . . .

I mean, obviously, I didn’t get eaten. I’m recording this, aren’t I?

(Not a fungal clone, ha ha! Although wouldn’t that be nice?)

And I promise, too, that I didn’t do any lasting damage to our relationships with the Feru, the Esh, and the Saludons—much as I’d still really like to with that last!

But soon after getting tumbled by an Esh-cloud over the edge of that cliff, there I was with FG wrapped around my wrist—FG, who had fluttered its fronds into a parachute as we descended—sitting dazed on the canyon floor with maybe a hundred different local species crawling and whirring and resting and feeding all around me.

It’s not a bad joint, Silv, that canyon, with its threads of ankle-high mist at the right times of the day, and its lush desert-styled vegetation . . . even if, okay, it is kinda weird that the Spinners chose not to allocate this property to any of us. Did our colonies really need a buffer to avoid a fight? Or did the Spinners just like having a core space from which to monitor us?

Boundaries are useful, though, I suppose—so if that is what this all is, I guess I should respect that. There’s been talk on our side, even, of creating a firmer barrier between our land and that of the Feru—and if that happens, crossing the canyon floor might eventually become the easiest point of travel between us. Way easier, I guess, than risking another idly paddling fool slipping from one territory to the next on a skiff, just to cause trouble for the neighbors.

But anyway, whatever its overall function in the grand, Drasti Prime scheme of things, for the moment, there I was, Silv—taking in the beauty of the canyon floor and listening to the keening of my fungal look-alike; and thinking about Zeph; and thinking about FG’s bewildering demand. A ship! Stars, Silv—no way would the Partnership let this Feruvian cast-off enter the service solo: at least not with so much still to be hashed out where basic interspecies treaties were concerned. But what other options were there? The Esh had no need for space-travel in a hard-shelled vessel, while the Saludons were pretty much always on standby for an excuse to kill and capture—definitely not in the business of ferrying tourists across the cosmos.

On alTspeaK forums, you know, tons of people seem to think that this solar-mech you’ve been studying might’ve helped with deep space travel. I know, I know, you’ve got other ideas, but you can see why they’re hoping for the transportation option, right? Because maybe cracking that mystery could take us to wherever the hell those ancient makers are hanging out now, and we could ask them to fix tons of our other problems, too. And besides, why not transportation? Where’s the evidence against it? That tech definitely wasn’t used to stabilize the sun’s growth cycle, like you thought on one of your first tours out, before you hit that first massive wall with your research.

I mean, no offense intended by that part, of course, Silv: You know how it goes, right? Sometimes the greatest triumphs we get in life come from eliminating nonviable possibilities. So I’m not saying it’s a flaw or anything that your guess didn’t work out, because . . .

Huh.

Yeah, we don’t ever talk much about your flaws, now do we, Silv?

And I guess that makes sense, because if you ask me, they’re only flaws in certain contexts. Like, as a researcher, you need that same perseverance. That ability to just keep at something even if it’s difficult, even if it’s hard, even if it’s just . . . you know . . . really wearing you down, and it might never amount to anything we’d call a success in the end. Even if you have a super-lousy setback, and that ancient solar-mech retaliates at your testing, and its blastwave knocks you so hard into a coma that you’re still taking your sweet time coming out of it weeks later, while the rest of your second-degree burns get hugely patched up.

What a scientist! they’ll say when you wake up, Silv. What an admirably driven Partnership officer, giving her all to one of the greatest cosmic pursuits: The desire not just to know, but also to connect. To make new and startling links where none existed before.

But that isn’t always the best trait elsewhere, is it, Silv?

Elsewhere like . . . in love . . . where it’s more like pure gambler’s fallacy: an addiction you can’t quite shake because you never really want to. All this pouring out of more time and energy and feeling . . . oh, especially feeling . . . into a well that’s sometimes just dry to the core, and will never ever give back the way you want it to.

The way most of us feel we deserve.

And, stars, Silv, you do deserve it, you know. You deserve a real chance at—I dunno where my metaphor’s going here; you’re the storyteller: Well-water? Love? Yeah, let’s just call it love—you deserve a real chance, Silv, at that thing with someone who doesn’t get all hung up over what they’re owed, and all the wounds that they desperately want acknowledged but definitely don’t want fixed up, because . . . because they’re too afraid that there’s nothing under them. That if you take away all their wounds you take away what makes them them, too.

Because, yeah, I’ve got my stories, and my reasons, Silv. We both know that much, at least—but this isn’t about either of those just now. This is about . . .

Oh, hell, Silv, it’s . . . about the sound of that waterfall, cascading down whole sides of the Spinner’s canyon in the right season, to converge in this valley where, just like the perimeter guard suggested, life always looks a bit simpler, and easier, and clearer: Eat and be eaten.

Live and copulate and rest and then die.

So I was hanging out down there, right? In the canyon where the Spinners feed, surrounded by all sorts of lizards and insects and arthropods that were just doing their thing without causing the same sort of grief that I always seemed to; and I was looking at this Feruvian cast-off that my mess of a first contact created, this look-alike that had its fronds wrapped so tightly around my arm while it begged for a ship—and all because of how I’d kept going on about my origin story when it and I had first met, and I’d told it that I just wanted to die; and I was thinking about how I’d been called back to base camp and really did need to go check in, to see how Zeph was doing, to see what Manoush needed . . .

When it hit me, Silv.

My man FG—he was right. Or, you know, it was right. The Feru was right.

Because the Partnership on whole? It’ll be fine, whatever happens—and the rest of the colony will figure out this mining situation eventually, and stabilize the microbial-engine shafts so that mining work can continue safely. And you? You’ll get out of that coma, your skin wholly regenerated and then some, and then I’m sure you’ll reveal that solar-mech’s secrets to the whole damned system. That’s just what driven people like you do, you know? You keep going forward.

But me—me, Silv?

Stars, Silv—

I think we both know it’s time I went home.

9

Picture this, Silv: Our good friend the sociopath, Keegler, would say that if a relationship’s just right, it’s no work at all—which is probably why his own relations always end the moment there’s discord, you know? Like, the moment there’s something off, he just gives up and moves on . . . which is not how plenty of couples figure it, but, hey, to each their own.

And yet, how weird is it that all of us—the Keeglers and the non-sociopaths alike—still act like both people in a relationship need to be present for the relationship to exist at all?

Like, if the Partnership walked away from Drasti Prime tomorrow—just, you know, cut its losses, left it to the Saludons, took its chances that this wouldn’t work against our side in the long run—Drasti Prime wouldn’t cease to exist, and the Saludons wouldn’t, either. Their outcomes, and ours, would still intersect no matter what. All we’d be doing, if we walked away, is deciding how much we can take, and how much we think we can control.

And when I made contact with the Feru in my messed up state half a standard back, I created a relationship that didn’t just stop when I went away, or even when I decided not to include it in the official report. Nah, my bad vibes had an impact long after that first run-in. I mean, this poor thing, Silv, this sentient Feruvian cast-off: After I’d left, it just kept struggling to replicate my behaviors and biochemistry so it could understand me, and reach out to me, and maybe help fix me. In a way, then, my trauma had become its trauma—so what else could the whole Feru do, as a spore-colony with its overall well-being to consider?

It did the only thing it could, really: The Feru cut out that hurting part of itself, the part that I’d unintentionally wounded, and it set that spore-form firmly to one side, to spare the rest of itself from living with that wild and erratic addiction to my trauma running through it all the time. But, also, it didn’t kill that part of itself—and why would it? The Feru’s a fungus, after all! Creating something new out of destruction is kind of its main gig.

And hey, true to form, FG’s still learning and growing, too—which is kind of neat, Silv, even if it does also put more direct responsibility on me than . . . well, than I think I’ve ever really admitted to having in my life. Even with you. Especially with you.

But also, Silv, because it replicates, adapts, and mirrors me so well, when FG latched on, I think I finally had a chance to see all the trauma I never could set aside on my own. All the shit that I carried with me from Doro to the River of Courage, and then from the River of Courage to Drasti Prime. All the trauma that I just laid and laid at your feet over the last few years, while calling that kind of separation, that compartmentalization, good enough.

It wasn’t good enough, Silv . . . but I hope you’ll grant me a little leeway here for all the muck ups to date, because it’s not as easy for a human to cut out parts of itself as it is for a fungus. And I guess that goes for relationships, too, because, I mean, the way I’ve acted, the way you’ve acted . . . There’s no complete severance here, is there? Not ever. For years we’ve reinforced things with each other that’ll always exist deep inside, no matter how the stars turn for us next.

You know, ever since the Feru were ‘discovered’ by the Partnership, alTspeaK forums have been going wild over the species’ dramatic way of mimicking and replicating to communicate, like that’s even something new. But it’s not, is it? It’s the same as we’ve always done: us, and plenty of other species, majorly sentient or not. Courtship is so often about mirroring each other’s movements that, to some extent, I guess our trauma has to be, too.

Anyway, that day in the canyon, still a bit dazed and confused and cranky with the Saludons for what they’d made the Partnership do, I looked up at the sound of that beautifully cascading water and saw a group of Spinners in Feru-masks lined up at the canyon’s edge, readying their blood-curdling shrieks before leaping to feed.

And I knew it’d be all right, Silv.

I knew that, after I got back to our compound, I was going to say my goodbyes to Mani and Zeph (who’s better now, by the way—you’ll see; he was only in the bio-chamber for a couple sols, lucky sod). I was going to say goodbye to all of Drasti Prime, too, and most of all—even if only through these audfiles—I was going to say goodbye to you. For good, Silv. The way I should’ve done the first time you tried to break from your researcher’s instincts and put up harder barriers with me. The way I never could bring myself to do before, though, because . . . because without you, who’d I be left with? Who’d I finally have to confront, out in the slim pickings of this whole damned Partnership frontier?

FG felt it, too: that transformation within me on the canyon floor, as hundreds of panicked critters scuttled and darted for shelter while those terrible arachnoid shadows surged overhead. And so at last my look-alike sighed, and released my arm, and more trustingly said: Home?

To which, well, yeah—

“Home,” I agreed.

Because I’d finally made the first contact I’d been putting off for years, Silv.

A lifetime, perhaps.

Stars, I hope I don’t mess this one up, too.

About the Author

Canadian by birth, M. L. Clark now calls Medellín, Colombia “home.” Clark is the published author of science- and speculative-fiction stories in Analog, Clarkesworld, and Lightspeed, as well as in three year’s best anthologies, among other publications. Other writing projects include poetry, reviews, essays (especially for a secular-humanist column at Patheos.com: “Another White Atheist in Colombia”), and a novel in the universe of “To Catch All Sorts of Flying Things” and “Leave-Taking.”

The Amusement Dark

Mike Buckley

Contact: Lost Colony. Vessel: The Intention

The man and his geezix stepped out of the burned hills in the pitch-black morning. Machines towered in front of them, caught in the lights of the floating handhelds, and Cal listened to the geezix make its way carefully over the pebbles of an ancient wash and tried not to love it.

The files were all wrong. This was supposed to be a military outpost.

“Daddy,” the geezix said quietly.

Two lights floated in front of them, directing most of their shine outwards so as to not blind Cal or the geezix. There was a fence structure that stretched off in both directions. Large, rounded animals towered over it, weeping strips of rust from their eyes and ears.

“It’s not what we thought, is it, Daddy?” The geezix said. Cal’s chest tightened.

“I told you. Don’t call me that.”

There was a moment of silence in which Cal could feel the geezix’s sadness behind him like a swelling wound.

“No,” he said finally. “We thought it would be a military base.”

Cal gestured at the handhelds panning their lights slowly over the floating animals.

“What is it, Daddy?”

“I don’t know.”

Cal felt the geezix’s hand upon his wrist and he realized he’d stopped walking.

“So do we get to leave?”

Cal looked down. The geezix’s eyes were round and swollen with tears, and the flesh around the left one drooped a bit, revealing bone.

“No. They sent us. We have to catalog it. Make the record right.”

It smiled.

“I want to help, Daddy.”

“I was hoping you’d say that.” He set down the sensor kit he was carrying and lifted the lid. The pod floated out, its muted lights glowing.

“Follow it that way, toward the tower. See it?”

Cal pointed out past the towering animals, at a distant shape in the darkness.

“OK,” the geezix answered softly.

“Don’t worry. It’s easy. Just follow the sensor pod. It will tell you if it needs help taking samples or anything.”

The geezix looked out at the darkness and the tower, a darker wound in the black.

“Don’t be scared,” Cal said. “This place is abandoned.”

“Ab-dab-donned?”

“Empty. No one’s here but us.” Cal pointed. “To the tower. I’ll find you in an hour.”

“Daddy,” the geezix said.

Inwardly, Cal sighed. He knew what would work, but it hurt to say it.

“Be brave, honey.”

It looked up at him and smiled, revealing half a mouth of teeth, the rest a mush of blood clots and old food.

“OK, Daddy.”

The geezix walked off into the darkness.

Cal activated his own sensor kit and followed it the opposite direction, through the gate, under an iron pig striped in rust at its bolts. Small empty structures stood under the animals, thick layers of dust on the windows reflecting the light from the handhelds right back at him. Past the gate a cobblestoned path split. The remnants of a large garden clung together at the split. Cal stopped and listened to the geezix’s footsteps rasping quietly off into the darkness, and he slid a small flask from his hip pocket and drank from it until the warmth inside him matched that of the flask’s metal.

“Tell me more,” Cal said to the sensor pod, which was hovering outside of the dead garden.

“Human colony, seventh wave. First colony records list it as Amara Station. Population unlisted. Organizational structure unlisted. After the war began the designation was changed to a military installation. Most recent records denote research and a mech garrison.”

“Human still, or First Ones?”

“Human. Then First Ones.”

Meaning the machines had come through and scoured the colony.

“If it belonged to the First Ones, shouldn’t records still exist? You won the war, after all.”

The sensor pod paused.

“The records pertaining to this system were destroyed in a raid on thought pool structures in a nearby meteor cloud.”

Cal smiled. It always made him feel good to remember times when the First Ones had lost something in the wars. You couldn’t deny that the First Ones were superior. They’d won the war. Their thought pools were so smart that it sometimes seemed like they could tell the future. As if to rub it in, they called themselves the First Ones, as they were as distinct from the life that had created them, humans, as humans were from primates. They were the first true intelligence.

With arrogance like that, how could it be anything except nice to remember that they’d suffered in the war too?

“Let’s go, then,” he said, and the sensor pod moved off into the darkness. It followed a contour in the ground, its dim lights revealing dead grass edging the cobblestones, and out in the darkness to the right were the edges of large cylinders, faded by time into a neutral plastic color.

“Machines that stimulate the nervous system by creating motion,” the sensor pod said.

“Rides,” Cal said, wondering what such a thing would be doing on this empty rock. As he thought about it a strange anger at the sensor pod for assuming he wouldn’t know what a roller coaster was arose in him. The memory was right on the edge of a darkness within his mind that he should know not to walk into, but still . . .

“Valia,” he said involuntarily. The sensor pod was smart enough not to answer.

“Children loved rides,” she had said. “There were whole parks full of them on old Earth.” She had a been a historian when they met, and was enrolled in a university that, ever since the war ended a hundred years before, was led by a First One thought pool. The students were all given research assignments, but only the most oblivious among them could be happy with it; the simplest research component on any thought pool could out-reason the brightest student. It was, like so many things, a way for the First Ones to keep human beings busy.

Cal had said as much about rides too, when she brought them up all those years ago.

“P’shaw,” Valia had responded gently. “You don’t believe that.”

He knew what she really was asking—do you still want to have kids? Even though they’ve placed us on a deep space research vessel, which isn’t really so different than being a researcher in the service of a thought pool at a university, as thought pools from different jurisdictions sent these research vessels out to map colonies that had been lost during the war. For posterity, thought pools would say, which is an endeavor that humans and First Ones share.

He’d been young—from this moment in time, with whiskey burning his throat, in the darkness, listening to the geezix laugh or call in the distance—he’d been so impossibly young. He’d smiled at Valia when she asked about kids.

“Of course,” he’d said.

She was pregnant when the ship launched, and Elena was born as they mapped their second colony. The ship’s medbay with its computer assistants had done it all while Cal waited and watched the metallic arms and the bright circles of the surgical lights move over his wife.

Cal dug the flask from his pocket and drank from it and almost ran into the sensor pod. It had stopped.

“Substructures exist ahead,” it said. “They run beneath us, as far as the adjacent trees.”

“What is it?” Cal asked.

“Unknown. The substructures do not appear on any description or remaining text that mentions the installation.”

“Maintenance, gotta be,” Cal said.

“It is not,” the pod answered. “It is of unknown purpose and must be explored.” It paused. “Your daughter is hiding nearby.”

“Where?”

The pod panned a light over the trees. In the hard phosphorescence they looked as if they were made of paper, as if even his eyes passing over them would leave small scratches. The geezix’s face appeared in the light. It was smiling its swollen, lopsided smile. It laughed. The sound ringing through the dead trees unsettled Cal.

“Shhh,” he said.

The geezix shook its head and walked toward him over the gentle slope.

“You didn’t see me, Daddy.”

“I told you to go all the way to the tower,” he said. “Where’s the pod I sent with you?” The sensor pod floated out of the trees, its lights coming on.

The geezix paused a few feet from him.

“This is a place for kids, Daddy. You didn’t tell me that.”

“Maybe it used to be. But our job today is to explore it and write a report.”

“I saw what was called a roller coaster.”

Cal couldn’t tell just what the geezix was about to say and had the odd fear that it would ask him in a completely neutral voice to ride the roller coaster with it. A broken, ancient roller coaster, a battered geezix that broke his heart every time he looked in its eyes, all in the dark. He spoke first.

“I found a substructure. I have to check it out.”

“Goodie. I want to help.”

“Three meters that way,” the sensor pod said, its light shifting to indicate a path through the dead trees. Cal followed it and the geezix followed him.

“How come there’s nobody here?” the geezix asked.

“They all left in the war.”

“Why?”

Cal shook his head. The sensor pod was hovering between two trees, bathing the patch of ground beneath it in amber light. Cal kneeled. The ground here was a fine dust that seemed to him to be more than a type of dirt, the final stage in some decomposition process. He swept it away, and the geezix leaned to help. As they swept they revealed a metallic panel beneath the dust, and Cal noticed that the geezix’s fingers seemed looser in the flesh than they should be, as if its skin was ill fitting.

“This is an access point to the substructure,” the pod said.

“Yay,” the geezix said.

“No, go sit by the tree, um—honey.”

“But it’s lonely.”

The sensor pod sank closer to the hatch, its utility arm extending. As its light got closer to the hatch it shrunk from the darkness around them, and the weight of the abandoned orchard seemed to grow. There was loud grinding and a pop, and then the hatch was up. An odor came out of it, foul, but nothing that Cal recognized.

“I mean it, honey, stay there.”

The geezix deflated, laying its head upon its knees, then looked up again, with her eyes coy and playful and sickening to Cal.

“Stay there,” Cal said one last time, and he lowered himself into the dark hallway. The pod had already moved to a corner of the hallway and it seemed to be weighing which way to go.

“The substructure is sizeable and consists of at least three levels,” it said.

It went silent as it considered the data its sweeps were producing. It could read space only and would be looking for open areas, computer cores, access points.

“No structural weak spots,” the pod said. In an unexpected kind of levity, it continued. “Choose a direction.”

Cal moved off left. His handheld light pushed the darkness back, keeping it a steady twenty feet from him, like a moving wall. He walked for ten minutes and finally found stairs.

“Computer core fifty meters from your present position.”

Ah good, Cal thought, wake up the computer, figure out what the substructure was for, and then back to the ship, and leave.

He followed the pod’s directions and in a minute his handheld lit up a cavernous room. Dead consoles covered the far wall in a concave stretch that made his neck hurt to look at it. A single empty chair sat in front of them and Cal settled into it and pulled the portable power plant out of a side pocket. It hummed and established a field. After a minute or so the screens blinked to life.

Three Years Ago, on The Intention

They tell you First Ones-constructed ships are big, but you really don’t get it. After six months on The Intention, Cal still hadn’t seen half of it. He’d walked all of the engineering decks first, the command deck and the quarters, all of them empty except for theirs, and then below those, a deck that was filled with a vast forest.

“They say it’s good for us,” Valia had said one day as they stood next to the river that ran through the forest. Well-placed lights shone through the trees so diffuse noontime hung around them like peach jam spread through the air.

“Huh?”

“To be outside,” Valia said.

Cal laughed.

“A forest in a spaceship.”

“We’re animals,” Valia said, something in her voice like humor. “We need trees to sniff.”

Cal looked up and saw Elena looking out from behind a tree, just her eye and a fringe of her hair. He turned and looked toward the water.

“Valia, this time I think she might really be gone,” he said.

“Really?”

“Yeah. Elena has this pony, see, that can ride through space.”

“Oh, of course.”

“This ship is boring, this forest is quiet . . . ”

He heard Elena’s foot on the grass just behind him, and then she leaped with a shrill roar and fell on his shoulders. Cal staggered up, screaming, fake-terrified, and finally laughing as she ran off into the trees again.

Later, Cal had killed that forest. He dug into the oversight programs and burned anything that looked like it kept trees alive and water running. Still it took them a year to die; they hung on, quiet in the dark, full of will.

A kindness, Valia had said. A kindness.

Amara Station

The computers were ancient, but once the field saturated enough of the control room the screens come to life. The room around them was early First Ones design—the floors swaled in weird ways; a door to his left was a foot off the ground.

Cal set the power plant aside and looked up at the sensor pod.

“Well? What are you getting?”

The sensor pod floated along the far wall, silent, panning its light.

Cal thought of ways he might ridicule the sensor pod, but only out of the tired reflex of a lonely man. He’d gone through a phase when he’d screamed at the screens in the command center of the ship. He’d killed the trees. He’d tried to crash the ship. None of it had worked.

“The structure is planned out in three chambers,” the sensor pod finally said. “Diagnostics are present for all of them. It is a medical facility.”

“What?” Cal asked. He’d always heard that First Ones unplugged old or sick members of their race, ground them up, and used them to make new technology. He walked on dead First Ones every time he walked down the hall. The table he ate breakfast at every day was ground up First Ones.

“Medical facility? Explain.”

The sensor pod said nothing.

“Well, we have enough to list it, right?”

“No,” the sensor pod answered.

“That’s it? No?”

It went quiet again, dragging its light over the walls.

Cal got up close to the screens, but they were impossible to decipher. It was all the First Ones’ language.

“Tell me where these chambers are,” he said.

The Intention, Three Years Ago

The trick was variety, and the spaceship knew it. Every morning there were lists of things to fix, and Cal fixed them, even though the comp drones could do it better. One day, a year or so after launch, the ship’s computer had sent Cal out into the forest to look for what it called a gratuitous passenger. A stowaway? The sinking terror of a stranger being on the ship, unseen.

Cal looked through the forest for two days, ready to kill. But he found nothing, nobody.

Like so many things, it had just been to keep him busy.

Like so many things, Cal had thought a few days after his daughter was born. Like everything.

When Elena was seven they came out of light speed near an abandoned series of military installations. The Intention didn’t really have shuttles. They were more like crewed artillery shells shot at a planet. Cal and Valia slid down a ladder into one and it sealed up behind them, leaving Elena to read books in her quarters. When they were strapped in it fired off and they roared down into the atmosphere. It landed in the mountains outside the colony. The walk out of the mountains was long, and neither of their hearts were in it, but finally they were crouched on a ridge looking down at the colony.

It hadn’t been badly damaged, and Cal’s heart leaped when he saw a person walking down one of the streets.

“Shit,” Cal said. “It’s still inhabited.”

Valia whistled, and Cal laughed.

“This is us, honey. We make contact with a lost colony. The pools task us to be the experts on it until one of the expedition ships arrives. We go back to Earth and get teaching gigs at university.”

Valia turned to him and smiled. That smile—so perfectly hers—a mix of joy and exhaustion. Her eye socket leaped away from her face and she stared at him, still smiling, and then leaned forward and caught herself with her hands, and she puked, and fell flat, dead.

Cal didn’t know what he did next. He might remember being by the shuttle, holding Valia under the arms, but not looking at her face. Maybe a pistol roaring in his hand. Maybe dead colonists in the gulley where the shuttle had landed. He was sure he dragged Valia back into the shuttle. And back on The Intention he remembered very clearly holding Elena as the med bots worked on Valia, and she cried quietly, the brave girl, and he was proud and heartbroken, and only later he thought that he might’ve covered her eyes or taken her away so she couldn’t see the med bots moving around her mother, leaning close with their faces full of optics, irrigating a wound they knew they couldn’t fix.

Amara Station

“Early First Ones were largely corporeal,” the sensor pod said, and they moved down a ladder into the first chamber.

“They would’ve moved throughout this station via the tracks you see placed throughout.”

The ladder led down into a simple room. There were old, overstuffed chairs. A few plates left on the table. The food that had been on them had long since turned to powder.

“This space was clearly not used by First Ones, which of course have no need for sustenance of this type,” the sensor pod said.

“So who?”

“Humans, presumably,” it answered.

Stating the obvious, Cal thought, and knew that meant that the sensor pod was as lost as he was. It shined the light on a hatch in the middle of the floor as if politely suggesting that Cal go through it.

He slipped his pistol free and gestured.

“I’ll open, but you first.”

The hatch came up easily under Cal’s hands and the sensor pod lowered into it, the blackness inside swallowing it up.

After a long pause, the sensor pod spoke.

“Biological material is present.”

The Intention

In Cal’s mind, the months following Valia’s death were clear and perfect and dark. It was as if he came into focus when he lost her, and even during just walking the narrow hallway of the ship it was impossible to lose himself, to forget for even a moment that she was gone. It’s because of beginnings and ends, he’d thought at the time: Anytime I start walking on this ship I’m moving toward or away from Elena, my girl. Valia’s girl too.

Elena cried herself exhausted, and then worse than the tears, he caught her staring at him at weird times. As he was raising a fork to his mouth, maybe, and in that stare he could see that Elena knew he could fix it. He was her dad, and he should be able to bring her mother back.

So he drank, and sent inquiries into the pools to see if he could come back to Earth, and received the refusals, and drank, and began to sleep in the forest.

His darkest moment was standing in the trees, catching a sound on the false wind, and realizing that it was Elena, crying. And staying there, knowing that he couldn’t face her.

Then there was a day, two years after Valia’s death, when he woke up and walked through the command center, got a cup of coffee, and topped it off with whiskey. He stood thinking. Or no; letting the cold rush of silence that had become his mind hiss through him. A thought floated through the silence: Elena would be hiding, waiting to scare him.

He walked the halls, looking for her. She wasn’t there and she wasn’t in her room and finally she could only be in the forest. And yes she was, in the river, wedged into a knuckle of fake rocks, her forehead gently bruised where she’d fallen. Drowned.

Amara Station

The biological material was survivors.

They were thinly stretched between striated metallic frames.

It took Cal a moment to understand what they were; at first he’d have said that they were meat, and as his mind tried to make sense of it, he’d say that they were some kind of bio scaffolding that the pools had used for something.

As with Valia, her eye having leaped away from her face; as with Elena, knowing she was in the dark forest; as with waking alone on the ship every day since; as with the moment the geezix appeared, smiling, the perfect countenance of his daughter: there was an edging horror.

They were people.

“How,” was all Cal could say.

“Stasis fluids,” the pod said. “Very reliable and straightforward. They are grown in the above vats and leaked across the biological material to maintain it against degradation.”

“They’re alive?”

“Yes. It is unclear, however, how the stasis vats are powered. Likely a solar source, perhaps a satellite we did not detect, or a collection point on a moon.” The sensor pod paused. “The separate power source indicates the importance of these biological specimens.”

Specimens. Three of them. It was like looking at stretched anatomical drawings. The feet disappeared into metallic clamps and the legs were peeled in all directions, stretched muscles, flesh flayed in open deltas. The guts were more complex, hanging in heavy arrangements and supported by discrete, sturdy frames. The arms were flayed like the legs, but the heads were masterpieces, opened in all directions, like flesh supernovae. They were all damp with the moisture trickling down across them from the vats above, the droplets making slow, predictable journeys across the bone and muscle, and finally disappearing into the foot manacles.

They were looking at him.

“Congratulations,” the sensor pod said. “This colony is inhabited.”

Later, Cal pulled himself out of the access hatch and into the still air. The sensor pod had stayed below, and Cal stood in the darkness above ground, waiting for his eyes to adjust. They didn’t, and finally he felt the geezix’s hand in his own, leading him away from the hatch, and helping him sit down on a stone.

“What did you find down there, Daddy?”

Cal listened to the trees shift above them.

“Will you tell me the truth about something?”

The geezix’s head settled on his shoulder, a perfect approximation of how Elena used to do it.

“Your voice, Daddy. You’re sad.”

“Just tell me. If I kill you, you’d come back, right?”

“Daddy,” it whispered.

Sometimes, in the dark forest, Cal thought about the First Ones’ sense of humor. The First Ones’ thought pools were brilliant and could tell you things about why you loved a certain humble woman named Valia, and why it turned you on when she shook her head and smiled kindly and in response to your own joke she said so cute, so dumb, but when they tried to joke it always fell flat. There was something about humor, and also about comfort, that they did not understand, these both being emotional moments that reach from one person to another. Bridges, in a sense.

Thus, the geezix.

He could feel it watching him in the darkness.

“So do we get to stay here?” it asked.

“You want to stay?”

“I know you do.”

Do I? Cal thought. That old, sodden animal that had become his mind ran futures: Running the ship into the sun with him and the geezix on it—wonderful, freeing. Burning the monstrosities below, putting them out of their misery—right. Staying and studying the colony until a survey ship arrived—procedure.

“You must be hungry,” Cal said.

The geezix came to its feet.

“Yes, Daddy. I am! Can we eat something?”

I’ve never asked it that before, Cal thought. It doesn’t need to eat.

“Sure. Follow me.”

The geezix laughed and followed him.

Cal walked out of the park, past the floating animals, and into the hills. The shuttle was on a flat plane, and inside it he flipped the overheads on, turning the dark world outside into a flat black sheet, with the geezix standing in it, smiling at him.

“I like han-gerbers.”

“I know. This shuttle only has little things, though. Simple things.”

Cal collected a portable heating cell, and enough food for both of them, and carried it all back into the park, the geezix following, kicking rocks. They sat by the access hatch and Cal unfolded the heating element. It bathed them in light, and more slowly, warmth. He peeled the foil off of two meals and handed one to the geezix.

“The right thing to do, honey, is burn them.”

The geezix looked a little concerned.

“Isn’t it dangerous to burn things?”

“They’ve been suffering for a long, long time.”

“Then let’s do it.”

Its voice had exactly that determined quality that Elena’s sometimes had. Cal looked up and saw it smiling and chewing, holding a hand to its cheek to keep the mashed potatoes from falling out of the hole in its face.

“But you’re right, anyway. We can’t burn them.”

“But you said we should.”

Cal imagined the pod dashing back and forth in panic as he tried to light the monstrosities below on fire. He caught himself.

“Not monsters. They’re people down there.”

The geezix nodded, trying to take another bite of food.

The pod floated out of the hatch and settled into a slow orbit around them.

“You’ve completed full diagnostics on the systems?”

“Yes,” the pod answered.

“Can we move them?” Cal asked.

“It will be very difficult. There is risk to the patients.”

Risk? Have you seen them? And just imagine the descendant of the First Ones that did this to them in the first place saying with a straight face risk.

“How much risk?”

“An acceptable level.”

“All right. Send the shuttle back up for the med bots. Bring them all and tell them to bring as many supplies as they can carry.”

The pod did not answer, which told Cal it was thinking about what he said.

“You have a problem with that order?”

“The survivors are most valuable in situ.”

“Valuable?”

“Their arrangement. The historical importance of the devices.”

“They might have something important to say, right? They’re not going to talk all strung up like that.”

The pod said nothing.

“I’m getting them out of there. Try to stop me if you want to.”

Cal knew it was an empty rebellion on his part. The pod wouldn’t have to stop him. It could just tell the med bots not to come down. He’d be left here in the darkness, angry, staring at the geezix.

But for some reason the pod didn’t push the point.

“Understood. Remote launching shuttle now. Med bots will be on site within the hour.”

“Yay,” the geezix said. It was watching something crawl across the ground.

“Did you find a bug?” he said, then added, “honey.”

The geezix looked up at him, its eyes glowing.

“Yes, Daddy. Have you ever seen one like this?”

Cal leaned over. The bug trundling between the geezix’s feet was a round, heavy beetle.

“Yes, I’ve seen them before.”

“It looks like a button.”

“Yeah.”

The Intention

The day the geezix had arrived, Cal had reached the end. That was how he thought of it, as if his life until now was a tunnel, and he’d reached a dead end. Valia dead. Elena dead. And the worst part was knowing what kind of father he’d been to his little girl since Valia died.

Had it been a week since he’d found Elena drowned? Maybe. Time had changed. It was pain now, and when he was awake he mostly just tried to stop it with booze. After a little while he wasn’t even awake when he was awake. There was a fire smoldering inside his skull. He was dead bodies sewn together, a bunch of dead memories in a cold soup swirling around the fire in his head.

He was in a hallway he didn’t remember, deep in the ship, walking. The pistol was in his hand. A ship this size, once it arrived back at Earth—how long would it take to find a body way down here? Would they ever?

He sat down, leaned against the bulkhead, gritted his teeth, and lifted the pistol.

“Daddy?”

The voice was soft. Elena’s, definitely. And there she was, ten feet down the hallway.

Something wonderful washed over Cal. Peace, relief, forgiveness. It was like waking from a dream to realize that the world itself is not as cruel as your mind is.

He stepped toward her, knelt, and took her in his arms.

He knew right away. Maybe it was the smell of her; maybe it was the look in her eyes. He shoved her and ran away from the sound of her crying for him.

Later, in the guts of the ship trying to avoid the geezix, Cal did his research from a computer terminal in the databases. It hadn’t been touched in a year, given the fuzz of dust covering it. He learned that the First Ones sometimes re-tasked biological matter, too. It was the best substrate for something biological-looking. Valia and Elena had been melted down and turned into something that was meant to keep Cal going. A geezix was the slang. The official name was long.

Cal avoided it for weeks. Which is to say he hid.

But it kept coming, calling Daddy through the hallways, crying to be tucked in, crying that it was hungry, crying that it was scared. Lonely. Cold.

Finally, he walked out of the depths of the ship and found his geezix.

Amara Station

It turned out to be even harder to rescue the colonists than the pod had thought. The stasis protocols were hardwired to exactly five outside power sources: A collection point on a moon, two satellites, a bank of batteries, and a terribly ingenious First Ones device that used the minute movements of the specimen’ internal organs to power the stasis tech. If the moon failed, if the sun failed, if the batteries failed, still the tormented hearts of the specimens would keep the tormented hearts of the specimens alive.

There were exactly five security protocols, too. The minute the med bots starting unscrewing panels, messages fired off to old First Ones military installations and dead comms centers. There’d be no answer, of course, and the pod bored Cal with the info it was digging up in the archives. The military installations and defunct comms centers that the stasis protocols were contacting were part of an offshoot from one of the core First Ones’ civilizations, the one that had left observable space after they won the war. Nobody really knew much about them, even the First Ones who had stayed to rule over humanity’s old colonies and the home system.

Each colonist was tied into so much that, as Cal watched the med bots work, it seemed that rather than removing the colonists from the station, they were taking the station apart. Where each colonist was, webbed across the odd stasis protocol frames, was at the top of large columns that stretched down into the structure. The med bots disassembled the ceiling and Cal hovered the shuttle over the open structure to slowly lift each column out. Only once they were removed and laid across the dead grass outside, now under massive phosphos that the med bots had brought down from the ship, did they dare try and separate them from the machinery.

Cal sat in the darkness outside the range of the phosphos and watched as the med bots worked. The geezix sat next to him. It had the beetle and would lift it to eye level, drop it, and capture it again before it could get away.

“Let it go,” he said, when he couldn’t take it anymore.

The geezix mashed its palm onto the beetle. When it removed its hand only a wet spot was left where the beetle was. The geezix sniffed its palm.

“Get to the shuttle,” Cal said. “We’re leaving.”

The Intention

Three hours later Cal was in his bunk, thinking about drinking enough whiskey to go to sleep. Being asleep didn’t sound any better than being awake, though, and he lay in his bunk waiting for the motivation to do one or the other.

A pong sounded next to his bunk.

“The inhabitants are aboard.”

“In medbay?”

“Yes,” the med bot answered.

“I’ll be right there.”

Something moved in the corner.

“Are we leaving, Daddy?”

Cal’s gut fell, and he sat up quick, banging his head on the low ceiling above his bunk. He held his forehead and stared at the geezix as it stared back, smiling.

“How did you get in here?”

“The door.”

Cal went over the memory of coming back—he’d been tired, but he’d seen the geezix walk off toward the forest. He’d walked in the room alone.

“I came in by myself.”

The geezix stood up and walked to the wall. It opened a panel and there was a short, dark tunnel behind it. Cal had no idea it was there.

“Silly Daddy.”

Instead of answering, Cal washed his face and jogged the three decks up the medbay. He lost the geezix after just a few steps and it called out for him, but he kept jogging, until its voice was lost in the maze of ship’s passages behind him.

In the medbay, three beds were folded out from the walls. Each was covered with a sheet.

“Wait. Are they alive?”

A med bot lowered from its place in the ceiling struts. It had three slowly rotating lamps for eyes. It didn’t look at Cal, but instead at the bodies on the tables.

“Oh yes. All three inhabitants survived. It was a complicated task, but made simpler by the quality of the original workmanship.”

Interesting moment to compliment your ancestors, Cal thought.

“Their musculature was peeled off of their bones, but carefully, as to retain most of the nerve connections. It seemed important to the designers that they feel everything. There were also a great deal of aesthetic considerations in the work.”

“What do you mean?”

“The peeled muscles were placed and trimmed in ways to produce symmetry in presentation.”

“Why?”

“I cannot be sure. Given the concern over nerve connections, and symmetry, I’d think of them as pieces of art.”

“They were people. Colonists. Prisoners of war.”

“Of course, and excellent sources for historical data, I’m sure. You must be very proud and excited to get to work. My own work was largely successful, although I fear they will not be the people that they once were.”

“If they’re alive, why did you cover them in sheets?”

“Their wounds are unique. Steps were taken, but they still might be difficult for you to look at. And there is the matter of their skin. It was completely removed. I have replaced it with a self-replicating bio scaffold that, given enough time, should produce something much like their original skin.”

“What’s their mindset like?”

“Two of them are deeply dissociative. They will need a great deal of time to recover, if they ever do. The third seems responsive. I will medicate him in preparation for your discussion.”

“Don’t do that.”

“He is responsive, but has been in a terrible state for a long, long time. He may not talk to you.”

“That’s his choice.” Cal paused. “Did you put it together?”

The med bot looked at him.

“It?”

“The geezix.”

It paused. It had not expected the question.

“Your daughter was shaped using the medbay technology, which includes the capabilities of units like this one.”

Forget it, Cal thought. You already knew all this.

“Wake up the colonist. I want to talk to him.”

Beside the medbay was a small rec room. It was attached to the cafeteria by an automated tunnel system, and as Cal waited for the first colonist to come in, he ordered two coffees. But did they even have coffee on the colony? He thought about summoning the pod and asking it to comb the records, then decided not to.

He heard a soft scuffing sound outside the door.

The door slid open. The figure that came through wore loose scrubs, the same kind the geezix had worn when it first appeared. The scrubs were damp from the inside, blossoming here and there with moisture.

The head was covered too, in a tailored paper mask. Cal could see the edges of exposed red flesh through the eyeholes. The mouth slit widened when the figure saw Cal.

“Sit down. Are you hungry? Thirsty?”

The figure moved slowly to the chair and lowered itself.

“Water.”

Cal turned to the panel next to him.

“Water,” he said. “Twelve ounces. Room temperature.”

A moment later the panel opened and a glass of water was there. Cal placed it on the table.

“Do you need help?”

“No.”

“Are you in pain?”

He shook his head.

“I asked the med bots to make sure there wasn’t any pain.”

The colonist stared at the deck beneath his feet, then finally up at Cal.

“What is happening?”

“You’re on a ship called The Intention. It’s a long-range exploration vessel. Our mission right now is to rediscover and catalog installations that were lost in the wars, or forgotten about after.”

“Wars.”

“Our best information is that you were on a military outpost. What’s your name?”

The man blinked slowly.

“I’m Jonathon.”

“Nice to meet you,” Cal said.

Jonathon looked at the glass of water and then at his hands.

“What is happening?” he asked again.

“You’re on my ship. We discovered your outpost and we stopped to see if there were still people here.”

“So we won the wars?” Jonathon asked.

What can I say to this? No. We didn’t win. That might terrify Jonathon.

“You’re safe now.”

Jonathon was still looking at his hands.

“What did they do to me?”

“I’m not sure.”

I’m not trained for this, Cal thought. Valia would be so much better at this. He could imagine just turning her loose on Jonathon—help him, he’d say, and then accept that he himself wouldn’t know how to. He’d disappear into the vastness of the ship.

“What am I wearing?”

“You can walk, right?”

“Yes.”

“Come with me,” Cal said.

The dead forest stretched out into the darkness. On the bank, Cal helped Jonathon lower himself onto the dry grass, and then sat next to him.

“Still no pain?”

“Stop asking.”

“Sorry. I haven’t talked to another person in two years. I probably wasn’t great at it even back then.”

“You’re alone? Out here?” the man said. “Where is everyone else?”

“What’s the last thing you remember?”

“Lights in the sky. And there was this roaring. It was. We . . . ”

A kind of deep sadness settled into the man, and he settled back onto the grass.

“I’ll just be honest,” Cal began. “I found your outpost a week ago. Records say it was a military base, but I think the First Ones took it over. It’s not a military base anymore.”

“What is it?”

“It’s been made to look like an ancient Earth amusement park.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a place that people took children. There were rides, they called them—big metallic structures—and they accelerated the riders, and had loops, drops, that kind of thing. They were exciting.”

The man reached slowly for the water and lifted it to his lips. He took a small sip and moaned.

“I’ve been thirsty for so long.”

“Can you confirm that your outpost was a military base?”

“Confirm?”

There was something in the way the man said it that Cal recognized. He was trying to lie.

“Look, we lost the war to the First Ones a hundred years ago. Any secrets you swore to keep don’t mean anything to anyone but me.”

He sipped again.

“We housed a mech wing.”

Something moved in the dark trees. The man reflexively lowered his hand to the grass, as if looking for something.

“Am I on a ship?”

“Yes. An exploration vessel.”

“With just you on it?”

“There used to be three of us. My wife and my daughter.”

Something flashed in the trees; it was the geezix’s eyes.

“What’s out there?”

“People call it a geezix. It’s made of biological material. Made to look like my daughter.”

“Made? Is it a bot?”

“Like one. A bot made of flesh.”

The geezix stepped slowly out from behind the tree.

“Daddy? Is this one of the people we found?”

“Yes.”

“Can I talk to him?”

“Later, honey.”

“But I’m bored.”

“Go out into the forest. Find something interesting.”

The geezix smiled.

“OK. I will.”

It turned and walked into the darkness.

“Her name was Elena,” Cal said. “She drowned two years ago. Just after, they sent the geezix.”

“Why?”

“The First Ones think we need things to keep us busy.”

“Or we’ll fight again,” the man said, with a certain satisfaction.

“No. I don’t think they’re scared of that. We’re zoo animals to them. The ship, the tasks, the geezix. They know I loved Valia, my wife, but they also know that I loved Elena so much that without her I wouldn’t make it. So they gave her back, in their way.”

The man raised the water to his lips and sipped.

“How long will it stay out there?”

Cal shrugged.

“It’s probably watching us.”

A long moment of silence passed, and Cal focused on the darkness, trying to see the flash of the geezix’s dull eyes. The motion of the branches and leaves occasionally fooled him—a slight, almost invisible twitch, and he’d think here, it’s coming back. But then nothing would emerge from the darkness and he’d realize it was just the trees slowly rotting.

“What did you call it? An amusement park?”

“Yes.”

“Why did they turn our base into an amusement park?”

“I don’t know. If I had to guess, it’s like a museum. A way for the First Ones to learn about humans.”

The man lowered the cup and his hand went again to something that he was used to being at his side. A gun, Cal imagined.

“Don’t lie this time. What did they do to us?”

I can’t do this, Cal thought. Valia would be better. All I can do is give him the truth.

“I don’t know for sure. The bots won’t say. But I think the First Ones turned you into rides.”

“Like the machines?”

The First Ones would slide themselves into the nervous systems of those people and ride their nerves, flash through their brains, thrill at their sensations. They’d become their sensations. And the park above was a museum piece. An antechamber to the real rides.

“I don’t know for sure either. But you’re free now, Jonathon. They’re gone and you’re free.”

The man’s energy didn’t last long. After sitting on the dead grass and looking out into the dark forest for a few more minutes, he asked to go somewhere he could sleep. Cal helped him stand and they went back up to the medbay. The bot was waiting at the door, hunched over, its eyes slowly rotating. It was motherly in a way that made Cal’s palms itch.

With the man resting in his cot, Cal went to the databases a deck up. It was a huge room of data cores stretching the whole mile-height of the ship. Most of it was inaccessible to Cal, but there was a single table set aside.

He sat down at the table and a screen emerged.

The colony was easy to find. The last records were as the pod had reported—a human military establishment, likely a launching pad for a division of mechs. Ten years before the end of the war it fell behind the advancing First Ones’ lines, and ten years after that, the war ended.

The last detail in the database said no survivors. As Cal watched it the writing changed. Three survivors, it said. Cal was listed as the planetary authority, and The Intention was listed as a research platform, not an exploratory vessel.

I have to change that, he thought. I have to get these people back to Earth. There’s no way they’ll want to stay near Amara.

Cal stood and stretched. He needed sleep too, but of course he could not go back to his quarters, knowing now that the geezix had a secret way in. How many times had it snuck in and watched him sleep, or listened as he suffered through nightmares, trying to capture words to use on him, trying, with its little part-robot, part-corpse soul to figure him out?

Cal walked into the databases and lay down next to one. It was warm, and after a moment his thoughts fell away, and he went to sleep.

The next time he saw Jonathon he was not wearing the paper mask. A shiny, tender skin had formed over the material that the med bot had placed over him, and he was sitting in the rec room adjacent to the medbay, a plate of food in front of him.

“Mind if I join you?”

Jonathon shrugged.

“Sit. I’m trying to guess what that bot made.”

Cal sat down and placed his own tray in front of him. He had slept for a very long time, and was hungry, but something told him to wait for Jonathon to start.

“It’s supposed to be mung bean cake.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“Well then, you won’t be disappointed. It’s nothing like what it’s supposed to be.”

Jonathon pawed the table for his fork, found it with his somewhat weak, numb hands, and slowly lifted it. He cut a corner off of the mung bean cake and took a bite. Cal chopped his in half and ate it quickly.

“You like it?”

“Sure,” Jonathon answered.

“They make other things. Don’t order any meat, though. It never tastes right.”

Jonathon placed his fork on the table and leaned back in his chair. He looked exhausted already, although he must’ve just woken up. Cal wondered how close he looked to how he had in life. Although his skin was a little shinier than Cal had seen on another adult, Jonathon was handsome.

“You know what whiskey is?”

“You kidding? You got any?”

Cal pulled his flask from his pocket and slid it over to Jonathon. The man slowly lifted it to his lips, sipped, and sighed heavily.

“Who are the other survivors?”

“I don’t know,” Cal said. “We can try to wake them up soon. Maybe you know them.”

Jonathon sipped again.

“Of course I know them. There were only two hundred people on the base. Half of them flew mech swarms. The rest of us ran the base.”

Us—that meant that Jonathon wasn’t a pilot. Cal would’ve guessed he was a commander of some kind. Maybe of the whole base. Records in the databases had indicated that the mech wing was a naval unit. Cal struggled to remember old naval ranks.

“You’d be an admiral, then.”

Jonathon laughed, coughed, and laughed again.

“I programmed the mess bots.” He smiled painfully. “I was the cook.”

Cal laughed too and gestured for the flask.

“Maybe you can help with ours.”

“What did you mean, earlier, when you said they made us into rides?”

Shit, Cal thought. He realized that he was hoping that Jonathon would drink some of the whiskey, would begin to talk about life in the colony, maybe tell stories about what it’s like to control a flock of robo-cooks on a base where everyone else flies a wing of combat mechs. Cal had been hoping he wouldn’t want to talk about where he’d been found, and how.

“Like I said, it’s a guess. This outpost was overrun ten years before the wars ended. The First Ones travel in discrete communities, like cities, but huge. Swarms of cities. The one that took your outpost disappeared after the wars, so we don’t know much about them. That’s probably why they sent me out here, to see if we could learn anything about the vanished cousins.”

“Yeah, I remember,” Jonathon said, taking the flask back. “Pilots used to say when you pick them up on the sensors it’s like you’re looking at a wall of ships that goes forever in all three dimensions.”

“Yeah. But like I said, we don’t know much about the ones that took Amara Station. We know that some of the First Ones were not corporeal. They were more like bursts of electricity. Like, I don’t know, thoughts. Given how they left you in there—nerves intact, conscious, kept alive—I’m thinking that they tried to turn you into a roller coaster. Maybe so they could understand amusement parks.”

Jonathon took the flask back and sipped.

“Ride?”

“They rode your nerves. Your ganglia. Your memories.”

“Why?” Jonathon breathed, trying to grasp what Cal was saying.

“I don’t know. To understand you, maybe. Do you remember anything about the wars?”

“Yeah. We were killing them. The same pilots that told me about the First Ones’ swarms told me that a good mech pilot could filet them like a fish.”

“Maybe they were scared of you.”

“Does that explain what they did to us?”

“No.”

But maybe it did. Cal had read about ancient wars in which fierce enemies were hung from walls, or turned into myths, or eaten.

“If you were killing them, how did they take Amara Station?”

Jonathon sat quietly for a second.

“I remember now. A distress call. They sent the mech wing out to investigate. They knew it was a risk. They were saying it when they were leaving. The First Ones must’ve hit us when all the mechs were out.”

Jonathon raised the flask again then set it on the table, empty.

“Impressive.”

“Gotta be to win drinking contests with mech pilots.”

Cal wanted to ask Jonathon what he remembered about after the First Ones took the station. He’d been turned into something terrible, but the First Ones had clearly cherished him, in a way. It was hard to imagine how to begin that question, though. But of course Jonathon would be asked eventually—either by the pods, or the med bots, or by the First Ones and human hangers-on that would come to study Amara Station.

“What was it like?”

Jonathon stared for a long moment.

“Dark. I thought I was dead. And then I drifted. Sometimes I was there just enough to realize that I had died and that I was wrong about everything. Hell was real. It is dark and it hurts. But then I drifted again. Everything that came before seemed like a dream.”

Jonathon stared at his feet.

“You’re safe now,” Cal said. “As soon as they let me, I’m taking this ship back to Earth. I’m taking you home.”

Jonathon raised his head.

“I am home, Cal. My home is Amara Station. I’m an officer there, not on Earth.”

“You were an officer,” Cal said, then caught himself. “I’m sorry.”

The other man sighed and slowly raised himself to his feet.

“You’re right. But you’re wrong too. The army I was in got killed off. I was captured. I was tortured.”

Jonathon looked down at him, and there was something in his eyes that seemed very unlike a cook’s. My eyes used to look like that, Cal thought. Those are the eyes that Valia would’ve fallen in love with. I lost those eyes in the forest, in the geezix, in the emptiness and silence of the ship.

“But they’re gone. And I’m still here.”

Jonathon walked slowly into the adjoining medbay. Before he went inside he looked over his shoulder.

“I want to go to Amara Station tomorrow.”

That night Cal lay down by the computer cores again. It was warm, almost like sleeping next to a living thing, and it felt private. He’d never seen the geezix here. Perhaps it could not find him in the databases.

But he couldn’t sleep. His mind was sharp and running, flicking back and forth between the past and the present, all the while mourning what he was now. A man stuck in a ship, rotting away in orbit around maybe the sickest place he’d ever seen.

And Jonathon wants to go back down there?

I’m sober, he realized. That’s why I can’t stop thinking.

Without whiskey numbing him to it, Cal could see that his thoughts were a separate living thing inside him. They roared on and on in the dark, dead forest decks above him, and he knew that when he finally did fall asleep, they’d still be up there, haunting the dead trees.

Cal sighed and stared up into the darkness. He tried to let it fill him, to let it pour into the dead forest behind his eyes, to blind him to it.

You love forests so much because you are basically a forest, Valia had said once.

Wait, not once. It was their first date.

Cal could remember thinking a long time about where to take Valia. She was smarter than him, and beautiful, and had a way of looking at him that felt like she could see everything in his future, and it made her laugh a little. He’d chosen to take her on a hike after considering everything else, knowing that she’d either hate walking through a forest together—or, he hoped, love it. She did, and as they trudged up the trail she talked about work, her passion for lexicography (“Words’ secrets,” she’d said, although he still didn’t exactly understand what it was), and her favorite books.

At the summit of the mountain she’d asked him why he decided to take her hiking.

“I don’t know. I love forests. I thought you might too.”

“What do you love about them?”

“The trees, and the way the light falls through them . . . ” Cal struggled to put words to it. “And the leaves. A thousand little blades of light.”

“Oh, I get it. You love forests so much because you are basically a forest.”

Cal hadn’t understood what she meant, but she had that future-look, so he didn’t ask questions.

“Daddy,” a soft voice said.

Cal could see it standing in the darkness, its hands crossed shyly.

“There’s doors everywhere,” it said. And then almost apologetically: “I know them all.”

“It’s OK, honey.”

Cal propped himself up on an elbow.

“Go back into the forest. I’ll see you tomorrow. We’ll go down to the planet.”

“All right.”

The geezix stood there, looking at him.

“There’s no one anywhere on this ship, except the sick people,” it said. “It’s just . . . There’s no one except us.”

“Come here,” Cal said.

The geezix walked to him and lay down. In the darkness he could see something. In his daughter he would’ve called mischief.

“What did the daddy tree say to the baby tree?”

“What?”

“Leaf me alone.”

It laughed, holding both hands over its mouth, as if it was embarrassed.

“Go to sleep, honey,” Cal said, and settled in next to it.

When Cal woke up, the geezix was gone. He walked to his quarters, took a shower, and made coffee. Taking his first sip, turning around in the small cabin, he saw the geezix standing on his bed.

“Daddy, one of the sick people is waiting by the shuttles.”

“He’s already down there?”

It nodded.

“He talked to me. His name is Jon.”

“What did he say?”

“That he knew how to make pancakes, and if I knew what they were.”

“Do you?”

“Shoes, right Daddy?”

“Yeah, shoes.”

Cal blew on his coffee, gulped it down, and found his pistol.

“You’re coming to the planet, right?”

The geezix angled its head and affected a silly voice.

“I planned-it.”

“What?”

“Planet. Planned-it.”

“Why are you joking so much?”

“’Cuz you like it.”

Cal walked to the shuttle bay, and the geezix followed. It sang songs as they walked, which Cal couldn’t remember it doing before. Maybe talking to Jonathon had inspired it somehow; maybe it has been bored all this time. Maybe it hates being on this ship as much as I do.

In the shuttle bay, Jonathon was standing next to the shuttle that they had used the most. It was striped with scorch marks from going through the atmosphere, and Jonathon stood there, running his finger along the border of one of them.

“Good morning, Jonathon.”

He turned. His skin had taken hold and looked almost entirely natural. He was a young-looking, rugged man.

“I’m ready to go.”

“Are you? You’ve eaten?”

“What am I, your patient?”

“Yeah. You’re my patient.”

“No I’m not. I belonged to that annoying med bot.”

The way he said it got Cal’s attention.

“What about the med bot?”

Jonathon returned his attention to the scorch marks. Finally, he answered: “I put it to sleep.”

“Well, who is taking care of you three?”

“No one. Who’s taking care of you?”

Cal shook his head and cued the shuttle door open. The geezix, who had been hanging back behind him, rushed past into the shuttle, and Jonathon followed it. Cal followed. Inside, the computers had raised stacked displays of numbers and trajectories. Amara Station hovered in the middle of the space, spinning slowly, a small throbbing icon where the actual station was. As the door closed the shuttle sank into the launch bay.

“You’ll want to sit back in that seat,” Cal said. The geezix had already arranged itself in its own seat and was kicking its feet back and forth in excitement.

Jonathon settled himself back, and so did Cal. When the countdown finished, the displays around them dimmed, and the shuttle leaped out of the ship, thrusting to the planet below. Cal felt himself mercilessly pressed into his seat.

It left the ship, and after the initial burn, rolled over. The overhead panel peeled back and they could see the planet below as the shuttle passed onto the permanent nightside of the planet.

The shuttle slowed and descended toward Amara Station, the graphic of the planet turning also, to indicate their progress.

Finally they set down in the hills. When the doors opened the geezix leaped out of its seat and ran out into the darkness.

“She’s been on that ship a long time,” Jonathon said. Cal didn’t know quite how to answer, so he followed the geezix, pulling his pistol belt straight.

They walked over the same ancient wash of pebbles that they had when they arrived, the geezix kicking at them just as it had before.

The lights that the bots had erected over the structures illuminated them, an island of light on the dark planet: the large metallic animals hung there, staring down at them as they approached.

“What in the fuck,” Jonathon said.

“Those weren’t there when this was a mech station?”

“It was all underground. Invisible from here.”

Jonathon looked at the geezix and smiled.

“I used to hike out here sometimes. There were wild lupas.”

“What?” the geezix said.

“Dogs.”

It kept staring.

“You don’t know what a dog is?”

The geezix shook its head and Jonathon crouched, as a dog about to run would.

“Lupas have this beautiful fur, and long legs, and you can feel them watching you. If you get close enough you can see their eyes look like your mom’s.”

Whether Jonathon had meant it as a joke or hyperbole, the word mom froze the geezix.

“They do?”

“Oh yes. And they talk. Not much, just a couple words, but when you get close, hey, they say. Hey good man. You have food, good man?”

“How’d they learn to talk?”

“They just listened.”

The geezix stared out into the darkness.

“Those lupas died a hundred years ago,” Cal said. “The First Ones attacked this place. They scorch planets. Nothing on the surface lives.”

Cal walked ahead and under the large metal animals into the pathways below. The landscape was stripped open and illuminated by the bots that had removed the three colonists. Cal stood on the edge of the pit. One of the bots was still working on the old computer cores down below, releasing the occasional flash of phosphor torchlight.

“Daddy, I’m hungry,” the geezix said.

“There’s food over by that tower.” He pointed out in the darkness.

“All right.”

The geezix walked off into the dark slowly.

“Why’d you lie to her?” Jonathon asked, suddenly standing closer.

“Her? It doesn’t need to eat, Jonathon. It just says things like that so I feel closer to it.”

Jonathon was quiet, so Cal continued.

“It’s not a kid, Jon. It’s a robot. A corpse.” Jonathon was still quiet, so Cal tried to say it more nicely. “She’s a made thing, Jon.”

“Yeah. But she is what she thinks she is, too. Like me and you and everybody else.”

Jonathon held his gaze for a moment, and then followed the geezix out into the darkness.

Cal spent the rest of the afternoon watching the bots in the pit excavate the old base. A couple hours after they parted company, Jon returned with the geezix, carrying armfuls of vines and an odd, dark fruit. They dropped them a few feet from the edge of the pit.

“Amaran water plums,” Jon said. “Come try. I used to gather them. We had a bot that could make a crumble out of these that would make you cry.”

“Cry?” the geezix said.

“Because it was so good.”

Jon looked at Cal, and Cal realized he must’ve had an odd look on his face.

“See?” said Jon. “They scoured it, but not everything died. Takes more than fire to kill these water plums.”

The plums were sweet but hard as tensed muscle. The geezix ate five of them, smiling as the juice dribbled down its chin. Cal ate two. Jon juggled with the plums that were left, and the geezix screamed in joy.

Back on The Intention, Cal went to the databases and lay down next to the warm computer core. His mind was still racing—from the dead forest above to lupas calling Jon a good man to the First Ones scouring a planet then saving three people to worship in their odd way. It was all so terrible.

Cal sat awake until he realized that he was waiting for the geezix. It did not come, and somehow the darkness in the databases made him less tired, so finally he left the databases and walked up to the medbay. It was empty, and the three med bots were standing in the corners, powered down.

He found Jon, the other two patients, and the geezix next door eating mung bean cake.

Jon greeted him as if he’d just entered his restaurant.

“Hey, Cal. Have a seat. This is Dr. Yuro Weirnan, Chief Medical Officer of the station, and Alex Pietro. Mung bean cake?” A little quieter: “And you have any whiskey? The doc and I could use it.”

Cal sat across from Alex, a small boy, dressed in the same damp scrubs that Jon had been in, down to the tailored mask, and a woman with large eyes. She stared at him, absently running her hand over her smooth head.

“This is my daddy,” the geezix said.

“Call me Cal. I’m the human element of the crew.” He thought about how to tell them what they needed to know. “Have you already talked to Jon?” he asked finally, taking his flask out and passing it to the doctor first.

“Yes.”

The doctor sipped the whiskey and struggled to find words.

“Thank you for freeing us.”

Cal shrugged. He wasn’t sure what he could say to express the fact that he hadn’t come looking for them, or even chosen to be here. If it was up to me, I’d have gotten back into the ship and left and never have found you, Cal thought.

The doctor shuddered and sipped the whiskey again.

“My daddy is the captain of this ship,” the geezix said. “He’s been on it for a thousand years.”

“It’s a bot, right?” the doctor said.

“Yes.”

“Looks biological. I’ve never seen one like it.”

The boy shifted in his chair and put his head down on his arms. The doctor leaned forward.

“I’m going to take him back to bed. But I want a tour of the ship.”

Cal nodded. “Sure. You can go anywhere.”

“Jon says it’s big.” She smiled. “I want you to give me a tour.”

“All right.”

Cal accepted the flask from her, and she led the boy from the room. Jon and the geezix started playing some kind of guessing game. The geezix laughed each time it got something right, and after a few moments Cal got lost watching it leaning forward, smiling, its hands on its knees. Self-consciously it touched its cheek where the flesh gaped and wiped away a bit of spittle. For just a bare second it seemed like a real child.

Cal stood up, fetched a cup, and poured a finger of whiskey into it.

“Here, Jon. You need anything else?”

The man looked up, startled.

“No, nothing.”

“All right. I’ll see you soon.”

“Bye, Daddy,” the geezix said, smiling hugely at him.

“Bye, honey.”

Cal met the doctor outside the medbay. She didn’t seem to have any destination in mind, and didn’t seem to want to talk much, so Cal took her through the hangars first. There were ten, and all but one were empty. Similarly, there were ten decks of quarters, all empty, and Cal took her through each. After they’d walked for twenty minutes she stopped for a second and placed her hand on the wall.

“I have to sit, Cal. That whiskey. I’m light-headed.”

He led her to the bottom of the ship. There was an old view portal, a room with a translucent floor looking out on the featureless world of Amara. Cal helped the doctor sit on the one bench in the room, which was rounded so two observers could look down at the planet while sitting across from each other.

“It didn’t used to look like that,” the doctor finally said. “It was green. There were so many forests on Amara there was a base rule that you couldn’t leave the base alone. You might get lost.”

“Jon said he used to go walking.”

She smiled weakly.

“Everyone loved him. He did anything he wanted. And he’d always bring back those water plums.” She paused for a moment, and her smile drew back into her face. “Milena would go with him.”

“Who?”

“His daughter.”

Of course he had a daughter, Cal thought.

“I can get you off of this ship, I think. The thought pools will probably let you go back to Earth.” The doctor stared at the world below her. “I offered Jon the same. He wants to stay.”

“What’s Earth like now?”

“Crowded.”

“Well, compared to this . . . ”

Cal smiled.

“Yeah. Compared to this, the only place that isn’t crowded is Amara.”

The doctor let another quiet moment pass.

“I don’t know, Cal. I don’t have anything back on Earth. Even back then, a hundred years ago . . . ” she breathed those words out as if they engendered vertigo. “Even then I was raised on an orbital station. I never felt at home on Earth. I don’t know what I’d do there. I suppose I’ll stay here and work with Jon.”

“Work with him?”

“You didn’t know? He told me first thing this morning. There’s an amusement park down on the planet. The First Ones built it. He’s going to rebuild it. Make it beautiful. Maybe people will come.”

“But why?”

She raised her eyes to his.

“After what’s happened, and where we are, what do we really have?” she asked. “What else can we do?”

Cal nodded and offered the doctor the whiskey again. She took it gratefully.

That night the geezix found him in the databases. It talked to him about what it had done that day—seeing the planet, picking the plums, walking all over the ship with Jon and the boy, Alex.

“He feels better, Daddy. You should see. I think they’re forgetting what happened to them.”

“I hope so.”

“Did you know Jon had a little girl?”

“Yes.”

“She died.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Are you going to help with the roller coasters? Jon is going to make them work again. He’s going to bury the old base. He’s going to bring plants down and raise them and let them spread. He says that maybe in a long long time the lupas will come back.”

“That’s not going to happen, honey.”

The geezix’s smile faltered, and it shook its head, knowing it had to agree with Cal.

“Yes, Daddy. Yes. It’s a stupid thing to think.”

It stopped talking then, and they both sat in the dark stillness of the databases. He felt the geezix breathing next to him and thought, why not help rebuild the park? What have I done for years now except hide in hallways? I don’t want to go back to Earth either. I want to stay here and see Jon and Yuro every day eating mung bean cake. I want to try and bring the dead forest back to life.

It’s not stupid, he thought. There’s no stupid. There’s no impossible. There’s just the darkness and what we’ll do with it. He opened his mouth to tell the geezix he would help with the park, and that as much as his broken heart could, he loved it. He loved her.

But he couldn’t say it. After a moment of trying he heard the geezix snoring lightly.

Cal put his head back against the warm computer core.

Tomorrow, he thought. Tomorrow I’ll be able to say it.

About the Author

Mike Buckley is a widely-published short story writer whose work has appeared in national journals such as The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Southern California Review, and Clarkesworld, Daily Science Fiction, and Escape Pod. His work has been anthologized numerous times, including in The Best American Non-Required Reading, 2003, and the upcoming Red Hen LA Writers Anthology. His debut collection of short fiction, Miniature Men, was released in 2011.

Grayer Than Lead, Heavier Than Snow

Yukimi Ogawa

A chain of patterns, drawn on opaque glass in subtle colors, framed the front door of the Hotel, the most luxurious accommodation in this country. The huge chandelier above the main lobby sprinkled uneven light over the plush carpet that danced and made you feel slightly mesmerized. The carpet was a riot of colors, only if you had the eye for such things—all of them mingled perfectly so that to a casual eye it looked somewhere between gray and beige, a soothing tone that only left impressions of colors to your subconscious.

The ceiling was so high your neck might snap when your eyes trailed the cord above the chandelier. From the niches on the walls, indirect lights illuminated the whole place; some of them were flickery, some steady, the overall rhythm weaving an entirely different pattern that buzzed the air in the lobby and the lounge right beside it. And the lounge—there were peculiarly arranged flowers every few blocks of tables and chairs, and you could not help but stop to stare at those. Before you knew it you were escorted by the staff, winding over the floor in a pattern that made your legs absurdly weary, and by the time you reach your seat, you’d never want to lift your bottom once you sink onto one of those softest cushions. The tall wall at the back was covered with colored tiles, some of them even with holographic effects that worked on your neuro-system to slow the ingestion of caffeine and alcohol, so that you could maybe have just one more drink before leaving.

Every line, every curve, inviting folks into the comfort.

I might want to look over the whole lounge from the mezzanine, she thought, dreaming for just one sip of their extraordinarily expensive tea, until the moment she saw the displeased expression on the face of the person she would soon have to deal with.

She almost cowered away, but then forcibly braced herself. Maybe, maybe, this was the chance for their skills to come out there, for them to stop lurking in shadows as if they were worthless.

The other person stood up, most of her features typical of islanders, though she was oddly tall for a local. Her hair was very dark, a black that almost glistened, and other surfaces visible on her were all evenly spread with a pale, pale indigo. Too perfect: just enough to sate the curiosity of the foreign tourists who came to this island for the exoticism of the islanders’ skin, but not too explicit to steal spotlight from the human locals.

The city official android smiled her perfect smile, which had no warmth meant for the plain-skinned craftsperson. “Craftsperson Kiriko, glad you are here,” the half-human said, as she placed a sum of money that was worth two days’ meals for the craftsperson on the table, beside the apparently untouched cup of coffee. “Sorry to have to move you as soon as you have arrived, but let us go up to one of the rooms in the tower wing. I cannot discuss business with a colorless citizen here, obviously.” She looked around, as if emphasizing the point. “To see our guest, Doctor Planet.”

“Obviously,” was the only reply Kiriko offered as they both wound their way out of the lounge and climbed the stairs to the mezzanine, where they could take the lift up the tower wing.

“As we already communicated in the letter sent to you, Doctor Planet is having an issue with his health, and we . . . cannot talk to the clinic about this.” The ando pressed the button for one of the topmost floors.

Kiriko wanted to ask why, but also knew she was in no position to be asking whys. “What do you require of us?” she said instead, into the official’s back, eyeing the gold-gilded mirrors on the wall and the ceiling of the lift.

“Alleviate Doctor’s discomfort. He takes some . . . doses regularly. But the aftermath of the recent storm is keeping the next ferry away, and his supplies are running out.”

A bell tinged somewhere above, and the doors slid open. “What about the Aeros?” Kiriko asked, frowning. She knew the government used aircrafts in case of emergency, though they rarely carried people. They’d fly over, drop supplies, and then be gone without even touching down. The storm itself had gone a few days ago, and the winds weren’t that bad at the moment.

“For the same reason we cannot talk to the clinic, we cannot open the Aero line for this. Hope you understand.” From the way she said it, Kiriko knew this android—Mizuha, as the letter demanding the craftsperson’s presence had stated the attending official’s name was—didn’t care if Kiriko understood or not in the slightest. “Just until he gets his supplies. It is not that much to ask, is it?”

Kiriko knew her mentor at her pattern atelier hated talking to the andos, and he probably wasn’t alone. The andos were an open secret of the city, not because they weren’t fully human beings, but because they were manufactured, with their calculated colors and patterns, in this place where you must be born with special complexions to be considered colored or patterned, where everything created or tampered with by the hands of humans was regarded as lowly fake. In a city where coloring your nails or your eyelids was deemed illegal.

And that their general attitude toward humans was for some reason disdainful—even hostile in the case of colorless and patternless humans—only added to the discomfort of the human islanders. For Kiriko, it was easier, though; many colorful and patterned folks looked down upon people like her, those who had no special colors or patterns on their skin to entertain foreign tourists, and to Kiriko it was just another pack of people disrespecting her. To the colorful and patterned who didn’t have much experience with disrespect, the andos must have been almost unbearable.

“No, it is not,” Kiriko replied. “As long as you pay enough for the service.” That Mizuha looked younger than her helped her keep calm, even though how old the andos looked didn’t really matter.

They seemed to have finally arrived at their destination. Mizuha knocked on the door, and then there was a click. After a few words exchanged, they were invited into one of the most luxurious rooms of the most expensive hotel in this country.

And what was there to do, but to gasp, gape, and stare around?

The curtains, of a material that Kiriko had never seen! Was it woven with threads of all the colors existent and imaginable, one for each thread? And the window behind them—at a glance the glass was plain, the most transparent thing she had ever looked through, but no, oh no, there were lines etched onto the surface, shallow and deep, deep and shallow, twining and stretching to provide the best possible light filter for the scenery outside. And the lampshades. And the bed canopy. Furniture. If she strained her ears, she could hear the water running through the pipes under the floor; the way it sounded . . . maybe even the inside of the pipes were patterned, to play music that soothed your . . .

“Ms. Craftsperson,” Mizuha called, sighing. “Stop looking stupid and get to work.”

Flushing, Kiriko closed her mouth and swallowed. “Yes. Of course.”

Doctor Planet was seated on the long sofa, beside which Mizuha stood straight, very much likely looking down her nose at Kiriko on purpose. The man looked ill at ease on that fancy sofa, fidgeting with a pouch in his hands. An old man, very pale tan color, eyes the color of the sky just before snowfall. He muttered something quietly, as if . . . sulking. Mizuha said something in the official language in reply.

Kiriko swallowed again. “First—can we have a sample of the dose that he needs?” she asked the half-human.

“Of course.” Mizuha smiled. Doctor Planet made a weak sound when the attending ando gestured for the pouch in his hand, as if parting with the precious portion of the dose was too much for him. “Doctor Planet.” Mizuha repeated gently, plying the small pouch out of his hand and giving it to Kiriko.

“Thank you,” said the craftsperson as she took it. “Now, can you ask him if I can get sketches of patterns from his body parts?”

Mizuha’s smile vanished at an impossible speed. “I don’t know what you mean at all. He is a foreigner, he is not patterned, as you can well see. Oh, of course.” The half-human’s lips curved just a fraction at the corner. “I knew you colorless folks see the world differently than us. But not that differently.”

Kiriko let out a sound that was a perfect cross between a sigh and laughter. She hated this kind of dance, really, but a long time working in the city had trained her somewhat well. “You are quite right about that,” she said, over another sigh. “For the remedy to actually work on Doctor, we need to see the pattern woven by his blood flows, skin firmness, and the refractivity of elements over his parts and his body, and combinations thereof. We call these silent patterns, and everything—even you—have many of these all over. We will control the efficiency of this dose of his using these. Oh, of course.” She forced a smile on her face. “We see the world differently, this is what only the colorless, experienced craftspersons can do. It might be too much for you to understand?”

Mizuha’s lower lip stiffened, ever so slightly. Then she said, “Perhaps you might want to learn the official language, so that you wouldn’t have to rely on entities like us, on an occasion such as this.”

“Oh great, then we can do such business as this directly with the tourists, can’t we? I thought you officials deliberately took the opportunity away from us colorless laborers for learning the language, from the way things look?”

Mizuha glared at Kiriko. Even Doctor Planet seemed to realize something was wrong, and he said something to Mizuha, who replied with a reassuring smile. After a few more words exchanged, Doctor Planet nodded weakly.

“You’re asking too much, and you know that,” Mizuha said, her perfect mask back on. “This has got to be really, really good.”

“You lied,” Kiriko’s mentor said, without looking up from his drawing.

Kiriko groaned, thumping loudly down onto her favorite flat cushion. “I didn’t know what this ‘dose’ really was, so I had to collect every piece of information available, right? Our usual method may not work.”

The atelier’s dealings were mostly true to its name: putting out patterned textiles for furniture and small objects for decorations, to be used in restaurants and shops, and sometimes, rich houses. But when these two craftspersons added a few tricks to the patterns they used on these things, chairs looked more comfortable, commodities on shelves seemed more attractive, and food even tasted better under certain lampshades. They also applied the same principles on minor body discomforts—and it worked. Though not everybody believed in them.

But her mentor was right. If all they needed was to enhance the efficiency of the medication, they had a handful of generic patterns they could choose from. Customized patterns were required for more complex cases such as persistent allergic reactions with rare allergens, or maybe pregnant women. This time they could probably just pick out ready-made-patterned starch paper and tell Doctor Planet to take the remaining doses—cut down to halves or thirds or even less—wrapped in it.

Kiriko had wanted to say something, anything, that might have looked as though she was striking back. Even if there was no point in striking back at the colorful. “And I got enough time to see the interior of the Hotel’s room because of that!” She sighed at the memory. “Oh, anyway. Let’s just get working on this, sensei.”

Her mentor frowned, put his brush down, and finally looked up at her. “My dear apprentice.”

“What? What are you going to scold me for now?”

“Why are you so eager this time?”

She cocked her head. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“You do know what I mean. You’ve always been quite intimidated by the andos. When you had to work with them before, you kept procrastinating forever, until I actually had to scold you like your father or something.”

“You are my mentor, that’s your job.”

“I’m not that much older than you and it hurts my sensitive little heart when I have to do that.”

Under other circumstances Kiriko would have laughed, but now, she pulled another cushion out of a pile and hugged it. “You have been to the Hotel, haven’t you?”

“I have.”

“Then you must know.” She fidgeted with the tassel at a corner of the cushion. “That whole place. It was made by someone like us.”

Every color, every pattern used in the building had been very, very carefully calculated; not a single one stood out to distract the guests or the staff, not a single one jarred the view without blending with the structure of the building itself. And yet, every one of them served the purpose of the bigger picture, of making everyone there feel comfortable, making them want to come back. It couldn’t have been achieved by one craftsperson alone. There must have been a team of them. Which meant that there had been a time when even the colorless people like Kiriko herself or her mentor, those regarded worthless in this island where tourism was the only means for it to survive as a nation, had been respected, had more say on the way things worked.

Her mentor fell silent for a while. Then he said, “If you think things can be like that again . . . ”

“No,” she cut him short, unable to hear the entire sentence. “But still. I cannot stop thinking about it. We could . . . maybe make one tiny step, impress this one ando-san, if we keep trying and some younger persons do the same, and then maybe in one hundred years’ time . . . ”

Her mentor only smiled weakly in reply. That smile always made her heart contract—there was too much behind it. Then he picked up another brush. “Do your best with each project. That’s the only thing we can do. Right? I guess you don’t need my input for that kind of simple remedy anyway, do you?”

“I’ll look into the medication and then let you know.”

And then minutes later, it turned out that it was nothing like what they had expected.

“So basically, you tricked us into supporting a criminal,” said Kiriko, doing everything to not grind her teeth loud enough for others to hear.

Mizuha shrugged like a foreigner. “You think you’d have had a choice?”

“That’s just outright rude and inhumane,” Kiriko’s voice came out louder and shrill, no longer able to restrict herself.

Mizuha lazily looked around, and Kiriko winced; they were both seated on the stiff sofas near the reception of the National Archives building, which most of the city andos belonged to. Entities like Mizuha usually worked at this site and went out to attend foreign guests when needed, following orders from the city. Here, it was hard to tell humans from andos by looks, but Kiriko thought she could, anyway, by the way some of the people did nothing to hide their disdain toward the craftsperson.

Really—they should have guessed. It was not hard to guess. Of course, the city wouldn’t have involved a colorless craftsperson in a treatment of an ordinary health-related issue. But they’d wrongly assumed that it was more about Doctor, not the thing they had to actually touch.

There was no mistaking the crazy pattern that this “medication” wove under the atelier’s customized microscope, which not only enlarged the object but also helped the craftspersons’ eyes take apart elements to grasp the silent pattern they needed for the particular case. General medicines had a way of spreading out over regular waves of a pattern, which forced the pattern from an affected area to submerge and smooth out. But this . . . this thing seemed to send out lines that were so irregular that they felt regular in the end, incessant and persistent, every line holding the potential of striking others into irregularity.

Of course, she knew a narcotic when she saw it.

Mizuha snorted. “For whatever reason, we cannot afford to displease Doctor at the moment. We have already paid and will pay grand again once you turn over the remedy, Craftsperson. You took this job for the money, right?”

“No!” Kiriko forgot herself again. “We took it so you bigheaded city tengu might remember that we are not worthless!”

Mizuha blinked, and Kiriko winced again; Kiriko had had no intention of saying that. She felt heat surging up to her face. “You may not have noticed,” she said, trying to cover embarrassment, “but the Hotel was full of work by craftspersons like us. When I saw the interior of that place, I thought you knew how the city used to value our patterns. But obviously, I was mistaken.”

Kiriko grabbed a bundle out of her bag and slammed it on the table between them. To her surprise, Mizuha flinched.

“Take one ground moontime-primrose seed, with just a few grains of Doctor Planet’s dose, wrapped in one sheet of the patterned starch paper here.” She pressed her hand harder on the bundle when Mizuha reached out for it. “Apothecary-prepared moontime-primrose seed. One sheet at a time. Use water only. Alcohol or caffeine is strictly prohibited. Understand?”

After a few moments of eye-to-eye, silent fight, Mizuha seemed to concede and nodded. Kiriko withdrew her hand and Mizuha took the bundle. “How many?” Mizuha asked without opening it.

“Two weeks’ worth. Certainly the tides will clear by that time?”

“Let us hope,” Mizuha said as she stood and disappeared down the stairs without another glance spared for the craftsperson.

Kiriko wanted very much to forget about this incident, but it haunted her dreams. She’d helped a drug addict. On the third night she woke crying from a dream where she contorted every pattern on the surface of the world with mere touches; she looked up into the dim morning gray to find her mentor peering down at her. On the floor beside him, beside the mattress, there was a tray with a steaming pot of tea. “Sorry, did I wake you?” she sounded like sandpaper.

“Almost morning, anyway. Have a sip.”

She sat up and took the lukewarm cup from him. Fragrant and pungent at the same time, but the aftertaste was sweet. Something finer than the everyday green tea.

“It’s not your fault, in case you aren’t aware,” he said.

Kiriko groaned. “What is this?”

“A strong-green blend with moontime-primrose leaf.”

“Oh you sadistic idiot.”

Slowly the sun rose, its light seeping through their window, row by row of tiles of glass. The first row, six tiles with different sandblasted patterns, was gradually warming the two craftspersons with the blood-flow-improving effect. The second row would work more radically.

“When I moved to the city, when I came to this place and knew that I had been right about what potential these patterns held, and the people—calling me liar all my life in my old village—were wrong all along, I thought I might deserve some respect for the work I could do.” With a pang, she realized it had been more than ten years since. “I was young and stupid.”

“You’re still young, my dear apprentice. And at least your service this time gained a lot of money.”

“Can I buy some fancy inks?”

He thought about it. “Just one.”

“Two.”

“No way.”

“One for me, and one for you.”

“I’d prefer a brush in that case.”

They laughed and Kiriko got out of bed. The sun had reached the bottommost row, and the patterns down there simply enhanced the light so that there was no sleeping under it.

That afternoon saw an unexpected guest to the atelier. For a moment Kiriko didn’t recognize the person standing at their door, with their hair pinned and shoved into a cap, and a pair of glasses that made it difficult for her to see the pattern of their irises. But her mentor running up the stairs and shutting the door and locking it behind him was good enough a hint. She frowned as she spotted the pale indigo skin. “Mizuha-san?” she asked, still unsure.

The ando removed her cap and showed her dark, gorgeous hair. “I just wanted to talk to you.”

“Is everything all right with Doctor Planet?”

“It is. May I come in?”

Kiriko prepared tea as Mizuha climbed the raised floor of the atelier’s reception space. When she returned with a pot and tray of cups, Mizuha was seated at the low table in a neat kneeling position. It looked so unlike the ando that Kiriko laughed.

“What?”

“Nothing. Have our mediocre tea.”

Mizuha obliged. Then she said, “Actually, I was surprised that Doctor really loved your remedy. I didn’t think it would work that well.”

Kiriko groaned.

“What now?”

“It means we successfully helped an addict.”

Mizuha smiled, and for a moment, Kiriko wondered if she’d just seen the ando’s genuine smile for the first time. “Think of it this way: you helped the nation.”

“I always want to help people rather than the country.”

“Would you count me as part of your people?”

Kiriko looked up from her cup. She didn’t like looking straight into others’ eyes, as the patterns of irises always made her uneasy for some reason. But now, she couldn’t help it. “Yes,” after a moment she said, “if you count us, the colorless, as part of your people.”

To Kiriko’s surprise, Mizuha looked hurt at that. “I guess you’re right.” She sighed into her own cup. “Can you perhaps explain what you did with that starch paper? I’m curious.”

Kiriko tried to shrug, but she wasn’t good at that foreign gesture. “We combined the dose’s silent pattern and one of our remedy patterns for enhancing water and airflow, and thus created a new pattern and put that down on the starch paper. The seed of moontime-primrose has the property of strengthening the effect of a stimulant. The leaf doesn’t work that way, only the seed. The seed also somehow works on the ragged lines of the drug, making it easier for it to blend with the flow-inducing pattern.”

Kiriko wondered if Mizuha was following her and paused. The ando nodded.

“Okay. So when all the things mingle perfectly with one another, Doctor can feel the effect of the drug much better as it soars through his systems with water. Also moontime-primrose seeds are relatively less soluble, so their larger particles leave their traces along the way, smearing his systems with echoes of the concoction’s effect, making for a longer duration of the drug’s work on him. This is working well just because he’d had less of that thing lately due to its running out, the deficiency itself working as another stimulant. When he gets to have enough of the drug again, the remedy won’t give the same result.”

“Oh.”

Mizuha sipped her tea while the craftsperson waited for hers to cool down a little. The silence was awkward; one where you had but to wonder why you chose to be alone with the other being at all.

So when Mizuha spoke again, Kiriko jumped. “Can you make such things for any substance of choice?”

Kiriko put down her cup and held Mizuha’s eyes. “What are you saying?”

Mizuha seemed to be groping for words. Kiriko realized the ando’s perfect mask had been carefully made, not a default feature of the entities like her. Mizuha looked down into her tea. “I’m not asking you to help another drug addict,” she said. “But there are things that we cannot have enough of. Have you ever thought about that?”

“The luxury of colorful folks’ lives is beyond my imagination.” Kiriko tried her tea again—now wonderfully lukewarm. “That pattern will probably work for many things that are addictive . . . more or less. But there will be a lot of margin for . . . error, so to speak. So I would not recommend applying it for another use.” She frowned to herself. “No. I would prohibit that, as the issuer.”

Mizuha looked up at Kiriko with the slightest frown Kiriko had ever seen; she’d have missed it if she did not have the eye for the thin lines near Mizuha’s eyes. “Do you think you are in any position of telling us what not to do?”

“I am,” replied Kiriko as she grabbed a handful of rice cracker dices from a bowl. “This is my job and I know what I’m doing. You do take your own job seriously yourself, don’t you?”

“Yes. But we are built so. Literally. That is different.”

“Is it?” She popped a few crackers into her mouth.

“You can make yourself known for this,” Mizuha pushed on. “You might be able to raise your place in the society. You might even leave your name etched onto history.”

Kiriko chewed loudly. She thought about the Hotel—she couldn’t help it. The ando’s eyes seemed to see something deep inside Kiriko’s eyes. She swallowed, purposefully loud again. “Leave my name as a supporter of addicts? I don’t think so.”

“I said—”

Just then the phone rang. This time they both jumped. “Excuse me,” Kiriko said to the other woman and climbed down the floor to walk to the other side of the earthen corridor. The call was from one of the atelier’s dedicated patrons, a good friend of the craftspersons. Kiriko promised to get back to them, and they suggested dropping by. Kiriko hung up, laughing; when she turned and sobered, Mizuha was nowhere to be seen.

And her fingers got sweaty on the quilt of the receiver cover, as the feeling of something missing clouded her mind like a thin yet unsweepable fog.

“So?”

Kiriko looked up from under the workshop table, hugging her knees. “She stole it,” her voice came out quite wet.

“That . . . Mizuha-san?”

“Yes.”

“She stole what?”

“The bag of our industrial waste.”

Her mentor frowned. “I don’t see—” Then he shook his head a little. “Oh. You mean, the print panel waste.”

For most of their remedy patterns, they made wooden print panels so that they could reuse them many times. With many tailor-made patterns for each client, they used thick, waterproof paper that had been made by other craftspersons who specialized in the material. But for this one project, they knew that there would be no repeat orders, and they had to make the patterned starch paper for a very speedy turnaround, so they went with a softer resin material, which was easy to handle but quick to deteriorate. They’d never had to dispose of wooden and paper print panels before; Kiriko had cracked this soft panel into a few pieces this time and put them into a bag along with scrap cloth, broken brushes, and used towels. And that bag was gone after Mizuha had left.

Kiriko’s mentor sighed, knelt down, and then sat cross-legged on the floor. “They probably won’t be able to reproduce that pattern. Even if they do manage that, then they’ll have the pigment concoction to consider. Just photocopying it won’t work.”

“I know. What scares me though is . . . ”

“Now are you scared?”

Kiriko slapped his knee. “My concern is, she sounded so desperate. As if any tiny bit of help mattered, even from a colorless. Why would the ando-san need the amplifier pattern? What does she want to amplify?” She rubbed her face. “And they aren’t exactly human, so we don’t know what abilities they actually possess.”

Her mentor sighed again. “Even if they do, miraculously do, manage to replicate the pattern, get the exact concoction, apply that pattern quite the right way, and get the desired result, after all of those efforts, by then you don’t really count it your doing, your fault. They decided to go with whatever they needed.”

“But I dropped the seed of it all at their foot.”

“Doctor Planet dropped the seed, not you.”

Kiriko rested her forehead on her knees, covered her head with her arms. “Or maybe the government who decided to be so nice to foreigners.” Her voice came out muffled.

“That’s more like it, yes. Now come on, we have to discuss the updates on Hama-san’s pattern, he is complaining about new symptoms.”

“Okay.” Kiriko sniffed. “I’m sorry, sensei.”

“Stop being sorry, my dear apprentice, and get to work. Just as always.”

Soon the ferries and cargo ships started to crowd the island’s not-so-large port. Doctor Planet was probably gone, or at least, he wasn’t having trouble with his daily doses. As she hung the dyed cloths to dry in their small courtyard, Kiriko thought maybe she would never have to hear from Mizuha again. And for a long time, she didn’t.

That afternoon, the early-winter air was crisp and silvery. Kiriko hurried along the High Street near the port, bundles of delivery for a restaurant in her hands and in her backpack. She didn’t particularly enjoy walking along the tourist-crowded High Street—just as no colorless laborer usually did—and kept her eyes low, eager to get to the client’s place.

When she was almost past the park enclosing the port, something tugged her mind at the corner of her eye.

The park was crammed with colors and patterns—dancers welcoming incoming tourists, stalls selling last-minute souvenirs to departing ones. Kiriko looked around and sighed; perhaps too many colors and patterns jarring her tired brain. That happened sometimes. She shook her head and was ready to resume walking.

Then something, again. She turned sharply, the momentum making her whirl with the heavy bundles. But this time she caught it. At the end of the park, quietly overlooking the scene was a tall, pale figure—her expression weary on her young face. Mizuha. Kiriko strained her eyes at the ando.

Something seemed to buzz over Mizuha’s pale skin. Static cracks and holographic flashes here and there. A shiver ran through Kiriko; she had never seen anything like it. She had no idea what it was, but she was sure it was not good. Kiriko readjusted her bundles and backpack and trotted through the crowd.

“Mizuha-san,” she called, when she was close enough to the ando.

Mizuha blinked, as if she had been forcibly plucked out of a dream. “Miss Craftsperson,” Mizuha said, slowly and quietly. “Good day to you.”

“Mizuha-san, is this common with entities like you?”

“What is?”

Kiriko gestured vaguely at Mizuha. “These cracks. Buzzes. I . . . I think something in your systems isn’t working quite right. Do you feel okay?”

And then in front of the craftsperson’s eyes, Mizuha’s perfect mask crushed so suddenly, so fast. “Can you see it? None of our caregiver human workers seem to see this.”

Kiriko’s heart gave a painful thud. “Maybe not all human eyes can see such a thing. When did this start? Do you know how it started?”

“Not exactly when or what, but I have an idea. Look.” Mizuha reached out, trying to touch Kiriko’s arm, maybe, but stopped short as if remembering herself. “Can you perhaps meet me at the National Archives? After office hours?”

“Sure. If you tell me more about how it feels, perhaps I can bring around something that might help?”

Mizuha shook her head. “Not now. I’m sorry, I’m on duty right now. You don’t want to be caught occupying me.”

“I see. At six, then?”

“At six.”

Kiriko nodded and wanted to leave immediately, without a glance, just like the ando had done when they had met at the Archives last time. But she could not help peering over her shoulder. Mizuha’s mask was back in place, mostly, only her right eye twitched as she looked on after Kiriko, a crack appearing and then soon disappearing right beneath it.

The sky was beautiful at dusk as she left the atelier, but by the time she reached the National Archives building more than half of the colors were lost beyond the black of night. There were electric lamps around the building, and near one of them, Kiriko found Mizuha standing. The ando was not alone.

“This is Sakura,” Mizuha said, by way of greeting. “I guess I don’t have to explain why he is here.”

“No,” replied the craftsperson, wincing.

Like Mizuha, this Sakura person—who looked older than Mizuha or Kiriko, with pale, pale pink skin and gray hair and dark-purple eyes—was obviously suffering from the cracks and buzzes that ran along his skin. But it was worse on Sakura. There was always a part or two that twitched and shivered, and the flashes changed colors so rapidly that it made Kiriko dizzy, with innumerable squares and dots of many shades of pink. Kiriko counted about twenty, from the pale color of the whiter part of a cherry blossom, to the eye-piercing beni red. There were tears in Sakura’s eyes constantly, as if he himself could not bear the flashes.

Kiriko swallowed down her pity. “This has to do with the print panel you stole from us.”

Sakura looked down at his feet, but Mizuha held her eyes with the craftsperson. “We didn’t have many choices. Let me talk about the ones we did.”

There was an abandoned park a little away from the Archives. A bench, an elephant-shaped slide, and not much more. Mizuha suggested Kiriko use the bench, but the craftsperson was too restless to be seated and keep still. “So.” She pulled her shawl tighter about her. “You are all tasked with collecting colors?”

“Not all of us,” Mizuha said. “I am not. Sakura is. We all have a color receptor here,” she turned a little, held her hair away from her neck, and tapped her skin there. “Only the receptors on half of us are actually activated. The government archives those rare colors, you know, that have appeared on only a handful of people. It’s difficult to find those, naturally, so some of us take bits of colors from many islanders randomly and compare them with the records. We apply a kind of agent on an islander’s skin, take the colors that bleed out to the agent into our receptors. Then analyze the color and store the info in our facility. This is performed very quickly, with no pain inflicted on the islander, so they usually never even notice anything is happening. But when entities like us, ones with very pale dominant colors conduct this, sometimes we take too much, and strip the affected islander completely of the color in question.”

Kiriko had heard about the incidents, of course; no one was really sure when or how it had started, but there were cases where a colorful person’s color got gradually or suddenly replaced with a gray, a complete gray that was devoid of any tinge at all. In most cases, this graying-down or graying-out robbed the affected islander of their job, or a status in the society. No cause had been quite pinned down so far. It didn’t make Kiriko feel any good knowing the secret behind the most-feared disease of the nation.

“That makes me guess,” Kiriko said, shifting weight on her feet, “when a pale person like Sakura-san takes too much, that topples the balance of elements on the taker’s part, too. Your systems and fluids might not be entirely the same as ours, but how the flows and movements work, and how these affect the air and light around us, work a very similar way.”

“I suppose you are right. We wanted to stop Sakura from doing that. Drawing too much against his will, I mean. And I thought, maybe, your pattern could help us.”

Kiriko’s lips curved into a weak, exhausted smile. “Did it help?”

Mizuha echoed the smile. “No, it didn’t. I should have listened to you. I apologize.”

The craftsperson waved a dismissive hand. “So what exactly did you do?”

“In fact, we got your pattern quite right,” Mizuha said. Sakura quietly walked over to the slide and sat down on the elephant’s head, his back to the other two. “We replicated the pattern not just from what was carved on the material but by calculating the flexibility of the print panel material, the kind and the amount of substances that bled out into the ink out of the panel. Ink composition, too, of course. We were very, very careful. I know how much work you put into it; we cannot create such a thing, we do not have room for epiphany like that, but we can copy.”

Kiriko wondered if this was the closest Mizuha would get to a compliment. “Then what happened?”

“Sakura . . . ” Mizuha eyed the other ando. “Most of us are familiar with some kind of science and chemistry, to deal with human colors and the analyses for them. He is one of the best ones at that. And . . . ”

“He didn’t trust our judgement on the composition,” Kiriko finished the sentence for her.

“Right. And the amount of the ink and the moontime-primrose seed combined with it. I didn’t know that he had done that, and personally helped with transferring the pattern onto his receptor.”

Kiriko sighed. “And instead of preventing his drawing too much from the islander, it only made him not able to stop taking.”

Mizuha nodded. “Thankfully, he didn’t do his first experiment on a human—he did it on a flower. But even now, now that he is not even touching this particular flower, he is somehow still taking, he will keep taking until every flower of the same kind loses its color—the entire species. He cannot stop.”

“Okay. Not okay, but I see the situation with Sakura-san.” She massaged the bridge of her nose. “But what happened to you? Your receptor isn’t active, didn’t you say?”

Mizuha rubbed her upper arms with her hands, as if she was suddenly cold. “We weren’t aware of this, but . . . it looks like the wrong balance within one of us affects other entities like us.”

“You mean, like, this is contagious?”

“Contagious. Yes.” Mizuha nodded as if she finally found the right word. “I’m keeping Sakura away from others right now, telling them he is ill and confined to his cell. But the fact itself that he is not showing up is already having bad influences on them, and I cannot keep this secret forever. And I’m getting worse, too—spreading a little bit of these cracks to the ones closest to me.” She hugged herself tighter. “This must sound ridiculous to you. We half-machines acting like humans.”

Kiriko shook her head. “Flows, energies, elements can work the same way on you as on us, you are built to look just like us. Also—when we customize patterns by combining more than two existing patterns, no matter what the symptom of the particular patient is, there are a few patterns that always work for similar causes. Like, two specific patterns are always used for any patient with severe allergic reactions.” She frowned at herself, realizing she was derailing just a little. “I mean . . . what I’m saying here is, I have a feeling that, no matter how different each of you seems, you share certain parts in your configuration. Which makes it easier for something to affect all of you with one kind of malfunction.”

“You really do see the world differently, don’t you?” Mizuha cocked her head. “I’ve never thought of it that way.”

“Your caregiver humans never told you about that?”

“No. They don’t really give any care for us, in fact. Just some maintenance stuff from time to time. But even so they’ll probably find out something is wrong with Sakura before long, then they’ll look into his receptor. And then mine, too.”

“All right, then.” Kiriko puffed a thin cloud of her breath into the air, whose temperature had dropped in the last hour. “We need a pattern to revert the effect of the wrong pattern on Sakura-san, and also a pattern to prevent damage spreading over you all.”

“What? Is that possible?”

Kiriko tried to shrug, winced as her shoulder gave a strange jolt instead. “I’m sure we can come up with something.”

“Thank you. My pride kept me from asking for your help, I suppose. Until you came up to me and outright offered it. I apologize. For being what I am.”

Kiriko snorted. “Don’t be sorry for such a thing. You cannot help that. Be sorry for not acting sooner for your friend and only for that. Anyway.” She rolled up her sleeves. “Let’s get working.”

The receptor itself couldn’t be seen, as it was embedded under the skin. Mizuha mailed the blueprint of the part along with the leftover configuration of ink and seed to Kiriko, care of the atelier. At the park she had sketched a few patterns that seemed to indicate Sakura’s vulnerability to intense colors; she’d found similar tendencies from parts of Doctor Planet, who was an addict, and Sakura was addicted to the color, too, after all. Kiriko and her mentor made proper drawings of these patterns first, and then started discussing a new pattern that could offset the effect of the original one. Line by careful line they constructed a pattern that could bend the way the world ran over Sakura and his affected systems.

And then there was one more thing they had to do to this offset pattern. They now looked into each line again, added new ones that could change the way light traveled over the first line, to build a new pattern that would only offset the first offset pattern optically. When this optical pattern was a perfect shadow to the first offset pattern, an ordinary eye could detect neither of the two when they were placed one over the other precisely.

“So we use three layers of films here,” her mentor said, as he tapped his long fingers on a roll of thin, transparent film, which had come very, very expensive. “We attach a small piece of the layers of this film on Sakura’s neck, just over where his receptor is located—where, supposedly, everything started. On the inside of the first layer we print the offset pattern with the ink composition altered by Sakura, concocted with a medium to prevent it from drying too fast, so that the pattern will slowly seep over to the receptor. We place another layer of the film, with no pattern on it, and then cover the two layers with one more layer with the optical pattern on the outside. Theoretically speaking, the caregiver humans, or other andos, won’t be able to see something is written on Sakura’s neck.”

Kiriko nodded. “The most dangerous part would be when the ink on the offset pattern is completely drained. Someone with a very keen eye might be able to tell the optical pattern alone there, even though the medium left on the first layer would still work as shadow to the optical pattern more or less.”

“Make sure that happens when he is off duty. Adjust the amount of the medium according to his shift timetable.”

“Yes. The weather forecast, too, for the amount of moisture in the air—there’s going to be a hell of a lot of calculations to make.”

Kiriko handed the patterned films along with the instructions to Mizuha. The ando looked uncomfortable; as she held the bundle between her hands she said, “I told Sakura that he should be here, too. Say his thanks by himself. But . . . ”

“It’s okay.” Kiriko laughed. “Well, how predicable.”

Mizuha sighed. “I’ll make him pay.”

Kiriko laughed again. “You scare me.”

The ando put the bundle inside her coat. “Thank you. This is my thank you. Because I won’t have to lose a friend if this works.”

“I’m sure it works. If you follow instructions. If he follows.”

“I’ll make sure of that.” Mizuha shook her head, a smile playing at her lips. “But how can you be so certain that it will work? I mean, humans are subject to errors, always. And I can only guess what you do here leaves no room for errors.”

Kiriko cocked her head, smiling. “Funny . . . you’re right. I don’t even remember when I stopped worrying about such a thing—our pattern not working. Those my mentor and I build together. We still worry a lot about whether or not a client likes our work, though.” She shook her head a little, and then nodded. “I assure you that it will work. And also . . . ” She pulled another bundle from her backpack and passed it to Mizuha.

Mizuha looked at the craftsperson quizzically. “This is?”

“The blueprint of the color receptor that you provided—it wasn’t marked as Sakura-san’s. So we assumed that you share this same module—at least more or less.”

“You are correct to assume that. That part is one of the few that are identical from one another.”

“Good.” Kiriko nodded. “So we made a small emergency pattern that would work for you all.” She pointed at the bundle with her hand, urging the ando to open it. When Mizuha did, three small objects shaped like tiny wooden pillars came rolling out of a leather pouch. One end of each was carved with a simple pattern. “We usually customize patterns by combining conventional ones. These three patterns are what we believe would work on you if combined precisely. Do you see those tiny cuts on the other ends?” Mizuha nodded. “For ordinary clients we make a pattern with the three overlaid perfectly, but carving that combined thing onto this very hard material would have taken a long, long time. But we believe in your precision. Use the cuts as markers to inflict the stamp precisely at the same place over your receptor, in a very speedy manner. Then you can make the desired pattern on the skin right there. There are receptors there, after all—you won’t need an ink, just the touch of the pattern would be enough to soothe the roused edges of your neuro signals, to stop the fractal progress of the unwanted stimulation within you.”

Mizuha placed the stamps back into the pouch and put the pouch into her breast pocket. “Thank you. I don’t know how I can thank you enough.”

“Do me a favor, then, would you?”

“Anything.”

Kiriko let out a breath. “Thoroughly eliminate the info in your data attached to these patterns, specifically about who made them. We can’t tell how much your caregiver humans know of what you know, so we cannot risk leaving any trace, for the city to hunt us down in case something goes wrong. Don’t make the mistake that we made the other day—leaving a half-broken print panel like that, for you to easily take away.”

Kiriko had expected Mizuha would immediately say yes to that. Instead, silence fell on them like soft snow. When Mizuha spoke, Kiriko could hear lead on the ando’s tongue. “But I want to remember.”

The craftsperson blinked. “What do you want to remember?”

“You. That you helped us all. That you will help us all in the future, yet again, with these patterns. I don’t want to let go of it.” Mizuha shook her head. “But then . . . we cannot share the information that a colorless craftsperson can be trustworthy enough for that. That memory itself would throw off the balance of elements in us.”

Kiriko laughed. “See? You cannot keep my doings secret, one way or the other. Just discard it.”

“We cannot attach the data of a colorless laborer to the patterns. But maybe just your name?” Mizuha looked up and met Kiriko’s eyes. “Just as the brilliant person who came up with this solution. We don’t have to attach data about your being colorless. We’ll remember your name, we’ll always relish your name. Let us remember.”

The colorless craftsperson looked back at the ando, who was apparently young, so young, that her chest ached with protectiveness. But then heard herself saying, “It’s too dangerous . . . ”

“Then we will not attach your name to your patterns. Just your name? We’ll all store these memories in very separate places. And make a map for them when we need to turn to you again, so that our indifferent caregiver humans would never know to connect those.” Mizuha came a step closer. “I don’t want to let go. I’ll make sure those like Sakura understand the importance of your name. Please.”

Kiriko held a hand near Mizuha’s shoulder, as the ando closed another half step. “Not only is it dangerous. You don’t understand. I don’t want to be remembered like that. When I’m remembered, I want it to be as a colorless craftsperson, and my mentor must be there with me, too. Just my name attached to one single work is not the same as me being acknowledged.”

For a moment, Mizuha looked at Kiriko’s hand, as if she wanted to touch it with her own. But she didn’t. “I don’t understand,” she finally said.

“It’s okay.” Kiriko looked up, strained her eyes at the clouds. “Not any information on us. Can you do that?”

At the corner of her eye, Kiriko saw Mizuha nod after a second of hesitation. “Can I remember you?”

“It’s your memory. Do whatever you like with it.”

The air was filled with the hint of moisture—Kiriko could see it and smell it. But it wasn’t yet cold enough—it would be half-snow, half-rain when it fell, that heavy thing that made the ground smeary and ugly, and made people shiver to the core, colorful, colorless, andos all alike.

“And you forgot to collect cash even for the films?” Kiriko’s mentor said to his apprentice who had come back soaked and shaking.

“I’m sorry, sensei. I really am. I give up the new ink.”

“Oh of course. No ink of your choice for the rest of the fiscal year.”

She wrapped her blanket tighter around her and drank warm water from a cup with blood-circulation improving pattern drawn on the bottom. “But ink can be our asset, not just my fancy thing.”

He grinned. “It’s okay, we’ll add an asset to our balance sheet. I’m going to get that brush for me, anyway.”

Kiriko almost dropped her cup. “That’s not fair!”

“It doesn’t have to be. I’m the owner here.”

Kiriko groaned and covered herself entirely in the blanket, head to toe. Her mentor laughed and went away into their workshop. Taking another sip of the warm water, she wondered if there was a reason that no one knew the names of the craftspersons who had worked on the interior of the Hotel. Not the reason that came from the city, or any other colorful entities, but from the old craftspersons themselves.

About the Author

Yukimi Ogawa lives in a small town in Tokyo where she writes in English but never speaks the language. Her stories can be found in such places as Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, and many more.

The Whale Fall at the End of the Universe

Cameron Van Sant

Tristar drifts close enough to a star, close enough that it stands out slightly more than the others, and they wake. The sail on their back unfurls and they feed on the light; their skin and tail scales glow green with photosynthesis. The light is faint and absorbing it only makes them more aware of their hunger, like a handful of water in a drought. They run their tongue over their unused teeth, still sharp in the vacuum of space. They flex their claw hands, wave their long tail.

Tristar doesn’t remember their home star, their parents, or what happened before they entered hibernation. They haven’t seen another person in a long time. They wonder if the home star they can’t remember has extinguished. They think about it for a few years, slowly passing through the star’s light, sleeping and waking.

They don’t remember exactly what a year is, or even a day. To them, a day is the period of being awake before they sleep again. The days are very short so far out from the star with so little energy. They vaguely remember years are related to orbiting, but that isn’t a useful concept while they drift in the expanse between stars. They imagine a year was “several hundred days,” but they weren’t exactly counting. They use the term to mean “a long time.”

Tristar cannot remember looking another person in the eyes. They wonder what that was like as they fall into hibernation again.

Light hits their face and Tristar’s sail unfurls. They wait for the starlight, for the photosynthesis, for the energy. There’s nothing. They turn their head to the light.

It’s not coming from a star. It’s coming from a whale.

The whale is enormous, the size of a city, and each of its four eyes are Tristar’s size and are still in death. It’s a whale fall: a carcass turned home for scavengers living on its body.

Tristar is a scavenger too.

The light that woke Tristar is from the bioluminescent scavengers living on the whale. Tristar peers at the colors in the darkness, mentally plotting their course. They blow from the mouth in the back of their head, the breath they’ve held for many years warm on their lips. With the brief propulsion behind them, they twist their body, and their trajectory turns, gently curves toward the whale fall. They squint against the darkness and against exhaustion.

Tristar sails impotently over the whale’s nose. They shut their eyes. They tried.

They are slapped from their trajectory by a long tail that stretched meters up to them and throws them against the whale fall, tiny bioluminescent creatures scattering in their wake.

The beast that pulled them is mostly one long jutting mouth that is twice Tristar’s size; its smaller body crawling on four squat legs. Its white eyes dimly reflect the bioluminescent glow; the teeth popping from its lips are small but too many, clinking in five orderly rows.

As Tristar backs away, they know why it brought them here. Both the Beast and Tristar will eat at the whale, and after there is no whale left, the Beast will eat Tristar—a healthier and bigger meal than they are now.

Tristar doesn’t have to stay. Gravity is weak here—they could push off, drift back into space, hibernate until they reach another star. Sleeping for years is better than being eaten.

But as they set their teeth into the meat of the whale’s nose, yanking against the gray skin, their jaws remember the lift and fall of chewing, and the buds on their tongue awaken to taste.

Then they remember everything.

Tristar remembers bouncing along in a pocket under a parent’s sail when they were a young hatchling, shielded from radiation until they developed enough immunity themself. The family flew to the Tucanae cluster, Tristar’s skin glowing green from the bombardment of starlight from all directions, munching on the smaller photosynthesizing creatures that lived there. They remember their parents holding their hands, forming them into signs—words that could be seen under light or felt in darkness.

That was many years ago. The stars are parting now, the universe darkening.

The whales dying.

They try not to think about it. Nothing can be done for this one. Tristar eats.

The whale’s fins are peninsulas, its sides great plains, its mouth a cavern. It’s a feast, and it will stay that way for a long time. There is no need to fight for territory. Not yet.

Tristar sleeps peacefully against the whale’s nose, and when they wake, they remember the Beast. They spot it up on the whale’s forehead, shaking its body back and forth to tear meat free.

Tristar pulls themself by their arms, slowly wags their tail in empty space, and they laboriously climb down the whale’s face. Chemicals disintegrated in Tristar’s stomach puff up in a breath in their back mouth, so they have the option to push off and float where they want on the whale fall, orienting themselves with a breath. They don’t dare. They’re afraid they’ll make a mistake and never return.

They take their time. They eat, they sleep. They examine the little bioluminescent creatures, scuttling with little claws, cheerfully glowing rainbow colors.

Tristar thinks about eating them and leaves them be. They’ll reconsider when the feast is nearing the end. They realize the bioluminescent creatures feel Tristar’s shadow the same way Tristar looks over their shoulder for the Beast, but everyone is content with the whale meat. The feast brings a tenuous peace.

Under the whale’s chin, they crawl lower and lower, toward the belly. Down below, they can no longer see the whale’s forehead or the Beast. Their arm muscles throb and they consider sleeping. But when they scan the new distant horizon of the belly, they see the sail.

Suddenly energized, they crawl on and raise their own sail, flashing it up and down like a signal. Eventually, the other person notices Tristar. They flash their own sail back and crawl toward Tristar. Tristar stops on the hill of the jawbone, the stranger stopped below them on the neck.

Tristar then doubts they are the same species. The creature below them is larger, and instead of one large sail, they have four sails organized into two pairs with a top and bottom one, like a butterfly’s wings. Their eyes are slightly closer together, their ears taller. Their skin is red and rough, not like Tristar’s, which is green, growing dim without starlight.

The other signs to Tristar, and Tristar doesn’t understand.

But goddamnit, if that red sail isn’t the most beautiful thing they’ve seen in a long time. Tristar climbs down the hill.

The other teaches Tristar their name, a sign Tristar can repeat but doesn’t understand. They decide to think of the other as “Hunter” because Hunter eats the bioluminescent creatures.

Hunter points away from the whale as if asking a question. Tristar doesn’t understand. Hunter then gestures an egg hatching and growing up into Tristar, and then they point back out into space. Tristar takes it to mean, “Where did you come from?” They look at the stars but don’t recognize them. They wonder how long they slept, where those familiar old stars went. It’s so dark out.

Hunter gestures an egg growing up into themself, and points to a little path of faint stars in the direction of the tail. Tristar peers that way, attempts tease some familiarity from them, but they can’t. They think Hunter is younger, young enough to have traveled from not so far away. Only a few thousand years.

Maybe Hunter’s entire species is younger—newly evolved from a school of Tristar’s species, separating wings and hardening skin for whatever dangers lurked in that cluster of stars.

Hunter shows Tristar their cave—a hole in the whale’s side, barely big enough for the both of them. Shoulder to shoulder, they peer out the hole, conserving warmth and eating morsels of the cave walls.

The feast vanishes into bellies as the years pass, helped by a slightly growing population—some scavengers stumble onto the whale fall, and some give birth here. Tristar and Hunter slowly build a pidgin language, creating vocabulary from their original languages. They exchange stories about people they used to know, stars they’ve seen, delicacies they’ve enjoyed. Tristar learns Hunter is not green because they don’t photosynthesize. Tristar worries how Hunter will eat when the whale ends.

The bioluminescent creatures learned to be wary of them, and the days grow darker. Tristar and Hunter descend to the end of a whale rib, eat meat from the bone, and break the tip off to make a spike. They repeat the process with a second rib, the spikes as long as their arms. They fence and prepare to fight off anything that wants to eat them.

Tristar hasn’t seen the Beast again and doesn’t let Hunter go near the top of the whale’s head.

Hunter dismisses their concerns. “I will kill the Beast,” Hunter says. “We will eat it together.”

Soon the whale fall is mostly bones, and the little meat left means its surface area is smaller, more compact, clinging to bones. The inside of the whale, formerly packed with meat and organs, is now a colossal space, and stars shine through the bones. Tailbones break off, drift away.

One day Tristar wakes up in the curve of a rib, and Hunter is gone.

They scramble in circles, craning their neck. Hunter is nowhere. They look up into the whale bones, up through the empty whale to the topside. They can see something happening in the distance, near the spine, but it’s too dark to tell what. Something thrashes.

Clutching their rib spike, Tristar pushes off the rib bone with their tail, spits out their breath from their back mouth, and they sail through the enormous cavern from the bottom to the top.

Tristar collides into the far side of a rib and hits it so hard the whole whale tilts. Their head appears under something’s feet—the Beast’s—and they see a red flash—Hunter’s sails in the Beast’s mouth. Tristar stabs the spike into the underside of the Beast’s chin. Hunter pulls free, red droplets of blood floating slowly down to the whale, two of their sails ripped and mangled. Hunter punches the Beast in its face with their tail. Tristar slips back beneath the rib and pulls the Beast’s foreleg with them. Bracing themself against the rib with one hand, they pull on the huge leg again and again, slamming the Beast against the rib.

The Beast lies still.

Tristar clambers up the rib and scrambles to Hunter. They put their arms around Hunter and press their hand to the sputtering sail. Hunter cries in their arms, precious water droplets floating up and slowly down.

Out of the corner of their eye, Hunter sees a glow. Hunter and Tristar are surrounded by a circle of little scavengers, ready for new meat.

Tristar waves the rib spike over their head and bares their teeth. The creatures scatter.

Tristar takes Hunter under one arm and Hunter drags the Beast—a simple task in the slight gravity. Tristar hauls them up to the whale skull, and the little creatures who previously hid there scatter in their wake. Tristar peeks down the neck, out the four eyeholes. Once the creatures evacuate, it’s dark except for a soft glow from up the neckhole.

Tristar holds Hunter’s blood in with their own hands. They eat the Beast and feed some to Hunter, who mostly sleeps. When the wound finally clots over, Hunter smiles at Tristar again and strokes their face.

Hunter talks of love, of red and green children growing into a school, of finding fire somewhere, steering the whale to a star.

Tristar doesn’t know if it’s possible for the two of them to have children, even if they were the same species. Regardless, they don’t think it’s a good idea to make any more mouths to feed. Then they realize the real reason this idea makes them uncomfortable.

Tristar looks Hunter in the eye and signs, “I won’t leave you hurt. You don’t have to say anything to keep me here.”

Hunter agrees and looks away, ashamed. Tristar curls up around them and they both fall asleep.

The Beast was large but no whale fall. Tristar and Hunter finish it in about thirty days, eating increasingly smaller portions. When it’s gone, Hunter is strong again and has only two sail segments.

Strange specialized scavengers appear in the skull, who suck any remaining nutrients from the bones. When Tristar looks down the neckhole, most of the other scavengers are gone.

Tristar worries about getting hungry, about forgetting again.

“I will leave,” Tristar tells Hunter.

“No,” Hunter signs.

“It’s been a good few years,” Tristar says, “but this place can barely support one of us. I’ll leave, hibernate, find light to eat, and you can eat the bone eaters.”

“I wasn’t lying when I told you I love you,” Hunter says. “I didn’t say it to keep you taking care of me.”

Tristar thinks it’s easy to fall in love at the end of the universe. But they love Hunter too and can’t deny it.

Hunter kills an armload of the bone-sucking creatures in the skull. Then they take Tristar’s hand, and the two push off with their tails from the whale fall, out toward the brightest star in the sky.

The two fly through space. Tristar corrected the trajectory with an exhale, and Hunter ate half the creatures one day, and the rest the next. Then Hunter’s arms were empty and they fell into hibernation.

Tristar clutched Hunter’s hand. Even if they both forgot, they would help each other; they would remember again. Tristar fell asleep and did not let go.

About the Author

Cameron Van Sant is a transgender writer of speculative fiction. His short stories can be found in Lightspeed Magazine, Queerly Loving Volume Two, and Capricious Magazine: The Gender Diverse Pronouns Issue which was selected for the 2018 James Tiptree Jr. Honor List. He has also written non-fiction for INTO Magazine and You&Me Magazine. He lives in Sacramento, California with his partner. You can find him on Twitter at @cameronvansant.

Separated at Birth? Occultism, Science Fiction,
and Why People Can’t Tell Them Apart

Mark Cole

Things are not always what they appear to be.

For example, take The Suns of Easter Island (1972), a film by French New Wave director Pierre Kast. The basic premise is familiar. So familiar, in fact, that one has to keep reminding oneself that it was made several years before a certain far better-known film. Aliens contact people with unique talents and tell them to come to a remote place to meet them. Most reviewers called it a science fiction film.

And yet it isn’t. Not even close.

It is ultimately about the occult.

The truly strange thing is that it isn’t the only work that has been so badly misidentified.

And perhaps the two have closer ties than we realize.

The connections between occultism and science fiction go back to the very roots of science fiction, to one of the genre’s seminal novels.

Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton is best remembered now for his turgid prose, thanks to an annual writing contest named for him. He was, however, one of those curious figures so common in Victorian society: a nobleman who turned down the Greek crown, was busy in parliamentary politics, and unsuccessfully tried to get his wife committed to the asylum after they separated. Despite his writing style he was one of the most popular authors of his age, penning an impressive number of novels, plays, and poems (and coining a number of familiar phrases such as “the great unwashed” and “the pen is mightier than the sword“). His books ranged from historical epics to mystery, romance, horror, the occult, and a work of science fiction (or perhaps proto-SF), The Coming Race (aka Vril: The Power of the Coming Race).

Published just seven years after Jules Verne’s first science fiction novel, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Vril tells the story of a young man who accidentally discovers a lost civilization deep underground, whose human inhabitants are vastly more evolved than us and wield incredible powers through their mastery of a secret force known as Vril.

It was a highly influential work for the early development of science fiction (there are even claims that the Gene Autry serial, The Phantom Empire, is loosely based on the novel), but, curiously, a lot of real-life occultists adopted Bulwer-Lytton’s idea of Vril.

For that matter, they also adopted several of his other occult ideas. The Rosicrucians even claimed him as their “Grand Patron” (although he denied any connection to them). Various other esoteric groups claimed he had been a member (although some of these claims have been disproved). Nor is it clear whether any of his ideas were actual occult beliefs—or whether he just made them up.

When the earliest enthusiasts for what would become science fiction went looking for works like those of Verne and Wells, there were few such stories to be found. They found a few buried among routine tales of supernatural horror, like Bierce’s “Moxon’s Master,” or ended up reading such works as William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland or Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow.

The first story in Chambers’ collection, “The Repairer of Reputations” is set in the future (1920) and portrays the rise of an American Empire. It is more or less science fiction, although it might all be a delusion. A later story also involves time travel.

However, these stories are all loosely tied together by the supernatural, thanks to the mysterious influence of The King in Yellow, which might be a play that causes insanity in those who read, a strange and decadent person, or a sinister yellow mark.

The House on the Borderland, on the other hand, was set in a lonely mansion with connections to something beyond our limited existence. It offered visions of alternate worlds, a hostile universe full of appalling superhuman intelligences (which would influence Lovecraft’s work) and even a glimpse of the far future and the death of the solar system.

This confusion carried into the early days of the pulp magazine, when science fiction was as likely to appear in magazines featuring weird horror as anywhere else.

The best known of these writers was H. P. Lovecraft, whose stories were filled with the occult, usually involving witchcraft and pagan ceremonies, while these unspeakable and unimaginable cosmic horrors frequently combined immense supernatural powers with incomprehensible alien entities. Ironically, some occultists even claimed that he hadn’t invented his fictional “Elder Gods” and that Cthulhu and the others were all real.

Or one might note influential SF and horror writers like A. Merritt and Fritz Leiber, both of whom were assiduous students of the occult. Both had massive collections of occult books and paraphernalia, and both were as likely to write about the supernatural as science fiction.

Meanwhile, Edgar Rice Burroughs, the creator of Tarzan, borrowed heavily from Helena Blavatsky’s theosophical notions of astral projection for his planetary romances (which is somewhat ironic when you consider that she borrowed heavily from Bulwer-Lytton!).

We tend to forget that the revival of the old classical culture that started during the High Middle Ages gave birth to both modern science and modern occultism.

While most see this revival in a purely positive light, not only did scholars revive the great works of literature and philosophy, but pornography, torture (a major part of the old Roman Law), and, yes, the occult.

In fact, there is even an overlap between the revival of science and the occult as many of the scholars who helped give birth to science, like Albertus Magnus—whose interest in the natural world, which he shared with Aristotle, inspired a lot of the early scientific thinkers like Oresme, Buridan, and Galileo’s “French Scientists”—also explored the occult works of Classical authors like Hermes Trismegistus. In Christopher Marlowe’s play, Doctor Faustus debated the merits of the various disciplines he might study—such as law, philosophy, and theology—before he settled on magic on purely rational grounds. Or consider Giordano Bruno, an occultist who defended heliocentrism because it fit in with his esoteric philosophy, who has somehow become one of the martyrs of science, despite the awkward fact that the transcript of his trial makes no mention of Copernicus!

Adding to the confusion, its practitioners often claimed that they had access to higher levels of reality and frequently called their doctrines the “occult sciences.” Some of these groups, like the Theosophists, actually achieved a strange sort of respectability thanks to such prominent supporters as Thomas Edison, the biologist Alfred Russel Wallace, and the inventor of the vacuum tube, William Crookes.

Nor did it help that a great many scientists threw their enthusiastic support behind spiritualism because it promised an empirical proof for the afterlife and might be able to unlock the mysteries of the universe, if those pesky spirits would ever stop talking about how happy they were.

This led the founder of parapsychology, J. B. Rhine, to attempt a scientific proof of the existence of psychic powers as a first step toward verifying the reality of spiritualism. His work gave a gloss of respectability to psychic powers—at least, until the flaws in his methodology raised too many questions about his conclusions.

However, this didn’t stop editor John W. Campbell from promoting psychic powers within the pages of Astounding Science Fiction. One finds even a dogmatic materialist like Arthur C. Clarke turning out stories about beings evolving into immaterial intelligences in stories like Childhood’s End.

And, as science fiction began to fade at the cinemas and horror and the supernatural became more popular, the supernatural began to play a larger part even in films which made some appeal to science: in 1957 alone, Blood of Dracula featured a scientist trying to perfect her theories of mental powers that would soon bring unlimited power to the world—with the help of an ancient amulet from the Carpathians; Voodoo Woman sent a scientist into the jungle to discover the ancient secret science behind voodoo (which required him to wear a goofy hat during his “research”); From Hell It Came pitted the scientists on a remote island against a tree monster summoned by a curse although our scientists did need to fertilize it a bit to get it to grow and learn that it is radioactive, in the end they merely push it into a swamp (in the most scientific way imaginable, of course), and the islanders decide to pursue science instead of magic; and we get the usual fifties scientific platitudes about everything having a rational explanation before The Disembodied gives us possession and voodoo magic.

Somehow most of these threads seem to have become tangled up in the UFO craze.

After all, it seemed to attract all sorts of reckless speculation, from Chariots of the Gods-style ancient astronauts to Nazis in the hollow Earth.

Curiously, a lot of the stories about alien abduction, fiction or nonfiction (of which Whitley Strieber’s Communion is one of the best examples), resemble nothing so much as the older and darker traditional stories about encounters with fairies and leprechauns. It would take very little to change some of these—The Device (2014), for example—into a purely supernatural tale.

It is often hard to decide how to file some of these films, like the Australian Indiana Jones copy, Sky Pirates (1986), which ties together Easter Island, the Bermuda Triangle, the Philadelphia experiment, and the powerful “magic” slabs left by ancient aliens—who could just as easily be gods.

Or consider the Richard Matheson-penned TV movie about a woman’s strange pregnancy, The Stranger Within (1974). It is essentially his version of the occult thrillers popular at the time, like Rosemary’s Baby or The Omen, and there is very little that makes it “science fiction” other than the minor fact that it’s aliens, and not the Devil, who are responsible. Nor do we ever get much in the way of alien imagery.

Then there are a few strange examples of films that didn’t exactly start out as science fiction, like Rutger Hauer’s battle against a mysterious killer in a dismal future in Split Second (1992). While the beast absorbs DNA from other creatures and might be a laboratory creation or perhaps something alien, it also has apparently supernatural powers, thinks it is (and might even be) the devil, and has a psychic link to the hero. The movie itself really has no idea what to make of this thing, but perhaps it makes sense if you know that Split Second started out as a copy of the supernatural thriller, The First Power.

However, we have to ignore this sort of confusion in Asian films, where the Japanese genre of tokusatsu is really about wild effects and gleefully mixes SF and magic with little regard. While in China, apparently supernatural films, like Chronicles of the Ghostly Tribe [Jiu ceng yao ta] (2015), with its aliens who could just as easily be fairies; or Time Raiders [Wu Xie Xiao Ge] (2016), with a revived snake goddess who might just have been a great scientist, have had materialistic explanations crammed in at the insistence of the Chinese government, which opposes anything supernatural in film, unless it is set in ancient times.

A few so-called science fiction films are so clearly occult that it seems strange that anyone would mistake them for anything else.

The Suns of Easter Island is one of the best examples: It starts out with the main character, who is working on a big solar energy project, explaining about how he is a sorcerer from a long line of sorcerers. He then gives us a demonstration of geomancy before we move on to the other characters who include an archaeologist, a psychologist, an astronomer . . . and a voodoo priest.

We are told that the strange messages they all receive came from aliens from a distant world who occasionally contact people to find out whether our world is ready for them to bring us into their civilization. However, they seem far less like aliens and more like the occultists’ ascended masters, and seem far more interested in bringing us to enlightenment than in sharing their technology or trading with us.

Or consider Code name: Ruby (1997), which was made for TV by one of the iconic directors of the Czech New Wave, Jan Nemec. It may start with the space shuttle colliding with a UFO, but before long it gets embroiled with alchemy, the quest for the philosopher’s stone, and a tourist trip through historic Prague. We are told that what really matters is not who is president, but who runs the Smithsonian Institution that guards all the ancient alchemical secrets—and that a young couple exploring Prague might just be able to finally create the stone.

A very different example is the neo-noir reality bender, Yesterday Was a Lie (2009). A hard-boiled PI finds her latest case raising all sort of strange questions about changing reality with the mind, with plentiful references to quantum mechanics (that staple canned explanation for those who want to have impossible things happen in their films).

However, what is really going on is something rather different: instead, the film revolves around Jungian archetypes and ultimately comes to a very occult answer: the human heart can change reality.

While Carl Jung’s work still enjoys a certain credibility, a lot of psychologists don’t agree that it should be considered science. Richard Noll’s book, The Jung Cult, details Jung’s occult researches and influences—and claims Jungian analysis functions more like a religion than science. Whether he is right or not, in Yesterday Was a Lie, Jung is one of the keys to what amounts to occult power.

A less-obvious example is I Origins, a 2014 film advertised as a science fiction whose official synopses described it as the story of a scientist whose research into the human eye had discovered something that would change the world.

The discovery, however, is that a child had the exact same retinal pattern as someone who died, and that the child is apparently her reincarnation.

What makes this particularly absurd and unscientific is that the retinal pattern is essentially random and does not even repeat exactly between twins (even if it might be similar). Nor would it be identical in a clone. So, obviously, we are talking about a supernatural effect, even if it can be measured empirically.

One suspects that a lot of this confusion is caused not by the filmmakers themselves, but by the critics, press, and yes, the press releases provided by the distributors. Still, this can be enormously frustrating, as with the stylish 2001 French thriller, Vidocq (aka, Dark Portals: The Chronicles of Vidocq), which was heralded as a steampunk movie before it reached the States, only to have its sinister, mirror-masked villain prove to be an alchemist seeking magical power.

But for others, this blurring of the lines between the two seems to reflect a belief that the two are the same—or at least aspects of the same reality. Or that the “occult sciences” are part of a higher reality than our visible one.

Somehow, it seems likely that these confusions will continue—and in all likelihood, get worse.

Because of Hollywood’s love of empty spectacle? Perhaps.

But it seems more likely that indie films will give birth to far more occult “science fiction” films—and not just because that’s where so many of these came from in the first place.

After all, it’s a venue where the unconventional and inexplicable can flourish, where the audiences are likely to applaud any film that keeps them awake and interested.

And where those making them have far fewer people to answer to.

About the Author

Mark Cole hates writing bios. Despite many efforts he has never written one he likes, perhaps because there are many other things he’d rather be writing. He writes from Warren, Pennsylvania, where he has managed to avoid writing about himself for both newspaper and magazine articles. His musings on Science Fiction have appeared in Clarkesworld and at IROSF.com, while his most recent story, “Let’s Start from the Top…” appeared in Daily Science Fiction.

Calibrating the Stakes:
A Conversation with Alastair Reynolds

Arley Sorg

Alastair Reynolds was born in Barry, South Wales. He earned degrees in astronomy from the Newcastle University in England and a PhD from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He began writing science fiction in his teens, and had his first publication in Interzone in 1990: “Nunivak Snowflakes.” In 1991 he moved to the Netherlands, where he worked for the European Space Agency as an astrophysicist. He did a postdoc at Utrecht University from ’94-’96, then went back to the Netherlands. His debut novel, Revelation Space, came out with Gollancz in 2000. In 2004, he became a full-time writer, returning to Wales in 2008. In 2009, he signed a ten book £1 million deal with Gollancz.

Revelation Space received a BSFA nomination and was an Arthur C. Clarke Award finalist; sequel Chasm City took the BSFA for Best Novel. Every year since 2000 Reynolds’ fiction has landed on major awards ballots and finalists lists, including the Hugo Awards. He received acclaim internationally, with Kurd Lasswitz and Grand prix de l’Imaginaire nominations and a Seiun win. Most recently, Reynolds received Locus Awards in 2016 for Slow Bullets and 2017 for Revenger. A stage version of Diamond Dogs was put on in Chicago in 2017, and short stories “Beyond the Aquila Rift” and “Zima Blue” were both adapted as animated shorts for Netflix’s Love, Death & Robots series.

Besides trying to keep up with the demand for his fiction, he says he’s “a keen runner, amateur musician, and am currently building a 1/8th scale flying model of a P51-D Mustang, my all-time favorite aircraft.”

Your first short fiction publication, “Nunivak Snowflakes,” came out in 1990. Your debut novel Revelation Space followed 10 years later. What was the road to breaking in like for you? Did it take a while to start selling novels? And if so, what changed, what made it happen?

After trying to break into the magazine market for about five years, I had a small rash of sales around 1989-1991. I thought I’d cracked it! Then it all dried up again and I didn’t really start to sell again until the middle of the decade. It took a certain amount of dogged confidence in my own abilities to keep going. But I wasn’t all that bothered: those were busy years, with lots going on besides a sideline in science fiction writing. I completed my PhD, moved to the Netherlands, got my first salary, studied Dutch, learned to drive, took up horse riding and indoor climbing, met my wife, and began to travel extensively for work. It wasn’t until a period of unemployment between contracts, in 1997, that I had a chance to return to a novel-in-progress and polish it for submission. That book then took two years to sell, but at no point was it ever rejected. I got an offer for it in 1999 and it came out a year later. I don’t think there was any real evolution in my methods; it was just a question of patience and persistence and getting on with other stuff.

You were born and live in Wales but you have also lived in Newcastle, Scotland, and the Netherlands. Did living in different places and being exposed to different cultures have any sort of impact on your writing or your process?

I’m sure it did, and continues to do so, although it won’t necessarily be reflected in the writing in an obvious, linear fashion. The first thing to say is that I’ve moved around all my life, ever since I was tiny. I’ve been in Wales since 2007 and that’s the first time I’ve ever lived in the same house for more than ten years. I’ve always felt happily rootless. Living in the Netherlands was a fantastic experience, doubly so because I worked for an international organization. ESA showed me that people from different cultures can work together very effectively. I’d like to write a novel with a pan-European setting one day.

At this point, your work set in the Revelation Space universe spans nearly two decades of publishing, most recently with 2018’s Elysium Fire, a sort-of SF/police procedural, where implant failures are killing citizens in growing numbers, among other things. Looking at the entire Revelation Space body of work, what are some of your favorite story moments or ideas? What do you love most about these books and stories?

It’s even longer than that, as my second published story, “Dilation Sleep,” is sort of set in a vague, proto-form of the Revelation Space universe. That was written in the eighties! By the time I did “A Spy in Europa,” I was edging toward the idea that there was a future history somewhere in the making.

Looking at the whole thing—which I’ve lately, and pretentiously, started referring to as a “mosaic” of stories and novels, rather than a series—there are bits I’m pleased with. I like the relativistic chase scene in Redemption Ark, with the two ships trying ever more desperate tactics. I like the invention of the cathedrals in Absolution Gap. It started as a doodle: I drew a cathedral then put tank tracks on it, and a (non-LED) lightbulb went off. I still love the manic invention of the cathedrals and the whole subculture around them. I know the ending to that book is a matter of division among readers, but I think the cathedrals offer some pretty entertaining scenery on the way. I was very much influenced by the films of Jeunet and Caro at the time, which I think shows through, especially in the grotesquerie of the characters.

As for the series—sorry, mosaic—as a whole, I love the constraints I built into it right at the start. No faster than light travel is the obvious one. It’s not nearly as restricting as might be thought. For every story idea it shuts down, there’s another one that you couldn’t possibly do in an FTL setting. The whole harrowing arc of Ana Khouri’s life, for instance—being separated from her husband, and unable to get back to him—wouldn’t play in Star Trek. I’m not the only writer limiting themselves to non-FTL physics, of course—many others had done so. But I think what marked Revelation Space out was that it wasn’t common to marry space opera and non-FTL travel in the same universe. Probably because it was an awkward marriage! I think it took me a few books and stories to figure out the shape of the story that worked best in that setting.

What is the hardest or trickiest part of writing in a universe you started two decades ago, a universe for which you’ve built so many narratives, characters, and concepts?

Playing within the established rules, not contradicting the implicit storyline. There’s no Bible to any of this stuff, just a few files on my PC and some moldering connections in my brain. Oh, and Wiki pages! That said, I’m not even trying to make the thing one hundred percent internally consistent—it jumped that shark about twenty years ago.

It’s more of a mood, an atmosphere, which I’m working hard to sustain, while at the same time exploiting the richness of the backdrop, where possible. The Prefect Dreyfus stories are particularly tricky, as they’re set a little earlier in the timeline and to a degree we know what’s occurring later. The stakes have to be calibrated quite carefully, making the story involving enough, but at the same time we know that the world must be saved. I backed off a little on the scale of the crisis in the second book, deliberately. I felt that if there were an escalation from the first one, things would be getting absurd by the third or fourth title, but if I dialed it down a bit (and gave the characters a bit more room to breathe), then I could go almost anywhere with the next one.

In 2009, you signed a £1 million deal with Gollancz to write ten books in ten years. How did it go? Did it change anything about the way you write?

It’s still an ongoing thing, believe it or not. The book deal didn’t activate until I delivered Blue Remembered Earth. Around the same time, the editor I’d been working with for the previous nine books departed at short notice, and a period of editorial limbo followed, meaning that we were very, very quickly off-piste. There were other factors, some of them personal: I lost my father very unexpectedly at the start of that deal, something I certainly hadn’t counted on. Now we seem to be back onto a fairly stable book-a-year schedule. It’s a schedule that suits my temperament most of the time, since I write fairly quickly, and equally quickly want to move onto something new. If I’ve added to the difficulty, it’s in doing too many extracurricular projects such as other novels, novellas, short stories and so on. I’ve put a temporary brake on most of that stuff until I’ve delivered the last novel in the contract, which will not be for a year or two.

Your website says you have “sixteen novels and more than seventy short stories.” Did you ever hit a slump—a period of time where you either couldn’t write, couldn’t sell, or both? And how did you deal with it?

I’ve alluded to the ups and downs of my first decade, after I broke into the magazines, but before I had a novel out. 1997 was the only time when I seriously considered quitting. I’d broken back into the magazines—well, Interzone, which was really the only market interested in my stuff—but at the same time I didn’t sense that my stories were making any impact beyond those pages. Inevitably, you look at stuff like The Year’s Best Science Fiction and wonder what it would take to make it into those hallowed contents. My stories weren’t even making the “also recommended” pages at the back of Gardner Dozois’ editions. Then, within a year or less, it all happened. A German editor asked for translation rights to one of my earlier stories. Gardner took a story of mine for reprinting, and then not long after bought one for Asimov’s. Interzone kept buying my stuff, and I felt there was a slight uptick of interest with each story. All that was enough to keep me going. My wife and I would go out to our favorite steak house whenever one of these developments happened—until they closed it down!

I’ve never had a serious creative slump. I’ve hit obstacles with various projects, sometimes serious obstacles, but I’ve always either powered on through with sheer bloody-mindedness, or (more likely) switched over to some other thing. I’ve got various strategies for unblocking myself: all fairly obvious. Walks are good. So is going to the cinema. I don’t know why, but something about being exposed to a different narrative form seems to help grease the creative gears.

I’ve had tough periods when there has been bereavement or illness to contend with—the usual stuff we all go through—as well as the inevitable speed bumps of any professional career, but I’ve always managed to keep grinding through and get some work done. That’s not to say I take it for granted: I’m very, very grateful to still be in a position where writing is a viable occupation, two decades after I began publishing novels. It’s not to be taken lightly and I don’t. That said, I feel like I’ve still got the energy and enthusiasm to keep at it, if the fates allow.

After publishing science fiction short stories and novels for two decades, do you feel like either market has changed in any specific, important ways?

I’m sure it has, but to the extent that I’m aware of those changes . . . not hugely. Books are still a thing; magazines are still a thing. Collections are still a thing; anthologies are still a thing. Novellas are still strong—if not stronger than ever. The process by which I get my words out into the world hasn’t changed to any radical degree. By accident or design, most of my stuff ends up in traditional media rather than being exclusively online, but that’s more a reflection of the professional circles I move in, rather than a deliberate strategy on my part.

In terms of the changes that have overtaken the field, and which I’m in a position to note, I think the opening up of science fiction to more diverse voices has been, and will continue to be, incredibly important for the vitality and longevity of the field. The one thing you can definitely say about the form at the moment, if you look at the buzz around certain writers and their works, is that science fiction is trending young, multicultural, and fully—and at times angrily—engaged with the world. Obviously, there are going to be times when the science fiction that we might be comfortable with begins to be edged out or eclipsed by newer forms, some of which we might not even want to think of as science fiction. But that’s all to the good of the field. As Pete Townsend said, music must change! Most of us were drawn to science fiction not because it was cozy and familiar, but because it was a bit unfamiliar and challenging. Long may it remain so. If I can still have a seat at the table as the field evolves, I’m grateful, but it’s not my birthright.

How does your short fiction writing process differ from your novella and novel process?

Not hugely. After you’ve finished a 150,000 word novel, a 15,000 word short story ought to feel like a walk in the park, but it’s rarely the case. It all feels like hard work, most of the time. I don’t actually enjoy writing. I enjoy rewriting, and polishing, but not the creative slog of actually getting words and ideas down. It’s a bit like running. I’m a keen runner but I hate running. I do it purely for the thrill of finishing, the warm glow of intolerable self-satisfaction and smugness that follows.

On a more serious level, I tend to think of fiction requiring the intersection of a minimum set of nonobvious ideas. Short stories need at least two intersecting ideas that don’t seem to belong together. That’s why they’re hard to write: you get one idea, but not the other one. I’ve had stories parked in the “one idea” folder for years, before the second idea crashes in and allows the thing to be written. Sometimes it’s a moment of blinding revelation where you realize that two stories can be mashed together to make one that works. Afterward, you stare at the adjacent files in slack-jawed incomprehension, wondering why that obvious marriage didn’t occur to you six months ago.

It goes on from there. Novellas need more gristle: three or four ideas. Novels are yet more work. It’s like stirring a stew, adding ingredients until it no longer feels thin. Then (if you’re me) you realize you’ve over-thickened it and need to start taking stuff out. I hasten to add I’ve never made a stew.

Your 2016 book, Revenger, centers on teenaged Arafura Ness and her older sister Adrana. It features space pirates as well as a spacefaring civilization that only partly understands the technologies they use. Do you feel like this is an inevitable categorization of a coming-of-age story? Or was writing a young adult book the goal?

I’ve walked a treacherously narrow line with these books, trying to have my cake and eat it. I don’t think they’re YA so much as YA-approachable, which in my contorted view of things is not quite the same category. My impulse for those books was several-fold. I’d written a shorter novel: my Doctor Who tie-in. That wasn’t done as YA but it was done with an idea that younger readers ought to be able to pick it up.

My agent liked the energy behind it and suggested that I might want to think of something with the same fun, accessible spirit, within the context of my normal series of novels. There was also a willingness from my publisher to go down that route. I was up for that, especially because I’d had a definite itch that needed to be scratched, which we might summarize as Delany’s Nova meets early Larry Niven’s Known Space meets steampunk, meets Robert Louis Stevenson, Melville, Dumas, and a heavy salting of Jack Aubrey by way of Horatio Hornblower. That impulse to do a “nautical” space opera has been with me since at least my mid-teens, but I felt I needed to read and ingest a huge amount of material before I could approach it with the right confidence. Obviously, the series starts off with young protagonists. As I’ve pointed out, so does Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and so does Dune.

Locus made a decision that the book was YA, and that was fine: it’s their call, they’re my friends, and I was grateful for the recognition.

You are a big Doctor Who fan and wrote a Doctor Who book. What are your thoughts on the latest season?

These lightweights, with their superficial knowledge only going back to the Baker era . . .

I’m (also) a long-haul Doctor Who fan, prepared for a bit of turbulence! I didn’t think the season got off to a particularly auspicious start, but that won’t be the first time and it won’t be the last. The episode with . . . the surprising buried thing . . . won me ’round rather persuasively, and now I can’t wait to see where we go after these revelations. Jodie Whittaker is a very good Doctor, in my view, and I hope she sticks around a bit. For myself, I’d like it to get back to being a little scarier, but the show has always moved through waves. Do you want a bit of trivia, by the way? I know the guy who designed the new sonic screwdriver. He’s the brother of my longtime guitar tutor.

One day I hope the producers will run out of scripts and ask themselves if they know any enthusiastic, prolific, lifelong Whovians who live extremely locally to BBC Wales.

Book two, Shadow Captain, begins three months after book one but is generally less lighthearted. Tensions rise between the sisters Ness as they struggle to determine who they want to be and how to use their ship. What can you tell us about book three, Bone Silence?

I think the difference between books one and two is mostly a matter of voice. Lots of really horrible stuff happens in both, so it’s not really that one is darker than the other. With Shadow Captain, I decided I wanted to tell it in Adrana’s voice, and that I wanted her account to sound distinct from Fura’s. With Revenger, there’s an evolution in that Fura starts off quite posh and then gets saltier and more piratical as we go through the book, not just in her dialogue, but in her own account of the action.

For Adrana’s narrative, I decided to immerse myself in Austen, booting her voice up in my head, and then filtering it through this madcap space opera storyline with ancient civilizations and haunted skulls. What I learned was that Austen is a wonderfully modern writer—who knew! Everything you’d ever need to know about dialogue. I think she reads much more legibly to us than, say, Dickens or Hardy, even though she predates both. I read a review somewhere that said something like “the trouble with this book is that it reads like Jane Austen in space” to which my response would be, that’s a feature, dude, not a bug. On the other hand, someone compared the books to “Jane Austen on crack,” or words to that effect, and meant it approvingly.

Bone Silence is a slightly different kettle of fish again. I had to think about voice and point of view, obviously. There were two choices: go back to Fura or introduce a third narrator. I went for the second option. There are lots of clues as to who that narrator might be, but it’s not explicit. It did however give me a license to go even more over-the-top in places, as this is very much a story being told, and perhaps embroidered in the telling.

What has been the most challenging aspect of writing Bone Silence? And what’s been the most fun?

I decided early on that if I was going to go for a third person narration, I had the option of putting the sisters into different storylines playing out in parallel. They’re separated in Revenger, but we only get Fura’s point of view. This time I came up with the idea of putting them on different ships and throwing different sorts of peril at them. This sounded fine in theory but getting the two timelines to mesh was an absolute months-long nightmare. It felt like I was stuck in a Groundhog Day loop in which I’d come to work each morning and attempt to resolve this riddle but never get nearer to a solution. I don’t have the Internet in my writing den but I do have a very naughty distraction, which is a beautiful metallic blue-gray 22-fret Stratocaster. Eventually, even the Strat had to be banished, until I found a way through the problem. Which—when I did—seemed trivial and obvious in hindsight.

After that, sticking pins into my eyes would have been fun, but I really enjoyed writing the main space battle halfway through the book, when Revenger is fending off the squadron. I really felt that I was getting the payoff for reading and processing just an enormous, obscene amount of space opera, WW2 submarine films, nautical fiction, and history from the age of fighting sail. Ideally, as a writer, you want to get to a position where you can believe, even if it’s only for a moment, that no one else on the planet is capable of coming up with these exact sets of words. You might be deluded, but on rare days you might just be right.

You’ve talked before about the term “hard SF” and scientific rigor as it relates to your writing. What are some of your favorite concepts from your books that absolutely aren’t scientifically sound? And what are some of your favorite scientifically rigorous concepts? Or perhaps your favorite deeply researched bits, those things which readers probably won’t know just how much work went into them?

I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the hard SF label and have been edging away from it over the years. It’s not that I don’t like some hard SF, or that I don’t occasionally wish to write something that might, under certain generous criteria, be considered hard SF. But the term carries so much ideological baggage, as well as setting up expectations in the minds of the readers, that I’d rather not be encumbered by it. And you are right to note that some of my ideas haven’t been at all scientifically sound.

Without going into details, I’m very pleased with the central conceit in Permafrost, to do with MRI scanners . . . I had a real “oh yes!” moment when I came up with that, but although it’s dressed up with some quantum mumbo jumbo in the story, it’s not in any sense possible. I also (keeping with the theme of time travel) like the idea in my very first story, “Nunivak Snowflakes,” about calibrating time machines using fish and frogs.

As for slightly more plausible ideas . . . I like the speculation about dark matter planets in one of the Merlin stories (“Hideaway”)—the idea that if you had a sufficiently dense concentration of dark matter, it could form a planetlike mass that could then orbit inside the volume of a planet made of conventional matter. I’m sure it’d been done before but I wasn’t aware of it.

My deeply researched bits haven’t always been as satisfying to me as the times where I just winged an idea. I remember in a quite early story, “The Real Story,” I tried to work out the aerodynamics of BASE jumping on Mars and came up with something quite similar to a wingsuit. I also had a situation in another early piece, “Great Wall of Mars,” where packages were being catapulted up from a secret Mars base to one of the moons, slowly altering its momentum. The conceit is a few throwaway lines in the story, but the editor wanted me to demonstrate that the maths was plausible, so I actually had to supply my workings out. That’s not how I like to operate, though. I’d go so far now as to say that any short story that depends on a bit of physics being correct for the story to work is not going to be a story with much longevity.

You had Permafrost come out March 2019 from Tor.com Publishing, and Bone Silence completes the Revenger series. What are you working on now, or what do you have coming out next, that readers can look forward to? And what can you tell us about it?

I have one short story coming out in March in Jonathan Strahan’s new anthology, Made to Order, and that’s it for 2020. I’m working on a new novel in the Revelation Space universe right now, set primarily after the events of Absolution Gap. It’s not a sequel to that book, nor a direct continuation of any of the others, even though there is some connective tissue and one or two minor characters in common. My hope will be that it can be read as a standalone. That one should appear in early 2021.

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.

Imaginary Friends:
A Conversation with Kameron Hurley

Arley Sorg

Born in Battle Ground WA, Kameron Hurley received a BA in historical studies at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and a master’s from the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, South Africa, specializing in the history of South African resistance movements. She lived in Chicago for four years before moving to Dayton, OH. She began writing copy for a financial services company, moved into marketing copy, then became senior copywriter at a software company. She started publishing short fiction in 1998 with “Brutal Women” and attended the Clarion West workshop in 2000. She landed a book deal with Bantam in 2008, which fell through. Her debut novel God’s War finally came out in 2011 with Night Shade. It was nominated for Tiptree, Nebula, Locus, Arthur C. Clarke, and BSFA awards, it won a Kitschy for Best Debut Novel, and it earned her a Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer.

Besides the Bel Dame Apocrypha series (beginning with God’s War, plus Infidel and Rapture), the more recent Worldbreaker Saga published by Angry Robot (The Mirror Empire, Empire Ascendant, and January 2020’s The Broken Heavens), as well as Simon & Schuster novels The Stars are Legion and The Light Brigade; besides a short fiction career spanning two decades, and short fiction collection Meet Me in the Future published by Tachyon in 2019; Hurley is well known for smart, insightful, and occasionally seething nonfiction—with far more pieces than could fit into the pages of award-winning essay collection The Geek Feminist Revolution, published by Tor in 2016. She has written commentary for Locus Magazine for several years, and has nonfiction work published in The Atlantic, Writer’s Digest, Entertainment Weekly, The Village Voice, LA Weekly, Bitch Magazine, and Huffington Post, not to mention her own longtime blogging efforts. In fact, ‘‘We Have Always Fought: Challenging the Women, Cattle and Slaves Narrative,” first published on the A Dribble of Ink site in 2013, won her a Hugo Award for Best Related Work. She also won the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award in 2014 for her essays, and the aforementioned essay collection received a Hugo nomination, a BFA Award, and a Locus Award.

Your debut novel, God’s War, originally purchased in 2008, was published in 2011, beginning the Bel Dame Apocrypha series. At least seven novels and a collection later, how has your writing changed since that first book?

I’ve learned a lot more about plot and structure, which I have deliberately focused on since completing that first trilogy. I knew early on—from back when I went to the Clarion West writing workshop twenty years ago—that I had a strong affinity for character and worldbuilding, but plot and structure didn’t come nearly as naturally. I partnered with an agent, Hannah Bowman, who is very good at story structure and actively involved in her clients’ projects from initial pitch all the way through proofs. I really wanted a strategic business partner, and she’s been invaluable in helping me navigate my career after that first series.

I am more deliberate when approaching projects now. My goal is to do most of the planning up front so I don’t have to spend so much time revising. Sometimes that works—as with The Light Brigade—and sometimes it doesn’t, as with the last book in my fantasy trilogy, The Broken Heavens, which I had to rewrite three times.

That said, plotting and structuring short fiction has become much easier. I’m writing a short story every month for subscribers via my Patreon, and on that more compressed structural scale, I feel I’ve really leveled up. In part this is because with short fiction you get experience writing a full beginning/middle/end every time. With novels, the process of doing that is stretched out over a much longer period of time, which means you get less practice in completing that beginning/middle/end cycle. It takes longer to level up.

In your previous Clarkesworld interview you talk about reading SFF classics, beginning in your late teens. In an era where problematic behavior is being brought to light about many of the authors of classic SFF, and given that so much has happened in SFF since the days of Bester, in terms of narratives and discussions and ideas, is it still important for new writers to read classic works?

In the genre spaces I came up in at the time—and to some extent in certain circles today—there’s a type of professional and fan who absolutely will judge the “seriousness” of a new author on whether or not they’ve read Dhalgren, The Stars my Destination, or every book by Heinlein. But lately I’m seeing fewer of those people in the audience at panels, or mingling in the bar. Some of this is simply attrition: older fans and pros who found those works formative and contemporary are passing on, and more new fans and pros are entering these spaces.

The truth is that new fans are going to have different favorites, different formative works. These days I get almost as many gasps when I admit I haven’t read any of the Harry Potter books as I do when I say I haven’t read The Lord of the Rings.

There was a time in the first Golden Age of science fiction in the ’30s-’50s where you really could read every single science fiction book that had come out. You just can’t do that anymore. A recent “science fiction and fantasy books out this month” post listed over 200 titles. In one month!

It’s like the days when all we had was network TV, and we all watched the same dozen shows and talked about them every week. As great as that was for societal bonding, who has access to watch Game of Thrones—or who even has interest, when there are so many other shows available on so many channels and services—isn’t a near-universal. More choice and diversity in media means that we don’t all have to settle for the same six shows or twelve science fiction books. That’s a good thing! And while I can understand the frustration of those who believed you had to read the same twelve books to be a “real” fan, the truth is that writing and fandom today is going mainstream, and becoming less insular, and that means newer writers and fans are more likely to read contemporary authors. We’re entering a period now—70-90 years on from the ’50s Golden Age—that is equivalent to telling a writer in the ’50s that they weren’t a “real” writer unless they had read all the most popular books in the 1860s and 1880s. Those eras are rapidly becoming another country.

It was important to me to read the classics early because I was a young woman writing in a genre that was still very insular, and it proved my “cred” and “seriousness.” These days, it’s far less necessary, and may even turn off a lot of people to science fiction. I remember giving a talk to an audience in Madrid, and afterward a young woman came up to me and said, “I didn’t think I liked science fiction, but after hearing you talk about all of these books, I’m starting to think I might really enjoy it!”

As long as there’s a perception of “science fiction” being the same twelve authors, the only people we’re going to draw to the field as writers and fans are the people who connect with those same twelve books. I’m honestly much more concerned when I speak to writers who haven’t read anything published in the last twenty or thirty years than I am with ones who haven’t read something published seventy years ago. At this point there’s far more merit in keeping up with what your contemporaries are doing so you can keep a pulse on the current genre.

As a reader, what is important to you to see in a story? What have you read lately that you really enjoyed and want everyone to read?

I tend to gravitate toward unique worldbuilding, quirky or busted characters, and prose that’s deeply immersive. And by “deeply immersive,” I mean confident writing that taps into evocative details that pull me into the world. What makes a work of fiction emotionally satisfying is going to vary greatly from person to person. I’ve noticed that there are recurring themes that I’m particularly drawn to: The morality and ethics of war; explorations of humanity’s monstrousness (particularly as it relates to toxic masculinity); the process of revolution; and the psychological weirdness of humanity. This last bit in particular is probably why I connected so much with some of the work that came out of the New Weird movement in the early 2000s, and my interest in wild worldbuilding drove my interest in some of the early Golden Age and psychedelic New Wave work as well.

The last few years, there has been a real surge in new and powerful work in the genre that’s right up my alley. I certainly have an interest in reading more work than I have time to read, and my “need to read immediately” pile is at least fifty books long. I’ve recently blurbed some great books: The Luminous Dead, Salvation Day, and The Wolf of Oren-Yaro. I’ve also really enjoyed Paris Adrift, Trail of Lightning, The Traitor Baru Cormorant, The Warrior Within, the Starfire series, and of course Martha Wells’s super popular Murderbot books.

In that same interview, you also talked about wanting to be an astronaut. You’ve developed a solid career in writing both fiction and nonfiction, not only earning enough to make a living, but also receiving numerous accolades and awards. How did getting into writing happen for you? When did you start writing, and when or how did it become a serious career focus?

I had a vast imaginary life as a kid, and went on all sorts of adventures out in the woods behind my house with my “pretend friends.” At some point when I was ten or eleven, I realized that I could write down the adventures I was having in my head and other people could read them. It was a way to take something imaginary and make it visible and almost tangible to other people. Magic! By the time I was twelve I was writing “novels” of several hundreds of pages, and thought, “Wow, this would be a fun thing to do for a living, just making up stories and sharing them with people!” It was also a good way for an introverted kid to connect with people. I would make kids from my class characters in my books, and they would pass the manuscripts around to each other to see what happened to “their” character.

My writing really picked up in college and grad school, when I had a lot more free time to myself to focus on my work, and college was when I started seriously sending out manuscripts to agents and publishers. It wasn’t until after grad school and starting my first admin job that I finally picked up an agent and that first book deal, though. And it wasn’t exactly for big money, so I’ve been hustling ever since.

My mom told me that it was fine if I wanted to be a writer, but that I would be poor. She wasn’t wrong about that, at least the writing fiction part. I’ve had to grind a lot to make a sustainable living, and until the US sorts out the $20k a year I pay in health insurance and health costs for me and my spouse, I’m going to have a day job or day job freelance work for the rest of my life.

But I’m certainly less poor than I could have been, because I did put that writing work to use in the corporate space. Morally sad, but necessary.

Your fiction has often been described as dystopian, violent, dark, grim. Some have even said your work resembles or borders on horror. Do you also occasionally like to write hopeful or light pieces? Are there specific things that a dark/grim/violent narrative does for you (or for readers in general) that appeals to you as a writer?

I tend to find works of grim humor or tragedy really cathartic. Tragedy is great because you know the ending before you even start. The idea is that you keep going, not because you believe you will win, but because what is happening allows you to safely emote about it instead of just powering through it. I had this experience playing the third Mass Effect game, when I realized within the first fifteen or twenty minutes of game play that there wasn’t going to be any “good guys win and the world goes back to normal” option. Whatever happened was going to be very bad, and I knew most people wouldn’t survive it. I cried though a lot of that game, which seems weird until you consider that it’s this ability to feel feelings of fear and sorrow in a safe environment that drives most of us to watch horror and tragedy. These are important and necessary emotions, but in “real life” we are often focused so much on survival, on “getting through” a tragedy or horror, that we don’t allow ourselves to fully process these situations emotionally.

I’ve done a lot of research into PTSD, which I found I suffered from after a particularly traumatic week in the ER where I nearly died. I found that medical PTSD was absolutely a thing—and that about 25% of folks who had experienced long-term ER or health stays suffered from PTSD symptoms like anxiety, flashbacks, etc. There’s studies that say PTSD is most prevalent in situations where people feel they have no control—war situations, car crashes and other violent events, sexual assaults, and yes, hospital stays where they are weak and vulnerable and at the mercy of medical staff. In these moments, the way we process memories gets short-circuited. Writing about and talking about these events can help, because they encourage the brain to move these events into long-term memory instead of constantly trying to relive them.

I spent a good deal of time in my twenties writing online, in part to process my life up until that point. I’ve always found that creating narrative from the random shit that happens to me deeply comforting. Humans want to find patterns. We want to believe things happen for a reason. Creating a structure to our lives—even if only in writing—can be very soothing.

There’s a sense that I’m drawn to these sorts of stories because I find something deeply cathartic in them. Grim humor in the face of horror and tragedy is how I cope, and this sort of humor is employed often by some of my more memorable and beloved protagonists. Of course, I also use alcohol, which is another recurring theme in many of my books. All those characters who sit down over tea or coffee to chat about the plot tell you a lot about what the writers are doing in that particular moment.

I also think my books are more hopeful than they may be perceived. Certainly, there is brutality; bad things happen. Good and bad people do bad and good things. They are morally complex people and worlds. But importantly—in nearly every book or story I write—life goes on. People are still alive and kicking to help create what’s next. I embrace the grimness of those dark moments of our lives, but I’m certainly not a nihilist.

Much of the body horror simply comes from my experience living in my own messy body. I have a chronic illness, and struggled deeply with body image in my teens and twenties. My brain and body are complex messes that are nigh impossible to control. I’m very much in tune with the fact that we are all just bags of ambulating meat and goo, and that comes out in much of my writing.

The conclusion to your Worldbreaker Saga, The Broken Heavens, just came out in January. Where does book three take the story begun with The Mirror Empire and continued in Empire Ascendant? What do you really want readers to know about the last book and the series as a whole?

I spent several years and many, many drafts working to tie up that series in a satisfying way. I started writing (or rather, rewriting—it was originally a trunk novel) this series back in 2012, and the world around me changed as I wrote. When it came to the final book in the series, I found that I had changed a lot too, and the original ending I had planned just didn’t feel emotionally right to me anymore. Sometimes, as authors, we go on a journey of discovery with our characters, and I was a different person in 2019 than in 2012. My agent and I struggled over that final book and the final choice in the end, and I remain deeply proud of how I resolved the series.

I’ve been pleased with the reception to this final book. The fans have embraced it, and that reception has certainly validated my choice to pull it out of the publishing schedule a few years back and take the time to do it right. Bad books are bad forever. I knew that if I turned in an underwhelming finale, it could sink the series as a whole. Instead, I hope I’ve created a final book that makes the whole series worth talking about.

Defining your work is, itself, a bit controversial. For folks not familiar, looking at your body of work, how do you describe your own fiction? Do you describe your books differently than your short fiction? And where is the best place to start reading?

I realized early in my career that I didn’t want to be known for writing in a particular genre as much as I wanted to be known for writing a particular kind of book or story. I’ve gotten to the point where I just call them “Kameron Hurley” novels. They are books and stories with unique and vibrant worldbuilding, morally complex characters and their relationships, a high ratio of women characters, found families, thoughtful approaches to gender, grim humor, no sexual assault against female characters, and most embrace themes of war, conflict mitigation, and resistance.

As for the best place to start, it depends on the sort of books one enjoys. For those new to science fiction or who may be turned off by complex worldbuilding, I recommend my time-traveling military science fiction novel, The Light Brigade, which has been called a leftist Starship Troopers. If you are an epic fantasy fan, the Worldbreaker Saga follows the stories of five very different people thrust to the center of an ancient recurring event where multiple versions of other worlds try to annihilate each other. Bonus points for sentient plants and star magic and polyamorous matriarchies. If you’re a fan of sword and sorcery books, or Elric and Conan—or, frankly, Firefly—I recommend starting with God’s War, which is about a team of messy mercenaries who bring in bounties on a planet engaged in perpetual war.

What do you have coming up that readers can look forward to? And what can you tell us about it?

I’m currently working on a near-future science fiction thriller that I pitched as “Killing Eve meets Die Hard, in space.” That will be out next spring! I also create a new short story every month for fans who subscribe over on Patreon, so I’m sure there will be more short fiction collections coming up soon as well. After this, I will be working on some entirely new stuff that I’m very excited about—more details as I have them!

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:
The Best from 2019

Neil Clarke

Over the last two months, our readers have been helping us select the best story and cover art that we published in 2019. While the first round went very smoothly, there were several easily-spotted attempts to stuff the ballot in round two. With that obvious exception, we’d like to thank everyone who participated this year. It was a very exciting race to the finish!

Best Cover of 2019

The result for best cover art was extremely close between the top three from beginning to end and the others were never that far behind. Only one point separated 2nd from 3rd place.

3rd Place: “Adaptation” by Beeple (October)

2nd Place: “Halo” by Derek Stenning (December)

And our winner is:

“Vertigo” by Matt Dixon (May)

Best Story of 2019

After a tight race to make the final ballot, I wasn’t sure what to expect in this category. For the first few days, it looked like we’d have more of the same, but gradually, five separated from the pack and exchanged the top spot on an almost daily basis.

3rd Place: “The Sun from Both Sides” by R.S.A. Garcia (May)

2nd Place: “Such Thoughts Are Unproductive” by Rebecca Campbell (December)

And our winner is:

“Give the Family My Love” by A. T. Greenblatt (February)

Congratulations to our winners and all the finalists!

Additional congratulations are due to this year’s story winner, A. T. Greenblatt. “Give the Family My Love” has also been announced as a finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Short Story!

Our cover art winner, Matt Dixon, will also be launching a Kickstarter campaign for his sixth book of robot art on March 10th. If you liked his cover, you’ll probably want to check it out.

I’m also happy to report that I’ve been given the all-clear by my doctors to resume normal activities again. Thank you all for your support and patience over the last couple of months. It’s been rough and I look forward to having some semblance of normalcy return to my life in the weeks ahead.

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: Pitstop

Thomas Chamberlain-Keen

About the Artist

Thomas Chamberlain-Keen is a concept artist at Playground Games.