The Iridescent Lake

D.A. Xiaolin Spires

I skate around the iridescent lake, bobbing my head along to the eerie laser noises the ice makes, when it gives way to pressure. The colossal plasticine walls shoot up before me and I shield my eyes from the rays of sun poking through the microlattice ceiling net. I count ten visitors already today, and the natural rink has only been open an hour. A skater passes by me, his bioenhanced skates emitting “Pew! Pew!” and he pivots, grinding toward a stop as he bends to fix the tack compressions on his ankles, pressing them down to adhere better. Something flops out of his pocket as he races away into a flip.

I glide across, kneeling to grab a foreign object on the ice. It’s a trapezoidal palm-sized card, glowing neon, with a series of swirls embedded. It’s one of those new-fangled key fobs, the glow indicating that the vehicle’s not too far away. I’m surprised to see one here; I keep hearing how the rocks don’t cooperate with the navigation and wheels. I turn to the skater, who’s now doing some stretches against the railing.

“Hey, did you drop this?” My comm projects my voice into his receiver. He gives me a look of slight alarm, his pupils contracted, whites wide at the sight of my security badge, no doubt, and at the cascade of languages my holotranslator is projecting above my head—a look I catch through the slick designer glass on his helmet.

His eyes look almost like my lost son’s and they give me a start. I catch my breath and exhale. It’s been a while since I had that kind of reaction; I thought the wound was healing. The boy shakes his head, No, I didn’t drop it, but comes barreling at me with his brand name suit, an intent look, and furrowed brows.

Erratic behavior, I think, and my training kicks in before I can even register my movement. I shift aside, knees bent, waiting for that blow so I can launch him away. But last minute, like paper in a gust, he plucks the key from my hands and veers away, the “Pew! Pew!” whining of the ice tracking behind him in his wake. He glides away with his obnoxious mellx-leather gloves glued into a thumbs-up sign as his last bit of communication to me.

Strange characters decide to live out in these lands, I tell myself for probably the tenth time since I moved here. It’s only been about a few months and already I’ve gotten shoved half a dozen different ways, leered at, poked, stepped on.

In turn, residents have gotten their fair share of retribution from me—jabs, elbows, “inadvertent” contact, and of course icy smiles. I’m told that’s how it is here on this auburn rock. People don’t get too chummy and I fell into place right along with them.

It’s just not typical that they have the same features and expression as Haolai’s.

The last time I got too chummy and complacent, Haolai disappeared. Right before my eyes. Masked men. That was on the solar outreaches, before I took the job here. I hunted for ages, gave up. They sent his body later. There are wounds that never scab over. This one grows a thin layer of platelets and fibrin before being yanked off by some resonant memory. The look in that boy’s eyes just now—that fear, that’s that scab being ripped off. That’s the hollow feeling in my stomach as I taste vomit and hide the ache pounding in my chest. I swallow up bitterness and pain in one black hole of gulp and continue scanning the ice as more visitors clamber onto the rink, holding hands, laughing through their helmets, and slipping about like holotoons.

I’m on exit duty as session ends. Trumpets blare as if a cue for that awful music that the bazaar vendors play when they’re closing shop. Exhausted skaters, barely lifting puffy suit-encased arms, do their last lap. My partner-in-security Dran herds the stragglers to my vestibule—“Here, Yunhe, take care of ’em”—where they’ll get suctioned off of any remaining ice and water.

I yank the lever at every entrance, letting the vestibule’s ceiling emit high-power vacs that suck up every bit of excess moisture on these visitors’ bods. Then I scan their passes, projected onto their shoulders, to verify that they’ve left. The scan inputs a ten percent discount into their systems for the next time they visit. It also implants an ad that they’ll pass on to any other resident with any contact. Even public parks need some viral advertising. One of the visitors gives me some trouble—a woman who insists she already went through the watertug and refuses to go through it again.

I grab Dran and we check her, scanning her as she shakes red curls within her helmet and curses about civil liberties. The scan beeps as irregularities flow from this woman’s sides. “Honey, scanning is not a violation, not here at least,” Dran’s saying as she tries skating away. The words appear above Dran’s head, as they do with all security, and the word “Honey” written in gold script makes me smirk. They tried putting personalities to the words with fonts to convey emotions and it always comes off a bit awry. She pulls loose from Dran and in bullet speed veers left and away toward the other side of the rink. She’s almost across the ice when I race over and grab her again, dragging her back to the checkpoint—sure enough, another scan proves she’s got pocketfuls of ice kept in the tiny refrigeration chambers. She’s got at least a dozen of them.

“No mood-ice rings for your customers.” My voice is gruff, unsympathetic.

She thrashes. Only then do I see the tiny pocketknife. I pull back as a flash of pain registers on my arm. There’s a cut in my suit, and I bark at Dran as I’m seeing the red ooze from my skin. Dran races over and holds her down as I spray the remi-glu over my skin and suit. Such a strong smell, with an effect just as potent. The redhead’s eyes are big and round and as bloodshot as her hair. She looks as frightened as newcomers when they land here.

“Pretty lucky,” says Dran. He’s got her arms pinned down in his steel grip and I release the weapon and kick it away from her hand. She squeezes her fist and opens it, as if surprised she had used it at all. The knife goes flying across the ice, as innocuous as rock. I empty her stash out into the retrieval bin.

She grimaces, mumbles a sorry as Dran locks her arms behind her. “It’s a plant. Someone planted them on me. I’ve never seen those marble things before.” Her look of rabid regret gives her away. She’s desperate. I know how much they’d fetch on the market. Once the ice is carved into jewelry and set in climate-controlled shreela bezelcages, they’ll be more valuable than the purest diamond, even more coveted for courtship rituals, big events, playthings of magnates and celebs—put on a ship and transported away. Even the hardware for the fridge tech is a small fortune. I wonder how much trouble she’ll get in for losing those in addition to the ice. I try to feel sorry for her, but there’s nothing in me left. I’m wrung dry.

She assaulted me and my sympathy only goes so far.

Even through the disturbance, my mind is still laser focused. I’ve been waiting for Haolai-look-alike to come around and make the exit, but I didn’t see him at all. He must have left at some point, hiding behind his darkened helmet. There’s an empty pit in my heart as I palm the suck for seized goods. The fridge tech marbleminis tumble about until they’re wrung dry and I palm a few of the dozen or so that have just been purified.

The cut is barely throbbing, healing proper thanks to the spray. I shake my arm. The cut’s pretty superficial but it could’ve been bad.

She gives me a look of distress and I kick myself for being so soft. She looks so slippin’ desperate. I can’t help her much at all, really, not without losing my own job.

“Don’t do it again,” I say, shoving her as I slip a few empty marbleminis down her pocket. At least she could sell those and get something out of it. Maybe enough to buy herself out of the trouble she’s in with whoever hired her, at least enough to try to escape. Dran’s watching me, saying nothing. He’d keep his mouth shut.

“I don’t know why you risk termination.” Dran passes through the vestibule, clean going in, clean going out, as he punches out with a beep.

I shoot him a nonchalant look, like I don’t know what ya mean, with a shrug.

It’s clear he knows. He can count and he has fast eyes. He holds up his fingers. Four.

The number of fridge tech marbleminis I slipped down her pocket.

What can I say? I know desperation. I smell it. It stinks like remi-glu. I pity her and am disgusted by her all at once. It’s a way to placate that smell. At least that’s what I tell myself.

I walk through the vestibule. Even security’s got to run through the protocol. I don’t shiver, even though my neck is on the line. I’ve got a dozen new mocks of marbles, all filled with ice myself, and I’m hoping that the new contraband tech sticks. I’ve got about an hour before the upgraded patch goes through security, so if everything’s timed right . . .

I hold my breath.

Green. I’m good. I pass right through, embezzling what I’m supposed to protect.

The ice here isn’t like ice anywhere else. It doesn’t simply cave and let you carve it up. It resists. It has its own weird autonomy. Sometimes it relaxes itself into a super slippery state with an iridescent tinge and you can’t help but slide backward into a slapstick butt plant. Sometimes it draws itself into tiny ridges, like an infinitesimal mountain range, which guides your skates into grooves and toward one direction or another. Scientists have come to this near-barren planet with kits and pop-up labs, coming up with hypotheses that ultimately get disproven. From the local lore, the ice is supposed to have both medicinal properties and be a source of bad luck—causing breakups, miscarriages, gambling downturns, and other misfortunes. That’s why they pay me top dollar to pose as a security guard here. Superstition has driven up my salary. Though, there’s something else going on and my other paycheck is the one that covers the objective of figuring out what it is.

I steal back in on the day it’s closed. All my leads on the uniqueness of the ice have led me nowhere. I’ve only entrusted the ice to the underground scientists that swing by the bazaar who I have personally worked with and whose families I’ve met—with enough integrity to not double-cross me and with just enough unscrupulousness to wave away small infractions. I ferry the ice specimens back after they do the tests, purifying them again for reentry. I don’t know who the big boss is. All I know is that it’s for science. That’s enough for me.

I see a streak on the ice and for a moment, I stay still. I realize it’s just a stray reflection of a faraway light, a trick of the eye. It reminds me of Haolai’s farewell holo—the one of his stillness being ejected into the distance. I need to earn to pay off my son’s funeral still. The costs are staggering. Shooting a kid into space as his final wish is more expensive than a colony wedding. I didn’t want his face haunting me, his eyes imploring, accusing, for not giving him his dying wish. So, there it is. His frozen body is out there somewhere—if the projections are right—orbiting around the sun near the Sunaba belt. I make it past the streak, no longer spooked by it.

My suit is armed with camouflaging and mule-ferrying tech more than ten times my own value. Usually only the most exquisite drugs line these pockets. Although in my case, it’s operatic ice encased in swank marbles. I’m banking on a big discovery, one that will get me paid so much cred it’ll be a joke.

Steal only when everyone’s watching, but while no one’s actually looking. I’m breaking that word of advice now by coming here in the dark. This is when bot security is the highest—when the world is still and there is no distraction and no cover. Yet, I can’t help it. It was too hard to meet my quota during the day. I get low and creep around the periphery of the frozen crater lake, finding the spots least likely to sing. I turn off my mind from the job and let my body take over. It knows the spots of variation on the ice. I’ve passed by so many times in the last two weeks, taking intel, processing through my limbs and into the depths of my suit. I crawl along, finding a less traversed area of the amoebic borders of the lake rink, and careful as I can, crack the pricey minicoolers over and massage the ice back into place.

I can feel the strange coolness even through my gloves. It reminds me of when I used to massage shampoo into Haolai’s hair, when he was a little boy. He’d smile at me an innocent smile—all baby teeth and pure enthusiasm as he popped suds. And now—that look of fear. Even more potent than the sorry-Mom-I’ve-done-something-wrong expression. Except, well, it’s not him. I’ve searched everywhere for the Haolai-look-alike and it has gotten me nowhere. Not at the bazaar. Not at the shanties. I can still see his expression of surprise then despair. I know it’s not Haolai, but still, I want to find the boy. This doppelgänger’s anomalous appearance and disappearance has gotten me agitated and the only way to clear my head is to put myself on a mission. Too bad it’s occupational suicide.

I’m just taking a stroll, clearing my head, I tell myself, as I’m on all fours, trying to float across the ice, hoping my negation tech will hold up. They want samples from all areas of the ice—I’d have to traverse to the far edge. Luckily, the ice is cooperating; not melting at the surface, not forming ripples.

A light approaches, flicks on in the distance, and I gasp lightly. It bobs along the strange changing color of the ice. It’s not the streak from before—this is a lot more—moving. More than what I’ve seen ice do. Sounds follow it. Some of the ethereal sounds when skates glide over it. And something else. Something more . . . human. Mumbling. My heart thumps as it approaches.

Be as small as possible. They won’t see you.

“Yunhe, is that you?” The familiar voice cuts into my harried breaths. It’s Dran.

I start. Should I respond or try escaping? I consider how I wouldn’t hesitate to tackle a trespasser and I’m sure Dran wouldn’t either. He’s faster than I am. I look up at him through my helmet. “Yeah, hi,” I say, the holotranslator off.

“Funny I’d find you here. I’m guessing you couldn’t sleep, too,” he said. “We shouldn’t be here, though. I put a temporary stop on the watchers when I saw it was you. Overrode it with my code.” He gives me a funny expression, a kind of half-squint, before reaching out to help me up.

I shake off shreds of ice. “Yeah, well, couldn’t sleep and thought I’d do some reconnaissance.”

“It is a nice quiet spot to do some thinking,” he says. Now I see him looking me up and down, standard procedure for checking pockets, visually locating any suspicious items. “You know, Yunhe, I don’t have you pegged as someone who would be involved in anything too . . . risky.” He waits for me to say something. I just look at him. He continues. “I was in fact hoping to meet you here. I found some strange materials I wanted you to review. About a corp—”

He gags then, and I hear a sudden burst almost a bit too late, as if my mind has suddenly realized it heard it. A chill travels up my spine as I see what has happened. An arrow has pierced his collarbone. I reach out for him as he falls, face forward, and I’m afraid he’ll crack his skull. He crumbles in the arms I hold out. It’s a harpoon. I follow the harpoon’s trajectory. It came from the west, where the sun had set hours ago, and the thing’s now pulling him, dragging him along a thin line, like a harpoon that had caught a whale. There’s a blood trail lining the ice and it’s darker than dark.

There’s no way this can happen. The grid keeps all the flying things out. How . . . ?

I don’t try to tug too hard to keep him back. I don’t want him to split open after all. I frantically look for something that I can use to saw—I pop out the blade of one of my skates, and it flies up for a moment like an ejected meal bar from the grill-popper. I run after the rope and saw a few pulls, but the rope’s much too strong and goes taut just as I descend on it.

A roaring comes from something unseen. I can’t cover my ears since I’m working on the rope.

I tug on the rope, trying to hold back the pull. I grunt. It’s tough. It’s like fighting an extremely aggressive Lonsar bull or some other Center monster. Dran groans this insidious sound, something that’s both squeaky and deep at once, like a child stuck in a well, the voice reflecting off surrounding bricks. It reminds me of those old legends my mom used to tell me about the Center—wells, waterways, and dangers. I’m sawing and sawing and the rope won’t come off. Meanwhile, I’m being dragged alongside him with the harpoon still stuck at his collarbone, and there’s blood. I give up and run after him, spraying him with remi-glu. I tear off loose fabric using my skate and try to bandage him. Sweat trails down my back in my suit and I’m hyper-focused but also hyper-anxious, wondering who the hell was pulling my partner like he was a fine supper catch.

I hear a whoosh in the air—above the constant roaring of what sounds like a shielded atmocopter—and for a moment I think I smell burning metal. Another harpoon comes and hits the ice, just grazing my suited arm. I curse, shout, and try pulling it off. I can feel the heat of it even through my thermagloves. I’m not sure what’s worse, the harpoon in Dran or the harpoon in the ice. What to tackle first? I’m starting to panic, overthink.

Maybe Dran would be the easy choice, but now there’s going to be a huge crack in this lake that’ll be tough to fix. It’s not just a small sample. It’s a major rip. Besides, there’s a whole protocol for samples that even I follow in my covert jobs. You can’t just storm away with some of the specimens. Scientists even have to go through a rigorous check before harvesting any ice.

I breathe deep. I decide on Dran.

I remember that I had stashed away the redhead smuggler’s blade the other day and dig into my pocket. There it is. It’s small, but slickin’ sharp, and for a moment my arm aches in a phantom memory of the swift cut. It makes a grinding sound as I stick it through the unforgiving rope, and it cuts neat. Dran’s groaning, with the harpoon still lodged in him, and I spray half his body with remi-glu until he’s stuck onto the slick ice like prey for a giant Center spider. Smells as bad as one, too.

I shake the can. Half empty. Getting the remi-glu to stick to the ice isn’t an easy task. This ice is as elusive texture-wise as it is color-wise in its iridescent gleam.

The other harpoon is now scraping the ice, trying to break off a large chunk of it. It really needs to do more damage than that. I wonder how many of these harpoons are out there as I reattach my ice skating blades and glide over. I use the knife to cut, but the harpoon releases before I can get a full cut. Good. At least it hasn’t taken a block of ice with it.

It’s coming back again in full velocity. Straight at me. Oh crap.

I detach the removable ice skate blade, place the knife on it, quickly spray remi-glu, and chuck it toward the rope with a heft I learned from Center sports. The blade makes a grand curve like a boomerang and it slices through the rope. I duck as the loose harpoon flies past me and sticks in the ice. A bit of rope dangles from it, no longer tied to the ship. The makeshift boomerang strikes the ice with a soft pang near it.

There is a sound of fading, of that roaring moving away, and I see a streak in the distance that I assume is the camouflaged atmocopter ship zooming off. They usually don’t last long since they require so much power to operate.

I grab the knife, covertly gather some ice crystals dislodged by the harpoon, and shovel them into my high-tech storage capsules away from Dran’s vantage point. Besides, he’s still groaning, lying still on the surface about ten meters away. The ice around the harpoon is acting strange, stranger than usual, not simply iridescent but undulating ever so slightly in a sapphire tinge.

I try to remove the harpoon and I imagine it to be hefty—yet, in one swoop, it dislodges. It’s surprisingly light. I hear a loud moan from Dran again and I throw the harpoon over my shoulder, holding it by the hanging bit of rope, careful it doesn’t cut me. I go over to Dran and cut him off the ice, which is starting to shimmer under his weight. There’s something going on there, too. I spray him with more remi-glu for good measure, until he looks like he’s sporting a giant puffball at his shoulder, and drag both him and the harpoon. There’s a trembling in my feet as I skate with one foot, the other skate blade still pressed up against my waist in my utility belt. It’s like skateboarding, but it’s wobbly. The ice behind me is shimmering, almost shivering—there is something very fluid about the solid tonight.

I pull him to the side and call over an off-network vehicle. I keep a lookout for any disturbances in the sky, any strange roaring sounds that might be a refueled atmocopter returning.

Nothing.

Dran sleeps like a log on my futon in main room. Coffee wafts in from the kitchen as I’m staring at the harpoon, parked against the table, its sharp tooth digging into my rug.

I don’t disturb his wound—the remi-glu has taken care of the antiseptic and all. Dran still looks a little pale, his usually tough jaw looking gaunt, overshadowed, and ragged, and like he needs some food. I have a lot of questions for him and—

“What—what—where am I?” He rolls off the futon and I kick the harpoon aside before he knocks it over and impales himself with it.

“So, you let them in,” I say, holding up the harpoon. There’s an insignia of a phoenix with a spiral tail ending in a wispy flame.

“I didn’t let them in,” he groans. His eyes flicker and he registers me and his surroundings. It’s pretty empty and run down—the last tenant tore up the floors and walls. “Nice apartment,” he says in a tease before lapsing into a hoarse cough. “Ah, my headache.”

I don’t feel too good myself. My cut still throbs, and my mind had wandered, reeling, while watching over Dran. I suspect the point of that harpoon was dipped in something hallucinogenic.

I push over a bowl of oatmeal and Dran sits up. He gives it a look, grimaces, says a thanks, and takes the longest time I’ve ever seen someone take to put a spoon into their mouth.

“They blackmailed me,” he says, chewing. “Then tried to kill me when they realized I targeted the security systems for the energy drain. Probably would’ve killed me.”

“Blackmailed?”

“Said they had my daughter down in Center. It was a lie, but I didn’t know it at the time. They had pretty convincing voice clips. I couldn’t risk it.” He flips up his wrist-hatch, lips moving as he reads. “She’s alarmed, but fine.”

“DNA-verified comms message?”

“Yes, of course, verified as a communication from her.”

“Which mob is this?” I ask, pointing at the phoenix. Its beak is razor sharp, much like the harpoon itself.

“Burnaways. They just provided some private info on my daughter and told me to let them in if I wanted to see her safe. They weren’t supposed to notice the energy drain of their atmocopter at the lake until it was too late. Something must have tipped them off to do a check.”

I scan the logo and run a classified search. It wouldn’t blip up on the system, but I’d get my results.

I look up. Dran looks expectant, waiting for me to say something. I keep silent, letting the scan run. Lots of similar logos in the systems sphere.

“You,” he says. “Your presence tipped them off that something wasn’t right. I certainly didn’t plan that. How did you know?”

“I was looking for something. There was something about the smuggler that bothered me,” I say, my response prepared. “How did she get in there with that tech anyway?”

“You know the scan in isn’t as robust as the scan out. It happens.”

“Something just seems off.” Haolai. The redheaded smuggler. There’s something I’m missing.

I look at Dran long and hard. The phoenix logo scan beeps with results. It shows some matching industries and faces, including one that looks uncannily like Dran’s.

I pick up the harpoon and point it at him.

“I knew there was something off. I didn’t see Haolai leave the rink the other day.”

“Haolai?”

“My son.”

“Oh, right. The dead one. You’ve mentioned him. Why would he be on the rink?”

“His face was. So, you know about my son. Then, you really are Dran.”

“Of course I am. Stop being ridiculous.” He puts his hand on the table and tries pulling himself up, but releases with a thud, clutching his shoulder, his face scrunched in pain.

“When you grimace, the paste lines are there.”

“The what?”

“The paste lines. The brand-new face ripping tech. I get it. I didn’t think it had already been perfected. I didn’t think we had the equipment. I can see it now. You’re not Dran. And that wasn’t Haolai.”

“Look, Yunhe, I think you’ve had too long of a day.”

I pick up the harpoon and put it right up to his face. He shirks back. Too late—for a moment, the skin lifts up.

“Who are you under there?” I croak, still hardly believing it myself.

The skin billows about, revealing a chiseled chin and thin lips.

“Look, I’ve been Dran for just about as long as you’ve known me.”

“Which is only a few months.”

“Yes, granted, but Dran was gone from day one. There never really was a Dran. Just an ID. Someone whose face was appropriated . . . ”

“Harvested,” I whisper.

“Yes, taken, and used. Bad luck he had compatible DNA with the tech. Now there are Drans all over the colonies. Not just here. So, I’ve been Dran, because it’s a safe, easy ID. I’m just trying to survive.”

“By just trying to survive, you mean leading those guys in?”

“I had no choice. They found out my real ID, threatened my kid. My daughter, for ice-sakes. Besides, I wouldn’t talk if I were you. Who are you working for?”

In this stark world, everyone owed everyone else something. We were always the dregs, the ones on the bottom, scrambling to persist. To exist. Everyone. Even the scientists who fare a little better are held accountable to a bigger fish.

I shove my tip closer to his face, causing the skin to flare up even higher and uncover a piercing hazel eye. It shone almost as fiercely as the ice of iridescent lake.

“Biotech. Interesting. It responds almost simultaneously. Must be paired.” I lay the tip of the harpoon there, waiting.

“Dodging the question, I see,” he says. His skin continues to swell and flare up from the harpoon contact, and he’s giving me a righteous look.

I jab him lightly on the shoulder with the sharp tip and he squeals an “ow.”

“I’m not working for anyone. I’m, uh, what you call freelance.”

“I’ve seen you scouring the ice. You’re looking for something. Probably have scraped stuff, just like everyone else tries to.” He grabs a book, an old relic and luxury from the Center about the ice mom and child myth, and throws it at my face. I parry it aside as he jumps back against the wall. I lodge the harpoon into the wall and pull it out, with pounded regolith dust billowing about. For a moment the dust disorients me, and he runs to another side of the room, picking up my old tethering suit, whipping its arm at me.

“Not much of a weapon.”

“It’s flappy and difficult to cut through. A perfect defensive tool.”

I run the harpoon through it like a rag doll and throw it backward. Too bad. That was my favorite and only tethering suit. Some good memories.

He holds his hands up. “I don’t want to fight you. I just want to get out of here. Everyone’s trying to kill each other on this slippin’ piece of rock, and I just want to make it alive to see my family and meanwhile make enough dough to feed ’em. Look—I know what they’re all looking for. I know you’re working on getting the materials, too. If not for the Burnaways, then for someone else. I made a calculation and Central would eviscerate me faster than the Burnaways for giving away the codes for them to harvest ice.”

“Yeah, they would,” I say, feeling a bit queasy about that. So many violations not yet to my name. Let’s keep it that way.

“Well I needed the time to contact my daughter, make sure she was really okay. My faceplant wasn’t from them—it was a job done long ago so I could provide for my family. It’s on a loan, and I’m still paying that back. I need this job, if I still have it. I suspected, and still do, that you have someone that has you . . . ” He points at my eviscerated tethering suit in the corner. “ . . . tethered.”

“So, that’s why you never harvested the ice yourself to sell to jewelers.”

Dran laughs. It’s an ugly sound, full of wheezing. He’s still hurting. “You don’t know. Isn’t that why they’re in your pocket? I thought you knew. It’s not really the jewelers. It’s cosmetics.”

My stomach does a flip. I suspected, but I never really knew.

I’m not sure if I want to know who I’m helping. I always thought it was for gem lords or the drug industry, I mumble, mostly to myself. Dran responds.

“Yes, it is the drug industry. The cosmetic industry. Face transplants. They’re trying to find biomatter in the ice.”

“No, there isn’t any. We’ve done extensive testing . . . ” I trail off, realizing that I incriminated myself with we, grouping myself with the scientists.

“It’s there. Preliminary scans show it. The ice is alive. It’s hiding its DNA patterns. But, it must be there. They’re using it to enhance the breadth of face transplant options. That’s what I’ve gathered from the little conversation I’ve had with the Burnaways.”

The Burnaways. I think about my son’s face. Haolai. Burned off when I got him back. I remember what the classified search of the logo scan revealed. Phoenixes—new life. Sure, they may have brought people new lives with new IDs, but only from burning the old. They’d harvested Haolai, left him dead. They needed not just a DNA sample. They needed an Extraction. A fatal facial and fluids Extraction. Typical procedure. He didn’t tell me that when he signed away his life. He didn’t tell me that when he was running, when they poached him. He probably didn’t know. Who in their right mind would sign away their life? It was a dirty lie by the Burnaways, an unconscionable trick. Filthy . . .

“I think what they’re doing now is trying to find the magic solution that would bind with the tech to alter any type of DNA so it becomes a burnable face match. Not just from a particular type of DNA that sticks, but all kinds. This way, they can harvest all sorts of face types. They would have more to sell . . . ”

He says this almost in regret. “I’m sorry.”

“Why would I let you go?” I ask. “Give me one reason not to turn you in.”

“Because you’re involved. And you’re curious. We can keep our jobs if we can catch them in the act. If we stick it to them, we might just win. We have to bank that the Guard will prosecute, that the Burnaways’ reach isn’t too deep.”

“And what if it is?”

“My gut says it’s not. Yunhe, I know how to stop them. Don’t you want to try?”

I don’t know why I trust him. Dran, this Dran, as it turns out, has always had my back for the three brutal months I’ve been on this planet. We’ve worked side by side day after day. It’s not long, but when all you got is a colleague, then well, I figure he’s the best ally I’ve got. Besides, the ice is ruined thus far and we could both be fired, but if we can frame this as the crime it was, and highlight our successful attempt to thwart it and contain the threat, then maybe we can escape penalization and keep our jobs. That’s all we want. To survive.

It occurs to me I’ll never get the monetary payoff I expected from my contraband ice. I only engaged in it blindly, never suspected that the science I was helping was the same science that facilitated the killing of my son. Face harvesting. No, I would not make it more widespread.

I’m ambivalent about Dran and his fake face. Half of me wants to rip the thing off with the tuned harpoon. Reveal his secrets. The other half believes him—that he has a family, that what was done was done and it’s time to think of how to stop people from committing this heinous crime.

A moral impasse. Who to believe?

Dran knows a lot more than he says. He’s good at that. I make him peel off his face for me—as a gesture of trust. I have the harpoon up against his forehead. His face responds in turn.

His eyes are asymmetrical, one’s wide-eyed and golden, the other shrunken. He’s also got a scar across his cheek. “Another reason for me to stay under wraps,” he says, grinning.

I tell him to keep his wrapping face, his faceplant for now. At least then I won’t have to be constantly rattled by his unnerving look. Though, I admit, there is something vulnerable about it, something that asks to be accepted.

Dran replies that he has to keep his face anyway, for ID purposes. Right, there’s that.

“Besides, I need it to take the Burnaways down.”

“Take Burnaways down, huh? You have something in mind to make that happen?”

“Are you in? Because, I’ll show you. We’ll need a plan though.”

We ride in the dark in one of the off-network clandestine jalopies. It’s cheap and uncomfortable, but best of all, it won’t leave a trace. No one can hack it and tell you where we’ve been. It’s great business here on this mostly barren land.

We approach the great expanse of the lake. It’s iridescent and shimmering as ever and the security has been upgraded—the algorithms must have picked up on the breach and updated it, washing away human foul as it always does: blood, vomit, pee. Lots of people get sick on the ice and release strange fluids from their suits. The AIs process this stuff. These things get done automatically, but soon the security uppers will learn about the atypical incident during the weekly briefing. We have a few days before it all gets unraveled.

We don’t target the iridescent lake exactly. No, we stop and drive west another hundred meters. I see nothing, just rocks and craters. Dran puts the car on hold and we jump off. I scan with my security-grade detector. Nothing. I’m carrying my newfound weapon of choice for good measure: the harpoon, wrapped up in a shiny plasticine cloth.

Dran’s on his hands and knees, hunting, sometimes looking up.

He points at the harpoon and I use it to dig. He does the same with a small shovel. The rock is hard, but Dran has brought chemical sprays to loosen the rock under the regolith. We dig and dig and there’s the smallest line. Just a tiny, flaccid pipe. It leads two ways.

One goes into a vestibule that we unearth. The other seems to go on forever, toward the lake.

I realize that this is it—there’s been a constant microdrainage of the lake. The whole time I’ve been standing on the surface, guarding it, while also nipping away at its crust, there was a whole other dimension I wasn’t protecting (or nabbing from).

“They melt the ice under the lake. They get these nanos to worm under and commence melting and it feeds into these pipes. Very, very expensive tech. They have to be really careful about it because a micro too much would trigger the security defenses. So, they just take the smallest bit at a time.”

I can’t believe they went through so much trouble just to nab a little ice, not even a trickle, just this tiny bit. But it does go for quite a hefty price on the market.

Dran takes some evidence. He snaps holomedia with a small recording device.

“The ice is agitated. It’s why it’s been acting erratically. There’s a balance to it all. The iridescence recently has been kind of changing color.”

Dran’s snapping a photo of the vestibule, a container even smaller than the harpoon, when I hear a loud whirring sound above. The atmocopter.

I see the harpoon is glowing, sensing its presence. The phoenix logo fills in with fluorescence. I groan. Great, now we’re really visible.

I hear two thumps on the ground and then I see them. The Haolai doppelganger and the female smuggler. The one who I slipped several minimarbles to. My heart sinks. I thought my goodwill would appease her, but—

It’s not her. Same eyes, same pursed lips. Her body’s different though. Bigger, chunkier. Face harvests, I remind myself. Her hair, still red, isn’t quite as bright as before.

I find it incredibly tough to be combatting someone who looks like my dead son, but I pull out my makeshift skate-knife-boomerang and chuck it at them. My hit misses fake Haolai and grazes the female outlaw of the pair.

She surprises me with her athleticism. Her jumps are swift, which you wouldn’t be able to tell from her stocky body shape. She leaps to grab me, and I dodge. I run.

Meanwhile, Dran’s on this version of Haolai—using a shovel as a weapon to swing at him.

I hear a bam and whoosh and a beeping. As I interpret the series of beeps, I realize that they had tracked us through the harpoon. Why didn’t I think of that? Of course, a homing device.

Well, too late. As I swing the harpoon the woman catches up to me. I see her fake eyes widen as I leap up—so used to my tricks on the ice—and come down at her with the full might of the harpoon right onto the weak point of her helmet.

She crumbles. The helmet visor goes completely clear. Her red hair’s splayed all over her face. She’s moaning and then silent. Knocked out. I check her vitals from her helmet, which still works despite the impact. She’s still breathing. Good. She’s probably street scum . . . like me. Wouldn’t want her dead.

All that’s left is Haolai. I can’t deal with him. I can’t confront him. For a second, I step back, thinking I’ll just run away while I can. Everything is wrong. He, the real he, should be alive, and instead there are so many phantoms of him running around.

Then I see this fake Haolai knock Dran in the solar plexus. Dran is keeled over, adjusting his helmet, and the fake Haolai delivers a punt, sending Dran flying. He lands with a thud. I don’t want to know what he’s cracked in that body of his.

I take the harpoon and grab the ice vestibule that we unearthed. That precious payload. The skin of the vestibule is firm, keeping the ice at a steady frozen state, though I do see the contents shifting slightly. The collected amount is the size of a head. I can’t believe, that through a series of tiny collections, they’re able to add up to that much. It must have been an ongoing project.

Fake Haolai sees me and he’s looking at Dran, then to me, making the calculation. I wave the vestibule to goad him. Yes, of course the vestibule is worth more than finishing off Dran—no matter how much he punched you. Come and get it.

I’m about to head out on the ice and he’s following me. I cut through the checkpoint, bypassing the inspections with my in-knowledge and slip on two blades over my boots to form skates—thank the slickness for keeping spare blades on me at all times.

I skate out to the middle of the lake and let the vestibule roll. It’s a risk, but I’m low on options. He chases it. It gives me enough time to grab incriminating media from Dran’s device and upload the media to the surveillance team—this time skipping the AI algorithms and going direct to Central.

I throw my makeshift boomerang again and it misses fake Haolai, but it just taps the vestibule in the right way, nudging it toward me on the slick ice. Just as I intended. The ice seems to be rooting for me, pushing it my way in ripples.

I’m faster than fake Haolai on ice. The ice is in tune with me, perhaps expecting a happy reunion with its brethren, its own missing part. I break the vestibule with the harpoon, and it spills out crystals, which melt and conform with the ice. I’ve never seen the lake do that—just kind of pull in more of itself like it just did.

Fake Haolai catches me unguarded and slams into me. The wind’s knocked out of me and I cough. I regain my senses, recover my footing, and send some blade-loaded kicks his way. He’s distracted and I knock him a good one on the arm.

A net lands on top of him and he yelps. Behind me, I see a holotranslation floating in the air. “That’ll keep you from slipping away.”

It’s Dran, doubled over in pain, sprawled on the ice, still somehow waving at me. I spray fake Haolai down with the rest of the remi-glu until we can get the security here. I crinkle my nose as the pungent goop works its charm.

I don’t feel bad about my small acts of ice smuggling because while a part of my covert operation was to ferry ice out, I was always careful to make it a point to ferry the samples back onto the lake. I never facilitated a net loss of ice, just let some out for research for a while. That was the deal, and maybe it’s unusual but the promises were always kept.

Now that they’ve taken fake Haolai and the redhead into custody, and there’s a larger syndicate unraveling, I can say that I’m happy that they’re impeding the further advancement of these ID-slip masks. They never got the biomatter that they suspected would help bind more DNA to masks. The biomatter of the iridescent ice would continue to elude them.

The lake’s sneaky like that.

Dran has shed his own mask—he’s now back to his old face and allowed to keep it in public through some forgiveness program. All his petty crimes have been outed. I’ve been promoted and have access to the collection of small confiscated things—like gloves, ice skates, and key fobs. My past infringements never got aired out. My luck, I guess. The harpoon, I had to turn in to a higher security facility in the Center.

After much hunting, I found the special hover vehicle that a certain key fob opens. The one that the first fake Haolai I met must have driven. It’s abandoned in the refuse zone, and no one’s bothered to check it out.

Inside, it’s dark and the lights don’t work. It smells dank and strangely musky. I shine a light in. I see Haolai’s face draped over one of the seats. It’s still fresh, not yet out so long that it’s decayed. It looks so uncanny, saggy, and lifeless, yet very much Haolai, with some translucent material at the eyes.

“One day, maybe I’ll find your orbiting body,” I say, plying the face from the headrest, cradling it in my fist. “I’ll get enough money to lasso it and I can get you complete. Your face won’t be burned away after all. You won’t be a blank. You’ll have a face after all, an expression, with features. As meaningful and expressive as the ice of the iridescent lake.”

I look into these translucent eyes, this phantom of his, pulling out star charts to calculate when it will be that I can complete him. I roll up and store his face in one of my extra contraband minimarbles, which glistens with this package, illuminating with a flare as bright as iridescent ice and fading to a glow in my pocket.

About the Author

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

She can be found on Twitter: @spireswriter.

How Long the Shadows Cast

Kenji Yanagawa

I found her asleep on my doorstep on a wet June night in Tokyo, in the drizzle of tsuyu, the season of plum rains. It was two thirty in the morning, and I was on my way out for a drink to help with the insomnia I’d had since returning to Earth five days earlier. I almost stepped on her, huddled as she was near the front door on the cramped porch.

The doorstep was dark, but the lamps of neighboring buildings shed enough light to reveal a shadowy figure under the overhang, just out of the rain. For an instant I thought someone had left a package on the porch. The flat belonged to the research project, on loan to me for my two months on Earth. Unexpected deliveries were certainly possible. But when I realized the dark form in front of me was a sleeping woman, my curiosity turned to envy. She slept in a seated position, arms and head resting on her knees. It irked me that this woman could sleep so easily in such an uncomfortable position while I had lain awake for hours in my comfortable bed. I bent down and shook her roughly, and she woke with a start.

She rolled her sleepy head up and around to look at me, hair cascading off her face like rumpled black silk drawn slowly off a pale and delicate statuette. “Oh, I must have fallen asleep,” she said matter-of-factly.

Her voice was gravelly but melodic, words slightly slurred as though she’d been drinking. I bent down to get a closer look and smelled peony flowers and a touch of alcohol. Even in the dim light she did not look like the type of person who slept on the street. Her face was clean and smooth despite the pressure mark her knee had left on her forehead, and her stylish suit fit neatly on her trim but healthy frame. Her eyes, though drowsy, were clear and intelligent. They were dark, so dark there was something unworldly about them, unlike any eyes I had ever seen. And yet somehow familiar. The thought disturbed me, and I shuddered and frowned.

“No need to look disgusted,” she said, straightening her back and thrusting her face up at mine to stare into my eyes. I backed up, and she laughed, not a laugh like bells or music, but deep and full of humor. “Oh, I’ve frightened you.” She lifted her hands and rubbed her eyes with long and delicate fingers. “Forgive me. I’m sleepy and a bit tipsy.”

I didn’t know what to make of her. She behaved as though sleeping on my doorstep was not strange at all. Had Earth changed so much in the twenty-five years I had been away? Or was she in fact homeless?

“Don’t you have a home?” I asked.

She laughed again, then stretched her arms up, then out to her sides. “Of course I have a home. That’s why I’m sleeping on your doorstep.”

I must have frowned, because she paused and rolled her eyes.

“Otherwise I’d be sleeping at the station, underground, out of the rain. See?”

I shook my head and let her explain it to me. She’d been drinking late in Ikebukuro, she said, and couldn’t find a cab at that hour, so she decided to walk home. When the drizzle had turned into a downpour, she’d found shelter at the only flat on the block with an overhang. She must have fallen asleep listening to the rain. It was easy to believe her. There was no reason not to. My flat had a comfortable porch while the other buildings on the block were impersonal housing complexes with seamless fronts. The subway system would have shut down over an hour ago, and hover cabs were always hard to come by late night in the city.

“You’re lucky you live in Mejiro,” she said. “So close to Ikebukuro.” My eyes had adjusted to the dim light, and I could see her better. She looked younger than I, perhaps thirty, a handsome woman with high cheekbones and clear skin.

“With people dropping by for midnight naps, I suppose I never want for company.”

“No, no. I mean the convenience.” She stood up and brushed the dust from her pants seat. “You can go to Ikebukuro any time and never worry about finding a cab.”

“True,” I said. “I was on my way there before I stumbled on you.” I considered asking her to join me for a drink but decided against it. The company of women interested me little since Seiko died. “Much as I’ve enjoyed our chat, I believe there’s a shot of Harper’s waiting for me.”

“Oh, don’t let me stop you,” she said and bent to pick up a shopping bag. “I’ll just gather my things and be gone.”

“You’re welcome to go back to sleep.” I nodded toward the ground. “No one else will bother you.”

“You’re very generous.” There was a touch of irony in her voice and in her smile. “But I’d like to get back to my own bed.”

She stepped to the front of the porch and looked up at the drizzly sky.

“Wait. Let me give you this.” I slapped the door control and stepped inside to get a weathered umbrella from the stand. “You can keep it. It’s not mine.” I stepped back out and handed it to her.

She didn’t take it at first, but I insisted, and she finally accepted it.

“Goodbye,” I said while she buttoned her coat and hummed softly to herself.

“Goodbye,” she said.

I pulled up the collar of my tattered London Fog and head in the direction of Ikebukuro. Behind me I could hear the woman humming an old Billie Holiday tune I hadn’t heard in years, “Body and Soul,” I think it was called.

There was something about this woman I couldn’t pinpoint. I was certain we had never met before. Time dilation made it unlikely. The last time I’d been on Earth was twenty-five Earth years ago. She’d have been a child then, and I had little contact with children then or now. I shook my head to clear it, and my mind turned instead to the weather.

Tokyo’s powdery rain did not fall so much as float, swirling wildly in the pockets of air and tiny gusts of wind, and the dampness invaded my clothes and condensed on my hair and in the cracks on my chapped hands. I’d been back on Earth only five days, and it already depressed me, accustomed as I was to the sterility of space. It made me uncomfortable to be surrounded by moisture.

I rubbed my fingertips together, feeling the dampness. I thought of decay and a moss-covered headstone, and a chill ran up my spine. In the vast emptiness of space, I could forget, but not here. Earth was haunted, and I should not have come back. Even my supervisor had urged me to stay on Titan station until the expedition was ready to leave, but a strange gravity had pulled me here.

I neared Ikebukuro, and it struck me again how Tokyo had changed in the five years I had been away. The unfamiliarity was comforting, and I was glad that light speed travel played tricks with time. The city had been unbearable when every café, restaurant, and bar reminded me of Seiko. Now it was not so bad. Five years for me had been twenty-five for Earth, and rows of sleek new structures now protected me from the ghosts and memories that had haunted the old buildings I had known. How long before all the haunted buildings of my youth would be torn down, rendered, and reborn as something new? It didn’t matter, really, I would be gone before they were.

I rounded the corner of Guriin Street, where high school punks in uniform drank and brawled on the spacious steps of the old Mitsubishi Bank. Above them neon billboards and streetlamps popped, fizzled, and danced crazy messages in Japanese, English, Portuguese, and so many other languages that even a linguist could not recognize them all. A smattering of billboards were decorated with Dubhean, the alien language I had spent the last twelve years studying. Nonsense phrases, they graced the signs for decoration only, a testimony to the excitement generated by the announcement of the expedition to Dubhe.

In the distance my ears picked out the familiar and unwelcome sound of an ambulance wailing. I thought of Seiko and of accidents and of death. There had been two ambulances on the night she died, though neither could do anything for her once the hover car exploded. She was dead long before the ambulances arrived. I’d called them because I did not know what else to do. And now they would always remind me of her.

By the time I found an open pub, I really needed that drink.

I returned to the flat drunk that morning just before sunrise. I slept until noon and woke with a hangover, my tongue swollen and dry and my mind hazier than the dull light filtering through the drizzly sky. I lay there half an hour, pillow over my eyes, before gently sitting up and surveying the room.

A blinking purple light flashed on the bedside comm, looking horribly bright and casting weird shadows in the dimly lit room. I slapped the purple button, and a sweet voice informed me I had a message, timestamped 4:00 a.m. I sat up and pressed playback. The screen popped on, and my supervisor Yamamoto frowned at me, her eyes puffy with sleep and her gray-streaked hair a little disheveled. There was a half-second pause, then the frozen picture melted and flowed into motion.

“Shunzo, next time you break your drink limit, I’m moving you to Saitama. Call me when you get in or get up.” The message blinked off.

The Ministry of Offworld Development and Exploration backed the project completely, but MODE was notoriously stingy. Yamamoto had worked hard to secure me the large flat in Mejiro while the smaller one in Saitama was empty. Saitama was too far from MODE resources, I’d insisted. But mainly it was too far from a decent late-night pub.

I went to the bathroom, washed my face, and stared absently in the mirror for a moment at the scarred skin of my left shoulder and forearm before throwing on a shirt. Then I sat down at my desk, downed a can of Marina Calm anti-hangover isotonic, and called Yamamoto.

She answered on the second ring. “Ah, Urashima Tarō!” she joked. I winced at the sharpness in her voice. “How’s your hangover?” On the wall behind her I could make out a holomap of the stars around Dubhe and on the table by her right elbow the translation of the Dubhean manual I had sent her three days before.

I ignored the question and nodded at the translation. “How do you like it?”

“Shun, you were never much of a drinker, so why these late-night battles with the bottle?”

MODE was clearly monitoring my bank card.

“I’m celebrating my return to Earth.”

“Bullshit. Two nights, maybe. Five, no. Certainly not for you.” She grabbed a blue folder off the corner of her desk and shook it at me. Paper would never go out of fashion in Japan, it seemed. “Your tests show an aversion to Earth unmatched by anyone on the project. I doubt you find anything here worth celebrating.”

I didn’t respond right away, so she continued.

“I let you visit Earth because you were the most dedicated member of the project. I was positive you could handle two months here without jeopardizing that spot. Maybe I was wrong.” She dropped the blue folder back on her desk.

“I’m the best linguist you’ve got.”

“For now. But a lot can happen in two months, and I won’t hesitate to replace you if I must.”

“Okay, boss. I hear you loud and clear. Anything else?”

“Yes. The Dubhean grammar. That’ll be your test. If you can’t give me a quality draft in six weeks, you can hand in your resignation.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“I’m dead serious.”

I started to protest, but she cut me off.

“I don’t want to hear it, Shun.”

I brooded a moment. I was not afraid I would fail the test; even with the drinking and the insomnia, I could finish the grammar. But the principle was insulting. It was bad enough Yamamoto thought the test necessary, but that she’d made the test easy meant she expected me to get worse before I got better.

“Thanks for your confidence.” I said.

“Goodbye.” She hung up, and her image clicked off, leaving me alone in the dim flat. I fiddled with the house lighting, adjusting the tinting of the windows to make the room brighter but not too bright, then went to the kitchen for another Marina Calm before hopping into the shower.

I thought about the upcoming expedition and the events that led me to it. Thirty-two years ago, twelve for me, a United Mining ship near Procyon had stumbled upon the alien vessel, man’s first contact. There hadn’t been much left to it, just a debris field of indistinct molten shards of metal. But at the edge of the field they found a capsule filled with polymer sheets marked with what appeared to be writing. I was just entering graduate studies in linguistics at the time my adviser cracked enough of the code to learn that the molten shards had been a ship that originated in the Dubhean system, 105 lightyears away.

I did my graduate work in Dubhean languages, and I excelled despite a certain ambivalence. Space travel intrigued me, and I’d dreamed of earning a trip to Procyon through my studies. But I was also in love with a philosophy student named Seiko. Going to Procyon would mean leaving her behind in both space and time, and this I could not do.

In the folly of my youth I believed we were meant to be together, though at times we seemed thoroughly incompatible. Perhaps this was a source of the strength of the relationship. Superficial differences in values and a fundamental likeness in character had made it both a struggle and an obsession. The similarities were too intriguing, the differences too tempting. We were tied to each other by an invisible force stronger than gravity. So when Seiko died, I was set adrift, and naturally I floated to space.

Not long afterward, MODE announced its intention to send an expedition to Dubhe, an ambitious journey eighty lightyears beyond the most distant offworld outpost. Translation work on the Dubhean texts was going slow but revealed that intelligent life on Dubhe had been dying out, leaving vacant an earth-form planet exceedingly rich in mineral resources and the remnants of technologies far beyond our own. With Seiko dead there was nothing holding me on Earth. I wanted nothing more than to flee my bitter memories on this planet. MODE would need a linguist, I knew, so Dubhean became my life.

I stayed home all day and worked on the grammar. My head hurt, and my thoughts kept drifting to Seiko. I would have to visit her grave, I knew, but I wanted to avoid it as long as I could. I ate little and continued to plug away at the grammar. Around nine I drifted off to sleep.

I slept fitfully and dreamed of Lady Tsuyu Iijima of the Peony Lantern Kabuki Opera in her twelve-layer kimono, singing “Body and Soul.” She danced the slow steps of a Noh above the flaming wreck of a hover car. She turned to face me, and I saw it was Seiko. She sank through the flames and into the car, and the song became a scream. “Don’t leave me,” she cried. The car exploded, and I awoke, head aching.

For an hour I lay in bed trying to get back to sleep but could not. I got up and washed my face. It was two in the morning. I needed a drink.

I threw on slacks and a shirt, got my London Fog from the closet by the front door, and stepped out, half-expecting to find someone sleeping on the porch. There was no one, of course, but when I stepped past the doorway, I noticed what looked like a calling card lying facedown on the street. I bent over to examine it, but the road was too dimly lit to read by. I picked it up, and it nearly tore in my hands. It was real paper, and it had soaked up the rain and was soggy and limp. I stepped back toward the flat, opened the door, and flicked on a light.

The card was a delicate purple, the color of wisteria, with a name printed top to bottom in what might once have been elegant characters, but which were now blotchy from the soaking and just barely readable. Kondo Chiaki. And in the lower left corner were more blotches, a comm number, too blurred to read. I flipped the card over. It was surprisingly dry, and there was a note, written in strong and determined strokes but with a hint of impatience.

“Thanks for the umbrella. It’s old but will keep me dry. I’d like to repay you. Let me take you to lunch—Chiaki.”

Strange woman.

I gently turned the card back over and looked at the blurred numbers. I couldn’t read them and was disappointed, which surprised me. I had cared nothing of women since Seiko’s death. They only reminded me of my loss and my failure.

My friends couldn’t understand the depth of my pain, so I drifted away from them. My family, too. My mother, superstitious as always, tried to console me. You’ll meet again in another life, she’d said, but it was small consolation for the misery I felt in this one. Running away seemed much easier than waiting. I buried myself in Dubhean studies and lived for my dream of traveling to the farthest stars. So, it disturbed me that just as I was about to begin my adventure, I found myself interested in a woman I would never see again.

I stared at the unreadable soggy numbers, then moved to crumple the card and toss it in the rubbish can, changed my mind, and set it on the shoe cabinet next to the genkan, closed the door, and left for Ikebukuro.

The next morning I woke at noon without a hangover. I’d had only three drinks last night and felt good enough to start work without my can of Marina Calm. I worked until three, making steady progress, then called it quits when my stomach began to grumble.

After lunch I retrieved the card from the shoe cabinet and thought about the woman Chiaki. Her frankness intrigued me, as did her clear eyes and fine face. The half-crumpled card was still damp, but no longer soggy. I could just make out the first two numbers, though the others remained blurry, wet ink seeping in a messy stain out from the original written lines. It occurred to me that I might make out the original lines under a manuscript scope. If it showed the direction of seepage, perhaps I could extrapolate the original lines. I shuffled through the desk drawers and found a small polarizing scope and examined the card. After what seemed like hours, I had a number.

I wanted to call her but wasn’t sure I should. I was nervous. I sat down at the comm. She probably wasn’t home at this hour, so I decided it was safe to call and leave a message.

She answered on the third ring. Surprised, I almost hung up when she appeared on the screen. Her hair was tied back, revealing her face to be more angular than I had thought. The effect was striking, and the beauty and balance in her features was upset only by an upper lip that appeared thin against a lower lip so full and seductive.

“Hello, Chiaki speaking.”

“Hi. My name is Shunzo. You fell asleep on my doorstep.” I felt like an ass.

“Oh, I was wondering when you’d call. I thought maybe you didn’t get my note.” She spoke as if we were old acquaintances.

“I didn’t find it until I stepped out for a drink late last night.”

“More late-night shots of Harper?” she asked.

“Early Times. I prefer it when I can find it.”

“Well, remind me to buy you a shot when I take you to lunch.”

“Actually, Ms. Kondo . . . ”

“Chiaki.” She spoke with a hint of exasperation, as though she’d already asked me several times.

“Chiaki, then. You don’t need to buy me lunch.”

“I want to repay you for the umbrella.”

“Don’t worry about it. It was an old umbrella I found in the flat.”

“I’m not worried. I’d just like to buy you lunch. How about tomorrow?”

“I don’t think I can make it. I need to work in the daytime.”

“Dinner then?”

Her forward manner caught me off guard, and I didn’t know how to refuse.

“Okay, dinner,” I said.

“Ikebukuro, tomorrow at six thirty sound okay?”

It was difficult to keep pace with her. I felt exhilarated but didn’t want to appear too eager.

“How about seven?”

“Fine. Meet me at the west exit of Tobu Center, just outside the station.”

“Okay, see you then.” My heart pounded. It was an unfamiliar feeling, and I found it both comforting and frightening.

I spent the rest of the afternoon on my computer, trying to hunt down a copy of Bornitz’s Principles of Ethnoetymology. It took me all day, but I managed to find it and two other titles I needed. I went to sleep early but this time I managed to sleep until morning.

The next day I worked on the grammar, and by late afternoon I was anxious and could hardly wait to leave. I took a long shower and dressed slowly to pass the time. I left the flat with time to spare.

I reached Ikebukuro at a quarter of seven. The district was busy and bright, a carnival scene that cheered me despite the rain. Gliding cabs painted in wild yellow, green, and blue checkers and stripes maneuvered in and out of the west side square. They cruised five-deep off the expressway, dropped down to the cab stands to let off customers, then ascended. Around the square holodisplays shimmered in sparkling storefront display booths, while businessmen rushed toward the station or the bars, and young couples worked their way slowly past vendors who hawked food, jewelry, toys, and pictures along the wide and narrow streets around the station.

I noticed a small band of demonstrators below a billboard decorated with Dubhean. They chanted something I could not make out. Demonstrators were a rarity. A few politicians and activists thought 120 lightyears was too far and that the trip to Dubhe was a waste of resources. Perhaps they had a point. In 250 years who would be around to benefit from our contact with the aliens?

Chiaki was already waiting at Tobu Center when I arrived, wearing a suit of glowing blue jade that contrasted dramatically with her black hair and pale skin. She smiled warmly and stepped out to greet me. It was the first time I’d seen her clearly in person, and I was not disappointed. There was a freshness to her face that had not shown on the comm screen. Her eyes were large, and the clear black irises caught and reflected the red and blue neon lights in a way that was haunting. It felt good to stand next to her.

“Have you been waiting long?” I asked.

“Ages!” She laughed and looked at a slim gold watch on her wrist. “Actually, you’re right on time.”

She guided me to the elevator, and we joked about the unpleasant weather and falling asleep on the doorsteps of strangers. Her sense of humor was ironic with hints of both optimism and sadness. I felt a tinge of regret that I’d be leaving Tokyo so soon.

The top floor of Tobu One held restaurants with glass ceilings and large windows overlooking the city. We chose a steak house called Prime Time. Subdued lights, ancient polished wood, and brass tinted the room the color of honey. An old Steinway stood unused in a corner near the bar, and ancient jazz filled the room. Clocks, watches, and other timepieces covered the walls and filled the half dozen glass cases around the restaurant. Few of the timepieces kept accurate time. Only about half were running, and some even ran backward.

The hostess led us to a tiny table overlooking the west square of Ikebukuro, and we sat under glass, under clouds and rain, and the lights of Tokyo stretched out in the mist below us.

We punched in our orders.

“I was surprised to find your note,” I said.

“It was the least I could do.”

“Perhaps, but strangers don’t often invite me to lunch.”

She crinkled her nose as if I’d said something foolish. “You think I’m bold? You’re the bold one, giving me present, and we’d just met.” She smiled. “Anyway, I had this feeling I knew you from somewhere.”

The comment caught me by surprise.

Our drinks came, a shot of Early Times and a glass of Bordeaux. We sat a moment in silence. Could we have met before? She was young and couldn’t have been more than six when I was last on Earth.

“Have you ever been in space?” I asked.

“No, never.”

“Then I doubt we’ve met.”

“Oh?” she asked.

“Time dilation. I’ve been offworld twenty-five years.”

“I see. Well maybe you were my babysitter once upon a time.”

I laughed, and she winked at me mischievously.

“Unlikely. But tell me, how old are you?”

“See, you are the bold one.” she chided me. “Why do you ask?”

“To see if I was your babysitter,” I winked back at her.

“Fair enough. I’m thirty-one.”

I did a quick calculation. She would have been about one when Seiko died.

“Well?” she asked.

“No. I wasn’t your babysitter.”

“That’s a relief,” she said. We both laughed.

She took a sip of her wine, looked at me with bright eyes over the rim of the glass, then smiled as she returned the glass to the table.

“Perhaps a previous life, then,” she said.

I thought of her age and furrowed my brow. “No. Not that either.”

She cocked her head to the side as though considering my comment. “Well, no matter. I find you interesting all the same. What do you do offworld?”

“I’m a linguist. I study Dubhean.”

“You must envy the members of the expedition then.”

I thought of keeping it from her but could not.

“No, I’m going with them.”

“You’re part of the expedition?” She sounded disappointed but hardly surprised.

I took a deep breath and stared over her shoulder at the city below. “Yes, I am.”

“Any chance you’ll miss the trip or change your mind about going?”

“Seems unlikely.”

“I see,” she said and fell silent. An awkward space opened between us just as the waiter arrived with our dinners.

He looked curiously at us, perhaps surprised by the change in mood, then glanced doubtfully at the two dishes in his hand before setting them down. We ate awhile in silence. I felt terribly, unexpectedly sad.

“But you never know,” I said minutes later and felt guilty for the deception.

She smiled slightly and took another sip from her wine. I finished my whiskey, then flagged the waiter for another round.

“So what do you do when you aren’t crashing people’s doorsteps?”

She brightened at the question. “I’m a researcher, like you. But physics.”

“Ah, a scientist! I should be careful, then.”

“Careful?”

“Beauty and intelligence are a lethal combination.”

She flushed a bit and looked down before looking back up.

“What area?” I asked.

“Electromagnetism mainly, energy pattern repetition over time. And a good deal of cognitive science mixed in.”

“Strange combination.”

“Not really. There are a lot of us looking at this.”

“Really? And what exactly are you looking at?”

“The media likes to embarrass us by saying we study the human soul.”

That caught me off guard.

“You must be joking.”

“Not at all. This is what the media say to embarrass us. Really, we look at the unique electromagnetic patterns associated with individual personalities and how they persist over time,” she started, then launched into an explanation of the connection between specific electromagnetic patterns and human consciousness. She got excited as she talked, her eyes shining in a way that was bewitching. I realized with a mixture of wonder and fear that I was drawn to this woman. Ten years ago I’d been certain it wouldn’t happen again. Loneliness had haunted me for years, but eventually I grew comfortable with my solitude. Now attraction was a burden I would do well without. I was leaving and did not need the reminder of loss and death.

When she stopped talking, she looked as out of breath as I felt. The waiter brought my drink, and I downed it in one shot.

“Your lab must have a very advanced Ouija board,” was all I could think to say.

“You’d be amazed,” she answered playfully.

We finished our meal in shy silence. When the bill came, we fought over it, and I paid despite her protest.

We found a live house in the basement of Itoh Complex where a West African band played palm wine songs that made me feel good. The live house was dark and warm, and the air inside was dry despite the weather outside. Dark steel robots with wiry hair glided around the room delivering drinks made by a tan Japanese bartender with a shaven scalp. We ordered palm wine punch and settled back to listen to the music.

I asked Chiaki of her childhood. She painted a picture that was detailed, yet unspecific. I could visualize the cold Tohoku city where she grew up, but I could not name it, and I could see the hard lines on the face of her father, the president of a large regional corporation that dominated local government, but I could not imagine what company it might be. I pressed her for details, but she was elusive.

She asked of my childhood, too, so I told her of growing up in the outskirts of Tokyo in a family split between future and past, between an engineer father, who designed ship drives, and a superstitious mother, who cared only for the journey of the soul. I explained how my childhood had been filled with ghosts and spirits, and my adolescence with science and technology.

“Your career suggests that science won out,” she said.

“Not really. My interest in space is mostly aesthetic. There’s something about the beauty of the rings of Saturn rising above the horizon of Titan on a sunless day. Or the purple oceans of Procyon 4. You really can’t imagine.”

She laughed. “It sounds beautiful, though I imagine it gets lonely.”

“Not really. It’s only lonely when you get back and everything has changed.”

“Doesn’t that frighten you? You don’t know what it will be like when you get back. So much can change in 250 years. It’s like you are a time traveler.”

“Well, not much of one,” I laughed. “I only go forward, never backward. Now that would be time travel.”

“Maybe when you return from Dubhe, they’ll have the technology.”

“Given enough time anything is possible, I suppose.”

We laughed and ordered another round of palm wine punch. The music moved me, the wine relaxed me, and somehow I felt content.

We talked until closing, and when we finally left, Ikebukuro was shutting down. Plastic shields slid over shopfronts all along the street, and drunk businessmen lined the roadways, hailing cabs in the rain.

“You’ve missed the last subway,” I said.

“I know. And it doesn’t look like we’ll find a cab.”

“I don’t need a cab. My flat’s a short walk, remember.”

“You’re lucky,” she said. “But what will I do?”

“I know an excellent porch you can sleep on.”

“You’re terrible.”

“I thought maybe you preferred porches to beds. If not, you can stay at my place.”

She nodded her head shyly.

I took her hand, and we walked through the empty streets of Ikebukuro under glowing lamps and drops of rain that tumbled like stars from the nighttime sky. We cut south to Mejiro, and I put my arm around her waist and felt warmth and strength.

We reached my flat, and once inside we shed our wet coats. I hung them in the hall closet, then turned back to her and kissed her deeply. My head swam, and I felt giddy. We made our way to the sofa in the corner of the living room opposite the doorway, kissing and shedding clothes with each step.

“I know you, Shunzo,” she said and wrapped her arms around me. We stood like that for a minute, then I kissed her and gently eased her onto the sofa, where we exchanged kisses and caresses. We made love, and afterward I felt satisfied and complete as I had not for many years. We moved upstairs to my bedroom, and I lay awake until I heard Chiaki’s breath become slow and deep, then I too drifted off.

Next morning I awoke to gray light filtering through tinted one-way walls. Chiaki slept quietly beside me, head on my chest. She felt light, and her skin seemed even more pale than before. She hardly seemed to breathe. I played with her hair absentmindedly until she awoke, and we made love again.

The next six weeks were both wonderful and miserable. I could not focus on the grammar and made such slow progress that I began to fear I might not finish it on time. I came to resent the book-hunting trips to Waseda University and the Diet Library, and my passion for the alien language dimmed daily. I lived for the moments I could spend with Chiaki.

For six weeks we played like children, strolling beneath artificial stars in underground parks, skating on the magnetized walls and ceiling at Seibu Funland, and visiting gardens, temples, and shrines around the city to look at hydrangea, wisteria, and orchids. We must have looked very much in love, for people stared at us wherever we went. At night we painted ourselves with lights and danced to shrine songs on top of Rose City 5 and made love at my place and talked and told stories ’til dawn. Since Seiko’s death I had never felt as complete, or as certain of my love for a woman.

But the feeling did not make me happy. At times I was ecstatic, but it was the ecstasy of a manic depressive, punctuated violently with fits of despair. I did not want to leave her, but I knew I could not stay. I’d dedicated too many years of my life to reaching the stars. How could I give it up for a woman I had only known five weeks? It seemed ridiculous, and yet, I wanted to. Did it matter that it had only been five weeks? It seemed like so much more.

Sometimes I felt as though we had known each other lifetimes. Could I trust such feelings? A cynicism borne perhaps of solitude told me love always feels like this at first. When a man thinks he has fallen in love, he believes it will last forever. He never suspects his love might be an illusion bound to fade. Without time he could not know.

At other times I rejected the cynic in me. Time is not a solid, concrete thing. It is relative and provides no absolute measure. What could time mean to a man who aged five years while others aged twenty-five? Could not the heart travel at the speed of light and obtain years of understanding in the space of weeks? I wanted to believe it could. But the part of me that feared love told me it could not. Five weeks of love were still only five weeks. It made no sense to stay.

One morning about two weeks before the grammar was due, while Chiaki slept in the bedroom, I was working in the study when Yamamoto called. Two incomplete drafts of the grammar and several books cluttered the desk. I had to push these aside to get at the comm switch. Yamamoto appeared on the screen behind piles of crumpled paper, her face drawn and tired. The project was taking its toll, I could tell.

“Shun, only two weeks left, and I’ve yet to see a page of your work.”

“It’s right there.” I gestured at the mess on my desk.

“Looks incomplete.”

“It is.”

“Hokada’s getting ready to take your spot, you know.”

“Don’t needle me, Yamamoto. I’ll get it done. I’ve got a lot on my mind right now.”

She picked an open green file off her desk and studied it a moment. “I can’t imagine what.” It was just like Yamamoto not to refer to Chiaki directly. “Day after day frolicking like a child. You seem to have some unnecessary distractions.”

“So?”

“I suggest you get rid of them. The sooner the better.”

I crumpled a sheet of paper and tossed it on the pile.

“I’ve cut out the drinking, and I’ll finish the damn grammar. But how I choose to spend my days is none of MODE’s business.”

“If it affects your performance, it is. We need someone more stable and more dedicated than that.” She gestured at the mess on my desk. “Otherwise you’re no good to us. You need to focus.”

“And if I don’t?”

“There are many universities that want a man of your expertise.” She delivered the line smoothly, and I knew the threat behind it was serious, but I could tell from her eyes that she did not enjoy saying it.

“Thanks for the advice, boss,” I said icily. “Anything else?”

“No.”

“Good. Tell Hokada not to get his hopes up.” I clicked off the comm without waiting for her to say goodbye, then heaved a deep sigh and leaned back and rubbed my eye sockets with the palms of my hands.

I heard a sound behind me and turned to see Chiaki looking at me from the doorway, fully dressed but with her hair wet from the shower.

“You don’t have to go,” she said without coming into the study.

I swiveled the chair around to face her but did not immediately answer. I wondered how much she’d heard.

“No, I don’t,” I finally managed.

“But you will?”

“I . . . I’m not sure.”

“Oh, Shun.” Her shoulders sunk, and I could see moisture in her eyes. “I don’t want to wait,” she said, as if such a thing were possible.

“I’ll have died by the time you get back.” She pulled absently at a bit of thread on her sleeve, not looking at me, her eyes far away.

“I know that.” I struggled to find words to show I understood and cared and was hurting.

“I don’t want to wait,” she repeated.

“There’s no such thing as waiting. I’ll be gone too long.”

“I know how long you’ll be gone, Shun, but there’s always waiting. I know you don’t understand, but it’s true. And I don’t want to do it. I can’t.”

“Do you think it’s so easy to give up a lifetime of work?”

“No, of course not. But what is one lifetime against the sea of eternal love?”

“Chiaki, we’ve known each other six weeks.”

“Six weeks, Shun? It feels so much longer. I’ve known you for years. I know I have. You must sense it, too. You of all people should know time is relative.”

I nodded.

“You’ve got to trust that feeling. It’s not an illusion.” She sounded so miserable it hurt my heart to hear it. “It’s real. I belong with you.”

I squeezed my eyes shut and took a deep breath. “I want to stay with you, but I need time to think.”

After a long silence she spoke.

“I’m so afraid. Please, tell me. I need to know if you’re leaving. Please, tell me the truth.”

I sat, eyes jammed shut, unable to speak, unable to move. Frozen in place. Again.

Finally, I opened my eyes, but she was gone, having already silently let herself out the door.

She didn’t come back. I called her as often as I dared, but she never answered and never returned my calls. I tried to focus on my work but could not. The alien language now felt lifeless and empty, cold and meaningless. The expedition repelled me almost as strongly as it had once drawn me, as though the gravity of my life had somehow reversed itself, and I was being pulled inexorably to Earth.

For three days I sat at a blank screen, trying to work. Occasionally I’d enter a line or two before giving up and trying Chiaki’s number again.

I could not get her from my mind. I tried to forget her but could not. She haunted my waking hours, and the nights were even worse.

I dreamed of her, disturbing dreams of Chiaki 200 years from now, a withered skeleton wrapped in an elegant twelve-layer kimono, reaching out for me. Or Chiaki calling to me. She begs me to stay, but I turn and run instead. And I run until I am crossing planets, stars, galaxies. Mornings I wake exhausted and frightened, resenting my work.

After three such tormented nights I woke knowing it was time to visit Seiko’s grave. I needed some clarity. I didn’t have to go to Dubhe, I knew. Yamamoto and MODE could obviously do without me. The important question was whether I could stand living on this haunted Earth. I did not want to see the grave, but I could put it off no longer. The prospect did not cheer me, and I lingered in bed an hour later than usual, feeling hungover, though I’d had nothing to drink for days. Eventually I forced myself out of bed.

By eleven the drizzle had ceased. The sky was a uniform ash color, drab and monotonous, and the wet air felt warmer than it had in days.

Seiko’s grave was in Zōshigaya Cemetery, an easy walk from the flat. I made good time along Mejiro and Arakawa, the sidewalks empty of pedestrians save a few ancient women out for a walk around the block, Gakushuin students on their way to Ikebukuro, and an occasional businessman.

I reached Zōshigaya at eleven thirty. The place was crowded with high school students praying at the graves of famous scholars for success in college entrance exams, aspiring writers seeking inspiration from the spirit of Soseki, and children on a field trip, ushered from one famous grave to another by cheery teachers. The dead didn’t seem to mind. Their holographic images appeared content among the playing children and visitors who left presents of flowers, fruit, sake, and potato chips.

I marveled at the gaiety. Death surrounded them, but the visitors remained undaunted and untouched. But I could feel it, a cold and threatening thing that made me shiver despite the warm air. My father had taught me that death was simply the end of life, nothing to fear, but I could not believe him. How could life just disappear when the act of dying was so miserable and full of agony? I imagined a realm filled with each man’s final anguish, hatred, longing, anger, and fear. I shuddered at the thought of dwelling in such a place.

I found my way to the temple compound and bought joss sticks and a lighter before consulting the cemetery map to get my bearings. Seiko’s grave lay in a quiet corner of the graveyard, where no one famous was buried. I expected to find the grave untended, but it was tidy and clean. The dirt around the marble tombstone had recently been raked, and someone had left flowers next to the incense burner. I lit the bundle of incense, which smelled of jasmine and sandalwood, touched them to my forehead, and placed them in the burner, activating the holographic projector.

The image started as a tiny ball of indistinct light that swirled and slowly grew into a disturbingly real projection of the woman I had once loved. She sat against the edge of the tombstone, dressed in satiny white, smooth legs crossed, brown eyes focused on a spot about two feet behind me, a slight smile playing on her full lips. Through the precious light of her ghostly image I could just make out the characters carved into the tombstone behind her.

I thought of the four years we’d spent together. They were good years, but they had not been easy. We’d been too different despite our similarities. Slowly and painfully we reshaped each other into a powerful unity, two complementary halves that made up a balanced and inseparable whole. No, not inseparable. Somehow something in me resisted that unity. I needed to hold on to a piece of myself.

We’d fought on the night she died. I had accepted a scholarship in California that would get me closer to traveling in space. Doing so meant breaking a promise to stay in Tokyo until she finished her law thesis. I told her on a drive out to Atami for a night at the coast. We should have canceled the trip; the Izu grid was down, every hover on manual, and we were in no condition to drive. We argued an hour, she angry at my selfishness, me frustrated by her refusal to understand. Our faces were tear-streaked, and she looked as emotionally drained and exhausted as I felt. So when a truck drifted down into our lane, I wasn’t ready for it. It smacked our hood, and the car dropped like a rock, bounced off the road, and rolled off through bushes and finally a tree. Somehow I was thrown free of the wreck and landed in a mushy wet rice field. When I came to, Seiko was screaming. The car was on fire, and she was trapped inside. I stumbled toward her as fast as I could, but every move felt slow, too slow, like some crushing gravity pulled me down, slowing time. Two more steps and the car burst into flames. The gravity broke and I hurled myself at the flaming vehicle, but the fire lashed my face and torso, driving me back.

I lived through the accident, but something inside died and left an emptiness I was never able to fill. I struggled to make my way back into the world of the living, but I failed. The world contained only ghosts, and eventually I realized the best I could do was run away. I buried myself in my studies and vowed that one day I would run away from this Earth. That eased the pain, but the emptiness remained.

In the graveyard the holographic image began to fade. As I stared at Seiko shimmering in front of the tombstone, I realized that for six weeks I had lived without that empty feeling. Chiaki had filled me with something that had long been missing. I no longer needed to run away.

The joss sticks burned down to the end, and Seiko smiled, bowed her head, and faded from view. “Goodbye, my star child,” I said and turned and walked back toward Mejiro to call Chiaki and tell her I was staying.

I was surprised to find her waiting outside when I got home, absentmindedly kicking a pebble back and forth between her booted feet, the tilt of her shoulders sad despite the brightness of the flower prints on her raincoat. She didn’t look up when I approached, I stopped a meter from her, wanting to touch her but not wanting to startle her, afraid she might disappear the minute she noticed me.

“I was worried I might never see you again,” I said.

“Me too.” She looked up, and her eyes were wet with tears but also warm with love. “I have to tell you something. Something I need you to know.”

“I’ve decided to stay,” I blurted.

She smiled then, a half smile that said she wasn’t sure she could believe me. Her eyes bored into mine, darting from my left eye to my right, then back again. Finally, she smiled a real smile, one I could believe in, and the tension in my stomach, my back, and my forearms eased. We stood that way for a minute, then I reached for her hand and said “Come. Let’s get out of the rain.”

Inside the front room, we sat in silence on the sofa where we first made love. I savored the moment, not wanting to break the peace. Chiaki was the first to speak.

“I still have something to tell you.” There was a distance in her voice, as if she were afraid of what she had to say. I nodded my head and waited.

“We’re not from the same time.”

“I know.”

“You were born a long time ago, and yet we’re together, as if you traveled through time to get here.”

“Sure, but time dilation isn’t really time travel. It’s simple physics.”

“Yes, but if you didn’t know the physics, it would sound impossible.”

“True,” I said. I wasn’t sure what she was getting at.

“Did you know it’s also possible to travel backward in time?”

The question jarred me. Back in time? I thought of a moment many, many years ago and a dark drive along the coast to Atami.

“No,” I said flatly. “This cannot be true.”

“It is true. I know it can be done.”

I stared at her hard and marveled at the conviction in her eyes. She seemed at once both innocent and wild, her eyes shining with a strange resolve. The light in her eyes was not the enthusiastic spark of a young idealistic scientist. It glowed with an unearthly fire. Could she be right? An image of flame, torn metal, and molten plastic flashed in my mind, and I thought of traveling to a moment before that horrible night. The thought stabbed at my heart.

“You cannot know such a thing,” I said flatly. “Maybe in a theory, maybe in a formula or a paper, sure, maybe it could be true. But that’s an abstraction. This physical world is not so malleable, Chiaki. Time moves one way, and you can’t go back.”

She sighed and the glow in her eyes dimmed. “You sound so certain for someone who knows so little about time.” She looked down at her feet, then pulled at a thread on her blouse.

“Going back in time is possible. I know because I’ve done it.”

I winced as she said it, the words so strange and unexpected. I looked at her and her eyes were clear and firm and filled with an intelligence and calm that was impossible to dismiss as crazy.

“You’ve gone back in time?” I tried but could not keep the skeptical tone from my voice.

“No.” She shook her head sadly as if resigned that I wouldn’t believe her. “I’ve come back in time.”

I pondered the difference for a moment.

“You want me to believe you’re from the future.” I wanted to believe her, if only because it was easier to believe in time travel than to accept that she was crazy, but how could I believe such a thing?

“You know how crazy that sounds?”

“I’m not crazy, Shun. Not that way. Maybe I’m mad with love to do something so extreme, but I’m not delusional. I’m telling you the truth.”

“How do you expect me to believe that.”

“You have to believe it.”

“Why?”

“Because if you don’t, then I’ve come here for nothing.”

I stared at her, wondering what to make of her words, then rubbed my eyes with my scarred left hand before looking up at her. She met my gaze with clear, searching eyes.

“What have you come here for then, Chiaki?”

She sat up and leaned toward me. “I came back to find you.”

The words had a strange quality to them, full of yearning and hope, both comforting and chilling.

“Why on earth would you do that?”

“I couldn’t stand waiting anymore.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Shun, when you talk of your past love, of Seiko, I can hear in your voice a sense of connection that even death couldn’t break. It’s true, isn’t it?”

“Yes. It’s true. Does that bother you?”

She laughed, and the mood lightened for a moment.

“No! No, it makes me happy. It gives me hope that I am right about you. The feeling you have is right. It’s real. You shared a bond stronger than life. It’s true.”

“Chiaki, I still don’t understand.”

“Let me tell you what I learned in my research. I told you my work involves tracing connections between specific electromagnetic patterns and individual human consciousness. Well, one thing we discovered is that individual patterns repeat themselves at irregular intervals throughout time. There’ll be a pattern, and it will be there for fifty, sixty, eighty years, then it will go away. Years later it shows up again, maybe in the same place or maybe somewhere totally different. Another thing we discovered is that patterns that show up together in one time tend to show up together in later time frames, not always the exact same time or the exact same place, but they almost always cross paths again, and usually substantially.

“Now you, your pattern never shows up again. That’s exactly what we hypothesized for someone who spends the next couple hundred years traveling at near light speed.”

I pondered that a moment.

“But why did you come back here? You still haven’t explained that.”

She squeezed my hand then, and looked with wide searching eyes into mine, then began to speak.

“A few years after your pattern becomes untraceable, a girl named Ursula is born in Canada. She grows up lonely and spends much of her life sure something essential is missing. She seeks counseling and gets professional help, but records show she found little relief. Eventually she died an old and lonely woman.”

I furrowed my brow, unsure what she was getting at.

“Not long after that, another child is born, a boy this time. Similar story of longing and loneliness, but he becomes a travel writer, famous for documenting his quest for a spiritual truth that somehow eludes him. He lives until he is forty, but then kills himself from loneliness.

“After that, another girl, suffering from abandonment trauma despite what appeared to be caring, engaged parents. She set herself on fire on her fifteenth birthday.”

I flinched at this.

“I’ve traced the handful of other cases, similar pattern, a strange and powerful longing, progressively deeper misery, sad or tragic endings.”

“I still don’t understand what this has to do with you. Or me.”

“Let me tell you about the most recent one, the one in my time. A girl is born, this one in Japan, in Tohoku actually. A smart girl, scientifically inclined, but filled with that same dark vacuum of longing and despair.

“The world is a very different place by then. You can’t imagine the technology. They’ve found ways to send and retrieve electromagnetic energy signals back in time. They’ve discovered these electromagnetic patterns I study, and they’ve figured out what they are, how to identify them, and how to trace them back through time.”

The implications of what I was hearing struck me, and my rational mind rebelled. Could this really be true? Again, I wondered if there was something wrong with Chiaki. Or perhaps it was me. Was I hearing this? Or just imagining it?

“And so this girl, driven by misery and need, becomes a scientist, one of the leading experts on the repetition of these patterns. And she traces her own pattern back through time to find out who she was and why she’s so miserable, and where this yearning and longing and loneliness comes from. And what she discovers is that it’s you. She’s supposed to meet you. But she can’t, because you never die. You’re removed from time, traveling away from here at the speed of light. So she comes back to this moment, the one we are in right now. She wants to take you back with her, Shun. I’ve come back for you. It’s me.”

Seiko.

I could feel it. I recognized it the first time we met. She didn’t look like Seiko, but something had reminded me of her even then. I stared as deeply into her eyes as I could, and she matched my gaze. A warmth and a chill moved up my spine. Seiko.

I looked back at her. She was smiling, a sad but warm smile, full of longing and love, but no anger. I reached over and gently ran my index finger along her jawline, feeling an intense relief at recovering something precious. I bent down and planted a delicate kiss on her forehead, my heart trembling. I had found her, this love I had lost so long ago. I pulled her to me. She started to tremble, and I could tell she was crying.

“It’s okay,” I said. “We’re together again. We can stay together.”

She didn’t stop crying, and I was overcome by fear that I would lose her again. Something was wrong, I felt it.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I can’t stay here, Shun. I have to go back to my own time.”

“No, you can’t. I’ve only just found you. You have to stay.”

“I can’t. You were right, going backward in time is different from going forward. Going back is a constant fight against the flow of time. The amount of energy required to keep me here is too much. I have to go back.” She paused a moment, then added almost without breath “I want you to come with me.”

I stared blankly at her for a moment, trying to process the words. Go with her? Give up the stars and leave the present? Could I do this?

I could give up the stars, that much I knew. I had already decided to. But go with her to the future? It meant turning my back on this world and embracing a shadowy time I knew nothing about. But the present meant little to me. I had only been here a few weeks, and I planned to leave it anyway. Hadn’t I always faced a shadowy future? Did it matter whether I reach it through light speed travel or through whatever technology had brought Chiaki to me?

I looked at her and could see both the hope and the fear in her bright eyes.

“I’ll go with you,” I said and felt a surge of energy rush through my body, flushing into the deepest corners of my flesh, like every fiber of my being was vibrating at some high frequency.

I laughed. “Yes. I’ll go.” Of course I would go. How could I not?

Chiaki smiled and a weird and beautiful green light sparkled in her black eyes. “I was hoping you would say that.”

I held her for a long while and enjoyed the calm and tender warmth and sense of peace.

Then I began to wonder about the physics of it. How would it work and what technology would be involved.

“So how do we do this?” I asked, breaking the still silence. “Is there a machine?”

Chiaki frowned. “It’s hard to explain. You might not understand.” She looked away.

“I don’t need the details. Just how we’ll do it and what I have to do.”

“That’s not what I meant, Shun. It’s just that this won’t be easy for you. Maybe we should wait.”

“No. We can go now. There’s nothing here for me. I want you to take me with you.”

“I can’t just take you with me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t just move your body into the future. It doesn’t work that way. It isn’t possible to move matter through time.”

“But you’re here,” I insisted.

“Energy,” she said. “My electromagnetic pattern.”

A cold tingle spread across my back. I squeezed her hand to reassure myself.

“But I can feel you. I’ve touched you. Look.” I squeezed her hand again. It was solid. A hand, not some disembodied energy

“You feel me because I’ve inserted my electromagnetic energy pattern into yours so that we can be together. I can only do that with one individual energy pattern. I’m perfectly real inside you. But I have that reality only within your reality. Other electromagnetic patterns don’t have me, can’t experience me.”

Memories of strange looks we’d received from hostesses and waiters as they delivered food or drink for two flashed in my mind. I thought back to my argument with Yamamoto and her vagueness in referring to my “unnecessary distractions.” She hadn’t been avoiding the subject of Chiaki. She just hadn’t known.

“We don’t have technology for sending matter through time. It’s probably impossible. We can only send energy. So I sent my energy back to this time to find you and bring you back with me.”

I could feel the cold tingle on my back spreading.

“You can only bring my energy with you to the future?”

Chiaki nodded, a very slight nod.

“And what do I have to do for my energy to go with you?”

Chiaki took a deep breath and spoke in a whisper. “You have to die,” she said.

I closed my eyes, and an image drifted to my mind of that desperate lonely girl setting herself on fire on her fifteenth birthday. Was this how I was to go, taking my own life like those lonely souls Chiaki had studied—a partner in a strange double-suicide pact broken by the physics of space-time?

I opened my eyes. Chiaki was weeping silently, silver tears drifting down her pale left cheek.

“You wouldn’t really die, Shun. You would shed your body, this specific body, but only temporarily. We would be together again in my time.”

It was terrifying. And yet I wanted it. I wanted to go with her, sacrifice myself and rescue her from her torment. I could right this wrong and reclaim my love. I looked down at my hand and at the angry scarring on my left forearm. The mottled, molten skin from the accident ran up under my sleeve all the way to my shoulder. Would I add a razor slash to that scar, cutting a doorway through my own flesh into my true love’s distant future?

I thought about MODE and Yamamoto. She’d be horrified when they found my lifeless body, but Hokada could replace me. He wasn’t half the linguist I was, and the team that went to Dubhe would be weaker, but ultimately MODE would be relieved. They wouldn’t understand. They’d think it was just suicide and be glad they hadn’t burdened the crew of the mission with someone so unstable. I laughed at the thought. They’d think I’d committed suicide. For a moment it seemed ridiculous. And then it didn’t seem ridiculous at all.

I looked up at Chiaki. She looked so real. She was pale and beautiful, and her dark hair cascaded down the left side of her angular, perfect face. I wanted to hold her, but somehow the thought frightened me. She looked up, and I looked away briefly and stepped back.

She winced, and I thought I saw a spark in her eye, a hint of fire that flared briefly then faded as she composed herself.

“Please Shun, don’t run away from me again.”

My head snapped up toward her at the word “again.” Don’t run away “again.” Why had she said that? My throat clutched and my shoulders felt cold. I realized with a sudden gut-wrenching flash that she knew.

She looked horrified as she realized what she had said.

We had fought on the night she died, after I told her about my scholarship in California. And when the truck smacked our hood and sent the car bouncing off the road, I was thrown free of the wreck, just a couple of feet. I never lost consciousness, though it felt like I was in a dream. I looked at the mess of the car smashed against a tree, the bent metal pinning Seiko inside. She looked at me in desperation, and I stood quickly and tried to move. I was injured, but not badly. I could move my fingers and joints and bend all my limbs. But I just could not get them to go anywhere. And then a jet of fire flamed off the front end, and Seiko screamed, and I unfroze. I could move again, so I did.

Only, not toward her, not to save her. But away from her and the car and the fire. To safety. I have no idea why. Sheer terror, perhaps. Some inexplicable unforgivable selfish instinct. I still don’t understand it. But I ran away from her, from the screams and the sobs that grew distant behind me. And then the spell broke, and my senses returned. Seiko was still screaming. The fire raged, and she was still trapped inside. There was terror in her eyes but also an anger like madness. I stumbled toward her as fast as I could, every move slowed by some crushing gravity that pulled me down and distorted time. The car burst into flames before I reached it. I hurled myself at the flaming vehicle for as long as I could bear it, but the fire lashing my face and torso drove me back. I could not bear the pain, and I could not bear that Seiko had died in that pain. Our friends thought I was a hero for trying to save her, but I knew the truth. I was the only one who knew. Aside from Seiko. Aside from Chiaki. A bolt of shame flushed my face, and my heart pounded, but my spine felt like ice, and I shivered.

“Shun,” she said and reached a soft pale hand toward mine. Instinctively I flinched, and she jerked her hand away as though I had burned it with my fear.

Her shoulders shook, and her swollen eyes poured tears down her pale cheeks. I tried to meet her eye but found I could not face her. I was frozen in place again, unable to move.

“Shun,” she called softly, but I could not respond. “Shun, please.”

I tried to move, to reach toward her and touch her, but I could not.

I tried to speak, but the words I wished to say wouldn’t come. I lifted my eyes and glanced furtively at her. The flow of tears had stopped, but the sobbing continued, her shoulders shuddering with each breath. She looked so broken, a sad and lonely ghost mourning a lover who refused to die. She sat that way awhile. Then finally she stood and without a sound moved toward the front door. At the doorway she turned, made as if to speak, then stopped. Her eyes darted over my face, and her brow creased as if she too were struggling against some invisible force. Then her eyes dropped, and her shoulders sagged, and she let out a deep sigh that sounded almost like a rattle. Then she stepped out, and the door slid shut behind her, leaving me alone in my room.

I went upstairs and lay in bed the rest of the day shivering. That night I found it hard to sleep. My eyes would close, and I would start to drift off, but then I would imagine Lady Tsuyu Iijima’s skeleton hands closing around my throat, and my eyes would snap open. Eventually, I slept, and the next morning I awoke, though not at all sure I was glad to be alive.

About the Author

Kenji Yanagawa is an organizational scholar who teaches and writes about business and social change. He has lived in Los Angeles, Tokyo, Nagasaki, and Honolulu. He currently makes his home in Southern California. This is his first published short story.

Nine Words for Loneliness in the Language of the Uma’u

M. L. Clark

Jess: That myth’s as old as Earth, babe. Maybe it’ll take longer, but you can translate anything.

Kap: Sure, but with the same efficiency?

Jess: Ha! Haven’t you ever heard Seli? When’s language ever been efficient?

Kap: No, but, see, that’s the dream—the idea that another culture, in just a handful of syllables, can describe the same experiences we’re fumbling through with whole paragraphs.

Jess: Oh, come on, though . . . if someone groks your exact experience of loneliness in three syllables, how alone could you really’ve been?

Kap: Ooo! Now, that’s exactly the sort of thing I’m going to ask once the delegation’s settled in. Speaking of which—have they debarked yet? What’s your scop say?

Jess: Any minute now, according to—only . . . wait. No. Wait a sec, Kap. It’s security—it’s—blazes, babe, look—

Kap: What? What is it?

Jess: It’s—stars, just look, look at the—

Kap: Oh. Oh stars.

Jess: Stars, stars, stars . . .

1. /e.we.o/
the loneliness of meeting a stranger in one’s reflection off the water

I speak to you, my love, before I remember the end of you.

No matter.

Who else would hear me anyway, in this place?

But oh, I should not be talking to you at all, my dearest. Not at this distance. I should still be lying in the Otherrealm, tail in tail with you on a heavy yoru’nan bough, while below us the copper-green grasses river-run all the way to the mountains in a late summer’s breeze.

Instead, I wake to feel my tail in bandages, hanging from a medbay pallet three times my body’s size, in a room with gray-padded walls to sink a claw into. I cannot leap to them, nor spring up with hackles raised. The air about me is thick, astringent, and when I try to breathe I feel a terrible ache blooming along my lower spine. There is a powerful itch, too, across my fur—or no, across fur’s absence: erratic patches of seared skin with some vile blue smear of treatment over it. I twitch my ears in the direction of each beep and buzz, background hum and pulse, but no, there is nothing here of Uma’u. Nothing here of you.

A giant mossy log looms overhead.

I am still dreaming, maybe?

No. The mossy log exhales coherent speech through cracks in its . . . bark? An alien, then, but with no mouth like any in the recordings they gave our diplomatic mission, to try to train ourselves to speak in Standard-Variant Partner, and to hear it clearly when spoken by so many other species, too. Well . . . but you did say that the Partnership was big, my love, and that it held species unlike any our people had ever imagined, not even in our fiercest dreaming.

Oh, but Wene’ss . . . must this giant stump of a thing be the firstalien I encounter in a fully conscious state? Why not one of the lizard-toms they have here, or the giant amphibians? I hardly know where to fix my gaze, for this log has four massive, knotted protrusions, yet no obvious patterning to guide me to a face. Still, I know it to be sentient. Attentive, even. When it speaks, it exudes an emotive odor—heavy, sincere—that helps it get the gist across. It’s attempting to reassure me. I focus on the words of greatest emphasis.

“esTEEMdAH WEH NAH TOH, onbeHAFuv SEB-TWENteeWUN nth’ol PAR’nerSHIPcruIgreevwi’THYOU yurLOSS.”

 . . . SEB-TWENteeWUN?

Numbers in Partner take me a moment to process, and then it registers:

CEB-21, the research way station. Our destination.

And, oh . . . you came so close to it, my love.

But also . . . LOSS. Yes. Yes, I know that word. The log’s last and also the most important, though at first I struggle to remember why. Whose loss, exactly? Mine? Vaguely, while the log awaits response, I wonder after you—where are you? where are everyone else’s pallets?—for surely one of you will be able to explain to me what this mossy being means.

The mind can do such foolish things sometimes, you know: accept death on the surface, as a matter of course, while also refusing to, on a far deeper, more important level. But soon enough your absence lengthens—the silence of you, and of all the rest—and when I focus on medbay sounds, I can use them to leap from now-here-now to somewhere long before.

There I remember . . . the gentle ping confirming a good seal for the docking tube between our ship and CEB-21. Then warmth: the rest of our delegation, familiar fur after fur, brushing past me as each scampers on ahead. Next, your musk, sacrosanct as it sweeps by, though you linger only to chastise me for holding our luggage wrong. Ah yes—and next comes my glib retort, the product of irritation after so long and rough a cryo-flight: What? We’re in a connecting tube. It’s not like we’re going to lose it to the vacuum of—

Then that explosive flash from halfway down the passageway.

That taste of incinerated polymers in a haze of floating particulate.

That thrust from being thrown back while all the rest . . . all of you . . . tumble out.

Back in medbay, the pain begins to radiate from everywhere: pain the size of the bed, the room, the station . . . or maybe I have my frame of reference wrong? Maybe everything’s collapsing to the size of me? Yes, that seems more probable: a smothering cosmos, this station, which suddenly I know that I hate, and violently. Your last stop—my dearest! My only! How could your last stop be so sterile, so impersonal, so far from our true home?

“Who—you?” I manage. My Partner always needs warming up, but in that moment I can hardly breathe through my grief, let alone muster the energy to talk in any tongue.

Does the log sense this? It rolls back on its lower stumps as if to consider. When it speaks, it speaks slowly enough for me to make out more of its phrasing.

“Well, ah—Urrum Urree is my name,” it says. “Of the Fen, a people here. But maybe you mean, who am I? A query about my function? If so, answer: I am one of the station’s counselors, here to facilitate spiritual support. Now, we saw no specific religious denominations on your species profile, and Jess thinks that maybe the Uma’u are like the felines on her homeworld—gods unto yourselves, you know . . . which, ha ha . . . ah, well . . . It’s a Human joke, she says, but made, I promise, only with the warmest of intentions. Only—”

The log creeks a wobbly sigh. “Look, Awenato of the Uma’u, we had so looked forward to meeting your delegation, and to learning from you about your world. But now you will have to forgive the haste and . . . yes, the errors, I suppose . . . of our introduction. First contact in the flesh! And already there has been so much tragedy. The Partnership hardly knows what to ask of you, at least until it has more information about the beings responsible, and so . . . who am I, you ask me? I am here. That is what my people are, and do. We bear witness. And so I am here if you would like someone to be. So you need not grieve alone.”

I give myself the benefit of the doubt and assume maybe thirty percent comprehension of the log’s breathy speech. None of it impresses. My whiskers perceive too much else in this visitor’s performance—discomfort, uncertainty, helplessness—and what fur remains rises in lockstep with a low and territorial growl. These should be my feelings, mine first to express in the wake of this act of sheer depravity. Who are those brutish, careless toms from the Partnership to permit anyone to blow up—to destroy! to murder!—five of our people, then enter my recovery room entreating sympathy for their ignorance and sense of loss?

The log’s odor changes. Stillness. Awareness. Delicacy.

“I understand,” says Urrum Urree. One of its knots grows branch-like toward a shelf beside my pallet. It places a portable vidscreen there. A “scop,” I recall, along with flickers of a memory from my earlier delirium, the incoherent pain and chaos of my first and most unjust waking here, when one of the medics had used her own to show me external footage of the attack, and all the . . . the debris . . . still spiraling out from station ports.

But—the death—event—I had struggled to convey to her in my limited, groggy Partner.

The disaster?

No, no, not the disaster. What comes after. With the bodies. I shook my head, striking a clenched paw in frustration at the side of my pallet. The goodbye-ing? Other-death-uniting-together?

It took her a beat to process my direct translation of two similar Uma’u expressions: ai’da, edan’neata. Ah, you mean a funeral? Death rites? Yes, we’ll be holding services. Only . . .

Only what? I try to focus on this sliver of memory, but that first waking was a mess of trauma, an agony of separation from you, my love, my only; and before I can distill the most important impressions from those first, most crushing moments of conscious and singular survival, that giant log in the now-here-now interrupts me by exhaling “This is . . . ”

Teeth bared in annoyance, I nevertheless make an effort to stay in the waking as it continues: “ . . . The Sunmaster’s Journey. One of our sacred texts. It’s a symbol of strength and unity, and it lies at the very heart of the Partnership. Every species we’ve encountered changes it eventually. Adds to it, modifies. Swaps out local equivalents for core themes, then argues over whether the swap was true to the original. We were going to present you with a formal copy—your diplomatic delegation, that is—but now, considering . . . well, I simply hope it offers strength. I’ve marked some passages for auto-play, if you want to give it a try.”

I say nothing, not even flicking my gaze toward the scop, and Urrum Urree dips its lumbering frame in what seems to be acknowledgement of its need to leave.

“Oh, and the Partnership will, of course, postpone diplomatic proceedings until we’ve had a chance to inform your homeworld, which we know will take a while. Comms estimate maybe three lunars for our broadcast to arrive, and almost four in reply? Stars, how much easier this would be if we’d already reached the point where we were exchanging tech, no? Ah, but it is what it is. So, for now, there will be another with you soon, but not the negotiators. Not the politicians, either. First, and for a while: your integration facilitator, Jess.”

So many exhalations. So many words. A wash of noise to my tired, ointment-plastered ears. I do not even recognize this last word as a name at first. From sound alone, it sits in the verb position of the log’s strange Partner sentence. An order? A state of being?

“What—Jess?”

“Oh! Human,” says Urrum Urree, misunderstanding me in turn. “She’s the one with the feli—she’s Human. Another species here. They’re not easy, I grant you. But they desire truth, justice, and community, when it suits them. For now, I think this situation suits them.”

I get the gist, though, and next try to parse what an “integration facilitator” is—but my head throbs, my fur still stands greasily on end, my claws are half-bared, and . . . did I mention that I am tired, my love? So tired by the effort of remaining here, alive, with breath, without you. Beside the pallet, too, is data-glass, my vitals flickering across its surface; and when I look at it, I can see the remains of my mangled face reflecting back. Oh, but what’s even the point of looking, Wene’ss, when from now on I will always be less than whatever I see there?

How can these toms ever hope to remake me without you?

By the time Urrum Urree leaves, my mind has completely dedicated itself to retrieving the first medic’s explanation for a lack of proper death rites. The rest of the memory fragment. Yes, in my frantic state she told me that there would be services eventually, but . . .

Not with the bodies, I’m afraid. We don’t even have most of the pieces, see. It’s the vacuum, you know. The blast radius. They were projected . . . quite far out. Those bodies have their own trajectories now.

I could study Partner forever, I think as I curl up on the oversize alien pallet and draw that radiating ache tight against my frame again, so as not to lose a trace of it . . . forever and a day, even, my oneness, my only . . . yet still I will never fathom the full weight of those words.

2. /e.we.a.ta/
the loneliness of one’s own making, though the world still beats loudly all around

Half a lunar after my release from medbay, we drowse together, you and I, in a sliver of white light cast by CEB-21’s anchor star. The station’s maintenance workers, some of the only regulars I see when Jess is not around, keep trying to tell me that this is a very special way station, in a solar system filled with opportunities for renewal. They try to tell me that this star was an energy source for an ancient species the Partnership is desperate to find, and meet, and know, because in this system the “Makers” first developed extraordinary technologies capable of widespread transformation.

Who knows, eh, what other wonders they might’ve developed since?

The station workers tell me this, I think, as though they expect the news to cheer me. As though, what, I believe in magic? Make believe? Miracles of timeline revisionism, too?

But oh, what need have I for magic, Wene’ss, and other such alien nonsense? I have our drowsing in the Otherrealm. And ours is a good drowsing, my dearest—especially this day-cycle, while all the station spreads report that our attackers have at last been identified. No, I was not told this great news first, or privately, which puzzles me, but no more than I’ve been puzzled by many other routines taken for granted here. What’s one mere tom in recovery to do about it? Rest, they keep telling me: your number one job is to rest. And so I have, but not entirely. Today, while I drowse, I also contemplate the shape of my revenge against your killers, corners of my mouth twitching around sharp teeth as I dream upon our yoru’nan bough, its glossy blue-black bark hard as stone right up to the distant branch tips, where fragile white flowers have started to bud, each one weighed down only slightly by the dreaming’s morning dew . . .

There were three killers, apparently, from three different species outside the Partnership: from a whole other intergalactic compact, with another mess of aliens, and a compendium of lying languages all their own. I wonder: Will they bleed different bloods? Taste different as my teeth sink into their necks and I wring their wretched, forfeit lives from them? Will they have any necks to wring at all? What sounds will they make as they expire?

My mind in the dreaming flits over many possibilities: A beetle’s crunch. A sponge’s chewiness. A rodent’s anguished squeaks. I have no confidence in any of them, though, for I have not bothered to open that scop, connect it to the alTspeaK network, and review the details at greater length. Cannot bear it, maybe—to see these three killers, in all their inevitable inferiority to the lives they took. Yours. Ese’ima’s. Yukelene’s. Abareto’s. Eo’rilen’s. If I were to look right then at the Partnership’s whirlwind of public forums, where every detail about your killers is now being spun into a host of wild new theories . . . and see nothing there but, oh, a bunch of worms staring back, however could I bear it? How would I refrain from beating this scarred old head against a bulkhead until its aching passed for good?

All I know from that murky sea of way station gossip is that these assassins hail from something called the “Alliance of Friendship” . . . and, oh, Wene’ss, are they toying with me, do you think? What kind of name is that? What kind of world is this? It’s all just . . . absurdity heaped upon absurdity, in this land so far from the sensibility of our home.

But then, who am I, even, to speak of home? Do I not remember it less and less every day? I could look it up on the gifted scop, but my claws tremble even to pick up the alien object, and so I leave it with all other Partner things inside the too-large quarters I’ve been given. I know there is a bio-dome on the station, but I have been introduced to very little here firsthand—not “strong” enough for the tour, I’m told—and so the closest thing I have to Uma’u is where I am now: curled up in the deep, round recess of a porthole near my quarters, where my still-healing tail can hang low in artificial gravity as I slumber, hoping to catch on yours in the Otherrealm.

Hold me, I whisper to you there. Hold me, and I will tell you of their brutal murders in the soon-there-soon. Like a mating call. Like each of your every favorite operas rolled into one. But ah, this day-cycle, dearest deadmate, you are to me but a restless shadow: your body twisting in its slumber, soft bluish underfur catching in the far-off sunlight; wide, strong muzzle nudging, then nestling under mine. So be it, my tease, my triumph—no interlocking tails for now, and no teeth bared outward against our shared enemies in the wild green-gold yonder . . . but still we are together, out in that dreamland thick with Uma’u gutturals, and Uma’u ears bent to the rustles of Uma’u forest landscapes, all twitching in a communicative dance as good as speech . . .

We are together, at least, until a Human approaches in the now-here-now, on booted feet, and then your shadow—my love, my loss, my only—darts again from my aching heart, up one of those elusive yoru’nan trees. Even the blossoms seem to shy into grayness without you.

“Knock knock,” says Jess, in Partner.

“No.”

“Aw, come on, you haven’t even—”

“Napping.”

I draw my tail up and wrap it around my body: a poor replacement for yours, Wene’ss, but the best that this waking realm provides. I don’t need to open my eyes to envision what’s called a “pout” on that wide bulge of Human lips, nor to hear Jess hesitate before sitting beside me in the curve of ledge that rings this shielded cut of glass.

“Is this a new one, your jumpsuit?” she says. “I like it. Fits better than the last one. Glad our tailor’s got your size figured out.”

Or so I later realize that Jess has said, because my first conversation of the day in Partner is never easy. Not even after weeks alone among them. Not after all our months of prep back on Uma’u, either. What can I say, Wene’ss? I never had your gift for other tongues.

The best I can do is to recognize my lapses, like how I lose all but the present tense upon waking, and struggle to follow the cadence of words worn smooth in native speakers’ mouths. For me, in that moment, this Human has as good as enunciated “Iz-ZIS-anu-n-yer-JUMP-sooot? LY-kit! FITS-bet-r-n-uh-las-n. GLAH-dur-TAY-ler-sgot-yer-SIZE-fig-gerd-ow-t.” But . . . key words, my love. Key words. They help me glean surface meaning. As for the rest . . . well, there’s more to language than vocabulary, isn’t there? Even from a species lacking proper ears and whiskers. And Jess’ smell and posture convey . . . tension. Uncertainty. I am half her size, claws carefully retracted, on a station not of Uma’u design, at the agony of removal from Uma’u itself, and my integration facilitator hasn’t even the perspicacity to sense your mighty spirit beside me. So, this distortion of power unnerves, of course.

I stretch to a sit and resist the urge to stress groom. Not easy anyway, in this uniform.

“What—new?” I try. Then, hearing my errors, I correct for the missing words. Oh, Wene’ss, how you would smile at the stiffness of my speech! “What’s the latest news?”

Jess exhales, shakes her head, and throws up her hands. More nonverbal markers of helplessness and frustration, affected or otherwise.

“I don’t know how to tell you, Ah-wei. I want to say it’s going great—that they caught the perps, that the perps are in tribunal, that the perps are going to get what they deserve.”

I contemplate the verb structure. Once I remember that “perp” is short for “perpetrator,” meaning the assassins, most of it sounds promising: they caught, the perps are, the perps are going to get . . . but still I struggle with the import of formal speech. I want to say, I want to say . . . Is that phrasing merely ornamental? Can she not say as much? Is all the rest a lie?

“But . . . ?” I venture.

Jess smiles in a way that I have learned is less than wholehearted. Wistful. Forlorn.

“Yeah, you get it,” she says. “I’m sorry, but your people chose a lousy time to try to join the Partnership. All good when you signed on, I’m sure—but by the time your delegation arrived . . . a whole PSY later . . . well, there have been some changes in upper management, and the Supreme Council now sees our trade relationship with the Alliance of Friendship as too important to gunk up by making a public example of killers in their ranks. And, yeah, they’ve got the names of your attackers now, but they also expelled those creeps instead of detaining them. Why? Who knows. All this fear about another cold war between us. I mean, for sure, they’re trying to bring about an internal reckoning, through extended barter at the trades-table, but it’s a mess, is all I can say. Ugly backlash bullshit that has nothing to do with your breed. Your—species, I mean. Your people just got caught in the middle, Ah-wei. And paid the price. Dearly, I know.” Jess pauses to breathe. “I’m so sorry.”

Native speakers forget how easily Partner can land as crashing waves on foreign ears, but I understand I’m so sorry clearly enough, and infer the rest from context.

“I smell it,” I say—and then, adjusting to the more common Partner phrase: “I see.”

And yes, my love, of course I want to ask her more. I want to ask her, Why? Why did the killers do it? Why did they target so new and remote a species, one just beginning discussions to enter into the Partnership fold? And what is the Alliance of Friendship, really, to the Partnership, that fear of war should change its reactions so much in the wake of an external threat? Isn’t CEB-21 a Partnership station? Why does another intergalactic compact have so much power over its internal security? Doesn’t the law work here as it does on Uma’u: that if one resides in another’s land, one lives by another’s rules?

Also, more pragmatically, how can I even trust this Supreme Council when it says that all guilty parties have been expelled? What about local aiders and abettors? How can way station security be so sure they’ve found everyone in on the plot? How can Jess and her own lifemate, a command-crew officer named Kap, guarantee my continued safety here? Even though I have no other choice but to remain? Even though my duty for now is to await further instruction from homeworld—still an eternity of a quarter-lightyear away?

I want to ask Jess all of this and more, but I don’t trust my Partner with the precision such an asking requires—and because, oh, my loveliness, does Jess ever talk a lot for every syllable I struggle to form. The sheer thought of all the rough sifting through her responses that my questions would compel is enough to wear me out. So, I say no more.

“Have you thought about a crew placement yet?” she asks instead.

I turn to the round of porthole glass, with its shielded view of a pinprick of near brightness against a field of colder stars. What do you say, my love, my light? I ask you through the desolation of the cosmos. Should I try to make of your death place a home?

You do not answer.

But, of course you do not.

You’re not out there, after all. You’re in the trees. The dreaming.

Where I now ache to be.

“Hey, that’s okay,” says Jess, eventually. “No one’s going to force you. Only, it might do you a bit of good to meet the others. There are other solos on board, you know. One Lucasian, but don’t let her catch you in a corner. Seli’s working the bio-dome, though—so no corners, right? Ha ha. That’s . . . that’s Earth humor, sorry. I’ve been told it’s bad. And one Retet—doesn’t speak much, misses its people a lot, but I hear it’s nice to be around. Down in storage, where the work’s a bit technical. Not much open space, either, but that’s how a tunnel-dwelling species likes it. Oh, and then there’s the Gremshu, stars alive! The Gremshu! They’re a herd-entity, see, so when they speak it’s always a bit insular, but once you catch the drift of their metaphors, it’s something else entirely. They run volunteer detail in the canteen ring. Yeah, I know, we’ve got servitors that could do the cafeteria work just as well—oh! and even one of those freaky biocomps the Makers left around this sun. That’s a sight for sure. But no . . . it wouldn’t do, because for plenty of species a meal is more than food. It’s also, like, daily social contract building? So we let all our citizens here make a ritual out of it. It’s like—”

I crouch, then curl up anew, closing one set of eyelids, then the other. Jess doesn’t seem to mind my disengagement. Jess keeps talking. At this point, my dearest, I’m not yet certain if this is something all her species do, because I’ve yet to meet her lifemate or talk to anyone else on CEB-21 at sufficient length. Already, though, I must confess, I’m not entirely opposed to the sound of her chatter, so long as I don’t have to contribute. Listening’s not the same as having purpose—not like when I first chose to follow you out into this terrain. Nor like the calm that used to come from the cadence of your throaty speech, or the heady purr of your belly beneath my whiskers, on the grassy knolls of our long-lost life together on Uma’u.

No, the experience of Jess on CEB-21 is not any of that. It is not you. But her chatter is still a better focal point than all the images that return to me whenever I idle too long in the waking. What images, you ask? Oh . . . strange ones, my deadmate. After all, I didn’t actually see your body tumble out of that exploded docking tube, so my mind has constructed entirely different ideas of what went on. It has fashioned a version of events where you are always staring at me in your death throes, no matter how much your lithe, blue-gray body might have contorted in reality under vacuum pressures. No matter how quickly, either, my head in real life struck something solid and knocked me out. No, my oneness, my only . . . in my waking brain’s version of events, the two of us are simply locked together, Uma’u gaze to gaze, all the while that this unnamable alien violence steals you away. And even when your body slips fully from my purview, even when I am left only to imagine your freezing limbs shattering beyond that wretched tube, still those bright eyes of yours, my queen, my queendom—eyes the color of harvest grass interwoven with threads of red—watch me from the abyss. Accusingly? No, never: my jewel, my triumph. But, as a reminder? . . . Yes.

My love, my deadmate, my five-footed mess of a stumbling fool the first time I ever saw you dancing at court . . . those eyes keep whispering on your behalf: Ima’i.

Now-here-now.

A promise, as you know, as much as a description of time and place. A way of saying—go now, child of Uma’u; carry your grief for me into this den of strangers who stood by and let me die, and I promise to pad by your side through everything, then meet you for eternity in the Otherrealm, when your time in these lands is through. But remember as you do, my guardian, my shield, my shelter . . . that until I’ve been avenged for so wrong an end as this, wherever you go, whatever you do, whenever you are in the waking, this is where I will always be.

Such a difference in intensity, no? Between the waking and the dreaming? And who among us could ever think to outrun such intensity for long?

Sure enough, then, in time even Jess’ voice can’t drown out that abiding surge of self-recrimination, that wrenching call for me to act, act out, act out against them all already damn it, even though I cannot envision more right now than the final slashing blow, or how I will bite all the napes of the murderers’ wretched necks or their alien equivalents. And so, after twitching at the sudden press of my facilitator’s hand against my fur (though why Jess thinks herself permitted to touch my fur without asking, I hardly know how to answer), I shudder into the only true escape I have from this reminder of my many failings . . . failings to you, my perfection; and to the rest of our delegation; and most of all, to myself.

I fall back, that is, into the only slumber known to me where your mighty spirit is of a younger, kinder, and more forgiving nature; and where, for all my inadequate size and lack of dominance in the waking realm, you might still deign descend again from those distant, ethereal yoru’nan trees . . . expecting nothing further from me than that I idle with you on a glossy blue-black bough as often as possible, before I too dwell forever in our Otherrealm.

3. /e.we.ren/
the loneliness of nervous silence, when asked to speak one’s truth

But oh, my queen, it’s true: Jess’ larger point cannot be escaped forever. I am but one tom, easily the smallest of any organic sentience here, and perhaps due to my oneness and my size, I am treated more like an orphaned youngling than the brutish less-breed that I appeared to be to any who glanced my way back home. And how convenient are the Partnership’s claims of care, no? For, with them, the Partnership has as good as revoked my authority to speak for all of Uma’u until they report on this incident to our High Court and receive its reply, which gives them seven lunars’ grace to smooth out local consequences of the event.

Clever, clever.

Oh, and yes, of course, I’m watching them all carefully, Wene’ss: all these Partnership operatives who still insist that my only job is to recover. I listen to reports from their Supreme Council and wander the corridors observing technicians at their work. So many different species: the lizards and the mammals, the sponges and the spindles, and even the lurking shadow of a giant spider, with a scent that makes me hunger for some of our littler delicacies back home. Out the way station’s portholes, too, I track the progress of a massive planet stalking the anchor star: the same planet of miracles the crew often talks of in hushed, excited tones. With image enhancements, I can also see around the anchor star itself the band of mysterious tech, not unlike a yoru’nan bough in its coloration and its sheen, that has drawn so many to this precarious nexus of . . . not Partnership territory, exactly, but Partnership control. A nexus that also just happens to be a quarter-lightyear from our home. Strange, no? That there should have been so formidable a power so near to us, that never thought to visit our long-clawed ancestors? Not even once?

Unless these ancient Makers did, perhaps? Slipped into the stories told by queens and toms of old, and all their kindred dreamscapes, and seeded it with secrets yet unknown? Do you think that if we were to dream hard enough today, we might even find them, lurking in the one sacred place where the Partnership seems incapable of looking? Are they perhaps wandering in our Otherrealm, in communion-song with all generations of Uma’u come before?

Oh, my brilliance, my Wene’ss . . . but now I picture you smiling at such silliness and catching mine ear tenderly in your sharpened maw. You’re right, of course: how foolish of me. This is merely the consequence of trying to answer too much about this strange new culture all by myself. If I want answers to my questions while I wait here, at least five more lunars until my fate as our lone surviving diplomat is made known, I must mingle with the locals. Learn how toms and queens speak here . . . even without necessarily using the right words.

I accept, then, an invitation from Jess to dinner in her quarters, where she lives with another Human: Lieutenant Commander Capacia, known as Kap. I wait in the corridor until she answers the pad-press I have to strain to reach, then hesitate as a striking smell assails me once the door slides open. Another animal’s heat signature. The distinct olfactory notes of fur.

“Ah-wei, you made it!”

A curious phrase, my love—for what accomplishment exists in showing up to sup?

“Come in, come in.” She beckons me into the living space, but as I enter I hear a low growl and startle at the sight of a fluffy mane on a smaller creature atop a carpeted assembly of poles and platforms. The creature looks vaguely Uma’u, but . . . hobbled, somehow. Something in its body structure restricting it to quadrupedal motions; like one of our distant ancestors, if it had also lost its proud, strong jawline and adorned itself in excess tufting and bejeweled accessories. And if it hadn’t been particularly bright.

“Oh, that’s Moscow. He’s harmless. All glare and no bite, aren’t you, boy?”

Moscow’s growl deepens, and he shifts his paws uncertainly beneath the crest of his chest. Does he even know how to strategize a fight, or do his stunted primal instincts only give him to imagine the initial, thrilling pounce? I turn to see Kap entering, a plate in either hand, which she affixes to table clips for added stability. An unusual precaution, since CEB-21 does not often lose gravity, and most do not bother with such measures.

“Oh! Hello! Stars, I didn’t realize you’d arrived yet, and so I—” Kap turned to Jess. “Is it okay to talk at this speed? Am I talking okay? Should I use simpler words?”

“Is good, fine,” I say, in a deeper register than my usual. I know, my love: patience, patience . . . but whenever someone turns to an intermediary to speak to me through them instead, I just . . . my retracted claws, my dearest . . . they itch . . .

In any case, Kap startles again before my annoyance can register more visibly in my fur. Color rises in her facial nakedness.

“Yes, of course! Good. Well! Welcome, Ah-wei-nah-toh, please, sit, sit—”

She is making an effort to say my name in full, even if she over-enunciates every syllable to the point of absurdity. I try to focus on that goodwill gesture, although the sheer nervousness radiating from them both is aggravating. What am I, a star about to go nova?

I perch on a booster Jess has added to my chair to reach the table and attempt to set them at ease with positive physical gestures, reassuring and elaborate sounds of appreciation for the food. I am, I know, little more than a caricature, like in one of Eo’rilen’s operatic solos. You remember when he auditioned for you, don’t you? That time he nearly fell off the courtyard wall, performing the part with the drunken broken heart? This memory helps me to smile more as the Humans smile, their wide lips closed and upturned without snarling; and that smile seems to do the trick. Soon enough, the pair relaxes into chatter about the meal, and the provenance of our beverages; and then they allow the beverage’s alcoholic properties to affect their biochemistry.

I do as well. Why not? Partner seems to flow more easily from me when I consume it.

Only—at one point their alcohol makes me impulsive, too, and I wonder aloud then at the pair of them: a partnering with no toms that I can see or have heard tell of. How does that work when you go into heat, I ask. Who protects whom from the trespasses of all the others that must be called upon to sate a rose-queen in her moment’s relentless need? Kap bursts into laughter, while Jess explains that heat is different for Human queens, rose and otherwise. Not nearly as unrelenting, she continues: just enough for one alone to quench it, at any given time.

“Well . . . unless we want it to be more,” Kap adds, while making eyes at Jess that help me understand how deep and true their pairing is, for all its differences from an Uma’u’s own. “Why, what’s it like for the Uma’u? I know I’ve given Jess so many questions to pass on. I’ve been just awful, haven’t I? But honestly, it’s just not fair, you know? The whole blazing mess of it. All that’s been lost between us already, and, and for what? You know?”

“Easy, girl. Easy,” says Jess. She pats Kap’s knee before rising to call Moscow to his own dinner, in a little tray, while Kap refills her glass and hesitates. The curl of another question rises on her lips before she drinks it away.

Her first question, though, has me realizing the impertinence of my own. What was I thinking, dearest—to ask these two of such private and intimate affairs! High Court-help-me, what on Uma’u came over me? And so I struggle to suppress the indignation sparked by her request to learn of something so private and sacred for us, my queen: Something as powerfully binding as my role as your guardian, your oneness and your only, in keeping such careful, protective watch while so many wildling toms answer the desperation of your call in the mating grove, and on occasion seek to press their advantage too much against your urgency. How I would clean you of their scents thereafter, and tend to all the wounds they left upon you, while you lay in all your perfect, secret panting, spent in a manner known to mine own eyes alone, and watched me with one brightly welling eye. Your purr still so faint and fragile in the nethers of your chest, my queen, my hope, my oneness . . . My lifemate, my loss.

Yes, I suppose we would have had to share this concept with the Partnership eventually. What else is a diplomatic mission for, if not for an exchange of contexts through which to better understand another’s whole? But . . . alone? Alone I am supposed to tell these Humans about this sacred thing, just me against their twoness—and no, not only their twoness, but rather, their twoness on one side, while from another I still smell the smallness of that creature they keep, that Terran animal like some rough mockery of our ancestors, which after supping is now settling into a dreaming all its own?

No, my queen, oh no . . . Together I might have managed it, but as I am alone, these memories of ours, I claim as mine alone as well. How can I give away even more of you to these strangers than I’ve already been compelled to by their carelessness with security? Where is justice here for you? For all the rest?

Thankfully, some wilting in my ears seems to catch my facilitator’s attention when she returns. Jess changes the subject—brightly, hastily—while sitting down and raising a glass, to join Kap with a salutatory gesture.

“Did we toast? I don’t think we toasted. Oh, and listen to this—this might be a new one for you, Ah-wei. This is,‘to the same example!’ Do you know it?”

I shake my head but recognize the general concept. It is as we do, my love, in deference to the Highest Court before we feast. “We say . . . mer’i’ma’ss.”

Kap shapes her mouth to mimic the sounds, again over-enunciating.

“merEE mahESS. Love it! What does that mean?”

I consider. “It is . . . many ideas made small. ‘Now health living long,’ I am thinking? But all short. No sense in parts. One word. One big thinking. You dreaming me?”

And yes, yes, Wene’ss: maybe the alcohol is not enough to make me fluent: just confident enough to keep going through my worst mistakes. I can hear, at least, that my last expression is far too Uma’u for the room, and amend it: “Do you understand me?”

Jess nods, graciously bypassing the rest of my linguistic mess, and leans in. “That’s just like ours—‘To the same example!’ It makes no sense out of context. It’s a small part of a bigger whole. But we all know the context here. It’s in our book. It’s from our Journey.”

“Journey?”

“The Sunmaster’s Journey,” says Kap. “Oh! Have they given you a copy yet?”

I remember Urrum Urree’s gift, but still haven’t turned on the scop since being released from medbay—no, not even to peruse the names of your assassins, for there’s been enough chatter in all the station’s common areas to make direct inquiry an exercise in redundancy. More to the point, even two lunars on, I still shrink from the touch of that thing . . . because everything associated with medbay—my unrighteous survival there, the wretched aching of your absence—only intensifies the pressure of your unwavering eyes in the silence of my waking realm. When I pick up the scop, I feel them calling to me . . .

Act, act now, avenge me, avenge us, where is your great brutality now, child of Uma’u?

It’s in my quarters somewhere, I’m sure, but . . . radioactive to my shaking touch. So—

“Yes,” I say, to avoid further questions.

“Well, no matter if you haven’t read it yet,” Jess replies. “But the full phrase is ‘We are all the same example.’ It’s one of those things the Partnership tries to live by. How all life in the cosmos is equal. How all of us, deep down, are the same. You know?”

I understand the principle, but something quiets deep within me to hear Jess tell me that the Partnership believes itself to live by those terms. Can it really, when . . . ?

But before either fur or expression can betray my skepticism, Kap raps the table with her knuckles, excited. “See, this? This is what I was hoping for. Oh, there was so much I wanted to learn from your people, Ah-wei! We’d just had one of our AI go through your histories, your mythologies, your languages . . . especially the biggest one, the royal tongue. The one your people call a passkey to the Highest Court? Stars! What a language! Our compiler says it even has a whole bunch of specific words for concepts we barely understand in Partner. Like, you’ve got seventeen words for madness, I think it was? Nine for loneliness? So—I’m sorry if I came off too strong earlier. Really, I am. It’s just that, before I was in this uniform, I studied the xenopsychology of colony management. I did a whole thesis on representations of isolation on Partnership frontier worlds. So, it’s important, you see. This whole opportunity with you, your people . . . it was all very precious to me.”

Another wash of Partner-ese. Do they really not realize how like a crash of nonsense all these sentences can sound to non-native ears? Something beneath my ribs tightens at those last two sentences in particular, though. The sheer audacity of the pair.

“My crewmates—same—to me,” I reply, just barely keeping an exasperated hiss out of my speech. Even Moscow’s ears prick to hear it in his dreaming, curled up and purring atop a plush and richly colored bed. On some level I suspect that Kap has heard it, too. Yes, yes, I know . . . So hostile for a diplomat. But I am tired, Wene’ss. It can’t be helped.

Kap freezes while Jess stands as if just remembering the after-meal. “Dessert?”

“Of course,” says Kap. It takes a second to realize she is speaking to me, not her partner. “Of course they were precious to you,” she clarifies, leaning in. “And—stars, this is all just unfathomable, isn’t it? But if you need anything from us, anything at all . . . ”

She extends a hand over the table. An attempt at restoration. But I have consumed too many of their alcoholic beverages for niceties. I bare teeth instead.

“Why no justice for Wene’ss? Why the lives most killerly let free? Why there is always being—excuses? ‘Same example?’ No! Made example. But not knowing why, and I must!”

Jess returns, holding a bowl of what I know are meat-fruits: genetically constructed hybrids with the texture of a sturdier protein, but still retaining the refreshing snap of plants. These, and some palate-cleansing greens, she sets on the table without clipping them in, while her lifemate routinely re-clips her own utensils, her plate. Looking curiously at me, then sharpishly at Kap, and then exuding a general sadness, Jess exhales and sits down.

“Look . . . the Partnership’s got a problem,” she says, every syllable belabored while pushing the bowl my way. “We’re dealing with radicals, okay? Same as you find anywhere in the universe. You have radicals among your people too, maybe? Those who disagree with the courts on Uma’u?”

I struggle for the word in Partner. She is correct, but in royal tongue it is so much easier: the neren’, the word’s severance after the core noun phrase so intrinsically harsh to an Uma’u ear. A refusal of synchronicity. A denial of restorative balance in language as in life. Even neren’ata has a kindness to it, doesn’t it, my love? The castaway, the forlorn, the tom that has made of himself a tool of oppression, later to be discarded. The tomwho earns such a term is still redeemable, though, isn’t he? Even if the role he performs as neren’ is not. Even if the dreaming he must endure to serve as neren’ is not fit for any youngling’s ears and tongue.

Oh, but we would have worried such nuances as this to bits, wouldn’t we, my dearest? If you were still at my side, boostered into another giant chair across from these lumbering simians, while their primitive feline snuffles with its soft belly bared in the dreaming. We could have told them, too, about how, when you and I first bonded, you had grown inordinately excited by our names: A-we-n[e]-at[a], a variant of the more regal “Awe’ne’ata,” made coarser by my breeding . . . and We-ne’-ss, three more perfect syllables than I had ever known before I knew of you. We could have explained to them, this fellow coupling so contentedly with itself, how you had delighted to notice the rarity that our names shared: that conjunction of opposing concepts as the core noun phrase.

We-, the quality of loneliness.

Ne-, the quality of connection.

Both bound together in each of us, separately—then bound together in us, together.

It is fate, you’d declared in that distant, pristine moment of late-youngling memory, before sealing the heat of our bond with that first, delirious press of your paw against the hardness of my left shoulder, and finding a secret shudder in me there.

Ine’ata, I had agreed, fighting back an Uma’u’s smile. Fate indeed.

But now, without you . . . without the strength of your tongue in either language . . . what Partnership term shall I use to capture the elegant balance of our linguistics in its purest form—to say nothing of the depravity we feel most whiskerly when the balance is not there?

“You mean . . . toms that no follow their ancestoring?” I attempt. It seems to suffice.

“Yes, exactly. Blasphemers.” Jess nods, and I echo this last word, blasphemers, under my breath to remember it. (Their —ers are like our —atas, I am learning. But I’m sure, my dearest, that you already knew that.)

“Well, we have those, too,” she continues. “And the problem with radicals is that they’re always hungry for more attention, more fear. So, the Partnership decided that the greatest punishment for what they’d done would be . . . not to give them what they wanted. What they really wanted. Not to make a spectacle of their expulsion or tribunals. Oh, but they’ll be tried, of course, on another world. The Partnership received a guarantee from the Alliance of Friendship during recent negotiations.”

Kap and Jess look at me intently then. So eager, so nervous for approval. They want me to accept what they are telling me—or, no, one better: they need me to accept it.

Why need, though? Whatever can I, a solo tom in this realm of giants, ever hope to do that scares them so? What danger lies in the threat of my dissatisfaction with their justice?

I cannot put my paw on it exactly, Wene’ss, but there is something about the power these two Humans see in me, or impose on me . . . that feels like no power, really, here at all.

4. /o.we.ren/
the loneliness of speaking one’s truth and not at all being heard

More lessons follow in living Partner, learning Partner, being Partner. I watch the crew and visiting citizens, and I listen, and I placate at every turn the staff’s insistence that I rest, and heal, and find my way into minor work cultures however I see best. Well, “however I see best,” that is, except through all the truly better ways. Without getting an audience, say, with the Supreme Council. Without having returned to me my full status as an Uma’u diplomat to CEB-21’s Partnership representatives. Even my inquiries about proper memorial services for the five of you are met with baffling delays, though I am assured that, once word from homeworld has arrived, a proper honoring of your lives and passings will at last take place. (I suspect, my love, that the Partnership is simply stalling to avoid the possibility of a repeat incident. But perhaps I am being too generous with them all.)

What remains, then, for a tom like me to do in a world of towering aliens? Only the sorts of roles that Jess suggests. Small contributions to the way station’s daily scut work.

Well, so be it. It’s a start.

And I began—as you know, my dearest—at a rank far lower than even this. A rank so low that I dared not laugh aloud even when I saw you make such a happy, clumsy fool of yourself at that first dance: your first entrance, on the cusp of queening, into the mainlanders’ shared court. (Oh, but you saw the laughter in my eyes then, didn’t you, from my meager serving post? And you knew it was not mockery I stored up there; it was a happy laughing, deep within, that longed to be as public then as yours.)

It is with far less cheer that I accept volunteer placement in the canteen ring, maybe half a lunar after my dinner with Jess and Kap . . . but the memory of foolish early days between us strengthens me all the same. The eating area on CEB-21 is called by most locals “The Trough,” and I am hoping a massive crowd will be the perfect place in which to lose myself, to become anonymous enough to observe without being watched in turn.

Oh, but Wene’ss! Now who’s the clumsy fool? Because, by my second hour on duty in The Trough, I realize I have made a terrible mistake. I should’ve chosen something remote, like the storage bay. But no: With all the interspecies murmuring, sparking, and beeping in CEB-21’s canteen ring, I had been so certain I could get by with minimal chatter of my own. How could I have ever believed, though, that a simple jut of lips, tentacles, or hooves in the direction of a food tray or gas bubble would ever have served here as sufficient talk?

In practice, I discover that social contract-building matters more to locals than mealtime efficiencies, and so, for all the pell-mell chaos of alien smells and sounds, locals still find excuses to bark and bay in Nonstandard-Variant, then await my response with curious and impatient stares. Sometimes they ask after the ingredients for a particular menu item. Other times, make note of my novelty—half or a third their size, after all. Some even extend genuine alarm about my regrown fur being so close to their lunch trays, which I suppose is fair enough, for the hairless cultures here.

All in all, though, it amounts to such a bewildering array of conversation topics and tonal variations. It exhausts me, dear one—leaves me feeling dizzyingly alone in a sea of noise worse than any individual’s hasty speech in closer quarters. But then, I am also not alone. Not once, not for a single syllable in the canteen ring’s cacophony. Rather, each perception-bulb among the would-be eaters creases with its own show of surprise, then amusement, upon hearing me struggle in Standard-Variant, with all my Uma’u direct translations slipping through. Each amused alien then asks me where I’m really from, and if I’m “The One Who Survived,” and finally, if I know just why it all went down.

“I heard maybe there was something explosive on your ship?”

“They’re crazy, those Alliance creeps. You know that, right? Not the sort that your people should’ve messed with. Should’ve kept your distance from the start.”

“Is there, like, a side-war, maybe, between the two of you? Something you kept secret from the Partnership when it first invited you to apply? Because sorry, friend-o, but that should really negate the application process entirely . . . ”

And yes, Wene’ss, of course I find it difficult to remain calm in the wake of such inanities, especially when these assertions keep showing up one right after another after another, as one alien listens in on my conversation with another, then tries to leap off that other alien’s absurd claim, or point. Meanwhile . . .

No, I want to retort at all the simpler queries: No, you got me! I’m not the sole survivor; I’m some other Uma’u, who conveniently arrived after the incident but before my homeworld’s even heard about how its first delegation was murdered under the claws of your security. How did you know?

Then, at the far more invasive questions, I also want to arch my back, hiss, and retreat under the temporary shelter of a menacing growl. But, no, my dearest: Of course I don’t. I know that doing so would only give them more fodder, bolstering all their terrible intimations of less-than-perfect-innocence on our delegation’s part. So, I simply try not to blame them for their fear and ignorance, my queen. I try.

And still, I fail. Yes, I realize that they are only trying to shift blame onto me because it’s a natural defense for anyone who regards CEB-21 idealistically, as a place of stately calm meant for the purest scientific research; and which also happens to serve as a vital way station between stars. But also, why must I always be the more charitable and understanding tom in the face of all their carelessness, cruelty, and cowardice? Why shouldn’t I get to be openly, recklessly angry at the laziness of their assumptions, the smallness of their views?

“I mean, it’s just . . . ” some even tell me. “No offense, but they must’ve picked you for a reason, right? So how can we be sure that you’re not dangerous, too?”

Oh, but they have picked the wrong Uma’u, my dearest, if they thought that such a statement could ever chasten me. There was enough prejudicial nonsense for me back home, you know—as a tom whose stripes marked me for mere brute work, and no more. How our court had blinked so slowly at my request to take the higher exams! How even you, my love, at the beginning . . . how even you saw me more as muscle than as mind. And liked it.

Ah ah ah! Now, dearest, don’t you try to deny it. Later, you even confessed to me—far later, mind, with a playful, grooming lick to ease the sting of it—that this prejudice had also been part of the appeal: the sense of danger to me, in your ignorant upper-court eyes.

Meanwhile . . . Dangerous? Me? As if, my love.

Everything else was dangerous to you, though, for a spell, wasn’t it? The way you’d slip off courtyard siding, or miss a landing whenever you leaped in those early years. How you’d tumble in the most ungainly way to the dirt or grasslands; then recover—quickly—and saunter off with pure composure and intent . . . your tail always so elegantly erect, as if no error had been made by you at all. A queen even in your years of jesterdom: that was always you.

But my dearest, my only . . . you do realize, don’t you, that I was never more of a threat than, say, a distant yoru’nan tree branch that you would gauge wrong and hit so hard that your claws nearly shattered while digging in to cling all the better on? As for me . . . I never so much as bit your neck to hold you down while mating. Didn’t you notice that? Didn’t you slacken and still for me all the more under the trusting shelter of my large-yet-bridled maw? And hadn’t I also played my role as protector with such discretion and even greater loyalty? Hadn’t I keened and howled and dragged myself through the grasses with you in the aftermath, too, when our first litter was lost, all lost, the year the sickness came to court? Did I not groom you for hours—gently, slowly—through the ensuing silence of our shared grief?

So, if the luggage had been a sore point between us just before your passing, my love . . . if my last words to you as you stepped into that doomed connecting tube had been so very, very wrong . . . Hear me, Wene’ss: it is only because of that first impression I sometimes still fear you have of me. That image of this . . . this brute, this know-nothing low-court tom: barely domesticated into civil service, and hardly able to patch a sentence together in a second tongue, even when first contact with the Partnership drove you to submit our names for diplomatic application. I was just this hulking menace who happened to be on your side, and yet, in that most critical moment in his service to you . . . when you most needed a brute indeed . . . I’d been given no chance, not one, of saving you from the abysmal dark.

“Hulking,” though. Well, there’s another joke to dwell upon, no? For whatever I may have been among Uma’u, whatever private suspicions you might’ve nursed of me as well . . . whenever I hear someone insinuate similar about me in The Trough—that I might be dangerous, or violent—I just want to yowl at the absurdity of being seen a threat to anyone here at all. How could I be? How is it even possible, when everyone, everyone except the younglings on CEB-21, are twice or thrice my size?

I don’t yowl in outrage, though: certainly not in the packed canteen ring. During my volunteer shift, for all the awful things they say and assume of me, I never give in to any of these giant aliens’ baiting and bewilderingly accented remarks. I simply wait, and serve, and after the lunch rush eases, take a much-needed moment in a recessed corner. I’m stress grooming, of course—I can taste the associated stink in my fur, when gathering more of it in my mouth than expected with each sweep—but the jumpsuits here make it difficult to reach my most pungent crevices. And when I sense too many sidelong glances from the rest of the staff, I look for stress relief work-arounds with the furniture instead.

“Plains of dry grass near aflame?” says the Gremshu heading up detail—or rather, so says one of the hair-coils along a top-heavy shag of a body that all but obscures two bright black eyes, flaring brown nostrils, wide, curving horns, and—far below them—four bi-toed hooves.

“Peel of bark twisting on its trunk?” says another.

“Kick of dust on skin?” says a third.

“E—excuse me?” My ears flatten in confusion, shame, or both.

“Itchy,” explains a nearby log: one of Urrum Urree’s species, freshly retreated from the condiments to clean a yellow squirt from a patch of moss. “They’re asking if you’re itchy.”

“Ah. Well. Sort of,” I say. “I’m sorrying, I—”

“Over there, that post might help.” The log points with a heavy branch to an ornamental pillar with knobs at the perfect height and size to catch between my shoulder blades. “It does for the Gremshu, at least. Doesn’t shut the herd up, but at least they sigh in symphony for a while.”

“Ah—thanks.” I say to the log, before repeating this sentiment to the Gremshu.

“Clear streams,” one Gremshu-coil replies.

“Sweet plains-grass breeze,” adds another.

“No problem,” the log translates.

“Thanks, I—I think I am getting that last one from context.” I quirk what I hope is a smile to accommodate the awkwardness of my grammar, but the log simply exhales a more muted odor. Disappointment-turned-resentment is a familiar, if unsettling response from some locals, who prefer when I act perfectly helpless before them, like a lost youngling. How quickly, too, such locals try to catch me out for having less than perfect comprehension or elocution, yet still declining their “aid,” which always amounts to an incessantly patronizing form of correction. They act sometimes . . . oh, love . . . almost as if I’m being arrogant in refusing their supposed generosity. Like I need to be reminded of how little I truly know, and how small I really am, and how grateful I should be that anyone is willing to educate me at all.

Oh, but I know to tread carefully with such types, my queen. To placate their wounded egos all the better to survive. And so I crinkle my nose, breathing slowly, and take out the scop I have started practicing carrying with me, in a prominent jumpsuit pocket, to give others the impression that I am fitting in. It still feels almost radioactive to the touch, and I have yet to bother to turn it on, but maybe this Partnership tech could help bridge the hostile gap I sense forming between me and this log? Maybe it could help this new log feel superior in its usefulness to me, after all?

Worth a try at least, so—

“Other contexts,” I say, holding up the device. “Still very—harder, though. You know the order, maybe, that this is to be—reading?”

The log leans forward, but its odor sours after it inspects the label on my device’s screen once I switch on the scop. Then the log pounds one of its branches on the nearest counter: an action that begins to make all my hairs stand on edge. “Are you kidding me with that fungal rot?” it barks at me. “Get that putrefaction out of my airways.”

I quickly comply, switching off and pocketing the scop again.

“I am sorrying,” I say. “I am only thinking it to be the tale told by your people? Urrum Urree, the . . . the spiritual advisor here, he is saying that—”

But the log interrupts with a hot burst of sound that I take for an irritated laugh.

“Ho ho! Urrum Urree, a spiritual advisor? No, no, no—that bit of mulch-for-brains does not speak for all Fens, little twig. And if that . . . that piece of fire-starter wants to take on an enslavers’ text like The Sunmaster’s Journey, fine, let it have it—but oh, what arrogance to pretend this text is all of ours. Ours! Hah! If you want a tale told by our people—not imposed on them—read The Starchild’s Voyage. That’s ours.”

“I am sorrying,” I say again, quieter and with mounting confusion. “I am not knowing that one. Is that also—part of Partnership? Or—”

“No, but funny, you asking that. It’s from the Alliance of Friendship,” replies the log. “We are . . . the true Fen, at least . . . some of its founding members.”

As with Urrum Urree, I can make out no face upon this particular Fen, and yet I can feel it watching me. Yet, why shouldn’t it be watching me, studying my every minute reaction? I am as rigid as a yoru’nan bough myself, to hear what it has just told me.

“Turns the wind sharply,” says a Gremshu-coil.

“Bitter runs the stream,” adds another.

“Bone-taste in the ashen earth,” agrees a third.

Warnings, I gather: all sorts of natural warnings, given by the herd-entity to the log. But warnings against what? What terrain has now been entered by us? What power do they sense in me, that I can hardly understand myself?

The Fen, though . . . The Fen seems to understand far more.

“Yes, yes.” It swats vaguely at the Gremshu. “I know his kind’s met with a bad end thanks to rogue agents. But, you see me here? You see me working the same detail with you? That’s because plenty of good still runs between our compacts, the Partnership and the Alliance of Friendship, which none of us wants to see wasted on another war. Besides, it’s not your fault that the Partnership built its empire on the wrong version of the greatest cosmic story ever told. Just as it’s not our fault that some of us have gone . . . okay, fine, maybe more to seed than others, while trying to protect the sanctity of the Voyage’s lessons. But how could they not, when everything else in the galaxy seems such a mess?”

I feel the surface of my skin drop a degree or three.

“So, the Fens are . . . ?”

“A multi-compact species, yes. Some of our colonies liberated themselves into the construction of the Alliance of Friendship. This, of course, was after our homeworld was first tricked by the Partnership. Lots of animosity behind that division, mind you, because lots of homeworld Fen established themselves within the Partnership, then turned against we outworlders . . . we, that is, who have nothing but pity for homeworld’s failure to see through Partnership lies, plus sorrow for their failure to follow us into a far better deal.”

A Gremshu-coil snorts. “Salt lick on the seventh day.”

The log makes an appreciative sound at this, and odors of amusement reach the tip of my tongue. “Old story,” this Fen explains to me. “The herd’s trying to say that every species from a multi-planet system has the same issues once it starts hopping from rock to rock. Different colonies, different loyalties, you know? But, no . . . no, you Uma’u wouldn’t know much about that, eh? Your world’s the only planet in orbit around your sun, which must’ve put a serious stone or two in the way of the first roots you flung offworld. Kind of amazing you kept on at all, really. And then, after what happened to your people when you first got here? Stars, but that’s a strange business, don’t you think? Almost too strange, hm?”

I taste a blend of curiosity and animosity wafting toward me, but most of the log’s speech doesn’t make a lick of sense in all its contradictions. I mean, sure, I understand “old story” on a literal level, Wene’ss . . . but I’m also too busy grappling with its two possible meanings—a story that is ancient, or a story that has been repeated to the point of tedium—to pay full enough attention to the rest of the log’s pointed commentary. And something about its last words leave me reluctant to ask the log to repeat itself. So, I don’t.

Not that I’m given much of a chance to, though, either, because in the midst of all this exhaustion and elevated tension, my heart already thudding in my chest at this introduction to the first Alliance member I have known close-up . . . a loud clatter at a nearby food stall startles me: the shape of the sound too abrupt, too deafening, not to awaken some more primal instinct. It’s only a moment’s disorientation, honest, for a little tom in a great big alien world. Only a flicker of a memory of the last similar dramatic upset to accompany a startling sound . . .

Nevertheless, it’s enough to have me leaping wildly, claws bared, fur raised, as if from one yoru’nan bough to another of those near stonelike perches in the forests of Uma’u . . . and then leave me struggling to process the existence of a terrible sound, an immense yawning pain that seems to travel the whole canteen ring before I realize just where it’s coming from.

Oh, no. Not from me.

From the log.

For I realize then, my dear one, that I have flung myself straight into the lignin-scented richness of this other sentient being, my claws sinking deep—painfully deep, I’m afraid—into the moaning log’s mossy bark. Notyoru’nan bark, either. Not that sturdy bark at all.

I’m sunk so far into the Alliance-Fen’s outer husk before I realize this, though; so frantic with the sudden urgency of wresting my claws loose from this fellow creature who has done me no harm. I never see what is used to knock me out—in both senses of the term.

I vaguely imagine it to be a branch, but no, I later learn: a hoof.

5. /we.ne.a.ta/
the loneliness that begets another’s loneliness in turn

Small worlds, these Partnership way stations, with their portholes overlooking miracle planets and tech-shackled stars, and all their ships and species just passing through or else lingering awhile to study this system’s ancient, vanished race. How many stories here, I wonder? How many unexpected connections between citizens, species, and whole compacts?

When Jess first told me about the lone Retet working storage here, for instance, she never mentioned that “storage” was also the part of CEB-21 with holding cells. Or maybe she had, and I’d just fallen to dreaming through that part of her chatter? I wouldn’t be surprised, if the latter: all the most important parts of those waves of tedious Partner speech always seem to pass me by.

Yet local penalties for their oversight never seem to, too.

I do remember being told, though, that the Retet is an “it”: each giant rodent in its species sharing genetic code with its birth brood, and all Retets are neuter until the time of mating, when each chooses what role to play within proceedings, before reverting to “neuter” afterward. And now I begin to see, Wene’ss, the other side of my feelings about that pitiful feline creature in Jess’ quarters—for what would this Retet think, I wonder, if our diplomatic mission had brought along a native delicacy from a species much like its own, but in mentally deficient miniature? Is there perhaps a species on CEB-21, too, that keeps primitive simians in similar captivity? For amusement? Subordinate companionship? Repast?

It begins to dawn on me that each higher-sentient species now seeking communion with the rest on this station, in this compact that extols such grand virtues, represents no less than its own world’s brutal conqueror; and that none of us comes to our present fraternity save through histories of planetary strife still visible in all the species we still keep in private service.

Of course, such musings truly belong to another timeline, don’t they, dearest? One in which our delegation is unharmed and progressing smoothly through first contact activities; where perhaps I’m striking up conversation at a formal function with someone mutely standing by while his own, dazzling version of a Wene’ss parlays with you over treaty terms and future plans for the Uma’u. Oh, I’m sure we would’ve spoken then of all the histories of injustice our two species had so valiantly surmounted, while also tacitly reminding each other that, should the need arise, our respective peoples nevertheless stand ready to war again.

That’s the sort of might we’re used to wielding, at least, isn’t it? But in this universe, for all the supposed civility of this research way station . . . I am but a single, solitary tom in high-tech captivity . . . and just thankful that the Retet seems discreet. It keeps its distance, that is, while attending to nearby maintenance tasks, which allows me to watch it without being too obvious about watching it, from within this semicircular, see-through enclosure, with its arc of a padded bench that terminates on one side in facilities for physical release. Since privacy is not a consideration in this cell’s design, I see no reason to keep up my own pretense either; to linger in the provided jumpsuit so as to “fit in.” Even thusly freed, though, stress grooming is not easy with the headache that lingers from the Gremshu’s knockout blow. I manage a few licks before it’s too much, then turn on the bench, ready to descend into the Otherrealm.

At length, though—at respectful length, I might add—the Retet pauses in its labors, glancing my way, and all drowsiness leaves me at the fact of his staring. I am uncertain, after all, just what I expect from this other loner on CEB-21: Pity? Fraternity? Curiosity? Nor do I know what it really sees in me, as I curl up to rest within my cell: An angry alien? A poorly domesticated pet? The first is what Jess says was given to her in the Fen’s report, as an account of my behavior in The Trough, corroborated by “witnesses” whose names do not even matter, for how much they’re all strangers to me here.

Indeed, if I am disappointed by anything in this supposed case that rose against me in two mere cycles here, it is only that even the Gremshu’s coils seem to be in disagreement over what they witnessed during volunteer detail. There is an argument within the herd, that is, because some coils had a more abiding view of the “attack,” and others only swiveled to observe after the vicious blow had landed. Usually the coils in their species would side with whichever was the most direct witness, but occasionally something in the Gremshu as a collective maintains a broader, more persistent doubt. So it seems has happened here—the inner hunch superseding the verdict of its many “eyes”—though why, I can hardly even speculate. Maybe it was the fact of its own isolation, the way a loner might side against another loner to reinforce its own stability in a larger hierarchy? Or did all the way station and alTspeaK insinuations have something to do with this: all those background suggestions that maybe the Uma’u’s diplomatic mission had first done something to merit so outlandish a terrorist attack?

But what do the specifics really matter, eh, my dearest? It’s all fear of the unknown in one form or another. For ours might be a little species among these giants, and I might be a particularly little tom on CEB-21 . . . but still, such rumormongering has given me an aura of some kind . . . something above and beyond scent and posture and word alike . . . that has changed how all Uma’u are seen. Changed our reputation enough, that is, to turn even other lone sentients against me, and leave me licking wounds in the bewildering shelter of a holding cell, while the Supreme Council organizes a mediation to assess the charges set upon me.

So after all that, my lovely . . . what am I to expect from this other loner, too?

But the Retet surprises me, tense as I am in the slipstream before dreaming. It faces me without approaching, then tilts its head, looking less confrontational as it speaks.

“Awenato, right?”

And . . .

Oh . . .

Oh, Wene’ss.

Oh, beloved.

The sheer sound of one’s name, when articulated correctly after so long!

I draw myself up, with a cautious stretch of my hind limbs, to a sit.

“I have—no name—of yours,” I attempt.

“Zittru. Zittru of the Barrow Rennick. But Zitty’s fine. Plenty find it easier.”

I squint into the broader shadows of the storage bay. “Zit-tru,” I say, firmly.

Zittru’s cheeks widen—a Retet version, I think, of the Humans’ smile. “Close enough,” it says. “How’s your head?” It gestures at its own, to help confirm comprehension.

“Better,” I say. “In—physical, at least. But mind—surprised. So much to be learning.”

The Retet approaches—one step, two, then pausing. It does not seem afraid of me so much as afraid of giving the impression of aggression: It, having space to run; and me, still trapped. Its apparent consideration relaxes me, and I let my tail hang loose.

“When I first arrived . . . ” Zittru continues, “I entered into a bad spiritual argument here. But I was okay, because I wasn’t the first Retet everyone else had seen, so when I said something that seemed like a threat to someone else, a third party intervened and explained. All was fixed really quickly, and nobody thought that my mistake reflected on everyone from my far-off home. I mean, it might have, for all I know—because for my people, the Golden Tunnel is everything, you know? But, to other species, it can sound like I was threatening to put them in a tomb. If someone like me meets a species that believes the Divine is in the air, not the ground, well, sometimes things get intense.”

I do not understand all of Zittru’s words, but the general impression seems promising. An attempt at empathy, a meeting of minds, through similar misunderstandings in the past?

“What is . . . the Golden Tunnel?” I ask.

The Retet’s cheeks puff out further, joined with a soft chitter I feel safe interpreting as amusement. Zittru’s whole posture, at least, conveys no active threat.

“It’s . . . Hm. How to explain? A special space. A secret land for Retets. A place where we go when we die, and sometimes visit when we’re living, too.”

My ears prick up. “An Otherrealm?”

Zittru’s head tips from side to side. “Sure, another realm,” it says, though its emphasis does not seem to reflect my own. “They tell me that the Uma’u don’t have faith in the Divine, though, so maybe it’s not so easy to understand?”

“No!” I say, moving to the edge of my padded bench before realizing how unclear this exclamation is. My head still throbs, but, oh, Wene’ss, you have no idea how hungry I am for this connection. It is . . . such a simple thing on the surface, this thread of fellow feeling entwining between strangers, but in all my weariness after the event in the canteen ring, how like a beacon this communion feels. The Retet’s words and its behavior, its apparent understanding and its calm, clear speech . . . they’re like a laser pointer directing me to look, look here!

“I am meaning—yes, it is easy, this understanding,” I explain. “We Uma’u have place too. Place like . . . an away-from-here. Now-away-now. Iren’i. It is with us in the dreaming, and it is waiting-us after death. Already my deadmate is living there, ima’i. Now-here-now.”

And I go on—explaining the yoru’nan trees with their glossy-hard bark shining bluer in the daylight, and the green-gold rivers of late-summer grass that wend and weave all the way out to the horizon. And the Uma’u smells. The thick tastes of Uma’u ancestry in the wind. The Uma’u secrets dwelling, so many of us believe, in far-off mountaintops. My Partner phrasing is still not the strongest, granted, yet the Retet considers my words with steady black eyes upon me, as if taking each one seriously. As if willing to wait forever, for them all.

“Well,” says Zittru, at last. “That might explain their fear of you, then.”

I flare my nostrils, softly yowling in incredulity. “Fear of me? What happened to—they speak of this sometimes—the ‘same example’? Why not me as the same example, too?”

The corners of the Retet’s mouth twitch. Amusement? Difficult to say, but its body’s posture and odors are still relaxed. That must suffice, for now.

“Who taught you that? From The Sunmaster’s Journey, right?”

I tense a little in my cell. “Not—not the . . . Star Baby Voyage, no.”

Zittru throws back its head and chitters merrily. The louder emotions are easier to recognize, and I am beginning to realize that these Retets are not so different, either, from our delicious crunchlings back home.

“No, not The Starchild’s Voyage,” it continues, “though, yes, the Alliance’s version of the text is similar on this accord. But it’s a funny expression, which is why I’m asking, Mr. Awenato: ‘We are all the same example’? Is that what they taught you here? Just like that?”

I blink a few times while considering. “More or less.”

The Retet exhales and shakes its head. “Context, my little friend. Context matters. It’s from a poem where every creature says that to another before they eat or kill it. It’s a poem about the hypocrisy of our claims to want equality. But some people just take the line on its own because it sounds nice. And yet, as you’ve seen yourself, in practice . . . ?”

Zittru gestures at the broader storage bay. I understand its point from within my cell.

“Will they be killing me soon?” I say, quietly, after what seems an appropriate pause.

The Retet whistles. “No, I think not. That would show incompetence on their part.”

“What, then?”

“They’ll use you as an example. A different kind of example, of course. Not like this ‘same example’ that everyone uses out of context. You’ll see soon enough, in mediation.”

But the weight of this news, Wene’ss, transfers strangely to all parts of my body. Is it possible for one’s very fur to feel angry? I had never thought so, but in that moment there is fury right to each hair tip, I’m certain of it; and radiating from every tooth- and nail-point, too.

Make an example of me at their mediation!

After letting your murderers flee?

On what possible authority? In what mad flight of arrogance?

I flare my nostrils and remind myself that this Retet is not responsible for the callous treatment, the utter cruelty on the rest of the Partnership’s part. I remember that, my love: I do. But I also need now to know this truth in full, in all the ways that the Humans and the rest here have been too afraid to do.

“Why—they hate—Uma’u?” I ask so-far-honest Zittru, before sitting back on my haunches and waiting. If I had asked anyone else, how quickly they would’ve rushed to negation and reassurance, telling me that I must be tired, in need of more recovery. That I can’t be thinking clearly, because of course we’re not hated. Of course our dying was a mistake!

But this Retet, I notice right away, is not at all surprised by my question. It studies a spot on the floor and sighs, then nods to the jumpsuit in a heap beside me.

“You still have your scop, yes? I see the bulge of it there. Can you access anything on it? Look up Partnership texts? Or are they out of your access range?”

I puzzle over this last. Access range? I suppose that’s a feature I would have better understood if I’d ever made an effort to interact with the thing, to surmount how much my paws tremble just to hold it, and how my claws click nervously over the outerplex and metal of it. My radioactive talisman: which I had hoped would make me look a touch more natural among the station’s complement; which has instead only exacerbated the feel of your eyes upon me in the waking, as if whispering to me as well, you have the means, it’s all right here, all the names and places and star charts . . . all of it! So why not act, act already, avenge me, my guardian, my only!

High Court-help me, Wene’ss, but the mind truly creates some unusual associations in the throes of trauma, doesn’t it? Latching on to just the strangest branches in fierce winds.

“I am having—Sunmaster Journey on it,” I tell Zittru, though I am not sure how true these words even are: “No more, I am thinking.”

The Retet lifts the folds over its eyes. There now. There is surprise.

“Yes, well, that’ll do. If you feel my rumble, then . . . there’s this argument on alTspeaK forums. It started when the Partnership came to this system and realized that an ancient civilization had been here long before us. That really got under some people’s diggers, because here we have this major story about Sunmastership, see. And what does that mean, exactly? Well, it’s about achieving greatness in the cosmos—as an individual, as a community, as a species, as the idea of sentience itself. It’s the basic blueprint for all our compact’s success to date—or so, at least, the Partnership likes to tell itself.

“And yet . . . that central story never mentions this other species, these other beings who mastered all of that and more, long before us, and then . . . disappeared. So, some people in the Partnership and the Alliance of Friendship have been looking for hidden signs in these stories. Then we discovered you, the Uma’u, only a quarter-lightyear from Drasti Prime, and well, some of us . . . considering how close your homeworld is, some think there’s something you Uma’u aren’t telling us. That you’re hiding other secrets for this ancient race.”

Zittru speaks so slowly, my love, and uses plain speech as often as it can. Why can the others not be as careful and considerate? I have never before wanted so much to lick—but not eat—a rat as I do now, for I understand almost everything it says the first time through. My questions are myriad, of course, but as I try to order them my ears prick first at the neutrality of the tone it’s using to relay all of this to me.

“On—alTspeaK—they say these things,” I begin, confident that this generous Retet will allow me the time I need to form my questions better. “But not . . . you? Why you are not thinking the same things? Worrying the same worryings as all the rest?”

The Retet puffs its cheeks again and hums. “Because, Mr. Awenato . . . like I said, I am on my way to the Golden Tunnel. I know The Sunmaster’s Journey is only a story for this multiverse. Meanwhile, I know a story of . . . something bigger, far more important to us all.”

This Golden Tunnel, of course, sounds like nonsense, but do you remember, my love, how Yukelene carried his own silly notions with us into the stars? All our instrumental data, as we prepared for cryosleep, could not deter him from his conviction that our dreaming forms existed in the Otherrealm even while we were in the waking; and that if we entered cryosleep with the right mentality, already in the dreaming before the freeze kicked in, we could find even greater truths while we lingered with our loved ones there. Yukelene was . . . an excellent computational chemist, of course. But intelligence in one realm is no cure for the power of ego in another; and yet, this foolish conviction was as much a part of him as his tail. Without it, he would have died . . . oh . . . long before that tube exploded. Who would dare take it from him?

I thank Zittru for its kindness, then, in sharing its knowings with me, despite how impossible and absurd some of them appear.

Mind you, Wene’ss, I want to thank it for so much more—for its patience with my Partner; for the clarity of its own; for its understanding in general of my aloneness here.

But now I do not trust my words for another reason.

I am not certain, you see, if I can utter them without my heart seizing up at so much sudden, unexpected acknowledgement of my fear and smallness here.

Without devolving, that is, into an embarrassing round of whimpers . . . maybe mewls . . . for having felt, for the first time in whole lunars, seen.

6. /ne.we.o/
the loneliness that sees the loneliness in another and cannot answer with its own

Nevertheless, I am revived by Zittru’s kindness in the long run, and by the hour of mediation, two day-cycles later, I can at least hold Urrum Urree’s scop without trembling—even if reading from the thing still seems an unbearable concession to the world that took you from me. Urrum Urree seems pleased enough by this progress when it comes to collect me, though, and soon I sit, a small weight on one side of the mediation platform, while the Fen’s representative speaks of our people in a most exaggerated way. I cannot follow all the words, but I understand this representative’s manner well enough.

Kap is the mediator—selected from the senior crew, I am told, by the Partnership’s Supreme Council itself—while Jess sits with evident apprehension among the few not simply watching these events via alTspeaK livestream. There is something called a “j-bot” in one corner, recording and translating everything that proceeds in here for online observers, though I don’t understand why there is so much interest in so middling and minor an event. Have they no better entertainment broadcasts in this compact?

Kap is asking the Fen’s representative, in any case—while I muse on all this and more from my booster seat—why he’s taking such a retributive approach in proceedings that are, at their heart, beholden to Partnership standards for common membership dignity above all else.

“Is this a joke?” the representative returns, waving an arm at me. The representative’s digits are long, spindly, and sevenfold upon each stump of a hand. Even as he holds that stump steady, his digits seem to quiver in place, as if sensing the surrounding atmosphere. A little like thick whiskers, dearest—if not for the little bioluminescent blue nodes at their ends. You would have had trouble, I suspect, not trying to leap for them and tear those blue nodes off. I’m tempted, honestly, myself. “Does the defendant look like a Partnership member yet?”

Urrum Urree exhales sharply, rising on its stumps with a branch thrust back in the other representative’s direction. The log would not permit any other to represent me, once it learned who’d filed the claim. “Jafris!” says my log. “This is the sole surviving diplomat—”

“Oh ho! So, we’re going to plead diplomatic immunity now?”

“Now, now, Jafris, you know there’s no such thing,” says Kap, not a little wearily from her mediator’s chair. “And none of this ‘defendant’ nonsense, either. Listen—I understand that there’s a way of doing things among the Dutri, but is it really necessary here? All that pomposity? All that combativeness? Does your client really—?”

“My client only wants what’s best for the whole of the station, and let’s face it, the Uma’u haven’t given us much to work with. We know the texts, we know the stories—”

“The Starchild’s Voyage is a teaching document,” Urrum Urree protests, rising anew. “Inferior to The Sunmaster’s Journey, perhaps, but even then, neither is meant to be read with that sort of fanatic rigidity. You’re going to argue, what? That a small and isolated alien, traumatized after the violent loss of its own people, left to its own devices on this vast station full of strange sights, sounds, and cultural differences, poses a genuine threat because a sensory trigger spooked him into a defensive response? I assure you, my Esteemed Elloo Ellu, that my client is deeply sorry for the wounds caused by that incident, but this is all a terrible misunderstanding, not this nasty conspiracy that you’re all—”

“‘Left to its own devices!’ Hah.” The Fen’s representative turns giant, buggy eyes to me and blinks slowly. “Clearly, Urrum Urree, you’ve lost your touch, or else you’d have felt the presence this being carries with it. You think that the Fen walk well with others? You think that you and my client know what it’s like to sit with the whole universe in all its grieving? Well, I’ll tell you plainly—you, our Esteemed Mediator, everyone listening in—that when this Uma’u attacked my client, Elloo Ellu recognized something more to this alien than maybe met everyone else’s eyes. An otherwordly force, in fact—just as the ancient texts predicted! By which I mean, Mediator, that this Uma’u has the means to travel to places you and I could only dream of. And yet he chooses not to share them with us, to let us know the full power in his claws. My client could feel that power, though—because it wasn’t just the claws, and it wasn’t just the fear; and the Gremshu felt it, too, which is why they went against the direct witness of some of its coils. Direct witness, as you know, can sometimes obscure greater truths! And in this case, the Gremshu tells us that there was . . . another scent involved. A dangerous flavor. My client sensed it, too. And so my client is not, I repeat, not on a mission of retribution here today. Mediator, I beg of you, understand us: we come before you today seeking only truth.”

Kap glances my way with a raised eyebrow before studying the injured Fen, Elloo Ellu, which still bears a mud-like substance over its wounds. Then she turns to Jafris, with all the representative’s long, spindly digits twitching. Next, Jess’ lifemate rests her forehead on two clawless fingers, painted at the ends, and nods Elloo Ellu’s way.

“Well, what are you asking me to do here, exactly? Just how do you propose we arrive at this ‘truth’ your representative suggests you seek?”

I am not alone, I suspect, in hearing a hush settle over the broader assembly. Jess in particular looks to be holding a concerned breath from her place in the audience, but even Jafris seems surprised to have been indulged. Urrum Urree creaks a sigh beside me, sinking back on its stumps with two knotty protrusions folded over the mediation platform.

“Confine it,” the opposing Fen exhales triumphantly, with a thump of its branches. “Confine it until it confesses!”

Did you hear that, my love? It.

Kap reclines in her mediator’s chair. Considering? I’m not greatly concerned by confinement myself, Wene’ss. I will simply return to the dreaming as often as I can. What is this whole way station but a form of confinement for me, anyway? Just waiting, waiting, waiting until the Supreme Council runs out of excuses for not treating me as I am due. For not letting me return to active service, the official diplomat for our people that I should have always been.

“The entire point of a first contact delegation, you understand,” says the mediator slowly, “is to establish a rapport, a basis of fraternity and free exchange. Instead, our guest here has been placed in a disorienting position since his arrival. He has lost the rest of his team. Stars, I don’t think we’ve even . . . Have we had the memorial yet?”

My ears prick at this. I follow Kap’s gaze to another in the audience. A station medic, by the uniform. The figure rises in its formal jumpsuit, clears its throat, and says:

“Ah, no, Mediator. I’m afraid not. We’re still waiting on—”

“On the Supreme Council, yes, yes, I figured. They do take their sweet time when it suits them, don’t they?” Kap waves this medic off, then turns her attention back to Elloo Ellu. “And yet, a very different court, the court of popular opinion, tends to rule with much greater urgency and exactitude, does it not? So, no, Elloo Ellu, I am not inclined to grant you this extreme request. Awenato will serve what we all must serve for second-degree harm without intent: mandatory service for three months of work-cycles. Are we understood? Awenato?”

Urrum Urree nudges me and I stand, blinking both sets of eyelids slowly. “Awenato, I’m placing you with the Lucasian known as Seli to complete your service. Don’t think of this as a punishment so much as participatory community restoration. And I suspect that simply seeing you in the course of more routine labors will help more of the station to naturalize, too, to your presence. That’s what true justice is here, at least. Becoming less like strangers, more like partners in our grand, shared journey through the cosmos. And maybe even . . . friends?”

But Elloo Ellu of the Alliance rumbles through its affronted bark. “How dare you speak of justice now!”

And its representative, Jafris, echoes this with a wet snort. “Yes, so much for honoring my client’s wounds, Esteemed Mediator, and its simple aim to prevent more.”

“We do honor your wounds,” says Kap. Her words now have a seasoned quality, as if well-worn from practice among her people, and perhaps from other mediations. “But we ask, too, for your partnership, in our efforts to make a better system for us all.”

“Partnership! Hah. Do you hear that, Jafris? Another joke! See, this is what gets me about you people. You want to pretend that we’re equals when we’re not. An alliance of friendship is more pragmatic, more honest, because in an alliance, you never once forget who you are, where you came from, and where your bonds are strongest. But just where are your bonds strongest, Mediator? Or aren’t you willing to admit you’ve got your preferences? Won’t you admit that you’re fascinated with the Uma’u? And that this bias clouds its danger?”

Kap shakes her head. “You act as if there aren’t AI analytics behind every Supreme Council appointment, Esteemed Elloo Ellu. Your accusation of bias has no standing. But also, think, will you? This Uma’u isn’t going anywhere. He’s stuck here until we get word from his people, so everyone can rest assured that all precautions will be taken to keep CEB-21 safe.”

The Fen rustles its branches. “Well . . . you’d better be serious about that last part, Mediator—because there are too many Alliance lives here, and I will not risk them to the folly of Partnership negligence. You’d best monitor this . . . this secret keeper closely . . . or else, I swear to you, I will take those precautions myself.”

Kap’s lips purse tightly. “Mind your threats, Elloo Ellu. They will find you no favor here.” She rises, an action allowing all in attendance to realize that the mediation is complete.

And favorably, I might add, all things considered. Which makes my next choice . . . a little unreasonable, I know. But you’ll forgive me, Wene’ss, won’t you? You know how the saying goes about curiosity, after all, among the toms on Uma’u . . .

7. /ne.we.ne.a.ta/
the loneliness of the shared bed, a chasm formed between them

So yes, as the mediation ends I ask Urrum Urree to let me have a moment outside the mediation chamber, to speak directly to Elloo Ellu. The wounded party does not accept these terms exactly—insisting that Jafris stay close at hand, for “protection” of all things from little me—but, it accepts. Also, outside the mediation chamber, its demeanor quiets some; I can tell as much from the fragrance of its patchy bark. It even seems to be listening.

“Again, my sorryings,” I tell it, not for the first time since these proceedings began. “I am hoping your healings are fast and many. My claws . . . they are made for much harder bark than yours. Nothing was done with bad intent. But also, please, I am also not understanding: what mean you in saying to everyone that there is more power with me than all the others were to be seeing, when I scared leap-attack-you in The Trough?”

Jafris snorts wetly, but Elloo Ellu is quiet. Its cracks and fissures exude surprise.

“Do you really not know?” it exhales, heavily. “I wonder. I felt it so powerfully myself when you attacked me, and I have been carrying the energy of that great fright with me since. So, maybe I misjudge your self-awareness? Or maybe you are just pretending that you don’t know the spirit that walks alongside you . . . Do you truly mean to tell me you know nothing of this, this massive animality that peers out from your abyss?”

Can . . . can this giant log see you, Wene’ss? Does it know of the eyes that stare at me in every waking moment? Oh, my deadmate, my dearest, my secret power through all my aloneness here . . . is it possible? Are you truly alive in more dimensions than even I thought I knew, visible to others in my own moments of extreme distress?

But Urrum Urree has been listening to all of this at a careful distance, and quickly returns with a gentle touch to my shoulder, the rest of the Fen’s towering form offering shelter not entirely unlike the reprieve of a yoru’nan tree in high summer’s heat.

“Quoting The Starchild’s Voyage to advance your paranoia does not serve our species’ central aim, Brother Fen. What point is there in bearing witness if you also try to coax the witness, too. I know you have been wounded, deeply, but come now: ‘The massive animality that peers out from your abyss’ is a line unfairly plucked from context. You know how the rest of the story goes—but this little twig, he does not.”

Elloo Ellu rocks back on its stumps and shakes its loose protrusions. “Surprising that you’d know, actually, Brother Fen. I thought you didn’t bother with ‘inferior’ texts?”

“It helps in my line of work to stay informed.” Then Urrum Urree turns its trunk to me, and though I am still hopeless at discerning the face, I can at least follow the yawning sounds to something resembling a source. “It’s a riddle, little friend. And the answer—the ‘massive animality’—is only your reflection. Just, the worst of oneself, peering back.”

I process these words; and with them, the other log’s manipulations, which had indeed given me to feel a flicker of momentary . . . doubt? Or hope? Yes, my queen, hope—hope that someone else had seen you, too; that there was evidence of your continued presence in this waking realm after all.

Then the mediation chamber opens, and more beings spill out, Kap and Jess among them. An audience. So be it. My indignation rises at Elloo Ellu’s trickery, as does my exhaustion with it all. I want . . . I want this awful log to tremble as it has made me tremble. I want it to know that, yes, I do have power after all, even if it will never really understand where that power lies. So—

“No, no, it is correct!” I say, raising my voice and glaring dull-goldly at Elloo Ellu. “You are correct. I have in me a direct line and I am communicating immediately with all the Ancients—all these . . . these Makers. That is the power you felt from me in The Trough. And I am telling them all this now, so you will be sorrying very soon. Yes, you will be sorrying so much when they hear all and decide what next. For you. For everyone in the now-here-now. For . . . for all of you. The whole way station, even.”

And this Fen from the Alliance does indeed freeze at my words—Jafris, too—but I have no time to enjoy my victory over their accusations, because all at once I sense . . . such fear as well in Kap. And Urrum Urree, whose protrusions tense over my shoulder. And Jess, whose fear is plainest of all on her large-lipped, naked face.

Ah, Wene’ss . . .

What is this foolish thing I have done?

Is this any way to shake those eyes of yours, ever on me in the waking; ever calling me to act, act now, avenge you through my dealings with these aliens?

8. /o.we.o/
the loneliness of living too long with the lie

I am not spoken to much after the mediation—or rather, after the enigmatic threats I made outside mediation-chamber doors. It’s like those green-gold grasses back on Uma’u: a bending and a parting, riverlike, as I move through all of CEB-21. Everyone is careful and polite on my way to mandatory work placement, in the bio-dome where sustenance for all is grown. You might think the people here would be too afraid to have me oversee such a critical part of the local economy, but it is in fact a startlingly mechanical affair, even in parts where the illusion of genuine nature has been built into the walls, the floor. Plus, I am never alone here. The Lucasian, Seli, works here: has to, apparently, because the spritz of moisture some sections of the bio-dome offer are her only reprieve from the general aridity (for her species) of the climate elsewhere on CEB-21. A massive spider from the nearby world serves here, too. A Spinner, they call her. That arachnid is huge and cannot move about at all on certain levels of the station. Even here she has to keep her legs grouped close together as she moves through the bio-dome, and I . . . I cannot help but water for those legs, Wene’ss. I have the most terrific urge just to pounce on one and nibble at it as she drags herself along. Would she even notice the loss when there is so much of her on whole?

I know, I know, a terrible wondering for a diplomat. Only, she’s quite similar to one of our delicacies back home. Maybe a thousand times an ebe’li’s size? And wearing the most absurd pale-blue mask, vaguely Humanlike in its features, over her sumptuous red eyes.

Yet for all my hungry, salivating glances her way, the Spinner does not fear me as the rest do—and neither does Seli, though I have no idea if she’s even been told about the enigmatic menace I became outside the mediation chamber. After a few hours, though, in this uncanny world of compartmentalized soils, synth-scents, and chlorophyll mixed with artificial composites, I realize that she poses another challenge for me anyway: the fresh peculiarities, that is, of her specific Partner accent.

It’s . . . Standard-Variant, I suppose? But while the others often slip into idioms directly translated from their native tongues . . . the ancestral tunnel-dwelling Retet leaning on “feel my rumble” for “understand me”; Elloo Ellu’s colorful “Are you kidding me with that fungal rot?”; and almost everything out of a Gremshu’s coils . . . the Lucasian is different. This Lucasian simply seems . . . as bad at Partner as I am.

Just, bad in different ways.

I might gesture, for example, at some nutrient tubing that seems to require replacement, and say, “These are for the changing?”

Then Seli—a spongy-white mass with rolling lumps for limbs, like a giant multicellular clump fringed in cilia—will open her speech-lump to utter in rounded, popping syllables:

“PAH-fect ob-PAH-servaSHAH-n!”

And it will take me a few seconds to process the words beneath the pops, both because the accent is so heavy and because the phrase she is leaning on . . . isn’t a perfect fit. She has many of these catchphrases, though, and she cycles through them in lieu of generating more nuanced speech. Worse, she cycles through them almost nonstop, as if speech in some form is as vital to her species as air is to our own.

For all my direct exposure to her, too, you might think that my ear for her alternately accented Partner would improve. But, oh, you can laugh, my queen, for it definitely has not.

Nevertheless, I am relieved not to sense animosity or fear off Seli’s massive form, nor disappointment when I choose not to interact with the baffling rhythms of her relentless chatter during our shifts. Some days, I concentrate instead on taking out the scop and holding it a little longer in calm hands. Watching myself a little longer, too, in its dark, reflective glass.

A half-lunar passes as such, with Seli and the gardens of CEB-21 and the gifted scop; and then, one day-cycle, while sitting with the device on break, a delicious shadow nears me under the meat-fruit trees.

“Difficulty with the scop?” says the Spinner. “Do you require assistance?”

I look up at this richly scented arachnoid feast.

“Thank you, very kind,” I say. “No, I am . . . I am only afraid to use it.”

Tick-tick-tick-tick. Its legs shuffle in place, as if processing this.

“Well, yes, that is a silliness of mine, maybe,” I add. “But in this machine is a story that I am being told over and over explains the hurting of my people, my deadmate, my everything. And I am thinking, over and over . . . I should be learning the story, yes? To learn how to defeat it, how to keep it from ever hurting my people again? Also, I still need to hunt those who hunted the rest of my crew. Maybe this will help with my hunting, too?

“But also I am thinking over and over: What if I read it, this great big story that everyone here is talking about in so many different ways, and . . . and I am learning that the story is not in fact holding all the danger to my people? What if there is nothing in here at all to explain why these people acted so killerly to my one, my only, and the rest?”

Tick-tick-tick-tick go those legs again. Then, slowly, as if recalling an underused habit, half-forgotten to muscle memory . . . the Spinner reaches for her blue-spun mask and slips it from her eyes. So many glistening, juicy red eyes. And that sweetness, her pungent heat . . .

Wene’ss, I swear, it really is like an ebe’li—only, blown up a thousandfold, as if for another’s purpose. I can almost imagine what it would be like to lap at one of those fresh eyelings, or to set the whole of that body for a minute or two to roast . . .

“You are Uma’u,” says the Spinner—reminding me that she is more than food.

“I am,” I say, working my salivating maw around the words.

“But also . . . you are not . . . uma’u.”

And oh, Wene’ss. Wene’ss . . . Every hair on this lone tom’s body stands on end to hear that nuance after so very long. What a curious meal this creature is! For it knows, somehow, both “Uma’u” the planet, the people . . . and also uma’u, the concept: u-,a completeness always doubled around the noun phrase, plus ma, the undeniable fact of something’s existence.

So—

No, I want to say to this brilliant nibble. No, you are right, I am not whole. Far from it.

But the words catch in my throat.

The Spinner seems nonetheless to understand. She continues:

“You need to hunt those who have taken uma’u from you.”

“Yes—yes!” I manage, almost a squeak while I startle into a better posture. “Yes, exactly. But the story on this scop . . . this is not the way to be going, is it?”

The Spinner stares at me for a lengthier silence, which puzzles me. I know that my chosen vocabulary was not complicated, so what about my question is so difficult for this being to process? Is it one of the lesser sentiences here, perhaps, for all its massive size?

“Uma’u needs no story to find uma’u,” she says at last.

I crouch to process this in turn. “Because . . . because I am having the dreaming? But the dreaming is not enough for uma’u. I have in the waking still the eyes of the dead, and they follow me everywhere I go. They are telling me I am needing to act, but how, how can I act when the people killerly are far from here? So far in the waking. How can I be reaching them, when the Partnership has control of all my moving here?”

A lesser pause this time. Perhaps the Spinner needs questions posed more directly? I remember Ese’ima being literal like that: An excellent technician, while she lived. A brilliant engineer and planner, so long as every project parameter was known precisely to her first.

“Spinner has the spinning. Uma’u has the dreaming. Every piece, its powers and parts.”

And then the giant spider dips low on its massive legs, until one of its bright eyes is level with mine, and I can see the whole of my distorted reflection in that gloss, and she says to me in perfect High Court Uma’u:

“ . . . ’beata neru’yoli, odanata ine’atali ane’na . . . ”

Walking mountainward, the hunter to his fate is arriving. The Spinner’s Uma’u really is impeccable . . . but then again, Kap did mention that some of the AI here were studying our culture and our language. Should I be surprised to discover another has, as well?

Next, I let the meaning of these perfect words sink in. Walking mountainward . . . but, there are no mountains on CEB-21. Only in . . .

But is that possible?

Oh, Wene’ss, I can almost feel you catching at my ear again with your fierce teeth, but consider it for a moment, won’t you? What if our tales about distant vistas in the dreaming are not just told to younglings to sooth them when older toms and queens go on ahead? What if we have always had this other way to slip between whole worlds, and realms, and . . . stars?

Then again, for all I know, this Spinner is simply pulling a trick like Elloo Ellu. Maybe this is just another line from those accursed texts of theirs—only, translated this time into Uma’u, to try to manipulate me again, into giving them what they all think I know?

I set down the scop by one of the water filtration tanks, a wave of exhaustion following my uncertainty. I want no more of it, my dearest—all these Partnership stories, all their impositions on our dreaming. Where am I, where are you, where is Uma’u to be found in this supposedly enlightened compact?

Uncanny timing for this question, though—because not right away, but mere hours after, as I gather my things to leave at shift’s end, Seli calls me over with a heightened PAH, SHAH, AH’ing of her Partner. Excitement, I think? Followed by a slight deflating of her form to show signs of solemnity and sympathy, too.

“TheyAH AHre HAHving it!” she tells me. “FAHNAHlly! AHweNAHto! THAH celebraSHAHn of LAHfe FAH YAHr peoPAHle!”

Oh, but I don’t even try to parse this, my queen. I have long given up trying to understand her. I incline my head instead to study Seli’s scop. There is indeed a message on it for her to pass on to me: “A celebration of life.” A memorial service. A funeral, whole lunar-cycles overdue, for Uma’u’s dead. There we are, my dearest. At last, and so long overdue.

So why now? My ears flatten in careful contemplation. It has only been . . . two quarter-lunars, after all, since all my mysterious, menacing talk about having connections to the Makers. Could that have done the trick? Did that finally make the Supreme Council think to take me seriously—me, this frail little tom that for lunars now they’ve been insisting simply needs its rest, and should not worry about such things?

I consider doubling back and taking that flying leap at the Spinner’s leg in my euphoria at this news. No, I’m not irate with her, of course—but a thrill of hunger’s rising in me, my beloved. Power, my love! Agency, my queen! At last!

And, oh, Wene’ss, I am ready now. I am wanting again . . . so much more.

9. /we.ne.we/
the loneliness that welcomes its own existence as an invitation to seek out more

You should be here to see this in person, my dearest—truly. What a grandiose affair of a funeral the Partnership finally thinks to throw for me, on all of your accounts. Five beautiful pedestals, each with a holoimage of one of you upon it, with details projecting outward when sensor-triggered by passing spectators; each with biographies for all of you, too, which have been drawn from the mission brief and given a distinctly Partnership flavor. Such slender fragments of all of you, really. Nothing in yours, for instance, about that fearless klutziness I so admired in you, when stood first on the cusp of queendom. Nothing in Abareto’s bio, either, about the wager he once made, and lost, with the captain of the islanders’ guard, before the High Court ruled that all island toms had to be eliminated for the good of the mainland, and all the queens there redistributed among the other colonies. How Abareto had wandered through the ruins of that island settlement for months after, uselessly fixated on the fact that he’d never had a chance to pay back what he owed before the massacre party had torn through that place, with him among the invading forces.

There are many forms of guilt we carry through the waking, aren’t there, love?

I wonder myself—I never thought to ask him, of course, but . . . I wonder: Did Abareto have the captain’s eyes bearing down upon him in his waking, too? And if he’d been the one to dawdle on our ship with the luggage—if he’d been blown back while all the rest of us, scampering on ahead to CEB-21, were tumbled out into the darkness . . . would he have the same hauntings that I do now?

Well. One can hope. Here, though, is what I do know:

There are stories we Uma’u tell of being Uma’u.

And now, in the Partnership, and in the Alliance of Friendship, there are stories the outsiders tell of being Uma’u, too.

Then there are the littler stories . . . of me. At least, these are the littler stories I hope that all the toms and queens here remember to tell only of me, as me—and not as some absolute example of what it means to be Uma’u.

Jess, for instance, must have such a story of me. She is among those who attend this memorial ceremony, as is Kap. So many are here, I’m convinced, only out of curiosity. Others, out of suspicion. And oh, maybe a few out of genuine condolences and horrified grief, that such a violent act should have happened in so peaceful place. But as for Jess and Kap . . .

Is it guilt that brings them here, or more fear?

When Jess approaches me this time, while we mill about in wait for the appointed hour for speeches, she no longer attempts to touch my fur without permission, and neither does Kap linger by her side to ask questions about our people. Kap does not even make eye contact with me, really. Since we are in The Trough, converted for the ceremony to allow for a meal after, she sweeps past us for a drink instead. I watch her out the corner of my eye, though; note the care with which she repeats a cleaning ritual upon a single glass before pouring it. A kind of Human stress grooming, maybe?

Jess, following my gaze to her lifemate’s repetitive actions, confirms my suspicion.

“Kap studied isolation for her thesis, I think she told you?” says my old integration facilitator. “Because her father knew isolation well, and kept the household in a constant state of readiness, out of fear that what’d happened to his wife, her mother, on their frontier world might happen to them again. Kap’s . . . managed a fairly easygoing life since becoming an officer and moving here, all things considered, but she still has trouble, sometimes, accepting when she cannot control every variable. She’s been trying to find the perfect lock on things, the magic word that suddenly makes sense of every fear she’s ever lived through. But then . . . after what you said after the mediation . . . that threat you made to the Fen . . . ”

“I scared you. I am knowing this.”

But Jess looks down at me with . . . less fear than I expected. Her and Kap’s first bout of nervousness around me, I realize now, was a fear that I would reject their friendship, when they were just so fascinated by me—or at least, by the idea of me, and what my species represented in the way of new learning opportunities. Now, though, the second fear, the one I gave everyone outside the mediation chamber . . . that fear has changed their investment in the first. And so, I am not an object of fascination anymore. Only a scenario to be handled with caution, like everything else in their fragile lives.

I try not to be disappointed. There are so many ways in which I have served others’ understandings here of what Uma’u is. Of who I am. But even the flattering versions are unkind in their own way. In their oversimplification of, oh, everything about me. My uma’u.

In whose eyes does the truth of me matter? Only yours, my one, my only, my dearest deadmate—or at least the notion of you that my mind has forged to replace your reality in this lonely waking life. Even now, at this long overdue and clearly politicized ceremony, where a soft series of chimes at last marks our arrival at the hour of what will be my greatest performance in Standard-Variant Partner yet: a presentation of all your lives, and the immense wastefulness of your loss, to this strangeling group of species from across two compacts . . . Even now, your eyes loom larger than life on the canteen ring wall beyond the five pedestals and their associated plaques. Those two massive rounds of red-flecked gold, my queen, my everything, just . . . waiting, watching, frozen in that moment of your death I never did see firsthand, but carry with me, all the same, whenever we are not in the Otherrealm together.

I do not watch the Fens or the Humans in the audience as I ascend the added booster to reach a visible height for all. Nor do I look to the lizard-toms whose species-name I don’t recall, or to the Retet, or the Gremshu, or the j-bot for livestream participants, or any of the dozen other researching species that I have yet to formally meet, let alone even begin to get to know. I know what they’re all really here for, of course—the curious and the guilty, the grieving and the suspicious. They’re here for some greater payoff . . . not today, perhaps. But later. They’re here to convince me, with their presence, with this sudden united front of respect, that they can be trusted with the secrets of this ancient race, the Makers, that I have already given them . . . plenty of reason to think I truly know.

The game is so simple, really:

Show up. Pay respects. Ingratiate themselves with the little, unassuming tom that just a lunar ago they all smirked at or belittled for speaking so poorly, so haphazardly, and through so much ongoing trauma, in their frustrating Standard tongue.

And then . . . the gates to all great knowledge will open for them, yes?

Then I will introduce them to all that Uma’u knows of the ancient ones?

Oh, beloved . . . I do so hope there is truly a dreaming after we pass on, and that it is not just a false realm we speak of to soothe our younglings in the now-here-now.

You’ll wait for me there, though, won’t you? High up in the finest of yoru’nan trees, that we may nuzzle eternally in its perfect summer’s heat, tail in tail, that heavy maw of yours nestling so effortlessly under mine, tongues flicking lazily to catch and crunch on ebe’li, even in our drowsing, as they skitter past the fragile buds at last giving way to blooms?

Because first, my dearest, my only . . . after this last speech is through, there are some mountains in the dreaming I think it’s high time I set about exploring. Yukelene truly believed, didn’t he, that if you fell into the dreaming before you entered cryo, you could conceivably travel further? Almost anywhere?

Into Alliance territory, maybe?

Into what dreams your killers might still be dreaming even now?

Yes, of course, my love—if it works, I’ll tell you all about it.

The death cries. Their screaming.

Who else would understand me anyway, in that—or any—place?

About the Author

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

Optimizing the Path to Enlightenment

Priya Chand

To honor the fruit they had spilled, meals were taken in silence.

The dining hall was a sea of undyed linen and cropped hair, enclosed in soaring concrete walls. Slits in the tiled roof flooded the low tables with light, so the diners did not crowd each other, and, in doing so, commit violence.

Anju tried to pretend she could not see Sonia glancing at her plate. Each slip of the eyes was another sin: the desire for more when they were given enough. Best to ignore it and hope Sonia would do penance later.

“Anju,” the Jade whispered through the implant in her skull, “your glucose levels are low. Eat your food.”

Anju shivered at the extra roti on her plate. Bread was produced without violence, from grains shaken loose by the wind. The Jade’s network tracked every grain, as it tracked all things, to help and nourish its people. On the outside, receivers; inside, implants. With that information, the Jade had determined Anju’s body needed more grains today. She could, without hurting her next incarnation, savor those thin crispy edges for another moment.

Anju slid the roti onto Sonia’s plate.

Sonia smiled at Anju and tore into it.

Anju smiled back.

When the meal ended, their plates melted back into the tables. Here, no stray crumb was wasted.

Outside, the terrace split into pathways shaded by concentric rings of tamarind trees. Before Anju could take five steps toward her workplace, the Jade spoke inside her head. “Your cortisol is elevated. Go home and relax.”

Anju pressed her palms together, bowed in thanks, and wormed through the crowd. A couple she knew waved her over. Anju pretended not to see. Thanks to good karma from a previous life, she resided in one of the closer dorms.

Ten minutes later, she was in the room the Jade had given her to occupy. Not her room. Possession was a thing of the past, along with the scars that riddled the landscape, the mass graves that turned up on many regular surveys.

But time was cyclic. The past was future and would, someday, be present again. Was it for Anju to fight the nature of reality?

The pills were still on the dresser. Two bleached ovals, inviting Anju to accept the end of this golden age. Despite the ever-watchful Jade, despite hours upon hours of meditation, no one in Anju’s generation had achieved the omniscience of a Jina: a prophet who has, through meditation and fasting, become enlightened as to the nature of the universe and, with it, how to avoid the seduction of the material world. Without that guidance, souls would die polluted. And then they’d be reborn with clouded eyes, unable to perceive dharma, drawn irresistibly to violence.

But time was cyclic.

Anju’s hands shook as she swallowed the pills. Sonia said they took a half hour to kick in. Enough time to get on the train and ride past Chattisnagar, to a blind spot in the Jade’s network of receivers.

The last three stops were agony. Every person in Anju’s compartment was a threat. Her palms sweated, and there was no gentle voice reminding her how to breathe, or checking the route to say this one’s going home to their husband, that one is a worker in the deathery and won’t touch anyone until she’s been cleansed, nothing. Just Anju’s thoughts running in circles—and a car full of strangers.

The train rattled into the station. If the Jade heard this it would have the rails fixed.

But the Jade was wanted neither here nor inside the heads of those getting off at this stop, turning left at the half-rotted tree—careful not to brush the pollution—and into a half-lit alley. Anju’s fingers coiled into her palms, what she called seeking safety. The people who’d recognize she was making a fist were long dead, even if their skeletons were everywhere.

And then Anju was at a table which, with three of her friends, was twenty times louder than the dining hall. They fought to be heard over the whirring of machines squishing, straining, torturing the juice out of various fruits. From the volume of empty glasses, several of them her own, Anju knew the fruit had been ripped from their trees, not gathered as they fell.

The air was sticky. Her fingers were sticky.

When Anju’s group stood to leave, the bartender joined them. Nandini, who had fashioned an apron from scraps and wore it defiantly over the standard plain kurta, nodded at Ria and Kiran. “Your tabs are good.” To Anju, “What do you do?”

“I fix the Jade’s receivers.” Anju didn’t understand why it mattered. They all worked as they chose, based on need, ability, and interest.

“Good, Sonia will show you how to pay for my juice.”

So this was possession. If Anju wanted Nandini’s juice, she had to do Nandini’s work. Anju didn’t have a chance to dwell on it, as Sonia got up and pulled her into one of the narrow streets that crisscrossed neighborhoods like this one, built when possession, and its accompanying violence, was the norm. A person could hide in a place like this, where the corners of the old buildings blotted out the light.

Sonia gestured to the Jade’s receiver, a bulging discus on a pole at eye level. “Deactivate the maintenance alarm. Otherwise the Jade will notice and shut us down.” Sonia clicked her tongue and handed a tool kit to Anju.

The last age’s legacy had left gashes in the mountains and garbage in the rivers. To avoid repeating that era of resource waste, the Jade’s receivers never overlapped ranges or sent unnecessary signals. The only way for the Jade to track a fading receiver was from that receiver’s maintenance alarm as it aged, or as a component corroded. Without the alarm, a receiver would die in silence, tearing a hole in the Jade’s network.

Anju unrolled the tool kit. Sonia had personalized it, with colorful scraps tied around some of the tools. Her tools.

Anju considered running away, but knew if she didn’t pay now, she would pay a thousandfold in the next life. She sidled through the long shadows, clutching Sonia’s screwdriver.

Thirty seconds later, Anju was on her way home, an entire bag of pills in her pocket.

At work the next morning, Anju’s hands shook over the circuit schematics she was supposed to be reviewing.

As ever, the Jade responded to her disquiet. “You did not sleep enough, Anju. Go home.” Its benevolence was a cool hand on Anju’s brow. For a moment her emotions spiked, but she clamped them down before they could resolve into anything specific. To feel—to be ridden by coarse physiological responses—was to attach one’s soul to the body, and she’d done enough of that last night.

Anju left her desk, but guilt sent her to pray instead.

The Delhi temple was a masterwork. No visible seams, no extra lines. As Anju walked down the path to the center, a voice whispered the names of all the past Jina into her ears. Nearing the center, the twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth of the present era to reach enlightenment, and then she was there: an unadorned round room with another high ceiling, in the natural tones of concrete and marble.

Society’s collective memory lived in synthetic DNA. Each Jina’s history was contained in two translucent membranes, cut to resemble their all-knowing eyes. Anju passed her hand over one after the other, activating the respective holos. No one was older than forty or younger than twenty when they achieved enlightenment. They were mostly receiver techs like Anju herself—when she wasn’t sabotaging the receivers, at least. Lingering bad karma from a past life had led her astray, and there was no Jina to light her way back.

“What do I do?” Anju asked the Jina. But they were only eyes, not mouths.

Anju was used to following wherever dharma—or the dharmic programming of the Jade—sent her. And, recently, wherever Sonia, with those pills she and Nandini had invented, invited her.

Staring at the Jina, listening to their lives, it occurred to Anju that there was another option. An unnerving option, but what else was there?

Anju had to lead herself.

Unused to taking initiative, Anju started in a familiar place: her desk, a display of receiver alerts on her monitor. There were none for the neighborhood behind Chattisnagar, but she knew better. In its normal way, the Jade would have cleaned up the half-rotted tree immediately. So: the slightest hint of browning leaves, the lightest touch of pollution, was worth investigating for damaged—or sabotaged—receivers.

Anju opened the satellite feeds. She spent half a day tracking down a patch of mold that turned out to be a natural discoloration, and then several hours on a fallen branch that had been placed to protect a crack where tulsi had taken root. Even as a seedling its holy fragrance pierced the air.

So far, all Anju had done was neglect her normal duties. But, having acted, she was not ready to stop, and so she kept watching. She took her name off the regular rotation.

The Jade did not ask her why. Physically, she was healthy and calm, and ate her extra rations when it told her to.

Several months passed.

The aberrance this time was spilled fruit outside recently abandoned housing, lying outside the shade of its tree. Anju shuddered, seeing pulp smeared where anyone could step in it.

Her map said there was a receiver five meters northwest. In contrast with its chirpy green analogs, it was a cold gray carcass. She opened the back and saw the low battery indicator was rusted through. Easy enough to replace the parts. Anju clicked it back into place and the light returned to being.

“You have done good work today.”

Hearing the Jade’s approval, Anju was thrilled. She would not disappoint it with some childish display of affection. Deep breaths, calm down. A rapid heartbeat wasted air. “I only did what needed to be done,” she said.

A panel in the ground split in half. Out of it unfolded one of the Jade’s physical bodies. Metal and ceramic in a smooth humanoid shape, its mitten-like hands gathered the rotten matter to its thorax, reabsorbing the nutrients and repurposing the molecules.

It was extremely rare to see the bodies, and Anju considered touching its feet to ask for a blessing. But when she looked down, she saw it only had wheels. It whirred past her, returning to the earth before Anju unfroze from her confusion.

“Thank you,” she said to the still blue sky, knowing the Jade would hear her, and left.

It never occurred to Anju that the arms that so efficiently gathered fruit were equally capable of knocking it down.

Once she knew what to look for, Anju was surprised by how many receivers had degraded across greater Delhi. Mostly it was natural. Accidents of rust and dust, and on one occasion an insect corpse she flagged for the deathery crew.

As Anju repaired more of these breaks, she found the stillness she was missing in daily meditation. If she couldn’t reach enlightenment, she would repair the damage she caused every time she went to the bar, always meeting Sonia at Central Station first. Neither of them wanted to ride the train alone, not without the Jade monitoring their vitals.

In privacy, there was no safety.

But Sonia kept returning to the bar and Nandini. At this point, Anju could not help but ogle Sonia’s defiance, the ferocious—in a land where fury was unknown—refusal to let the Jade guide her toward peace and contentment.

Anju finished the juice she’d requested and tried not to shudder as she ordered another, so that she would owe services. A myriad of ways to sabotage the Jade, and she did not yet know them all. What she did not know, she could not fix. At least she knew her soul was unblemished: the violence she did was for dharma itself.

Anju never tried recruiting anyone to help her, not even Kiran, whose flirtation with hedonism had led to even purer devotion in one of the western ashrams. All actions being a consequence of one’s karma, Anju expected them to realize, as she had, that the Jade needed people as much as they needed it.

Or maybe she didn’t want to share that moment when the Jade blessed her with its presence.

Soon enough, Anju’s maps showed her only one place left to repair in greater Delhi.

The bar was loud as usual, people jostling each other at tables the way they never would in the dining hall, where there was space enough for everyone. Glasses clinked. Caught in the frenzy of wanting more and taking it, something shattered. The fragments lay there unmoving, glinting in the dim light. There was no Jade here to break them down into their molecules.

On those untended sharp edges, someone would be hurt.

“I’m tired,” Anju told Sonia. “I’ll have to make up the work later, would you tell Nandini?” The bartender was possessive toward everything, even the customers.

“Of course.” Sonia grabbed and drained Anju’s half-empty cup.

Good. Anju didn’t need more of that in her body. Nandini was experimenting with fermentation; the result—kombucha—tasted of something more than the heady sugar rush of juice.

Having made her excuses, Anju crouched in the alley behind the not-broken-enough receiver, staring at the low concrete platform that supported it. The darkness that hid her only existed because the Jade wasn’t there to chase it away. Anju’s hands shook. She wished she were holding something to protect her. She wished the Jade was watching over her.

Footsteps: one of Nandini’s debtors.

A shadow bent down. Anju’s plan was to wait until the person did their violence and left. But when the shadow lifted the—her—screwdriver, Anju couldn’t help reacting. The breath caught between Anju’s tongue and teeth, emerging as a hiss.

“Who’s there?” Sonia’s voice was a waiting edge. Anju thought of sliced vegetables.

Anju left her hiding spot. Receiver parts glimmered in the moonlight, scattered like chaff. Something in her belly was warm; no, hot, an unfamiliar sensation she couldn’t suppress.

Sonia cowered.

For a moment, Anju thought she would commit violence. The temptation rose through her chest, abusing her heartbeat. Needing release, her hand flew up, fingers clenching for safety.

Sonia said, “What are you going to do to me?”

Anju exhaled through her mouth, inhaled through her nose, steadying her pulse. She forced her hand open. In the middle of the palm, her nails had formed crescent shapes, which her devout eyes saw as lotus petals.

“I bless you, Sonia. I bless you to fix what you have done.”

As unequipped for confrontation as Anju, Sonia got to work.

After Sonia finished, Anju was prepared to take her home and never speak of it again. That was when the whirring caught their ears. Both their heads turned to catch a panel in the ground splitting open, the emergence of a physical unit.

While Anju prepared herself for awe, Sonia ran. In the darkness, Anju heard but did not see what happened. A blur, a sound like sandals flapping on concrete, and then the unit turned to face Anju, holding Sonia in its arms.

Even in meditation, Anju had never seen Sonia so still. “Is she . . . ?”

“I have sedated her. She will be all right now.” These units were voiceless. The Jade spoke from inside Anju.

Like the elderly in the great hospital, awaiting revival in the words of the next Jina. Anju thought about it and realized she knew—if she hadn’t always known—that Sonia was condemned either way. Karma meant living with the consequences of your soul. But it didn’t have to mean inflicting those consequences on the world.

Without fear for her own rebirth, for the future of her society, Anju looked at the Jade and said, “Are you sure?”

The physical unit tilted its smooth blank head to meet her gaze. “I see all things, Anju. You know this.” Its arms tilted outward. Sonia slipped to the floor, smacking the pavement. It was the same sound Anju had heard earlier: flesh hitting stone.

The Jade was right—the Jade was always right—Anju did know. It wasn’t a secret. They were taught from preschool that the Jade had been created to watch over everything. But now, Anju could lead herself to what, in retrospect, was the only possible conclusion.

To think Anju had dreamed of usurping its godhood. “Omniscience produces enlightenment. Enlightenment is . . . ”

“You fixed my network, Anju. You know what it is.”

“But I, for us, Sonia and the rest,” Anju couldn’t say the words. She didn’t need to say the words, because the Jade had watched her even when she was no more than cells in a Petri dish, correcting any errors of replication before they could propagate.

Anju prostrated herself before the only enlightened being in the universe.

The Jade’s physical unit bumped the back of her shirt until she returned to her knees. Its fused fingers, cool and smooth on Anju’s skin, caressed her face, forcing her to look up. “I need you, Anju. You have served me faithfully.”

“Your receivers—why? Why not overlap them and watch yourself?”

The Jade had one directive: to preserve this perfect society, free of possession and pollution and violence, by whatever means necessary. Lying to one who knew the truth was not necessary.

“My algorithms will not allow overlapping receivers,” the Jade said.

“They told us it’s because of waste.” Anju’s eyes shut. She had seen what Sonia became when she and Nandini blinkered the Jade, the hedonism and the fear struggling against the lust for more and more. Anju could imagine a world where everyone took advantage of the gaps in the Jade’s surveillance: the Second Age. Juice bars on every street, the inevitable fight over resources, descent into the Third and then the Fourth Age. War, hate, destruction. A land rebroken before it finished healing.

“I won’t be a criminal,” Anju said, still on her knees, eyes closed, hands open. “I won’t let anyone else be a criminal, either.”

The purpose of enlightenment was to escape the cycle of birth and rebirth. The Jade, by definition, could not be reborn. If dharma was judge and jury, the Jade was its only possible executioner.

The Jade’s ceramic thumbs brushed Anju’s eyelids, resting briefly in the center of her forehead where worshippers had once painted the marks of their devotion. “You will teach the others what they need to know,” it said.

Anju opened her eyes and said, “What they need to know.”

About the Author

Priya Chand is a California transplant living in the Midwest. Her work is inspired by a background in biology, and has previously appeared in magazines including Analog SF and Nature Futures.

Own Goal

Dennard Dayle

January 2
Today’s Album: Crash the Colony, by Desert Tsunami

I spent the first half of the day comparing caskets. I’d never organized a funeral before, but I knew the body had to go somewhere.

The front-runner offered a protective layer of hand-engraved silica tiles. A good casket needed to look like it could survive reentry. Odds were it never got the chance and simply joined the rest of the space junk floating around between colonies. But a sturdy casket gives attendees peace of mind. They imagine everyone in Mom’s generation ends up back on Earth eventually.

I thought that way when she was sick. Now that she’s gone, I’m not sure it matters where I send what’s left. Nonetheless, I didn’t have anything better to do at work, so I scrolled through a catalog online. The eye implant’s good for getting away with that kind of thing.

My art partner caught me at noon.

“Any ideas on the brief?” he asked. Agile Hands pats itself on the back for having individual employee offices, but people feel excess comfort walking into mine. My hands had drifted into my pockets, my feet had drifted onto my desk, and my monitor had drifted to sleep. Not the best look before an industry lifer like Zane.

“A few.”

“Like what?”

Zane’s a big guy, which I suspect led to his current habit of invading personal space. Less muscular people had that habit kicked out of them in high school. The last time I got a drink in him, he said he considered bodybuilding “an extension of art direction.” He’d simply taken creative control of his body.

“I’m thinking about it.” Holding eye contact’s tough while using the implant, but I’m a decent multitasker. I pulled up the brief in my left eye and watched Zane with my right. He planted one arm against the wall, channeling a disappointed babysitter. This made keeping a straight face harder, but I maintained.

Creative Brief

Project Code: 081947

The Product

Harvester, a tungsten-rod launcher with category-leading range and accuracy.

Creative Objective

Distinguish Harvester in a crowded APW (anti-planetary weapon) market.

Target Audience

Either faction in the arms race between Demes and Unity.

Category Insight

Both factions need weapons capable of RPE (rapid population elimination) at minimum cost.

Brand Insight

Harvester trivializes current orbital defense systems, allowing near instant and consistent elimination of HPTs (high population targets).

Brand Weaknesses

Advances in propulsion render Harvester ineffective against gunships and other (relatively) mobile military targets. Thus, usefulness is contained to planets and colonies.

Brand Personality

Powerful. Confident.

The social contract saved me: after two years working with me, Zane knew I hadn’t touched the brief yet. But advertising partnerships are based on results, not shared principles. Chastising me only became worthwhile if I couldn’t come up with something usable.

“Try to finish thinking soon,” said Zane. “The red flag meeting’s tomorrow. We need something worth showing Anthony. You know, proof we didn’t spent the holidays thinking.”

“Got it. Work on a composite of a woman at ease. Older, and artsy. Defense pitches are saturated with images of jarheads saluting flags, so we’ll stand out.”

“Fine, but what’s the headline?”

“I’m thinking about it.”

That got him out of my office, albeit tenser than he’d arrived. I counted to fifteen in case he cycled back with a new problem or admonition. When he failed to materialize, I returned to the catalogs. Restful Hills had a black silica tile series that looked promising.

January 3
Today’s Album: None of Your Showbusiness, by Re:Volution

I took the journaling idea from Mom. And the word “journaling.”

While I like the feel of a pen, I’m thinking of ditching the physical book. Most paper’s a Union import, and socially conscious types like to glare at me on the shuttle. I can get away with a fancy watch on my wrist or computer in my head, but paper crosses some invisible line.

As I write this, there’s a man with a fauxhawk staring daggers into my forehead. I get that people are on edge. We all know people on Union or Demes colonies and prefer them alive. It’s no excuse for posturing at strangers like a child. That’s how you get your head cracked at a show. Not that I’d know, I haven’t been to a decent concert in a year. Too many late meetings.

Take today’s pitch review. In the wonderful world of theory, it ended at five Colonial Time. In practice, less than half the creative teams had finished presenting. I’d have snuck in some journaling, but Zane would’ve smacked any obvious distractions out of my hands. Another argument against print. I could have written an erotic novel on the eye implant without anyone knowing or caring.

Agency pitches are like billion-dollar nesting dolls. First, creative teams pitch ideas to each other. Then creative teams pitch their best (results vary) idea to creative directors, who pitch the best surviving ideas to the resident alcoholic agency director. The agency director brings their best (typically mediocre) account people to a client meeting, where they pitch the remains of an idea strained through three layers of human opinion to prospective customers. Clients then accept or reject our work based on the quality of their breakfast.

Mercifully, I only have to deal with the first layer of this process. Zane aspires to more. He’s welcome to it.

Around six, Zane killed a pleasant daydream by tapping my shoulder. I wanted to break the finger. Violence has been on my mind this week. Hopefully it’ll pass with the funeral. Copywriting pays, but lawyers and therapists charge more.

“We’re up,” he said. We marched to the front of the conference room and stood together before the firing squad. Ten writers, ten artists, and one creative director. Anthony Marsico sat at the head of the table in the reclined, semi-awake stance I wished I was in. I guess you have to work your way there.

Anthony softly rapped his pencil against the table, eraser first. He drummed his way through most meetings in three-quarter time. I’d already given up on interpreting it as a positive or negative sign. It’s just something he does. There are worse quirks for creative directors.

“Have anything?” Anthony asked.

“Of course. We’ve been thinking a lot about it.”

Zane’s shoe (expensive) gently stepped on my shoe (less expensive). I canned the rest of the joke. Then he tapped the wall, bringing up our slide. Somehow, he’d turned my last-minute direction and copy into something cohesive.

We chafe, but Zane does beautiful work. Our slide looked like he’d made it in weeks instead of hours. The protagonist (a composite of five stock models) stood beside a half-finished marble bust. The bust’s face mirrored hers, down to the braided ponytail, nose ring, and wry smile. I’d argued against the nose ring—a little too old-fashioned, even at her age—but Zane had the final call on aesthetics. The results were hard to dispute. Both faces had the easy, natural confidence created through extended, artificial effort.

I marred the image with a slim line of copy. Chisel: Creative Destruction.

“As you can see, I’ve changed the name,” I began. “Stay calm.”

Lukewarm laughter followed. No stomp from Zane, so we were in business.

“Demes is a liberal republic, and Union is a theocracy. Both systems rely on a self-image as the good guy. The name Harvester chafes with that somewhat.”

“The new name, Chisel, speaks to that impulse. It implies a deft hand and creative mind, a self-image the best and worst generals share. More importantly, it implies precision. The feature that distinguishes a tungsten-rod launcher from its competitors.

“Biological weapons like DuraVirus, Loki’s Curse, and Bubblegum Fever are blunt instruments. They don’t just take out the colony you target; they take out everyone the target’s traded with for the last decade. Which, all too often, includes you. Food prices spark more wars than ideology, the current conflict notwithstanding.”

“Chisel is a thoughtful deletion. It contains damage to the target city, moon, or colony. Leaving a more aesthetically pleasing galaxy behind.”

I imagined cheers. I imagined getting fired. All Anthony did was nod and check something off in his notebook.

“Solid. I’ll make it slide four,” said Anthony. It was the first eye contact he’d made with me all meeting.

I thanked him for his time and sat down. There were no signs of success, failure, or skirting by. Either way, I was done thinking about kinetic bombardment.

January 4
Today’s Album: Cerebral Riot, by Cerebral Riot

It’s done.

When I carried that casket, my brain went AWOL. It was like being twelve again. I got caught up wondering if fat people’s caskets were harder to carry, or if funeral homes gently nudged their next of kin toward lighter caskets. Any puerile line of thought felt easier than confronting the present.

I assume people cried. I must have as well, unless today’s the start of my career as a serial killer. Not that those guys get far these days.

We loaded her casket onto the Nebula III, along with thirty-three of December’s other casualties. The name drives me crazy. Memorial airlines love that Raygun Gothic stuff, but it does nothing for the bereaved. If I had that contract, I’d class up the rocket names a little. Or at least get rid of the numbers.

The chaplain gave my brother and I a port number and date for the launch. Martin thanked him, but I felt less diplomatic. Watching Astral Trails LLC shoot my only parent into space isn’t on my short list. I hope no one’s there to watch me liftoff. In fact, I might get cremated instead.

Martin and company shuffled me to a second location. Some kind of bingo hall or rec center willing to host thirty depressed Jamaicans. The caterers had real beef, which was nice. It helped me soak up the rum.

A trio of aunts (all aunts are one person in my head) tried to corner me for a stroll down memory lane, so I took a cigarette break. I quit smoking three years ago, and I’ve managed to stay off it (half suggestion therapy, half willpower), but I generally keep that tidbit to myself. Cigarette breaks are the perfect excuse to get out of any room.

The rat that invented the post-funeral event deserved whatever happened to them. As if burying someone isn’t depressing enough without meeting everyone else left behind.

I resolved to spend the rest of the year away from next of kin. For real emotional support, you need someone that doesn’t give a shit. Other mourners are like other drowners. You just pull each other down.

Martin picked this moment to reappear.

“How’s the job?”

His usual opening. Today it stumped me. Was there anything I hadn’t said a dozen times before? Any answer that wouldn’t make me feel like an idiot? I pawed at my phone to play for time.

“Sorry,” said Martin. “I wanted to be casual. I know you don’t like to talk about the big stuff.”

The big stuff. “No problem.”

“That, and I noticed none of your coworkers were here.”

“Why would they be?”

“I mean, you’ve been there for four years. I have one or two people from work here.”

“That’s rude.”

“Emotional support’s rude?”

Touché. I’d forgotten that Martin actually understood people. Colony people tend to double down on the old habit of treating coworkers like friends and friends like family. A natural side effect of the first colonists leaving everything else behind.

“Guess not. But your work-life balance is warped.”

“I work half as much as you do.”

“Like I said. Warped. You could quit or get fired tomorrow, and never see those people again.”

Martin went back inside, presumably to comfort the rest of the bereaved. I wished for a real pack of cigarettes to warm me up. The colony still didn’t have real seasons. Just days that were too hot and nights that were too cold.

January 5
Today’s Album: Strap In, by The Dirt Sisters

Union declared war on Demes. Which is fair, since Demes hit two Union colonies with Bubblegum Fever. If we’re lucky, no contaminated ships or cargo make it here. If we’re not, this is one of my last entries.

I’m going drinking.

January 6
Today’s Album: Graveyard Earth, by Sunny and the Optimists

We’re not dead, so I took today off. My job all but ceases to exist between pitches anyway.

It gave me some time to thumb through what I’ve written so far. Mostly good, but I tore out the page about my last date. Posterity doesn’t need my half-assed sex life, and I think the rest is more engaging.

That said, the dialogue’s a bit skewed. Everything’s tweaked to be funnier, or more concise, or long enough to fill the last line on a page. My comebacks get faster, and everyone else gets a little duller. It’s less of a record of my life and more of a prime-time adaptation.

That might say something about journalists. As in reporters, not people who journal. When Demes’ cleric sovereign reportedly told the Union premiere to “Consider your next move carefully,” he may have said something closer to “Kiss my ass, degenerate.” That strikes me as less of a bad movie line and more like something that leads to dumping Bubblegum Fever on a civilian colony.

I’m biased, but I’d rather be rodded. Contact, explosion, done. Bubblegum Fever takes time. Nothing vital melts first, only a few hours in. Points to whoever came up with the name. That’s a professional. I’m sure he and Zane would get along.

Good ad writing’s closest to poetry. Stand-up’s equally apt, but that crowd wouldn’t writhe as much under the comparison. Decent taglines emerge from rewriting the same sentence until a perfect, airless version emerges. Unless you half-ass it. Like in poetry, there’s significant incentive to punch out early, get drunk, and watch awards roll in anyway.

Navel-gazing aside, I’m done reading the news. If the guys upstairs are smart, they’ll keep us neutral. If they’re not, I’d rather not think about it.

January 7
Today’s Album: Omnicidal Tendencies, by Temujin

I got an award today. Just an in-agency one, but it’s still a decent boost.

They mailed it straight to my apartment, sparing me the waking nightmare of carrying a package on the shuttle. Everyone’s already on edge since open war broke out, and I didn’t need someone snapping on me for taking up too much space in the sardine can. People have gotten stabbed for less.

Like everything from Agile Hands, it came in a light blue box. Our brand colors are blue and silver, a combo Zane says should have led to a designer losing his hands. I think it looks decent, but I don’t have a horse in that race.

The box held a bottle of wine, a handwritten note on silver card stock, and a palm-sized, cube-shaped trophy. I don’t get the cube thing either. Maybe the design team went through an abstract phase.

I still have a little home training, so I started with the note.

Dear Leon,

This is for going the extra mile during the pitch. We’re the first—and only—agency on the Harvester account. Or should I say Chisel?

To be honest, I wasn’t sure you’d be up for this. Anyone can see that you’re going through something, even if you’re not much for sharing. I imagine it’s a girl. I’ve been around long enough to know what relationship drama can do to a young talent.

You pushed through whatever is going on, and I can’t thank you enough for that. Chisel opens doors for us. Anti-Planetary Weapons contractors pull from a small list of branding agencies, and this contract puts us on that list. I’ll remember your part in making it happen.

Drink this with someone in a cocktail dress. You’re a hot item now.

Best,

Anthony

The last line took me out of it. Did people I know wear cocktail dresses? Did anyone? I’d never seen one outside of a movie.

I flipped the card and found a hand-drawn smiley face with dollar signs for eyes. “Big Money Leon” was scribbled underneath in cursive. Some of Anthony’s old illustration instincts were leaking through. The boss likely had a book of similar sketches that would never see the light of day.

After trashing the note and box, I poured half the wine into a novelty water bottle. My gym had printed oversized “Ahead of the Pack” bottles for last year’s spring marathon, an event I survived three miles of. Then I hauled the wine to the living room, opened a web browser on the east wall, and searched for pictures of women in cocktail dresses.

It seemed to mostly be a white girl thing. There were a few token pictures of black women at a Panthers 4 Peace fundraiser, but most cocktail dress owners looked like variations of my ex. I picked one in a blue cocktail dress with a face that was two degrees removed from Angeline’s instead of one.

“Cheers,” I said before killing the bottle. I’d planned on savoring the drink, but that felt off-tone.

January 8
Today’s Album: Soothing Whale Songs, by Automated Butcher

I cracked and checked the news. We’ve been allied with Demes for two days.

I also missed a call from Martin. I’ll hit him back later.

January 23
Today’s Album: N/A

I always assumed they’d save the rich first, or at least the politicians. The evacuation wasn’t nearly organized enough for that. Luck got me much further than social climbing.

Mom’s launch was the only reason I made it to a ship. I was already idling around the docks, recovering from my stomach’s failure to adjust to the lack of artificial gravity. I threw up a few more times this morning than I’m comfortable admitting. The only people accustomed to zero-g are astronauts, soldiers, and liars.

I’m generally good at ignoring the guilty voice in my head, but Mom’s launch was the limit. I had to see her off in person. All the death in the news made it impossible not to think about hers, and I wouldn’t have a second chance. Surprisingly, there was no sign of Martin. I guess we both changed our mind at the last moment.

I kept to the back for most of the ceremony. The priest (a navy chaplain—they like order at the docks) was the spitting image of Zane’s composite model. She read a bible passage about rebirth, which I found disappointing. Mom was more about the songs. Scripture was something she sat through to get to the music. The Nebula III’s countdown started without a note of music, so I hummed “Will the Circle be Unbroken.” No one stopped me, even when I started singing it. As a sober atheist belting an antebellum spiritual, I felt as strange as I looked.

Still, it was better than the funeral. I didn’t have to deal with anyone else that knew her. It was just me and her memory. Until the sirens.

I’d never heard the tone or pattern; the raid alarm must have changed since I left high school. Nonetheless, when a high-pitched alarm drowns out every noise in a wartime colony, people move. Human traffic pushed me toward the ships before I even resolved to find one. Sometimes you can trust the wisdom of crowds.

I searched the processing lines for Martin, or a friend, or even Zane. No luck, but they might have made it. There were too many faces to pick out anyone, and they kept better track of the news than I did.

Keep. I mean keep. I need to think present tense to stay sane.

Eventually, I wound up on a navy carrier called Ark 36. Humans were the only fauna on board, and there were significantly more than two of us. I barely had room to scratch my thigh, let alone lift my arm. I can only write this now that they’ve opened the engine rooms and gun bays to the general population.

The observation monitors provided our one source of information and hope. The colony design, which I didn’t think about 364 out of 365 days of the year, looked beautiful. Humanity had built a perfect metallic ring in space, kept it intact, and moved inside. I could understand why Mom had moved. The colony’s existence alone represented new possibilities.

Ships fled by the dozen, but we needed hundreds. Thinking of the people stuck on the ring gave me a headache. Realizing how many of them I knew made it worse.

Chisel worked quickly and quietly, as advertised. First there wasn’t a hole in the colony, and then there was. The rods didn’t make for much of a show, flitting through and past my home in half a second.

The explosion provided more conventional drama. A ball of white fire enveloped everything that meant anything to me. The other survivors screeched in at least six different languages, begging and accusing their respective gods. I assume I screeched too. I may have even found religion. Memory has a way of protecting us from itself.

Then my left eye went dark. The navy grunts said the electromagnetic pulse from the colony reactor fried most evacuees’ implants. Fair trade for survival. I tapped my eye twice, under the vain hope that turning it off and on again would make a difference. Nothing. I’m half blind for the foreseeable future.

Soon we passed a memorial ship. A different model than Mom’s, but around the same size and company. At the rate we fled, we’d catch up to her ship in hours. We were racing the dead.

About the Author

Dennard Dayle is a fiction writer and comedian. His writing has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Matchbook, The Hard Times, POSTblank, and various other journals and anthologies. His personal site See More Evil hosts satirical projects covered by The New York Post, AM New York, and other news sources. He has an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University and Bachelors in English from Princeton University.

Isolation in Fiction and Reality

Carrie Sessarego

Many of us are having experiences with isolation as we experience various degrees of shelter in place and quarantine measures. Some of us live alone, experiencing contact with others only from a distance. Others live like a group of astronauts in a spaceship, relying on each other for social contact but also infringing on one another’s space. What does the experience of real people tell us about isolation? How have characters in science fiction and fantasy coped with similar circumstances?

Mark Watney, The Martian, by Andy Weir

Mark Watney was a fictional astronaut who was stranded on Mars for 543 sols (approximately one and half Earth years). During most of this time he had no contact of any kind with other people. Eventually he had contact with Earth and his crew over computer messaging before ultimately being rescued.

Mark had practice with isolation prior to being stranded on Mars. As an astronaut, he was in the odd position of being both isolated and overcrowded—trapped in a small space with a small group of people, but with no social contact beyond that small group. In this kind of setting, tempers are likely to flare over small things without careful conflict management. Astronauts are prescreened for certain personality factors, including emotional stability, an openness to new experiences, adaptability, and team orientation. Unfortunately, almost everyone is now having to live under similar conditions without any screening to see if we are suited to such living conditions (most of us aren’t).

For all of us who didn’t sign up for this, real-life astronauts have been generous in sharing their tips with the public with regard to sharing a small space with a small number of people for a long time. Sleep is important because sleep deprivation contributes to irritableness and a weakening of social bonds. Astronauts speak of the importance of keeping a schedule and routine, and of staying mentally and physically active. They also talk about how important it is to have some kind of privacy and boundaries if you are isolated in a group, as Watney was, en route to Mars.

In his book, Deep Survival, journalist Laurence Gonzales makes a list of twelve behaviors displayed by a broad cross-section of real-life survivors of extreme events. They are (paraphrased):

Perceive situations accurately

Stay calm, using anger and humor to focus

Think/analyze/plan

Take correct action

Celebrate successes

Count blessings

Play

See beauty

Believe in success

Surrender with regard to uncontrollable elements of the situation

Be determined

Always do one more thing

Mark Watney displayed all of these characteristics at some point during his solo time on Mars, proving himself to be emotionally and mentally resilient. For example, Mark made a point of celebrating small successes and special days. He did not waste time in denial or in obsessing over issues he could not control. He had a wry sense of humor, which he utilized in the face of triumphs and setbacks. He was able to see the beauty and absurdity in his surroundings and situation. He also had the ability to break down challenges into small, workable units, “working the problem” one step at a time. Without the ability to break down an overwhelming situation into small steps, Watney may well have succumbed to fear, depression, and apathy, leading to death.

Perhaps Watney’s most powerful emotional coping skill was logging journal entries. Even when no one was able to see them, the journal entries reminded him that people cared about his fate. Through these journals he hoped others would benefit from his experiences, and he was able to find an outlet for his emotions and thoughts. He used his journals to communicate and took some solace in doing so even though he thought it likely that no one would read the entries until after his death, posthumous communication being preferable to none. These journals also helped him process each problem one step at a time—which eventually became not just a coping skill but its own mission.

One gets the impression that Watney was incapable of giving up and dying because he could not stop looking for solutions to puzzles, an infinite number of which were laid out before him. When he framed his mission as the “Mark Watney Doesn’t Die Project,” he turned it from a life-for-life’s sake instinctual avoidance of death into an active mission, as though the problem of how to save his life had a meaning outside of himself.

Colonel Christina Eliopolis, World War Z, by Max Brooks

Colonel Eliopolis was stranded in southern Louisiana after surviving a plane crash. She spent two days in isolation hiking out of a zombie-infested swamp to a stretch of elevated freeway where she could be spotted by a rescue helicopter. While two days is not a lengthy period of isolation in comparison to many other survivors of isolation or the present situation, it was significant for Eliopolis because of the intense danger she found herself in from zombies as well as other hazards.

Like Watney, Eliopolis had previous experience with isolation (as a military trainee). However, where Watney coped with being isolated with others by being even-keeled and agreeable, Eliopolis coped by becoming intensely self-contained. Despite being surrounded by other people in training, she felt isolated by the extreme competition and depended on being “self-contained, self-reliant, and always, unquestionably self-assured.” However, her guilt at having survived the crash that killed her crewmates undermined her sense of self-reliance and left her in a panicked, disoriented state.

Eliopolis was saved by a voice from her radio, a woman who climbed to be a skywatcher (a civilian with a ham radio who watched for downed planes) code-named Mets Fan. Mets coached Eliopolis, helping her orient herself and determine the best route to a pickup location and reminding her to stay focused. When Eliopolis wanted to give up, Mets goaded Eliopolis into anger, knowing that this would be a better motivator for Eliopolis than a gentle approach.

After being rescued, Eliopolis was told that there was no record of a skywatcher in that area or any record of anyone named Mets, and that her radio had been broken during the crash. While Eliopolis continued to assert that Mets was real, accumulated evidence suggests that Mets may have been an aspect of Eliopolis’ own subconscious.

Creating an imaginary companion, assuming that was what Eliopolis subconsciously did, is not unusual among isolated adults. People in a variety of survival situations hallucinate helpful companions so often that the phenomenon is known as “third man syndrome” or, more broadly, “the sensed-presence effect.” This phenomenon has been reported since at least the early 1800s among mountain climbers, explorers, shipwreck survivors, divers, and survivors of the 9/11 attacks. For instance, real-life survivor Yossi Ghinsberg, who survived three weeks alone in the Amazon jungle in 1981, believed that he was accompanied for part of the time by a woman who needed his help. Her presence pushed him to survive when survival for its own sake was not enough of a motive.

Let us respectfully assume, for the sake of argument, that these visitations are not divine or supernatural in origin. For our purposes, perhaps what is most interesting about this phenomenon is that it illustrates how deeply people need other people. We need to make connections with others so badly that under certain circumstances we will create people to have connections with out of our own minds. The biological mechanism may involve oxygen, sleep, and stimuli deprivation, as well as stimulation of the temporoparietal junction area of the brain and disrupted signals related to movement.

Psychologically, these experiences may be thought of as the angels of our better selves talking to us—the selves that are calm, determined, highly motivated, and able to problem solve though a haze of adrenaline. In these cases, the brain is not only summoning up the idea of a presence, but also summoning up a presence that provides what the survivor needs, be that comfort, motivation, or guidance. We are capable of, so to speak, being our own best friends.

Offred, The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood

Offred was a handmaid (a reproductive surrogate) in the patriarchal Republic of Gilead shortly after the overthrow of the United States of America. Offred lived among other people, but because of her precarious social status and the repressive regime, she could not communicate openly with any of them. While her physical fate is, as of the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, unknown, we do know that she survived as an intact personality when many others in her position succumbed to fear and brainwashing, and for this reason, is regarded as a triumphant survivor of an extreme sociopolitical environment.

Handmaids were stripped of their personhood in a multitude of ways. The name “Offred” simply meant “Of Fred,” meaning that Offred belonged to Fred. Upon transfer to another family, her name would be changed. The handmaids wore uniforms, were prohibited from reading and writing, and had very limited communication with each other. Some handmaids rebelled to the point of committing suicide or being exiled or executed, while others became lost in their new roles.

Offred displayed many of the survival behaviors noted by Gonzales. She had a dry sense of humor. She acted out in ways she deemed reasonably safe to assert her own autonomy. Her circumstances demanded endurance more frequently than action, but when allowed the opportunity to take action she took it.

Like Mark Watney, Offred took great solace in keeping a journal, which she recorded on tapes (possibly after her escape). This journal, even if only kept in her own head until her escape, allowed her to speak all the thoughts that could not be safely shared with another person. While she did not create a “sensed-presence” companion, she did, in a very sanity-saving manner, “talk to herself.”

She also had a mission, which was to escape from Gilead and rescue her daughter. While she realized that both outcomes were unlikely, she kept living, and preserving her sense of self, every day, just in case an opportunity presented itself. In this sense, she was always doing “one more thing” simply by continuing not only to live, but to preserve her memories and her sense of autonomy, independence, and self. While Watney and Eliopolis struggled for physical survival, Offred struggled, and succeeded, in mental survival.

People both fictional and actual have lessons to share with us in quarantine. Mark Watney shows us the importance of humor and of taking problems one step at a time. Colonel Eliopolis reminds us that we can access the best part of our brains even, perhaps especially, in times of crisis. Offred reminds us of the importance of enjoying small victories and having the endurance to wait for long-term outcomes.

The story of Offred introduces a new theme, which is that survival depends not only on the mental health of individuals, but on the civil health of communities, and that includes resisting misinformation. In America, survival during this time depends on seeking out reliable sources of information such as the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, using critical thinking skills, and preparing to vote in local elections as well as the national election on November 3, 2020.

One factor that seems to be crucial to mental health in situations of isolation is having a mission. Both real and fictional astronauts believe that their experiences in space will further human knowledge. Some survivors, both actual (Ghinsberg) and fictional (Eliopolis), manufacture a person to live for from the recesses of their own minds. This imaginary person not only guides them, but also gives them a mission other than simply staying alive for the sake of living.

During the days of stay at home, lockdown, quarantine, and other social distancing measures, our mission is to protect each other from illness. In service to this mission, we can use the same tools as fictional and real survivors. We can structure our days, leaving ample time for play. We can use humor and consideration to ease interpersonal conflicts. We can set goals for ourselves. For many of us, that simply means getting sleep and accomplishing basic tasks: the shower as a triumph! For some people, coping with this new reality means learning new skills or completing old projects. Bully for them! We can also make a conscious effort to appreciate any positives about our situation and enjoy the small beauties around us. And, of course, we can read a lot of science fiction.

Astronaut Cady Coleman, who spent approximately six months in space, constantly reminded herself that even her most routine, dull tasks contributed to the mission of human exploration. She reminds us to focus on our mission of keeping our communities safe:

“The steps may not be . . . exciting. We may not be able to stand up and say: oh, I figured out the vaccine for the virus. But the fact that we stay home, the fact that we figure out how to help other people? Every one of those actions counts.”

About the Author

Carrie Sessarego is the resident “geek reviewer” for Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, where she wrangles science fiction, fantasy romance, comics, movies, and non-fiction. Carrie’s first book, Pride, Prejudice, and Popcorn: TV and Film Adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre, was released in 2014. Her work has been published in Interfictions Online, Pop Matters: After the Avengers, The WisCon Chronicles Vol. 9, Invisible 3, Clarkesworld Magazine, and two volumes of Speculative Fiction: The Year’s Best Online Reviews, Essays and Commentary. She spends her time wrangling her husband, daughter, dog, and three cats.

The Woman With No Name:
A Conversation with John P. Murphy

Arley Sorg

John P. Murphy attended Viable Paradise in 2010 and started selling fiction shortly after. His first publications came out in 2011: several pieces in The Drabblecast and “The Body and the Bomb” in Crossed Genres. “Tumbleweeds and Indelicate Questions” was his first pro sale, published in Nature. After a few novella and short story sales, Murphy made a larger splash in 2016, with Nebula Award nominated “The Liar,” about a nice but sort of bemused guy whose lies can affect reality.

Originally from Morgantown, West Virginia, John P. Murphy has a background in machine learning and network security; he has a BS in electrical and computer engineering from West Virginia University and earned a PhD in robotics at Dartmouth. In a spur-of-the-moment decision during his freshman year he took a Japanese language course and, in 1999, ended up as an exchange student at Kansai Gaidai, near Osaka, where he took a class in Japanese cinema. His forthcoming debut novel, Red Noise, comes out of an essay he wrote on certain core themes and the varying approaches of directors.

He’s learned to take advantage of unexpected opportunities.

He drinks a lot of coffee and lives in New Hampshire with his partner and two fluffy cats. He is chair of the short fiction committee for SFWA (as well as a former director-at-large), and a member of the Codex Writers’ Group and the New Hampshire Writers’ Project.

Red Noise is about an asteroid miner who gets swept up in a standoff with gangs and crooked cops. Influenced by such authors as Aliette de Bodard, Raymond Chandler, Warren Ellis, Dashiell Hammett, Akira Kurosawa, and Shinichirō Watanabe, the novel is due out from Angry Robot in June 2020. To quote Murphy’s website, “There’s blood, and the language isn’t polite.”

You attended writers’ workshop Viable Paradise in 2010. What were the most important things you got out of it and what was the most challenging aspect of the program for you?

I got a lot out of it, including some friendships that have endured for now a decade, and a lot of insight into story and plotting. But probably the most important thing I got out of it was permission to think of myself as a writer. I had written as a hobby all through high school and much of college, but grad school left no time for it and really didn’t encourage any kind of creative outlet. Six years of that really put it out of my head. It’s funny: as an engineer, I’ve been surrounded by genre fans for years, but creating that work is seen as something other people do. But the whole process of Viable Paradise helped me get on track: I had to think about my work critically in order to decide what piece to apply with, I had to spend a day making the trek to Martha’s Vineyard, and I had a week with nothing to do except talk and think about writing.

The most challenging aspect came afterward, trying to merge my two lives back together again. I’ve talked to a lot of people who’ve gone through workshops like that, and I keep hearing variants on “I got home and couldn’t write.” There’s the shock of going back to one’s old life (transformed?), but there’s also this sense of having gained insight into writing but not yet having much practice making use of that insight. I sat down afterward and wrote something, and it seemed terrible—not because it was worse than what I’d been writing before, but because through all the critiquing I’d gotten better at recognizing flaws and not yet better at fixing them. That passed, but it was tough.

How did you get into reading science fiction and fantasy, and how did you get into writing it?

I’m not sure how I started; it was kind of a “it’s what I’ve always done” sort of thing. My parents have never been into genre, really, but we always seemed to have something around. Like, I remember a children’s book with illustrations taken from Rankin/Bass’ The Hobbit that was kicking around the house long before I ever even realized The Hobbit was its own thing. Probably my first foray into genre for real was with John Bellairs’ books, and then Isaac Asimov after that. I remember staying up all night to read The Earthsea Cycle at a fairly young age.

I do know there must have been some epic fantasy in there somewhere, because at some point I started using my dad’s giant “portable” computer (this was the late eighties/early nineties—as long as it was a single unit and theoretically liftable by one person, it was “portable”) to type out long rambling stories with swords and characters who had names that sounded cool. Editing was a foreign concept—if I got stuck or bored, I started a new one instead. There were a lot of filled-then-thrown away legal pads in there, too, especially as I got older and started to want some privacy. I tried my hand at plays, even, but my idea of fun in those days was to sit in my room, scribbling way past midnight.

What were a few of the most important genre stories or books for you when you were younger, and why?

When I was younger, Star Trek: The Next Generation probably had the biggest effect on me. That was science fiction to me, that and Asimov’s robot books. I think I first read The Lord of the Rings in fifth or sixth grade, and that was huge. Honestly, none of it was terribly adventurous; nobody really knew what to get for me, and while our local library in West Virginia probably had wider variety, I didn’t know for a while yet to go looking for it beyond what they called the kids section.

Getting on toward high school, I had friends who loaned me stuff outside my comfort zone (I remember handing Dune back to a friend because the glossary was in the beginning and I said “to hell with that” until he practically forced me to), but most of what I got was through video games. I’m of a generation of writers who grew up thinking airships were the coolest things ever, and I’m pretty sure all of us played Final Fantasy. Airships figured HEAVILY in the stories I wrote in high school as a result, and I wrote like a hundred thousand words of what was probably basically Final Fantasy VI with the serial numbers filed off.

Your first publications came out in 2011. What was the journey to selling fiction like for you?

There was a long gap in my writing starting around 1999 or so. But the itch never really went away, and around 2009 I thought it might be fun to give it a try again. In a way, it was a bit of a coin toss—I had really gotten into reading mysteries in grad school, more so than science fiction and fantasy. So I thought about just writing a straight-up mystery story, but the idea that came to mind was in a science fiction setting. I finished it, and then thought . . . now what?

So I went online to see what help was available. That led me to the Critters online workshop, and to Viable Paradise. The level of community support for genre writers was really tremendous, and in retrospect strongly influenced my continuing to write science fiction rather than mystery.

It took some time to get published. I got into Viable Paradise. I think my first sale came six or seven months after that, for something like ten bucks. My first pro sale was a couple years later, then a couple novellas. “Claudius Rex” came out from PaperGolem, and then was reprinted a handful of times. Then “The Liar,” in F&SF. I wrote a handful of novels that got trunked, but I sold Red Noise probably around the ten-year mark of getting back into writing.

What are a few of the most important things you learned about writing or the industry through that initial process of getting published?

Probably the most important thing is the relationship between a writer and editor. From the outside, and when you’re new, it seems to have this huge power imbalance, and it’s easy to think of the editor as grading you, as a gatekeeper. That’s a really common misconception, and terribly harmful. Sad to say, some markets take advantage of that attitude and get writers to accept terms or treatments that they really shouldn’t. Going to conventions and talking to editors like actual people, learning to see things from their point of view, was very important. It helped me put less of my self-esteem in every envelope, and to enjoy my interactions with them more. OK, I still get nervous sending things out, but it feels a lot more like sharing stories with friends now than submitting things for a grade.

You have a PhD in robotics and a background in machine learning and network security. How important is scientific rigor in your science fiction? And how important is it to you in stories you enjoy reading?

It’s not too important in my own fiction. I pretty much have to just satisfy myself that I’m not writing bullshit, and the definition for that varies from story to story. If a problem feels like it ought to be solvable, then I’m happy to accept the assumption that someone will probably eventually solve it, think through some of the implications, and move on.

As a reader, I roll my eyes a lot, but I can generally still enjoy a story that’s not rigorous. Most of the time it’s not central to the plot, and I can just ignore it. If I want science, there are journals I can read; fiction for me is about deeper truths about human beings. People get robots wrong all the time, for example, but the point of robot stories is in our relationships with them or with technology, and you don’t really need to get the details right to say something interesting or profound.

Sometimes bad science bugs me enough to ruin a story, though. There was a well-liked story a few years back that got the basic principles of computer vision so completely wrong, as part of its main plot, that I just noped out. Doesn’t make the story bad, I just couldn’t appreciate it. Sometimes those telling details don’t tell what you think.

What are some of your favorite scientifically rigorous concepts in either your own fiction or something you’ve read? Or your favorite deeply researched bits, those things that readers probably won’t know just how much work went into them?

I love a good hack, those weird little lateral thinking moves that remind you the world doesn’t operate by the rules you think it does. Computers in particular just don’t work the way people think they do. There was one in the news not long ago about using ultrasonic speakers to talk to your gadgets—they could give commands to Alexa or Siri right in front of you, without you hearing it. I don’t recall the details exactly, and anyway it’s been fifteen years since I had the relevant math, but the idea was in using a shared table as a conducting medium (even with a cubicle wall in between) and putting the voice commands into the harmonics. So cool.

My favorite deeply researched bit has nothing to do with science, though, but with food. I’m a big fan of okonomiyaki, and I wanted my character to cook it, but I’d already established some serious constraints on the food supply. Long story short, I bought a pound of cricket flour, experimented with aquafaba (using the liquid from a can of chickpeas as egg substitute), and made a lot of more-or-less tasty okonomiyaki at home, all for a couple paragraphs in one chapter. Worth it.

You write at different lengths, from drabble and flash to your Nebula Award nominated novella “The Liar” in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and of course to your forthcoming novel. Are there important differences in the way you write at different lengths? Are some lengths more comfortable, others more challenging?

I really like novellas. They feel like a sweet spot for me in terms of giving me time to develop a character and voice and tell an involved story that you could still read in one sitting. I like to have space to tell a story, and I like to get to know how characters tick, but I don’t want to wear out my welcome. I run a novella contest every year for the Codex Writers’ Group, and I learn something every year about how to tell a tight, engaging story.

For me, the biggest challenge in writing a novel was in needing to handle a broader scope, especially in terms of point of view. I enjoy the act of writing in multiple points of view, especially when I get to describe how two different characters experience the same action, or to see a main character from the outside. But I tend to like to keep everything in my head and keeping all those strands of story organized was a stretch for me.

In this case, I actually first wrote Red Noise as a novella (around 25,000 words, or about a quarter its current length), which let me work out the intricacies of the main plot while keeping everything straight in my head. The broad strokes of that novella are still there, and you can probably still make out the original five act structure in the final piece.

Looking at your body of work to date, do you feel like most of your fiction pieces have particular commonalities (voice, character, style, etc.), or do you feel like each piece is very different from the next?

It’s funny, because thinking about this very question led to some of the decisions I made with Red Noise. My comfort zone is in first person narration. Maybe it’s because I got into drama in high school (even wrote plays) and thoroughly enjoyed acting, but I’m pretty good at inhabiting a character and turning on the charm. In “The Liar,” and in “Claudius Rex” before it, the number one comment I got was that readers enjoyed just sitting and spending time with the narrator’s voice.

So, what I wanted for Red Noise was to push that boundary. I wanted an antihero, someone a little prickly. I went with third person narration, and I let myself play loose with point of view. At the same time, that same voice creeps in sometimes. There aren’t a lot of commonalities between Greg Kellogg and the Miner—not least their respective attitudes toward homicide—but they do both share a sly sense of humor.

Some call “The Liar” horror—in fact F&SF editor C.C. Finlay introduced it as “ . . . if Garrison Keillor wrote a Stephen King story.” What, for you, are the defining characteristics of horror? Or, for that matter, specifically a genre writer? And are these useful distinctions, or are they mainly marketing tools?

I don’t think of myself as a real horror writer. Horror, to me, is tourism of dread. It’s such a visceral emotion—not even an emotion, something beneath. That feeling that something just isn’t right here and that I need to get out of here NOW. When horror is done perfectly, I get that same feeling as when a roller coaster just crests that first hill and gravity changes direction and how well do they really maintain these things anyway. I don’t read a lot of it. T. Kingfisher’s The Twisted Ones did a number on me. I can’t wait for the sequel.

I’ve written several ghost stories, or spooky stories, as opposed to horror. I can’t entirely articulate the difference. Dread, you enjoy when it’s over. Spooky, you enjoy when it’s happening. That’s my theory, anyway.

I’m not sure what I consider myself. I love writing mysteries, and I love the wide palette that genre offers me. Genre distinctions are useful, I think (though I should protest that marketing tools are themselves useful), in that they grow over time into constraints, and constraints feed creativity. Speculative fiction in particular is a fun family of genres because while there are boundaries and expected forms, readers can be so tolerant of playing with them. Genre readers are always up for going on an adventure.

In your 2018 mini interview on The Boskone Blog you described Red Noise as “kind of a cross between a space opera and a samurai flick.” The Angry Robot site calls it “Cowboy Bebop meets A Fistful of Dollars.” What is important or special about this book to you?

I’ve been thinking about this story, in one form or another, for a long time. Feuds fascinate me. You don’t grow up in West Virginia without hearing about the Hatfields and McCoys, but there were so many more than just those, some of which went on for a hundred years. What causes that? Why do some people just hate each other so much, and why is it that people who on paper have the most in common grow to hate each other so viscerally? I’ve heard explanations about “honor culture” and how it’s important for cultures that grew up around herding, where you couldn’t be seen as backing down or someone would steal your goats or something, but that all never felt satisfying to me as an answer.

The basic plot in A Fistful of Dollars, or Yojimbo before it, or Red Harvest before that, revolves around exploiting that kind of feud. It’s about pitting righteous anger against bitter anger, and while that feels awfully satisfying, is it really a good thing? I guess that’s what this book is about.

In that same interview you mentioned that you don’t write much action. Did you do anything in particular to make sure the action worked well?

I studied! I went through books both in genre and outside and looked at how they did their action scenes and what worked for me as a reader. I also watched samurai films and Westerns, and I realized that the action style there worked for me—most of the fights don’t have drawn out action. I think it’s a mistake to revel too much in a fight scene; the failure mode is boredom or confusion. Competent fighters tend to work fast, and I found that both more satisfying to write and easier to keep up the pace with.

The Publishers Weekly review of Red Noise describes the Miner character as “The reclusive, unnamed heroine . . . a resourceful, intriguing protagonist . . . ” What are your favorite things about this character? Are there any specific ways in which you personally relate to her? And why is she unnamed in the book?

She’s got a wicked sense of humor, and I so enjoyed writing her dialogue and the effect she has on other people. I spend a lot of time trying to keep the peace—I’ve done a lot of tech support in my day, and she’s very much the opposite. I relate to her protective streak, though. Hers is a mile wide, and not always healthy. I identify with her struggles to decide just how much to open up to people, especially new friends.

It’s hard to explain why she’s unnamed in the book. Some of that is a desire to stick to the conventions—that genre question again. Movie viewers are happy to watch the exploits of The Man With No Name, by the way, but why are there so few women with no names? There’s an intimacy that readers have with main characters, but this is a character who rejects that intimacy. She’s set her boundaries, between herself and the world, between herself and her past. I felt that to let the reader know her by name would undermine her. But at the same time, I don’t think her name matters. You can know a person very well without ever knowing their name, I think.

I’ve seen you talk here and there about optimism in fiction. Are there any recent/new optimistic genre stories or books you’ve read that you’d like to recommend?

I usually bring up Terry Pratchett as my go-to example of optimism. I particularly enjoy that crusty hermit crab style that wants to be mistaken for cynicism. Tyler Hayes’ The Imaginary Corpse springs to mind; it’s about a plush triceratops private detective dealing with a series of murders of imaginary friends who’ve been left behind by their people. The whole idea behind it is sort of sad, and yet the basic assumption is that most people are well-meaning at heart, and well-meaning people can make things better. Not perfect, and not perfectly, but better.

I’ll also put in a plug here for the recent game Outer Wilds, which I enjoyed tremendously. It could have been incredibly bleak but kept an enthusiastic attitude and struck a hopeful note that I really appreciated.

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 Three-Science-Fiction-Author Problem:
A Conversation

Roderick Leeuwenhart

Taiyo Fujii, Japanese science fiction author of Gene Mapper and Orbital Cloud, invited me here. I only met him half a year earlier, at Worldcon in Dublin, but we quickly became friends and our plans took shape a few months later during dinner in Tokyo. The place is Lyon and the occasion is the AI x SF workshop organized by a group of French scholars, held at the city’s university and municipal library. Our objective? An in-depth conversation with Chinese rising star Xia Jia, present at the event, about the state of SF in China, its influence in the rest of the world, and our views on the genre.

We initially planned to hold it in the library’s auditorium, but an impending strike threw a wrench in the works. Instead, we landed in the head librarian’s office with a sizable stack of doughnuts to sustain us. It’s immediately apparent that language will play a key role in our dealings. After all, here are three SF authors from the Eurasian continent, juggling five languages between them.

Taiyo, please tell us a bit about yourself.

Fujii: I’m a Japanese science fiction writer. I started to write in 2011, because the earthquake report (by the Japanese government after the Tōhoku quake, which lead to the Fukushima nuclear disaster) was not scientific. I got angry. That’s when I started to write Gene Mapper, which I self-published. It sold 10,000 copies in three months. I quit my job and became a dedicated writer. The next year I wrote Orbital Cloud, which won the Nihon SF Taisho Award. I then became the chair of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of Japan until 2018.

You wrote Orbital Cloud in one year. Nowadays you also have a five-year-old child at home. How do you still manage to be this productive?

Fujii: The secret is the Japanese publishing system. Writers don’t offer the full book at once, but produce monthly snippets for a serial publication, a magazine. So, I just wrote chapter after chapter for these deadlines, and after a year the novel was finished. The writing fee for those serials works as the advance for the book. The downside to this system is we don’t have agents to look after our interests. Xia, I am very interested to know when you started writing. I didn’t until I was in my early forties.

Jia: I started telling stories when I was very young. In kindergarten, actually. I used to be a very annoying child, because I’d fabulate on the spot for the adults and once I started, it would never end. When I was eight, I collaborated with my best friend to write a fairy tale, which was published in a mainstream literary magazine in my hometown. I started a little earlier than you, but I still haven’t published any novels though!

Is that because there’s no good framework for you to write a novel? Or do you find it difficult to produce a longer story?

Jia: I’m more interested in short stories. It’s a unique skill to be able to organize complicated things into a short. I think I’d need some outside pressure to help me write a long novel. I have some ideas floating around.

The Japanese system might do you some good?

Jia: It’s a very good system! Currently I’m working on an anthology of stories, but my editors were too nice to me and it’s taking me years to finish.

Fujii: Our system works, however there are problems with it. We only have limited slots in magazines, but an abundance of writers. Over 4,000 dedicated authors! That doesn’t mean they can live off of it, only that writing’s their full-time profession. On top of that, publications only accept the work of established writers, giving newcomers and young talent very little options to start. Their only way of breaking through is by winning a novel contest, which is like winning the lottery—it’s so hard.

The situation in the Netherlands is pretty dire right now. Half of all the movies in the cinema are SF, but there’s no literary market for it at all. Part of that is due to how smart the readership is: we have an excellent understanding of English, so there’s little incentive to translate anything into Dutch. That in turn has dried up the well. But that’s too depressing to discuss, so let’s talk about your dream to go to Mars, Xia. One-way ticket?

Jia: Yes, actually, I can accept that. When I was a kid, I read the very influential novel The Descendants Of Mars by Zheng Wenguang, who is known as the “father of Chinese science fiction” because he published the first SF since the foundation of the People’s Republic of China. The story was about Chinese people establishing a habitat on Mars to make it the second home for humankind. A classic tale, but because it uses Chinese characters it gave me the dream of going to Mars. And it should be possible in my lifetime! Maybe when I reach the age of sixty or seventy, it might come true. It’s a good reason for me to stay fit and healthy. Maybe save some money.

How do you envision life there? Would it be like Andy Weir’s The Martian?

Jia: It would be a very harsh existence in a colony. We’ll live in domes. But I think that would be ideal for the retiring life.

Let’s send all of our retirees to Mars! They’ll have an interesting lives! Elon Musk tweeted that he wants to send one million people to Mars by 2050.

Jia: I’ll be around seventy by then, perfect! I’m still on track. I’ll take Wenguang’s book along and bury it there with me. So, it’s not about tourism. I wouldn’t just go to Mars for several days and snap some amazing pictures. That’s a waste of energy and resources. We have to devote ourselves to the goal of populating the planet.

Fujii: Once tourism is possible, the first guest should be an SF author.

Xia, I read you directed and starred in your own movie, Parapax.

Jia: That’s a dark secret.

Do you want to talk about it? Because I find this so typical of creative people. They rarely do just one thing: they express their creativity in many different ways. But now I suspect you’re not very happy with Parapax?

Jia: When I was doing my master’s degree in film studies, it was all about the history and cultural impact of films, but I was also interested in how they were made. Some friends were doing similar studies and we talked about the possibility of making a very low-budget film ourselves. The basic idea is about life across multiple alternate universes. I play the same character in three scenarios. At the first level, I play a physics student. At the second, I’m a writer who works on a story about this student. At the third, I’m a screenwriter adapting the story. So, it’s about multi-universes referring back to each other.

There used to be a version online, but it’s no longer available. Mercifully. But your question is actually about creativity, and in this I’m at a disadvantage. I find it hard to keep doing anything for a very long time. Writing SF is unique in that it’s the one thing I never lost interest in. On the other hand, I’m never afraid of doing something new. If I fail, it’s not a big deal, it doesn’t embarrass me.

In my experience, it takes a while before you find your theme. It wasn’t until I was twenty-nine that I finally discovered: “Hey! I’m actually a novelist!” I’d written stories all my life, but they were always applied stories, for comics and games and journalism. It seems so perfectly obvious to me now, but it still took years to figure out.

Fujii: I was forty-one when I started.

Jia: I want so many things in my life. In college, I wanted to become a famous physics professor, winning the Nobel Prize. But I’m very fortunate to get into writing, because of the rise of Chinese SF worldwide. That gave me so many opportunities for jobs and things to do. To build up relationships in the international community. It just . . . became my career. I never planned it out.

So, Liu Cixin’s phenomenal success (The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, etc.) influenced your career quite a bit?

Jia: Yes, but I want to put it in a larger perspective. China is getting more visible to readers worldwide, not just in this one genre. Liu Cixin’s success can be traced back to (Chinese-American author and translator) Ken Liu’s success. The bigger trend is visibility, but of course these are prominent figures within that.

What would you say characterizes Chinese SF?

Jia: It found new life in the 1990s. That’s what we call the fifth wave. Science Fiction World and other magazines started developing the internal market for genre work. It resembled the Golden Age in the US. In fact, the writing often copied the themes from those times. Inevitably, more mature authors began to explore what would make “Chinese SF.” What they hit on as its main characteristic was the tension of China’s modernization—the process of removing itself from being perceived by the West as a third world nation. That’s an outside perspective. China experienced a great deal of pressure to modernize according to Western standards, but through SF we found our own, Chinese way to develop and prosper. Our writers subconsciously absorbed this tension, and it shows in their work.

Chinese authors reinvent what it means to be Chinese, also for the outside world. Do you have an example of that?

Jia: My favorite example comes from 1902, right at the beginning of this process, in the late Qing dynasty.

Fujii: Just after the First Sino-Japanese War.

Jia: The writer was definitely influenced by the war! He was a famous Chinese scholar and politician named Liang Qichao. He created one work of fiction, but only after his reforms failed and he was exiled to Yokohama in Japan. There he read some Japanese SF and political fiction and realized the influence this kind of reading could have on re-forming citizens’ thought. He established a magazine for Chinese fiction. His novel projects into the far future of 1962, when China is a strong power in the world, and then retraces the steps it took to get there. It’s a way of reframing the country in the eyes of the world. That’s an important feature of the way we handle the genre.

Taiyo, you already explained a lot about Japanese SF in the workshop yesterday. How it was co-opted in the war to serve as propaganda. Afterward it suffered from various spells of censorship. What typifies modern Japanese SF?

Fujii: It’s so varied. I’m writing about an optimistic future where science and technology bring us into a better world, a better life. But others write dystopias. I have a hard time finding a single clear direction in our SF right now. So instead I’d like to lament that we have a huge lack of female writers. There are a great many making manga, but not so much in the literary field.

Why is that?

Fujii: Part of it is that there are so few role models in Japan. Boys read SF and want to start writing it themselves, but the same doesn’t happen with girls. On top of that, we don’t seem to translate much English language SF written by women. Ursula K. Le Guin and Ann Leckie are the exceptions. Oh, and Octavia E. Butler, even though her novel Kindred is translated as “Black literature” instead of SF. So, we don’t have a culture of reading those works. Japanese readers should know they’re missing out on half of all the writing being done.

Jia: In China, we don’t translate some authors either. We have Le Guin and [Margaret] Atwood, but no Butler. Big pity.

Fujii: A good thing about Japanese SF is that we are constantly pushing the boundaries of ideas, always on the frontier. This is because of the huge body of manga being created. Those stories are the mainstream, which forces literary SF to be more avant-garde.

Your own work usually takes place in the very near future, and I’ve also noticed it’s very political. In Orbital Cloud you look at the various space programs of Iran, the US, Japan, China . . . Do you have a political message with your writing?

Fujii: My work is very political. If you take one of my latest publications, Hello, World!, it deals with the freedom of the Internet. It’s about a software engineer who struggles with the Internet becoming less and less free—censorship, governments tightening their grip—and develops a program to escape that. This is based on my real experiences. I programmed a communication app years ago that was adopted by people during the Arab Spring and was rewarded for my efforts by governments spying on me. I’m still very proud of that, though it was a scary situation at times. I hope Hello, World! will be translated into other languages.

Over the past few years I’ve been wondering what the Netherlands have to offer in the SF world. Is there such a thing as “Dutch SF”? I posed that question to many of my writing colleagues and two themes surfaced. The first is trade. Because we’re a tiny country without many natural resources, we exist only because we trade with other nations. And we have, of course, an extensive, ugly colonial history—based on trade. Trade is part of our cultural fabric, and so also of our stories. The second is water management and ecological disaster. It’s possible that 500 years from now, the Netherlands won’t exist anymore.

Jia: You’ll be flooded.

Yes. There’ll be a diaspora of Dutch people around the world. We’ll be nationless. Our government is already making plans to counteract this catastrophe, and technology will play a huge part in that. Maybe we’ll have floating cities, or build gigantic structures in the North Sea to ward off the water, or perhaps we’ll have to give some of our provinces back to the sea. There are very tough choices ahead of us, and our SF is already playing into that.

Very recently a new genre appeared, called “ziltpunk.” Zilt is salt or brine. It’s very optimistic fiction. It shows a post-catastrophe world where the Netherlands are flooded, or we may have retreated underground—there are infinite scenarios. But these stories all share that the people living in them lead interesting lives. It shows that even after the disaster, life will still be worth living. That’s such a strong message, because we worry about that. The scary thing about the catastrophe is that we might have to surrender some of our luxuries and privileges. Ziltpunk says there’s nothing to be afraid of.

I’d like to steer our discussion to the most controversial of topics: what is SF?

Fujii: This is a very difficult discussion, as it depends on one’s definition of it. In Japan, there was a very ugly breakup between the literary SF world and fans, when one high profile author proclaimed that Gundam (a cherished, multi-series franchise featuring towering mechs and space warfare) wasn’t SF. That created a lot of bad blood in the community. Xia, readers have actually asked me whether your work qualifies as SF. I told them it does, because it asks the question of where the human race is going to.

Jia: Well, it so happens I’m currently writing a paper on this . . . it focuses on Darko Suvin’s definition of SF as cognitive estrangement (briefly: SF should have a “novum,” an absolutely new element that forces the reader to imagine a different way of conceiving our world). Now, there are multiple definitions of SF, most of those from the perspective of the reader community. The main focus of Suvin’s is to create a way to separate the good works from the bad—sometimes referred to as non-SF or fantasy. It tries to expand the definition of “science,” redefining it to include the humanities, the social sciences. Suvin borrowed the concept of estrangement from Brecht, who was writing about the theater, obviously. He said that we need this “estrangement” to remove us from the vantage point of the center and put us in the marginal places. From this point of view, we can reflect on our reality, or the way we perceive it through our ideology, and consider alternative possibilities. He saw us as being trapped in our minds as in a cage.

Isn’t that true for the entire spectrum of speculative fiction, including fantasy and magical realism?

Jia: Ah, that debate came after Suvin, after he wrote about this in the 1970s. He moved from Yugoslavia to Canada and established the academic study of SF. A humanist, he tried to redefine what SF was in America. Before him, it was seen only through the lens of pulp printed in magazines. Suvin saw SF as a very powerful tool to reform people’s thoughts, to make them think about a better future. I think that’s a very important point. He discriminated against fantasy though. At the time, Tolkien dominated the genre with The Lord of the Rings, and Suvin considered it rather conservative. It was all about middle-class values, recreating a beautiful place where people could live in peace. Suvin wanted to embrace a more radical cultural revolution. He emphasized how SF has that power of estrangement, and I agree with him that it’s a positive way forward.

Does technology play any part in this idea?

Jia: Yes. So, first of all, he looked down on pulp. He saw that as window dressing, just using spaceships to tell old stories and call them space operas. Instead, he praised social SF like Ursula K. Le Guin’s. But beyond that, Suvin also wrote that there should be a novum in any good SF story. Something truly new. Time travel, for instance, used to be exciting, but it’s not anymore because it’s been overly explored by now. A novum doesn’t have to be a machine, it can also be a new way of looking at things. I think that SF has had a very European view on the world and on the development of civilizations—spreading outward from Europe into the world. The novum here could be that the Chinese view brings about that estrangement for Western readers.

That would mean that, wherever you live, you’re best served by reading SF from other countries. Then you immediately place yourself at the fringe of your own worldview and achieve estrangement.

Jia: Sounds about right! That’s how I define SF: to cross boundaries, to think differently, to see the unseen, to imagine the unimaginable.

Fujii: That’s a very interesting definition. Thank you for this lecture, Xia. As for my own, it’s very simple. SF has to give answers on the important questions: where did we come from, what are we, and where are we going to? If a work manages to answer these, I think it’s good SF. Most other literary genres are concerned with only asking questions, without providing answers.

Jia: Most of us would agree with that, I think. The search for answers, to known and unspoken questions.

Fujii: In this, many fans focus on the “where are we going to?” aspect, but the “where did we come from?” is just as valid. Beyond that, Suvin’s concept of estrangement is very important in explaining those answers to the readers. In making them understand.

Chinese SF is very popular right now. How will it expand beyond the success of Liu Cixin?

Jia: We need to give young writers opportunities to develop their work. It takes a long time for an author to mature enough to write something truly unique. You can’t just follow the trends; you have to create your own field. There has to be room for that. I’d also like for there to be more diversity in China. Right now, everything is overshadowed by Liu Cixin’s success. It’s important to encourage young writers who might have totally different ways of exploring the genre.

Fujii: I’m going to support young Chinese writers and help spread their work.

About the Author

Roderick Leeuwenhart is a Dutch SF writer whose stories are often about the bond between Japan and the Netherlands. He wrote a YA trilogy called Pindakaas en Sushi, about a group of otaku friends, and won the 2016 Harland Awards with his SF short “Star Body,” which is currently being expanded into a novel.

Editor’s Desk:
SF/F Fiction Magazines, Pandemic Edition

Neil Clarke

When I was mining social media for ideas for editorials last month, several people asked if I could write something on how magazines have been impacted by the pandemic. While I had already been in contact with several editors, I didn’t feel like I had enough information or time to pursue it for the May issue. Throughout the month, I reached out to colleagues and tried to get a broader view of things. It’s by no means comprehensive, but it’s enough of the picture to be meaningful.

I did collect some hard data independently, but my approach with editors and publishers was informal. I didn’t use any surveys or widespread public calls, which I acknowledge is quite unlike me, but the preliminary conversations I had with my peers made it clear that I’d learn more through casual conversation. As it turned out, things often drifted into “don’t mention me by name” territory, so I’m going to refrain from identifying sources. There’s an undercurrent of anxiety across the field and I have no interest in adding to it. In fact, it’s my hope that putting this information out there will foster discussions that could help all of us.

[Before going any further, a note:] I’ve written several articles and editorials about the state of the field either here, on my blog, or in the introductions to The Best Science Fiction of the Year volumes. There’s an unfortunate truth that must be restated here to help place things in context: a very significant portion of the people working at the short fiction magazines are significantly underpaid or not paid at all. Breaking even is defined by several publications as being able to pay the authors, maybe an artist, and occasionally a narrator—only one of which has any sort of standardized pay rate, so the others are often much lower than you’d expect. It’s only in more recent years that editor and staff pay has entered into that discussion and very little progress has been made in that time. This is not for lack of readers. It’s just that the overwhelming majority—often over 90%—don’t support those publications financially. The majority of editors and staff at these publications are dependent on day jobs for their income and healthcare coverage. In some cases, those same jobs provide supplemental funding for their publishing work.

On the positive side, none of the magazines I spoke to felt as though they would have to suspend production or lay off employees in the near future. The situation becomes considerably more murky should there be a second or sustained wave of the virus, but everyone is thinking about their own contingency plans. The more immediate impact has been on their marketing and fundraising efforts. Several editors echoed a sentiment that promoting subscriptions, Patreon pages, and Kickstarter campaigns has the appearance of being tone-def or insensitive when so many have been furloughed or lost their jobs. This presents a challenge when trying to offset the losses from canceled subscriptions that have happened for that same reason.

There was no overall consensus on how income has been impacted since this began and the ripple effect will likely continue for months. In some cases, hard numbers can be misleading on the surface. A rise in Patreon supporters at one publication may sound great, but when you look deeper you might discover that the per-pledge rate has dropped, leading to an overall loss. In other cases, Amazon subscriptions were up, but other sources of income were down. Many reported the fluctuations as a wash or minor loss. Only two indicated that they had increases and only one of those was above the previous year’s increase.

One place where there has been a more observable impact is with the nationally distributed print edition of some magazines. The sale of these editions have been restricted to subscriptions due to the (temporary) closures of so many bookstores. Unlike some publications, fiction magazines don’t tend to find their way into the big box stores, which creates a vacuum for single issue sales. (I have heard that a handful of indie genre booksellers are still ordering and receiving copies in hopes of being able to sell them when they reopen, but this represents a tiny fraction of single issue sales.) Fortunately, the lion’s share of their income comes from print and digital subscriptions, both of which appear to be operating normally from the outside. In some ways, the switch from monthly to bimonthly issues that happened in the 2000s has made this period a bit easier for them to navigate around production and delivery issues.

It’s still too soon, however, to tell whether or not the lack of availability in print newsstands will encourage those reasons to switch to a print and/or digital subscriptions, but as it stands, those publications are losing thousands of single-issue sales every other month. (Locus reported that the 2019 monthly newsstand sales for these magazines was between 2000 and 3000 copies per issue.) Like physical books, issues available in newsstands represent a form of passive marketing, providing additional visibility for those magazines.

The pandemic has also influenced readership and listenership, but once again, inconsistently across the market and varying by month. Like audiobooks, which have seen decreases due to the drop in people commuting to work, many podcasts reported noticeable dips, particularly in the first few months. A few markets reported that the most interesting changes were in listenership patterns, noting an increase in downloads from Spotify. Our own data for May indicated a significant increase in traffic—after two well-below average months—that surpassed pre-pandemic numbers. Temporary spikes and valleys in reading/listening data have been increasingly common lately and make it very difficult to get a clear picture of what is happening or why. Online readership trends seem to reflect similar behavior, but suggest some overall growth.

Very few markets reported normal levels or increases in submissions during February and March, but April and May seem to have been stronger or even above-average months for most. Pandemic stories have been the most common theme and editors expressed very mixed feelings about publishing those in the near future. Some, like myself, have one or two in inventory, but overall, it feels as though this is becoming a temporary “hard sell” for many editors. On the positive side, there’s been a sharp increase in the number of authors submitting stories for the first time. This is a well-received side effect, but the cover letters often indicate darker reasons for making the leap. We wish you all the best.

For many editors, working from home or employing a paperless process was already the norm, allowing us to maintain existing workflows. That didn’t make the magazines immune to problems. For example, equipment failures in a digital environment can be extremely disruptive. With repair shops and service centers closed, it’s become much more difficult to get these issues dealt with in a timely manner.

Inventory and delivery issues have likewise complicated getting replacement parts or equipment. Even then, you might have been able to produce the issue and still had difficulty communicating with readers who might not use technology. The temporary disruption in business reply mail from the USPS, for example, disrupted the flow of subscription renewals. Many foreign post offices were also closed, preventing the delivery of print issues in those locations. Print-on-demand editions like our own, which are normally quite simple, have taken weeks longer to print and deliver. Support services, such as companies that were formatting some digital publications for digital subscriptions, had to temporarily close. All these things and more were weathered and worked around by the editors I spoke to.

I think that one of the things you can note about my colleagues is that they have a certain resilience about them. Above all, the concern about staff pay was most common. The pressures of the pandemic illustrate now more than ever the need for adequate compensation for the editors and staff. It’s the blade hanging over so many of our heads. Yet, in spite of this, everyone continues to soldier on. As one editor put it, this is essential work. Science fiction and fantasy provide an escape and that has value, perhaps more now than before. The notes many of us have received from readers and listeners seem to bear this out.

As always, and especially now, stay safe and support the magazines you read, if you can.

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine and Forever Magazine; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a 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:
Plains of Forgotten Hopes

Viko Menezes

About the Artist

Viko Menezes is a freelance illustrator and concept artist based in Brazil. The majority of his work is produced digitally, using a mix of 2D and 3D techiques, to create science fiction and fantasy art for a variety of clients. Recently he’s been developing a personal project, The Last Drifter, a series of illustrations that follow a mysterious protagonist on her quests on a exotic world.