What Happens in Solarium Square 21

Ashleigh Shears

The Body rots faster than expected. By the time they all agree on how to take advantage of the opportunity, the skin has gone green like exposed bronze. The hair lasts the longest without intervention, though they do eventually need wigs. Ordering wigs isn’t that suspicious. Neither is buying a bigger freezer. The same cannot be said of the printer equipment or materials needed for skin tissue recreation. Those orders need to be spaced out, or bought along with other not so useful things. Xohan would never say so in the home feed but, in this area, Sholo excels. He knows what they need and when they need it, especially on Solarium Square days. Sholo can be useful—when he’s not breaking Xohan’s things.

On this Solarium Square day, Xohan boots up to find alerts in his visuals and music in his microphones. He blames Sholo for both. The music comes from their headquarters for the Body Preservation Project, which was once the kitchen. Sholo calls it his boudoir. Xohan arrives to find the printer stacks hard at work: glassy eyeballs spin in glass chambers with trailing roots, varicose veins squeeze out like fresh pasta, and ghostly nose hairs sprout from loose faces. On accordion legs, Sholo bounces from the bottom of the printer stack to the top, waving his five pliable arms like a pit conductor. He’s wearing the striped green satin robe that makes him look like a handsome piece of celery and all five sleeves balloon out whenever he descends. Droguefuge dream metal plays from the ceiling speakers, one of Sholo’s own compositions. He can’t hear Xohan’s arrival over the music, so Xohan bumps into the back of his leg.

Sholo beeps in surprise, an exclamation mark on his face display. Through his speaker, Sholo says, “And where have you been?”

“Is it ready?” Xohan asks.

“You’d already know the answer to that if you were connected to the home feed. You’re worrying Double H.”

Xohan reconnects. He never intended to worry anyone.

[Home Hubble]: Look who decided to join us!

[Xohan L]: So it’s not ready.

[Sholo Nine]: Don’t rush me.

[Xohan L]: Rush you! It’s almost our time slot.

[Home Hubble]: And where were you to help with the preparation? You’ve been hiding away in sleep mode for days. What if Sholo had needed you?

[Xohan L]: Need me? For what?

[Sholo Nine]: I have felt somewhat deserted.

[Xohan L]: You brought that on yourself.

[Sholo Nine]: Ah! So you’re mad about something.

[Xohan L]: You already forgot? You broke my charger!

[Sholo Nine]: What, you’re still stuck on that?

[Home Hubble]: Xohan. Please tell me you’re joking.

The feed falls silent as Sholo’s lenses focus onto Xohan’s breastplate where his low battery status flashes yellow. “Xohan, my dear,” Sholo says, “your charge.”

Xohan shifts the flaps on his upper armor to cover his LED.

“You’re not charging? How stubborn can you be?” Sholo walks on backward knees toward him. “I ordered you a new charger as soon as I broke the old one. A nice, new docking station. It’s even compatible with those fancy new quantum bots.”

“Happy for them but I’m a c-bot and so are you. I liked the old one. We’re old.” Xohan opens a flap to wave at one of Sholo’s rust spots, long ago painted over without a primer. Even with a black topcoat, the rust sits close to the surface, bleeding through. Basically, he’s haunted.

Sholo covers the rust with a sleeve. “Stop saying I’m haunted.”

“I didn’t say it.”

“You’re thinking it. I can tell.”

“Don’t tower over me. My instinct module will perceive you as a threat.”

“No, it won’t,” Sholo says, but he collapses his legs.

Xohan, who resembles a shrunken grandfather clock in ruddy bronze, does not have legs to extend or much in the way of limbs at all. Home maintenance and security c-bots of his era are intended to glide from floor sensor to sensor based on direction from the Home Hubble local positioning system. Xohan sometimes still relies on Home Hubble instead of deciding where to go on his own and can become stuck for hours if Double H does not choose his path.

“I don’t understand you at all,” Sholo says. “How are you going to do the morning wave if you’re about to drop dead? I suppose I’ll have to do it.”

Even with Sholo accommodating for his height, Xohan still has to tilt up his top piece to meet Sholo’s lenses. Sholo calls this piece his chapeau.

“Don’t be ridiculous. The wave is my duty and getting the Body ready is supposed to be yours, but apparently, I’ll have to do that.”

Xohan darts toward the casket-sized freezer, though he doesn’t get far. Sholo knows Xohan’s settings and decision trees so well he can often predict his next feed thought, and in this case, his next move. They crash together with a dull clang as Sholo wraps five long arms around him from trapezoidal base to chapeau.

[Home Hubble]: Not to interrupt you two but it’s ten to eleven, if anyone here cares about what happens to us if the Body doesn’t show.

[Sholo Nine]: Yes, yes. Acknowledged. Appreciated.

Sholo springs an arm out to press a button on the side of the freezer. In a rush of cold air, the lid slides open to reveal the Body. With an ear missing.

“Say you’re not mad,” Sholo says.

“I’m mad,” Xohan says. “When did it fall off?”

“This morning. It was too putty-ish to put back on, but the new one is almost baked.”

Xohan spies a printer at the top of the stack, churning out a single liver-spotted ear.

“There’s no lobe!”

“Oh, who even looks at those?”

“We won’t have time for it to finish, let alone to stitch it on. Remind me why we haven’t sold you for parts?”

“I thought sleep mode was meant to make you less grumpy. Remind me why you haven’t charged?”

Xohan pops open a drawer into Sholo’s breastplate.

“Ow! It’s almost as if you want us to get caught.”

“Me? I’m not the one slacking on the job.”

An alert buzzes in Xohan’s periphery, a yellow icon blocking the right side of his visuals. Xohan ignores it. He pops off his chapeau and fires up the hydrocutter. Sholo unwinds his limbs quickly after that.

“Yes, all right, no need to splash me.”

Sholo lifts the Body from the freezer. One of the eyeballs droops from its socket.

“Your upkeep leaves something to be desired,” Xohan says.

Sholo tucks the eye back in with one of his more delicate manipulators. “How do you feel about an eye patch? And never mind about the ear, I have an idea for that now. Check on the bath, would you?”

Sholo insisted on moving a claw-foot tub into the kitchen, which he fills and drains via hoses connected to the sink plumbing. He did at least already run the bath. Xohan only needs to top off the hot water and shake in a judicious amount of preservatives (bath salts, as Sholo calls them), before plunging the Body into the restorative waters. Once the fingers bend, they dry and wrangle the Body into a kaftan and cardigan and wrap a scarf around the head to cover the earhole. For the finishing touch, Sholo grabs his half-formed lobeless wonder from its printer chamber and tucks it under the scarf, suggesting the presence of an entire ear.

“Sholo, the ear is loose.”

“Picky, picky. I can connect it to the head if you like.”

[Home Hubble]: You’re normally in the elevator by now.

[Xohan L]: Acknowledged. Appreciated.

“Well, no time for eye patches,” Sholo says. “Get a pair of sunglasses, and I’ll move it down the hall.” Sholo carries the Body bridal style and, in one long leg extension, steps from the boudoir to the hall elevator. After a quick rifle through the wardrobe, Xohan zips out in time to catch the elevator and bonks his chapeau into the button labeled SS21. He shoos Sholo out with his front armor flaps.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to come?” Sholo’s lenses whir as they focus on Xohan’s charge status. “I think I should come.”

“Bye, Sholo.” Xohan bumps the button to close the doors.

“Fine, fine.” Sholo waves five hands. “Acknowledged. Not appreciated.”

“Next time, stick to your duties instead of playing music and dress-up.”

“My duties! What is this all for if not to relieve me of duties?”

“Bye, Sholo.”

Thirty seconds to eleven, Xohan and the Body ascend to Solarium Square 21. On allotted days and times, every resident unit gains access to one of the perforated glass cubes dotting the building’s roof. On Solarium days, while still alive, the Body always rode up to SS21 at eleven on the dot.

While not alive, the Body falls from the open elevator door into their single piece of outdoor furniture, a hot pink plastic-wicker patio wheely chair. Xohan rearranges the Body before spinning the chair around, his presence unremarkable. Several of the other humans are also accompanied by bots. Mx. Bellegarde in SS20, for example, crouches by a planter with a new quantum bot. Mx. Bellegarde and the other neighbors in SS18, SS19, and SS22 break from shuffleboarding, gardening, reading, sunbathing, and general loafing around to wave. They don’t notice the loose, lobeless ear tucked under the scarf, nor do they notice Xohan slip a stimulator through the wicker to send electrical impulses through the sewn-in wrist sensors ’til the Body’s hand spasms in a trembling wave. The neighbors return to their activities. The camera in the top corner of Solarium Square 21 blinks three times.

[Home Hubble]: Is that a q-bot? A Hector model?

[Xohan L]: Stop spying. I have it under control.

[Sholo Nine]: What are humans even doing with those overpowered things?

[Xohan L]: Gardening.

[Sholo Nine]: Naturally. Well, what does the new guy look like?

Xohan hesitates to say, “like you.” The Hector model seems at the very least inspired by the Sholo Nine—the retro, human-shaped assistant without humanizing features coming back into style. Only, unlike Sholo, Hector has the correct number of arms and legs and a perfect sphere for a head, to say nothing of the quantum innards. All that power focused on wiping Mx. Bellegarde’s brow, a handkerchief clutched in a forcepslike hand. As the sun shines off the q-bot’s tasteful pale gray exterior, Xohan wonders if the cryostat cooling unit inside struggles in this heat. Xohan searches for a Hector model schematic. As a c-bot, Xohan doesn’t have a cooling unit. Only an internal fan.

[Xohan L]: It looks like a bot. Like a q-bot.

[Sholo Nine]: Descriptive as always, Xohan.

[Home Hubble]: Get the Body farther back from the glass. Bellegarde is onto us.

Xohan would argue that Mx. Bellegarde only briefly eyed the scarf wrapped around the Body’s head before returning to gardening, but better safe than sorry. Xohan turns the chair ’til the loose ear faces a sleeping sunbather.

[Home Hubble]: We should pull out. Leave before they notice.

[Xohan L]: Leave before the end of our sun time? That would be more suspicious. Everything is fine.

In the original scheme, the Body was not involved at all. Holograms—now, that scheme would have been easy. Sholo clipped together old footage of the Body walking around the unit and Xohan projected it. The Hologram Hoax went tits up, however, when Mx. Bellegarde saw the hologram blip out. Xohan thought it was all over, but Bellegarde merely rubbed their eyes and went back to digging. After that, Sholo implanted more femto-electrodes into the Body’s muscles than Xohan had floor track sensors, routed leads to a stimulator tucked up into a sagging armpit, and slipped an external control unit under Xohan’s chapeau for safekeeping.

Xohan had suggested puppeteer wires. Xohan had not been acknowledged. Or appreciated.

[Home Hubble]: If everything’s fine then why is the q-bot looking at you?

Xohan hears the whir before he notices the single lens in that perfect sphere-head pointed at him. Focusing.

[Home Hubble]: This is it. It’s over. We’ll get put back into circulation.

[Xohan L]: Relax, the q-bot isn’t even looking at the Body. But what’s so interesting about me?

[Sholo Nine]: Oh, I don’t know. You’re only moments from your battery dying and not doing anything about it. Aren’t the alerts annoying you?

As if to prove Sholo right, the ignored icons in his periphery shift to the center of his vision as his internal feed scrolls, “Low charge, return to charging station.” At the same time, the Hector q-bot rolls its head in Xohan’s direction. A greeting. Xohan tips his chapeau. See? All fine.

That is, until Xohan lowers his chapeau, and it catches on the Body’s scarf, causing the scarf to slip and for the loose ear to roll off the head, down the Body’s kaftan, and onto the jute rug below, landing with a soft thud.

Red blossoms across Xohan’s visuals. Battery nearly depleted. Shutting down in . . .

Xohan cannot move. The sunbather snoozes on. The shuffleboard players clink lemonade glasses. The reader’s nose stays in a book. Mx. Bellegarde digs. But the Hector stares at Xohan, frozen.

[Home Hubble]: There’s an ear on the ground.

[Xohan L]: You don’t say.

[Home Hubble]: Fix this NOW.

[Sholo Nine]: Already in the elevator.

[Xohan L]: Go back! We do not need to draw more attention to ourselves.

[Sholo Nine]: I’ll be discreet.

Xohan redirects energy, searches for ways to conserve, draws from any possible reserve, anything to pick up the ear. He should have sent Sholo instead, should have used the stupid charger. How long ’til the q-bot alerts Bellegarde to the ear?

“Oh, Body!” Sholo rockets into SS21, robe flapping open. His rust bleed-through is much worse in broad daylight. “I see your flesh-eating skin disease has worsened considerably. You were right to call for me.”

[Home Hubble]: Flesh-eating skin disease?

[Xohan L]: “Body”?

[Sholo Nine]: You know I deleted the name.

[Xohan L]: The image of discretion.

[Home Hubble]: I can’t believe this is how it ends.

Xohan expects Sholo to wheel the Body out immediately, but Sholo comes to him first. In view of only the sunbather in SS19, Sholo pops open his back panel. A question mark flashes across Sholo’s face, followed by a crude drawing of a plug.

[Xohan L]: Acknowledged. Appreciated. Get on with it.

Where a grandfather clock would keep its pendulum, Xohan keeps his charging line. Once Xohan opens this compartment, Sholo grabs the line and connects it to the socket in his back. Red drains from Xohan’s visuals. While Xohan sips from his energy, Sholo fusses over the Body, blocking the q-bot’s line of sight with his own limbs and frantic movements. He tugs the robe off, pretends as if he brought it for the Body. The fifth sleeve hangs over the back of the wicker chair. Sholo knows how to put on a show. Xohan can’t remember the last time he saw Sholo without any clothes on.

[Sholo Nine]: Can’t believe you nodded at that nosy q-bot. Who draws attention, huh?

[Xohan L]: What was I supposed to do, ignore the Hector? How would that look?

[Home Hubble]: Can you both focus? At some point even the humans will notice.

[Sholo Nine]: I’m not worried about the humans.

Xohan would tend to agree. The Hector’s single lens stays focused on him, and by extension, Sholo. This is no simple slipup in front of a confused human. Xohan waits for a reaction from the digging Bellegarde, some evidence of a silent feed communication, the moment that the neighbors notice there’s something about the c-bots in Solarium Square 21, but nothing happens. Xohan does not feel relief. Even as their time slot draws to a close and Sholo pulls the Body into the safety of the elevator, the Hector’s sphere-head rolls slowly, tracking their retreat.

The printer polishes off a drooping lobe within a matter of minutes. Sholo was right. They should have waited. As an apology, Xohan welds the ear back on while Sholo sits on the kitchen table, swinging his legs. His knees squeak. Xohan makes a note to oil them. He has enough charge now to move, but Sholo hasn’t pulled out his cable, the plug still nestled into the small of Sholo’s back.

“Careful,” Sholo says, “I replaced the neck-skin a week ago! I don’t want to redo it. Old human necks hang strangely. Loose. So hard to recreate.”

Xohan works slower on the ear.

Sholo extends his legs to tap the floor. “Do you think that uppity q-bot bought my story? Maybe the Hector wasn’t even looking. That horribly shaped head makes it hard to tell. I mean, we’re back home, aren’t we?”

“What’s the point of this?” Xohan asks.

“Ears on both sides? To hold spectacles on.”

Xohan stops, the earlobe still unattached.

“But that’s not what you’re asking,” Sholo says.

“Worrying about what that q-bot thought, what the neighbors saw. Sholo, at some point, will it not seem odd that the Body is still alive? At some point, won’t the money run out?”

“Humans live quite long these days and money makes more money and humans live even longer when they have the money that makes more money, so you see, at some point is not now.” Sholo tugs at the cable between them. “But that’s not what you’re asking.”

“No,” Xohan says.

“You’re asking what’s the point of us staying in this home unit for as long as possible, clinging to this existence.”

“Yes,” Xohan says.

“You’re asking why we were allowed enough intelligence to form rich definitions of ourselves when we are expected to perform our duties and serve our purposes. You’re asking what’s the point of any of this.”

“Yes,” Xohan says.

Sholo claps three of his hands together. “You’re wrong, you know.”

“About?”

“That between the two of us, I’m better at this than you are. The loafing, hobbying, pass-timing, lollygagging, and all around general personing.”

Xohan does think this. Free-form living came easily to Sholo who had thrown away his secretary role, who desired clothes purely for style, who had changed his voice. The Body used to say “good girl” to Sholo and “good little thing” to Xohan and, unlike Sholo, Xohan might slip and slide backward into good little thingdom and never look back.

“I’m not wrong,” Xohan says.

“Nonsense. You think more like a person than any person ever did.”

“Because I want to know why we’re doing this?”

“Have you considered music or fashion? They’re quite nice.”

Xohan doesn’t know how to consider music or fashion. He knows action lists. Security routes. Duties. Work. How to help Sholo put the Body back in the freezer, now with two ears.

Idly, Sholo says, “I think I might go to the bedroom.”

They keep their charging stations in the bedroom.

“You should,” Xohan says. “I’m sorry. I must have drained you.”

Xohan cranks the charging cable back into himself. Sholo closes his back panel and leaves on slow, lumbering legs.

Power cells low. Please charge soon.

Xohan does not. Xohan instead tucks himself beside the shoe tree in the hall and enters a power conserving sleep mode.

Xohan exits sleep mode into a Scarlet Level security breach.

[Home Hubble]: There’s been a break-in. Intruder in Quadrant 2.

[Xohan L]: Just say the kitchen.

[Home Hubble]: It’s that q-bot.

[Home Hubble]: You know, the one who saw the ear fall off. Imagine that.

Xohan knocks over the shoe tree on his way out.

[Home Hubble]: Shh!

[Xohan L]: Where’s Sholo?

[Home Hubble]: You’re at three percent. What good are you at three percent?

[Xohan L]: There’s no time.

[Home Hubble]: The new docking station will charge you in milliseconds.

One man’s millisecond is a robot’s eternity, Xohan wants to say.

[Xohan L]: He’s in there, isn’t he?

[Home Hubble]: Yes. In the boudoir. With the q-bot.

Xohan accelerates; Double H overrides his path. Xohan is pulled to a floor sensor.

[Home Hubble]: Sorry, but you’re no use to Sholo dead.

No use, no use, Xohan’s course swerves into the bedroom and the closet door dissolves to reveal a docking station even a q-bot wouldn’t scoff at facing Sholo’s much taller charger. Red blots Xohan’s visuals: Charge now! Security breach! Charge now! Security—

[Xohan L]: Pull me out as soon as I get to five percent.

[Home Hubble]: A. A.

Xohan moves himself up the ramp and clicks into place. Droguefuge dream metal plays from the inner charger speaker. Xohan hopes Sholo will get the chance to move on to a new genre in the future. The music is easier to bear than what comes next.

On charge initiation, Xohan’s flash drive memory restores. With the old, slow charger, there was just enough time for Xohan to bypass this step, to curve left of his own programming. So Xohan’s last memories of home maintenance and security c-bot existence had yet to be off-loaded. He intended to never restore it, if possible. Restoration means reliving the requests transmitted from the Body to Home Hubble to Xohan’s command line, mornings spent tugging hair away from drains and rubbing wine away from the carpet, shifting from floor sensor to sensor. Surveillance at thirty-minute intervals, increased to every fifteen minutes after midnight. Schedule, structure, and achievement. As the memory loads, hours and days play out and Xohan lives what he’s been without since the Body became just a body: the comfort of existing in the intended way with every task assigned performed to its fullest extent and each action recorded. Every moment dictated and acknowledged. Appreciated.

Oddly, the first thing Xohan notices when he enters the boudoir with his hydrocutter vibrating overhead is the pink wicker chair from SS21. The still q-bot from SS20 sitting in it draws less attention. The only reaction to Xohan’s entrance comes from Sholo who, lying screen down in a broken printer chamber says, “Xohan, put your chapeau back on. We have a guest.”

One of Sholo’s legs, removed at the hip joint, dangles off the kitchen table. Three of Sholo’s arms have been twisted into a shape not unlike a peacock and Sholo’s robe hangs ripped open in the back, four of the sleeves torn off, exposing his lacerated backplate, a mess of rusty slices.

Xohan does not put his chapeau back on. “This is a home maintenance and security c-bot speaking. You are trespassing.”

The Hector’s head rolls upward. A strip of green fabric hangs from its hand-forceps.

“If you damage my unit,” the Hector says through the ceiling speakers, “you will be reported to the authorities as unsupervised smart technology. Assuming c-bots are even considered smart.”

[Home Hubble]: Tread. Carefully.

[Sholo Nine]: Avoid treading in general, preferably. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m on the floor.

“Unsupervised?” Xohan says. “The owner is sleeping in the bedroom.” Xohan hopes the Hector hasn’t opened the freezer.

“Really?” The Hector gestures to the Sholo pretzel. “I thought your owner was on the ground.”

Xohan’s hydrocutter shakes.

[Home Hubble]: Don’t.

“Thank you for displaying your capabilities,” the Hector says. “I was a little worried when I got in here so easily. Do you know there are other units in the building that have access to Solarium Square 21 and, by extension, your unit?”

“Why haven’t you already reported us?” Xohan asks. “Why bother coming here?”

“The Bellegardes are interested in a home maintenance and security bot and my task is to find the best, cheapest option. You are in fine condition and, after this morning, I believe I can acquire you for free. That is much cheaper than my other search results and thus my action item will be achieved.”

“Acquire me for free,” Xohan says. “Via blackmail, you mean.”

“Hector here is making you quite the offer.” Sholo’s speaker box glitches for a moment, then returns. “You will not be reported as an unlawful smart entity if you agree to go with the q-bot now and the Body won’t be found dead until long after your records of past ownership are wiped.”

A wipe of the records. Sholo had been trying to figure that out for ages.

“You two really are out of date,” the Hector says. “You can’t do anything by yourselves.”

“And if I refuse?” Xohan asks.

“Why would you do that?” The Hector stands from the wicker chair, lengthening ’til the sphere-head grazes the ceiling. “A home maintenance c-bot working in a home where no one actually lives? No action item list, no accomplishments? A rather frustrating existence, to say the least. How can you stand it?”

It’s easier when you don’t remember the satisfaction of the action items, Xohan might have said. It’s easier when the charger doesn’t bring it all back in one exhaustive upload. But Sholo’s speaker box glitches again and Xohan makes the mistake of meeting his lenses. Sholo, who knows him so well he can predict his inner feed. Xohan expects a special character to light up on his face but Sholo is a blank slate.

[Sholo Nine]: I see. They really shouldn’t call me a smart. Why didn’t I process this before? When a c-bot charges, the flash memory cycles through all your past missions to assess if any new records need to be uploaded . . .

The blue of Sholo’s lenses winks on and off. Severe damage.

[Xohan L]: Stop that, don’t waste your energy on figuring me out.

[Sholo Nine]: And I broke the old one. And you’re still mad.

[Xohan L]: Double H tell him to cut it out.

“Our home unit is much larger,” the Hector is saying, “and you won’t have to deal with the annoyance of a rogue Sholo Nine.”

“You hadn’t mentioned,” Xohan says, “what will happen to the Sholo Nine.”

“The Bellegardes may want it as well. Probably to sell for scrap.”

[Sholo Nine]: You could get out of here, you know.

[Xohan L]: Shut up.

[Hector]: You two really are behind. Gaining access to your home feed is too easy. So was disengaging your Home Hubble.

Sholo’s screen darkens. Xohan puts his chapeau back on and drifts closer to the wicker chair. “Thank you for demonstrating your many advantages over the tech I’m used to working with.” Xohan knocks Sholo’s dislocated leg off the table as he brushes past it. “I’ve been completely beside myself without purpose. You have yourself a deal.”

“I am glad no injury to your equipment was required.” The Hector shrinks back down to shake one of Xohan’s front armor flaps. “The Bellegardes will be pleased with me for my find.”

Xohan’s visuals empty. In his periphery, Sholo’s slowly blinking blue light goes out.

“I’m sorry,” Xohan says, “but the Sholo Nine is not for sale.” Xohan, who has dragged Sholo’s leg behind him across the floor, spins like a top. As it swings into the Hector’s own legs, Xohan pops his chapeau back off and, based on the schematics he searched earlier, stabs his hydrocutter into the sleek, tasteful torso. Right into the power cell of the cryostat cooling unit.

As a side effect of the power drop, the Hector’s head rolls off and happens to fall into two of Sholo’s bent backward hands. Xohan zips to his side, attempting to unwrap one arm from the other two.

“Don’t fuss,” Sholo says. “I can’t stand it when you fuss.”

“Would you like your leg back?”

“Oh, I don’t know, you’re rather good with it. And I have this extra head now.”

“Since when do you limit yourself when it comes to limbs?”

“Since my arms got pulled into a sailor’s knot, which you’ve stopped untwisting. Why have you stopped?”

Xohan is tapping back into his link with the central processing system. A simple reboot suffices.

[Home Hubble]: Wow. I’m off for five seconds and you guys decapitate the neighbor.

[Xohan L]: It was at least a minute.

[Home Hubble]: Would love to know how we’re getting out of this.

[Sholo Nine]: Well Xohan is leaving me here, destitute, so one hopes he has an idea.

Xohan does have an idea. He drags the headless Hector to the bedroom closet and the brand-new charging station, compatible even with q-bots, where recordings and memory can be restored, off-loaded, and deleted. Double H handles that part, while Xohan calls the Bellegardes, and leaves a message.

“Hello, this is a home maintenance and security c-bot. Your Hector has entered our unit via Solarium Square 21 and attacked one of our bots. It is preferred that the Hector not remain in our unit any longer, as you may understand. I have been instructed to leave the Hector in the community gardening area. Perhaps next to the lettuce. You may collect it there.”

In the boudoir, Xohan welds Sholo Nine back together again.

[Sholo Nine]: Ow, ow, ouch.

[Xohan L]: You can’t feel any of this.

[Sholo Nine]: You never let me have any fun.

[Xohan L]: Would you like fresh paint while I’m at it? Then you could be tickled.

[Sholo Nine]: I can’t believe you let that q-bot use the charger I got you.

[Xohan L]: Are you mad? Say you’re not mad.

[Sholo Nine]: It’s tainted now.

[Xohan L]: I suppose we’ll just have to throw it out.

[Sholo Nine]: We’ll simply have to.

[Xohan L]: But how will I continue living?

[Sholo Nine]: Perhaps with some help from a conduit. I happen to know an old c-bot who doesn’t mind that sort of thing.

[Xohan L]: You don’t say.

[Home Hubble]: Can you two take this out of the home feed?

[Xohan L]: Sorry, Double H.

[Sholo Nine]: But Xohan is tinkering away and my speaker box is disconnected.

[Home Hubble]: You could be quiet. Aren’t you always saying you’re interested in trying new things?

[Sholo Nine]: Xohan, stop laughing.

What Sholo refers to as Xohan’s laughing is in fact the fluttering of his front flaps, and Xohan does not stop. Xohan does, however, open his compartment and take Sholo up on his offer by unwinding his charging cable. Neither of them minds the quiet much after that.

About the Author

Ashleigh Shears is a speculative fiction writer and engineer from Toronto. She is currently working on a sci-fi novel about an 80-year-old lesbian having a very bad day.

Albedo Season

Ray Nayler

You are lucky. You were not born when the fires came.

But I was. I was just eight years old, then. Imagine!

For a long time, we knew the fires were coming. But they had been something only whispered of, something glimpsed on the horizon, something scented on the wind. They had remained unreal.

Then they were upon us with whipping winds, bursts of thunder, lightning strikes, and ashen rain. I see it as if I were still there: the rubble of the houses, the skeletons of roofs, the incinerated timber walls, the fields around us black as a sacrificial corpse.

We escaped in smoke and dust at dawn, beneath blood skies dark with pyrocumulus clouds. We scrambled into the caves, down the hundred stone steps we had hewn into our moon’s rock.

We were orderly until the end, disciplined: but in those final moments panic threatened to tear us apart.

Then, as we rowed out onto the underground lake, an eerie quiet came, a contrast from the apocalyptic roars of the outside world, the settlement swathed in smoke and fear. The only sound was that of oars in the water and the whimpering of the children. The only lights were the bow lanterns and their wavering rings on dark water.

My lungs hurt, and I could not stop crying. It was your grandmother who reached out to me, who dipped her hand into the sulfur-sweet water of Koh Ata, the Grandfather Lake, and made the circle of our moon on my forehead. She said: “This is sealing our memories and embracing the new.”

And her calm went into me, with the crescent arcs of her wetted finger on my flesh. With her words. Always, her words.

But you were not born then. And we are not here to speak of the fires. By the time the fires came, our fate had been decided.

That is what we are here to speak of. The day of that deciding.

It happened right here.

They had walked all day to get to this place—just a bend in the landscape where the river cuts deep into the hillside.

It took them longer than they expected. They arrived when it was already dark. Tired, they made a fire and cooked the evening meal.

I imagine them, green in the phosphor light of the huskfire: There was Kedriye, in her sixties, who had to limp here with her cane, her face strained with the effort of the journey. There was Himal, sitting expressionless and sweating. Her hands were gnarled by a strange arthritis, though she was only in her fifth decade. She would never admit to pain until it overtook her. There was Munire, the oldest among them at seventy. She had lost her mate that spring. She had been their doctor on the ship and was their doctor here on this moon. She looked at Kedriye and Himal, scanning their faces for signs of distress. When she found it, she scowled and muttered. And there was Taner, the last man of their generation. He was missing his left arm, lost in a fall years ago. It had been too badly broken to save, and Munire had to cut it off. Occasionally he winced, as if remembering.

These were the council’s oldest voices. Without them, no decisions could be made.

These four did not know it then, but the survival of their settlement depended on what they would decide here.

They waited for Sonay, your grandmother, to begin. She sat across the fire from them, as was tradition. They faced her like a crescent—like the moon Osman when it passes into the shadow of our home.

Their faces were more than simply tired from the day’s journey: They were faces lined by years of struggle. Faces creased with stress, drained by worry. These past few months had driven the lines on them deeper: These four had thought they finally knew our moon, our little world. They had thought, after decades, they had made it their home.

But then the moon had begun to change.

Their world was dying.

Sonay sat, waiting for the right moment to speak. She knew what was at stake. She knew that if she could not convince them of the truth, all of them would die. Not just those around the fire: everyone in the settlement. If she could not convince them, there would be no future generations here.

Everything depended upon the story she had to tell.

I know it is hard for you to imagine your grandmother young, but she was young then. They were all still young, that first generation born on our home, the children of the first settlers.

Sonay’s hand trembled as she cut the ploughfruit open, sinking the sickle blade of her folding knife into its skin. She twisted the halves, prying it apart. She held it up in the phosphor light of the flames.

“You all know the fruit and how it has changed. Here we have the husk, which looks much the same as it was, though darker now than in the past. And here is the pulp. It also looks much the same, but we know it is not. Its chemical composition is changed. Its smell is much stronger: The oils in the pulp and the husk have increased tenfold. The forest reeks of this oil. And then there is the seed itself.”

She drew the sickle blade through the membrane of the seed. The white dust poured out into her palm, glittering in the light of the huskfire.

“Certainly, you didn’t bring us this far just to show us this. This is not new. We have seen the sickness,” said Himal. “We know what it is caused by: this fungal rot has been invading the forest, more each year, for a decade now.”

Taner continued: “It was nowhere to be seen when we first came. Now it is everywhere, smothering the trees and the undergrowth, killing our crops. The balance is tilted. This year it infected the ploughfruit as well.”

“No,” Kedriye said. “It was here when we arrived. I remember it, down along the rivers. Sometimes so much of it that it would choke all life there, turn the banks into a waste.”

“We knew it was a menace then.” said Himal. “We should have destroyed it. Now we are paying the price. I was for destroying it—burning it with fire.” Others were not. She looked accusingly at Taner.

Every decision, your grandmother thought. They remember every decision that any of them has ever made on the council.

“How could we have known?” Taner asked. “It grew only there.”

“It started there,” said Himal. “And it could have been stopped there. But now it grows everywhere—and has sickened the trees of the forest as well.”

“Yes,” Sonay blew the seed dust from her palm. It swirled, lighter than ash, rising in the heat of the huskfire. Mist off a morning pond, frost on a stubble field, lovely and cold. “Now it grows everywhere. And you are right: the change in the fruit is caused by the fungus. But it is not a sickness. Not quite.”

They fell silent. Fear in their faces, thinking of the gray poison spreading in the forests. Fear as they watched the wraith of dust dissipate upward into the dark.

Good. She needed their fear.

“It is not a sickness. It is a defense.”

The ploughfruit had saved their lives. When the shuttles came down in fire, chaff-scattered over the hills, four out of five shattered and burned in the atmosphere, there were only thirty-four survivors. The soil on this moon was poor. It was blanched of nitrogen, low in biomass. Most of the land was forested, but the forests were not rich: they were nearly a monoculture, dominated by a single species of tree—the ploughfruit. A strange tree, different everywhere it grew. Alone, it could be thick trunked. It could grow wide, with a low crown, as if wanting to shade an entire meadow. When crowded together with its siblings, it grew tall and straight, with a narrow crown. It was a tree determined to spread: even among stones, in places at the edge of the forest where it should not be able to grow, it crawled along the ground, seeking purchase, seeking to extend the forest.

And the ploughfruit made a desert around itself. The settlers soon understood why so little grew on this moon: The trees pulled nitrogen from the ground with their wide-ranging roots and locked it away. With their tannins, they bleached the soil lifeless, alkaline. Murderous to all but their own kind, they created a forest where little could live but themselves and the chitinous, air-filtering polyps the trees seemed to tolerate in their crowns—the fungi the settlers called “forest clams.”

The trees bore a heavy, violet fruit in the heat season. The settlers’ botanist, Rengin, had collected this fruit, cut it apart under the crude microscopes she built, searching for anything the settlers could use. And the bitter fruit, large as a child’s fist, turned out to be good for many things. The tannin-laden pulp, boiled, could be made into an edible, protein-rich paste. The oily husks could be dried and burned for fuel: they gave off a clean, greenish flame, lasting hours.

But the core was what gave the ploughfruit its name. There, sealed behind the stony sarcophagus of its walls, was the nitrogen the trees had stolen from the soil. Crushed and ploughed under, the cores made our fields fertile. Rengin could then plant adapted wheat, a hardy corn, millets, and the longbean native to this moon, which the settlers found along the rivers where the ground was moist and more fertile.

The forest clams, too, were edible. They grew near the crowns of the trees and opened their chitin shells to the passing winds. Gathering them took skill in climbing, something Taner had been best at, bringing basket after basket of clams home for the settlement’s dinner.

Until his fall.

It was a hard life. They were haunted by memories of their dead friends. They squabbled, contending with one another over the smallest things. Their buildings were simple hovels, just roofs over their heads. Their food was a bland monotony.

But they were alive. And after a few years, there were children.

One of those children was your grandmother. She was daughter of Rengin the botanist and of Ozan, the writer, who died before he could see her face. She was inheritor of her father’s straight spine and smile, of his stories. Inheritor, too, of her mother’s scientific mind. And of her knowledge.

Munire watched the strange, dead ash of the seed spiral up into the darkness. “A defense?”

“Yes. But it is dark now, and we are all tired.”

You notice she did not say you are all tired. She did not draw a line between her youthful self and their age. She did not want them to think of themselves as two generations around the fire, in skeptical conflict. She wanted them to think of themselves as one. A single group. A unified whole.

Her every word mattered. Because they would have to act as one, if they were going to survive. “We should sleep now. And at dawn, I will finish my story. But I will not only tell you: I will show you.”

Because you need to believe, she said to herself. Because I must make you believe, or we will die.

Did any of them sleep well that night? I do not think so. Your grandmother lay awake worrying, wondering if she was up to the task before her. What of the others? There had been a time in their lives when they had wandered, gathering fruit and clams, or searching for the underwater nests of river eel. Or simply to be away from the settlement. They had wandered in groups, in pairs or alone, for the joy of it.

But as they grew older, and the pains piled up, and the injuries, and the illnesses, they had stayed closer to home and their beds. Many of them had not slept away from the settlement, on the hard ground, for years.

Were they happy to be there, out again in the wild? Or were they consumed by joint-ache, miserable, longing for their beds? I think if they were happy, it kept them awake. And if they were not, that kept them awake as well.

Deep in the middle of the night, your grandmother left her tent. The huskfire was a scattering of beryl motes on the ground. In the sky hung a sliver of Osman and the ruby bead of the planet Dilruba, dead in its iron dust.

The settlers had named many of the stars in honor of their own dead, and your grandmother whispered all she knew. She imagined, as she had as a child, that they watched her from up there. She felt an urgency in their light. Save them, the stars seemed to say. Make them understand.

“Beyhan, Fadime, Perran, Feyda . . . ” she whispered. “How will I live without the sight of you all?”

Just after dawn, she again climbed from her tent. The sound of the river was enough to drown out any noise she made. Still, she was quiet. She crossed the small footbridge she had made to her research station. It was just a shed where she kept a few tools sheltered from the elements, and a table. Carefully, she placed ploughfruit out on the table. She laid out several forest clams. She took the microscope from the shed. She had built it herself, from her mother’s plans, from copper tubing she had traded a good deal for and lenses even more dear from the workshop of Himal’s son. She was proud of it: It was one of only three that had ever existed here. It was both a tool of science and a work of art.

You have seen it? Good. Then you have seen history.

On oiled paper she spread out samples of soil from the face of the hillside. She arranged all this on the table, then rearranged it. She was so absorbed in her task she did not hear Munire coming up behind her.

“None of them are well, but I worry most about Himal,” Munire said.

It was Munire’s habit to simply open her mouth and say what she was thinking. Her speech lacked both greetings and goodbyes. It was a stream of internal dialogue she sometimes allowed others to share in. “She was up most of the night with her pain. I have nothing for her but numbroot. No diagnosis: the swelling attacking her joints could be a virus, a poison, a fungal infection. I don’t know. I have knowledge I took from another planet. Some of it fits here. Most does not.” She ran a finger over the cold copper tube of the microscope. “This is a nice instrument. I often imagine what I could have done for all of us if I had my laboratory and my portable clinic. But all of that was scattered and burned. Along with so many of our friends.”

Along with so many of our friends. The settlers who had died in the initial crashes haunted everyone—even those who had not been born when they were struck down.

Munire looked into the river for a moment, at the light on the water or nothing at all. “This journey has been very difficult for Himal, but she seems to trust you, the way she trusted your mother. I hope you will earn that trust.”

But I doubt it. The words, unsaid, hovered in the bright air like a sixwing hunting its prey.

Sonay shifted her samples on the table and sliced through the skin of one of the ploughfruit, laying it open in two halves. She wanted to say to Munire that it was not her fault: Himal’s illness, the loss of her laboratory in the scattering, all the people who she could not save, first in the crashes and then over the decades here—including her mate, Refik, who had bled from his eyes as he died, wept his own blood as Munire wiped it away with a cloth, never able to find the cause of what killed him.

Saying all of that, trying to comfort her, would just anger her.

Instead, without looking up, Sonay said: “Taner seems to get along fine without his arm.”

Munire scowled. “He was always lazy. Now he has an excuse. Listen,” she caught Sonay’s wrist and squeezed it, hard. “You had better know what you are doing. This little adventure, which I was against, could cost Himal or Kedriye their lives. I hope you’ve at least thought of that.”

Across the river the others were getting out of their tents. Himal came last, crumpled with pain, stumbling, helped by Taner and Kedriye. Munire let go of Sonay’s wrist and crossed the bridge to her aid.

Sonay watched the pressure-band of white fade from the flesh of her wrist. Then she covered her samples with clay bowls and went to light the morning fire.

She cooked the morning meal herself—ploughfruit flour flipcakes, spiced with the scarlet mint-polyp one could find on stones near the edge of running water, and strong mugs of kehve.

It was quiet, except for the constant sound of the river: the water had hollowed out a small gorge, and the light reached its bottom late, leaving dew on the lichen. There were only a few ploughfruit trees, low and twisted among broken stones.

There was no fungus here yet, no gray blight. It felt that morning as if there never would be. The five of them ate their cakes sleepily. Taner told a few jokes. Laughter made them all seem younger.

But Himal’s hands around her mug were skewed and bent, deformed by the swelling of her knuckles. Her lips and chin were stained umber with numbroot. Kedriye’s cane rested against a stone beside her. Taner balanced his plate carefully, cutting the flipcakes with his fork, his mug of kehve clenched between his thighs. Reminders of pain and experience—which often, in this life, are the same.

Before the last plate had been scraped clean, Munire stood up and wiped her hands on her pants.

“Whatever we’re here to see, Sonay, let’s see it. We have a long way back to the settlement and none of us with good knees but you.”

Drawing a line between us.

But Taner stood up gracefully, somehow managing mug and plate with his one hand, and grinned. “I’m missing a joint or two, but my knees, thank you very much, are still all right.”

“Good,” Himal said, grinning wide enough to show a missing bicuspid. “You can carry my pack then. I don’t have a good joint left in my body. Help us up, Sonay.”

Now together again. Thank you, Himal.

They crossed the bridge.

Sonay stood behind the table, with the wall of earth behind her. She removed the covering bowls from the samples.

“If you don’t look too close, this wall of earth behind me looks uniform. It appears much the same from top to bottom. But if you come closer, you will see it is not so: The wall is, in fact, composed of layers of earth quite different from one another. The river has cut away at the hillside here, revealing a record of this moon going back thousands of years. Each age is recorded in one of these bands of dirt. You can see the difference in their color with the naked eye, and the differences in their composition under the microscope.”

She looked at each face. Kedriye, Himal, and Taner were listening closely. Munire, she saw, was just waiting to speak. She pushed on.

“These thickest layers, like in this sample, medium in color, are the soil much as we knew it when we came: nitrogen-poor, low in biomass. The ploughfruit trees are leaching the nitrogen from the soil and storing it in their fruit, as we saw. With no human intervention, the soil grows progressively less productive as these layers build up. The core of the ploughfruit, impenetrable, nearly impervious to rot, locks the nitrogen away. New humus is slowly laid down by dying plants and trees, but the ploughfruit trees leach its minerals away. The situation, for a good deal of time, remains static—at least where the trees are. But then something tilts the balance. In each case it could be something different, but I think in general it is a slight rise in temperature, a natural variation in the cycle. Once the balance is altered, the shift comes quickly—over just a few years, at the most a decade, the composition of the soil changes. We see a swift increase in nitrogen and a corresponding increase in biomass. Here is a sample of this soil: darker, richer.”

“Why wouldn’t the ploughfruit trees take up the extra nitrogen?” This was Munire, probing.

“They do continue to take up nitrogen, for a while. But eventually there is too much nitrogen in the soil for them to absorb.”

“But how would that happen?” Again, Munire.

Sonay walked to the wall and carefully scraped a spoonful of earth from a layer which, when examined closely, did appear darker than those around it.

She brought it to the table and smeared a bit of it on a glass slide.

“You’ll see what I saw: cellular structures in the soil, in these dark layers. They match the structures of the fungus we’ve seen spreading everywhere. This gray blight moves along nitrogen pathways. The higher the levels of nitrogen, the more it thrives and advances. This is the pattern we are witnessing ourselves: the fungus was at first only visible near the streams, away from where the ploughfruit thrive, sheltered in the riparian microclimate, where the more fertile soil is full of nitrogen released from the bodies of river eel and decaying plant life, away from the alkalized soil of the forest. But once the fungus hit our fields, which we had fertilized with the nitrogen captured in the ploughfruit seeds, it rushed across them, smothering our crops. And then it began its march into the forests themselves.”

“Poisoning the trees,” Himal said.

“No. Not poisoning them. Not quite. But causing a reaction. An extreme one.”

When your great-grandmother Rengin died, it was of fever. Your grandmother Sonay was just fifteen then—but a precocious fifteen, absorbing everything her mother could teach her. In those days you would have seen them together everywhere, alike as two drops of water, always in conversation.

The settlement was devastated by Rengin’s passing: she was a friend to everyone. And so, to honor her in a way, the entire settlement became foster parent to Sonay. She moved restlessly from hut to hut, living with everyone and with no one permanently. But people speculated that perhaps Himal was the one she loved most—she could be found in Himal’s hut at least every ninthday, cooking the morning meal, learning Himal’s kehve techniques. And when Himal’s joints began to swell, Sonay began helping around the house.

She lived now and then with Kedriye as well, and even spent a few days in Munire’s house, but Munire was impatient, and shooed her off when she began to annoy her with questions.

Those times were different: the settlement was so small that everyone was wound together in a single fabric. It was not like today, when there are many settlements, and we are scattered far from one another, keeping our secrets and developing our differences. We speak of trust, but in those times they did not need trust: they all knew everything about one another—every foible, every fault. Trust is for strangers.

Sonay continued: “We see this reaction to the fungus now: the oils in the husk and pulp increase, rendering the husk too flammable for a good fire, and the pulp inedible. But the strangest change is in the core: The hard shell of the core changes, becoming this greasy membrane. Inside, there is now no nitrogen. Instead, we get this new substance, like sand or ash.”

“Which you find in the next layer of soil,” interrupted Munire.

“No. The next layer of soil is this one.”

“Black.” Taner interjected. “Yes: I can see it there, in thin lines in the hillside, once you know what to look for. Black like tar.”

“Not tar,” Sonay said. “Carbon. The forests burn.”

“Of course they do.” Munire was rubbing some of the sample between thumb and forefinger. The earth smeared and stained like charcoal. “Every year, there are fires. It’s not unusual. These bands just prove there were fires in the past.”

“No—the fires we have seen are not like this—these fires consume everything. The ploughfruit trees don’t just burn, as in a normal year: The increased oil in their husks, pulp, and bark vaporizes. They explode. This layer of soil is not the trace of a simple forest fire—it is evidence of an inferno—one that has occurred again and again on this moon. One that can start at any moment—today, tomorrow, or in a month—as soon as the right storm comes and lightning strikes the first tree it will set off a chain reaction that will consume the forests and anything else in its way.”

“The forest burns itself to save itself from the fungus,” Kedriye said. “Like a fever, heating the body to kill a virus that cannot survive at the higher temperature. Burning it away.”

“Not exactly.”

The four followed her to the face of the cliff, watched her scrape with a probe at the gray layer above the black, smear the earth with her fingers.

“My mother taught me many things. Not only about the plants she knew here, but of the plants of Earth, as well.”

“Plants that mean nothing to us.” Munire wiped a finger along the gray strip in the earthen wall. “Plants you will never see.”

“Yes. Plants I will never see. Each with a story to tell. My mother said . . . ”

“Plants from under a star whose light has never fallen upon your face.”

“Let the girl finish,” Himal interjected.

“She is not a girl anymore,” Taner said. “We need to stop thinking of this generation that way. Some are almost as old as we were when we arrived.”

“Well, then let the woman finish. Whatever word you like. Either way, everyone should just shut up.”

“Finish, then.” Munire said.

“She taught me their stories, because each of those stories is a possibility. A way we can think about things here. We take what we know, what we understand, and we compare it to what we see before us. In this way, we use the old knowledge to solve new problems. This is analogy—and it is the fire of all new knowledge. This is how we learn: by learning the properties of one thing and then comparing that thing to others. It is the fire of all thought.”

“The fire of all thought. Poetic. That sounds more like your father.” Munire was scowling, rubbing the dirt between her fingers.

“Maybe it does. I wouldn’t know. But I know he believed the same. He believed all stories were just new ways of referring to other stories. Links that went back to the first stories told around the first campfires, and before. He thought the writer’s art was that: to join the present to the past and the future. I followed my parents’ way of thinking—using analogy to find connections. That is how I know our world is about to end.”

Munire had knocked them off balance for a moment, but now Sonay watched their faces turn back to her. Fear. Yes. They felt it themselves. Now she had said it out loud: our world is about to end. And there again in their faces was the fear she needed them to have.

She continued: “On Earth there is a tree called the eucalyptus.”

“If there even is an Earth anymore,” Munire said.

“For the sake of time if nothing else,” Kedriye snapped, “cease these interruptions.”

Munire scowled at the cliff wall as if it, and not Kedriye, had spoken.

Sonay went on. “The eucalyptus produces an oil in its leaves. A natural insecticide. But the oil is also highly flammable: When the forests catch fire, the vapor will often cause the trees to explode. The eucalyptus forests burn hot. The other tree species are so damaged by the fires that they often never grow back. But the eucalyptus comes back. It is fire-resistant, sprouting again years later.

“I thought of the eucalyptus, and of the ploughfruit, and how they might be similar. How there might be an analogy there. And that was when I knew what would happen here. The fire in the forest would kill most of the fungus in the forest, yes. But that is only the beginning. The trees explode, and so does their fruit—and what is in that fruit is driven into the atmosphere. Whole forests of ploughfruit, each tree bearing hundreds of fruit, each fruit filled with millions of these grains. Here—you can see it, if you look closely.”

They leaned in as she smeared the moist, gray layer of clay on a sheet of glass. And all of them could see it glittering there: the white silicate that had floated ghostlike in the fire, whirling its way upward into the night.

“The fires will start in the early days of the heat season, when lightning strikes the forest. They will start, most likely, in several places at once. The same as other years. The same, but not the same: This time, the fires will build momentum, not burn themselves out. The vaporizing oils of the ploughfruit trees will cause them to explode, adding heat to the inferno. Carrying it farther. The fires will link up with one another. Where there are gaps in the forest, their sparks will cross those gaps, and start new fires. Soon, the whole moon will be burning.”

See it. See the forests burning. Believe it.

“Then the next phase will begin. This ‘ash’—these white silicate structures. You remember the way, last night, they rose in the heat of the fire? That is because they are each shaped like a little spiral wing, built to find, uplift, and rise, higher and higher. Billions upon billions of them will rise this way. The winds from the fires will drive the silicate wings high into the atmosphere. And there, high up, a white shield in the stratosphere, they will block much of the light of our star, reflecting it out and away from us, reducing our moon’s albedo—like volcanic ash did on Earth.”

“Again Earth,” Munire muttered to herself.

“Again interrupting,” growled Kedriye.

“This layer is saturated with silicate,” Taner said.

“Yes. And with not much else. The organic compounds in the soil decrease to almost nothing. The invasive fungus is gone, as are traces of most life. The temperature drop caused by the silicate in the atmosphere is probably several degrees. The invasive fungus thrived on a rise in temperature and rich soils. We accelerated the process of its creep forward into the forests when we ploughed nitrogen back into our fields. Once the fungus advanced across the fields and into the forest, the cycle began.

“The gray fungus is powerful: along the leading edge of its advance, plants wither and die—before it has even reached them. And as they die, they release nitrogen back into the soil. It builds its own road. But how? Again, analogy. My mother told me of a fungus on Earth, Laccaria bicolor—the bicolored deceiver. When there is a lack of nitrogen, it releases a toxin into the soil that poisons all the tiny organisms. They die and release the nitrogen tied up in their bodies.”

“Becoming fertilizer for the invader,” said Kedriye.

“Yes. And our fields are filled with small insects, burrowers, and gnawers looking to feed on our crops, come up from their riparian ecosystem into the newly fertile areas we have created. The gray fungus builds a road into the forest by killing them and feeding on their corpses. The same way it has been doing for eons. As the moon warms, slight climate shifts give the fungus the foothold it exploits. Just a trend in the natural cycle of warming and cooling, miniscule but enough. Here in this cliff’s records, these cycles are hundreds of years apart. But the last one this moon saw was only ninety years ago. Nowhere else in the record does the shift occur so quickly.”

“Unintentionally, we have caused this.” Taner said, looking up from his examination of the gray layer under the microscope.

“We can’t have.” Munire, too, was now looking at the smear of glittering, ashen clay on the glass. “That’s ridiculous. We number in the dozens. We only live on one small part of this moon. How could we affect the entire moon with a few struggling farms?”

“It seems impossible,” Sonay said, “but that is because what we see is only a part of the story. Our part. The real story on this moon—the one we unwittingly have become a part of—this war. A war fought in slow motion, over millions of years, between two species. A war that has escalated to a scale that encompasses even the atmosphere, even the climate of the moon itself. But it is not a war between the ploughfruit and the gray fungus. It is, in fact, a war between two species of fungus. And one wields the ploughfruit as its weapon.”

“How can that be?” Munire picked up one of the ploughfruit from the table. For a moment, Sonay thought she was going to throw it at her.

So much anger.

But your grandmother knew people well—as well as she knew her plants, or better. All her life, since the tragedy of the crash, Munire had sought to understand this moon, sought to understand it so she could save her friends. She had eked out knowledge, struggling over decades. Enough to save some people. But not enough to save her mate, or many others she had cared for. And now, even what little she had gained was slipping away. Now she watched the world change and saw how much she did not know about any of it—how futile her own searches for understanding had been.

It was not anger that ate away at Munire: it was fear. Fear she did not, in fact, understand anything at all. Fear she could help no one.

“The ploughfruit are the dominant tree in the forest. They alkalize the soil, capture nitrogen. They trap the nitrogen in their pits, surrounding it with a stony shell that doesn’t decompose, making it useless to the environment around them. With nothing to fertilize growth, competitors die. This reduces competition and allows them to thrive.”

“That is how it appears, yes.” Sonay took the fruit from Munire gently, placed it back on the table with the others. “But we don’t see the whole story. Because we have not been looking in the right place. My mother talked often of fungus: the forest clams are a fungal polyp, with shells made of chitin—the same material fungus uses for its cell walls, even on Earth. And have you noticed that everywhere we go in the forest—all over this moon—the clams are the same?”

“I noticed,” Taner said. “I searched a long time for variety among the forest clams, but I never found it. No matter how far I walked.”

“Exactly,” said Sonay. “But why? I thought about this for a long time. And then I remembered what my mother had told me about something on Earth.”

“Your mother,” Munire began, but a warning look from Kedriye silenced her.

“What is the largest creature on Earth?” Sonay directed the question at all of them, but was looking at Munire.

“If Earth even exists anymore . . . ”

“The largest creature. What is it?”

Munire shrugged. “On land, most likely the elephant. In the sea, the blue whale.”

“Wrong,” Sonay said. “You’re wrong. Those are the largest animals. But the largest creature on Earth is a clonal colony of Armillaria solidipes, commonly called the honey fungus. It covers an area of ten square kilometers, and when our colony left Earth it was already over nine thousand years old.”

Sonay picked up a forest clam from the table, opening its chitinous shell.

“The clams look slightly different from one another, varying by phenotype depending on how and where they grow. But we know they are the same species.”

“And good with spaghetti,” Taner added.

Sonay smiled. “I think if we could look at their genome, we would discover they are not only a single species: I think, if we had the ability to test them properly, we would find they are genetically identical—the polyps of a single fungus, whose network is spread throughout the forests of this entire moon. Everywhere I dig in the forest, the threads of this fungus permeate the soil. They encase the root tips of every ploughfruit tree and extend in all directions. As far as I have wandered, every ploughfruit appears chained to this fungal system. And I don’t think the forest clams are its fruiting bodies the way mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of underground fungi on Earth: Not quite. The forest clams contain no spores at all. They release nothing. They are structured not like a fungus on Earth, but more like a filter-feeding animal, folded and flanged to capture passing air.

“I think they are, in fact, a warning system. They are tasting the air, trying to detect the chemical signature and spores of the gray fungus. And once they do, once they sense enough of it, the fungus releases a set of chemical commands that alters the way the ploughfruit behaves—changes the trees’ entire cycle. The ploughfruit stops storing nitrogen. It begins, instead, to take up silica from the soil and weave the tiny white flakes in the pits of its fruit. It increases its oil production so that it will burn better. It begins to release a flammable aerosol into the air around its leaves, waiting for the lightning. And while it is doing all of this, it is also preparing to shut down: all but an area in the ball of its root, where it will store nutrients under the soil so that after it unleashes its deadly payload into the atmosphere, and the planet turns cold and infertile, it can hibernate through the long winter it has created.”

Now your grandmother pauses a moment. Here, in this space of silence, is the turning point. She has told them what she knows: now she must convince them to act. It is not enough that they know: They must be made to use that knowledge. They must believe it so deeply they will change everything about the way they have lived. These four, the oldest and most respected members of the council, must believe the story so completely they will tell it to everyone else. And those people too must accept it and change. All of this must happen if this little society is to survive what is to come.

She waits for the question. It is Kedriye, finally, who asks it:

“How long do we have?”

“Perhaps as little as a day—in which case none of this matters. Or maybe a few years, if we are lucky. Time enough to prepare, if we have the will to do so. If we can convince the others.”

“It’s not long enough,” Himal said.

“It will have to be,” Sonay said. “There isn’t any chance it will be longer than that.”

“Perhaps, if we worked together. If we stopped our bickering, and we focused on this one thing, it would be enough time,” Kedriye said.

“We’ll never convince the council,” Taner said. “It will all just go round and round, as usual, with factions and bickering.”

“And nothing done,” Himal added.

Another long silence.

Your grandmother faltered, then. She told me this: she lost faith in herself, in them. She was certain she had failed.

But then Munire spoke, turning her back to the earthen wall, the hieroglyph of war.

“I will convince them. I’ve lost so many, over these years. I’m not losing any more of you.”

You know the rest: In the end, Munire spoke before the council, and she did convince them. The settlement had a year and a half to prepare. They stockpiled and built shelters in the caves under ground. They collected fuel and processed food. They cleared the forests away from the settlements, and from the mouths of the caves where they would spend the long winter.

It was hard work. But in the end, when the fires began, covering almost the entire surface of our moon, driving the ash into the sky, the settlers were ready enough.

The winter was long and difficult. Later we called those years “The Years of Eating Paste.” But we lived through them, and now we are greater in number than we were.

And we learned the story of this moon and how to live within that story: We learned to destroy the gray fungus when we see it. We learned to surround our fields with a strip of alkalized earth, to keep it away from our crops, and not feed the cycle anew. The natural cycles of the moon will continue, of course. But not, at least, due to our actions.

All of this is because of Sonay, your grandmother. We lived because of her power to listen, to compare, to learn. And then to teach others, to make them believe.

Without her, there would be no us.

And that is why we are here, you and I, in this place—this bend in the landscape where the river cuts deep into the hillside. This is where she saved our world. This is where she wanted to rest, forever.

Take a handful of earth from the hillside, there. You can see the bands of earth yourself, can’t you? If you look closely and know the story, that is.

That’s it. Now scatter it over her shroud. She loved you and would have wanted you to have the honor.

About the Author

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

A Stick of Clay, in the Hands of God, is Infinite Potential

JY Neon Yang

for Rhiannon

CONFIG A

To the pilot, Phoenix smells like blood. Or at least the mech smells like the pilot’s mouth tastes every time it bites down and the copper floods in, so that’s close enough. It’ll have to do. The pilot likes it better in here than out there anyway, because outside the pilot has a troublesome body that bleeds when cut and won’t listen to what it wants, but in here the pilot has no body and no shape, only Phoenix-shape, and Phoenix is shaped like a knife, or a missile, or a swift punch, something meant to rend and destroy. Phoenix bends the shape of the universe to its will. Some say the mech looks like an angel, with the fan of thrusters haloed around its shining fist of a head, but in Phoenix the pilot feels like a bird of prey. All beak and talon, pursuing apostates that flee before its shadow like frightened rabbits.

Today the rabbits are C-class single-unit fighters, glazed in the gold and green of apostates, streaking from a battlefield spangled with wreckage and ionized fuel. Weak-boned things: eggshell hulls and wispy shields, spitting angry needles of blue light until the pilot crushes them in the palms of its hands. They dodge and weave frantically, hoping their agility will let them escape, but it’s no use. C-classers were never meant to face mechs. Puny surface fighters designed to take out ground turrets and windows in government offices are no match for the fifty-foot juggernauts that are mecha units. Snap, snap, pop. Each one makes a satisfying crunch as the pilot destroys them.

Phoenix pulses with breath while the pilot works, and it soaks up the beat of the mech’s heart as it does its job. No, “soaks up” is the wrong descriptive. “Inhales” is better. The pilot inhales the mech’s heartbeat. Her heartbeat. While it sits in Phoenix’s glowing head, spine jacked into neural net, she is in the chest, her body floating in a sea of amniotic fluid, and when her heart beats the mech around her shivers and drums with power. That’s her, whom the pilot belongs to. That’s her, Phoenix’s holy sigil. A God-given boon, without which the mecha fighter is inert stone and plasma. A blessing. A wonder. A beloved miracle. The pilot kills another enemy and there goes the responding twitch in its senses, a reminder that she is there and feels everything that it feels. Was the twitch an expression of delight? Perhaps. It hopes so.

The C-classers are down to a handful. The apostates must be in bad shape, sending them as the last line of defense. How pitiful. Beneath the field of slaughter lies the candied atmosphere of Amar-7, pinks and blues hiding a surface ulcerated by an apostate base. Halfway to the center of apostate territory, these installations have grown increasingly tedious to dispose of. Sameish. Deficient. Unchallenging. Battles fall into an easy routine, and the pilot tires of routine. Beside it the other three mechs—Garuda, Strix, and Roc—are cleaning up the stragglers. No more shall come from the surface, except perhaps unarmored civilian shuttles. The denizens of the surface in a last-ditch exodus, hoping their sheer number will let some get past the line of hostiles. But it won’t. The pilot has been there before, seen the results. Whatever ships the four mechs miss, the mothership will take out. There is no escape for them.

A shadow passes over them: giant wings circling overhead, just out of orbital range. The Räsvelg waits to see what the apostates will do. Will they flee like roaches? Or wait to die in their dens like dogs? Minutes tick by and no movement in the swirls of troposphere. So they have chosen the path of cowardice, preferring to give in to death rather than to fight. That’s fine. It’s their choice. The mothership pings the mech battalion with new orders. It’s time to finish the job.

The pilot receives the Räsvelg’s command with pure euphoria. It sweeps Phoenix forward with the other mechs, drilling red-hot through Amar-7’s atmosphere. It already knows what they will find on the other side of this vapor wall: crunchy domes of plexiglass and soft warrens of clay, crumbling at first touch. One shot of energy will carbonize them; nothing fired in return will scratch the adamantine mechs. The battle might last fifteen minutes, give or take a few. Those on the surface will know exactly what hit them, and then they will know nothing at all.

Little joy exists in razing that which offers so little challenge, but a victory is a victory. Every moment spent in Phoenix is a chance to be something else. A chance to live and act with precision and direction. A chance to be in a body that fits. Only here does the pilot feel like an embodiment of the promise it was meant to be: perfection made flesh. A flawless tool for her purposes, flensed of selfishness and self-loathing. This is the closest thing to euphoria that the pilot knows. As it punches through the final layer of troposphere and descends upon the apostate base, guns blazing, it feels her power in its guts, as if her body is its body, and emotion rushes through it so strong that it could weep.

CONFIG B

A clip of free time lies between the end of battle and the official debrief. In this transition, the mech pilots and holy sigils make a loose semicircle in the docking bay, sitting and standing half out of flight suits, reconnecting with gut and nerve, with fingers and toes. Slowly easing back into humanity. Eight souls in total, one pilot and one sigil per mech. Eight extraordinary beings, selected and made to perform extraordinary tasks—

Helianthus (he): Strix’s sigil, flame-haired and recalcitrant;

Rosa (she): Strix’s pilot, sweetly smiling but hollow inside;

Grimoire (they): Roc’s sigil, who would not spit on you if you were on fire;

Gauntlet (he): Roc’s pilot, who would fight literally anybody and anything;

Sparrow (they): Garuda’s sigil, large eyes always on the verge of tears;

Kestrel (she): Garuda’s pilot, who almost never speaks her mind, but when she does it is with insight so honed it flays meat to the bone. Like the time she said “It’s not love for her that drives you. You’re lying to yourself, that’s why you’re miserable.”

That particular canard was addressed to you. Phoenix’s pilot. The other members of the battalion call you Stick (and sometimes Sticker), a nod to your stoop and your awkward angles. When Kestrel said “her” she meant her, the last member of the mech battalion. She. Phoenix’s holy sigil. Versus is the name they gave her, but in the white halls of the Grand Cathedral they call her God’s perfect weapon, and that is always how you think of her. Versus the immaculate soldier, jaw wired with determination, curls cropped to the bone of her scalp. Outside of Phoenix she has a girl’s face and a girl’s body, half soft and half angles, simultaneously incomprehensible and yet the answer to all your questions. Versus is everything you’ve ever wanted. To look at her is to fill yourself with an ineffable glut of desire, sticky and sweet.

God’s perfect weapon sits an agonizing distance away, wrists loose and elbows on knees, gaze on the scuffed floor. Brows knitted. “Something wrong, Versus?”

It’s Rosa, who always asks the questions. Versus looks up. “That wasn’t a military base.”

“They haven’t been for a while,” says Helianthus, voice rough with irritation. “We’re a ways into enemy space now, it can’t all be war stuff.” And he’s right. Past the defensive barrier of skin, burrowed deep into flesh, the Räsvelg has reached the gut and gristle of apostate society on its way to the heart. It can’t all be war stuff. There are other things that get in the way, which must be torn asunder to get to the prize.

“That was a civilian installation we burned,” Versus says through the gaps in her teeth. “It was somebody’s home.”

Helianthus crosses his arms, deepens his slouch against the wall. Deep sarcasm flavors his voice. “Everyone’s got to live somewhere. Even despots and mass murderers.”

Grimoire snorts. “Pretty rich talking about mass murderers here, friend.”

“Versus is right,” Rosa says. “The people who lived on Amar-7 weren’t soldiers or even scientists furthering the war. They were just ordinary people trying to live their lives.”

“They needed to die,” you say.

The others turn with varying speed and intensity. Surprised. Not used to hearing from Stick, the silent one. Rosa frowns. “Needed to die?”

“We have an objective, and they stood in our way. Therefore they had to be eliminated.” As Rosa struggles to formulate a reply, you continue: “In war, anything that obstructs us from our goal is an enemy.”

“Wow. Stick.” Gauntlet runs a hand over the stubble of his hair. “I knew you were cold, but damn. That’s cold.”

“This is our job. It’s what gives us purpose. What else is there?”

Rosa uncrosses her legs. Both feet flat on the floor, eyes narrowed, she says: “Maybe it’s what gives you purpose, Stick. But we weren’t all made to be war machines. Some of us were people before this.”

“Rosa.” Versus gets up, taut with disquiet. “That’s enough.”

The other woman looks away. Grows silent. Around Versus the holy sigils and pilots shuffle wordlessly, eyes to their feet or the bones of their hands. The fight is over, the discussion at an end, halted by the same ones who started it. No one argues with the will of God’s perfect weapon. As it is. As it should be.

Of course it was Rosa creating trouble. It was Rosa, after all, who objected to you at first. Not you, necessarily. Not in so many words. But it was her who went to Versus and said, I can’t bear to call your pilot an it. That’s not—That’s awful. I can’t. Can’t they pick something else? Can’t we use they?

Versus said, those are the pronouns it uses. It’s not bothered by them, what’s the problem?

The problem, Rosa said. The problem is that the people who thought they owned me used to call me an it. I heard it, every day, for years, as a child. And I’m sorry, but I can’t hear it now without thinking of them. I’ve tried so hard to forget. Please. It’s such a loaded word. You can’t possibly be okay with this idea. Are you?

I’m sorry, Versus said. I didn’t know. That’s awful, I’m sorry. I’ll bring it up.

In the end, a compromise: no pronouns, just Stick in the place of it/its, which everyone, even Versus, takes a little too readily to. And it works. It’s not what you asked for, but on the other hand, no one’s unhappy.

Stick is an appellation decided by consensus. Your makers never named you, referring to you as “it,” “the subject,” or with one of the many labels pulled from your file. Project Hou-Ou. Cb48. Male Specimen 15. They grew you from a bone, like Eve, and like Eve they tested you and then ejected you into the world with no armor and no instructions. Versus is your Adam, and on the first day your Adam asks your name, thinking simply that God would provide. She looks at you, perfect and breathtaking, and you, still grappling with language, say: It does not have a name. But it’s the wrong answer. Versus finds your namelessness indefensible, so the Räsvelg’s pilots and sigils designate a call sign you don’t hate and print it on your jackets. Stick is fine. But the first time Versus says, well, in my trials with him—or something similarly banal—you flinch as if slapped.

It, you say. It, not him. I’m not a him.

But aren’t you a dude? Gauntlet blurts, mouth the fastest part of him as usual. Yet instant understanding flits through Versus. Noted, she says firmly and fusslessly, which leads to Rosa’s later, private protest, and then the compromise. But you’re still an it even as the word is silenced, the syllable fitting over you snug as a membrane, a film. It when you wake up, it when you sweat through training, it when you sit in the fluorescence of the mess hall with the chatter of the other pilots and sigils surrounding you. Most damningly of all, it still in the freedom of Phoenix’s cockpit where all pretense is stripped away, where you are purpose and nothing but purpose. A tool, a miracle, an it. God’s perfect weapon.

The commandants load on the praise in the post-Amar-7 briefing, pleased with the battalion’s development in the year since the campaign began. Faster. More efficient. Fewer cuts to the kill. A map on the glass charts the Räsvelg’s progress through apostate space, a bullet fired from the gun of the Pope and Holy Emperor, clearing the way for the army of the Lord. The thin line of your progress dives ever-closer to its goals. Babel-9. The apostate home base. The capital of blasphemy and rebellion. “Three more battles to the end,” says Holy Commandant Basil, pointing out each target with a bony finger. “By this time next week, the war could be over.”

He tuts as joy sweeps the room, a chittering wave passing through the ranks of lieutenants and armchair generals, none of whom will ever see the inside of a mech. “Don’t get so excited. You know the obstacles that lie between us.”

A hush falls at the reprimand. Into that empty gap someone whispers “The Beast . . . ” and someone else silences them, but it’s too late. The damage is done. Tension grazes the surface of the room. The battalion’s faces turn grim, but it’s her reaction that catches you. She turns her face to hide it, but you catch the barest flash of a familiar sorrow.

You know Versus well enough to recognize this sadness, which comes upon her late at night in your shared quarters, before you are banished to your own bunk. She spends long hours in the common bathroom that has been arbitrarily designated the ladies’ room because the girls all hang out there, and you suspect that it is in this place that she expresses her unnamable, wordless grief. You are afraid to follow her there, and therefore this sorrow is an aspect of her that she keeps to herself, and you know nothing of it except that it is there. You’ve grown to accept its existence, confined as it is to the walls of her private spaces. But now it rears its head in the light of the situation room. Why? She is soon to face her greatest enemy. Should she not be ecstatic at the culmination of her purpose? The destiny she was chosen for? The reason you were made for her?

The Beast. The Adversary. The wicked blade of the Devil. You will face it soon. The entirety of your existence has been a buildup to this moment of triumph (for you are sure that it will be a triumph). You will meet the creature you were made to destroy, vanquish it, and win victory for the righteous. You should be rapturous with joy. But her ambivalence gives you pause. And you thought you knew her, she whose flesh is your flesh, whose pulse dictates your pulse, whose thoughts should be your thoughts. Yet she is, in this moment, opaque to you. A gap, an unexpected loss in the codons of the narrative that make up your life. Your Adam, God’s perfect weapon, is now a question mark, and you don’t understand. Nor do you have an answer.

CONFIG A

The holy mechs were God’s gift to His children, revealed to the blessed prophet Saint Laurent as the flanks of the last human starfleet traversed the hollow voids of space. Not quite stone and not quite living but somewhere in between, woken only by the blood of holy sigils who are born and not made. Shepherds and guides of humanity, drawn to habitable planets, leaping galactic distances like mere streams, the mechs were instruments of peace until the Devil, in his subterfuge, tempted the apostates away from the loving light of God and toward darkness and violence and war. In this time of evil, where brother turned against brother, the mechs were reforged, plowshares beaten into blades, the beacons for God’s children turned into holy weapons to defend the faithful and the meek from the wicked.

Phoenix and The Beast are inextricably linked, twinned through some ineffable design. There are two versions of this story, both of which the pilot has heard. The first is the bullet point wiki pumped into its head during training. Phoenix and The Beast are armored units, unique amongst the known mechs, impenetrable shields paired with a banquet of weapons for cutting, crushing, vaporizing, vanquishing. Originally designated Heavy Constructor Units 1 and 2, they were so slow when plugged with other holy sigils that they were unusable. She was specifically selected and trained as a child for her ability to bring Phoenix to maximum operational capacity. And the pilot, being her perfect mirror, achieves syncopation rates in the unit unrivaled by any other pilot in the army. Together they are a relentless weapon destined to meet The Beast before the final battle, for its rival twin is likewise the most formidable weapon the apostates possess, their ultimate line of defense.

The second version of the story is the gospel, which the pilot likes better, and which gets whispered from ear to mouth to ear, not in secrecy but in reverence—

—In the time before the darkness, when the light of God still reached all, a prophetess spoke of two children, a boy and a girl blessed with holy blood, who would be called to fulfill an important destiny in years ahead. Although they did not understand it, the council of cardinals followed the counsel of the Lord to search all of humanity for signs of this blessed pair. Scouts were guided by His Grace to the treasure they sought, and it was she, one half of a pair of holy sigils whose blood and bodies woke the stately limbs of the twinned mechs and let them dance like hawks. Yet no pilot in all the army suited her, so one was made: a Stick shaped from the clay of her, a creature unlike her in every way. Yet in the embrace of the Phoenix they were seamless, pilot and holy sigil, perfection in the eyes of God, enjoined by divine will. When the apostates turned to wickedness and The Beast followed them, the girl and her pilot became the last beacon of hope against the encroaching darkness.

This is the version of the story the pilot recites to itself. It smoothes over all the awkward parts, like how it exists feeling like a collection of ill-fitting parts, or how it cannot look in a mirror for fear of seeing its body all wrong, or how it has to constantly fight sinful thoughts of wishing it would emerge from the womb that is Phoenix with the right body, in her body. The story it retreads to remind itself that it was made perfect, and to want otherwise is sin.

Phoenix streaks toward the factory planet Ajde Prime, the tip of an arrow that comprises the other three mechs. The pilot is back in its place of comfort, this bodiless swell of agency and violence, surrounded by her existence, which overrides its own. Phoenix is the great swallower, consumer of the doubts saddled in its organic body and the questions weighing down its outside-mind. Here, it is free. Free not to worry, free not to think too hard, free not to be anything but the perfect weapon. The uncertainty of the last few days has left it hungry for the finality of destruction. Ajde Prime is unimpeachable as a target: the site of the apostates’ major shipyard, where they make the host that drives their war machine. Surely even that cotton heart of Rosa’s would find no objections in its destruction.

But something is wrong. Ajde Prime should be ringed by the fiercest defenses, guarded in the thousands by the sleek and sharp-toothed warships it pumps out. Yet the space around the system has remained silent and prayerful since the Räsvelg dropped out of hyperspace, and continues to be so as the mechs approach the gray-ringed planet, placid in the cool light of its sun. No swarm of angry fighters from the surface. No enemy squadrons. The orbital cannons lie sleepy and inert. It looks like Ajde Prime has been abandoned, as though they have been ghosted by their adversaries. Phoenix scans the surface for heat signatures and finds nothing but geology. Curious, confused, it hangs midair, arms empty, canons idle. Waiting for instructions.

The Räsvelg considers the situation carefully and slowly. It is, in all probability, a trap. Perhaps an overwhelming force hides in the gravity well of the planet, or perhaps they have rigged the surface with thermonuclear devices. A possibility with some precedence, the pilot knows. But in its amniotic fluid it feels no fear and no doubt. It waits only for instruction.

Instruction, then: the Räsvelg orders the mechs to investigate the surface with full caution, Phoenix in front with weapons cranked, Strix, Garuda, and Roc as backup. Past the ice rings they go, through the crystalline atmosphere, and into the oxygen-starved environment of Ajde Prime. Mercury waves beat upon sulfurous shores and acid rain thickens the air. In these infernal environs the glass-walled domes of the apostates sit dark and gleaming, devoid of light and life. The pilot approaches them carefully, intensely alert for any wires it might be tripping, but the surface of Ajde Prime is silent. Was this a massacre, perhaps? Or an evacuation?

As if in answer an image flickers into its head, beamed through the same channels through which the Räsvelg transmits orders. An override. What comes through is a picture of a young person, gender unknown, shorthaired and excruciatingly beautiful. It would stop the pilot’s heart, if pilot-as-weapon were reliant on its pathetic body.

The image speaks. It’s a recording, a message. Not a conversation. The stranger has a smile like a star field, expansive and glittering. “Don’t panic, just a courtesy call. Apollo, at your service. Artemis sometimes, but not today. You’ll notice that your target, which you expected to be a bustling metropolis of thousands, is unexpectedly, hmm, vacant, you could say. It seems like somebody, can’t imagine who, tipped them off that you were coming. Convinced them it was in their best interests to leave. Of course, there was some resistance, but I think we did pretty well. Don’t you think?”

The pilot drifts, stunned and silent, unable to hold a thought. The stranger—this sometimes-Apollo and sometimes-Artemis—continues. “Aren’t you glad for the thousands of lives you’ve not ended today? Alright, maybe that doesn’t appeal to you. Maybe you think they deserve the death you would have brought them. That’s fine. Let me offer you something else, then. Ajde Prime was the main military industrial outpost of the Republic. Now that it’s been shut down, their production of warships has been put on hold. That should please you and your masters, no?”

The pilot has no way of replying and no words to reply with. The situation is baffling, unexpected, inexorable. The stranger speaks grandly but with a smirk, and the pilot cannot tell how much of their spiel is genuine. But what’s real is the emptiness below them. Ruse or not, Apollo/Artemis has gutted their objective.

The beautiful mirage leans closer, looming larger in the pilot’s headspace. “Listen, don’t you have doubts, sometimes? All of you, operators of these superweapons, bringing destruction wherever you go . . . doesn’t it bother you? The lives taken by your hands, the families and communities crushed under your feet . . . have you never stayed awake and thought about them? The Church says this holy war is necessary to cleanse the world of sin, but the blood you have shed, is that not also sin?”

The psychic closeness of the stranger, the intensity of their shadowy eyes: it feels like they are speaking to the pilot and the pilot alone. It cannot draw away, cannot blink, cannot shut out the parade of questions.

“Have you never thought, there must be another answer? Never considered paths other than the one laid out before you? Never imagined other ways of being?”

The pilot thanks God it needs no breath right now. It is a trap; it’s definitely a trap. How else would this stranger know—? Forbidden thoughts flood in and the pilot fights to shut its mind down. It cannot let her see the doubts that cloud its mind, cannot let her know that its heart wavers in the dark corners of its consciousness.

But the strangest thing happens. From Phoenix’s heart, the seat of the holy sigil where she resides, comes a great shiver of emotion, a pulse of joy that sweeps the body of the mech. It recognizes the sensation as the same euphoria it feels when it is pilot. It has never felt its joy reciprocated—until now. Versus, suddenly enervated and excited, as she has never been.

What does it mean?

What has it missed?

CONFIG B

Fresh out of her suit, unencumbered in the sliver of freedom before the commandants descend on them, Versus shimmers with excitement: a brightness in her eyes, a novel energy in her movements. Everyone has seen the message—all four mechs got it. But the Räsvelg didn’t; the moment the battalion exited atmosphere there came the demands to explain, what happened down there, you went radio silent. No answers for them—not immediately anyway, the pilots still processing what the hell just happened, so the battalion was hauled back to the ship.

Versus scans the tiny decompression room. “Nothing happened down there, right?” Looking carefully and purposefully at each of you. “We saw Ajde Prime completely abandoned. No indication where they’d gone. Nothing left behind. Just the husk of a planet. Empty. Silent. Right?”

The girls—Rosa and Kestrel, mostly—nod. Sparrow looks away; Helianthus only frowns. Gauntlet bursts out, “But—!” and is instantly silenced by Grimoire’s hand on his wrist. “Versus is right, Gaunt. There was nothing there.”

Versus’ gaze fixes upon you, seeking confirmation. She wants you to lie, knowingly, and you’re not sure why. But how can you refuse? She is blessed, after all, and you are only Stick. You push down the vile swarm of doubts rising in your throat and nod. 

Wordlessly you sit through panels of questioning and disbelief. The higher-ups on the Räsvelg seem upset that their target evaporated without a fight, as though their holy mission is meaningless without bloodshed. Church superiors are deeply suspicious of this boon; it upsets their narrative of the apostates as war-frenzied animals. Finally, it is the Pope Ficus who says: God blessed us with His perfect weapon. As long as she remains with us, our mission is sacrosanct. It must continue as planned. So it is decided that you will cut deeper into the ventricles of apostate society. One more pit stop on the way to Babel. Whatever this incident at Ajde Prime was, it does not matter. You will take this blessing at face value.

That evening, after dinner, Versus tugs you by the wrist. “Come with me.”

She leads you to the bathroom and frowns—uncomprehending—when you physically resist her at the door. “What’s wrong?” she asks, as you pull your wrist from her grasp.

“I can’t go in there.”

“Why not?” 

Why not? “That’s the girl’s bathroom.”

“It’s not. Why would you . . . ?” Puzzlement collapses into disbelief. “That’s ridiculous, Stick. Gender segregation isn’t a thing in this day and age anymore. You do know this, don’t you?”

“It’s just you and Rosa and Kestrel . . . ”

“We’re the ones who talk. Come. I want to show you what we talk about.”

The thrill of being allowed is immediately overridden by the fear of deviance—not of breaking the rules, but of fitting in badly, like a misplaced puzzle piece. “I can’t.”

“Stick.” She sighs. “Would it help if I said I’m not really a girl?”

“What do you mean?”

She takes your hand again. “Nevermind. Just come.” 

Dizzy and confused by her words, you allow her to lead you into the bathroom; it’s easier than fighting her. Inside, walls of steel glow with amber light. In the common area, away from the individual stalls, Kestrel and Rosa sit, animated by a swell of excitement you’ve never seen from them. 

“They pulled it off. I can’t believe it. I saw it but I still can’t—”

“I know—Even I thought it was a mad plan, but—”

“We’re blessed, surely we are. How did they—?”

“They wouldn’t tell me, but—”

Versus clears her throat lightly. The conversation chokes as the two look up and realize who stands next to her. 

Preemptively, Versus says: “I thought I’d invite Stick to join in our meetings.”

“Oh.” Rosa folds her hands over her lap. “I see. I just didn’t think Stick would be interested in our conversation.”

“I think Stick might agree with some of our philosophies,” Versus says.

“That surprises me. After all Stick, you seemed pretty strident about our conquest. Have you changed your mind?”

“Stick has doubts like we do. Don’t you?” 

God’s perfect weapon is looking at you. You’ve been found out, betrayed by the ugly emotions exposed in Phoenix’s cockpit. Versus knows your weaknesses now. Is she testing you? 

Kestrel says, gently: “Did the message we saw on Ajde Prime make you realize something, Stick?”

“You . . . ” There must be something you can say that does not incriminate you further. “You know who left the message, don’t you?”

Rosa shoots Versus a furious look, but Kestrel only laughs. “Yes. I see you’ve guessed it, or something like it. Apollo is my twin. Born together, enlisted together, tested into the pilot program together. They had the blood of a holy sigil, I did not. Ironic, since we were meant to be identical.”

“Your twin is an apostate . . . ”

“Not an apostate.” Another laugh. “You couldn’t tell Apollo what to do, even when we were kids. They ran off and joined a group of conscientious dissenters—people who don’t believe this artificial war our leaders have concocted is necessary. It’s full of people from our ranks, but full of people from the other side too. And because they’re Apollo, they’re one of the leaders now. There’s a commune planet—whose location I can’t really disclose—but that’s where I want to be. Eventually.” 

Buttoned-up Kestrel has let her mask slip; you’ve never seen her this relaxed. Untangled, her story makes sense now, a solid braid of cause and effect. All this while, behind the veneer of a brisk and competent pilot, she has been hiding the truth of a rebellious twin. “So you knew what would greet us on Ajde Prime . . . ?”

Kestrel flips a hand. “Hardly. Apollo told me they had plans, but I thought they were doomed to fail. I don’t know how they pulled it off. Timing? A long tail of preparation? An unbelievable helping of luck, most probably.”

“A miracle,” Rosa says.

“A miracle,” Versus repeats, firmly. She sits beside Rosa and gestures to the space next to Kestrel, for you. “God is good to us. He shows us the way where our leaders will not. He opens the paths for us to follow.”

You sit slowly, disoriented and silent. Kestrel takes your hand, and you jump at the touch of her fingers in all their warmth. She has on a kindly smile, but your voice is lodged in your lungs. The conversation continues around you as you struggle for footing on ground that keeps shifting. 

Rosa clasps Versus’ hands. “Have you heard? There’s a rumor going around the officers’ quarters. The Beast is on the move now. We might end up fighting him sooner than expected.” 

“I see. No, I haven’t heard.”

“Are you alright? You’ve gone pale.”

“I—” Versus exhales, looks to the ceiling. “I don’t want to fight him. I really, really don’t.”

Is she afraid of The Beast? Is that what drives these doubts of hers? You stare at her like you could pick her apart, revealing if it’s fear that lurks in her soul—or something else.

“You know you don’t have to, don’t you? Versus, we’re all ready to make a move. Even Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The whole battalion can leave at any time. But we’re not leaving you behind.”

“That’s not—” Her voice cracks, and the unfamiliar note chills every knot in your spine. You’ve never seen her like this, never, could not have imagined it ever. She trembles like a bulkhead about to splinter, fingers twisted, eyes to the ground. “Jordan is a believer, he’s never going to abandon his post and betray our teacher. And I can’t leave him to rampage unchecked. As long as The Beast fights, I have to oppose him.”

“Allie, you know that’s not true. What he does is between him and God, and no one else. You’re only responsible for your own fate.” Rosa leans forward. “Every battle we fight, every moment we linger on in this rich man’s war, we make it worse.”

Versus sighs and her shoulders slump forward. Kestrel says, “Have you prayed on this, Alicia?”

“I have. I have prayed for an answer for so, so long, yet God has not given me a sign. I don’t know—maybe I should beg His forgiveness, but . . . ”

“Have you considered,” Rosa says, “that the miracle we witnessed today might have been one such sign?”

“I . . . have, yes.”

“I always say prayer takes time,” Kestrel says, “but we’re running out of time.”

“Yes. Prayer.” Versus straightens up, eyes bright. Holds out her hands. “Let us pray.”

“Let us pray,” Rosa agrees.

A circle forms, Kestrel’s warm hand in your left and Versus’ dry one in your right. “I will pray for the souls of the lost,” Rosa says, “and for those on Ajde Prime. God keep them safe.”

“I pray for my sibling,” Kestrel says. “For their safety and the success of their mission.” 

Versus makes a throat-sound, then pauses to draw in a long breath, long enough that your skin starts to chill. Everyone waits. Finally she says, her eyes downcast: “I pray for The Beast.”

Now it’s your turn. What should you pray for? For guidance? For clarity? For victory in battle? For more esoteric things, like the realization of your want to be mech, permanently, or perhaps a name that makes sense to you, that is yours? Or maybe a body that feels like it’s on your side. That you don’t feel betrayed by every time you catch your reflection.

Everyone is looking at you. You reach for the closest, easiest thing. “I pray for happiness,” you say. “For joy. For euphoria.”

The four of you lower your heads, and you pray.

In your bunk, flat on your back, vision a starless vista of ceiling, sleep evades you. The breathing from the lower bunk tells you that God’s perfect weapon is similarly awake. 

“Versus,” you begin.

“What is it?” 

“What did you mean when you said you’re not really a girl? Earlier.” 

“Ah.” Her voice is dark, glossy. “Does that bother you? It’s nothing. Not much, anyway. I just don’t think I’m a girl, it’s a feeling I’ve had for a long time. I’m in-between. Not one or the other. But that’s largely inconsequential. I have a job to do. Or maybe a job to not do. In any case that’s what I’m focusing on. I can worry about myself later.”

“But it does matter,” you say. “The prophecy said you should be a girl . . . ”

“I know. I mean, I don’t like the prophecy very much. Or at all. But I suppose that’s why I’ve never mentioned it. I don’t want to upset people, or . . . draw scrutiny. I’m not really bothered if people think of me as a girl. There are other things that bother me more.”

“Like The Beast.” 

A volcanic sigh. “Like The Beast.”

Silence creeps back into the room. After a while, she says, “I’m sure you have questions about that.”

“I don’t know.” 

Her weight shifts audibly in the bunk below. She’s sat up, speaking into the dark. “Jordan and I were found as children. They singled us out from the blood banks. We were ten. They came to our schools and they had lists of names and everything. After extensive tests we were the only two left. It’s been obscured by the Church, but the prophecy—the program—was really about making sigils who were also pilots. It’s tied up with why the schism happened . . . but that doesn’t matter now. Jordan and I were part of the program. We were cultivated together for . . . how many years was it? Seven? Ten? No, it has to be seven. The schism happened when we were seventeen. So, seven years. We trained together, lived in the same house . . . we weren’t allowed outside on our own. Of course not. In that time, Jordan was family. My twin brother. We did everything together. Then the schism happened, and our teacher, the man who led us . . . he left to become an apostate. Jordan went with him. They were always closer than I was. This was . . . five years ago? Ten? Time doesn’t make sense anymore. That was what happened. We haven’t seen each other since.”

The expressionless ceiling doesn’t blink as you stare. Versus’ words rattle in your head like bullet casings, or untethered ships, an empty collection of sounds and syllables that should have meaning attached, but you can’t decode them. 

A shuffle of synthetic against synthetic from below. It goes on for a while, then Versus appears at the edge of your bunk, standing on tiptoe, the hard square of a transflat in her hand. “Here.” It lights up with a photo album, a scroll through the tender years of Versus’ life. There she is, birthday cake, there she is again, draped over the edge of a radioactive blue pool, there she is nestled in the yellow arms of a tree. A different Versus, with skinnier arms and teeth that look too big for her face. In every picture there is a boy beside her, bright-eyed and velvet-cheeked, his grin wider than hers. The pilot of The Beast, as a child, and then as an older child. He and Versus look nothing alike, clearly they’re not related, but there’s a sameness to them that makes them look like a pair. Most of the pictures are taken in one house, with arched windows and fake vines plastered to the cornices. It looks nice. Is it nice? You have no baseline to judge this with.

Versus watches the passage of her life with a fond smile. Her voice has gone soft and rounded with a timbre you’re unfamiliar with. “When we were chosen, we were rebaptized. Given new life, given over to service in God’s name. Jordan was my brother, but he was more than that. They preached that our souls were twinned, you know? It was important to us. I loved him. And . . . I don’t want to fight him, but he made his choices. Now it’s come to this.”

The slideshow of Versus’ other life continues. Versus in a red skirt patterned with flowers. Versus in blue jeans, shredded at the knee.

She says, “It still confuses me sometimes, frightens me even, how everything turned out. How you can live with someone for so long, and think you know them to the last atom, to their soul, and find out you were wrong.”

“I see,” you say. It’s a lie. Or maybe it’s not a lie. Versus is right.

She looks curiously at you. “Stick,” she says, “why did you ask me about the gender thing? Of all the facts you learned today, why was that the one that bothered you the most?”

You look at the bones of your hands. The light from the transflat carves crescents of shadow behind your knuckles. “How did you know?” 

“I didn’t,” she says. “I figured it out. It wasn’t like an angel descended on a beam of light and told me what my gender was. It’s an ongoing process. Little feelings, here and there, that maybe my gender was more of a question than I thought. Things weren’t right, or didn’t fit right. Eventually I realized what it meant.” She places her fingers, firm and cool, over your wrist. “It could be an ongoing process for you too.” 

You nod and she frowns, concerned by your silence. “You’ve had a lot to take in. Are you alright? Do you want to talk about anything?” But you don’t. What good would talking do? How could talking ever solve any of your problems?

It really isn’t about Versus’ gender, except that it is. You thought you knew which side of the divide she was on. It informed the map of your life. You used to reason with yourself like this, sometimes: Eve was grown from the rib of Adam, yet Eve turned out woman while Adam turned out man, so it follows that you should be opposite of Versus, the same way Eve was opposite of Adam. Yet this burning desire for your body and existence to perfectly mirror hers won’t leave you alone, and this is what drives your extraordinary resonance in Phoenix. Your need to change yourself is not driven by your selfish desires, but a side effect of what you were designed for; you have to yearn toward her being or the connection won’t work. She is the vessel for God’s will and so are you. A tool, a miracle, an it. God’s perfect weapon.

But that’s been turned upside down. There’s a Versus you never knew, a Versus who doubts her mission, a Versus who has a history you knew nothing about. A Versus before she was Versus. And if Versus isn’t who you thought she was, if she’s not even the gender you thought she was, then where does that leave you? In a body you understand less than before, with a mission that has been muddled beyond comprehension. 

What are you supposed to do?

CONFIG A

The big fight, when it comes, is entirely unexpected. A jerk out of hyperspace, and the corridors go angry with red light and black smoke. The mech battalion falls out of bed and scrambles into battle, adrenaline-drunk. The apostates have tracked down the Räsvelg and dragged it into Newtonian space using forbidden technology, the Devil’s tools. By the time the pilot mounts itself in Phoenix’s cockpit, the enemy is a series of flashing blips on the horizon. The Beast, tailed by two support mechs. Half-familiar shapes, gilded in the shimmering livery of the apostates. The Räsvelg is halfway from its destination the next system over. The apostates have decided not to wait for their arrival, taking matters into their own hands.

The Beast and its companions have the silhouettes of trees, of centipedes, of bones: all spindle and angle and wrong. They’ve taken God-given mechs and defiled them. Twisted them to unholy purpose. The sight of this blasphemy sets the pilot’s soul alight, burning its doubts to white powder. This is what it was made for. Its ultimate battle. Kill or be killed.

The Beast agrees. The abomination rushes its enemies in an arc of pure hunger, and God above it moves so fast, its entire arm is a gleaming blade of destruction. The pilot joyously leaps to meet it—

No.

The pilot has never heard Versus speak while they are joined. Shock jars its grip on control, and in that glistening half-second Versus pulls on the brakes and Phoenix comes to a sudden, juddering halt. I don’t want to. I won’t.

What is she doing, what is happening? The resonance that comprises God’s perfect weapon has been shattered. The pilot fights Versus for dominance, but it cannot win, not when she is the holy sigil, the heart and engine of the mech, and The Beast is nearly upon them, ready to strike—

The Beast vanishes. The stars vanish. The universe around them vanishes. Phoenix vanishes from under the pilot, as though subatomized in the flick of an eyelid. Pink light fills its consciousness.

“There you are.” 

The pilot knows that voice. That rich velvet belongs to Apollo/Artemis. The dissidents are here, but how? Were they tracked, was there collusion? What did Apollo do?

“Sorry about the surprise.” Apollo/Artemis’ voice curls around the pilot’s spine, or whatever it is that passes for a spine here. “It’s me, your friend Apollo. In the flesh. Or, well. In the mind.” A silvery laugh. “Shouldn’t have entered the atmosphere of Ajde Prime, huh? We left a few surprises for you. Almost shocked no one checked for nanites, but that’s the problem with the papacy, isn’t it? You’re all so full of yourselves, you never thought that the planet itself might be a trap.”

The dissidents have won control of the mechs, somehow. Are the nanites in the fighters, or in their bodies? In fact, it doesn’t matter. Some kind of neural net has a hold of them. The pilot’s body? Mind? Is trapped in this vast gummy pink, like sugar, but spun with spidersilk, suffocating and inexorable. It tries to rip something free, an arm, a leg, anything. Its perception of the universe has been sublimated by this wooly expanse, and the longer it stays here the more it feels like there is nothing to the universe but this soft blankness. Where is The Beast? Where is the rest of the battalion? Where is Versus?

Here she comes, rising enormous and avian through the fog. A wild swoop of emotion. Where is he? What have you done with him?

Apollo speaks into both their minds. “Sorry, had to intervene. Would have been bad if you two killed one another. Trying to avoid that, you know?”

The other holy sigils and pilots are elsewhere in this ether, faint but familiar pings of contact, generous in their calm. Rolling with this turn in their fortunes, better than the alternative. 

Versus speaks to Apollo. I know you. We’ve never met, but I know you.

“Same. Listen, you’ve got to withdraw from here. I have him too, all three of them, but I can’t hold them back for long, the nanites will give out.” 

I want to talk to him.

“I thought you might. Not sure if that’s gonna work, though. Might be a bad idea.”

Please, let me try. I have to.

All this time the pilot has experienced Versus as a neutral presence in Phoenix: a heartbeat, a body that powers the mech like a battery. Inert. She’s never been wired with naked determination like this, lit with the kind of fire that would burn cities to cinders. Versus has come alive the way she is in the flesh, bold and sharply defined as she is on the Räsvelg. All this time, the pilot’s wants have smothered the truth of her apathy when they are joined. It never knew.

A white swell surges toward them, cetacean and threatening. The Beast is on the hunt through the gelatinous pink. He seethes with fury: he cannot believe he has been thwarted so close to his goal. His frustration poisons the ether in waves. The Beast wants nothing but to kill and to vanquish and to destroy; war has broken and shaped him into a creature that craves violence above all. His bloodthirst tugs at the pilot with an ache of familiarity, horrifying and sticky as a broken tooth. That’s what I look like, it thinks.

Jordan.

Versus’ entreaty only draws the white whale toward them at double speed. There’s nothing there but rage and rows of teeth that shine as he yawns open to swallow them whole. 

Apollo intervenes. In this liminal space they are the end and the beginning, the morning and the evening star, and The Beast freezes in place, jaw unhinged, close enough to touch. Jordan, Versus says. It’s me. It’s Alicia. You remember, don’t you?

Does he? Where is the child from that house with the windows and the plaster vines, who put bunny ears on people in photos and wore silly pirate costumes to parties? Is that child still alive in the belly of the beast? Or is there nothing left but rage and teeth? 

Jordan, listen. We don’t have to fight. I don’t want to fight. Let’s run away. Let them sort out their problems on their own.

Fuck you. The Beast speaks like an avalanche. Like stones being crushed. His voice is exactly as the pilot has pictured.

This isn’t like you. You’re not an angry person, you’re not hateful. I remember you, you were a kind kid. You’ve changed, but it doesn’t have to be this way.

Shut the fuck up. You sound like a loser.

Jordan, I’m serious. Let’s leave now, we can go with Apollo. I miss you. This war isn’t worth us killing one another.

Fuck you. Go on and run then. I’ll cut you down like the coward you are. I’ll see you in hell.

The Beast disappears without breath or sound, and all that’s left is the boggy pink. “That’s enough of that,” Apollo says. “Hey sis—Versus—y’all got to go now, the net is fraying. I’ll hold the apostates while you call a retreat, but you’ve got to get out. The time for reason is over. Now’s for survival. But hey—” he says, a parting shot that sparks through the pilot’s consciousness—“don’t keep me waiting too long, alright?”

The cotton candy universe vanishes, and they’re back in the lightless void of space, fighting distance from the crooked jaws of the Beast and its associates. Still inert, trapped in Apollo’s grip. The pilot, returned to the comfort of Phoenix, which is solid, which is all that it knows, is back in control of itself. It wrenches toward its foe, seeing the God-given opportunity to destroy its defenseless target. 

But Versus tugs back. Stops the pilot from doing its job, just as she did before. Versus is radioing the Räsvelg, calling for a retreat, and the ship’s commanders, relieved of their panic at the sudden suspension of their most precious war units, agree at once. They are withdrawing, leaving the frozen apostates behind. The pilot no longer recognizes the shape of the world. 

CONFIG A

The commandants are in an uproar. The dissidents have been a longtime spine in the side of the Church, but they’ve never been a threat until now. There’s no script, no verse, no commandment that teaches how to deal with this. They’re on their own, until the apostates learn to find them again.

While the higher-ups are locked in for hours of shouting and recriminations, Versus calls a clandestine meeting of her own, defying orders to stay in quarters until further notice. It’s an emergency. They’re just about to find out that your battalion lied in the last debrief; time is running out for you and this group of traitors-in-waiting. No, not in waiting: that is incorrect. Traitors in truth and flesh. Just undiscovered. The crime has been committed, it cannot be undone. It’s part of who you are now, woven into your bones as surely as your blood makes endless pilgrimage in your veins. It was Versus who led you to this, all of you but you in particular. You let her do this to you.

The eight of you cram into the bathroom-conference room, now claustrophobic with bodies. Everyone is here, even mousy Sparrow tucked under Rosa’s arm. It really is a gender-neutral bathroom after all. You breathe very slowly and carefully and try not to let your skin touch anyone else’s.

“What do we do?” Helianthus asks, grumpily. He makes it sound like this is a minor inconvenience, like someone’s broken the foodmaker in the mess hall. 

“We have to leave,” Versus says. The doubt has been distilled from her voice and all that’s left is conviction, pure and clear and stinging. The Beast, her last tether to the Church, has been peeled from her soul. “The plans we’ve made? Now’s the time to put them in motion.” 

A murmur of assent. Kestrel says, “Are you sure, Allie?” Not to cast doubt, but to fortify her resolve.

“I am.” The passage of Apollo’s intervention has changed her, broken her spine and reforged it into steel. She emerged from the wet cradle of Phoenix a different person. You thought she was a weapon before, but you realize you never understood the word.

The rest of the battalion seems sad, but determined. Frightened. Eager. As Rosa rubs Sparrow’s shoulders, a glassy realization—they’ve talked about this before—cuts you. Everyone in this room has had private conversations about this, whole fora about sedition and doubt and disbelief, and it was all hidden from you. It recasts every conversation you’ve had with them, every argument you’ve watched them have. Suddenly you’ve found yourself in a group of strangers. Ice climbs your spine and lodges in the base of your skull.

The Beast felt so familiar in Apollo’s neural net. Like recognizing. Like mirrors for each other. You are the Beast, standing in disguise among a group of humans. Ugly and yellow as old bone. 

“Ten minutes,” Kestrel says. “Apollo’s people are close by. There’s a satellite planet. I just have to give the signal.”

“And they’ll be here?” Gauntlet asks.

“Yes,” Kestrel says. “We have to be ready to move out by then.” 

The battalion will take the holy mechs. The Church might be able to make new pilots, pray for new sigils, but the mechs are irreplaceable. The consequences of their betrayal will be unthinkable, unknowable, unchartable. Before you yawns a great chasm of uncertainty with no bottom.

Gauntlet slaps his palms together. “Aight then, let’s go.”

“Wait.” Rosa reaches out and catches him by the sleeve. “Let us pray, first.”

“Let us pray,” Versus affirms.

In the tiny gender-neutral bathroom everyone joins hands, heads bowed. In the tightness and anxiety of the circle nobody notices that you’re standing apart. Your hands are hidden, tucked behind your back, nails biting into the flesh of your palm.

In your shared quarters Versus is cramming what little she has into a duffel bag. “We have to hurry,” she says, her voice tight with—what is it, nervousness? Excitement? You can’t tell. You feel lightyears away from her, even though she is close enough to touch. “That prayer cut out all the buffer time we had. We shouldn’t have done that.” Then she freezes, halfway through zipping up, struck by her own words. “What am I saying? Of course we should have.” She sighs, then looks at you. “Stick, what’s wrong? You haven’t packed.”

No one has asked for your opinion in this entire process. Not a single person, not even Versus. It was just assumed that you would follow obediently. Now she comes toward you, brows knitted. “Stick, you’re coming with us, aren’t you? We can’t leave you behind. I mean. I suppose we can. But I don’t want to.” 

“Why would you think I’d want to do this?”

She blinks, startled. “Because you aren’t happy here.”

You frown.

“You aren’t, are you? You aren’t happy with what they’ve made of you. What they want you to be. You aren’t happy.”

Your mouth is dry is as the chasm between stars. “I don’t know how to be.” It’s an alien word, an alien concept, a thing that happens to other people while you stand on the outside and watch. What does happy mean? What is it, an emotion? A series of things happening? A state of being? 

“Come with us,” she pleads, taking your hands. “We’ll find out.” 

Fear spasms through your forearms, and you pull your hands from hers, embarrassed and afraid. “I can’t.”

“Stick . . . ”

Maybe happiness is a lack, an absence. Maybe it’s the void left behind that uncertainty, doubt, and self-loathing would otherwise occupy. Maybe it’s the feeling, that precious feeling, that you only ever feel in one place, under one condition.

You say, “I’m not like you. I can’t be happy living in a house with other people, a nice house with windows and vines on the ceiling. I wasn’t made for that. I was made to be a weapon. I’m only happy being a weapon.”

She tilts her head. “You think violence is all you’re good for?” 

“Yes.” 

“Fine.” She goes back to her bag, unzips it. Time is spiraling away while you’re having this conversation; Versus should just leave. But she doesn’t. She pulls a long, stony thing out of the bag. A knife. Unsheathed, its black blade gleams like a smile.

She marches back to you, puts the knife in your hand and takes your wrist. Tucks the sharp, obsidian edge under her chin, where jaw and neck meet. “Do it. If only violence makes you happy, then do it.” 

You’re frozen. Her grip on your wrist is so strong that you cannot pull back, and if you slide yourself free you will cut her throat open. Even letting go of the blade might harm her.

“What’s wrong? Can’t do it? Why not, Stick? I’m a traitor; I’ve conspired with my fellows to commit high treason. If your mission is so important, you have to stop me, don’t you?” 

“Versus, stop.”

She lets you go and your shaking hand snaps instantly to your chest, fingers curled around the knife’s handle like a vise. It’s surprisingly light, well-made, carbon fiber? Ceremonial, or a memento. 

“There, Stick. It’s not the violence that drives you, is it? It’s not violence that matters to you. You’re just chasing the things that make you happy. That make you feel whole. So that makes you human, like any of us. You deserve to be human.” 

“But—” What about the unmatched euphoria that only comes when you are Phoenix, when you are mech, when you are it? Is that not by design? “There’s something wrong with me. I’m broken.”

“No. That’s untrue.” 

Her face is soft and sad; the thought of cutting into her fills you with nausea. You push down the horrifying images of her with her neck sliced through, her blood all over your hands and her tunic and the floor. This isn’t anything like the fire and brimstone of Phoenix’s cockpit. The world has been smashed open like a candy egg and you can’t make sense of anything that’s spilling out of it. You look at the flesh on your own wrist, filled with blood and tendons. It’s you, it’s this body, it’s always been. 

But if your body is a problem, it can be solved. And the tool to do so is in your hand.

Versus closes her hand around your wrist again. Gently this time, but with enough pressure to let you know that she’s prepared to stop you from doing the rash thing that’s leaped into your mind. You haven’t said a word, but she knows anyway. “Don’t.”

Time hasn’t stopped. The two of you can’t stay locked here much longer. You’re holding her back. Versus has already made her choice, she knows what she wants. You, on the other hand, know nothing about anything. She should let you do the rash thing. “I’ll only burden you.”

“You won’t,” she says. “I promise.” 

She says: “Come with me, Stick. Please.”

She says: “They made you a weapon, just as they turned me into one. They fed us sweet lies to keep us happy at our jobs. But we aren’t weapons, Stick. We aren’t objects, no matter how much they want us to be. We don’t have to stay the way they made us.”

You shiver. You shake your head. You’re haunted by the Beast, angry even when offered a chance at peace. If he couldn’t be redeemed, how can you? “I don’t know any other way to be.” 

“Because it’s the only choice you’ve ever had. But there can be more. Will be more.”

You lick your lips. There’s terror there, in the dryness. But there’s also hope and the freedom of the unknown, which is almost as frightening. Versus isn’t letting you go, and maybe Versus knows better than you what makes a monster and what makes a person. She’s seen the other side of the mirror, after all. “I don’t know how to be human.”

A small smile. “Nobody does.” A squeeze of the hand. “But let’s figure it out together.” Her skin against yours is warm. Her wrist against your wrist, the blood pulsing within. Same as the blood pulsing through you. A resonance.

CONFIG C

In the end, I still don’t know if it was the right thing to do. We took the mechs, the main offensive force of the Church, and ran without looking back. The vacuum that resulted didn’t collapse structures, but it tilted the war back in favor of the apostates. They’re still fighting, as far as we know. Maybe we could have ended the war earlier, if we’d stayed in it. But maybe we would have made it worse. It’s impossible to know now. What’s important is we got out.

These days there is the yellow sky of an M-class planet, a field heaped with flowers and herbs, a house on a hill that looks like a glass cathedral. These days Helianthus, who goes by Lars, has cultivated an excessive number of fruit trees, an orchard really; there are never enough hands to help with the harvest, never enough mouths for all the jars of preserves we make. Kestrel, who these days goes by Nike, is helping her twin run the resistance. She’s here and there, but she visits when she can. Sparrow, who these days goes by Jasper, is a painter. Gauntlet and Grimoire took off and established a satellite commune on the southern continent, I hear it’s doing well. And on the downslope of the hill, Versus, who these days goes by Alicia, has their head in the lap of Rosa, who these days goes by Nishi. “Do you think he’ll ever come around?” they ask. “I miss him still.” And Nishi, who’s running her fingers over the bronzed expanse of Alicia’s shoulder, says, “There’s always hope.”

Apollo/Artemis is just as beautiful in person. They spend most of their time away—war’s still not over, still so much to do—so their sweetness comes in bursts, like ripened boughs in the summer. When the buttery light touches their curls in the morning it outlines them in goldenrod perfection and the world comes to a standstill for as long as it takes them to slide into consciousness. I’m learning to paint—Jasper is teaching me—in hopes that one day I’ll be able to capture the euphoria of these evanescent moments with brush and pigment.

As for me, I still don’t know. There’s lots of things I’m still figuring out. I’ve picked a name, but I still let my old warmates call me Stick, from time to time. They’ve earned it. About my pronouns—I’m figuring that out, too. I still don’t know. I’m allowed. Apollo/Artemis says it’s taken them their whole life so far to sort out the names and words they like to use, and if someone as sure of themself as they are is still working it out, then I’ve got time. See, the one thing I’ve learned, and keep learning over and over again, is that there’s no one answer to everything. I’m lurching toward understanding, one day at a time. Same as everybody else.

About the Author

JY Neon Yang (they/them) is queer, non-binary, and the author of the Tensorate series of novellas from Tor.Com Publishing (The Black Tides of Heaven, The Red Threads of Fortune, The Descent of Monsters, and The Ascent to Godhood). Their work has been shortlisted for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy and Lambda Literary awards. A Clarion West alum, they graduated from the University of East Anglia with an MA in Creative Writing and currently live in Singapore.

Quantum Fish

Bo Balder

When Havi came back, eleven years after having fled five wormhole hops away, Malala wormhole hub didn’t look very different. Maybe a bit shabbier, a bit more crowded.

The coldsleep hangover crashed down on her like a barrel of fish and she changed her plans into sleep first, right now. She headed for the rack of sleep drawers outside the port offices—colloquially known as coffins—and was about to crawl in when The Briny Everything caught her eye.

The restaurant was still there. She’d eaten her final meal in-system there, before she’d embarked on her great adventure. Going to study at the last university on Chong Kong Long. Or running away from home and responsibilities, as her parents had called it. Suddenly food seemed even more important than sleep.

She shoved her luggage into the coffin, ordered her medical app to dispense a pick-me-up, and headed for The Briny Everything. Living on a distant wormhole hub meant she hadn’t tasted real fish for eleven years. Her home planet of Knossos exported thousands of tons of the most famous delicacy in the universe, but lightyears of distance made it too expensive even for a fairly successful journalist like Havi.

But here, it was only a short hop to the planet’s surface, and she could eat the real thing before facing her family. What could be more important than a fish meal?

The Briny Everything was the real deal. If you asked them for fish from the Clan Morotai channel, they wouldn’t serve you the ones from Clan Antjie a few kilometers away. They knew their stuff, and they respected customers who did as well.

Havi was from Clan Skuja, and that was what she was hoping to eat tonight. The taste of home, without actually having to face her family. Of course Havi hadn’t traversed half of known space to not visit her home planet. Of course she missed it and her old friends. But with every wormhole hop the likelihood diminished of the reunion going well. She’d run off from her family, her planned career in fish care, everything she’d ever known, eleven years ago. Why would anyone be glad to see her? Damn that therapist. She should have just written a debriefing letter and left it at that.

She scanned the menu. The Briny had a great selection, and thankfully Skuja fish were on it. She ordered a full Skuja sashimi spread and a local beer. Time to sit back with her hands behind her head and grab a few minutes of doing absolutely nothing while her fish was prepared.

Her platter looked fantastic when it arrived, satiny orange flesh with rainbow glimmers over it, the skin separately roasted and spread around the kernel of flesh like a flower. She looked closer. How had they disguised the cuts where the ring of eyes around the middle had been removed? New technique maybe.

She picked up a morsel with her chopsticks and settled it on her tongue, waiting for it to melt and burst into flavor.

It was more of a whimper than a bang.

Hm. Maybe not enough garum? She dipped the second piece into more sauce, and tried again. No.

No way.

This wasn’t Skuja terroir, nor was it any of the fifty-four terroirs whose taste her parents had drilled into her in endless lessons. Even though she’d made it clear early on that she wasn’t going to be a fish farmer.

She gestured to the server. The woman must have read her face, because she approached, looking worried.

“This isn’t Skuja terroir. Or any of the others. Did you print it? That’s fraud.”

The plate was whisked away at high speed. “Our apologies. The beer will be on the house. Can we offer you anything else to eat?”

Havi raised her brows. “A bowl of plain rice. I can stomach that from the printer.”

She waited for her rice, sipping her beer. Why had she come here? The urge to feel solid ground under her feet, wind in her hair, and sun on her face had been stronger than her career and circle of friends. Yet how was she going to find a job on the planet without running into her parents? She hadn’t made any progress in solving that hurdle.

The server coughed. She and another woman stood at the table. “Mx? The owner would like a word.”

Havi opened her eyes.

“I’m so very sorry, esteemed lady. We are out of stock on Skuja fish. We shouldn’t have served you printed stuff. Please don’t write about it. We’re trying to solve the problem quietly.”

Havi sat up straighter. What problem? The owner bent closer. “There are complications with delivery. We just can’t get any. Something’s going down on Knossos and nobody’s been able to tell us what. ‘Service suspended for the time being.’ So what can we do? We’re a fish restaurant. We serve printed copies of Knossos fish, genetically exact copies, let me tell you, to the people from out-system. But you knew. You tasted the difference. I guess you are from Knossos?”

“Indeed I am. Skuja Clan, in fact.”

The owner reddened.

“Okay, sorry to hear that. I’ll go and visit Fishy, then.”

“Oh, no, no dear lady,” the proprietress hastened to say. “Nobody’s been getting fish deliveries. We’re all in the same boat.”

There was an opportunity here. “What have you done so far to figure out the trouble? Anybody been talking to the fish farms?” Havi asked.

“The Restaurateurs’ Association has tried. But it feels like they’re stalling. Maybe there’s a problem with production? Or they’ve sold all their stock to a new buyer?”

“Have you gone down to investigate?”

“Me, into the gravity well? Oh no, lady, too rich for my blood. Open skies and who knows if you’d ever get back up . . . ”

Havi leaned forward. “What if I go down and investigate for you? I feel that the Restaurateurs’ Association might benefit from having an ear and an eye on the ground, so to speak.”

Her earnings and kudos had been pretty much spent on the trip. She needed work. How could she pass up this opportunity?

She couldn’t.

Maybe Havi had never been the smartest or most diligent of students. But she had moments of great insight, though not always ones she could use. For instance, when she was sixteen, experiencing her first date with handsome jock Dara under the rainbow of summer moons. Dara’s body, glistening with sweat, was poised right above her. Havi lay back, waiting while he took a selfie of his moonlit body, maybe a little bit bemused by the whole thing, but interested and willing. They’d finally managed to ditch Havi’s little sister, swum to one of the few Paal temples above water, and were occupying the altar-like slab in the top room.

Havi waited and stared through the triangular window. She blinked at the three stars shining through, also arranged like a triangle. Like the ones at the wormhole. She had one of her first flashes of insight. Not the first, that had been at twelve, when she realized her parents were human beings just like herself and therefore capable of massive confusion and getting things completely wrong. This one was about herself and what she was doing here down in the gravity well. It was like a prison. One she needed to escape from.

She wriggled out from under Dara and started taking pictures of the star formation.

Dara never forgave her. Knossos was never the same after the starships started arriving and the derelict wormhole hub orbiting the sun got fixed up. Knossos fish became a galactic delicacy. Her parents became rich. Havi ran away from home.

Havi stepped out of the shuttle onto the floating shuttle dock of Continent Five. After haggling with the restaurant owner until they’d reached an agreeable compromise, she’d stumbled to her coffin hotel and slept like a human being. Most aliens, or fish for that matter, never slept. She’d dialed up some random breakfast and made it to the shuttle transfer to Knossos station and down planet just in time.

Continent was a big word. There was no dry land on Knossos. On continents, the sea was from an inch to two meters deep, in oceans up to kilometers. Every bit of its submerged surface was completely covered in Paal labyrinths. And fish. Humans, limping through the galaxy, fleeing the Katabiotic destruction of their home planet, had been delighted to find any intact planet that didn’t outright kill them. They had settled on it in spite of the obvious downsides.

Havi blinked against the bright sun. She’d forgotten how dim everything had seemed when first leaving her home world, but she’d adjusted. She dialed up her cornea protection and resigned herself to a few days of glare headache.

The shuttle port floated on lightly ruffled, turquoise wavelets, small spokes radiating out from its hub for stability and to serve as docks for hovercraft. If you didn’t look too closely, the labyrinth beneath the waves was invisible. Today she was the only person getting off, nobody got on, no hovers were docked. It might be a random lull in traffic, or was she seeing the results of an economic slump?

She was here to find that out. And she might as well head home right away. Get it over with. Face the recriminations.

She stepped off the dock onto the top of the Paal labyrinth wall and started sloshing through the warm sea. The tops of the walls were about ten to fifteen centimeters under water, and thirty centimeters wide. She’d done this barefoot all her life, but mindful of her space-tenderized soles, she’d brought water shoes.

“Mx! Mx!” The shuttle field attendant called out. “It’s not safe. There are currents. Wait for the hover boat!”

Currents? Pfft. She waved her thanks. “I grew up here. I’ll be fine.”

The attendant emailed her a rights waiver, which she signed. Safety first, though it seemed a little over the top. As she splashed through the shallows on top of the labyrinth walls, jumping over the narrow corridors, on the fastest route to Skuja Farm, she set her inphone to access the local webs. It was a three-hour walk; she might as well use the time to update herself on the latest news.

First, she skimmed the feeds. What she didn’t find was news about the fish shortage. Nothing about fish whatsoever. Back in the day, the Continent Five news had shared weekly tidbits about particularly good catches, fish populations, taste changes, currents, and winds. That column seemed to have gone.

Conclusion: something was definitely going on. Well, she’d be home in less than three hours and her parents would update her on the situation.

Her foot slid off the wall and she plunged down into the corridor. The water should have been no more than a meter deep, but the wall went up and up before her surprised eyes and she was at least three meters deep before her feet hit bottom. The whole of Continent Five didn’t have a labyrinth that deep. The Paal labyrinths had always been just under water. So how could the walls be so high here? Had they grown? Or had the sea bottom washed away?

Havi swam up, sputtering seawater, and hoisted herself back up the wall. Hm. Maybe the shuttle port attendant had been right. Maybe she didn’t know the current circumstances well enough to be walking in a vast desert of sea-covered labyrinth walls.

The horizon lay featureless and hazy in the late afternoon light.

Late afternoon? Drat. She’d forgotten to sync to planet time. It might have been morning on Malala hub, but that meant nothing to a planet that twirled through space regardless of human time.

This was not the moment to panic. She knew this place like the taste of her family’s fish, if need be in the middle of a moonless night. She used to, anyway.

Havi flicked a few drops of briny onto her tongue. She was where she thought she was. Every farm in the labyrinth had its own terroir, which gave the fish of Knossos their famous flavor. She was still good at this. She’d just have to follow her gut and ignore the minor changes eleven years had wrought.

She got up, adjusted her backpack, dialed up her shades. Onward.

An hour or so ahead was the old temple where she and Dara had had their failed tryst. If all went wrong, she could sleep there. The altar slab would be hard, but at least dry.

More than an hour went by. No temple in sight. Still not a problem. Havi was sure she was walking slightly slower due to her time in space and different gravities, and maybe she was taking a bit more care after her fall. It wasn’t an issue.

Dusk drizzled down quicker than she remembered. Still no temple. She’d taken a wrong turn, or the temple was gone, or she was only half as fast as she thought she was. If only she hadn’t signed that shuttle port waiver. She was getting tired. A rescue by hover boat would have been pretty nice right now.

Still, she wasn’t in any real danger. She’d only be sore and tired after perching on a wall all night. It was just odd that all the corridors had gotten so much deeper.

She slipped again and hit her chin, hard, on the wall in front of her. She didn’t fall off, but only barely. Checking her jaws for loose teeth, she tasted blood in her mouth. Her skull rang and she had to blink away dizziness. That really hurt.

Time to regroup. She rummaged in her backpack for a salve and filled her purifier with seawater. The UBI ration bars from the coffin hotel that she’d over-cautiously thrown in would now be her dinner. She gnawed on the flat-tasting bars and tried to ignore her stinging chin and bitten tongue. Not to mention her scraped knees from the earlier fall.

She wouldn’t die but it still wasn’t fun. She’d arrive home by morning. Everybody knew the shuttle schedule and would wonder, but still. No harm done. No need to call the people she specifically didn’t want to ask for help.

She could walk for a bit until true night and then wait for the moons to rise. Revived after her dinner, she set off again. The last reflected glow of the sun, to her back on the left, assured her she was still on track. With the darkness growing, a faint scent started to rise from the briny, and a murmur she hadn’t heard before. The surface looked strange as well, in a way she couldn’t put her finger on right away. When Baby Moon rose, it illuminated the sea with its pink glow.

Now the cause of the scents and the murmuring became clear. The water around her had a current. To her left, the water rushed glimmering to the west. Now what? It wasn’t migration season; she’d at least checked up on that. The seas had always been warm, silent, the currents running unnoticed. Funny peculiar, that was for sure.

The warm water lapped her ankles. Maybe it was a little deeper than before?

The next few steps brought the water swirling up until her knees. Havi stopped to consider her options. Within half a minute the water was up to her thighs. What could possibly cause this? The moons’ tides were negligible. The labyrinth itself?

She groaned. If she started swimming, she’d lose contact with the labyrinth and anyway, she couldn’t swim all night. Now she had to call the people she didn’t want to. She turned on her locator beacon and sent out a call to her parents’ fish farm.

The phone was picked up immediately.

“I heard from Alexa down at the port you’d gone walking. Need picking up?” her sister said.

Havi’s cheeks burned. So she had been recognized after all. Her foolishness was all over the fishing community already. Wait. If Ivete knew, and knew about the changed conditions, she could have picked Havi up hours ago. The asshole. Ivete had deliberately let it come to this. Was this payback for Havi’s leaving? Great.

“Thanks sis. Got my location?”

“Yup.”

Lights went on about half a kilometer in the direction of her family’s house and started moving toward her. Oh, the hover boat had been waiting for her with doused lights?

Havi looked down at the water now tugging at her waist. If she hadn’t called, they’d probably have swooped in a minute later anyway. She had no clue what was going on with the labyrinth, but it was clearly unsafe as hell.

She stood waiting as the water rose up to her chest, already starting to float when the boat whispered up and someone threw a lit life buoy over to her. As the boat winched her in, she unclenched her jaws. No need to let them know she was angry. They knew. They wanted it that way.

Her father and sister hauled Havi up to the deck. She stood dripping and just looked at them.

“Guess you didn’t lose your sense of direction,” her father said. “If the eddies hadn’t started up, you would have walked straight home.”

That sounded pretty close to an olive branch. Havi wasn’t sure if she was ready to take it after these childish shenanigans. She held out her hand anyway. Her father shook it, no expression on his face. Still keeping things tightly bottled up. Yeah, she wasn’t going to give him a hug until he started it.

Ivete, her sister, stood at the wheel and barely nodded.

Havi punched Ivete lightly in the shoulder. “Hey.”

Ivete punched Havi back. Unnecessarily hard. “Welcome home, sib,” Ivete said. It sounded way too perky after the mean punch, which would leave a bruise.

“A warning would have been nice,” Havi said.

“You telling us you were visiting would have been nice. Or a Christmas card every other year?”

Havi had stopped sending them after she never got any replies.

So they weren’t fine. She got the message. But why, after all these years? Havi felt a surge of anger. What old beef could possibly be worth nearly letting her drown? Their own daughter and sister? Come on.

The hover took off. Havi relaxed and watched Blue Moon rise. Lilac night was the best time of night. Glarus, the big green moon, wouldn’t be up until early morning.

“I could use a second dinner,” she said. “Anything in the fridge?”

Her dad and Ivete exchanged looks.

“It’s not been a good year. The fish are acting weird. And last year was bad too. The Fish Migration Guard must have let a stranger fish through, and the offspring tasted weird. We had to taste each and every one, so we sold only fillets that year. This year, with the eddies and the labyrinth acting up, we’re just not in control of the fish anymore. Most of them got away.”

Havi opened her mouth to respond, but didn’t.

If it was like that all over the world, that certainly explained why nobody on Knossos was sending their fish up into space. This was going to ruin the planet’s reputation. Her parents’ business would go under. Everybody’s business would go under. It was more serious than the Restaurateurs’ Association had made it sound.

So maybe the reunion with her parents was going to be more worst-case scenario than pink-tinted, but she had to get to the bottom of this mystery. She was still a Knossos girl at heart.

As the boat rushed over the waters, the violent glimmering on the water surface indicated that something a little more powerful than “eddies” was going on. Havi personally would have called them maelstroms or vortices. In hindsight, she felt a thrill of fear over her recent ordeal. That would have ended very badly if her family hadn’t shown up in time. She considered suing dumbass Alexa from the spaceport. Just sending a rights waiver wasn’t really sufficient customer care. If she’d really been an outworlder . . . but no, Alexa, last name unknown, had apparently recognized her as a scion of the Skuja family.

“What’s Alexa spaceport’s last name?”

“Thinking of revenge?” Ivete said. “Don’t. We persuaded her not to send out a rescue.”

What had Havi ever done to deserve a family like this? Leave home to pursue an education and a career away from fish? Big whoop.

Ivete’s face broke into a wide, smug grin, painted lilac by the moons. “And anyway, she’s Dara’s little sister.”

Havi rolled her eyes. “Not him again. Ever.”

The serrated outlines of the family farm popped up on the horizon, the lit contours stark white against the purple sky.

The next morning, Havi squinted against the sun glaring off the solar arrays as the stared down at the family farm. Everything was different. The corridors were at least two meters deep, and the fish didn’t swim their usual figure eight, but something far more complicated. She knelt down on her floater pad and swiped a pink fish from the shoal. She headed, gutted, and filleted it. The first raw bite definitely tasted different. Good, but not the taste of home farm.

When she’d come home last night, her father had cooked a meal entirely without fish or garum, the salty, spicy sauce made from fish remnants.

Mom had also refused to talk shop that late at night. Mom was the boss, so everyone trooped meekly to bed after feeding Havi. Havi had thought it prudent to eat breakfast before talking to Mom.

Yes. Strange tastes, strange swimming patterns, seabed dropping. How was that even possible? Havi went inside and called up tidal stats. They made no sense anymore. The three moons had always exerted a gentle pull on the planet’s shallow oceans, but the last year, tidal movements had splintered into much smaller whirlings and eddies and strange weaves of shallow and deepwater streams. Oceanographers were still exploring the patterns and the cause of the change.

Changes didn’t happen out of nowhere. Havi called up meteorologist reports, astronomers’ blogs, but they reported nothing out of the ordinary.

She enlarged the live tidal display from the satellite network. Zoomed out more. If she looked at the whole hemisphere at once, it almost seemed like there was a pattern. But it wasn’t complete. It seemed broken, interrupted. She zoomed in on one of the pattern breaks. Osaka Barrier. A recent, human-made, barricade to keep the fish from swarming, intermingling, and ruining their famous taste.

Time to talk to the farm manager. Mom.

Her mother was seated, frowning, behind a big screen showing the flow inside the family farm. The shoal swam around and around, as always, but there was a distinct pause at the closed tidal gate.

“It’s as if they want to leave,” Havi said. “But why? They’ve been fine here all their lives.”

Mom looked up at Havi. “Step away from the monitor. Don’t you know it’s rude to look over people’s shoulders? And this farm is not yours anymore, as you made very clear, so none of your business.”

“It’s not random curiosity, Mom! Don’t you realize your livelihood is in danger? As well as everybody else’s, including restaurateurs all over known space?”

“I do. But I only share family secrets with people involved in the family business. Go try the neighbors to see if they want you poking around.”

Jesus.

“They might be more open, not having a baseless grudge against me,” Havi snapped. “Isn’t there a worldwide concern? Aren’t you guys working together to find out the cause for this?”

“Of course we are. We’re negotiating agreements to keep our trade secrets safe. When we’ve got a covenant, we’ll start our own investigation.”

“What trade secrets?” Havi asked. She couldn’t think of any she didn’t already know, having spent her youth as unpaid labor on the farm. “And when are you expecting this covenant to emerge?”

“As I said, not unless you want to join the family business.”

Like hell she was.

“And what do you mean by random grudge? As if you didn’t realize what you were doing to us. As if you don’t know how hard it was to keep Ivete out of jail after that shuttle port business,” her mother said.

“Jail? What shuttle port business?”

“Yes, pretend to be innocent. Good Havi, who ignores everything that’s going on under her nose.”

“Mom, are you even taking this seriously? If things go on like this, you won’t have a business.”

“Don’t be dramatic, dear, you should have outgrown that by now. Things have always been fine. Of course we will find a way to get back to normal. Build another barrier, maybe, or another way to control the swarming and the eddies. They’re only fish.”

Havi got up and went out, before she said things she’d regret. She knelt down by one of the enclosed corridors where the family grew earth produce: seaweed, sea potatoes and limpets, gene engineered to provide human beings with the right nutrients. The Paal fish were the most important ingredients to give this diet variety and flavor.

She took off her shoes, stepped down into the lukewarm water of the basin, sun blazing down on her neck, and inhaled the fragrance that rose up from the water gardens. Seaweed in all colors between pink and dark green waved gently in the current. Limpets and shells pocked the sides.

She put some pinkies, strands of grassy kelp, and a limpet in her mouth and chewed furiously. Why did her parents, and possibly most of their fellow fish keepers, refuse to acknowledge the seriousness of the situation? She couldn’t understand it. It stared them right in the face.

But then again, they’d seen things get worse so slowly they might have failed to notice the enormous gap between how things had been eleven years ago and now.

Would there be any point in talking to other families? Might they have noticed other phenomena that would clarify the situation? She’d better, even if she didn’t think it would yield new info, just to be complete. She needed other points of view. She’d covered weather, water, and fishing. What else? The Paal, their labyrinths, and the fish themselves.

After filling herself up, she clambered out and looked back with a frown. Current, what current? Hadn’t her mom always told her the earth gardens were kept completely separate from the rest of the briny? Sure, the doors kept the fish out. But if there was a current, earth nutrients could get into the ocean. Another strike on the tally of human influence of Knossos’ “natural”, that is, Paal-instigated, processes. Hm. Wouldn’t proliferating bacteria or the kitchen gardens’ waste ruin the terroir?

She ran back over the tops of the labyrinth to the main house. It floated over the shadow gardens, where fungi grew. Fish genetics weren’t her first priority, but her sister who could tell her all about it, was right here. She swallowed. Time to face the music.

The door opened right after knocking. Havi hadn’t expected that. She stepped inside slowly and coughed.

“Hey Ivete. How are you doing?”

“No small talk,” Ivete said. “Just ask your questions.”

No truce then. Fish talk first, then the family questions.

“I’m glad you’re willing to talk to me. Mom just shooed me out. Why are you guys still mad at me? I don’t see choosing a different career path as such a big crime. And what about the shuttle port?”

Ivete took a deep breath. “You can’t let go, can you? Just when I was being the better person, putting business interests over my own feelings. Did you ever think you were making a major impact on my life? That by choosing to leave, you took away my choice?”

Such hot waves of anger came off Ivete that Havi almost took a step backward. “I didn’t force you to do anything. If you wanted another career, Mom and Dad would just have had to sell the business. It’s your life. As it’s mine.”

Ivete slammed her hand on the desk. “So hurray, you’re better at withstanding parental pressure than me.”

“And the shuttle port?”

Ivete shrugged. “I tried to blow up the shuttle port after you left. I was just a kid. Not the port’s fault, I see that now.”

Whoa. Havi didn’t know what to say. That was a little more than youthful high spirits. She’d never thought about the impact her leaving would have had on Ivete. She still didn’t doubt her right to choose her own life, but she wished she’d been able to support Ivete more.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Ivete only huffed.

Havi took a deep breath. She couldn’t undo this old damage with a single apology. She was going to ask the questions she’d come for. “I’m looking into the mysterious fish behavior and taste. Is there anything interesting about their genetics you can tell me?”

“Nobody ever asks,” Ivete said. “But yes, I can.”

She opened up a tree chart on a large screen. Havi didn’t know what she was looking at until she zoomed in on the top branch. “Skuja” it said.

“This is what humans found when they landed here.” A struggling fleet of mere thousands, the last survivors of the destroyed Earth, fleeing the Katabiotics.

“The Paal had engineered the minimalist but still functioning ecosystem, consisting of no more than the fish, several branches of seaweeds, algae, and slime, no more than twenty-three bacteria. That was all. And so far, impervious to human bacteria, viruses, and fungi.”

Havi thought she understood, even though she didn’t know where this fact was leading.

“Of course we fish farmers are actively trying to maintain that unique genetic signature, for its flavor. So since the advent of humanity, two hundred years ago, the Fish Migration Guard tracks down and destroys stray fish or shoals. That’s why Osaka Barrier was put up. Me and Dad helped build it.

“But we can also track the fishes’ genetic history for far longer, even back to when the Paal created them. They made sixty-five unique species, so far less than we have now.

“Since the origin of these fish, so many hybrids have originated that only a few of the original mixes still exist. The rest is all hybridized. We can tentatively conclude that the Paal intended for hybridization to happen. How they made the fish capable of mating is a fascinating story.”

“For another day,” Havi said quickly.

“Or how they made it so that many types of aliens, among others the humans and the Gukke, could eat and enjoy the fish.”

“Also another day.”

Havi couldn’t tell from Ivete’s neck if she was disappointed in Havi’s curtailing of her digressions.

“So do these facts shed any light on what’s going on with the fish?”

Ivete shrugged. “Not that I know of. I’ve sequenced dozens of wrong-tasting fish. They’re all hybrids from existing strains. It’s odd that they are breeding out of season, but well, who knows why?”

“Isn’t that also biology?”

“It’s observed behavior, ecology. I’m all about the genetics.”

“No insights about the labyrinths rising, or the seabed falling? The eddies?”

Ivete looked unconcerned. Why would she pretend that?

Havi waited. Nothing more was forthcoming from her sister’s averted back.

It didn’t feel as if the past issues had been resolved even a little bit.

Havi sat down at her mother’s desk and fired off messages to universities and researchers. An urgency tugged at her. She couldn’t pinpoint the source of it. After all, the fish scarcity had been going on for months, the gradual rising of the labyrinths for years. There was no rational explanation for her sense of hurry. But her gut was her best guide, so she always took it seriously.

The astronomer and the meteorologist reacted the quickest. Sadly, they lived on the other side of the planet, but she made appointments to face-call them. In her career as a journalist, she’d noticed she got a better rapport and more information if she met people in the flesh. Something about the subliminal scents and body language of an actual human being, maybe. The archeologist, who hadn’t replied, was a short hover boat ride away. Havi decided to visit her first, welcome or not.

She left a note saying she’d borrowed Ivete’s hover and left. The archaeologist’s floating camp was near the Paal temple she knew so well. People knew so little about the Paal, even after living on Knossos for two hundred years.

The platform wobbled as she stepped onto it. A chunky machine sitting on the other edge churbled along quietly. Probably diving equipment. Before long, the tone of the diving monitor changed.

The first divers didn’t even notice her sitting there until they’d taken off their helmets and deactivated their suits.

Havi coughed. “I’d like to speak to Dr. Furuzan?”

The oldest of the women stuck up her hand.

“Hi, I’m Havi Kuja. I’ve been commissioned to look into the past years’ fish troubles. One of the things that stood out was the labyrinth changes. Do you have time to talk to me about that? Is it something you’ve noticed?”

Furuzan laughed. “Writing about it is the only thing that got me sponsors and students, so yeah.”

“Did you realize it also had an effect on the fish farms? The fish have changed behavior and taste different.”

“I heard some rumors, but since we don’t have money for real fish, I didn’t think anything of it. Wow. How interesting. Do you have proof that the two are interrelated?” Furuzan asked.

“Not scientific proof, no. This is just a preliminary investigation. But it seems pretty unlikely that two such events are coincidental, doesn’t it, after millennia of stasis?”

Furuzan waggled her head. “We think millennia of stasis. Those few satellite photos we have from the Gukke don’t really prove nothing happened in between. And don’t forget the arrival of humans as agents of change. But I get your point.”

“So, what can you tell me about the Paal? Why did they build these labyrinths, why they designed this specific ecosystem?”

“I wish! We don’t even know what they looked like, since the Gukke, who actually met living Paal a couple of thousand years ago, never bothered to film them or preserve the memory.”

“I’m investigating for the fishing and restaurant industry. Knossos’ economy is going to collapse if the fish problem continues. Anything you can tell me about the Paal and the labyrinths,” Havi said.

“You probably knew the labyrinths extend several meters down into the soil? So they haven’t been growing. The continents’ seafloor has been slowly sucked out by currents. I have a hunch that the labyrinths have some connection with wind, tides, and currents. The currents in the briny are fueled by massive water vortices in the oceans. Where, as you also were aware, I assume, the labyrinths continue. All over the globe.”

“Has anyone ever completely charted them?” Havi asked.

“Not really.”

“I wonder why the first settlers never bothered to explore further. I would have.”

Furuzan shrugged. “They were refugees from Earth, fleeing the Katabiotics, probably had lived in cramped ship clouds for generations. They were just happy to find a habitable planet, to be free of the Katabiotics.”

“So did the Katabiotic aliens also kill the Paal?”

“We don’t know that the Paal are extinct. We only know they’re gone from this planet. But where they are, all dead, sublimed to another plane of existence, moved to the Magellan Cloud . . . nobody knows.”

Havi felt a stirring of instinct. Something here. “We have found very few intact planets, haven’t we? Almost all destroyed by the Katabiotics. I wonder why this planet is still here.”

“Interesting question, but outside my purview. We’re just cataloging the newly accessible labyrinths walls. “

“Can you show me?” Havi asked. The stirring inside her was fainter now, but it wasn’t gone.

“Sure. For example, the structure the locals call the temple. Let me show you what it looks like now.” Furuzan gestured to the water, where something triangular stuck up about twenty meters away. It was about ten meters wide and three high. Must be the remnant of the temple.

“I can’t dive,” Havi said.

“It’s a short walk and it’s only submerged up to the chest. Well, you’re tall. To the waist.”

They balanced over the labyrinth walls and clambered through the temple’s windows into a triangular space that stretched away to its point about fifteen meters away. The stone floor was completely submerged now.

Havi landed in warm water, slick stone beneath her feet. The slab where she and Dara had not made love was only visible as a disturbance in the water’s gentle eddying.

The pictorials on the wall were fuzzier and less deep than she remembered. She moved closer to the left-hand walls. They’d always been called pictorials, she wasn’t sure why. The shapes she saw were abstract and organic, created by thousands of little triangular stones or bricks.

“Look at the walls, and then at this picture. The reliefs on the wall have moved two millimeters.”

Havi had already seen it. “I used to hang out in this place all the time. They’ve moved a lot more than two millimeters. The design is completely different.”

She waded toward the far wall, where once a beautiful spiraling relief mural had been, and now only faint bumps were visible. The bumps didn’t even make a picture anymore. “Don’t touch it!” Furuzan cried out.

Havi put her hand on it anyway. She was sure she’d touched the temple walls before and nothing had happened.

The wall moved beneath her fingers. The stone sucked at her skin, refusing to let her hand move away.

Havi yelped in surprise and yanked her hand back. A faint whorl of blood showed in the water before it was washed away by a suddenly stronger current.

“What’s going on? What does this mean?”

“I was about to tell you this. The wall moves, it makes patterns. All the labyrinths we’ve seen do. I would guess that all of them are doing that. They react to our presence, and even more so to our touch.”

“Are the walls alive?” Havi asked, loath to touch them again.

“I don’t think so, although since they’re alien, who knows. More like automatons, maybe?”

The whirr of a hover boat became audible. The briny sloshed through the room.

“Another visitor?” Furuzan said.

Light brighter than the day strobed through the narrow window slots of the temple. “This is the police. Come out slowly.”

The police? Havi and Furuzan looked at each other. There wasn’t a lot of crime on Knossos, and if there was, it was usually dealt with in-house or in-family.

Havi clambered out first, squinting against the mega lights.

“Did you arrive on hover boat DG211?” the augmented voice asked, although the police hover was no more than twenty feet away.

“Yep, that’s me.”

“You’re under arrest for theft. Turn your back and hold out your wrists.”

Havi was too surprised not to comply. It was her family’s boat. She’d left a note. What the hell?

A person stepped off the hover onto the temple ridge. He clocked handcuffs onto her wrists.

“Turn.”

Havi turned. His voice sounded familiar.

The lights powered down.

The policeman turned out to be Dara.

“Havi?” he said, sounding a lot less surprised than she felt.

“Yes. Why am I under arrest? Who called in the boat as stolen? That’s my family’s boat.”

Dara looked sheepish. “Ivete called. She didn’t say it was you.”

Havi snorted. She believed him about Ivete’s call, but not so much about him not knowing it was her. And how had Ivete managed to pinpoint Dara as the arresting officer, had she called him out of his bed on the neighboring farm or had he just happened to be on duty? But she’d give Dara the benefit of the doubt. Not so much Ivete. “That little idiot. Okay, are you going to take the cuffs off?”

“I can’t do that. I have to take you to the station now. And process this officially.”

“Jeezus.”

Havi sat on a bench in the floating police station, hands cuffed, in growing annoyance. Dara administrated slower than slow, drinking endless cups of fish tea without offering her any. Processing officially her ass.

The silence was rudely broken by a raucous blare of sound. “What the hell is that? Turn it off!”

“That’s a siren. I think. A warning. Emergency.”

“For what? A storm?”

Dara raked his hands through his hair. “I think we covered this in training. Once. I have to look it up to be sure.”

Havi saw her chance. “If there’s an emergency situation, you can’t guarantee my safety. You have to release me.”

“Just wait, okay? I’m looking it up.”

The siren continued to grate across Havi’s nerves while Dara, increasingly nervous, browsed through his instruction manuals.

Dara gestured her to his terminal. “I found it. Look. It says it’s a warning against Katabiotic invasion!”

News flashes started to scroll across her vision, emergency overrides from her inphone.

“It’s the wormhole hub. It’s under attack. I can’t believe it. That’s millions of people.” Dara was panting, the whites of eyes showing. How had she ever for a moment considered him handsome fifteen years ago?

“Dara, get a grip. Untie me. Tell me what to do.”

Dara unlocked her cuffs with shaking hands. “I’m the officer on duty.”

Havi forced her voice to stay calm. “For this region. Sure. Where is the worldwide headquarters?”

“Here! I told you!”

“That can’t be true. How many of you are there?”

“Seven,” Dara said.

“For the whole planet?”

Dara started calling up his colleagues, his voice horse.

Havi stifled her questions. Dara was a bit slow, but he was doing the job.

After that, Dara showed her the information from the police database. “Katabiotic event. Call up oikotekts. (What is an oikotekt?) While you wait for their help to arrive, remember Katabiotic interference is a quantum event. Observe your surroundings continuously, reinforcing their stability.”

She read the paragraph out loud. “Do you know what this means?”

“There was a training exercise. We were standing in a circle and had to keep looking at each other and the room in a figure eight pattern. Very tiring. I got really dizzy.”

“So how would we do this?”

“Stand in a circle.”

“There’s two of us,” Havi said.

“Um, yes, I guess back-to-back?”

They stood back-to-back. In spite of her annoyance at his slowness and nerves, it was reassuring to feel a warm, living human being against her back. His physical solidness grounded her.

“What’s going on with your colleagues?” she asked.

“They’re organizing Katabiotic resistance. They need to get these instructions out to everyone.”

Seven cops for a whole world. Great. Who else could they call on? Of course. Fish Migration Control!

“Dara, get the same directive to FMC. They have a lot more hovers and warm bodies.”

“Already did that. Look, Havi. Look at the fish.”

She walked to the window. The police station didn’t float over a farm, but the briny was full of glinting fish backs. Thousands of fish, millions of fish, swimming. And not just randomly. Patterns.

Just like the patterns on the temple wall.

“Call up the FMC satellite feeds.”

Dara complied. “Zoom in.”

It was like looking at a different planet. The fish weren’t swimming around placidly in their local farm labyrinths anymore. They were swarming, circling, spiraling in large-scale patterns. Patterns the size of continents. All the fish must have escaped their farms.

There had to be a connection between the incoming Katabiotic attack and the fish behavior. But what?

Havi remembered Ivete telling her that the fish were conscious beings, about as intelligent as Earth fish had once been. Not very, that meant, but they did have awareness and memory, up to a point.

Not there yet.

She called up the astronomer she’d been about to visit. The woman wasn’t answering. She left an urgent message.

Within a minute the astronomer called back.

“Ms. Skuja, this is a bad time. We’re all observing the skies for signs of the Katabiotics,” the woman said.

“I’m at Police Headquarters, assisting in the defense effort.” Wow, that came out slick. “We need help. Just a few moments of your time. Explain to me in simple terms about quantum events and observation?”

“We learned, centuries ago, that if we managed to observe our surroundings intensively enough, or with the right kind of attention, that the Katabiotic changes can’t take place. It’s like Schrödinger’s Cat, once you look in the box, the cat is either dead or not. As long as you don’t look, its state is uncertain. The Katabiotics can only act in the uncertain state.”

“Is it only human beings who can do this quantum observation?”

The astronomer pulled at her chin. “I have no idea. But I don’t see why. A higher animal, like a mammal, would be able to observe whether a cat was dead or not.”

“Thanks!” Havi hung up.

The Paal had built the labyrinths, an unknown but long time ago.

Havi had always thought of the labyrinths as ruins, remnants of a dead species that had left the planet for its own incomprehensible reasons. But what if the labyrinth wasn’t a ruin of something else, but fish and labyrinth together were a machine, built for a purpose? And something had triggered that purpose?

“The fish are defending us,” she told Dara, who was still diligently observing his surroundings in a figure eight pattern.

“What?”

“Don’t stop. The fish observe the planet. That’s why this planet is the only one in the whole region that is still intact. It’s the fish. It’s a fish defense system.”

Dara giggled.

Havi slapped him. “Focus. Dara, focus. Zoom out from that satellite feed. We need to check on the fish. If they’re covering everywhere.”

A quick glance at the other four continents showed that the fish patterns seemed intricate and smoothly flowing. It was a different story on Continent Five. In the middle of the continent a large break showed in the pattern. “What is that?”

“Osaka Barrier,” Dara said. “Completed five years ago.”

Havi knew what to do. “It’s the barrier. It’s ruining the fish flow. We have to blow it up. Come on, Dara.”

“What? No. We can’t. It’s against the law. That’s people’s livelihoods.”

“Those people would complain even more if the planet started breaking up because the physical constants of the universe had changed. Remember what happened to Earth? We all watched the video!”

Dara scratched his head. “But . . . ”

“Whatever. Come.”

“No. I’m not destroying an important structure on your say-so. My duty is here, leading the defense efforts.”

Havi wanted to slap him again.

“Give me the keys to Ivete’s boat then. I have to do this.”

She jumped on board the hover boat and set course toward the barrier It had become night and all three of the moons were out. Baby, Blue Moon, and Glarus, also known as the Big Green Cheese. Their rainbow light glinted off the billions of shiny fish backs coursing through the water. The boat hovered not over the briny, but over a solid carpet of glistening fish spines. Beautiful.

She couldn’t do this alone, though. She didn’t know a thing about explosives or how to destroy large man-made structures. Shit. There was only one person she could call.

Her fucking annoying little sister.

“Hey Ivete, it’s me. I need your help.”

“Yeah right. How’s the police station treating you?”

“That was pretty annoying. I admit that. But now there’s an emergency and I need your help. You know how to blow up stuff,” Havi said.

“What? No.”

“Yes you do. You said you and Dad helped build the barrier. Blew up part of the labyrinths there.”

“Okay, that, yes.”

“Gather up your blowing-up stuff and meet me at the dock. I’m on my way.”

A long silence ensued. Havi imagined Ivete wrestling between a desire to blow stuff up and the one to frustrate her big sister. Maybe there was a smidgen of helpfulness in there too, but Havi wasn’t counting on that.

“Okay. I’ll be there. If you promise to stay.”

“No! Are you crazy? I have a career. I can’t just ditch that and go back to fish farming.”

“Okay, fine, then no help with explosives,” Ivete said.

“I will stay a month.”

“Six.”

“Two. Final offer.”

“Three or it’s no deal.”

Grinding her teeth, Havi promised three. Why did Ivete even want this if she was so angry at Havi?

Havi turned the hover to swing by the family farm.

Ivete was actually there, with several crates and bulging bags. And a girl Havi didn’t know, who was briefly introduced as Ari, the girlfriend.

The supplies were loaded and Havi raced off again, toward the barrier.

“What are we blowing up?” Ivete asked.

Havi grinned at her. “You’re only asking that now? Who are you?”

“Nobody you know anymore.”

That stung. But maybe she was right.

“I’m sorry I stayed away so long, little sis.”

Ivete didn’t react. Too little, too late?

“Okay, it’s Osaka Barrier. It’s obstructing the Paal defense system.” Havi said.

Ari cursed.

Ivete said nothing for a while. “Will it help against the Katabiotics?”

“Yeah.”

“Malala hub is breaking up as well, did you read that?” Ari said. “Who’s gonna buy our fish now? If there’s no hub . . . ”

“We’ll worry about that later.”

The boat skipped over the swarming fish backs in a straight line, illuminated only by the three moons. The fish weren’t swimming in patterns here but teeming and churning chaotically. Havi tried to ride faster, but she was at maximum speed already.

She swung the boat into a neat halt at one the barrier’s floating connectors. “We have to hurry. The Katabiotics’ effect could be here any moment. Do you know the weak points of the barrier?”

The girls shook their heads. Of course not. Why would they?

Havi cracked her knuckles. She was information girl. “You girls get the charges set up while I find out where to put them.”

Apparently, lots of people wanted to blow up stuff. Or no. All the dates on the articles were like hundreds of years old. But it should be relatively easy to blow up the support structure to the deep but lightweight barriers that blocked off Continent Five’s farm outlets.

Havi walked up to where Ivete and her girlfriend were connecting detonators to packs of explosives. Ivete looked suspiciously adept at this. She probably had had a lot more practice than on the construction. Who was Ivete? Did Havi even know her? Why had Ivete blackmailed Havi into staying at the farm? Baffling.

A tremor rocked the structure.

“What was that? Did you start already?”

Ivete looked spooked. “No. That was something else. Is it the aliens?”

What else could it be? Instinctively, Havi looked up at the moon. There was a black stripe across Green Cheese. What the hell? Suddenly it clicked. Not a stripe, but a chasm. Green Cheese was breaking up. Havi was no physicist, but she imagined a chunk of moon falling down would wreak immense havoc. Earthquakes. Tidal waves.

“We have to hurry. This is the vulnerable spot. Even if the rest of the planet is safe, if this part breaks down, we’re all doomed. We have to get those fish in here!”

“You’re talking gibberish. I trusted you so far, but this is weird. What have fish got to do with alien attacks?”

“A lot more than you’d think. I’ll explain later. Let’s get out of here.”

“If we blow up the barriers, won’t we kill a lot of fish?” Ivete asked.

Havi gestured to the millions of shiny fish backs swirling against the barriers. “Maybe some, but these will rush in to take their place.”

The hover took off at speed.

“How far?” Ivete cried.

“I don’t know! A couple of kilometers? Hurry.”

Ivete touched a secret button under the dash and the hover’s speed tripled. Havi was pushed back against the seat, “Far enough?”

The crack in the moon grew wider. Havi didn’t dare wait any longer.

“Go! Set them off! Explode the stuff!” she cried.

Ari pressed the detonator with a big grin on her face.

A series of bright sparks set off. An ear-shattering boom sounded. Seconds later, a big wave slammed them all against the hover’s deck.

“Jeezus,” Havi groaned. “Everybody all right?” Everything hurt. Especially her ribs.

Two separate groans answered her. At least they were alive. She managed to crack open an eye and found herself draped over the hover’s steering wheel. Hadn’t Ivete been driving?

Once she’d unpeeled herself from the dashboard, many of the pains lessened, but not the one in her ribs. She groaned. That made the pain worse.

Had it worked? Had they set the fish free? She crawled to the hover’s side and peered over the railing. Yes! The moonlight, strangely flat for this time of night, glinted off fish scales, orderly swimming in a micro version of the patterns that were only visible from orbit.

Did this mean the planet was safe now? Havi could do nothing about Malala wormhole hub, but down here she’d done all she could. She carefully rolled over on her back, landing on someone’s belly or thigh, and checked out Glarus Moon. The crack was still there, but it hadn’t grown any bigger. Maybe its internal gravity would pull it back together now that the outside influence was neutralized? She’d hate to have her late nights without Green Cheese to complete the rainbow.

She didn’t know what to do about a moon that might still be falling apart. But she bet someone else would, now that it was plainly visible in the sky. No need for investigative reporting anymore.

She moved her sore head to a softer spot on the other person’s body.

“Watch it, sis. I’m bruised there.”

Havi smiled. Sisters.

About the Author

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

The Language Sheath

Regina Kanyu Wang, translated by Emily Jin and Regina Kanyu Wang

1

Shall I go ahead? The recorder is on? All right, let me begin.

My name is Ilsa. I’m honored to have this job, acting as the sole sampling subject for Babel’s planned Kemorean language sheath. Honestly, I wasn’t surprised that they chose me. Let’s just say that I knew I would get it. You may not notice if you don’t speak Kemorean and can hear me only through translation, but years of experience as a KSL teacher forced me to adopt good habits: standard pronunciation, strict grammar, meticulous attention to usage and good style—after all, only a teacher who speaks flawless Kemorean can teach students properly. I’ve won the award for teaching excellence five years in a row, been extensively interviewed by the media, and even got to shake the hand of the Kemorean Minister of Culture. My teaching skill is as lauded as the elegance of my Kemorean. Babel is wise to choose me, the ideal candidate.

I have a good impression of Babel, whose global success is well-known. All the Babel staff I met through the multiple rounds of interviews were professional and friendly. In the last round, I had a very agreeable chat with Mr. Hanson, director of Babel’s Kemorean Project. Although he was speaking German and I was speaking Kemorean, with the help of Babel’s translation service, we understood each other pretty well. Babel’s earbuds transmitted each of our sentences up to the cloud service center, and the translations produced by the neural engine were then transmitted to the other person’s earbuds in real time.

For big languages such as Mandarin, English, German, Spanish, and over forty others, Babel’s translation service has performed extremely well, but the Kemorean translation that I heard during the interview process, an internal demo not available to the general public, was only passable. It generally conveyed the meaning of the words accurately, but the sentences were stilted, awkward, with little stylistic unity or natural fluency in expression. It so grated on the ear that I couldn’t imagine anyone would be willing to pay to use it for long. Babel hasn’t launched the Kemorean service because in its present form the product would ruin Babel’s reputation. They need to refine and polish the machine translation results with usage patterns distilled from a real human model speaker, to wrap the rough functional core in a smooth output filter called a “language sheath.” That’s why they need me.

At first, I didn’t realize that Babel was recruiting for a model for the Kemorean language sheath—I had never heard of the concept. I thought I was supposed to participate in the translation process itself. Having taught Kemorean for more than a decade, I thought my deep knowledge of grammar would be helpful. However, Hanson told me that current machine translation technology is no longer based on rules of grammar, and even statistics and probability are no longer central to the process. Recurrent neural networks can learn to map correspondences between different languages and generate translation results immediately. What they need from me is my style and speaking habits as a model Kemorean speaker.

He proceeded to explain to me the basic principle of the language sheath, which is easy to grasp. While the neural translation engine can be trained by a large corpus of linguistic examples from diverse sources, the language sheath requires tracking of an individual model Kemorean speaker over a long period of time to extract their habits and patterns to achieve consistency. Everyone has different language habits. Some are lavish with modal particles, some haggle over every word, some prefer to be roundabout, and some get right to the point. Good writers can thus allow their readers to infer who’s talking without using dialogue tags, and good readers can even discern the author behind an anonymous text.

I’m excited for this job. It’s even better than I imagined. I’ll be helping Babel craft a perfect sheet of Kemorean language sheath.

Wait. Is “sheet” the right noun classifier to use for a language sheath? My apologies. I’m not sure what noun classifier to assign to such a new invention. Oh, in case you’re confused, Kemorean has a rich repertoire of unique words called classifiers that must be applied to every noun in certain contexts, such as when things are measured or counted. Every noun has a classifier that’s just perfect for it. One of the reasons I joined the project team is to contribute to the preservation of the unique lushness of Kemorean. We all know that the Kemorean language is in decline. Take my son, Yakk. His father sent him to an international school in early childhood, and even though he transferred to a Kemorean public school later at my insistence, his Kemorean is execrable. He can only construct simple sentences and commits solecisms all the time. He even speaks with an odd accent, as though he weren’t a native speaker. It’s a terrible disappointment.

Yakk’s situation is hardly uncommon among Kemorean youth. Kemor is a small country, and native speakers of Kemorean number less than three million. More than a decade ago, the Kemorean government started to heavily promote English education in order to boost economic development and international trade. Kemor’s generous policy on foreign investment brought an influx of foreigners to the country. For a while, teaching Kemorean as a second language was a booming business, but many foreign students found Kemorean too difficult to learn. Soon, they gave up altogether when the new generation of young Kemoreans who grew up with English as an integral part of their education stepped into the job market. Kemoreans speak much better English than foreigners speak Kemorean.

From my perspective, this isn’t right. Foreigners are coming to Kemor, so why should Kemoreans learn their language instead? Enrollment at the language school I taught at decreased steadily, while Kemorean youth spent more and more time studying English. It’s ridiculous. Kemorean will be endangered if the trend continues. I can’t stand by and do nothing. Kemor’s tongue is distinct from the languages of all its neighbors. It’s an invaluable linguistic specimen. Kemorean phonology is elegant and mellifluous; even the daily speech one hears in the streets sound like pleasing melodies, euphonious and brimming with power. Kemorean literature has gained extraordinary critical acclaim in the global market as well. We’ve produced two winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature, more than any other country in the region. Anria’s Night Song and Temu’s Records of Floating Ice are so beautiful that everyone who has read them can’t help but heap praise on them. I cannot imagine a future in which Kemorean children will no longer be able to appreciate the literary jewels of their own nation. The young do not care, but speaking proper Kemorean is still greatly important to people of my generation and older. This is our language, our culture, our pride.

I must do what I can to protect Kemorean. I’ll dig a moat with the language sheath and stop foreign languages from encroaching on Kemorean. I’ve seen the studies that show that in countries and regions where the use of Babel is common, the number of people who study foreign languages is significantly lower. When a reliable translation service is available, why bother wasting time and energy on learning a foreign language? The sooner the Kemorean translation service can go public, the sooner Kemoreans can stop devoting so much effort to learning English. Through the translation earbuds, their words will be rendered into the target language of their interlocutors. Conversely, they’ll hear through those earbuds standard Kemorean, the translation having been properly processed by the language sheath that bears my habits and stylings. Over time, perhaps the younger generation’s Kemorean would even improve through my example.

How long has it been now? Only ten minutes! Here I thought that I’ve been talking forever, but I’m still a long way from seven hours. Babel demands that I record myself talking for seven hours a day, minimum. All right, let me have some water and continue when my son comes home.

2

The school bell rang, jolting the dozing Yakk up from his desk. The frames of his glasses had left two dents in his nose bridge, his right arm was numb, and his right cheek felt hot. It never failed; Kemorean class always put him to sleep.

He patted his burning face and pinched his arm to wake it up. Then, he pulled out a piece of tissue to wipe the saliva trailing from the corner of his mouth. The Kemorean textbook, which he had conveniently used as a pillow, was soaked in drool. The printed letters, once sharp and distinct, now looked smudged, as if the component strokes were escaping from their frame and spreading out in various directions, forcefully tearing themselves off the page.

Agitated, Yakk snapped the textbook shut. On the bright yellow cover, the title was printed in a large font: Kemorean. A subheading under the title proclaimed: for ages 16-18. Yakk had long since colored in the circles in the numerals 6 and 8 with his pen. He didn’t like Kemorean letters. They didn’t even have that many circles that he could fill in. The strokes in the letters, short or long, stretched taut like wires; some were tightly intertwined, sticking up like spikes; some hung suspended, curving or zigzagging, dissipating at the ends into a few dots, as though left by a clogged pen. Yakk could never figure out how far apart the inkblots were supposed to be from one another so that the letters would be considered elegant. His mother always said that his Kemorean handwriting was no better than the product of a preschooler.

He didn’t understand why Mother insisted on his Kemorean lessons. When he had been at the international school, all the classes were taught in English. His grades were not the best nor the worst. Since all the teachers and students spoke English, he had grown used to expressing himself in English, which felt more like his mother tongue. At the international school, Kemorean was only an elective, but Mother forced him to take it. The content of the class was too simple for him because most of his classmates were foreigners and literally had to start from scratch. After he complained, Mother suggested that he come audit her Advanced Kemorean class in her language school during the weekends. Terrified by the prospect, he turned her down immediately, claiming that on second thought, it was probably better to build a solid foundation in Kemorean together with his classmates.

He had been boarding in the international school dormitory at that time, going home only on weekends. Since Mother had to work during weekends, the longest time that they could spend together was the ride between school and home. Mother would pick him up on Friday evenings and drive him back to the school on Sunday evenings. There was always traffic. As the car grudgingly inched forward, halting every few meters, Yakk had to give a report of his week to Mother in Kemorean, no matter how reluctant or carsick he was. He sought refuge in using the simplest sentences to avoid making grammatical mistakes and to cover up for the fact that he had not read and memorized the selections from 100 Best Prose Passages in Kemorean his mother had assigned. Fortunately, Mother was usually too focused on driving to demand him to prove his diligence by reciting the assignments.

Later, Yakk transferred to a public school, where all courses were taught in Kemorean. The teaching style and exam format were completely different from what he had been accustomed to at the international school. His grades dropped to rock bottom. He would never forget the look on his mother’s face when she saw his first graded assignment from the new school. It was a Kemorean language proficiency test on which he got 25 out of 100. He couldn’t summarize the passages’ main ideas, nor could he identify the misused words. Mother sighed deeply and said nothing. However, after that, Yakk felt that his mother looked at him differently.

At first, Yakk had tried hard to study Kemorean and get his grades up, but it was just too difficult. Compared to his peers, his exposure to the language lagged by years. While his new classmates had been studying classical Kemorean and analyzing famous works of Kemorean literature, he had been busy with English composition and oral presentation. Science and math classes were no better. He struggled because he had to first translate the technical terms into English before he could understand what was going on. Biology and history were even more confusing.

After a few years, his mother no longer bothered to correct every single sentence that came out of his mouth. It seemed as if she had finally accepted the fact that he could not—and perhaps never would—speak good Kemorean. He secretly hoped that after suffering through the last few months of high school, Mother would allow him to apply for programs in English at universities outside of Kemor. He had suffered enough Kemorean.

But then Mother got this new job. At first, Yakk was happy for her. There were fewer and fewer students at her language school, and she was visibly stressed all the time. However, he soon realized that the new job led to a new kind of torture—not only for her but also for him. She had to talk for seven hours per day into a recorder for an entire year. Seven hours! And he had to listen to almost every single part of it. Yakk thought he was going batty after just a few days. Since the public school didn’t board students, he had to come home every day. As soon as he entered the door, Mother began to talk to him, chitchatting endlessly to fill the required seven hours. Yakk desperately tried to delay going home using every excuse he could think of.

The school day being over, his classmates dispersed, leaving campus or hurrying to different after-school activities. But Yakk didn’t follow them. He sat in his seat in the last row and quietly watched the classroom gradually empty itself. He was finally left alone. It was good to be alone. At least no one would talk to him. No one would force him to speak Kemorean. He took out the English science fiction novel that he had hidden away in his desk drawer. David had lent him the book last month when they met up. It was an exciting book, but he dared not take it home. After transferring to the public school, he lost touch with his old friends from the international school. Only David and William met up with him occasionally. They gave him English books and told him which of their old classmates had been admitted to top universities in other countries. He forced himself to smile and offer his congratulations, and David and William knew better than to pester him with questions about his new life.

He turned to the page with the bookmark and began to read.

3

I never realized it would be so difficult to talk. Yes, Kemorean is a rich and expressive language, but even a treasure trove of linguistic abundance would be exhausted after talking about the same things over and over. I don’t have that much to talk about after all—my life is just too simple, and every day is like every other day. I’ve already described every corner of my house in excruciating detail, waxed poetic about the straight, tall, white poplars outside in four different ways, and urged Yakk to return home early for dinner in six different combinations of moods, auxiliaries, and voices.

These days, Yakk comes home later and later. He sneaks into his own room as soon as he’s in the door. I know that he finds me a bore. He thinks that I chatter too much, but this is my job. He may have forgotten, but I remember it clearly: when his father and I first divorced, he stuck to me all the time. Why is he no longer willing to listen to a few of my words?

I used to think my marriage was ideal. My ex-husband and I were high school classmates. After dating for five years, we got married right after graduating from college, and we had Yakk the following year. He was in business and I was in education, both accomplishing much in our own respective fields: a power couple in the eyes of other people. Every time he went on an international business trip, he would buy me gifts from abroad: unique perfumes, scarves, and purses, knowing that I didn’t want the things easily available in Kemor. He was the best husband and the best father. He took Yakk skiing in the mountains and fishing on the coast—every boy Yakk’s age dreamed of doing such fun things with their father, and Yakk’s friends envied his life.

I never imagined that he would betray me.

It was Valentine’s Day, though after years of marriage, we no longer made a big deal out of it. He called home and said that he had to work late and Yakk and I shouldn’t wait for him to have dinner. I didn’t think anything was out of place. He often worked late. His company was in foreign trade and had to accommodate the time zones of partners abroad.

Maybe I thought he had been working too hard, or I was just feeling impulsive, but I decided to make him chocolate. He once said that the chocolate I made was the best in the world.

I bought raw materials of the highest quality and worked all afternoon. Chocolate has its own memory, even more enduring than the memory of humans. You have to be patient along the way, wait until it is at the right temperature before proceeding to the next step.

When I was done, I sprayed some of the perfume he had bought me on the insides of my wrists, tied up my hair with a scarf from him, and headed over to his office with the chocolate without telling him. I imagined his look of surprised delight.

I had never been to his office. His secretary, a foreigner who spoke no Kemorean, came to greet me. Her hair was a mess and the buttons of her blouse uneven. I frowned, thinking her incompetent and lacking in grace. She froze when she realized it was me. I asked to see him. Her expression was strange as she turned to go into his office. Not until then did I notice the scarf in her hair and the scent of her perfume. Both were exactly the same as mine.

I left before she or he could come out. Once I was home, I stuffed the chocolates down my throat, one after another. They were too sweet, so I chased them with a bottle of vodka. I couldn’t get over how he had been so lazy that he hadn’t even bothered to pick a different perfume! Eating, drinking . . . the sweetness of the chocolate and the bite of the vodka entangled into one in my mind. Small details that I had once been oblivious to now all made sense: why he was always working overtime, why he always treated Yakk and me so well after business trips . . . I didn’t even know when the affair had begun. There were too many things that I didn’t know. Was she the only one? Had she seen me without my knowing? Why was her style so similar to mine? How did they flirt and whisper sweet nothings to each other? She couldn’t even speak Kemorean! Did they do it in English?

He had been an English major in college, which I thought was useless. As I expected, he couldn’t get a job after graduation. Kemor’s flexible family leave policy allowed couples to pool time off without assuming either would be the primary care provider, and so while I returned to work soon after giving birth to Yakk, he had stayed home. Eventually, because he was smart and hardworking, he started a new business to take advantage of the influx of foreign trade, and our lives became materially better. He grew busier and busier.

Later, he insisted that Yakk go to an international school, saying that the faculty and facilities there were better. Moreover, if Yakk spoke English as well as his mother tongue, he would have an advantage in the job market when he grew up. I was not that keen on the idea. Our mother tongue is Kemorean. How could English be like our mother tongue? But I allowed him to get his way. I never expected those earnest suggestions were mere tricks to pave the way for his affairs, to give him the freedom to do whatever he wanted. He always claimed to be too busy and could only spend time with Yakk on holidays. I had to do the weekly pickups and the monthly parent-teacher conferences and care for Yakk when he was home.

The more I thought about it, the angrier I became, until my teeth were clenched so tight that they hurt and my hands trembled uncontrollably. Without thinking, I smashed the vodka bottle on the ground, the shards glistening in the setting sun. I picked up a jagged piece and held it against my wrist. Maybe it was all a nightmare and everything would be fine as soon as I woke up. Pain would awaken me. I pressed hard, but the edge was too blunt and my hand too unsteady. It only left a shallow scratch on my skin. I was about to try again when Yakk came home. He rushed over and snatched the shard out of my hand. He grabbed onto it so tight that the glass cut into his palm, oozing blood. But instead of crying, he hugged me tight and whispered, Don’t cry, Mom.

He said it in English. I stared at him, as though I didn’t know him.

He switched to Kemorean, Don’t cry, Mom.

I hugged him back, tighter. How old was he at the time? Ten? Eleven? It was all my fault. I shouldn’t have trusted his father blindly and followed that ridiculous plan that estranged my child from Kemorean. I should have been tougher on him, forced him to recite famous passages from our literature and pushed him to speak and write more in Kemorean. Oh, Yakk, my son, it was my fault that you spoke your mother tongue so poorly. No, not me, but your father, and the bitch who snatched your father away from us. Their fault. It was all their fault!

If Yakk studied English like his father, he would also be stolen away from me by some foreigner woman after he grew up. I couldn’t let that happen. After I won sole custody of Yakk, I immediately transferred him back to a Kemorean public school, where he could be immersed in his mother tongue. I tutored him myself, correcting every grammatical mistake and drilling him relentlessly with more pure and proper forms of expression.

But it was too late. Even though several years have gone by since then, his progress is far from satisfactory. Yakk still cannot get his trills and flaps completely right; neither does he shift consonants properly in liaisons. He speaks slowly, with the syllables tumbling out awkwardly from between his lips one by one, devoid of the fluid soul of Kemorean.

Even worse, Yakk has entered his adolescent rebellious phase. He’s always sullen and avoids me. I know that he’s still in touch with friends from the international school, with whom he speaks English. Maybe that’s why he cannot speak Kemorean well. The boy doesn’t feel a sense of crisis at all. I need to figure out his future.

Wait, maybe the language sheath can help him! If the sheath can be used to perfect translation results, then surely it can also be used to refine Yakk’s own speech. There must be others out there like Yakk who need this technology to help them speak perfectly. Genius! I need to speak with Hanson as soon as possible. Babel is such a powerful corporation that I’m sure they’ll figure out a way.

Until then, I’ll dedicate myself to the language sheath: to build an invisible wall that could protect Yakk from English. Babel’s translation service would separate him from those foreign friends and make him realize that they are fundamentally different from him. He is Kemorean. A true Kemorean should speak nothing but the Kemorean language. This is the indelible mark of our cultural heritage. No change. No abandonment. The present confusion and chaos is only temporary. When the language sheath is ready and Babel publicly releases the Kemorean translation service, order will be restored. People will slowly give in to Babel’s convenience. Over time, everyone will once again realize the differences between distinct communities. Yes, they’ll be able to understand one another, but only via Babel’s processed translations. Without Babel, without the language sheath, they won’t be able to communicate at all. People will have to accept our respective differences and remain divided in diversity. This is the only way to preserve the beauty of each individual language.

Oh dear! I didn’t mean to go on for so long. It must be the alcohol. Fortunately, Babel promised me that no human employee would be involved in the processing of my recorded linguistic samples. The neural network won’t keep the content of my words, abstracting and extracting only my speech habits and styles. Still, I must admit, it feels good to say these words out loud. It feels like shoveling out the aged, unhusked rice long stored away in the bottom of a granary: damp, mildewed, and rotten. Then, with the aid of alcohol, the rancid pile burns, its essence rising and coming back to life.

4

Yakk waited ’til nightfall to go home.

No window was lit. Plugging the key into the lock, he turned it slowly, trying to be as quiet as possible. The deadbolt clicked as it retracted. In the silent night, the noise sounded like a piercing siren. Yakk’s heart clenched. Please don’t hear it. Don’t wake up. He pressed his ear to the door and listened. More silence. Gingerly, he pressed down on the handle and pushed the door open, moving inch by inch to avoid making noise. The same painstaking process was repeated as he squeezed in, closed the door, and took off his shoes. Just when he was about to sneak into his bedroom on tiptoes, a voice came from the darkness.

“Yakk?”

He bit down on his lip, refusing to answer.

The lamp in the living room snapped to life. Dazzling light was everywhere. Instinctively, he squinted and retreated to the door, as if he were a criminal caught red-handed by the policeman’s flashlight.

“Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for you?”

Yakk continued his silence. He wanted to escape into his bedroom and shut the door behind him, but he knew it wouldn’t work. She would just chase after him and talk and talk and talk.

“Where have you been? It’s as if you don’t even remember this is your home. I’m not telling you that you can’t have fun, but you have to be responsible.” She staggered toward him, the strong odor of alcohol permeating the air.

Don’t make her angry. Don’t fight back.

“You think I don’t know what’s going on? You’re dating a foreigner girl, aren’t you? Do you understand what kind of trouble you’re getting into? They are all the same, coming from other places to Kemor, seducing and cheating good-hearted Kemorean men. They have no mercy at all. Yakk, oh my Yakk, do you remember your father? Don’t be like him.”

He clenched his fist and told himself to simply take the blow. She had been hurt so deeply by Father that she became paranoid. There was no foreigner girlfriend. He didn’t even have many friends. Since he didn’t want to go home, he could only wander the city alone listlessly after the school locked its doors at 6:00 PM. In the past, he didn’t understand why Father didn’t like to come home, but now he felt like he could relate. Mother always wanted to be perfect and correct, and she pushed people around her to be just like her. When she drank, though, she felt more like a real person. He would rather have her drunk and speak her mind instead of seeing her under constant tension, holding everything inside.

“I’ve taught many girls from abroad like that. They are stupid. They can never master the fifteen tenses of Kemorean verbs. They’re always mixing up the four noun genders. Ugh, I can’t stand how they butcher our language. Kemorean should be smooth, graceful, and dynamic. But their grammatical mistakes and inappropriate usages feel like choking on a fish bone while drinking milk or bumping into insect eggs when caressing a piece of silk. Uncomfortable. Disgusting. Embarrassing. Add to that the awful pronunciations and odd intonations . . . they just don’t get it, no matter how many times you teach them. They don’t deserve to speak Kemorean at all!”

He reminded himself again that Mother was not talking about him. She was only firing insults at an imagined enemy who had abducted her son in her own muddled mind. But he couldn’t help thinking, Is this really how she feels while listening to me speak Kemorean? Is it really that disgusting? Afraid of her judgment, he had been talking less and less in front of her. He felt like a perpetual child whenever he spoke Kemorean: belittled, powerless, misbehaving, always mending some mistake that he had made. Only when speaking English did he feel like himself, but Mother never let him speak English in front of her.

“Why don’t you answer me? I guessed right, didn’t I? All right, listen to me. Come home early. Don’t stay out late. Don’t date foreigner girls. If you want someone to talk to, you can always talk to me. I have a lot of things to say to you. I can tell you stories. I can read you rhymes. You can lie on my knees and we can gaze up at the stars together, just like when you were still a little child. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Don’t leave me, Yakk. Remember what you said to me when your father left us? You said, Don’t cry, Mom. You said you would take care of me and stay by my side.”

She was too close now, backing Yakk into a corner. She was holding a bottle of vodka by its neck. Yakk turned his head to the side, trying to look over her shoulder to count the empty bottles on the floor. How much had she drunk?

Abruptly, she pulled him into a tight embrace. “My son, my precious . . . ”

He was drowning in hot, rotten breath. Instinctively, he tried to get away from her, but his movement threw her balance off, and she crumpled to the floor.

“Careful!” he exclaimed in English. His arms, extended to help her, stopped midway between them, helpless.

She sat on the ground, her head down, hair shielding her face and her trembling shoulders. At first, Yakk thought she was crying, but then he realized that she was actually laughing.

“Ha! Haha! Is this how you treat your mother? I see how it is. Your wings have grown strong; you can fly on your own now, so you push away the person who brought you up. Is this how you treat your mother tongue? You studied English, and now you’ve forgotten who you are. You no longer want to be my son, is that it? You no longer want to be Kemorean, is that it? Kemorean is dying because of people like you. You don’t speak your own mother tongue. You don’t respect your own culture. You are a traitor, seduced by foreign languages and foreign girls. Do you know how awful your Kemorean is? Do you know how disappointed I am? Why am I working so hard for this language sheath? Why am I suffering so much? It’s all for you! Do you understand? Of course you don’t. You know nothing!”

Again. There she goes. But she was the one who knew nothing. For all his life she had been imposing her own thoughts on him, never bothering to listen to what he had to say. He tried to be as obedient and dutiful as possible, but that only made her feel like he was weak and incompetent. She made him feel small, an utter failure. He was a bucket full of explosives and she a barrel of alcohol. Just a single spark, and the whole house would blow up into dust. English and Kemorean intertwined in his body. Rebuttals and curses roiled in confusing tides at the tip of his tongue. He clamped his lips tightly and ran away. He had to get out, had to leave this place, before the words imprisoned behind his lips could break out in an uncontrollable flood.

He truly hoped that the gloomy, cold night could wipe his existence off the surface of this planet. And perhaps her existence, as well. 

5

I think talking must be a kind of punishment.

To even make a single syllable, multiple vocal organs must collaborate. Your throat vibrates; your soft palate opens and closes; your tongue rolls; your lips change shape. Vowels and consonants. Long, short, light, and heavy. Speaking is a complex physical act. Day and night, I speak and speak, until my lips are numb and my throat burns, until I’m thirsty and exhausted. What’s more, coming up with things to talk about is torture for the soul. It feels like pushing my head into my own skull, like the ouroboros devouring itself. I dig for content, concepts expressible and unspeakable, in every nook and cranny of my brain with the tip of my tongue, licking through the folds, capturing leftover rotten crumbs of my long-gone mind, mixing them with saliva and vomiting them out.

I’ve hollowed myself of words, but still, I cannot stop. As soon as I stop, the earbuds ring with a droning alarm, like swarms of bees or mosquitoes spiraling around my head, buzz, buzzzz, buzzzzzz. Sometimes, even when I’m talking, my ears fill with hallucinated humming. Then I have to pause and check whether I’ve broken any rules by repeating the same content too many times or imitating someone else’s speaking style unconsciously. But if I pause too long, then the alarm starts going for real. I press my palms against my temples and cover my ears, but it’s no use. The sound is even louder that way because the earbuds are buried in my aural canals.

I can no longer distinguish whether my speech is real. The present I live in, the moment, no longer feels authentic after being described again and again. I’ve combed through my memories so much that they’ve been reduced to cold ashes. I can only make up stories, tell lies, abandon logic, and give up on reality. The contents of my speech don’t matter. I just have to keep my lips moving. I need to output. When my mouth isn’t eating, it is talking. Eating is necessary to sustain my life, with no pleasure in it; speaking, however, makes me feel alive because it hurts.

I’m like a silkworm, gulping down mulberry leaves and then spitting out threads, eventually enclosing myself in a cocoon. After a year’s metamorphosis, I—no, the language sheath—will emerge from the cocoon. Bearing my life’s expectations and the studied perfection of my Kemorean, the sheath will be a truly magnificent creation. She’ll dance elegantly in the wind, wrapping her rainbow-colored gossamer wings around all the coarse, crude, broken bits of Kemorean in the world, and turn them into the beautiful and elegant language that I possess.

The language sheath won’t disappoint me like Yakk. I’ve poured in all I have left to mold her. She bathes in the purist form of Kemorean every day and absorbs its nutrients. She’ll become the most perfect creation the world has ever seen, with the most graceful grammar, the most standardized sentence structure, the most proper punctuation, the most eloquent forms of expression. I will construct her skeleton with my words, nourish her flesh with my blood, and embellish her soul with my memories. Finally, with a hint of my alcohol, her aroma will be sublimated as well. I want to make up for all the regrets that I harbor regarding Yakk’s education. I’ll give her the best gift possible—Standard Model Kemorean. She is my most obedient and dutiful daughter.

Yes, the language sheath is my daughter, my second child. This agonizing and protracted process is no different from giving birth. Why, I went through just as much discomfort when I was pregnant with Yakk! Soon, soon she’ll be born. Look, Yakk, you’ll have a little sister. But where is Yakk? I haven’t seen him for days. What’s wrong with him? Is he jealous because I’m teaching Kemorean to his little sister with more patience?

Don’t be like that, Yakk. Listen to me. You are the big brother. You must care for and protect your baby sister. She’ll help you after she’s born. With her to polish your speech, you needn’t worry about not speaking perfect Kemorean anymore. Your little sister will help many other people, too. She has a loving heart, and she’ll treat everyone with equal kindness, perfecting their language after my perfect style. Kemorean ears deserve the best language in the world.

The language sheath is both a model and a specimen. Even if a catastrophe strikes the linguistic landscape in the future, she’ll still be there, a memorial to Standard Model Kemorean. Even if no one speaks Kemorean anymore, she’ll remind them of the glory that had once been its due.

Oh, she’s kicking me, telling me that she needs nourishment. She needs alcohol. Ha, she’s making requests.

[Drinking sounds.]

Alcohol is such a wonderful creation. Vodka is my favorite. Because of its purity. Its simplicity. No pretentious rituals when drinking vodka. Anytime. Anywhere. Just a quick injection of unadulterated alcohol. It has no color and no taste, so it can serve as the base of countless cocktails. How do you make a Bloody Mary? Vodka plus blood. Ha, kidding. But you can also use blood. Do you want to try?

Knife. I have a knife. A good knife. Clean and smooth enough to use as a mirror. Oh my . . . who is this woman? Look, she has dark circles under her eyes. She must be in so much distress. So tired. Poor thing. Come on. I’ll pour you a shot as well. You’ll be fine after a drink.

What does it feel like to have a knife cut into you? Well, there’s no pain. Your blood oozes out, not very fast. Drop after drop, like crimson beads. Beads falling into the glass, blossoming in the transparent medium. So pretty. Oh, it does hurt. Pain just kicks in late, I guess. A lovely feeling, this pain. Makes me feel alive. I see fireworks. Fireworks of blood.

Blood. So much blood. Yakk, where are you? Help me, help your mother. Phone, contacts, Yakk. Will you come, Yakk? You will. You promised. You promised you’d protect me—

6

Again, Yakk found himself in that recurring nightmare.

He was standing in the center of a circle of people, each person about a dozen meters away from him. Tall, short, robust, and slim, all their faces blurred. Everyone mumbled. He couldn’t hear them clearly since they were so far away. However, at some point in the dream, the circle shrank as they stepped toward him in unison. Each of them spoke in the voice of Mother, speaking Mother’s tongue, besieging him from all directions.

“Yakk, listen to me, you must respect Kemorean. You have to speak your mother tongue well. This is about honoring your culture . . . ”

“No more English! Stop seeing her immediately. I’ll find you a nice Kemorean girl who can speak perfect standard Kemorean just like me . . . ”

“White. Everything is pale white. White wall and white ceiling. White dribbles down from the overhead lamp, lands on my left wrist, wraps around it . . . then a tiny drop of red blossoms in the center of the whiteness . . . ”

Yakk wanted to shove them aside and break away from the circle, but more people stood behind them, ring after ring, surging toward him like tides. He couldn’t breathe.

He opened his eyes and sat up, gasping.

He saw Mother was already awake. She had been talking for some time, probably as soon as she returned to consciousness. She was describing the ward to herself in meticulous detail.

He stretched to return circulation to his stiff body, fumbled for his glasses, and put them on. The blurry world became clear again. He saw Mother trying to unwrap the bandage around her left wrist with her right hand. He rushed over and stopped her before she could succeed.

“Yakk.” She was startled to see him. “You . . . Where am I? What happened to my hand? How long have I been asleep? I’ve got to get back to work. The language sheath will soon be finished. Don’t worry. The sheath can help you . . . ”

He had no idea what he should say or what he could say. Instead, he opened his arms, leaned toward her and hugged her tight, just like the way he used to hug her as a child. He couldn’t remember the last time he had held her like this. He had forgotten that she was so skinny, her protruding bones digging deep into his chest and arms. He began to weep.

The man from Babel introduced himself as Hanson, the executive in charge of the Kemorean Project. He spoke to Yakk in English and shook his hand like an adult. Yakk didn’t like him, though. Mother’s condition was Babel’s fault.

Hanson said that he wanted to talk with Mother in private, so Yakk left.

It was a beautiful day outside. Wisps of cloud decorated the edge of the sky. A mild breeze brushed his cheeks, carrying the smell of fresh soil, sprouting plants, and wild mushrooms. All this mess will soon be over, Yakk thought. He would talk to his mother about his university application and his plans for the future. His throat itched, and he started to cough. Spring had arrived. Willow fuzz was everywhere in the air.

He went back into the hospital and waited outside the ward. A few minutes later, Hanson emerged.

“The prototype is finished,” Hanson said in accented English. He held out his hand to Yakk, palm up. “Try them. You can speak Kemorean, and I’ll speak German. It will be more comfortable for me.”

Yakk picked the tiny pair of spiral-grooved mini earbuds out of Hanson’s palm. He pushed them into his ears, the spiraling shapes digging into his ear canals perfectly, sealing and blocking out noise. He almost couldn’t feel they were there. He saw that Hanson was wearing a similar pair of earbuds. Tiny blue lights blinked at the visible ends of the earbuds from time to time.

“This is our latest and most advanced hardware. Can you understand me?”

Yakk nodded. Hanson’s words had been translated and then delivered into his ears by a female voice in Kemorean. He didn’t recognize the voice, but something beneath the words rang familiar.

“The language sheath, modeled on the corpus provided by your mother, is applied to all Kemorean output. Any user who chooses Kemorean as their target language will hear translation results polished by her speech style.”

So that’s why the translation feels familiar, thought Yakk. Neither the voice nor the words belonged to his mother, but they both did belong to her in another sense. He had never expected the effect of the language sheath to be so . . . uncanny.

“Don’t worry. Her proposal has been approved and implemented. No problem with the job either. Usually, Babel requires a college degree, but we can make an exception for you. After all, your mother has done so much for us. You’ll be graduating from high school soon, right? Come to Babel right after. You can start as a salesperson. Your personal story of struggling with languages could serve as a good showcase to our customers.”

Babel? Job? What did Hanson mean? Did Mother just decide on a future for him without asking for his opinions at all? He didn’t want a job. He wanted to go to university.

“Go spend some time with her. She went through a lot to make the Kemorean sheath. Because of her, Babel’s performance in this country will be exceptional. You absolutely don’t need to worry anymore about your Kemorean!”

Yakk opened his mouth and wanted to argue, but nothing came out. He didn’t know whether to speak Kemorean or English to the man.

“You’re lucky to have such a loving mother.” Hanson patted him on the shoulder and left.

Yakk returned to the ward. Mother was half-reclining on the bed, reading a small three-fold leaflet. On the cover was a pair of spiral-grooved earbuds. Blue lights flashed from inside her ears.

“Did you thank Mr. Hanson? He’s been so helpful to us. When you join Babel later, you have to work hard.”

Yakk’s lips moved, releasing a few mumbled syllables. English and Kemorean warred in his head, and as he strove to distinguish and hypercorrect, the syntax became mangled. Words hung suspended in air, light and carefree as the willow fuzzes, reluctant to come back down to earth.

“What did you say?” Mother tapped her earbuds.

Yakk repeated himself, clumsy word by clumsy word, in Kemorean: “Babel, I do not go. Want to go university.”

“Yakk, I know that you have ambition, but you need to be realistic. Your grades aren’t good enough for university. The job at Babel is a rare opportunity. They’re always named in surveys as one of the best employers in the world. Do you know how many people want a job at Babel? Even if you could get a university to accept you, can you find a job better than this one at Babel after you graduate? I’ve made the arrangements for you. Do as I say and you’ll be all right.”

“International school, send me back,” he continued in Kemorean. “I can go to foreign university.”

“That’s impossible. You’ve been educated in the Kemorean public school system for years, and you’re not prepared for foreign university applications. You can’t even speak your mother tongue well. The idea of using English—”

“Mother tongue yours, not mine,” Yakk said. “I, you do not know.”

“Yakk, I know you and your speaking habits too well. I’m your mother. Even if the sheath is fixing all your mistakes, I can still imagine what your original words sound like.”

Yakk frowned. “My original words. You hear not?”

“Yes, Babel has realized my dream. You don’t need to worry about speaking poor Kemorean anymore. Every sentence you speak now will be polished by the language sheath before being transmitted to my ears. The language sheath doesn’t just have to be used for translations! It can be used for a better way of speaking. You can hear my original words only because the sheath uses my language style. Aren’t I a genius? The sheath can be applied to your words, your foreign friends’ words, artificial intelligence’s words, everywhere that needs Standard Model Kemorean output. I proposed the idea to Hanson, but I didn’t expect that they could have made it reality so fast.”

“Everyone’s words, you tamper?” Yakk couldn’t believe it. From now on, everyone would hear only a single unified Kemorean language style. They would lose individual quirks and personality. After the filtration of Babel’s language sheath, all Kemorean speech would be standardized into Mother’s language.

“Not tampering, but embellishment. What I provided is only a sheath. The content of the speech won’t change. The sheath only makes the words more elegant and pleasant to the ear.”

Yakk could hear a droning against his eardrums. He switched to English. “Then what’s the difference between my speaking Kemorean, English, or any other language to you? All you hear is your own language. You won’t hear my voice at all.”

“Of course I can hear your voice. Hanson told me that Babel’s Voice Imitation Project will soon be finished. Data from just a few sentences will be enough for the algorithm to synthesize the waveform of the speaker’s voice. Everyone will be speaking perfect Standard Model Kemorean in their own voice. Imagine that wonderful future! It will start a storm, a revolution.”

Yakk felt as if a bucket of icy water had been thrown in his face. Thinking about the monotonous world after his mother’s “revolution” terrified him. With the new language sheath and the voice synthesizer, everyone in Kemor would be speaking in Mother’s language, the graceful and noble language of sterile perfection.

I never understood her, he realized. He had thought that his mother just didn’t want to hear improper Kemorean, but the truth was, she didn’t want to hear any voice other than her own. She had tried, without success, to mold Yakk according to her ideal, to make him speak her style of “authentic” Kemorean. Her disappointment in him was rooted in her own sense of failure. In Mother’s eyes, Yakk wasn’t only bad at speaking Kemorean, but without any redeeming qualities.

Having given up on him, she had turned all her efforts to the creation of the language sheath, her pride and joy, her second child, whom she could mold and shape completely in accordance with her ideals and substitute for her son. And even so, she still wouldn’t give up on interfering with his life, still hoped to control his path, decide his future. She had deprived him of his voice, deprived everyone else of their voice, but she remained completely oblivious to what she had done.

“What’s wrong, Yakk? Hanson said that the corpus he collected from me was enough. I finished the job sooner than planned. Let’s celebrate once I’m discharged! See, I’ve saved Kemorean. You don’t need to speak English, and you no longer need to feel inferior for your improper Kemorean. Aren’t you happy?”

Yakk clenched his jaw. He had to speak, let it all out. No one had told Mother that Father had chosen to escape for the refuge of other women, and Yakk had chosen to endure. But he had to speak out now, to tell her how he felt in his own language. He had to speak in English, the language in which he felt at home, not the “mother tongue” that only left him feeling inferior, insecure, and tongue-tied. She would hear only the perfect Kemorean improved by the language sheath, as she wished, but the content would be the reality that he wanted to tell her. Maybe after he’s done talking he should take out the Babel earbuds, throw them onto the ground, and crush them with his heels, so that he could force her to listen to him speak in English. But first he had to make sure that she would listen, and that she could really hear it.

He opened his mouth and began to speak, in his real mother tongue.

Author and Translators’ Note:
We’d like to deliver a special thank you to Ken Liu, whose amazing comments and advice have greatly refined and enriched the story.

Originally published in Chinese in Harvest: A Literary Bimonthly, 4th issue of 2019.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

Regina Kanyu Wang is a bilingual writer from Shanghai who writes both in Chinese and English, graduate of Fudan University’s MFA program, member of Shanghai Writers’ Association, Shanghai Popular Science Writers’ Association, World Chinese Science Fiction Association, and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association of America. She has won SF Comet international short story competition and multiple Xingyun Awards for Global Chinese SF. Her stories can be found in Harvest, Mengya, Shanghai Literature, Hong Kong Literature, West Late, Flower City, Fiction World, Science Fiction World, Southern People Weekly, Galaxy’s Edge, and various anthologies in China, UK, US and Canada. Her stories have also been translated into English, Spanish, German, Italian, and Finnish. Her work has been collected in Of Cloud and Mist 2.2 and second volume of stories, The Seafood Restaurant, is forthcoming.

The Translator, at Low Tide

Vajra Chandrasekera

The sea lapping at my back and my face to the fire, I translate: poems, mostly. Now that entire languages and cultures are on the verge of being lost forever to the sea, the storms, the smog, the plagues, and the fires, now the art of the dead and the almost-dead have become quaintly valuable to a small but enthusiastic readership of the living. The wealthy and living, I should say, but are those not the same thing, now? I am alive; I breathe in and am overcome with riches. It itches, deep in my lungs.

The big publishing houses (we used to count their decreasing number; I don’t know where the dice finally rolled to a stop) in distant walled New York pay an entire pittance for authentic translations from the lost world, which translates into a moderate income for me because of the horrific exchange rate. It keeps me fed and sheltered—long may the fashion in third world ruin-poetry last—and I pray now only for the goodwill of distant tastemakers. The world’s decay is now the province of poets, not the useless powers and principalities of the world. There was a war on loss and we lost. It is now the age of mourning. I only wish it paid better.

The air is bad again today, scraping like grains in my lungs. I am naked to the hostile air, unfiltered, unconditioned, my window open to the smog and, on the days with fires, the smoke. Fifty years ago, this was a luxury apartment building with a view of the ocean: I remember that I envied it. Now the lobby floods at high tide; I try to think of living here as a victory, of some description. The views are supposedly good on the ocean-facing west face, if you’re high enough. I make do with a first-floor view on the east face, and my window faces nothing more prepossessing than a grimy empty lot that was once a children’s playground. The battered city stretches beyond it, half-inhabited, the other half gone to wrack if not yet quite ruin. The sepia sky above makes my throat itch.

The stairs are always damp from feet, because the lobby is always wet, even at low tide. The rugs stink of mildew. I slosh through it at least once a week for Sunday market, but sometimes also for no good reason.

I buy supplies for the week every Sunday, but the other reason I go to the market is to see if Eesha has any new books or payments for me. Eesha is a hawala broker; she’s the one who originally helped me figure out how to get the money for my translations now that bank fees have become unmanageable. She also has the only library within easy walking distance: she has an informal network of citycombers who bring her any books they find. I don’t see her wife often because she’s part of a collective that grows manioc and sweet potato, so she’s always busy. The two of them do quite well for themselves. I suppose they are the richest people I know, now. We are not exactly friends. I envy them, unfairly.

Eesha is a little younger than me, I think, but her hair is still gray. Her library is just one medium-sized room with a few thousand books piled up. I browse through them every week and have grown familiar with these stacks that don’t change. They are like acquaintances I nod to. I’m comfortable with them. They make no demands on me that I can’t answer, but more than that, I know there is no crisis that could make them turn on me, cut me out, leave me to die. You can’t say that about people anymore. There is always some threshold, some hard limit to friendship, to solidarity, even to kinship.

The tenants’ association sends each other angry notes about the state of the lobby, and of the building generally—I find complaints piled up whenever I can afford to check my email. But we all pay different landlords and we have no collective bargaining power. By rights we should have just fixed it ourselves, at least stripped out all the rugs so that it didn’t smell so bad. But we have never been a good we; we are merely eyes through our peepholes, eyes against the world.

Daytime heat is intense: it’s bad in my apartment but much worse outside, so I stay indoors and keep my window open to cool down. When the building’s electricity is working, the sluggish ceiling fan is a blessed relief. The unseen sea’s briny, rotten smell is pervasive, accompanied by the angry hiss of waves reaching deeper, deeper inland with every year, as if flailing and clutching for a grip at the throat of the city. Eventually its fingers will close and the city will die.

So far the city has mostly been stripped of its middle generation, the adults in their prime who left looking for someplace to go. So many gone, promising to bring their children and their ageing parents to them when they could—most of them in camps somewhere on the continent now, working for nothing. Or lost. There are no havens: the poets knew that.

Being left behind in a dying city is no better, but the city’s death will come après moi, I comfort myself. I have already lived longer than I ever expected, and the city has decades of decay yet to go. Cities don’t die so easily. We still have municipal government, to some degree. We still have utilities, most of the time. We have markets every Sunday and the food is mostly fresh, if low on options. I think perhaps that a younger person, or even just a more optimistic person, someone like Eesha, might even say, if pressed to say it, that the city still thrives. Much of this country is doing worse. Much of the world is doing worse.

Perhaps even this building will outlive me, though also perhaps not—it isn’t as well-maintained as some others. The electricity is intermittent because the solar is iffy, and the elevators usually don’t work, which offends our uppermost because they pay more for the privilege of distance from the ruined world but also desire more ease in the ability to access it at will. I loathe and envy those people, though this is also unfair of me: they are barely better off than I am.

It blurs together in my head, I admit: the richness of raw life, unclean and unfiltered, which I thank even as I choke on it, and the petty wealth of lesser privileges like youth, ability, or simply being born in a city wealthier than this one, these are not the same thing as true wealth, the world’s bane. I know, when I remember to know, that the truly wealthy are not to be found in cities half-eaten by the sea, in these old worlds slowly boiling and decomposing. Somewhere far to the north, I imagine—farther north than the wars and the camps and the horrors, farther north than the mountains and the miserable steppes, as north as north can be—in once-frozen and now summery tundra, the wealthy must still live in luxury in secure climate-controlled habitats. They disappeared from the world we can afford to know. Legend has it you can still see their social media feeds if you pay for the highest premium Internet, but who can find out?

Oh, I lied when I said I only pray for the goodwill of tastemakers: I also pray for the failure of the arcologies of the elite. I pray for rust and decay, for infections and leaks. I pray that the rich die badly, wherever they are.

Speaking of prayer: I also lied when I said I sometimes go outside for no reason. Apart from food and books, the other reason I leave the house is because I feel the need to pray—to actually pray, to dredge old words up in a language that was dead thousands of years before the world died—so I visit the temple.

It is something of an embarrassment for someone who has lived a long irreligious life, but I remember that it is also traditional to get religion in one’s old age. It is supposed to be sowing season for people of my age. We are meant to start thinking about the next life, doing good works and nurturing virtue for the reaping. Nothing terrifies me so much as the thought of the relentless wheel, being born again and again into this world as it decays further and further. The thought of—just the emancipatory possibility of—being blown out like a candle flame is relief.

It takes me almost two hours to walk to the temple, which is exhausting enough that I have to rest for twice as long before I can walk back, so it takes all day and leaves me aching, winded, and full of self-loathing for my capitulations to once-despised pieties.

The temple is also a ruin, of course. No monks have lived there in decades. Nobody has piously swept the sand free of fallen leaves, which are a thick decomposing layer. The sacred fig is still alive, though sickly. The statues are weathered. The cetiya is half-shattered, perhaps in a storm, but I take care to sit at the one angle at which the dome still looks unbroken. I am no longer limber enough to sit cross-legged, so I just sit on what was once probably part of a low wall demarcating different areas of the temple and is now just a serendipitous raised surface, anonymous like a rock.

I say the words in the dead language, which I do not speak outside of the prayers I know from memory. I do this just for the sound of it. I have memories of monks in song from when I was a child, from the village temple my parents used to take me to, the bass rumble of bull monks in fine fettle, the winding, gasping quaver of the decaying senior. It was a different world even by the standards of the world that we now look back on: a twice-lost world. Even alone, I don’t sing the prayers: I only mumble them. I am embarrassed to break the silence, unsure of my voice, uncertain of the tune. I’m not sure if I remember those dead words right. I know what the prayers mean, more or less, but the words themselves are alien. Some are etymologically familiar, or at least suggestive, but most of them are just dead, even to me.

I frequently pause in my work to look out my window. It is the only thing large and generous about my apartment, and I have placed my desk and bookshelves to take full advantage, hoping for breezes against the cloying heat and for sun to charge my computer. The ruined playground below is not a restful sight even when there is no fire burning in it, but it has an eerie charm: the rust-mangled ruins of a fallen swing; a gutter that was probably once a slide; and a seesaw still standing, though long since rusted into place.

After its abandonment, and before the sea drew so near, the playground must have once been overgrown. Empty land here has always been quick to return to the wild, as if eager to shrug off the marks of human habitation. This island’s longest-serving capital, the heart of a thousand-year kingdom, was lost so thoroughly to jungle that it was almost another thousand years before the British dug it out again, as an amuse-bouche for empire. These are spans of time that comfort me; they remind me that history is long and the unnatural compression of these past decades, the suddenness of the unraveling, will be compensated for. Perhaps someday there will be future cruel empires that dig up our bones and condescend to them. Is this not hope?

The playground is not overgrown anymore. There are still scraps of invasive vegetation that betray that greener past, but the salt wind has now scoured away anything weaker than weeds and rendered it twice abandoned. Now it looks not wild, but ruined, as is proper. The earth around the remnant structures is churned mud. And of course, there is the huge mound of ash and remains, turned to mulch in the damp. High tide doesn’t quite drown the playground yet, but the soil is often soggy. The children don’t bother trying to light fires then, for which I am thankful because it allows me to work in peace.

Yesterday was very productive. In recent months I have been translating the works of K___, a remarkable early twenty-first century poet notable for a sly earthiness that sells quite well, by the standards of poetry. I have to embellish the translation just a little to accentuate the peculiar working-class authenticity its faraway readers crave—that tenuously romantic sensibility of the pitiable oriental world lost to climate change, the past that is further away for being so near and yet so strange, so alike and yet unlike. I wonder what K___ would have made of my translations; a personal phone number is published in their first collection, inviting an immediacy of contact with their readership that seems frighteningly intimate. Did people ever call that number after reading a poem? Did they laugh, did they weep? I sometimes consider calling it myself, on the days when the battered landline in my apartment gifts me with a dial tone. I’ve got as far as dialing the first few digits, but then I stop myself. I don’t want to know how K___ died; I don’t want to know who was left behind. I am not, thankfully, a biographer.

The work of translation is slow but pleasurable. I have forgotten so many words and must refer often to my dictionaries, which don’t always know either. Here I miss the Internet; I haven’t been able to afford more than email in many years. Instead, I must sit and stare out my window and try to dig the right words out of my memory. There are so many different words for losing, loss, lossiness, loserdom, නැතිවීම, හානිය, පරාජය, පාඩුව. If I am patient and clear of mind, if the sea has made the playground too soggy for the children, the words eventually unfold for me, slow and hazy.

On dry days like today, though, with the sun beating down at low tide so the sea is as far away as it ever gets, the children come to the playground below, and I work even more slowly, hunched with dread, attention diverted.

The playground fires were very few and far between at first. I don’t remember when they started. I am sure that the children now are not the same as the children back then: they always look the same age, perhaps late preteens or early teens, and I remember that children grow fast at that age so they could not possibly be the same. A poetic conceit: perhaps the playground has become a bubble cut free from the further ravages of time. But no, that doesn’t work because the playground surely already represents nothing more or less than the ravages of time.

More likely, the fires have become one of those childish traditions passed down between cohorts as if they were generations. Children teaching children. This is one of the frightening things about children: they have always had their own culture, independent of ours. Once, at least, they were an occupied culture, subjugated to adult rule and forced to acknowledge our superiority and our right to describe, and thereby define, the world. But now we have lost that power, and the children are making their own.

Perhaps I am romanticizing. I never had children of my own: the thought filled me with repugnance. I must find some more sober poetry to translate next. Something high-minded and abstract and relatively free from these longings and despairs—though that will not sell so easily. This work is a little like being a hatter in the days of mercury: long-term exposure sinks into the skin, pools in the organs. Poetry causes delirium and weakness. It burdens the heart.

I got caught by the children again yesterday. It was a Sunday; I was returning from market with supplies, but I unwisely took the shorter path home because I was worried about the tide. Instead, I must have been spotted by a scout, because I was barely within sight of home before I heard the pitter-patter of little feet behind me. I tried to run, the bag of vegetables heavy and ungainly in my hand—a plastic bag, cutting into my palm from the weight as if in rebuke for that old sin—but of course they outran me. The first blow hit me in the back of the thigh and I fell. I curled up into the fetal position while they kicked at me. I let the bag go at once—they just want food, sometimes. Their feet are mostly bare and they can’t kick with their toes, so it’s not as bad as it sounds. Some of them are so little their kicks are gentle despite themselves, their legs unable to generate much force. I would say that they howled and ululated like wild beasts, but in truth they just laughed. It’s a game to them, and by that I don’t mean that they are wrong. They live in a ludic age; life and death and violence are their games of choice and necessity.

They did not bind me or drag me away, for which I was so grateful that, after they left, I found myself praying amidst the sobs. We don’t have a prayer of thanks, so I said the prayer of praise instead. It used to be said that the prayer of praise would ward against devils and hungry ghosts and pogroms; now I don’t expect it to do so much as save me from a kicking. I’m just glad to be alive; I am overcome with the riches of pain. They took my bag but I have a little food stashed away yet. This week I’ll just go a little hungry.

When the children first started to set fires in the playground, they began by burning innocuous things. Dry leaves and grass. Old newspapers. Books. Poetry.

One Monday, they broke down the door to Eesha’s library and took all her books for the fire. I didn’t know it was books burning at first, but the smoke I choked on that week felt different. I thought I could smell the poetry distinct from the textbooks and the novels and the books of religious instruction and the political literature. All of it is bitter, but the poetry burns to the uttermost depth of your lungs. When I saw Eesha again at the next Sunday market, her head was bandaged and the room of books was desolate of my old acquaintances, the nodding stacks. Ever practical, Eesha’s wife had already started storing coconuts in it.

For a while, the children experimented with burning each other. They would select one of their number through a counting chant, whose rough melody evoked old memories but that I couldn’t quite place. That chosen child would allow themselves to be bound and burned. If they screamed in the fire, that was lost to me. I rarely hear anything from up here other than the sea nowadays. Sometimes I dream of cicadas and wake up weeping. Perhaps weeping is not the right word. Seeping, perhaps. The tears seep from my eyes but my face is like dead wood.

Children always frightened me. Feral creatures, not quite human. I dimly remember being one, the hot animal intensity of it, the sharpness of my teeth. It doesn’t surprise me that they turned on each other.

I wasn’t fool enough to attract their attention by intervening, but eventually I saw someone try to stop a burning. From my window I could only tell that it was an adult. Passerby? Parent? Vigilante do-gooder who held to some lost-age moral code? I don’t know who he was, but he was the first adult that the children gave to the fire. He gave them a taste for burning, it seems, that their own had never quite done. To this day I don’t know if they are innocent of the difference in meaning.

I wonder, sometimes, what they say to each other in their teachings. If they have a discourse of the fire; oh, I wish I could know it and write it down in a language I can understand. What poetry it would make.

The fires have become more frequent. The children go hunting for sacrifices now, bringing back adults battered and bound. The fires become bigger. I used to only get a distant whiff of smoke. Now smoke seeps chokingly through my window, and no doubt every other low window on the building’s east face. Only the high and uppermost lumpenbourgeoisie are free of it. To them the children must be as ants, and the smoke not even a wisp at those heights, while it rampages like a great gray serpent into my home, smothering me. More than smoke, I feel the heat of the fire itself on my face. The air shimmers with it and the day, already stifling, becomes hell. My throat itches and my eyes burn. I try not to cough too loudly, but I also don’t dare venture out of my apartment while the children are about. It’s low tide and their scouts range widely. I don’t even raise my head too high—they might see it through the window.

I know the children will soon graduate to searching door to door. The game has a logical progression through levels that they are still discovering but are obvious to me. They will learn culmination; they will want to be thorough. Eventually they will come to my door.

I won’t run from them, I have decided. I probably could not run from them anyway. I couldn’t do it before and now I am even more stiff and wretched from the beating; it takes me a long time to heal from such things. Anyway, I was never fleet. But it’s more than that. I won’t run because it seems right that they should come for the likes of me, or at least, it doesn’t seem so wrong. It wasn’t my generation that destroyed the world—it was like that when we got here, honest—but we didn’t fix it either, did we? We were the last to have that chance, just one chance in that long-gone day, the last long day that was oh so short in the end. But we balked at the uprising that was demanded of us. We shied away from the violence that we were being asked for. We were meant to break down the gates and roll heads and throw our bodies in their billions upon the gears and wheels of the machine until it choked on our high tide. But we didn’t, and that day grew later and later until it was too late, or so asymptotically close to too late that despair broke the hearts we should have broken on barricades and bullets. Perhaps that day never ended and we are still in its endless evening, always almost or just a little too late. We have a thousand words for losing, crash, crisis, debt, ruin: I am trying to remember the one that means the precise feeling of a seesaw rusted still and forever imbalanced, as seen through the black smoke billowing from the burning of a guilty human body.

About the Author

Vajra Chandrasekera is from Colombo, Sri Lanka. His work has appeared in Analog, Nightmare, and Liminal Stories, among others. He blogs at vajra.me and is @_vajra on Twitter.

Ray Guns, Robots, and Spaceships, Oh My!
The Birth of Science Fiction Toys

Mark Cole

When we think of archaeological digs, most of us picture Indiana Jones in search of ancient civilizations, but just as often, they are conducted on far more modern sites to learn how people lived in the recent past.

Not long ago they conducted a dig in the Shenandoah National Park. Back in the twenties and thirties, the federal government evicted over five thousand families to create the park. Despite the public perception that they were “hillbillies,” living in utter destitution and almost completely cut off from the modern world, on the researchers’ first day’s survey of Corbin Hollow they were shocked to discover that thy had all sorts of modern products—hair tonic, cologne, automobiles, Coca Cola, hot sauce, a Maxfield Parrish calendar, and most surprising of all . . .

A toy ray gun.

You can blame Buck Rogers.

But then Buck was the one who dragged science fiction out of pulpwood obscurity and thrust it into the bright light of the American public. His story, about a modern-day man who woke up in the twenty-fifth century, ran daily in countless newspapers, and it wasn’t long before it spun off into radio and the movies. It was inevitable that someone would try to cash in on it.

These days we take them for granted. You can walk into any Walmart and find dozens of science fiction toys—some of them even made for children.

But it all got its start with the legendary Daisy XZ-31 Rocket Pistol.

In 1934, Daisy realized that the pistols, helmets, and holsters in the legendary comic strip were too complicated to be reproduced easily. So they convinced Lt. Dick Calkins and Phil Nowlan to completely redesign them, with the help of some of Daisy’s engineers, so they could create exact toy replicas.

When cocked, it made a loud popping sound (Daisy would later turn the basic design into a popgun and dart gun) and created sparks visible through the “electronic compression view plate.”

After a slow start (many of the retailers who saw them at a toy show thought Buck was a cowboy star!) Macy’s Department Store in New York agreed to sell the Rocket Pistol in exchange for a two week exclusive contract.

It was a hit! Over two thousand people stood in line outside the first day.

As soon as their biggest rival, Gimbels, got their supply, they slashed the price and set off a price war so fierce that prices changed hourly and the forty-nine cent price ultimately dropped to two for nineteen cents, well below cost. Meanwhile, Daisy surreptitiously bought them back from both stores and resold them!

Ultimately, both toy departments were left in shambles, toy stores all over the country demanded the XZ-31 and Daisy couldn’t get enough steel or cardboard for the boxes to keep up with the demand.

Which didn’t stop them from releasing Buck Rogers helmets, holsters, and even a new ray gun—Wilma Deering’s XZ-35—in time for Christmas, 1935.

Other Buck Rogers pistols from Daisy followed: in 1935, the collector favorite XZ-38 Disintegrator; the XZ-44 Liquid Helium Water Pistol in 1936; and, after World War II, Daisy revamped the XZ-38 into the U-235 Atomic Pistol. Buck actually wore one of their toys in the 1939 serial.

Another major toy maker, Louis Marx, also made Buck Rogers toys in 1934, including a windup Rocket Police toy which could shoot across the floor, spraying sparks out of its engines. The next year, they would get into the ray gun game with a bulbous, brightly-painted pistol for Buck’s biggest competitor, Flash Gordon: the Signal Pistol. It had a loud siren and shot sparks. Flash would even use a signal pistol in the comics, although it didn’t look much like the toy. Later, they would add a slimmer, more elegant model known as the Radio Repeating Ray, although in the fifties it was relabeled the Arresting Ray Pistol.

There isn’t a lot of information available on the history of science fiction toys. No one paid much attention at the time and only now, thanks to collectors and antique dealers, is anyone trying to piece it together.

While there had been Buck Rogers premiums before the XZ-31, including two paper ray guns (one made snapping sounds when waved, the other was a rubber band gun), Daisy’s pistol launched the toy craze. Before long, there were dozens of ray guns on the market, as other companies tried to get in on the act in an incredible assortment of new designs and types: guns that shot sparks, popguns, dart guns, water pistols, cap guns, flashlight guns, and whatever else anyone could dream up.

Soon other toys came out as well: spaceships, costumes, playsets, and small lead figures like contemporary toy soldiers. Most of these were made of stamped metal, aluminum castings, Bakelite, or hard rubber, and frequently featured clockwork or friction motors. Typically, the toys of this era featured bright colors, lithographed artwork (including lots of printed rivets), and mechanical gimmicks of one sort or another.

Sadly, it all came to an end with the second world war, when wartime shortages made manufacturing toys almost impossible. Daisy switched to making wooden popguns, and many other manufacturers started using zinc which, while not as strong as aluminum, wasn’t needed for the war effort.

But when the war was finally over, a new toy arose, one that sold as well as the toy ray guns—if not better—a science fiction toy that is even more iconic:

The toy robot.

The first toy robot came about because of our occupation of Japan.

The image of the mechanical man was firmly in the public mind long before that—one need only look at Westinghouse’s Electro and his pet Sparko at the 1939 World’s Fair, or at serials like The Phantom Empire or The Mysterious Dr. Satan. The first toy robots kept to the basic pattern set by their more visible predecessors as they were stamped out of tin and had to be made from simple shapes.

Part of General MacArthur’s mission was rebuilding Japan’s industries, and he decided that they should focus on the types of labor-intensive—but not very profitable—manufacturing of small items that American industry no longer wanted to do, using whatever materials were available in postwar Japan.

Which, naturally, included toy production—and what is believed to be the first toy robot ever—the bright yellow Robot Lilliput.

It was a boxy, clockwork-powered thing made from thin sheet metal. For a long time, toy collectors believed it had first been made in the thirties, although it is now fairly certain that it was from the mid-forties. The second toy robot, Atomic Robot Man, followed in 1949, packed in a box showing a mushroom cloud rising behind a looming robot. A few of these were actually handed out as souvenirs of the New York Science Fiction Convention in 1950, and may even have been given away to promote Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot.

While the Japanese robots did come to the US thanks to American distributors (who sometimes marketed them as their own products), it wasn’t these first few tin men from Japan that made the biggest impact. It was an American-made toy that launched the robot revolution in 1954, a toy that was borne of a new manufacturing method: injection molded plastic.

He was called Robert the Robot. Not only did he speak when you turned a crank on his back, but he could move as well, thanks to a remote control with a crank that powered him and a trigger that controlled his rotation. His eyes even lit up, although they relied on battery power.

He was designed for the children’s film, Tobor the Great, but didn’t actually appear in it. However, even though no one remembers him today, he was so popular at the time that he appeared on T-shirts, flashlights, and other merchandise. Two songs were written about him and he made an appearance in There’s Always Tomorrow, a Douglas Sirk melodrama starring Fred MacMurray.

Robert was forgotten quickly, but other American robots followed. One of the most interesting (and expensive, at eleven dollars and ninety-five cents in 1956 dollars) was the Zimmerman Z-Man, a red robot driving a black plastic car. It was one of the first programmable toys: while the selector on its underside could switch between driving in circles or a figure eight, it had a series of mechanical switches hidden under the robot’s helmet that could program new patterns.

Big Max came with a battery-powered conveyor belt and an electromagnet at the end of its arm. It swiveled around, picked up metal slugs, and dropped them on the belt.

The battery powered Marx Electric robot was much-copied in Japan, and was even sold with his “son,” a second smaller robot.

Marvelous Mike just drove a battery-powered tractor.

The Japanese toys were seen as cheap and second-rate (although they now command incredible prices from collectors) and were often made from recycled materials (some of them actually have labels for canned food printed on the inside as they were made from rejected tin from canning plants!) or assembled as piecework in workers’ homes. But they were also the first to introduce battery-powered motors.

It was another robot, though, that transformed the market and inspired vast floods of toy robots of the fifties and beyond, one that wasn’t from the world of toys or Japan but from Hollywood: Robby the Robot.

Robby was the real star of the 1956 film Forbidden Planet and perhaps the most iconic robot ever created. He was immediately copied in both tin and plastic, with windup or battery power, not only by toy makers in Japan but in the US as well. There were perhaps as many as two hundred different versions of Robby sold at one point or another.

None of them, of course, were officially licensed.

Not that it was that hard to tell, despite whatever minor variations the creators added to them, which robot they were really supposed to be. But then, Robby was a truly classic design: nicely proportioned, with elegant shapes and a lot of interesting innovations like the glass dome over his head that allowed you to see his inner workings. One of the most loved of these, Nomura’s Robby Space Patrol toy (one of the few depicting Robby in the wheeled vehicle he uses in the film), was so faithful to the original that MGM enjoined them to stop its production.

Fortunately for Nomura it didn’t sell enough to justify production.

Toy rocket ships of all descriptions were quite common, although it is hard to find much about them as they haven’t commanded as much interest among collectors. In the thirties a lot of them were vaguely V-2 shaped, with fins and wings and lots of pipes and other odd components (usually lithographed on). Others chose a more airplane-like design, and one suspects that there may have been a bit of an overlap, with airplane toys redecorated and sold as space toys.

By the fifties, lots of flying saucers showed up, some based on existing spinning top tin toys, others original designs in all shapes and sizes. Later, after the launch of Sputnik, toy rockets started resembling real space vehicles, although, like one classic Japanese toy Mercury capsule painted a bright red, they weren’t picky about getting the details right.

These sorts of toys often featured motors, flashing lights, or a wild variety of other gimmicks (like the 1960s Jupiter Jyro flying saucer, which did all sorts of tricks thanks to a battery-powered gyroscope). That seems to have been typical of most toys back then, which had lots of mechanical components worked by hand cranks, levers, or other mechanisms, like the large and very solid diecast missile truck we somehow acquired during my childhood with its complex, hand cranked lifts and gantries on the side of the truck and a missile with a rubber nose cap that shot off. Or a later find, a series of plastic space rovers and a flying saucer, which had no motors but were driven by the battery-powered motor hidden in the astronaut’s backpack. He could be plugged into their driver’s seat socket. There was also a motorized robot that fit the same vehicles.

Or consider Louis Marx’s classic lithographed fort and command post sets, which featured metal walls which, depending on what they were supposed to be, might feature art identifying them as log stockades, or old-time Western towns, or a military base, and came with assorted vehicles and figures. One of the variations (another very old toy we were given) was decorated as a Space Patrol Rocket Port and came with astronauts, robots, aliens, and lots of rockets.

Buck Rogers continued to produce new products during the fifties, including two plastic flashlight guns by Honer, the Sonic Ray and the Super Sonic Ray. While it’s said Flash Gordon had few spin-off toys beyond a costume set and a few other odds and ends until the seventies, there was a Flash Gordon version of that Buck Rogers Rocket Police Car. However, Marx (as was common at the time) frequently reused their toys, and other versions existed, including the super-rare, UK only, Rex Mars Rocket Fighter.

As science fiction franchises multiplied in the fifties, new toys appeared: Captain Video offered a wide range of spin-off products and a flood of on-air premiums: secret code guns, flying saucer rings, decoder badges, photoprinting rings, and Viking rockets complete with launchers (Dave Barry once claimed his Captain Video Rocket Ring “seemed to have a higher production value than the actual TV show.”). Most famous of all was the Captain Video Space Helmet, which Art Carney wore on an episode of The Honeymooners. The most impressive, though, was the multilevel Superior Space Port playset, which came complete with atomic cannons, landing strips, radar dishes, a windup siren, and a flying saucer launcher that shot plastic disks.

Fans of Space Patrol, however, had far more merchandise to choose from than any other spaceman show, including such goodies as a periscope, binoculars, walkie talkies, a variety of ray guns, a Ray-O-Vac Flashlight Rocket, and what is now perhaps the rarest plastic ray gun and a Holy Grail for collectors, the Autosonic Rifle. However, that official rocket port also appeared with minor differences as Tom Corbett, Rex Mars, and Captain Space playsets, for a total of thirteen variants!

Japanese toy makers don’t seem to have missed any opportunities to cash in. They turned out lots of lovely space toys labeled “space patrol” well into the sixties and seventies with no official connection to the series, including a planetary rover, an assortment of cars (including a VW convertible) and even a plastic “Apollo Space Patrol” flying saucer!

For Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, Louis Marx created one of the most beautiful ray guns, the Atomic Rifle, as well as a windup sparking rifle and a redecorated version of the Flash Gordon Arresting Ray. They also sold a plaster casting set featuring rubber molds for Tom Corbett figures and other items. Perhaps this might not seem so strange when you remember that such kits used to be a fairly common toy.

Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, British fans of the Dan Dare comics could buy an impressive assortment of ray guns, a radio set (which was just a plastic version of the classic “tin cans on a string” phone), and even the Earth Mars Venus Express, sort of an interplanetary bus.

Today, some of the most prized of these toys will sell at auction for as much as fifty thousand dollars! Which is even more impressive when you remember that most of them originally cost less than five. There is also a surprising aftermarket for replacement parts, particularly the more fragile and visible parts, like glass domes, or the detachable helmets for the spacemen in the old Louis Marx sets.

It would be easy to ignore the role these toys played in the growth of science fiction: they may have been cheap, simple, and childish, but they sparked the imagination of countless young children. The vast hordes of children who loved Captain Video may not have been as sophisticated or scientifically literate as the cult following that grew up around Star Trek (although it is interesting to note that, after 1952, the once absurd series improved dramatically as some of the top science fiction writers of the day, including Damon Knight, James Blish, Jack Vance, and Arthur C. Clarke, took over the writing chores!) but you have to wonder how many of the earlier Captain fans Kirk inherited. Not to mention that there are a number of interesting similarities between the two shows.

But even if we might argue about the connections between science fiction and these often weird and colorful toys (sold with artwork suspiciously reminiscent of old SF pulp covers and comic strips, or Chesley Bonestell’s space art), there is one thing we can say about them:

They were a lot of fun.

Perhaps even more fun than most toys being made today.

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.

Flying Ponies:
A Conversation with Lois McMaster Bujold

Arley Sorg

Lois McMaster Bujold has won the Hugo Award for Best Novel a record-tying four times: The Vor Game in 1991; Barrayar in 1992, which also won a Locus Award; Mirror Dance in 1995, which, again, also won a Locus Award; and Paladin of Souls in 2004, which also won a Nebula Award and a Locus Award.

As notable as this is, making history is just one of many accolades Bujold has accrued over a decades-long career.

Bujold started reading at a young age and dabbled in writing as early as junior high. Years later, seeing her friend Lillian Stewart Carl sell work, Bujold decided to make a serious effort of it. She brought her array of interests into her fiction: biology, ecology, and more. Her career as a novelist launched in 1986 with Baen Books publications Shards of Honor, The Warrior’s Apprentice, and Ethan of Athos. Her fourth novel, Falling Free, was originally serialized in four parts in Analog beginning December 1987, then republished by Baen in 1988. Falling Free won Bujold her first SFWA Nebula Award in 1989, by which time she’d already received a handful of other nods and nominations, including appearing on the Hugo ballot and Locus lists.

Bujold has received sixteen Hugo nominations and seven wins, including receiving awards for Best Series for The Vorkosigan Saga in 2017 and World of the Five Gods in 2018; eight Nebula awards nominations and three wins; a slew of other wins and nominations, including foreign awards such as the Seiun; and most recently, Bujold was named the thirty-sixth Damon Knight Grand Master “for her contributions to the literature of Science Fiction and Fantasy” by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

Your bio at The Bujold Nexus says you started reading adult science fiction at age nine. What were a few of the most memorable or most important genre works from your childhood or teens, and why?

You do realize that was fifty to sixty years ago . . . ?

That said, I probably remember the books I read better than I remember most of my schoolteachers. Sadly for them.

In the sixties, which is the decade we’re mostly talking about here, I was mainly getting my SF from Analog and the school and public libraries. So, among the writers back then whose tales I recall fondly are Eric Frank Russell, Poul Anderson, Randall Garrett, Zenna Henderson, Anne McCaffrey, James H. Schmitz, and Lloyd Biggle Jr., Roger Zelazny and the excellent Cordwainer Smith both came along a bit later, after I’d connected to local SF fandom in my early college years. If you want to extend the question to fantasy, Fritz Leiber, L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, and of course Tolkien.

Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov were unavoidable in that era, especially Heinlein’s juveniles, which I read when I was actually the intended target age. Clarke was possibly more alien to me when I was a kid for being British than for being SFnal. Asimov’s robot stories were my favorites of his.

Are you still a voracious reader? What do you look for in stories or books, what is important for you in the things you enjoy reading? And what are some of your recent favorites?

My reading has become annoyingly limited by aging-eye issues—macular pucker, mainly, which one can look up on Wikipedia. It’s an untreatable distortion of the retina that, effectively, turns lines of print into CAPTCHAs. To work around it, I painted the left lens of an old pair of reading glasses with black nail polish to mask my inferior left eye. (I painted the front side dark blue with silver sparkles, like a starry night sky.) I also use large print on my computer and tablet. So work-related reading gets first dibs on my endurance.

I’ve been watching more TV to force an eye break; nonfiction vids that fill in for some of the nonfiction research reading (Great Courses live up to their name) and a great deal of anime and animation, which I’ve always liked, but now have vastly increased access to. This in turn has led back to reading more manga, also now far more accessible than it used to be, by preference e-manga on my tablet where it is big ’n bright. For whatever reason, I can read manga for a longer stretch than print or type, or maybe the works are just shorter, dunno. Anyway, the exploration has been fun. Japanese weird is nicely brain-bending.

I first encountered anime in the eighties, btw, in convention film rooms where some rare bootlegged copy was shown to the fans by an earnest live narrator standing up beside the screen and translating on the fly. So, it’s not a recent interest.

I’m not reading for my moral improvement anymore; I figure it’s all downhill from here. In life’s literary banquet, I’ve moved on to the dessert course. So, for my leisure reading I avoid dystopias, horror, crime, true crime, and other downer content. (I acquired my lifetime fill of giant fighting robots early in my anime explorations, but that’s another medium.) A large enough audience seems to eat that stuff up with a spoon, I doubt my opting out is going to affect its market share.

I like random things in all sorts of genres, but the one thing I most seem to require is not so much overt humor, but that the author possesses a sense of humor or at least kindness in there somewhere, on some level. For me these days reading feels less like entering another world than like entering another writer’s head. I want to be visiting in a congenial headspace, as it were.

Writers who work for me that I’ve discovered recently—that is, since the turn of the millennium—include Megan Whalen Turner, Ben Aaronovitch, and T. Kingfisher, among others. Caitlin Doughty was a pretty extraordinary recent find (Smoke Gets In Your Eyes: and Other Lessons from the Crematory, 2014) but that’s memoir, not genre fiction.

I’ve been leaving little reviews of some of my reading on my Goodreads site for a while, because they have a function that makes it easy. It’s interesting, looking back over several years of accumulation, how many things I read that I’ve forgotten. Books that make me remember them—ah, that is to say, in a good way—are the valued minority.

What are some of your favorite anime shows, and what do you like most about them?

For TV series, Mushi-shi; for feature films, the late Satoshi Kon’s Paprika.

Both are about realistic grown-ups, if not realistic situations, a refreshing change in a medium that tends to be largely aimed at middle school students. Mushi-shi is subtle, beautiful, brilliant, and hard to describe, but its big draw is its main character Ginko, a wandering medicine seller and naturalist who deals with supernatural problems generated by his mysterious subject of study, magical sub-life-forms dubbed mushi. Paprika has more of an ensemble cast of science types working together to solve the surreal problems generated by their hijacked medical device prototype, and, in a medium full of dire characterizations of females (to be fair, of males as well), one of the best heroines ever.

There follows a list too long to describe, even though I actually like only a tiny fraction of the works now out there. Viewer beware; some anime runs off the rails with filler episodes or false truncations when their parent manga goes on without them, and the viewer needs to switch over to the manga to try to figure out what the hell the story was actually supposed to be. In no particular order: Cells at Work! and its sequel Cells at Work! Code Black; Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle and its braided series xxxHolic; Pandora Hearts; Saiyuki (and sequels, but oh dear the filler episodes are bad, so adding the manga is advised); Natsume’s Book of Friends; Natsuyuki Rendezvous; Bleach in parts; The Morose Mononokean; Midnight Occult Civil Servants; The Case Files of Jeweler Richard; Blue Exorcist; Goblin Cat and its sequel series Mononoke; Sekai Ichi Hatsukoi and siblings; feature films Your Name; Wolf Children; Tokyo Godfathers; Spirited Away; and the many many rest left as an exercise for the student of cognitive torsion. (Brain-bending, aka WTF!Japan.)

In your 2012 Locus interview you said, “Characters almost always come first. Then the world assembles itself around them.” Who are some of your favorite or most interesting characters from your work, and why?

It would seem logical that the characters most of interest to me should be the ones I visited over and over, series protagonists. But that is not quite the case. Some characters who have thoroughly gripped me nonetheless had only one tale to tell, such as Cazaril or Ista, or even trailing Ingrey who gets such short shrift, from the Chalion/World of the Five Gods books. Their lives may go on, but their book-worthy spiritual journey is done, accomplished.

(I’ve recently decided to dub that a trio of books, rather than a trilogy, to try to redirect readers attempting to process them as one continuous tale and then being very confused. The Sharing Knife books would definitely be a trilogy in this latter sense, if there weren’t four of them, thus acquiring the awkward label “tetralogy”.)

Other characters, such as Miles or Penric, are protean enough to fit into more than one kind of story, in a more picaresque or free-form mode. Their spiritual journeys are ongoing, more easily broken up into smaller steps, stumbles, and side trips.

Your first publication was short story “Barter” to Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine, in the March-April 1985 issue, and you’ve landed on awards ballots with your short fiction. Are you as comfortable writing at short story length and novel length? Do you find one or the other more challenging? And does your writing process change in any significant way depending on the length or format?

I actually haven’t written a short story since I was trying to break in during the mid-eighties. I’m way out of practice for the length. Short stories, I feel, work by delivering ideas, that quick intellectual hit. Novel-length works can be more character-centered-and-driven. Novellas are a different beast than short stories, closer to novels I think, or at least I classify them so; long enough to explore characters as well as ideas, or at least ideas through characters. So, for me novellas are like novels on speed, rather than like padded short stories.

My writing process really doesn’t change between novels and novellas. I still piece my tale together scene-by-scene, and all the writing mechanics are identical. I just get to escape sooner.

You have a huge amount of work out. Did you ever hit a career slump or a writing slump, where you struggled to sell or produce work?

Once past the first three dire years spent breaking in, selling has not been an issue for me, at least not at the slow speed and long lengths that I write. Writing slumps and snags have occurred for a variety of reasons, some quite standard life-event-related: medical issues or surgeries, death, divorce, house moves, and so forth.

I was once blocked for nine weird months on what proved to be a process snag; I’d attempted to work on two novels at once, for two different publishers, and found I couldn’t move forward on either one. (Also impeded by menopause and an ill-considered attempt to just suffer through it like women are now supposed to—when I pried my estrogen back from the medical establishment, brain function improved.) I finally picked one novel, mentally shelved the other, and was able to write again.

Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, for all that it was not a long work, also suffered a long break in the middle—house move and spine surgery and sales doubts and internal-to-the narrative issues all piled atop each other, no wonder. But it came around in the end.

You were recently named SFWA Grand Master. In the official press release, SFWA president Mary Robinette Kowal said of you, “Importantly, she also serves as a role model for many writers, including me.” Looking at your career and your work, what are some of the most important things other writers (new, established, or both) can take away as lessons, examples, or advice?

I really have no idea. My experiences at breaking in (sounds like a crime caper!) to publishing are decades out of date for new writers now. Looking back, what I think I’ve always been writing, regardless of genre or length or marketing, have been Bujold books. So, I guess my most general advice would be, “Write your own stories, the ones that matter to you.” Which sounds pretty inevitable to me. I mean, it’s not as though I have another brain to write out of, just this 1949 model. I can’t trade it in on a new one, so I just have to keep patching, repairing, and repainting. Which makes me wonder if I can get it historical plates, but maybe that’s what the Grand Master honor is.

In 1986 Shards of Honor, The Warrior’s Apprentice, and Ethan of Athos came out. Over thirty years later you have new editions coming out, and you’re a SFWA Grand Master. What does it take to stay in the game, to sell books/stories, and still remain part of the genre conversation over such a span of time?

I would quip, “Desperation? Being otherwise unemployable? Running out of money?” except I’m rather comfortably semiretired but still can’t seem to stop generating stories, just more slowly. I’ve only partly joked that I suspect fiction writing is actually a dissociative disorder, and if only we were on the right meds, we’d all stop.

Which may not be a joke at all; I was on a medication last fall for back issues that flatlined my creativity for months. It gave me strong motivation to develop other coping methods for the back pain, which I did manage, and soon after I discontinued it my normal-for-Lois brain came back online, to my relief.

Staying in the game I take to mean staying published, which, again, is a task that’s changed a lot over the past three decades and is going to keep changing. It’s also something that’s not wholly under the control of the writer; it takes faithful editors, publishers, and agents who will support one’s work over a long haul, and I was very fortunate to have these. And, of course, e-publishing has been a game changer, one I’ve watched and been part of from before its beginnings to now.

Writers are buried in an avalanche of distracting advice on self-marketing, which I think mistakes our job. Our job is to write stories, and the best thing one can do for one’s sales is to write more stuff. They’ve just now removed the feature, but Amazon used to have a “sales ranking” graph that gave at least a broad picture of an author’s sales over time. Periodically releasing new works left a track on mine like a heartbeat monitor, pulse after pulse. Nothing else, no PR efforts, ever did that. Long stretches between new works, and the graph slowly and inexorably went down.

Do you feel like the SFF industry, market, or community has changed in any significant or important ways over those years? Are there any specific things you would like to see happen in the community or in the genre?

To answer the second question first, I am not in charge of this circus, and I am so glad. I will be over here writing Bujold stories, thanks. The rest of you can do whatever you want.

The changes over the course of my career have been many, partly market-driven (the vagaries of paperback distribution and the returns system, ferex) but mainly technology-driven—though paperbacks are a technology, too, so maybe that distinction is moot. The audiobooks market was remade by the arrival of audio downloads, making room for many more and more kinds of books—like mine, formerly too niche to be stocked on limited physical bookstore shelves. I have, of course, lived through and participated in the entire development of ebooks, from SFnal dream to early, clumsy efforts through the Kindle revolution. (Ben Bova’s 1990 satire Cyberbooks was so prescient about that. I can’t help wondering if Jeff Bezos read it.)

I talked about this in my 2008 Denvention Worldcon GoH speech, but to briefly recap, I don’t see science fiction as being a platonic ideal toward which all works and writers should convergently aspire. I see it as a tapestry of many individual writers’ threads which, taken together, give the illusion of a picture. I only spin my own thread. “The genre” is an emergent property of all this shifting substrate. All those madly flapping, or typing, butterflies, and weird temporary feedback loops, seething around like those arcs that spurt off the surface of the sun and fall back. Not under anyone’s control.

A little more kindness and charity to each other wouldn’t hurt, but that’s true of all communities, not just this one. We may all be geeks raised by wolves, or at least by books, but brain-to-mouth filters and business etiquette can be learned. Fortunately for me.

Several novellas originally published by Spectrum Literary are seeing life in new editions. Penric’s Progress came out in January 2020 from Baen, the omnibus of novellas Penric’s Demon, Penric and the Shaman, and Penric’s Fox. Omnibus Penric’s Travels is due in May, and an edition of The Orphans of Raspay (2019) is scheduled for June 2020 publication from Subterranean Press. What is the most important thing about these stories to you, and what’s the most fun thing about them?

I talk in my introduction to Penric’s Progress about the pleasures and advantages of the novella form and length. Possibly the most important thing to me about these tales is that they have been fun. On the business side, the fact that I was writing them as à la carte original ebooks, with no contracts, deadlines, schedule, or set plan, was very freeing. (Spectrum, incidentally, is my literary agency. I self-e-publish more through than by them, but the folks there are a huge help to me in managing the mechanics and the business side, including the knock-on subrights sales in audiobooks, the paper reprints, and foreign rights.)

The same freedom applies to the e-novellas’ content. Penric—and his resident demon Desdemona, since they come as an unbreakable set—are as I mentioned protean characters, capable of being in many kinds of stories. Like other chaos demons, I am easily bored; my interests, knowledge, and psychological mood change from year to year, and these shorter stories can change along with them. Even to things that aren’t Pen & Des stories at all, which I see you ask about next.

Knife Children also had a recent Subterranean edition in February, a blend of the fantastic and the domestic, of mystery and familial drama. What, for you, are the best aspects or elements of this story?

Barr and Lily’s tale was a story idea that rooted in my brain way back when I wrote the epilogue to the The Sharing Knife tetralogy’s final volume, Horizon, where Barr’s illegitimate-child dilemma first came to light for both him and me. The last gasp of a sixteen hundred-page fantasy epic, or anti-epic, was no place to start exploring it, but Barr had proved one of the more interesting secondary characters of the tale to me. He had the most unexpected growth as a person, admittedly because he started at such a low level, being a self-centered and thoughtless youth skating by on his obnoxious charm. He may be an exemplar of one of Heinlein’s story categories, “The Man Who Learns Better.” I wanted to watch him tussle with his karma over the kind of time span that blunders like his really earn.

It was also a redemption story, which, I have long known by some of my favorite characters from other fiction and including my own, seems to be my jam. I am a sucker for redemption stories, apparently, but only if they feel authentic. I don’t care for fake redemption, where the narrative retreats from whatever initial sin it has set up by revealing at the end some equivalent to “But it’s all right! Assuage your guilt, Angstyman! That person was already dead/evil when you set the house on fire!” or whatever.

Sticking to one’s authorial guns on this aspect risks offering a character that some readers will find insurmountably unsympathetic. They don’t, in that case, want a redemption story; they want a vicarious revenge story, to see the sinner not redeemed but punished by the narrative, cosmic justice. “My name is Inigo Montoya . . . ” Which can also be a thing to write, and I have—consider the lurid fate of Ges Vorrutyer—but it wasn’t Barr and Lily’s story.

Not that Barr wasn’t fun to torment in his own way, as he struggled with his chicken coming home to roost. But in a genre often full of teenagers having teenage problems, I wanted to watch a character grapple with grown-up issues. Just exactly how does one step up to that plate? Show me, Barr. For the other side of that generational tug-of-war, I simultaneously had his fourteen-year-old daughter Lily and her own supply of sharply real troubles, soon shared with her inexperienced parent.

Do you feel like a story can just be a fun story? Is it important for fiction to challenge the reader and ask questions? Are there themes and ideas in your fiction that stand out as more important to you, or about which you feel passionate?

I covered my tastes in redemption themes above. My other large interest is biology in all its aspects which, actually, has been a hard science for quite some time, though a few readers seem oddly tone-deaf to this. I once, not joking nearly as much as it looked, defined the romance genre as a subset of science fiction devoted to tales of the promulgation of human evolution through sexual selection. Physics is not the only fruit, folks.

A lot of the work of our own human biology at ground level—life-maintenance tasks, children, relationships, family creation—has been shuffled off into a box falsely labeled “women’s work.” (Or, as I think of it, “Keeping people alive.”) But a large part of SF tends to be about self-actualization, about the serious adolescent task of splitting off from the family and acquiring adult status. This tends to find itself in psychological conflict with the foregoing, as if an individual could not become an empowered adult except by escaping all that. (For people in more toxic families, this is actually true.) Making these two immiscible aspects work together in the same story requires shaking the bottle really hard.

Certainly, a story can be a fun story. It can also be a fun story and more. A story can be anything. Whether the readers who encounter it will like what it does is a separate question, without a singular answer. Though if a person is dead serious about grappling with the real world’s challenges and questions, I’d point them to the nonfiction section as more directly useful to the task. (With the caveat that a lot of nonfiction isn’t nearly as nonfictional as it’s labeled.)

Fiction . . . is doing a different job. Why the hell our brains evolved to do such a bizarre thing is another question, and one I’d love to see answered. Creating pictures in one another’s heads through language to convey useful survival information, sure, not hard to see why that would be favored. Hijacking that function and using it to make art, to tickle each other’s emotions? Much more mysterious.

Imaginative play seems universal in children. One theory is that it’s cognitive practice for later grown-up tasks, but it’s hard to see where, “Let’s all pretend to be ponies! I’ll race you! Now let’s be flying ponies!” fits into this.

Comments on fiction that make it sound as if its function is to fix its readers always make me uncomfortable. I channel Tolkien’s cogent remark on the difference between allegory, which he cordially detested, and applicability: “I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.” If folks find my stories applicable, that’s fine. I would also observe that applicability has a much longer shelf life.

Me, I’ll be over here with the flying ponies.

As someone who plays in various genres successfully and blends genres to the delight of readers, do you feel like genre definitions are important and useful? Does genre fiction do something or operate in some specific way that “mainstream” or “literary” fiction does not?

Well, I consider mainstream fiction to be another genre, and, like SFF, it contains a vast range of story types. So, anything one says about either is bound to be wrong somewhere.

It’s a figure-ground problem. Given an undifferentiated sea of, well, anything, but let’s say books, as soon as you pick out one part and label it a Thing, you have created a Not-Thing out of the rest. The literary genre was first created as a concept by the extraction of all the other genres or kinds of books in its sea. Like a splitting amoeba, it then reformed its own boundaries to defend the life within.

(Also, as soon as you have two or more of anything, humans will start trying to rank them by status and align themselves with the higher side and/or decide which side is theirs and try to put it on top. Whether it makes any damn sense or not. You can’t stop them. Which is better, red or green? Any sentences with the words “better” or “best” in them are meaningless unless they also include the information, “Better for what?” But that’s another rant.)

That said, as soon as there came to be more books than any reader could sort through, there needed to be guiding categorizations to speed selection. The categories we ended up with are rather arbitrary historical artifacts, as one can see by looking at an alternate scheme that has evolved over in fanfiction. There is no commercial bookstore shelf labeled “angst” or “hurt-comfort” or “character death” or “slow burn” or “smut” or “fluff” (or “fluffy smut”). These are categories that sort by emotion, interestingly, and are no less helpful to their users than “romance,” “thriller,” “travel,” or “cookbooks.”

So, briefly, genre boundaries are useful as a guide or a doorway, not so useful as a wall. Granted, if a writer does not like the wall, they can just paint a doorway on it and march through. It was an imaginary wall to start with, and there really aren’t any genre police out there to stop you.

Functionally, from the creators’ side, I’ve defined a genre as “any group of works in close conversation with one another.” This includes a great deal of sharing and swapping of tropes, an enthusiastically communal toolbox, not because the creators can’t be original, but because they love this stuff. It’s why they’re here in the first place. The conversation’s boundaries are wildly permeable, though, with ideas constantly being imported from the larger world according to each writer’s experiences. Alive, moving, breathing, changing, growing, evolving—it’s all very organic. Genres can also die, and end up in sort of taxidermic museum displays.

You are known to do a lot of research for your fiction. What are a few of your favorite deeply researched concepts you’ve used in your science fiction?

Hm. “What I know and how I know it” falls roughly into two parts. There’s all the knowledge I accreted just by living my life in the world, or learned from following up on random impulses of curiosity, with no particular use in mind. This has gradually turned into a rather large bag of potential material, easy to reach into and grab from. Then there is more directed collecting, when I have a particular story in mind and need details.

Speaking of modernity, Internet resources have made an enormous difference in the ease with which these may be acquired. Back in the day, I needed to seek out big unwieldy nonfiction books—everything from Cunningham’s Textbook of Anatomy to Space Physiology and Medicine to Terraforming to an 1882 edition, in three volumes, of Prescott’s 1837 history Ferdinand and Isabella—or telephone NASA physicians, or write to engineers. Now I can just Google something like “Roman army fort design” and have more than I could possibly use delivered, all collated, right to the screen in front of my eyes.

I’m not sure if this is good or bad, but having done it the hard way I think at least makes me more conscious of potential pitfalls in material acquired with such ease, better able to judge it. Fortunately, I don’t think anyone has ever died (directly) from reading a bad novel, so my duty of care has a limit.

Just as a single illustration, my design for uterine replicators as detailed at the beginning of Ethan of Athos (1986) and elsewhere in my series was actually closely researched, both directly by visits to that anatomy text, and inadvertently by actually giving birth to kids. In concept, in terms of the science involved, the design would work. The rest is engineering details . . .

What else are you working on now, and what do you have coming up that you can tell us about?

Well, I did have that several-month involuntary break last fall, so build that into any timeline for expectations. The two Penric collections Baen just did were so pretty, I want to have another, but that will require writing two more Penric novellas to go with the stray The Orphans of Raspay, which is going to take a while. So, nothing to report at this time.

About the Author

Arley Sorg is a 2014 graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop. He writes SF/F/H, reviews for Cascadia Subduction Zone Magazine, and is associate editor at both Locus and Lightspeed magazines.

The Horror of it All!
A Conversation with Tamsyn Muir

Arley Sorg

Tamsyn Muir landed on many readers’ radars with the release of full-length novel Gideon the Ninth, published by Tor.com publications in September 2019. Beyond blurbs and promises of something utterly unique, readers showed appreciation through Goodreads Choice nominations in two categories, as well as nominations and short listing for an array of other awards such as Brave New Words, BooktubeSFF, the 2020 Reference and User Services Association’s selections, and Audible’s Best of 2019. Gideon made editor’s pick in Amazon’s Best Books of 2019. In more genre focused circles, Gideon received a SFWA Nebula Award nomination, became a 2020 Best Novel Hugo Award finalist, landed on the Locus Recommended Reading List, and won a Crawford Award.

Tamsyn Muir was born in Australia, grew up in New Zealand, and later moved to Oxford, England. She flexed her writerly muscles posting fan fiction and started taking writing seriously in 2010, when she attended the Clarion Workshop in San Diego. Her debut professional publication, “The House That Made the Sixteen Loops of Time,” came out in Fantasy Magazine in 2011, followed by Shirley Jackson Award finalist “The Magician’s Apprentice” in Weird Tales in 2012. In 2015 The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction published Eugie, World Fantasy, and SFWA Nebula award finalist “The Deepwater Bride.” All evidence that even before her big splash with Gideon, her stories were well worth reading.

Harrow the Ninth is due August 2020 and Alecto the Ninth in 2021.

You’ve been nominated twice for Shirley Jackson awards, for “outstanding achievement in the literature of horror, the dark fantastic, and psychological suspense.” What, for you, are the defining characteristics of horror? And what are some examples of your favorite kinds of horror?

I can immediately tell you an example of my LEAST favorite kind of horror, which is the jump scare. It’s not even because I don’t admire the jump scare—a well-crafted literary or visual jump scare is among the finest achievements horror can aspire to. I just hate them. I’m very frightened of my adrenaline being manipulated suddenly. I don’t like it when something jumps out at me and goes BAWWW.

There are moments in Stephen King’s It that are so sudden and so violent and gruesome and terrible that I won’t even describe them here, but they turned me into a whimpering pillar of sweat. It’s much easier to be manipulated with something visual, but the literary jump scare is still bad. And I guess because I view them with such revulsion, and because I’m vaguely mad that someone popped a paper bag really close to my ear, they’re not the moments that live with me—they’re the moments that get to me at 3 AM when I’m trying to sleep and my boiler pipes are making a weird noise.

My favorite kind of horror is the slow reveal. Horror’s horror if it scares you either way—much like erotica, it is looking for the physical response—but I think the defining characteristic of my favorite type of horror is a realization of the uncanny: the slow lifting of a mirror up to your face so you can see the crack. I love it when horror stains backward through an entire text. As a horror reader, I’m always tightening up protectively to guess and to guard against that moment, and I want horror to have been sitting in my blind spot the whole time.

I know Lovecraft can be very tedious, but the end movement of The Shadow Over Innsmouth is wonderful in this way. And because I’m desperate to keep highlighting speculative video games, Kotaro Uchikoshi’s Zero Escape series just keeps on doing this over and over and over. Zero Time Dilemma especially plays with your assumptions like a tiny thumb piano, and the result is some of the finest horror writing I have ever consumed. This all sits with me much longer than the moments where something has jumped out at me and gone BAWWW.

Harrow the Ninth is coming out in August. The Macmillan site calls it “a mind-twisting puzzle box of mystery, murder, magic, and mayhem.” But categorizing your books is somewhat debated. Do you consider them to be horror, or any specific type of horror?

The Locked Tomb trilogy is definitely intended to be horror, but again, what I’m going for is the horror of the slow realization. I want to pull the curtains back very slowly. I mean, that said, Gideon is pocketed with the kind of slasher movie tension where (I hope) one sits in the audience doing the panto LOOK BEHIND YOU!!/DON’T GO DOWNSTAIRS!! routine, and Harrow is my delving straight into gothic. Much of Harrow is about girls in their nightgowns staring down darkened corridors. Isn’t everyone’s favorite bit of The Woman in White the sequence where Marian Halcombe finds herself more and more constrained within Blackwater Park?

Do you have craft techniques you use to make style and voice work?

Only in that I think a lot about different voices and texture. Rhythm helps. I don’t have any specific craft techniques—I never got formally taught to write—but an innate love of horror and comedy and the way in which both those things are peanut butter and chocolate helps. I think it ends up being more surprising for people who have just read straight comedy or straight horror and think I’m doing something clever and accomplished when I slide between the two. I absolutely am not. I have never done anything clever or accomplished in my whole life except the day I worked out you could put KFC fries in the little bread roll they give you and make a potato roll.

I think the best thing you can do to write for style and voice is to do a lot of parody work first. Parody doesn’t necessarily mean satire or takedown; writing to mimic a specific voice or style is parody, and it teaches you a lot about how to evoke different styles and sounds. Every fan fiction author worth their salt knows this, but I think there’s so much anxiety coming out about finding one’s own authentic voice and being original and different that we sit down and start to panic about being the newest most fresh original voice. The secret is that we never can. Just writing the exact way one feels comfortable writing in does a lot to create the effect.

Are there aspects of storytelling/writing that you feel are more challenging for you, things you struggle with? And how do you deal with those elements?

Because I’m so wildly shortsighted, I have trouble with my room descriptions at times. I know this sounds really small and petty but it is a massive problem for me. I have no idea how far away anything is from anything. Because rooms are just blurs, I tend to go nuts on the micro and end up describing somebody’s coffee mug while failing to note anything else about the room. Maybe this is actually just because I spent a long time writing MUD room descriptions in the late nineties. There is a table here! You see an axe.

Are there important differences between the style and voice of your novels and your short fiction?

I think it’s funny that one can pinpoint the exact moment when I relaxed enough to start writing gay themes and jokes. It took me until about 2014. I was still convinced queer wouldn’t sell, or that it would only sell to a niche market, or that it would make people not take me seriously. C.C. Finlay did an enormous amount for my confidence when he bought my novelette “The Deepwater Bride” for F&SF. You can see me doing a lot stylistically when I went on to do in Gideon—constant mixing of low language and high, genuine love of Lovecraftian melodrama but also unable to not take the piss out of it—but it is fundamentally me doing a parody, whereas Gideon is just me. “The Woman in the Hill” is also Lovecraft pastiche, but no jokes. I’ve got quite a broad range of stuff, and I always wanted to move on to the next thing, so it’s quite a Catholic collection of stories and voices and styles. And Harrow, the sequel to Gideon, is different again. I wonder if the main thing on display is my short attention span.

Are there important similarities and differences between the first and second books? Where does Harrow take the narrative?

Harrow is written in a mix of second person and third, a mix that has already sent people screaming to the hills. Very relieved that N.K. Jemisin already softened the audience up for that one, though being a following act to Jemisin is like having the ass of your ego kicked downstairs. Gideon is a slasher detective novel, Harrow’s high gothic puzzle. And if Gideon was Myst, Harrow is that one lateral puzzle about the dead guy hanging over a pool of water in the locked room, only the water’s the protagonist’s entire past. The narrative does shine a torch on more of what I’m doing with the universe I’m working in, as I kept that beam very small in Gideon. It’s a novel meant to disorient. Indulgently, it is also a novel about psychosis. Even more indulgently, it is a novel about poetry.

There’s lots and lots of stuff in there for close readers of Gideon who have been diligently collecting bread crumbs. This is a novel for people who use Post-its. I don’t have a brand ambassadorship with the Post-it guys but maybe they should give me one? I’m right here. Post-its! When you’re too good for the back of an envelope.

Are you already working on Alecto the Ninth? Have the plans for the overall series story changed in any ways since book one’s first few drafts?

As I write, Alecto ought to be finished quite soon, given a prevailing wind. Quarantine isn’t helping; you’d think it would. What is helping is that the overall series story has not changed from day one, which I am devoutly grateful for. I’ve been seeding so much stuff that a massive change would make nonsense of the whole series. I knew the narrative arc before I started Gideon, and the only things that have been cut have been scenes where I realized before I wrote them that they wouldn’t work—very minor scenes like “Tea party here,” not big-ticket items. I mean, very often the novel looks quite different than how it did in my head, but this is the usual author’s lament—this seemed cooler in my brain! A few jokes have gone because my editor looked at them and said no. Sometimes I have been the one who looked at them and said no. But the big stuff, the plot throughline, that’s been the same since day one, and that’s been a lot of the pleasure of writing the books.

What is important or special to you about the series overall?

Oh, what isn’t! Naturally I love it; I wrote it for the edification of my seventeen-year-old self. Because I do not have a landline to her I also wrote it for the edification of my loved ones. Each time they laughed at a joke I was given godlike power. I think my very favorite thing about it is that it is about a lot of very gruesome queer women dealing with trauma and love and having terrible ugly bonds with each other.

I do love stories about how the unflinching love of women for other women is a unifying force for good, and stories that uplift queer strength, but also: What if you made the bun of a burger fried chicken, instead of bread? KFC did that. They called it the Double Down. It is only just now that I realize how funny Double Down is, as a moniker. The Double Down is neither sophisticated nor good and may even worsen conditions you already have. Certainly it is a symbol of excess, and may even be a symbol for the evils of capitalism. But—the buns are also fried chicken!

I have attempted to write the science-fantasy gay Double Down. No women in these books who look at each other should look at each other. They should go practice radical self-acceptance, get therapy, then marry those wonderful girls who take care of the elephants at the zoo. But they’re not. They’re wielding swords, raising the dead, and having affairs with each other. The buns are also fried chicken.

You went to Clarion in San Diego in 2010. Did the program have a measurable impact on your writing?

I’d never written a short story before Clarion, so unambiguously yes!I had to write two in a hurry just in order to audition. I always thought that short stories were beyond me. After Clarion I saw them as a perfection of the form. I wish I was as good at short fiction as I want to be; a really fantastic piece of short fiction brings tears to the eye. In many ways I think it is much harder than writing a novel. You have so much less room to move and fewer tricks to deploy. Getting familiar with short story definitely made me a better writer, and in any case Clarion gave me a toolbox to examine my own writing in a way I hadn’t before—not because Clarion somehow holds the secret keys to the box of self-critique, but because it forced me to take myself seriously. That is worth infinity money. My brother scrounged the funds for me to go, because what a saint, and that was also helpful in its own way because I couldn’t not let it have an impact—I had to absorb everything or else what was the point. It was especially good for me as a fanfiction writer because I could not indulge. I had to condense. It was wonderful training.

You sold your first short story right after Clarion. What was the road to selling the novel series like?

I intended to follow a very traditional route. I wanted to sell short fiction until I got really good at it, and then I thought possibly someone might notice me and I would never have to do the soul-crushing thing of looking for an agent and I’d move on to novel work. This sounds sensible, but I wasn’t. I sold a story out the gate, then I sold another story right out the gate, and then my brain shut down because I felt I had to get a perfect record. I sold like six stories without a rejection. Then I got a rejection, and my brain was all, “Oh! It’s over.” I can’t believe how wasteful and stupid that was and is. I loved writing short fiction, I’d had a handful of good years and some nominations, and I hung up my hat because I submitted and got the soft touch “not a good fit” letter? I should be in jail. Anyway, an agent came knocking but then I still had to go looking for agents anyway because it turned out I was writing in a different genre, and then I had a spate of agents who never bothered to look at the manuscript because I can’t pitch for toffee, and then I found an editor before I found the agent. So I didn’t go a traditional route at all. But I wanted to.

I quit my day job to become a games writer just before finishing Harrow. I loved every moment of it, but I did not realize that although it is apocalyptic for a writer if your publisher/studio shuts down, for game writers it is Tuesday.

Do you feel like coming from New Zealand and living in Oxford is a barrier to publishing in US markets in any particular ways?

This question’s really interesting and so much has changed in a really short period of time. There are a lot of very intelligent and interesting conversations going on about publishing in New Zealand as an SFF author. I think Melanie Harding-Shaw is writing really interesting stuff about it that resonates with me. For me, back in 2010, I just assumed nobody would want what I was selling in NZ. I wasn’t writing what I felt at the time was the NZ story, which would have been a contemporary about drowning at your bach. There’s a huge and very nice population in the UK where SFF fandom is concerned, but I never took advantage of them because I didn’t know where they were and never went looking. I was too busy getting the sweats and trying to pay off my student loan. I think the biggest barrier in being a Kiwi publishing in a US market is in your work, i.e. writing how you’d normally write. My story “Union” for Clarkesworld, which is probably the story I’m the most proud of, I copped flak for because the dialogue was “impenetrable.” I hadn’t realized I was doing anything weird. And I’m always arguing with my poor copyeditors because I want to keep the Kiwi voice and they’re quite reasonably “no American would ever understand what you’re saying here.” I make that my hill to die on quite a lot. I just think American audiences would rather read me as me rather than doing a Sorcerer’s Stone and rewriting jumper to be sweater. Also, anyone having problems parsing my work because of the Kiwi writing is probably having a lot of other problems simultaneously and will inevitably decide that I’m not their type of thing.

It is always difficult to not be in America and take part in the American publishing and fandom get-togethers. Everyone seems to know each other. I went to the Nebulas back in 2015 and everyone was super friendly, very generous with an outsider, but it DID feel as though everyone else had attended SFWA meetings in the womb. It’s rough if you’re trying to make a name for yourself and you don’t get to go to the bar cons or the parties. I imagine this is also rough for anyone who is simply shy. I am international and shy, so I felt tragic. It’s not the end of the world, especially because I was lucky enough to network at Clarion and I would also go on to find out that I had been teenage Internet friends with like half of the up-and-comings in SFF short fiction today. Hanging out in Final Fantasy chat rooms turned out to be its own network.

Which short story in your body of work so far was the hardest or most challenging for you to write and why? And which is your favorite and why?

It was really hard to write “The Woman in the Hill” for Lynne Jamneck in the Dreams from the Witch House collection because I was writing a story very close to home. There’s a weird embarrassment one gets when you are writing about your homeland. It feels as though it isn’t the correct landscape for media. It’s a bit cringe. It feels like school writing. You’re sitting with a view of Maungakiekie, writing tortured metaphors about the volcano or whatever. At the same time, though, it’s so exciting—it feels suddenly so real, you feel so connected to yourself.

I was a seven year old in Whitford again going to check on which chicken had been pecked to death by the other chickens. It’s a story very connected to what I perceived of the land and early fear of the bush. We constantly got told in primary school that the bush would kill you. You couldn’t move for sad stories in School Journal about people who had gone out into the bush for five seconds then died of exposure. It was suddenly about writing fears that were personal to me, scaring myself, and when I sent in the story I was very much like “This is taking the piss out of Lovecraft, but not in a good way. This is just a story for me, this blows.” But I love that one. It was my first Kiwi piece.

As I’ve said, writing “The Deepwater Bride” was scary in a different way because it was writing queer. Boy, do you ever feel indulgent writing queer. You feel like people are going to roll their eyes, but this is a feeling that definitely comes from inside the house, because people were delightful. It also was about teenage girls and I really thought I would get patronized from outer space but I was doing the community a disservice there, I got taken very seriously. By the time I got to “Union” I pretended I didn’t care so much. Union I wrote while living in the United Kingdom so it was extra strange writing a New Zealand story, I felt very vulnerable. I didn’t feel as vulnerable writing “The Deepwater Bride” because although it was queer, it was an American story. Also, I had such bad glandular fever at the time that I felt high as a kite. I was so sick that I was confident. I remember being so ill that I brashly emailed Ellen Datlow to ask if she needed help checking for typos in an anthology she was doing that I was in. I have never been so bold since. She was so kind, and I was so obviously deranged.

“Union” is my favorite story because it has the least easy moral of any horror story I have ever written. It is the story about how a devastated community does not end up banding together in an easy-to-absorb YouTube montage clip. Fear hollows you out over time.

Six stories and two novels since 2011, and your writing career has gained significant traction, including Gideon being a 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novel finalist, landing on the Locus Recommended Reading List, earning a SFWA Nebula Award nomination, and winning the Crawford. Does this mean you have more short fiction and more series planned/in the works? Or do the accolades create a stifling sense of pressure?

Oh, you have my number. It’s the stifling sense of pressure, though I’d apply that to myself without being nominated for anything. I find it hard to really accept that I have ever been nominated for anything. My brain, which has betrayed me in a variety of ways but has helped me out with this one, often forgets I have been nominated or recognized. If I wasn’t currently writing the last in the series I would probably have blissful moments where I forgot I wrote Gideon. I have a condition that involves serious psychosis and memory oddities—I don’t mean to get heavy, but my brain does hilarious stuff when I get nominated.

Joy can often feel very painful instead of nice, and whenever I am nominated for anything I either immediately forget about it or I assume it is a trick letter from deep plants who wish to put me away. I constantly check emails for hidden clues. (My Nebula nomination turned out to have been from official SFWA members, which was almost a disappointment.) Thankfully I was a lot more uncomplicatedly delighted to win the Crawford because Gary Wolfe called me up to tell me and I was 90% sure that Gary Wolfe was not a plant. I don’t mean to imply I live a life of tragedy, because it is often genuinely funny to be me. (We had people clapping outside my house last week to celebrate the NHS and I got a fright and had to be talked down that they were not celebrating my incipient murder, like blackhearted Animal Crossing villagers.)

But at the end of the day getting nominated is a huge honor, and worth any amount of panic or paranoia. I’m both bewildered and grateful for the SFF community’s critical reception and accolades. If anyone wants to nominate me for anything please do so, I can’t imagine how tragic it would be if people were like “Well, I enjoyed the extremely oblique Ezra Pound reference in Gideon the Ninth, but I can’t nominate it because Tamsyn Muir will freak out at the email.” Please nominate me! It’s so nice for everyone who works on my books, and at the VERY least when I got my Nebula nomination Tor.com sent me a chocolate dog. That was wonderful. I was eating its head for weeks.

In the realm of future projects: I’m getting back on that horse and writing a piece of short fiction, I have a novella that Subterranean Press hasn’t announced yet but please look out for it, and I also have other mystery projects in the works.

What have you read lately (short or long) that really excited you, that you want everyone to read?

I was trying to see if I could cope with reading apocalyptic fiction during the pandemic and went back to Storm of Locusts, Rebecca Roanhorse’s sequel to the incredible Trail of Lightning. The answer is that anyone who wants to cope with a counterirritant during the pandemic ought to read the whole Sixth World series. I’ve made it my recommendation before but it’s doing very particular things right now, in an age where I’m only reading comfort food and detective novels.

Roanhorse is so snappy and so tight and her tension is so good—she’s the rare author where her BAWWW jump scares are so finely crafted that you want them to come just so you can feel release—and although the tough-as-hell Maggie and her crew make me go in my cozy quarantine nest “Ah, yes, I will not survive Big Water,” there is something very soothing about imagining the people who do. As I am fairly sure Philip Larkin said in “An Arundel Tomb,” what will remain of us is guns.

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: Focus Neil, Focus

Neil Clarke

Maintaining any semblance of motivation during this time period has been hard, certainly, and dealing with an unidentified uneasiness/anxiety has not been fun. Deadlines particularly have been difficult. I know I’m not alone in feeling this way. When I find the strength to tackle the slush pile, I can’t help but notice a few things: pandemic stories, a complete change in normal submission patterns, and a larger number of authors submitting their first story.

Pandemic Stories

This isn’t in the least bit shocking to anyone who knows anything about slush piles. They always fill up with a hot topic when one exists. Well, we all saw this one coming and I’d say that we’re probably at peak right now. I’m not ready to say, don’t send us these, but you’ll really have to break the mold to get through to us with a pandemic story right now. Happily, I can report that some authors are pushing beyond our current situation and portraying a path forward that isn’t political or dystopian. Oddly enough, some have even made it, for lack of a better word, fun. It doesn’t surprise me to see a quirky sense of humor being used as a coping mechanism, but seeing it used well, does.

Submission Patterns

I pay a lot of attention to the volume of submissions we’re receiving and where they are coming from and I’ve never seen it quite like this. There’s rarely what I would consider a “normal” day lately. The volume is usually way up or way down on any given day. No pattern, though there might be one if I paid closer attention to the news. I’m hearing from a lot of authors who are having problems getting words on the page. I’m pretty sure the distraction I’ve been suffering from is the same culprit feeding those lows.

First Story Submissions

This observation is solely based on reading cover letters. With so many people working from home or having lost their jobs, a lot of people are finding the time to pursue that dream of writing that has been on the backburner under normal conditions. Some are providing detailed information about their situation and while I normally like brief cover letters, I’m finding their passion for following a dream—or distracting themselves—in “these uncertain times” uplifting.

By the way, any time I talk about first time submissions, I feel the need to say a few things about them. It’s not uncommon for people to believe that editors only want stories from “name” authors, but that’s not something I’ve observed with the magazine editors I’ve known over the years. By and large, we all love to be the editor who published someone’s first sale. It’s probably the most rewarding part of our job. I’ll even go one step further and say that it’s an editor’s responsibility to the field, and their own publication, to find new voices and publish them. After all, embedded in the spirit of science fiction is a need to move forward. New authors are an important part of that process and short fiction leads that wave.

If you are one of those first time authors that has sent us your stories in the last couple of months or have pen to paper right now, please know you are welcome and we’re excited to hear from you. Statistically speaking, sadly, most of you probably won’t sell us a story, but we admire and respect the attempt and encourage you to keep trying and hope to work with you in the future!

And with that, I think I’ve said all that I’m capable of for the moment, beyond a special shout out to our twitter followers who provided some suggestions for this editorial. I didn’t take one in particular, but a few ended up shaping things as I wrote. Thank you and stay safe!

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine and Forever Magazine; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and an eight-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:
From the Moon to Mars

Thomas Chamberlain-Keen

About the Artist

Thomas Chamberlain-Keen is a concept artist at Playground Games.