Yesterday’s Wolf

Ray Nayler

They found the torn lamb in the gold spring grass, beside the gravel road. The flies had found it first. But the flies were still lazy and slow. Later in the season, when they found a feast like this, you would be able to hear them buzzing from a distance.

Elmira watched her brother Taalay and her father Nurlan from several meters off. She did not want to see the lamb. She had carried it to the summer pasture in a bag dangling from the side of her own horse. She did not feel like crying—this was not the first lamb she had seen destroyed by wolves—but she did not need to look at it, either. She looked instead at the small white coins of her family’s two yurts, higher up in the valley. Then at the herd, three hundred meters away, a pool of tan balls shifting from one grazing spot to another.

She could hear the bell on the neck of the goat they called Nursultan clanking. He was old, long a leader of sheep, slowly going blind in one eye.

“She won’t be the last one we find this season,” Elmira’s father said.

Arystan, the fat stupid shepherd dog, stood off on the other side of the road, wagging his tail slowly back and forth. His barking had, maybe, driven the wolves off so they did not finish their meal—but it hadn’t stopped them from killing the lamb.

“What good are you?” Taalay yelled at the dog. “Why even feed you?” He pretended to pick up a rock. Arystan danced off a few meters, then came back and stared at them hopefully, knowing eventually his incompetence would be forgiven.

Elmira’s father climbed into the battered old jeep and drove off to the village, the wooden slats of the trailer clacking behind.

“Too bad you can’t reprogram that idiot dog.” Taalay said to Elmira. He spat in the grass and walked off toward his horse.

“You’re drunk.”

“I’m not.”

“I can smell you. Do you think I can’t smell you?”

“I only drank enough to be polite. I even poured some out on the ground. Do you think I want to drive these roads drunk?”

Elmira lay underneath her sheepskin, listening to her father and mother outside the yurt. They always fought like this—in angry whispers just as audible as their regular voices.

“Come and see it. Come over here,” her father said.

“What did you pay for that thing?”

“Nothing. They found it on their summer pasture. I used the winch to drag it out of a stream bed. Amir said I could take it away with me.”

“He was drunk.”

“Yes. He was drunk.”

“He’ll want it back in the morning.”

“What for? He wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

“What to do with it? Sell it for scrap metal. What else would you do with it?”

“Elmira will know. Is she up?”

“She’s asleep. Leave her alone.”

“I’m up!” Elmira shouted from inside the yurt. She was already out from under the sheepskin, pulling on her heavy quilted coat.

Her mother, Bermet, was standing near the trailer looking down at the thing. Elmira ran over.

What it looked like most was the skeleton of an enormous dog. Its body was still coated with dried mud, but its head must have been sticking out in the last rains, because that was almost completely clean. Its protruding visual arrays stared off at the mountains. Elmira examined it closely. Its limbs were all intact.

“It’s just junk,” her mother said. She looked at her daughter almost hopefully. “It must be wrecked, otherwise they wouldn’t have just left it there.”

“A friend of mine found one of their armored vehicles last summer, just lying in a ditch,” Elmira’s father said. “It started right up, and he drove it home.”

“A friend of yours.” Bermet stared at her husband.

“A friend of a friend.”

“Well, at least you made it to town before getting into this nonsense. Elmira, get the rest of this unloaded while there’s still a little light left. I don’t know how we’re even going to get that thing off of there.”

Elmira’s father looked at her. “Is it broken? You’re the expert.”

He was looking at her the way he always did when they were talking robotics, computers, anything technical. As if he were the child, and she were the parent.

Elmira’s father was confident in everything he did—but to him, tech was an incomprehensible, secret world. Elmira’s prowess with tech was magical, a power he bragged about constantly to his friends, and indulged in any way the family could afford.

This was just the latest of the treasures he had brought home for her. Over the years he had gathered old terminals with their screens cracked, wet and moldy programming guides from before the war, any dongle or wire or circuit board he came across. And in winter, in town, he was the one that loaded her up with credits so she could spend hours in the basement web café, practicing coding and designing new programs, viewing all the latest techvlogs while the neighborhood boys blew muscle-bound, armored avatars of one another to pieces in VR.

“She can figure that thing out later,” her mother snapped. “Right now I need her help with real chores.”

Elmira sat on Alatoo, watching the herd. There was a thin rain coming down, one of those mountain rains that kept turning to sleet and then back to rain, and she tightened the strings on the waxed hood of her poncho.

Alatoo shifted from one hoof to another, and Elmira patted her with a reddened hand.

“I know you don’t like him. But he’s going to help us.”

Arystan growled. He had been walking in circles around the horse, staying as far away from the herd and their new guardian as he could.

The sheep hadn’t liked their new guardian either, at first. But then Taalay put Arystan’s old collar on him, and that seemed to be enough. Now they treated it as if it were any other shepherd dog.

The goat Nursultan remained suspicious. He would occasionally stop and stare at the gaunt, black thing with one eye and then the other, as if trying to fit it in to at least one half of his goat brain.

Taalay had doubted her, and so had her mother, but her father had watched the process as if viewing a film, in which his daughter was the star. He’d circled around her for days with a small smile on his face, stopping in his work constantly to watch hers, waving her mother and brother off when they tried to distract her or enlist her for some other chore.

Recharging the battery was the trick: she needed to charge it just enough to bring the processor online so she could dump its old routines, and then load in the new ones. If she charged it too much—if it started moving before she got the old war routines out, who knew what would happen? So she took the whole thing inside one of the yurts, turning it into her workshop. She isolated its processor, disconnected it from the chassis, and worked on the new code while the diesel generator ran for three days, returning power to its core.

Once fully charged, she knew, it would run on its own for years, picking up power from the sun via the solar nanocrystals in its hardened, black coating, and from a dozen other systems. It even regained power from the impact of its feet on the earth.

These things had been designed to run independently for years, patrolling areas where regular soldiers couldn’t go. And of course that was the problem—after the war, no one had been able to come back to the summer pastures for a decade. Those who tried found themselves dragged from their yurts and torn to pieces. But eventually the kara itter—the black dogs—stopped moving, one by one. The summer pastures were safe again—except for the occasional mine or bomb. The streambeds were the worst: unexploded cluster bomblets and mines washed into them in the storms and lay among the stones and torn branches, waiting indifferently to do what they had been designed to do.

She watched the sleek kara it pacing back and forth beside the herd. She had named it Batyr—Warrior.

Last night she had woken up, along with the rest of her family, to the sound of wolves. They came in close to the yurt camp, to where the sheep were penned. Her father reached for the old shotgun in the dark, but Elmira stopped him.

“No, just wait. Batyr will take care of it.”

And he had. There was much howling and snarling for a few minutes, then nothing at all. In the morning, they found a jumble of tracks in the mud, and a few droplets of blood. Batyr was pacing the perimeter of the sheepfold, turning his sharp, pseudo-canine head side to side. Elmira thought he looked proud.

“The sheep are all here,” Bermet said.

“But he didn’t kill any wolves,” Taalay added.

“I didn’t program him to kill wolves,” Elmira said. “Wolves are good. They balance the mountains. Without them even the rivers would not run as steady. Don’t you read anything?”

“Wolves are expensive,” Taalay said.

“Maybe so,” their father said, “But these are their mountains. And we are their guests.”

“I would like to give him a piece of meat,” Bermet said. “He has been such a good boy. Aren’t you a good boy, Batyr?”

At his name, Batyr stopped and walked over to Bermet and sat in front of her. She took a step backward.

“It’s okay,” Elmira said, “I programmed him to do that. Now say, ‘shake.’”

“Shake,” Bermet said, after a moment of hesitation.

Batyr put a paw in the air, but she would not take it.

“Maybe I’m just not ready yet,” she said, and walked away. “I better get breakfast started.”

But her father came over and took Batyr’s paw in his hand. “Arystan never learned that one.”

At the sound of his name Arystan whined and turned a circle in the mud.

Elmira clapped, and Batyr went back to his patrol.

That had been in the morning. Now, in the sleet-rain of a cold day, Elmira sat on Alatoo, watching Batyr pace his line along the sheep herd.

She heard the sound of the car behind her, the smooth electric hum, its immaculate honeycomb tires on the road. She knew who it was, of course. But she did not turn.

“They counted three hundred sheep,” her father said.

They were all cross-legged around the cloth. Dinner was finished, and they were drinking green tea. The electric lantern light made Elmira’s father and mother look old.

“But there aren’t three hundred,” Bermet said. “There are two hundred and ninety two.”

“They round up,” Taalay said. “That’s new this year. They round up to the next ten.”

“So they can take another sheep from us. On top of the ten percent they take.”

“Yes,” Nurlan said. “They’ll come for them in the fall. Thirty. And any lost from the flock between now and then is our own loss, of course.”

“It should be twenty-nine.” Elmira protested. “And counted at the end of the season. That’s how it was last year.”

“Yes,” her father replied. “But the year before that, it was only one out of every twenty.”

“And next year, they will count the sheepskin we sleep under as sheep. They will count our jackets, and our bowls,” Taalay said, looking off into the dark as if he could still see their electric six-wheeler, somewhere out there.

“They are the government,” their father said. “They take what they need.”

“They take what they want,” Bermet said. “And they are not a government. Governments give you something for what they take. They give us nothing. They are a gang. They are the ones with guns and power, that is all.”

“They keep the others away, at least.”

“Others who are exactly like themselves.”

“No,” Nurlan said.

Old. The lantern makes him look old. And Elmira was reminded that he had fought in the war. He never spoke about it—he was not like some of the others, who wore old parts of a uniform or a cap, so you knew they were veterans. He had put all that away, as if it never had been.

But it had been. Somehow the light of the lantern, which made everyone look a little aged, a little weaker, brought it out.

“No,” Nurlan repeated. “There are others that are much, much worse. They will take everything, and not only the sheep.”

“After a while,” Bermet said, “Whoever is in power becomes just like the others. They are not like wolves: they do not eat only what they need. It takes time for the hunger in them to grow, but it always grows. Next year they will come for more than just sheep. Or perhaps even this year.”

“Are you all right?”

Elmira didn’t know any other question to ask. She sat on top of the kurganwith her friend Jyrgal. Two years older than her, Jyrgal had been kidnapped the year before while walking home from her high school graduation ceremony. She had been forced into a car by a second cousin of hers and a boy who attended her school a year ahead of her.

That boy’s name was Eldar, and he was now her husband. Elmira watched him down below, standing in a circle of men talking with her father.

Elmira had come along with her father to talk about buying a yurt from this family, who lived a few summer pastures over from her. She had been surprised to see Jyrgal here.

Talking to her now, she felt like she was speaking with the ghost of someone she had once known. Jyrgal was not who she had been a year ago. She was pale, her face more oval now than the happy moon it had been when they went to school together. The bony tip of her chin was visible against the flesh. She kept her head angled away when speaking.

“They are a family like any other family,” Jyrgal said.

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“The mother-in-law is a mother-in-law. The father-in-law is a father-in-law. Eldar is a husband. The cousins are all as stupid and boring as cousins are. They are exactly like my own family.”

“Then—it isn’t so bad?”

Now Jyrgal turned to face her. It was the first time she had made eye contact. Elmira had forgotten the color of Jyrgal’s eyes. They were amber with a ring of brown at the center. How could she have forgotten?

“They held me for three days, trying to force me to say yes. But I wouldn’t. They threatened to spread rumors about me. That they had . . . used me. But I wouldn’t give in. I knew my father and brother were looking for me. I knew they would find me. But Eldar’s family had taken me off to the mountains, and it would take time for them to come. All I had to do was hold out. Wait for them. I had hope.”

“But they didn’t come.”

“They did come. On the sixth day. With guns, and two cousins of mine. But by then, Eldar had forced himself on me. I was afraid to go back to my family. I had already agreed to a wedding.”

“You said they were just like any family. But how could a family do such a thing?”

“Ask my father,” Jyrgal said. “My mother was kidnapped when she was younger than me. She didn’t even finish school. Ask my brother—I hear he and two of his friends dragged a girl off last week. A freshman at the polytechnical university. I hear she has already agreed to a wedding. Most of us do.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“No,” Jyrgal said. “But you will be, if you don’t get out of here.”

Driving home in the bouncing, creaking old jeep, Elmira was silent, staring out the window at the mountains, the new green of spring grass, the hoops of yurts going up. Here and there, a man on horseback, a lonely kurgan in the middle of a plain (and deep in that barrow, a skeleton that had once been a man on horseback).

There were scars from the war: a bomb-hole that had become a pond, a glint of metal in the distance that resolved itself into the smashed carapace of some murderous machine.

“They have heard about Batyr,” her father said. “They are already jealous. They said the wolves are worse this year. They have even seen them in the daytime. The wolves have killed a few shepherd dogs already, and the season has barely begun. They asked if you could do it again—if they found another kara it. I said it would cost something, but you could. Maybe you’ll start a small business.”

He smiled at her hopefully. But she was not smiling back at him.

“Your friend,” he said. “I know.”

“Was mother . . . did you kidnap her?”

Her father was quiet for a long time. Elmira sat in the clanking, jostling car, staring out at the unwinding landscape as it repeated itself with variation.

Finally Nurlan spoke. “Your mother was kidnapped, but not by me. We were classmates, and a week before graduation, they took her. She fought and fought. She had no father to come and save her, no brothers. So I got a few of my friends together, and we went and found her. I could not let it happen.”

“You were in love with her.”

“No, not yet. I was in love with justice, maybe. With the law. This system—it is wrong. It is wrong now, it was wrong then. It was wrong from the very start. When we finally caught up with them, they told us she had already agreed. That they had already . . . ” he paused. “We took her back anyway. We shot one of them, in the leg. He almost died. In the car, on the way back, she never spoke. But later, she wrote me a letter. A real letter. And we started walking together. You should . . . you should know something.”

“What?”

“No man can ruin a woman. They claim they can, by doing things to her against her will. But none of that is true. Because that isn’t what a woman is for.”

“What is a woman for?”

“A woman is for herself.”

Elmira found herself thinking of Jyrgal’s eyes. She had been wondering if they were what had gotten her kidnapped. The most beautiful eyes in school. But no—it wasn’t her eyes. It was the idea that had gotten her kidnapped. The idea that the kidnapping could be done. That a woman was a thing, to be stolen without consequence.

“What would you do if I was taken?”

“I would tear the skin off the world, looking for you. But I will not have to.”

“Why not?”

“Because you can take care of yourself.”

“There’s barely anything to do, anymore,” Taalay said over his bowl of soup. “Batyr does it all for us. I was thinking”—he looked at his father, but with a glance, as well, at Elmira. As if I have some authority too. As if father would not decide things without me. Can that be true? “Maybe we can take on more sheep. Get a loan, this winter. I think one of the banks might give us a loan, if they saw what we have now.”

“The banks,” Bermet said, “Are men just like the ones you call ‘the government’—men whose job is to come and take what you have. We won’t double what we have now—we’ll lose everything.”

“You never want to change anything,” Taalay said. But not to his mother—to his father. He would never dare contradict his mother. “We just go around in circles: winter in the town, summer in the pasture. And nothing to show for it.”

Nurlan set his bowl down. “What do you think all this is?”

“All of what?”

Nurlan gestured in a circle “All of this. What we have. This is what there is to show for it. And it’s all I want.”

Outside, Elmira washed her bowl. The summer pasture lay under the heat, alive with the chittering pulse of insect sound.

Indeed, there was little to do. They had not lost a sheep since Batyr had come to them, although the wolves returned weekly.

Last week, she had seen something she had never seen before. She had been on Alatoo, watching as Batyr coursed along near the herd, when the horse started under her, tossing its head and moving in a frightened half-circle.

The wolf was walking casually through the grass, not more than fifty meters from her. It had a dead marmot in its jaws. The moment Elmira saw it the wolf paused, looking at her. One of its forepaws was raised off the ground. It cocked its head and held her gaze.

Then Batyr slammed into it. The wolf tumbled through the grass. When it scrambled to its feet it ran, with Batyr trailing it. At five hundred meters, Batyr stopped, just as he had been programmed to, and trotted back to the flock, passing Elmira as if she did not exist.

Elmira dismounted and found where the marmot lay in the grass. It was golden brown, fat, and sleek, barely marred by the wolf in any visible way, except for blood around its snout and some smears of drool on its fur.

“This is the sacrifice,” Elmira said to Alatoo. “Instead of one of our sheep, this one died. I wish there were something we could do for it.”

But there was already a Cinereous vulture circling overhead, waiting. Elmira watched the arc of its shadow on the grass. Burying the marmot was the kind of thing people who lived in the city did—taking a meal away from the animals and insects in order to make themselves feel better.

Still thinking of sheep, wolf, marmot, vulture, Elmira finished washing her bowl. She was seeing circles everywhere, after what Taalay had said. The circle of her bowl, the spirals of the vulture in the air that day, the coin of the sun. Even the loop home at the end of the season. They did not go back the way they came. Instead, they drove the sheep over the pass and down though the valley to the south, letting them fatten up a little more on the return trip. The winding road was like a loop of string dropped on the ground, twisting here and there but, finally, resolving into a circle. Loops, circles. The hoop at the top of the yurt . . .

Taalay broke the spell, walking past her. “We’re trapped here. And it just goes on and on and on. Boredom. Forever.”

“I don’t feel trapped,” Elmira said.

Taalay looked at her. For a moment she saw anger in his face. Then something else—something softer. She would not have known what to call it. “No,” he said. “I know you don’t. You have another world to go to, when this one is not enough. But I am not as smart as you are. I don’t have anything but this.”

Their father came out of the tent. His terminal was at his ear. “Yes,” he said to someone on the other end. “Yes. We will come. Send your ping.”

“What is it?” Taalay asked.

“We have to go and help someone.” He ran back into the yurt, came out again, this time with a shotgun. “Taalay—stay here with your mother. I need you to come with me, Elmira. Bring your command terminal. And Batyr.”

Elmira called to Batyr and he loped over, looking in the evening light like a pile of burned branches that had come alive, imitating the shape of a dog. At her command, he clambered into the back seat of the jeep.

“It was that young man—Eldar,” her father said as the jeep shook and rumbled over the rutted road. “He said . . . they dug one up. They found it at a place where the stream turns against the mountain stones. It was buried there, in the gravel. They dug it out. They thought they would bring it to you. To program. They took it back to camp and cleaned it off. Then they laid it out to dry in the sun.”

“And it woke up,” Elmira finished. She was already hooking the command terminal to Batyr, concentrating on the alterations in the code. And the parameters of the behavior, the time. Failsafes. You couldn’t get any of it wrong. Not if you wanted to live.

To her father, Batyr was a miracle—magic, worked through the tools and materials he brought her. Like a father, she thought, in a fairy tale, gathering herbs and mushrooms for his witchy daughter. For Taalay, Batyr was a reminder of another world—other possibilities, other ways they could live. A tool that could be used to take them somewhere else.

But Elmira remembered her mother, unable to take Batyr’s paw. Her mother sensed it in that moment. She knew what Elmira knew: Batyr was a monster. A machine designed for killing. Elmira had changed that, programmed it away. She had covered it up with little flourishes—making Batyr behave like a pet, stick out its deadly, tearing paw. Come when called.

But she had not forgotten it. She had seen the code, the original instructions. She had stored it on her terminals to pick apart, to analyze the way she analyzed everything. Sitting up nights, in the glow of her terminal, she had seen their programming in all its violence and power. She had thought of the people who wrote it, who put these things out there in the world. Monsters behind the monsters.

“Almost finished,” she said to herself. But she saw her father looking at her, and realized she had said it out loud.

“We must be careful,” her father said.

She finalized, and Batyr sat up, staring out the window of the jeep, head scanning from side to side as they pulled up near the yurt camp.

“Yes,” Elmira said. “I know.”

One of the yurts was completely collapsed, just a pool of dirty felt and torn plastic sheeting that had been used for additional protection against rain. The other one was tilted, half collapsed, a hole torn in its side. Elmira saw the torn corpse near the hole.

The sheep were clustered together on the top of the kurgan, milling in a mass. They all wanted to be in the center of that mass, protected. They knew what happened to sheep on the edges, when wolves were around. But this wolf wasn’t hunting for them.

“Not much light left,” Nurlan said.

Elmira opened the door, and Batyr jumped down to the ground. He wound a figure eight in the grass, then raised his head and bolted, past the kurgan and off across the valley. Elmira could hear the grass hiss against his flanks.

“Will we lose him?” Nurlan was loading shells into the shotgun. Solid slugs. Those might knock it down, but they wouldn’t stop it.

“Maybe,” Elmira said. “But I hope not.”

“You have grown fond of him.”

“No, Papa. That’s not it. I am not fond of Batyr. He is just a machine. But he is our machine. And if he does not stop that thing, it will kill everyone in the summer pastures by tomorrow night. Eldar—if he is not dead already—and Jyrgal, if she is still alive, and everyone left in their family. And then you, and me, and Taalay, and Mama, and the next family, and the next one, and the next one. Eventually, someone might stop it. But not until all of us are dead.”

They had come to the corpse, now. It was Eldar’s father.

The father-in-law is a father-in-law.

Inside the half-collapsed yurt was Eldar’s mother.

The mother-in-law is a mother-in-law.

Those were the only two bodies here. So they had gotten away—Jyrgal, Eldar, and whoever else was with them. For now.

It began to rain. They sat in the jeep, listening to the tap and thunk of fat raindrops on the roof as the clouds swept overhead. The clouds were moving quickly. The rain would come, hard, carrying bits of hail in it, then stop again, just as suddenly. Pools of light and cloud-shadow drifted across the kurgan, and the sheep made their slow turns atop the ancient grave-mound. It felt safe in the car, with her father and his shotgun. It felt safe, but Elmira knew: the metal they were in would only delay their deaths a moment.

They both saw it at the same time. It came slowly through the grass, limping, determined, in a direct line toward the car. It looked like something that had crawled out of a bonfire.

Nurlan squeezed his daughter’s hand. Elmira could almost hear the thought.

It should have worked. And we had to come. But now I’ve killed you.

Elmira rolled the window down. After a moment she said, “Do you hear it?”

“Hear what?”

“Arystan’s collar. You can hear the metal tag on it, clinking. That’s Batyr.”

Eldar’s body was in the grass a few hundred meters beyond the kurgan. He had fought back furiously—bravely. The many wounds on his arms told that story.

The mother-in-law is a mother-in-law. The father-in-law is a father-in-law. Eldar is a husband.

Nurlan traced the path leading onward through the grass.

Batyr went ahead of them, pointing the way, limping.

Just like Arystan had, when he’d gotten a thistle in his foot. It was so easy to think they were alive. It was so easy to think Batyr was good. So easy to make mistakes. To forget.

The thing was in a wash, among stones. Here, the thundering water that flooded the wash at times turned against harder rock, and a cluster of boulders unearthed by the flow formed a narrow cave.

The thing lay near the narrow mouth of that cave, on its side. Batyr had managed to get behind it, and tear away the connective cabling in its neck.

They had not been programmed to know that shared weakness, but Elmira had found it, and given Batyr the knowledge. The advantage.

The boulder-formed cave was where they found Jyrgal. She was curled up at the back of the space, covered in scrapes and cuts from shoving her way into a crack almost too narrow for her. They dug it out and pulled her free.

She was alive.

They rode back to their yurt camp with Jyrgal in the front seat. Elmira rode in back with Batyr. Jyrgal could not stop turning to look at Batyr, with terror in her eyes. But she said nothing.

Nurlan spoke to break the silence. “I told your mother what I said to you—about the way we met.”

“You did?” Elmira was surprised. “She must have been furious with you.”

“She was. She wanted you to know something. I keep thinking she is going to tell you, but I don’t believe she will. I think she wants me to do it.”

“What is it?”

“She wanted you to know—that I didn’t buy her by saving her. That wasn’t the way it was. She didn’t marry me because I saved her. She married me because I was the kind of person who would do such a thing. There is a difference. Do you understand the difference?”

“I do.”

“Good. I am not sure that I do, but good.”

“I understand it too,” Jyrgal said. They were the only words she spoke on the way.

As they drove up to the yurt camp, they saw the black, electric six-wheeler, parked in front of the yurts as if it owned them. Two young men leaned against it, straightening up as the battered old jeep approached. Another man was standing nearer the yurt, talking to Taalay and Bermet.

Nurlan parked the old jeep and got out. Elmira followed, leaving her door slightly open behind her.

Nurlan shook the man’s hand, then backed off a few steps, joining a semicircle of family.

Taalay spoke first.

“He came to . . . ”

“I came to ask,” the man said. “Like a modern man. I don’t want to do it the old way. My son, there—it’s time for him to marry. And it would be a good match . . . ”

“No,” Nurlan said. “She doesn’t know him. She is going to the university, and then on to a different life.”

“I came to ask,” the man said. “So as not to do it the old way. Out of respect for your family.”

“I thought you only took sheep in the fall,” Elmira said, “After all the work had been done fattening them. It’s still August.”

The man turned to face her, smiled, and said over his shoulder to his son, “This one has character. I can see why you would want her.”

Elmira had never seen the son before. When had he seen her? How long had he been planning this?

Elmira whistled.

Batyr dropped down from the jeep, loose and bony, and came at a slow trot to her side. His limp made him seem more menacing—old and mean and of the mountains, like the lead wolf of a pack with many seasons behind it.

“You should come back in the fall,” Elmira said. “For your twenty-nine sheep.”

“Thirty,” the man corrected.

“It’s twenty-nine. And not one more.”

The man was looking at Batyr. Elmira had seen that look before: it was the same look her father had, once, when he saw a viper near his boot, but did not want to startle his two children, close behind him. It was a look of terror, hidden behind a mask of control.

The man nodded. “We’ll come back in the fall.”

They drove off in that strange, silent vehicle, its honeycomb tires purring against the crushed gravel. A vehicle so far beyond the means of anyone at the summer pasture that it was like a spaceship from another world. But inside it, the people were the same old people.

The father-in-law is a father-in-law.

Bermet ran to the car and began to help Jyrgal out of it.

Nurlan looked at Elmira sadly. “I think it is time for you to leave this place. Before they return.”

“No,” Elmira replied. “This is my home. But we should go and retrieve the other kara it.”

“That monster?”

“It can be repaired, and reprogrammed. Two of them is better than one. There are many wolves in these mountains—more with every season.”

About the Author

Ray Nayler has lived and worked in Russia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Balkans for nearly two decades. He is a Foreign Service Officer, and previously worked in international educational development, as well as serving in the Peace Corps in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan. A Russian speaker, he has also learned Turkmen, Albanian, Azerbaijani Turkish, and Vietnamese.

An experienced short story writer, poet, and author of travelogues, Ray began publishing speculative fiction in 2015 in the pages of Asimov’s with the short story “Mutability.” Since then, his critically acclaimed stories have seen print in Clarkesworld, Analog, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Lightspeed, and Nightmare, as well as in many “Best of the Year” anthologies. His story “Winter Timeshare” from the January/February 2017 issue of Asimov’s was collected by the late Gardner Dozois in The Very Best of the Best: 35 Years of the Year’s Best Science Fiction. Ray is represented by Seth Fishman at the Gernert Company.

It is a Pleasure to Receive You

Ziggy Schutz

If one wants to feel small, all one has to do is look up at the sky on a clear night. There is something about the stretch of the horizon, about the distance between you and each bright spark, numbers that feel so large as to be nearly impossible summed up in a simple gesture.

Some might find it terrifying, but Simon’s always found that anonymity to be a comfort. No matter how often he stumbles, how many mistakes he might make, they mean nothing against the great scope of the universe.

And when the chance came, to throw himself into that expanse, to pull space around him like a favorite blanket and float through it like a dream, he threw himself at it with more will and want than he’d ever done anything in his sixteen years of life.

Caught up in the constellations, his very own satellite is just another spark in a vast sky, and there’s something poetic about how it’s only once he’s surrounded by the vacuum of space that he’s able to breathe deeply.

Simon is the sole occupant of the communications satellite Nirah-89, and most days are this—staring out at the stars, Earth indistinguishable from everything else in the universe, and caught up in the wonder that his little home manages to pick up anything at all.

But she does, and so he sits at his desk, listening to all of the messages that humans have sent into space, as sound waves flash by on his screen. He listens, notes where they are coming from and if there has been any response. For the older ones, the rusty and the rough, he pauses, runs them through his systems and his fingers until they’re smooth once more, adjusting levels and tidying up tones until they’re almost as good as new, and then he sends them on their way again.

How tragic would it be, after all, if one of these decades-old messages were to finally find its way to someone who needed it, and it was too tired to be heard?

In the grand scheme of things, he’s just a little speck in the larger picture that is space expansion and exploration. Many of these oldest messages were sent before humans ever settled onto other worlds, before they expanded to the edges of their solar system and beyond, comingling with all they found there. And many of the newer ones are nothing important, echoes of letters home and shopping lists for space station stopovers that are months past, now.

But it’s not his job, to determine which of these messages hold value. Simon is no museum curator, only selecting the most significant voices to honor. No, he’s simply an archivist and janitor, tidying the papers he finds on the floor, leaving the sorting through them to decide which ones can be recycled for someone else.

Maybe this is why he reacts the way he does, when a particular set of words come through his systems just as he’s about to tuck himself into bed. He could blame the late hour (in the way that every hour is a late one, he runs off of his own time here, dictated by his needs for sleep and for food more than any number or clock), or the fact that it’s midway between one supply ship visit and the next, meaning it’s the longest he goes without talking to another person.

Whatever it is, when he hears a stranger wonder if anyone is listening, hears how their voice breaks as they ask if anyone has ever, he does what janitors and archivists and satellites are never supposed to do.

He engages.

He answers.

“Yes, I hear you,” he says, and is shocked by how steady his voice is, when everything around him is vibrating. The satellite, as it continues its lonely orbit. His skeleton, at the breaking of rules, at the effort of reaching out. But his voice is steady, calm enough to almost feel like a lie, except that he never quite got the hang of lying, never thought to practice it with his peers, instead preferring to spend his time playing pretend with imaginary friends.

Maybe that’s why it feels so easy. With no visuals, he can close his eyes and pretend the voice belongs to some conjured companion, as opposed to a person, somewhere else entirely, only sharing this moment with him through happenstance and an inconsistent sleep schedule.

“And are you real?” asks the soft voice, no hesitation, just hope.

It’s a question Simon has asked himself before, on the days that bleed into nights and back again, where sleep is more memory than reality, and he’s not sure if the ship is spinning or if that’s all him.

But when faced with someone asking, the answer is easy.

“Yes,” he says. “Are you?”

“ . . . I think so.” The reply is slower this time, but the words no less honest, no less bare. “Wasn’t sure for a second, there. But I am now.”

“Good.” Simon smiles. “You’ve reached the satellite Nirah-86. Do you have a message you would like to send?”

“I do,” they say, and Simon would like to imagine that they are smiling back. “Thank you.”

It’s not that they’re not allowed to call. He knows, in theory, that many of the satellites make calls home. Often, even. There’s only so far their entertainment packages can take them before something a little more substantial is needed, something more personal.

It’s just that he’s never done it. Called home. Not really something he’s interested in, and most of the friends he’d managed to make in school were fleeting at best, held together more by convenience than any real connection.

And they’re definitely not supposed to be responding to the messages they hear. At training, Simon had been told over and over that it was best to break down each message into collections of meaningless words. It makes them more objective, means that they wouldn’t accidentally add their biases to the transmissions in the form of emphasis, cultural context, or translation.

Nirah-86’s systems can speak almost every language humanity has ever made, plus an ever-growing database of alien dialects and settlement slang.

Simon can only speak about seven, but he’s working on it, over his morning meals and in the quiet moments the days find.

He still lets the computers do the translating. He just likes to follow along. Likes to understand.

It’s easier to make their messages shine, when he has an idea of what they were doing, when they were sending them. Who they were, even if it’s all just guesswork.

Imaginary friends, again.

“I think I’m technically a prospector,” they say. They’ve talked well through Simon’s night, and their voice is raspy. This time, not with the desperation that had them reaching out in the first place, but with the wear that comes through talking for hours with a stranger. “But I prefer gardener, and it’s not like anyone is around to argue with me over it.”

Their accent has the rolling highs and lows of Saturn’s moons, settled early on in the expansion and largely unchanged since. Their name—“Lyrical Wonder, but only my mothers use the full thing. Lyric is just fine”—also speaks of an old family, and Simon can’t help but wonder what sent them spinning off-moon, landing in a digital swamp somewhere on Earth, combing through old deleted files and abandoned clouds for anything tangible.

“What do you do,” he asks. “When you find them?”

That much discarded information makes the ground soggy, the air damp, a man-made bog with little in the way of life, and always a threat of spreading. That’s what people like Lyric are there for, or so they explain. To keep the boundaries clear, to stop the slow creep, to encourage the growth of plants and things with roots that know to reach for the sun.

Simon hadn’t known that there were scraps of paper to be found, too. That sometimes the tossed info came in the form of books, newspapers from before either of them were born. But there are, and Lyric finds them, sifts through the mire with a net and a song, pockets full of pages.

“I plant them.” Their smile is obvious in their words, an affection often reserved for pets or small children sneaking into their voice. “If I’m lucky, they’ll grow.”

A garden, in the middle of a place that’s supposedly known for its still water, its lack of life.

“What do they grow into?” Simon can’t imagine it, and there’s a need in his words, to understand, to be able to picture it, if he can.

“Oh, Nirah-86,” And there’s something intimate in Lyric’s voice, as they shape the name of a satellite with their gentle tone. Something that cuts through the miles between them, like a hand on his shoulder. “Whatever they know how to be.”

“Simon,” he corrects them. “The satellite is Nirah-86. I’m Simon.”

“Simon, then.” A little laugh. “This is usually where I shake a new friend’s hand.”

“I’ll accept an IOU,” he replies, before he can overthink it, and the laugh grows, passed between them until they’re both giggling. A sound so small shouldn’t be able to fill up the whole ship, Simon thinks, but it does, lingering in the corners like stardust.

He looks it up later, when Lyric’s soft words have shifted into the even softer sounds of sleep. Recycled nanotech, something almost obsolete turned into art and metaphor instead. Fragments of things can grow in all sorts of ways. Most often, flowers with paper petals, folded as delicately as nature can manage, ink turned to gentle coloring and shades. Pretty, although not particularly useful.

But sometimes, under the hands of a good gardener, they’ll grow into whatever they have words for. Whatever their bits of story captured.

Simon sits, thousands of miles away from anyone at all, the sound of a new friend sleeping in his ears, and wonders if that isn’t what they all do. Grow into whatever shape they have words for.

It’s not supposed to be a sad thing, he thinks, as he feels his chest grow tight.

But he can’t help but wonder what words he’s missing from his own makeup. What he could become, if only his vocabulary were a little bit larger.

Maybe it’s time to work on language number eight.

“It’s really only breaking the rules once.”

Lyric’s logic is a little sideways, in Simon’s opinion. They approach problems from angles Simon hasn’t learned how to see, offer solutions by skipping steps altogether, and they can deliver it all in such a steady tone that it doesn’t even sound all that out there.

“After that, it’s just phone calls home. And you’re allowed those!” There’s a pause, and then a hurried addendum, their voice pitched up in panic. “Not that I’m calling myself your home, or anything!”

Funny. Lyric’s voice has slipped so easily into the simple routines that make up his life. If they hadn’t drawn attention to their phrasing, he would never have questioned it.

“You’re fine,” he assures them. “You’re right. We’re allowed to call friends. And there’s no small print about how we’re supposed to have met those friends.”

He knows because he checked.

“If anyone asks, we can say we met . . . ”

“On a reality broadcast,” Lyric suggests, anxiety discarded in favor of this new game. They’d told him distractions always work best. “At a conference for left-handed folks.”

Simon’s already laughing. “I’m not left-handed.”

“Neither am I,” Lyric admits, and they’re laughing too. “We’re time travelers, we met a century ago when we both went to assassinate the same person.”

That shouldn’t make him laugh harder, but it does, sends him spinning off to the corner of the room, because his satellite had decided it was the perfect day to run updates on its gravitational system, and he’d forgotten to strap himself in.

It’s what he blames, for the giddy, weightless feeling that talking to Lyric fills him with.

“Hate to break it to you, but I’m not a time traveling assassin, either.”

“Not yet, you’re not,” Lyric chirps back, and Simon sees stars.

Sometimes, Lyric’s words come quick and fast, and Simon has to scramble to keep up. But sometimes it’s quiet days, where full minutes pass after starting a call before they even say hello.

On days where Lyric’s words have run dry, he lets them listen in while he works.

It’s only fair, he tells himself. They’ve got him invested in each plant and scrap in their garden, so why not let them listen in as he works away on the messages that find him? And they get it, without him having to explain. Why it feels important, even if there’s no one waiting on the other end.

Of course, that’s how it happens. He never would have done it on his own, wouldn’t have had the words or the bravery to go with them.

The message is a short one, but crystal clear. A single voice, laughing weakly as the owner of the voice asks if anyone knows how to wrap up a broken ankle well enough to stand on it.

“Simon,” Lyric says, voice gone tight with worry, with urgency.

“I don’t know,” he admits. He took another language, instead of the first aid course. “I can look it up, but we have no idea if they’ll be able to hear us, if they’re even still listening—”

“We can try.” And Lyric’s right, they should try, but he’s frozen, too far away to be of any help, listening to the laughter turn into a pained whine as the stranger attempts to stand.

“I don’t know what to do.” He feels like he’s failing, like he’s falling, but Lyric is there, calm in the face of someone’s pain in a way they never quite manage with their own.

“Patch me through,” they’re saying. “I know how, patch me through.”

And Simon breaks the rules a second time.

“Hey,” Lyric says, talking to the stranger now. “Can you hear me? We can hear you. I’m Lyric, they/them. I can talk you through it. We’re here to help.”

The “we” makes Simon wince. He’s done nothing but connect them, connect them and panic.

“Sup, Lyric,” says the voice on the other end, and there’s a relief to the voice now, a relief Simon lets sink into his own limbs. “M’Nova, she/her. Not to rush you, but I’m not exactly in a place I’m supposed to be, right now, so if you can speed run me through this . . . ”

And Lyric does, steady and sure. Hands used to coaxing seeds made up of punctuation to grow in places they shouldn’t be able to now walk Nova through a bandage wound like a trellis, not even stumbling when Nova explains that she’s only got one hand to work with, on account of her other one being in the shop.

“Got strong teeth, though,” she says, and Simon thinks of grins with bloody teeth, of what “survivor” looks like in his mind, and adds to that image a low laugh, a voice raspy and sharp, like at any moment it’s about to grow claws.

When Nova is able to push herself to standing, Lyric actually claps, they’re so caught up in the moment. If Simon were a little less frozen, he would have been right there with them.

“Cute,” Nova says, and then there’s the sound of shouts in the background, and she curses.

“Gotta go, thanks for the save!”

The transmission ends, and Lyric and Simon sit in silence, the space given at the end of a song to let it really sink in.

This is the place to applaud, he thinks, and Lyric lets out a shaky breath that sounds like it’s been held for far too long.

“Think we’ll hear from her again?” Lyric asks, hours later, and Simon marvels at how they can be so far apart and still thinking the same thing.

“Hard to say,” Simon says. “Never really done this before. She seems like the kind of person to do whatever is least expected, anyway. Just to say she did.”

“Yeah.” Lyric hums for a few bars, which Simon knows means they’re thinking.

“I guess I’ll just have to expect to not meet her again, then.”

Simon smiles, softer than he should. It’s fine. Only his satellite’s ceiling is here to see it.

“I’ll do the same.”

The next day, Simon catches the tail end of a transmission in a familiar voice, asking if the stars had any clever medical advice to share today.

“No stars here,” he says, as Lyric’s voice jumps up in excitement.

“Yeah,” Nova answers, like she breaks ankles and takes part in daring rescues every day. “Stars aren’t nearly so generous with their skills.”

The stars aren’t exactly around to defend themselves, and they’re basically Simon’s neighbors, so he takes on that task himself.

With three people laughing at once, the satellite feels bigger than it ever has.

“So you’re a gardener in a place you’re not supposed to be able to garden,” Nova summarizes, and Lyric makes a noise that somehow sounds like a nod, wordless but no less clear. “And I’m a sculptor whose first art piece was my arm, and I did go for form over function.”

Simon thinks that’s a wild way to downplay the brilliance it must have taken, to design, build, and install her own arm. Especially since all of her materials come from the junkyard she’s been squatting in for the better half of a year, ever since whatever happened to make her lose her arm had inspired her to drop out of school and run full tilt at being a starving artist type.

“It’s like if graffiti was in three dimensions,” she’d said, trying to describe her work to the two of them. “Or tattoos, if tattoos could turn against you . . . And if they were made out of your mom’s old pocket kitchenette.”

Simon can’t picture it, but he wants to. Wants to see Nova’s sculptures just as much as he wants to wander through Lyric’s gardens.

“Quite a pair,” Simon says, and it is perhaps the wrong response, because he can feel Nova’s attention turn to him, can hear her smile get wider.

“What about you then, Simon-my-boy?” she asks. “You a walking contradiction like the rest of us?”

He doesn’t want to talk about what he does. He supposes it’s not that far off of what the both of them do, finding beauty in the discarded pieces of other people’s lives. But they both transform the scraps they find, into things new and stunning.

He just tidies up other people’s good words and sends them on their way again.

So he deflects, focuses on the wrong part of the sentence.

“Oh, I’m not a boy.” he says, nothing but cheer in the correction. “I collect genders like you collect space junk.”

It’s a good metaphor, he thinks, for all that he still can’t quite picture her work. Pretty pieces of potential on a shelf, and some days they fit one way and some days another.

“I just use he/him out of convenience.”

“Whose convenience?” Nova asks, sharp as skeptics, and he feels his heart flutter at how quick she is to ready herself to defend him.

“My own,” he assures her. “It’s for no one but myself. I like how it sounds, and it’s the most accurate the most of the time.”

He doesn’t get into the rest of it, how in this tiny satellite of his, he could be anyone, could wake up a new person each day, and that terrifies him. How easy, to lose yourself in space. He needs constants, needs touchstones of identity to keep him company. His name, his pronouns, they are like magnets on a fridge, pins on a board. Keeping the less permanent parts of him steady, for a time.

“Okay,” Lyric comes in, ballast to Nova’s sails. “If that changes, you’ll let us know, right?”

What a delightful thought, that they’d know each other long enough to update each other on things like shifting identities.

“I promise,” he says, and the future is sweet on his tongue.

Do you believe in fate, he almost asks, when Nova just so happens to call him on a night that is especially dark. She goes on about a piece of junk she’s found, how it bends just like a waterfall, and he listens, lets her fire light up the room.

Did you ever read fairy tales, he traces into his desk, not daring to ask out loud, on a morning where Lyric has enough words to walk them both through every flower they have growing. He hasn’t managed to sleep, but their voice makes it easier.

If we’d met differently, he practices out loud, on a day where both of them are busy, and he is alone. If I were closer, do you think . . . ?

He doesn’t know how to end that sentence, so he saves it. An unsent transmission. A secret, just for him and all of space.

It’s not like the universe cares, anyway.

Once he finds the perfect way to say it, he will, he tells himself, runs the sentences through every language he knows to see if one sounds better than the others.

Maybe it’s just a vocabulary issue again.

He’ll leave it for now.

“A shift is five months?”

Simon shrugs, a gesture more out of habit than any added meaning. Nova’s outrage on his behalf has quickly become a comfort, even if he still feels a twinge of guilt for bringing it out at all.

“It’s not like I have to stay up the whole time, or anything. It’s just easier on resources for us to stay up for extended periods of time. Sending a supply ship up to all of us, instead of us going down and up.” He brightens. “But we get a month or two off between shifts, if we’d like.”

“If you’d like.” Lyric’s not convinced. Neither is Nova, not even a little. She’s known him barely two months, Lyric only a few more, and already they both see through him better than anyone at home ever managed. It’s enough to make a satellite feel stripped bare. “So, if you wanted, you could stay up there even longer?”

Nova’s reading into his silence before he’s even made up his mind whether or not to answer, cutting to the quick.

“Hey, Simon? When was the last time you pulled your head out of the clouds?”

He hesitates again. Not because he doesn’t want to tell her, but because he needs to take a moment to count.

“ . . . Fourteen months,” he says.

“Simon,” she hisses, and he grimaces.

“It’s not on purpose!” he says, quick now, trying to cut off the lecture he knows he’ll get otherwise. “It’s just, my hometown isn’t exactly my favorite place, and my parents are really busy anyways, and they’ll just ask why I had to run away to the stars to avoid going to university, and I can’t be bothered to have that conversation with them again.”

He should really give them a call. It’s been almost a year.

Later, he assures himself. He’ll worry about it later.

“It’s not that I don’t want to come down,” he says. “I just don’t really have anywhere I’d want to land.”

“You didn’t,” Lyric corrects him, and the confidence alone winds him, leaves him blinking away the stinging in his eyes. “You didn’t. But that’s changed, right?”

“It better have,” Nova growls, and the growl makes him feel warm, hands to his cheeks so he can feel his own blush spread. “I’m working on something really neat, but it’s gonna sound stupid as hell if I try to describe it.”

“You’ll just have to go see it in person,” Lyric says, and how can he say no to them both, when they so perfectly overlap like this?

He should say yes. He should say yes, thank you, I would love that.

Instead, he starts to cry.

“Simon?” chorus two voices belonging to faces he has never seen, and he aches with it.

“Sorry,” he gets out, curling up on himself, tucked away in his chair. It’s on wheels, so that he can move it to the other rooms when he needs to. There’s only one chair, in this whole place. It was only made for one person, why would he need more than one?

“You don’t have to apologize,” Nora says, almost stepping on him in her haste to get the words out.

“Talk to us,” Lyric says. “Please, Simon.”

And he does.

“I think the whole world must be lonely.”

The words ring in his ears.

“Why do you say that?” Lyric asks, and their voice is soft, the way one might speak at a funeral.

“There are decades and decades of us sending letters to the stars. Not knowing if anyone would listen to them, desperate to connect, to have someone respond. Thousands of words, in as many languages as we’ve got. Reaching out to the sky, again and again, hoping against hope that someone will reach back.”

“That’s not—” Nova starts, but it’s Lyric’s voice that comes through clear.

“I don’t think that’s loneliness,” they say, that same whisper, threaded with a conviction like steel. “You said it yourself, Simon. That’s hope.”

There’s a hum of agreement from the other line.

Later, he’ll wonder when they all started to pick up each other’s speech patterns and verbal stims. But that’s for later.

Lyric continues.

“They reached out because they had hope that one day, their messages would find someone who was listening, hoping to hear something in the stars. It is in direct opposition of loneliness. How many of them use the word ‘friend’?”

“A lot of them,” he says, and they echo in his head. Greeting, friends. Friends of space. Welcome home. Before, they had always sounded like half-finished tragedies. But the words themselves don’t really say that, did they?

“I can see how someone might hear them and hear them just as messages never answered, and there’s something terribly lonely in that,” they continue. “But I think these words came from a much brighter place than that.”

“And they did find someone,” Nova comes in, and where Lyric is the wind, Nova is the river. “They found you, didn’t they? You heard them.”

“I did,” Simon confirms, and he wonders what his choked-up words sound like, sent across a thousand miles.

“Even if you’re the only person who ever hears them, they’ll have done what they were meant to do. They found someone out there and let them know that they had friends here. That they weren’t alone.”

Simon sits above the Earth in his little satellite, spinning through space at a pace he can largely not even comprehend, and he listens to two voices remind him that he is not alone, using the words he’s repeated to himself like a prayer on the most empty of nights.

They take on a new life, on their tongues, and he is reminded of the first time he found these words, his first shift, his first night away from home. How precious the words felt, held in his hands like seeds he couldn’t wait to plant, metal he couldn’t wait to bend.

When had they lost their shine? When had he stopped hearing the beauty in them, and instead interpreted them like a tragedy?

“Thank you,” he says, and he’s really sobbing now, but something’s changed. He doesn’t think it’s because he’s sad anymore.

He’d been taught, somewhere between grade school and the great adventure of space, that if someone is crying the best thing you can do is support them without commenting on it. It’s polite. It saves the person any embarrassment.

But he thinks that maybe the person who taught him that has never had two voices, different in every way, thousands of miles between them, say “oh, Simon,” in perfect synchronicity, as his voice breaks over the call and they reach out with all that they have to comfort him.

He falls asleep to their quiet conversations, and he sleeps without dreaming.

Do you think you can fall for two people at once? he asks the static.

There’s no answer.

He takes the words and buries them inside of him.

He doesn’t know what he’ll do, if they decide to grow.

The universe is infinite. This he knows.

But the world is circular, and he knows this too, orbits around it every day.

Life has infinite possibilities. That is what they say.

But it prefers to stick to patterns. To days and months and years, starting something the same place something else has ended. History repeats, little stories spin in circles, and transmissions loop.

Somewhere on Earth, in a digital swamp no one would really make note of, it is storming.

In space, there is no rain to hammer on the roof of a little cabin, to offer warning. There is no putting down your feet to find out that the water is already up to your ankles, and the fear that comes with that flood, because the ground is soft here. Perfect for planting.

Not perfect for escaping a mire that has snuck up on you in the night.

Simon doesn’t know any of these things, of course. For him, panic comes in the form of a staticky call for help, made crackling by the weather rather than by the age, and a voice he has grown to know so well, begging for help.

He’s up in an instant, heart in his throat as he sprints to his workstation.

“Lyric?” he calls down the line. “Lyric, can you hear me?”

With one hand, he is calling for Nova, because he needs her, because he can’t do this alone.

The other is doing what he does best, hours and hours sitting right here—cleaning up the message, so that every word is perfectly clear.

Nova joins him just in time to hear Lyric bite back a gasp.

“I’m stuck,” they cry, and there’s sounds Simon isn’t used to, the rushing of water and data, the sucking of solid ground suddenly turned to deep, deep mud.

“Thought you were supposed to leave yesterday?” Nova asks, and yes, yes, she’s right. The bog’s dangerous this time of year, Lyric was supposed to spend the next month or two in the city, waiting for the ground to get solid enough for planting again.

“There was . . . things were still growing,” Lyric confesses. “I was going to go today, but I . . . ”

Later. They can tell them off later. After they’re somewhere safe and dry.

But it was them, who walked Simon and Nova through the last crisis. Their steady voice, their careful hands.

“I’m sorry,” Lyric says, and Simon thinks they’ve said it a few times now. Panic is making it hard to catch each word. “I’m sorry, I keep sinking, I’m sorry . . . ”

“Simon,” Nova hisses, and her claws cut through the fear. “You have to tell me where they are.”

That’s not something he’s ever done. It’s the most important rule, after all. His job is not about the people who send these messages, just like it’s not about who receives them. He is not, under any circumstance, supposed to trace a transmission.

But this isn’t a transmission, says the part of him that sounds more and more like Lyric. This is a call home.

To hell with the rules, growls a part of him that parrots Nova’s bravery. Rules are only as good as the people they protect.

“I can try,” he says, and already his hands are moving. He’s never done this. But he knows this system, knows it better than he’s known anything.

He can take it apart, split it open and follow them, the seeds and the scraps and the nuts and bolts. He can tune in to the words, and more importantly, to the voice that’s saying them.

His instructors had told him that it didn’t matter, the person behind the messages he heard. That they were all as good as ghosts, as far as they were concerned.

They were wrong. They were wrong about so much, and this most of all.

For the third time, Simon of Satellite Nirah-86 breaks the rules.

“I’ve got you,” he promises Lyric, who’s sunk to their waist now, who reached out into the stars and just so happened to find him.

“We’ve got you,” he promises Nova, as he sends her a coordinate, listens to her bike roar like something wild as she goes speeding off.

He hadn’t looked before, but he’s looking now. All these months, and the two of them had been less than fifty miles from each other.

The universe is so big, but it doesn’t have to be. Sometimes it shrinks to just this. Just three people, moving as one, to save a life.

“You’re going to be okay,” he repeats, on loop like one of his favorite messages, polished to shining. “Nova’s almost there, you’re going to be okay.”

“I believe you,” Lyric assures him. “I’ve always believed you, Simon.”

He doesn’t know what he says, in those painful, stretched minutes or hours or years between that first cry for help and the distant sound of Nova’s voice through Lyric’s line, calling their name. He must say lots of things, because he talks the whole time, so that Lyric can save their breath for surviving, and Nova for the race toward them. Bits of messages he’d memorized before he’d met them, sentences they’d both said to him that stuck. Reworked, reshaped into something all its own, a monologue designed to reach down from the stars and pull Lyric up and out of that mud and into the arms of someone who loves them.

He talks until Nova gets close, and then he lends his shouts to Lyric’s, as they call until Nova spots them.

He only stops talking when Lyric’s line drops out, and it’s through Nova’s alone that he hears “I’ve got you, we’ve got you, told you we’d do it.”

And he cries along with them both, when they reach solid ground and he hears them both collapse with it, tangled in each other with his voice in between them, muffled by how tightly they’re holding onto each other, but never intruding.

This call has three heartbeats, all racing with their close call, and it’s to that pounding beat that one of them moves, and the other one responds, and Simon realizes that they’re kissing.

“You’re a force of nature, Ms. Nova,” Lyric finally gets out, and Simon can hear their smile.

“You’re an idiot,” Nova replies, but she’s smiling too.

“You’re okay,” Simon breathes. “You’re together and you’re okay.”

“We’re okay,” Lyric repeats, and then the rain that’s been the backing music to this all suddenly lets up, and Nova swears, and Lyric laughs, and as always, their laughter is contagious enough to catch.

They spend the first few minutes together laughing until the panic drains away like the storm.

Simon’s not sure if he believes in fate, or in rules, or in the patterns of the universe.

But he thinks he could be happy, just believing in this feeling. Whatever it happens to be.

Simon tries to give them space. He does. A lot has happened, and near-death experiences have a way of taking a lot out of you. Not to mention kissing someone you’d only just met. It’s a lot. He’s trying to be respectful.

Neither of them will have it.

“Look, I miss you too,” he admits, after Nova calls him five times in as many minutes, and he finally picks up. “But Lyric’s recovering, and the two of you are getting settled, and . . . I mean, the two of you kissed. You’re . . . shouldn’t you talk about this? Before just inviting me to visit?”

“If you’d been here, I’d have kissed you too, idiot.” Nova says, and he’s so stunned that he forgets, for a second, every language he knows.

“It is something we should talk about,” Lyric says, and there’s still a thrill, to seeing both of their voices come through one transmission. “But conversations like this are best had in person. Don’t you think?”

So they’re really serious. Simon hums, a thinking noise, and looks over at the screen that serves as calendar and countdown both.

 . . . His shift is up in three days.

How had he not noticed?

“Because you’ve never had a reason to look forward to it before,” Nova says, responding to a question he must have asked out loud. “Because you’re a workaholic.”

“We all are,” Simon reminds her, and then makes a face. Might be a bit soon, when Lyric’s work had so recently almost killed them.

But there’s laughter on the other end, and he relaxes. Not too soon, then. Or maybe they’ve all just been looking for an excuse to laugh in the face of what they had just survived.

“Yes,” Lyric agrees. “Maybe we all need a break.”

“ . . . I have some vacation saved up,” Simon admits. Months and months of it, although he doesn’t want to start with that. Doesn’t want to move too fast. “If you’re both sure. If you don’t mind.”

“Come on down, Simon Satellite,” Nova calls, singsong. “Come be our summer fling.”

If Simon is remembering right, it’s not even midwinter where they are.

It’s an invitation, then. A long one.

It’s a place to land.

Simon swallows, mouth gone dry with anxiety. No, not quite. With a terrifying, intoxicating anticipation.

“I can be there in three weeks,” he says.

“Holding you to that, then.”

“We’ll be waiting,” Lyric adds, and there they go again. Making promises of a future Simon is less and less scared to imagine.

Simon still feels small, when he looks up at the sky.

There’s no such thing as a clear night, in the bogs. There’s always a slight blur to the air, millions of bytes of information drifting through their final resting place.

It makes the stars seem closer, somehow. Brighter.

The horizon still stretches out in every direction, but to Simon’s left is a short someone with hair that curls tighter in the humidity, and the night looks so much smaller, when mirrored by their dark skin, freckles like their own constellations, ones Simon cannot wait to study.

And to Simon’s right is a taller girl, smile sharp and daring, and her arm interrupts any straight lines, as she points at the world and questions what everyone else has gone and accepted as truths, and her pale cheeks go red when Simon reaches out and captures her hand, tangling their fingers together and suggesting that maybe, they can find the answers together.

The numbers that make up the impossible expanse of space feel smaller, when viewed by three.

Maybe they really do mean nothing, in the grand scheme of things.

But maybe that’s not the point.

The universe doesn’t know who he is, and that’s fine. He’s not really anyone—just a satellite, just space junk held together by scribbled equations and an outdated sound system.

But he doesn’t need to be someone important to the universe, to be someone to the two on either side of him.

He can just be Simon.

Tonight, he plants his name between his ribs. In the soft ground beneath their feet. In the metal sculptures that stand like sentinels around them.

Tomorrow, together, they will see what grows.

About the Author

Ziggy Schutz (she/her/he/him) is a queer, disabled writer who is at all times looking for ways to make his favorite fairy tales and sci fi tropes reflect people who look a little more like her.

When he’s not writing, she’s spending his time exploring haunted houses and chatting up the ghosts who live there. This is not a bit.

Xiaolongbao: Soup Dumplings

D.A. Xiaolin Spires

The sky swelled with vermilion. Each step that I took toward the rosy jade grove, the redder and denser it got. It looked like the sky soaked itself into my mom’s old lipstick. I stood paralyzed for a moment by the thought of her lips, moving in her signature hushed way, reading to me, about math, about our family history, or at least what she remembered of it. The dire warmth in my hands woke me from my reverie. The steam from the xiaolongbao dumplings peeped through the basket resting on my palms and wafted upward, its faded gray mixing with the vermilion, as if feeding fuel into these flame-burned heavens.

I shook my head and returned my focus straight ahead. My gaze pierced through the woods, and I picked up my pace, maneuvering through the rough stones. I rushed over to Lihui’s house. She had lost her mom, too—and today was the death anniversary. The illness that started from the journey here and ate away at my mom over the years also consumed her mom. A quantum bacteria, they called it. Not exactly organic, but a pestilence nonetheless, and one whose fatal bite may be worse than any cancer.

We bonded over our sadness, over our sudden unwanted independence, and after the funeral—over pork and bamboo covered in a thin sheet of chewy translucent wheat—transplanted wheat that my mom had brought with her and grew here. After we consoled ourselves with food, we whispered about all the things we could remember about the two. The steamed dumplings I prepared were an exact replica of how my mom used to make them . . . nineteen folds. A fold for each year of my life . . . with ten folds representing the decades my mom wasn’t there, as she and Lihui’s mom—Ayi—as I called her, passed when I was nine. Lihui was seven then.

When I arrived at Lihui’s house, I removed my shoes, dusted the rosy jade leaf dust off my shoulders and from the basket. I pulled out a photo and laid it next to Ayi’s. We placed the basket in front of the altars as offerings, lit incense, and said our prayers to our respective moms. I burned some joss paper in the shape of their favorite dumplings as we consumed the fleshy version that I brought and offered. They were so juicy, and we ate them, turning away from the altar and instead watching the sky shift to even darker shades of crimson.

It was then that we noticed the first burst in the sky.

The rosy jade grove sat between our two biggest settlements. We got everything from its resources. Okay, that was a bit of an exaggeration, but we did dust for its powder, which we baked into foods, medicine, and used it as a spice-enhancement. It had great fertilizing properties, too.

Lihui shook one of the trees and the dust covered her hands. She began to lick it.

“Lihui, you’re not supposed to . . . ”

“Aw, come on Chiu. Lighten up a bit,” she said. “It’s not like anyone’s around. Besides, it’s good for the soil.”

“Yeah?”

She sprinkled some on the ground. “Of course.”

She continued upward, licking her arms. I hesitated but did the same. It’s been years since I’ve been so rebellious—you’re supposed to wait until you’re out of the groves before tasting its parts. A superstition that the groves were watching, and you shouldn’t feed on it in its presence. But it’s been years since the grove has been this empty, and I wasn’t really one to think the groves could really see in that way anyway.

I took another lick. I didn’t think the flavor ever tasted as good as it did now or maybe my memory deceived me. It had a nutty flavor now, but in another twenty minutes, I knew the flavor would change depending on the input from the skies, the wind, and the direction the pole-like trees were facing.

I sat, grasping on to a tree, and started shimmying upward. Lihui was ahead of me, goading me on as she raced me, peppering her movements with cheerful insults, pumping her strong arms, and working her way up another trunk. “Come on, where’d all your muscles go? Burned away with the red sky?” She laughed.

The image of the first burst seared into my head. I shook it away, shimmying faster.

She smudged some of the dust off her face and pretended to throw it at me. I ducked.

It was a game we’d been playing since we were kids. Racing up toward the heavens. The jade trees (faux-bamboos, as some of us call them) bent from our weight as we neared their tops, but they still handled us pretty well. I used the empty basket from dumplings to fill with rosy jade leaves. I bent the leaves at different angles once I collected them—it created a sear in their fiber that released a relaxing chemical. It helped them start the fermentation process for longer keeping, with different angles producing different flavors.

Lihui picked up a jadeberry and chucked it at me. She laughed while I dodged the berry and ended up scattering a dozen folded leaves toward the ground below. There goes the tea for tonight, the powders for dumpling meat, and the fibers for the weave-threads, I thought, grimacing.

I heard a jump and a swinging, and Lihui was off to another trunk below me. Of course, she was Lihui, so she was ready to salvage what she wasted. She held up her basket in mid-swing and caught a few of my scattered leaves and reached for others.

“This isn’t New Year’s! No need to shed confetti,” she said.

“You provoked it,” I said, nodding my chin at her.

“You dropped them.” She grinned.

“You’re in an awfully good mood for the death anniversary.” I plucked off another leaf, dusting it off.

Her face fell.

I looked at the sky for a moment and the angle of the faux-bamboo. They were beginning to tilt toward one direction. Usually, their canopies faced in all various ways, but sometimes when celestial occurrences were impending, they started to bend in a synchronized way.

I didn’t dare talk about the burst. There was too much there, too much fear, too much of everything. I bent the leaf at the third mark and stuck it in my basket. “ . . . and wasting resources while at it.”

At that she sobered up a bit, turned to me with her clear, piercing eyes, and said, “It’s the day after death anniversary. I’m celebrating life.” I did hear a tinge of sadness in her voice. I wondered if she was thinking about her mother or the mark in the sky.

The way the faux-bamboo were tilting. The first signifying that the prophecy of impending doom might be right after all.

“The jadeberries are getting redder,” I said.

I didn’t want to think about it. Clinging to the pole-like trunk of the jade tree, I wiped one berry on my shorts and popped it in my mouth. Sweet, but tangy.

I chucked one back at her. She was dexterous enough to catch it and slip it down her throat.

We chewed on another. Sweet. Again. This would be a good harvest.

But, underneath that, a trace of bitterness. I spat out the seed onto the ground of the grove below me. The seeds were edible but not exactly tasty. Besides, sometimes it was fun to watch the seed plop against the bottom trunks—which were turning from a healthy pink to a strange shade of violet. I wondered if we would all be around to see this seed grow into a tree. Or if there would be a grove left at all for it to grow in.

I gave my legs some slack and plunged downward, while clinging lightly to the trees during the fall. My stomach flew into my throat, and I shivered, licking my lips. The bitter aftertaste of seeds in my mouth blossomed as I free fell toward the bottom.

Above me, I heard Lihui pull the same maneuver. She was shouting “whooopeee” as she fell.

The sound of another explosion rumbled in the sky. It left an audible wake of searing static as a new pattern that flickered between clouds.

The bowl in my hands shook. Ground jadeberry seeds spilled onto the table and floor, staining the surfaces red.

Lihui was handling the dough and a puff of rose jade leaf powder rose up from her bowl.

I counted to three.

The pulsing steadied.

A visible line appeared outside the window, like the silhouette of a faux-bamboo stem etched in the red sky.

I traced it with my fingers, pretending to feel the line from the first burst. And now this one, pointing toward it like a V.

Lihui next to me drew two lines nearly touching into the spilled seeds with her index finger, mixing xiaolongbao dough with the ingredients for the filling. An aroma of raw meat and flour wafted into the air.

“And then there were two,” she said, giving me a pointed look. I nodded.

I knew what she was thinking. The prophecy.

My mom used to say: “Chiu, there is an art and serenity to crisp folds. A kind of magic.”

The steam of the iron would cloud over her expression and then it would clear, revealing her limpid brown eyes. She looked determined, like a dragon summoning rain. And then it would come again, another billow of steam. Her arm movements were swift, rolling over our tees and our qipaos of special occasions with the heat of the iron.

It was silly, I guess, just clothes, but she packaged them into neat bundles: flat, angled, firm.

It was just like how she made her xiaolongbao. A crown of nineteen perfect pleats met at the top in a cusp.

Crisp folds.

I popped a folded rose jade leaf in my mouth, tasting its spice.

When the casket lid folded over my mom with an audible creak at the hinge, I remembered, “There is an art and serenity to crisp folds.”

And with that creak, I felt my anchor to my last world disappear. I was like the laundry that tumbled around in the washer. Wrapped up, wrinkled, wrought up into knots.

I ran after her as they pushed her body into the gaping maw of the restricted area. I struggled with the machine operators, trying to elbow my way in, but they held me back.

In my struggle, a ball of heat hit my face. The dry heat of the incinerator was so fiery—so different from the warm steam of the iron that reminded me of my mom. Similar steam rose up from the cooked dumplings that she would ladle into porcelain spoons for us.

The maw closed behind her, swallowing her up. After that, I just felt limp.

That was the last time I saw my mom, or what was left of her.

They dragged me out before I even knew to cry.

As I trudged back to my settlement, telling myself to put one foot in front of the next as I kicked up stones, I thought about her creations.

I always liked how structured her creations looked. A tower of well-pressed garments. A faux-bamboo dish of methodically arranged dumplings, symmetrical and homologous in concentric circles. Their folded whorls of tops all pinched to perfection.

Even the casket she designed months in advance was so beautifully and intricately carved—faux-bamboo curving toward each other in an unusual way. Dotting the angular design was the gentle curve of embossed jadeberry forms, delicate like sparkling constellations.

And now it was dust.

I couldn’t help but think of her when I needed something systematized to hold me together.

The lines in the sky unnerved me. I wish I could hold on to her hand, have her massage the creases in my palm with her rough, warm fingers.

Instead, I clasped on to the sides of the T-shirt I was wearing, caking flour onto the fabric. I dragged my mind back to the present.

“A couple more teaspoons of silken sauce,” I said. Lihui dropped them into the bowl of filling.

“Would you like me to do the honors?” Lihui asked, making a mixing gesture with her arm. Maybe she noticed my hands were still shaking.

“No. I got this.” I held the spatula firm as I stirred in circles, clockwise then counterclockwise. I was counting rotations to myself.

I paused when the mixture was glossy and tinged ruddy brown with sauce. Lihui shook her head, and I agreed. There were still some chunks.

I continued stirring, wanting the fillings to be even more smooth and incorporated.

That’s when the rumblings began to increase and I dropped the spatula, which got stuck in the bowl like a shoe caught on rocks.

I lost count of the orbits the spatula in my hand made within the bowl. It must have been at thirty-something.

No matter. I waited for the rumblings to decrease and my hands to calm down. Admittedly, I was a bit unnerved.

When the table was still, I spooned a lump of the mixture out, and the batter gleamed as bright as Lihui’s inquisitive eyes.

My mom would tuck me to bed with the same story.

The prophecy, as some people told it.

Long ago, there were expert xiaolongbao makers that lived on top of a mountain.

They made divine dumplings that if eaten, would grant your most heartfelt wish.

But there was a rigorous process to become these xiaolongbao makers.

First, you would have to climb the mountain. Then you’d have to scale across the tops of the faux-bamboo groves. They would all bend in a strange way, synchronized. There would also be puffs of clouds that pointed the right way as clear indicators if you were heading in the right direction.

Don’t eat the jadeberries, my mom would say. They will get you drunk, and you will lose your holding. But keep latching on and scaling.

Then as your hands roughened from all the activity, you would start gaining the calluses for the rigorous mixing and dough pounding.

Then when you get to the famed kitchen, here comes the fun part—filling and folding.

The xiaolongbao makers—in my head they were always short and gregarious—would gather in a circle and ladle meats, fold, and pinch. Their hands were as quick as bird beaks, their twists as tight as qipao zippers.

“Qipao zippers? That’s pretty tight,” I sometimes said, squirming in my pajamas. Then my mom would laugh.

The first batch would contain nineteen folds per dumpling, and they would send it to those on our planet.

The second batch would contain thirty-eight folds per dumpling, and they would send it to the nearest star.

My response was always the same and always incredulous.

“Thirty-eight folds? But, mom, that’s impossible.”

“Hush, Chiu, they don’t have typical hands. Remember? They carry the cherished callouses from traversing the divine mountains and passing across the tops of the sacred faux-bamboo.

“Unlike typical callouses, they are still sensitive and dexterous, enough to manipulate the pliable skin without breaking it, yet they are blessed with incredible speed and skill. They are gift callouses on hard tough hands—hard tough hands fast and adroit enough to pick up a single eyelash in the air in a flash of a millisecond.”

She would bat her eyelashes, looking very serious.

I would look at my hands, soft and pliable. My mom’s hands, on the other hand, were as rough as the rocks in front of our house.

“Then they would fold seventy-six pleats, all pinched into a whorl up top. Their hands would move so fast at this point that they’re not even visible. You couldn’t even tell where they were—it was more probability than existence.”

I laughed.

“The quantum xiaolongbao makers,” my mom would say with a nod, finishing her story.

The joke was that if the seventy-six fold did happen, and it did appear before you on a tray, the universe would rip apart. Collapse and decoherence.

I remember touching my mom’s calloused fingers before my eyelids would weigh me down, and I would fall into a deep sleep.

The roughness of her fingers and knuckles made me think of all the work she did for us. I would dream about her working and me asking her questions, playing around her general busyness, bugging her as she scampered about.

All that labor—that sometimes her movements were so methodical, you would forget that she was doing each one with will and it wasn’t just a continuous system, like she was breaking the law of thermodynamics in infinite sustained movements, that seemed to be moving on their own, coming from nowhere and everywhere at once.

When they said she had a quantum bacteria eat away at her, I had no idea what they were talking about. Living on this planet was a new thing. We were refugees and settlers all at once. Deposited here without much memory of what had happened before. We didn’t know what we’d find here. The settlement grew over time as we grew accustomed to its settings.

Lore grew as fast as illnesses, grasping with rigor like weeds.

Us kids did the best, adapted fastest, grew alongside the faux-bamboo, red-cheeked like their rosy glossy bark. We were as ruddy as the sky itself.

We experimented, played, and still adopted and adapted the customs of our people, the ones we could still access in our memory collective logs, retrofitted them to better serve this world.

Meanwhile, as we thrived, our two moms eventually deteriorated. It wasn’t only them. More aunties and uncles were falling sick. And they weren’t sure how to contain the illness. The medicine was only effective at keeping the worst at bay.

As another sear ran through the sky, I started freaking out. There was something about that sound and the accompanying tear and the way I could see the faux-bamboo leaning in the distance. The color of the sky wasn’t so red anymore—more orange than anything else.

I could smell an aroma wafting from the distance, from the faux-bamboo groves, coming in with the drafts in the cracks. It was an odor that was not within the trees’ typical range of shifting, grove-like smells. A damp dewiness but somewhat rank. Something wasn’t right.

We tried to focus on assembling our offerings—these xiaolongbao that have kept us fed and strong, that we planned to share with our dead moms.

I was wrapping in a frenzy. Lihui could feel my anxiety, I could tell. She kept telling me to slow down. My hands were shaking, but it only made me wrap faster. My wraps were getting sloppier, seventeen folds instead of nineteen. Sometimes twenty or twenty-two. Lihui made it a point to count them aloud to get me to focus.

Hers were still a perfect nineteen. But my movements were more erratic. I could feel heat emanating from my fingers.

And then more booms and sears startled us both from the heavens.

We should have stopped like the rest of the village. We should have stepped outside to check out what was going on. There was a murmuring crowd out there, and I could smell roasted faux-bamboo, somewhat sweet but with a burnt bitterness. I could hear the commotion and the gasps.

Lihui had her hands against the pane, getting them dirty with grease and flour. She gave up on the dumplings, instead focusing on the distraction.

Maybe there was a fear in me that I didn’t want to face what was going on, like the way I didn’t want to face my mom’s death those many years ago. Maybe I just needed an activity to calm me down, even if I was wrapping in a fury that showed no hint of calming down.

My xiaolongbao were strange and nonconforming. This is not how my mom taught me to do things. They were, however, marked by crisp folds, but the folds were anything but systematic in number.

I didn’t even bother counting the pleats or even really paying attention to the finished products. They still needed to be steamed, anyhow—passed through a form of fire as a ritualistic burning.

I finished the last one, my teeth chattering, my heart in trepidation, my hands jittery, and I quickly plopped them onto the crisscross weave bottom of the faux-bamboo steamer.

I stood next to Lihui, my dirty palms pressed up beside hers against the glass, watching the commotion in the skies and in the clearing below us, the voices of the village—shrieking and exclaiming.

I heard a ding telling me the dumplings were done. Half-reluctant, half-relieved, I pulled myself away from the commotion outside the window. There were ten lines in the sky now. They were all pointing toward one another, like an asterisk, except without the intersection in the middle.

I pulled the steamer to the table and called Lihui over. She was getting a bit ecstatic, whooping at every burst in the sky. She had half a mind to run out there, but I begged her to stay with me as we fulfilled our solemn duty, giving these offerings and eating with our dead moms in thought.

Besides, even though more than half our village was down there, who knew if it was safe? Who knew if a tear in the sky wouldn’t rip out this land itself, along with the whole planet? We were too new here to know the kinds of cycles this world is used to.

But who was to say that being here in this house was any better?

I pulled open the steamer lid and a cloud of fragrant warm heat rose up. We breathed it in and dug in with chopsticks and spoons. I ate without thinking, without counting, but did say a word or two to my mom.

It was juicy and filled with umami, I suppose, but I was too distracted to notice, my ears still attuned to the outside bustle.

When we finished one batch, we opened the next, the layer underneath.

Once the steam cleared, I gasped.

Lihui leaned in and made a strange hiccupping sound.

There in the middle of the bunch of odd disjointed-numbered pleats was one that had pleats so countless it looked like a lotus flower.

“Did I make that?” I gulped, standing up. I brought my chopstick close to the thing and pulled back, as if it would electrocute me.

But Lihui ignored me. She was already counting.

Her eyes bulged as she kept talking, and she even ignored the big bolt of sound that rang through the skies and shook my home.

“It’s impossible,” she whispered when she was done.

I started counting, too, apprehensive. My hands were still shaking, causing an incessant clink clink clink from my chopsticks. I got to fifty and I had to sit down. My legs were quivering.

Seventy-six. My non-calloused, non-divine-land-traversing hands had pulled together a whopping seventy-six folds.

Before I could stop her, Lihui grabbed the dumpling, ripped it in two with her teeth, letting the soup juice inside spray out. She chewed and swallowed and swept her palm at me, stuffing the other half in my mouth.

It was hot as hell, burning soup, and so deliciously thin and delicately crafted, that for a moment all that came to mind was really the feeling that my mom was here in all her structured, nurturing glory. It tasted like something she would make—something orderly, exacting, and perfect.

I could even hear her voice, “my little quantum xiaolongbao maker,” whispering in my ear as I swallowed.

The boom that followed knocked us off our feet, shook our chairs until we fell onto the floor and hid under the table.

I grasped onto Lihui’s hands, and they felt rough and textured like I never noticed before.

Around us the dumplings fell, tumbling from the edge, on this side and that. The smell was incredible—steam and meat and the tinge of sweet jadeberry seeds.

When it stopped shaking, we looked at each other and climbed out. It was a disaster. Pans, pots, broken cups—not to mention the splattering of sauces and a few dozen deformed dumplings all over the ground. I grabbed Lihui’s hand and nodded. We slipped past them on our greasy feet and tossed on slippers and ran outside.

The sky was quieter now. No land-rattling rumbles, but just a soft groan that seemed to be emanating everywhere all at once.

Even the villagers were shushed. Or worse, dead. They looked petrified enough from where we were rushing.

We got to the clearing, and no, they weren’t dead, just a hush of a whisper as some pointed to the sky and as some tried to take photos.

The pattern in the sky was incredible, not just any asterisk, but one with so many dozens of lines, I could barely count it.

“Count it by quadrants,” Lihui said. “It’s symmetrical, so one quadrant would do.”

She set about whispering to herself, increments going up and up.

She had this wild look to her like she was swinging on a faux-bamboo, like she was about to shove another divine xiaolongbao into my mouth.

“Let me guess,” I said, while she said, “seventy-six” at the same time.

I sucked in a breath of air.

I could taste the savor of that dumpling, the one that conjured up the image of my mom. I don’t think I tasted it much then—it was too hot to really consider, but the sudden jolt of savory umami hit me like an aftershock.

Through the emptiness to which all the lines were pointing—that great maw of a hole in the center—came a dot. It became bigger and brighter.

“Get cover,” someone more sensible than us yelled, and we ran to an underground bunker the settlement built when we first arrived, as part of the many disembarking safety precautions.

Everyone gathered in. When the last villager dodged inside and shut the door, there was an explosion above land that rattled the jars on the shelves.

When one of the aunties pulled open the bunker door minutes later, the heat was astounding, and the sound so deafening that she immediately closed it again.

About half an hour later, we heard footsteps and tugs at the door.

We didn’t know what to expect.

We took a vote. With a show of hands, it was decided: unlock it and open it up.

Each villager pressed a hand onto the multifaceted digital lock we had on board when we first arrived. It could read the DNA of those in the bunker and align it with its release protocol.

It tinkled a light melody, flashed bright green three times, and the door pulled open.

Two unfamiliar faces peered in, looking at us with curious eyes. “Mom?” called out a neighbor. “Aunty?” called out another.

I didn’t recognize them at all. But more voices called out: “Aunty Zhen!” and “Aunty Li!”

I squinted and it dawned on me. It was them after all, just that their features were smoothed over, as if a rolling pin had gone over their faces, removed their wrinkles, tightened up their smiles.

They lived across the bamboo grove but had died in graves and burned in the incinerator.

A scream let up. Ghosts, some of the villagers yelled. Some demanded to shove them out and close the bunker door again.

We started whispering then. Around me fellow villagers discussed the best ways to throw herbs at their faces or to retrieve mirrors to scare them away.

But the two aunties were calm and shushed them all. A coolness passed through my spine, coming from what felt like a collective stirring in the air. Their voices were honeyed and soft, much like ghosts.

Behind them, I saw two uncles. And behind them two more aunties. But they weren’t just any uncles and aunties. They were familiar and unfamiliar all at once. Uncle Ming, Uncle Zheng, Aunty Xi, Aunty Hua.

But all somewhat misconfigured, as if their features didn’t really reflect their inner selves or the selves they were before incinerating. I couldn’t pinpoint it, but something felt redone, as if they had gone through a machine that compressed their skin.

I held my breath.

I spotted someone who was peering about trying to look over the necks of those in front of them. It was more than familiarity—it was family. My closest aunty.

Ayi, Lihui’s mom.

Her, I could recognize.

And I couldn’t breathe. Behind her, someone was trying to wave to get my attention. That figure, that hair, that lipstick color.

Mom!

It didn’t even occur to me to ask how she managed to get that lipstick from the afterlife.

I didn’t care about anything then.

All I cared about was that . . . this was my mom. Or at least some manifestation of her.

Us abandoned kids . . . we cried and ran over to them, not caring if they were ghosts, the supernatural, or reincarnations of spirits themselves.

“It’s safe now,” the collective parents said. “You can come out now.”

Over dumplings, bamboo seeds, and other festive foods brought out by us all, we listened to their stories.

I held my mom’s hand. It was strangely smooth, the callouses wiped away like our shared pain.

Her voice was still honeyed, but her typical maternal, assertive tone was setting in. She and the others recounted the tale in rounds, as if they had it memorized.

The fiery maw of the incinerator wasn’t a funeral. It was sending them to another strand in time and space . . . but it was only open during particular days, and they had to hurry, as it only allowed a few people in at each open session. They really did pass through what might be considered some form of almost-but-not-quite-death, but it was a collapsible state, one that could be death and not all at once.

Who did this? Who planned all this and executed the trip? We begged to know.

The ones who sent us here to begin with, my mom and the others responded. The ones who we never met—or if we had, we had systematically forgotten—but knew in our hearts had planned it all so that these ill settlers, our people, could get treatment.

They implanted in us the prophecy that they had calculated through intricate astronomic analysis.

There would be a great event, a great deformity, held open by many folds, and it was at this point they would return to us, our people saved.

The xiaolongbao I made just happened to be a coincidence. At least that was the conclusion that the aunties came up with.

Secretly, that is not the conclusion Lihui and I came up with.

And we had no evidence of it now, now that it was shoved down my digestive tract and passed days ago.

Nothing to peer at, poke at, and wonder if it did something. Certainly, the lore can’t be discounted.

Maybe we were just too worked up and excited and mis-saw and miscounted, one aunty suggested. Maybe we were just seeing what we wanted to see.

But I remember that taste and that distinct feeling of my mom’s lips brushing up against my ear, whispering to me.

Now, we cook together, Lihui and I and our moms—with their smooth, polished countenances that we were getting used to—folding xiaolongbao dumplings and chatting and laughing.

The sky returned to its typical crimson and lost its lines. The rosy jade groves were moving straight again. The people were going along in their ways, convening every so often and returning back to normal—or better than normal.

But there was an apprehension in the air—as if, well, we were not the sole holders of our will. That there were secrets that our once altered memories would never let us know.

The quantum bacteria had long been purged, destroyed by the quick pervasive heat in the wake of the ship’s arrival, and had dissipated when our once-thought-deceased villagers alighted.

The ship had been long gone, and no one remembers what it looked like or how they even got here. All the recovered passengers can’t remember if the seats were comfortable, if they had motion sickness, if they were fed well.

But they looked healed and healthy—and just a bit different from how the other villagers remembered them. Livelier, younger, more active. Somewhat flat and with a tinge of that nectar-sweet accent that they could never get rid of.

Try and try as I might, I could not get my hands to work as fast as they did on that day the departed villagers returned. I tried to force myself to fold as many folds in a dumpling as I could, but it would always fall apart, the skin tearing by twenty-something folds.

“Stop wasting the food,” my mom said.

But, even as she said that, she had a twinkle in her eye that I remembered from before she had left. Despite her renovated appearance, that twinkle would remain and reemerge from time to time. A hint of mischievousness to her ordered, structured life and creations.

In her hands, she had a dumpling that she covered with the other palm. I could see just the skin of it peeking out, with its myriad of folds. I could smell the aroma of folded rosy jade leaves and jadeberry seeds. When I tried to take a good look at it, she pulled it back, laughed, and dropped it in the steamer.

When Lihui tried to reach for the steamer lid, Ayi swiped at her hands.

“That one’s for me,” my mom said.

Mom winked at Ayi and laughed then, too, as if they shared a joke Lihui and I would never understand.

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 in publications such as Clarkesworld, Analog, Nature, Terraform, Fireside, Star*Line, Liquid Imagination, and anthologies such as Make Shift, Ride the Star Wind, Sharp and Sugar Tooth, Deep Signal, and Battling in All Her Finery. Select stories can be read in German, Spanish, Vietnamese, Estonian, French and Japanese translation.

Dog and Pony Show

Robert Jeschonek

People say the needles of a dog are a boy’s best friend, and I believe them.

I mean, the nozzles are okay too, and I shiver with delight when they unfold from my dog Wazoo’s gleaming carapace. I love when they spray the green gas that makes me work harder, or the purple gas that makes the daydreams come.

But the needles are the most magic part of the dog. Just ask anyone.

One minute, I’m collapsed on the concrete floor of my bin, exhausted from another triple shift of Playtime. The next minute, ol’ Wazoo is scuttling over to me on his six spiny black legs, barking sweetly.

K-klak klik buzzzz klak klik.

Right away, as tired as I am, I’m smiling again. I can’t help it. My pup always takes good care of me.

As his glossy black face gazes down at me, shiny silver needles poke out from the hundreds of facets in his big, bulbous eyes. When he leans closer, they jab into my nose, and I smell his voice in my mind, singing a story of very strong perfume like the scent given off by rotting flesh. Can there be anything more soothing to a ten-year-old boy like me, living with the perfect dog in the paradise of Beastbless, in the parish of Menagerie?

Among dog lovers, this is what we call a good nose-lick. And it is enough, all alone, to make life worth living.

Do you know how lucky I am to have a dog at all? Or a dog as great as Wazoo? My same-aged friend, Incompleta, would do anything to have Wazoo or any dog like him.

This morning, she reminds me again. “Are you sure you don’t want to trade your dog for my breakfast, Beneathy?”

“Thanks, but I already have breakfast.” From across the gray table where we eat alongside dozens of fellow Playtimers, I hold up my bowl of delicious red morning clay, sweetened with a garnish of baby chicks. As adorable as they are delicious, the chicks’ tiny black bodies scurry around on eight spindly legs, trying to avoid my white plastic spoon.

“I have another idea.” She reaches back over her right shoulder, and two long, rust-colored antennae brush her hand. “We could trade my pet for your pet.” The body of a young kitten flows over her shoulder, hundreds of tiny legs flickering under its segmented scarlet shell. The body just keeps coming, wrapping around her three times like a gleaming stole.

“Lovebite is adorable.” I reach over to pet the kitten’s smooth head, laughing as it snaps at me with its jagged pincers.

Incompleta puts her hand under the kitten’s mouth, which disgorges a glob of lumpy green ooze. “Just listen to her purr.”

“I hear it,” I tell her, and I do. Screee snap shrreee snap screeee. “What a beautiful sound,” I say, though I still believe there’s nothingas sweet as the bark of a dog. “Are you serious about trading her? Why would you ever giveher up?”

“Because dogs are just the best.” Her freckled face reddens as she stares at Wazoo, who then scuttles down off my back and under the table. Lovebite’s tail scrolls around Incompleta’s head, little legs fluttering through her short red hair. “And yours is the best ever.”

She’s right about that. Smiling, I reach under the table to feel Wazoo’s bristly proboscis quivering, making my fingertips sticky. I wouldn’t know what to do if I ever lost him; I can hardly remember what life was like before I got him.

“So will you trade him for my kitty?” asks Incompleta.

“No way.” I smile as Wazoo hops and barks, bumping the underside of the table. K-klak klik buzzzz klak klik.

Incompleta sighs. “I wouldn’t, either. Especially with the dog shortage going on.”

“There’s a shortage?” I spoon scuttling baby chicks and red clay into my mouth and chew.

“That’s right.” As Incompleta eats the lumpy green ooze, her darling Lovebite rears its head up and jabs a clear spike into the soft spot on top of her skull, sipping pink fluid from her head. I’m a little jealous; as great as dogs are, a cat can still be pretty cute when it’s bonding with its owner. “And you better keep a close eye on your dog if you don’t want to end up at the Pet Pageant empty-handed.”

I think about the Pet Pageant a lot during Playtime. It helps take my mind off the screaming things on the Funsembly Line as my fellow Playtimers and I make them extra Beautiful and Happy.

The Pageant happens in less than a week. People and pets from all over Beastbless and the parish of Menagerie will be there, competing to take home awards for Best Bark, Best Fetch, Best Lick, Best Chew, and more. But only one animal will win the title of Doggiest Dogaroonie, Prince of Pups—and I’m hoping that dog will be Wazoo.

“Hey, Beneathy!” Caustico, the tall, blond boy on the other side of the belt jabs the tip of his bloody Plaything at the screamer sliding slowly between us. “You missed one!”

Snapping out of my reverie, I instantly spot what he’s talking about and jump to fix it. The screamer shrieks at the top of his lungs as I leave my playful mark on his belly, getting him ready for the next level of the Playtime game.

“You wanna win this time, or not?” snaps Caustico.

“Sure I do.”

“Then pay attention.” Caustico flicks blood at me from his Plaything. It will blend right in with my red coveralls and the other blood already soaked into them. “We’re supposed to be on the same team, remember?” He puts down the Plaything and reaches for a Joy Stick, its barbed tip cherry-red and smoking.

“I will, I will.” Even as I say it, my mind drifts back to the only thing Ireally want to win. I imagine my wonderful dog atop the Hill of Buddies, barking and flashing his glossy black wings as the top judge drapes a gold medal around his proboscis. I can just see Wazoo flapping up into the air and flying victory laps above the crowd, that beautiful medal swinging and glinting in the sunlight.

K-klak klik buzzzz klak klik.

On the front of the gleaming gold medal is the image of a dog’s face, complete with multifaceted eyes with needles jutting out of each facet. Two words are emblazoned around the edge of the medal, following the curved edge:

Doggiest Dogaroonie.

I see a date, too, and the name of the winner, and I feel a rush of joyful warmth from head to toe. As wonderful as every day of my life is, as lucky as I have always been to be alive and here, this one thing is what I most long to see.

According to the medal in my daydream, the name of the winning dog is Wazoo, and this year is when he will win the title of Doggiest Dogaroonie.

The bunnies are biting outside when I take Wazoo for a walk after Playtime. Clouds of them swirl around us, tiny dark flecks getting in my eyes and nipping at my skin—making me smile with each tiny bite, because who doesn’t love bunnies and their tender little kisses?

Wazoo, as usual, scuttles back and forth before me, probing black masses and smears left behind by other pets on the sidewalk. Once in a while, he gets excited and pops out his wings, shooting pink mist from the special white nozzles exposed along his back. The mist, which smells sweet like burning plastic and drying paint, always makes me feel a little tipsy when I get a whiff of it.

Suddenly, Wazoo stops zigzagging and bolts off the sidewalk on a beeline. He drags me along behind him through the brush, holding on to his prickly leash for dear life.

“What are you doing, boy?” I duck out of the way of a low-hanging branch that narrowly misses my head. “Where are you going?’”

Wazoo, who has never done anything like this before, answers by buzz-snorting and picking up speed, rushing even more recklessly onward. I stumble on a rock, then trip on a root, nearly going down both times—but miraculously stay on my feet.

K-klak klik buzzzz klak klik.

Wazoo’s barks get louder the farther off-trail we go. The loudest comes when he hurtles into a clearing and stops. When I stumble in behind him, I see why.

Wazoo isn’t a big fan of complete strangers, and the clearing is full of them. Three cops in standard gray uniforms encircle a crouching man and a little boy, younger than me, on his knees.

When the cops hear us, they move apart enough for me to see that the boy is crying and cradling something in his arms . . . something so misshapen, I can’t figure out what it is.

K-klak klik buzzzz klak klik.

Bzzzzeeeeeekkk.

I’ve never heard Wazoo bark like that before, like some kind of broken machine. His wings unfold, and he takes to the air; I have to let go of the leash as he flies circles around the strangers in the clearing.

“What’s going on here?” The words rush out of me, though I feel like I’m intruding.

The boy’s face is wet with tears and smudged with black as he looks up at me. Moving closer, I see by the fading light that his arms are full of broken pieces of something black and shiny. Multicolored fluids drip from his elbows and run down his knees, pooling in the dirt.

His father drops a hand on his shoulder, but the boy only sobs harder. “W-who would do something like this?” The boy asks the question as if Iknow the answer. “Who would k-kill my sweet Gilgamog?”

Only when he says it and holds out the broken pieces do I realize what has happened here. Only then do I understand what has been in his arms since before I arrived.

And my heart sinks. My belly twists, and I want to run away that very second. “Your poor dog . . . ”

“I lovedher with all my h-heart,” says the boy. “And now somebody k-killed her!”

“Somebody or something,” corrects one of the cops, a male.

“We don’t know which one yet,” says a female cop.

“It doesn’t matter.” The boy slumps to the ground on his side, still clutching the broken pieces of his beloved dog. His voice grows soft as he shivers with sobs. “She’s d-dead. My dog is d-dead.”

Meanwhile, Wazoo keeps circling overhead, making that new sound as he passes.

Bzzzzeeeeeekkk.

Bzzzzeeeeeekkk.

Bzzzzeeeeeekkk.

People say the world would be a dark and awful place without the Nylon Knights around to keep it bright. Seeing them ride into town the next morning atop their handsome steeds, I believe it.

The seven men and women ride tall in the saddle, clad in gleaming white plastic armor from head to toe. The long lances they carry are just as perfectly white, and so are the saddles they sit on. Proud and strong, the Knights stare straight ahead, fixed on their mission with unwavering focus.

Their legendary horses are just as impressive. Their long green bodies clamber down the street, perfectly balanced and nimble on slender legs, though they hardly look sturdy enough to carry the weight of armored riders. With spiny forelegs always folded, they look like they’re constantly begging or praying—though the truth is, those legs can swing and clamp suddenly in time of battle.

Who could resist running over to touch such beautiful animals? Not me. Along with a dozen other young Playtimers, I hurry over on the way to the Funsembly Line and pet the bright green hide of the closest horse. The hide is one of the nicest things I’ve ever touched, studded with points and bumps and jagged burrs that prick my skin and draw blood. It feels so good, I could gladly pet it for the rest of the day, if I had time.

HSSSSS. As the horse whinnies, its triangular head spins around, and its big green eyes look my way. HSSSKLAK.

“They’re so pretty!” Incompleta is beside me, stroking the leafy green folds of the horse’s wing. “I wish I had a pony like this!”

“Is there any animal you don’t want?” I ask her.

“A giraffe, maybe,” she tells me. “Too many fangs and too much venom, you know?”

Just then, the knight spurs the horse, and it trots out of reach. We move on to the next in line, which turns out to have an even nicer hide. Two strokes along its leg, and my hand is speckled with blood.

Impetuous as ever, Incompleta shouts up at the Nylon Knight. “Why are you here? Is it because of the dog killer?”

The Knight, a woman, judging from the cut of its armor, glances down at us. Two eyes glow bright red from the darkness under her visor—and then a third glows bright yellow between them. “Curfew begins now.” Her voice is a droning monotone. “Proceed to your Playhouse and lock yourselves inside until further notice.”

“Do you know who’s taking and killing the pets?” asks Incompleta. “Do you know where to find him?”

“Information later,” says the Knight. “Curfew begins now.” With that, she spurs her horse, which rears up and whinnies before galloping off with the rest of the team.

HSSSSS. HSSSKLAK.

Incompleta sighs. “I want a pony more than ever now.”

“Have you ever thought of becoming a Nylon Knight?” I ask as Wazoo scuttles up between us. “Then you’d get a pony for sure.”

“Only if I get to keep Lovebite.” She pats her shoulder, and the long red kitten crawls up her back from under her shirt and wraps itself around her head like a multi-legged, segmented turban. “And a dog like Wazoo, of course. And maybe a giraffe, after all. Wearing a Knight’s super-hard plastic armor would make its poisonous fangs easier to deal with, wouldn’t it?”

There’s no law against leaving Playtime early because who would want to? The Funsembly Line is just what the name says—funto the max.

But today, for the first time in my life, leaving early is exactly what I do. I leave three hours early, believe it or not.

And it’s all because of Incompleta and her cat.

“Beneathy! You’ve got to help me!” She dashes into the room in a frantic state, eyes wide and hair wild. “Lovebite is gone!”

I admit, I’m annoyed at the interruption. The screamer on the belt is in peak shriek, and I’ve got a fired-up Joy Stick with his name on it. “Gone?”

“She slipped away somehow!” Incompleta grabs my sleeve. “I was busy playing and only just noticed.”

“Where could she have gone?”

“Anywhere! You know how cats are!” She shakes my arm roughly, oblivious to all the Playtimers who are staring our way. “Please, Beneathy! Help me find her!”

The screamer’s going berserk. I have to finish him ASAP or someone else will get to have all the fun. “She’s probably just somewhere in the Playhouse.”

“She’s not,” snaps Incompleta. “I’ve looked everywhere. She has to be outside. Maybe she sneaked out through a vent or a crack or something.”

“I’m sure she’s fine.” I shrug off her hand and turn back to the screamer, raising the Joy Stick over his already-flaming navel. “Cats can take care of themselves pretty well.”

That’s the last straw for Incompleta. With a loud grunt, she knocks the stick from my hand, seizes my arm, and drags me away from the Funsembly Line.

I try to pull away, but she’s got a firm grip. Other Playtimers look like they think about helping me, but none of them do.

When we get to the doorway, I grab hold of the jamb and fight, determined to stay put. She responds by swinging me around against the wall and getting up in my face.

“What if it was your pet who was missing?” Even as she hisses out the words, Wazoo scurries around us, bumping our legs and barking. “Would you do nothing and just hope he came back?”

K-klak klik buzzzz klak klik.

Wazoo’s barks change my mind. So does the memory of the kid from the clearing the night before, the one crying over the broken corpse of the dog called Gilgamog.

Incompleta is right.

I shake my head and stop fighting. “Can somebody cover for me? I need to go look for a cat.”

“Sure!” Caustico’s only too happy to take my place. “But I don’t think the Nylon Knights make exceptions to the curfew for cat-finders.”

“Here, Kitty Kitty!” calls Incompleta as we wander the forest of Beastbless. “Come to Mama, little Lovebite!”

The noise makes me nervous. I keep looking around, worried that the Nylon Knights might hear and punish us for breaking curfew . . . or worse, that the pet killer might decide to kill something other than pets. Sneaking out of the Playhouse might not have been the smartest move we’ve ever made.

Though of course I want to find Lovebite, too. I can’t stand the thought of any pet owner, especially a fellow Playtimer, going without the sweet companion that makes life worth living.

“Lovebite!” My calls aren’t as loud, but at least I bring another helper to the search. Antennae wiggling, Wazoo crashes through the brush by my side, snuffling at the vegetation with his bristly proboscis. If there’s one thing a dog’s good at, it’s hunting down a cat.

“Where is she?” Incompleta stomps her foot in frustration. “We keep getting farther from the Playhouse, and there’s still no sign of her!”

“Chasing a mouse, probably. Cats can’t resist the claws and stingers on those things.” I push through a patch of waist-high weeds, but nothing jumps out at me. Nothing much interests Wazoo, either.

“What if the killer got her?” Incompleta sounds panicky, and her eyes well up with tears. “What if the reason she’s not coming to me is that she’s dead?”

“I’ll bet she’s fine. Cats have nine lives, don’t they?” I smile her way with a confidence I don’t really feel.

But it’s hard to keep up a good front as we search further without success. Either Lovebite’s a great hider, a fast traveler, or something’s happened to her—an accident or attack by another animal, if not the pet killer.

Suddenly, though, Incompleta gets excited. She ducks down at the base of a big tree and picks up a bloody mass of fluff and feathers.

“Look, Beneathy! I’d recognize this dead goldfish anywhere! It’s the work of my sweet little Lovebite!”

Just then, we hear a loud animal cry from nearby, followed by the sound of thrashing through the brush, moving rapidly away.

Without a word or hesitation, Incompleta leaps up and bolts away in the direction of the thrashing. I’m about to race off after her when I have a sudden change of plan.

K-klak klik buzzzz klak klik.

Barking his head off, Wazoo charges in the opposite direction, running so hard that he snaps his leash. Whatever he’s after, I can’t see or even hear it.

But what if he’s heading into danger?

I hesitate for an instant, looking one way and then the other. Wazoo and Incompleta might both need my help. Which one do I go after?

Bzzzzeeeeeekkk.

As soon as I hear that sound, the one Wazoo made at the scene of the other dog’s murder, my mind is made up. I run after him as fast as I can, leaving Incompleta to her own devices.

Bzzzzeeeeeekkk.

But as I run, and Wazoo keeps making those sounds, I wish I’d brought a Joy Stick from the Playhouse or something else I could use as a weapon. I’m just so used to a world where pets aren’t killed, and the only Playtime happens on the Funsembly Line, I didn’t even think about it.

Bzzzzeeeeeekkk.

Bzzzzeeeeeekkk.

Bzzzzeeeeeekkk.

But I’m thinking about it now. As I burst into a thicket of trees and see Wazoo face-to-face with some kind of monster, I’m thinking about it hard.

Because the monster, with its four legs, long tail, and mottled brown and black fur, is crouching, baring its gleaming white fangs, and making a noise deep in its throat that can mean only one thing.

Grrrrrrrrrrr.

And that one thing is Playtime, monster style.

Ears flattened back against its head, the monster snaps its jaws and lets loose an unholy howl.

Raarrrr.

My heart’s pounding, my hands are shaking—but Wazoo is unfazed. Fanning out his black wings, he roars at the monster with more menace than I’ve ever seen him muster.

SCREEE KLAK EEEE AAARRKK.

The monster lunges, snapping and howling with wild ferocity.

RAARRRR RARRRR RARRRRR.

Instead of backing down, Wazoo lunges at the monster, spraying green gas from one nozzle and black from another. The monster lurches back, coughing and shaking its head hard.

Wazoo presses the attack, unleashing more plumes of gas. His opponent coughs harder than ever and stumbles back on shaky legs, his savagery flagging.

Just as I cheer in my heart, however, things suddenly change. Loud, heavy footfalls pound toward us, accompanied by violent thrashing. Another monster explodes into the thicket, much bigger than the first—a four-legged beast taller than I am, with glossy black hair and a long face with a bone-white stripe down the middle. Before Wazoo can direct any sprays in its direction, this monster whips around and lashes out with its two hind legs, blasting a brutal kick in his direction.

The new monster’s feet land with such force that they propel Wazoo across the thicket into a tree trunk. He slams into the wood and bounces off, dropping into a patch of weeds where he lies motionless on his back, leaking multicolored gases from his nozzles.

“Wazoo!” I start to run to him, but I don’t get far. The bigger, black-haired monster lumbers between us, blocking the way.

And then it gets worse. More monsters straggle in from all sides of the thicket, closer in size to the first—each covered in fur of a different color yet essentially the same type of creature as the first monster to attack. They all have similar shapes, with stubby snouts, black noses, and tails . . . and they all make the same noise in their throats as they converge around me.

Grrrrrrrrrrr.

I look around frantically for a way out or a weapon but find neither. I’m trapped and helpless in the midst of monsters who might have just killedmy faithful companion.

Grrrrrrrrrrr.

The biggest monster with the bone-white face backs out of the way as the other monsters come closer. They let him through, concerned only with me.

“Go away!” I try to sound tough. “Get out of here! Leave me alone!”

It doesn’t work. The ring of monsters tightens.

“I said go!” I start to realize this might be it, the end, and I wonder: is this what happened to the missing and murdered pets?

Suddenly, then, I hear an unexpected sound—a whistle. The kind of whistle only a human being can make.

And then a voice. The voice of a boy my age or not much older.

“So tell me.” When the boy steps into the thicket, I see he has long blond hair and bright blue eyes. His clothes are very brown, very dirty, or both, and his face and hands are caked with grime. “Should I call off the dogs, or let ’em have you?”

I stare at the growling monsters arrayed around me. “Those aren’t dogs,” I tell him, though I know I shouldn’t talk back, given the circumstances. “I have a dog.”

The new boy chuckles. “No offense, kid, but you’re barking up the wrong damn tree.”

The boy, who says his name is Joe, leads me off through the forest with the monsters in tow. If I try to get away, he warns me, the monsters—which he insists on calling “dogs” and a “horse”—will run me down, and I might get hurt.

But otherwise, he promises, hurting me is the last thing he wants to do.

“Then what do you want to do to me?” I ask him.

“I want to tell you the truth,” says Joe. “Though, to be honest, that might hurt a little bit, too.”

We walk for what seems like a very long time, weaving between trees and through brush. I keep looking around, hoping I’ll see Wazoo zooming to the rescue with nozzles fuming . . . but all I see are sharks flitting around, chirping, and flapping their colorful, feathered wings. The sight of them with their pointy little beaks makes me shiver, the way sharks always do.

When we come to a little stream, the “dogs” and “horse” stop to drink, their pink tongues lapping up the trickling water amid sunbeams cast down through the treetops. It’s sickening; everyone knows dogs only get their moisture by sipping it from the bodies of dead things.

“You’ve never spent time with real animals, have you?” Joe runs his hand along the side of the “horse,” stroking its glossy black hair. “I’ll bet you’ve never even touched one, have you?”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” I know I’m scowling, but I can’t help it. I hate him and all his monsters.

“Or maybe you’re the one who doesn’t truly understand.” Joe reaches down, and a big “dog” with shaggy golden fur trots over and licks his fingers.

Watching that happen makes my stomach churn. I think I might throw up—but not yet.

Smiling, Joe pats the beast’s head, and the “dog’s” tail flicks quickly from side to side. “It’s not your fault,” he tells me. “All you know is what you were taught.”

“You don’t know anything.”

“But that’s all right.” Joe whistles, and the “dogs” and “horse” stop drinking and start across the stream. “You really can teach an old dog new tricks, my friend.”

After a while, we come to an ancient cabin at the base of a tree-lined hillside, which seems to be our destination. The “dogs” run barking to the decrepit front door, and the “horse” ambles over to a rickety water trough for a drink.

“Welcome to camp.” Joe claps a hand on my shoulder and leads me toward the ramshackle little building. “Or as I like to call it, Home-for-Now.”

The front door opens, and a tall old man looks out from a cloud of wispy white hair. The “dogs” go crazy, jumping on their hind legs and pawing at his torso and chest. “Good boys,” he tells them. “Good dogs.”

“Hey Grampa!” shouts Joe. “Look what I found!”

“Oh, Joe.” Grampa wags his head. “What have I told you about bringing home strays?”

“But he doesn’t know what a real dog is,” says Joe. “He doesn’t know about the old days.”

Grampa eases his way out the door, feeding the jumping “dogs” with chips of black jerky from the pockets of his tattered denim overalls. “He’s probably better off that way. The truth hurts.”

“I already told him about that.” Joe guides me forward. “Maybe he can take it.”

Eyes narrowed, Grampa stoops and meets my gaze. “The others won’t like it when they get back from the hunt. They’ll say you shouldn’t have brought him here.”

“But isn’t this why we’re doing it?” asks Joe. “For people like him?”

“Doing what?” I frown. “Who are the others, and what are they hunting?”

Grampa shakes his head. “You remember what happened to the last one you brought in?” He isn’t speaking to me.

Joe sighs in frustration. “Just tell him. Please?”

I’ve never had anyone stare at me as hard as Grampa does then. He makes me so uncomfortable; I squirm and want to run away.

Reaching into his pocket, he pulls out a two-inch-long strip of jerky. “Take it.” When I don’t reach for it, he grabs my hand and presses the jerky into my palm. “Now give it to him.” He gestures at one of the “dogs”—a little white-and-tan furred one with pointy ears, short legs, and big green eyes. “His name is Stubby.”

Stubby scampers toward me, licking his lips. Heart pounding, I jump back and drop the jerky. Stubby gobbles it up and gazes at me, clearly hoping for more.

“Congratulations,” says Grampa. “You just fed an actual dog.”

Stubby hops up and sniffs my fingers. I wipe them on my pants to try to shed the smell of the jerky, but then he just sniffs and licks my pants.

“Those other things,” says Grampa. “The ones you and everyone else think of as dogs—they aren’t.” He walks back to the cabin and returns a moment later with a white plastic bag. It crinkles as he opens it and reaches inside. “This isn’t a dog.”

He pulls something out of the bag, and my blood turns icy cold. I back away when he holds it up to me, stopped only by Joe when he clamps a hand on my shoulder.

“This is a bug.”

Grampa is wrong. I don’t care what he says. The thing in his hand is nothing like a bug.

It’s a dog, a true dog, just like Wazoo, complete with a black proboscis, a shiny black shell that opens up into wings, and bulbous eyes with hundreds of facets for popping out the silver needles that are a boy’s best friend.

But for once, a dog like this isn’t a welcome sight. Thisone isn’t moving. It doesn’t make even the slightest twitch, and the reason is clear.

Its body has a gaping hole in it.

“It’s dead.” A thought occurs to me, and I feel sicker than ever. “You killed it, didn’t you?”

Grampa doesn’t answer my question. “If you tell enough people this is a dog, they accept that it’s a dog.” Black bits of the dead dog trickle out as he shakes it emphatically. “They forget what a real dog is like. Or a cat, or a horse. Or a life. They forget that things could be different. Better.”

Grampa tosses the dead dog aside and marches over to grab my arm. He grips it so hard that it hurts.

“But some of us remember. And we tend the packs and tell the stories and wait for the day when the better things replace the ugly ones.”

“Because you killthem!” I twist free of Grampa’s grip. Joe makes a grab for me, and I push him away. “That’s what you do, isn’t it? You’re the ones who’ve been killing the pets!”

“They aren’t pets,” says Grampa. “They’re monsters. They’re controlling you, and you don’t even know it.”

“Did you kill my dog, too? Did you kill Wazoo?”

Grampa stands there, glaring, and shakes his head. “His indoctrination is deep, isn’t it?” Again, he’s talking to Joe, not me. “I don’t know if we can ever get through to him.”

“That’s what you used to say about me, too,” says Joe.

“That’s true.” Grampa’s features soften. “Maybe you’re right.”

“We should take a break, don’t you think?” says Joe.

“Sure.” Grampa turns and heads for the cabin. He pulls jerky out of his pocket, and the “dogs” come running. “We’ll pick it up later.”

But as I watch him go, taking a break is the last thing on my mind. If these people killed Wazoo, or even Lovebite, I will never see things their way. I will never forgive them.

And I will never let go of the life and world I know.

“Come on,” says Joe. “Let’s go play with the puppies.”

“Play? Like on the Funsembly Line?” It doesn’t make sense. “But I don’t have a Joy Stickor Plaything. I don’t even have a man opener.”

“Don’t worry.” Joe walks off, gesturing for me to come with him. “Different kind of play.”

Joe and I hike to a nearby field, followed by a dozen “dogs.” The afternoon sun shines bright on the tall grass waving in the warm breeze.

None of which improves my mood a bit. I don’t see how anything could, as long as I’m with one of the people who for all I know might have done something terrible to Wazoo.

Seemingly oblivious to how I’m feeling, Joe scouts through the grass, looking for something. “Have you ever played fetch?” he asks.

“With my dog, a real dog, yes.” I stay close to the tree line, hoping for a chance to slip away.

Joe sees something and ducks down to retrieve it. “Well, that’s what we’re going to play.” He resurfaces with a stick in his hand, fairly straight and about two feet long. “I’ll make the first throw, and you can take the one after that.”

When he whistles, the “dogs” fling themselves in front of him, jumping around and making noise.

Rarrrr Rarrr Rarrr Rarrrr Rarrrr.

“Fetch!” When he gives the stick a throw, the “dogs” scramble after it, churning pell-mell across the field. One of them, a big white “dog” with black spots and floppy black ears, scoops it away from another “dog” (a little one with gray fur and a pushed-in face) and runs it back to Joe with a spring in his step.

“Good boy! Good boy!” Joe scratches behind the “dog’s” ears and takes the stick. As he reels it up and back for another throw, the spotted “dog” jumps around crazily, never taking his eyes off the thing. As soon as Jack heaves it, the “dog” bolts off after it, joined by several others.

“You ready?” Joe shouts in my direction. “Want to give it a shot?

“That isn’t fetch,” I tell him. “Not enough fire.”

“There’s no fire in real fetch.” When Joe gets the stick back, he throws it my way. “Now you try.”

Instinctively, I catch it, but I’m flustered when the “dogs” come bounding after it.

Rarrr Rarrr Rarrr Rarrr.

“Just throw it!” shouts Joe. “As far as you can, so they get a good run!”

I hesitate, and the “dogs” press closer. When the spotted one jumps up, grazing my chest with a paw, it’s enough to make me panic and pitch the stick with a sudden burst of strength. It spins across the field, taking the pack of “dogs” with it, and the stress they make me feel.

But the relief doesn’t last long. Seconds later, the spotted “dog” hurtles back through the grass with the stick in its mouth, heading straight for me.

“Thank him and do it again!” says Joe. “Tell him what a good boy he is and give him another throw!”

Taking a slobbered-on piece of wood from the mouth of a drooling monster and possible killer of real dogs is the last thing I want to do right now. I know I should play along, but I flinch when the beast pushes the stick at me. I turn away, and he follows, persistent.

“Just do it! Just throw it!” Joe laughs. “He won’t hurt you, I promise!”

As I turn away again, the other “dogs” barrel up and hurl themselves at me, leaping with jaws open to seize the stick. I let it go as I fall under the weight of them, unable to stop from toppling into the grass.

My heart hammers, and I’m short of breath when I hit. It’s like something out of a nightmare as the pack of “dogs” converge around me, all fur and teeth and lolling pink tongues.

It only gets worse from there. One “dog” licks my face, dragging its tongue over my cheek, and I want to scream. Then another licks my face as well, and another.

And another. Stubby, the pointy-eared, short-legged one, licks my face with as much enthusiasm as he licked my jerky-scented fingers earlier.

I close my eyes, toss my head, and thrash on the ground, but it doesn’t seem to help. The licking continues, three and four tongues at a time slathering my cheeks and nose and ears and mouth.

And then the truly unexpected happens. Against my will, against my better judgment, I start to giggle. Something about the combined action of those tongues on my face makes me squirm and laugh uncontrollably.

I reach up to bat away the monsters, and my hands come in contact with fur. I want to pull away, but I’m surprised at the feel of it; I’ve always been taught it’s rough and prickly, but it’s not. Something about it makes me want to keep touching it, running my hand over it just to feel the smooth texture.

“Are you okay?” Joe’s standing over me, holding the fetch stick.

“This fur.” I run my hands over Stubby’s shaggy white-and-tan coat. “It isn’t soft at all.”

“Sure it is. It’s very soft.”

“Soft means it hurts my hands.” I pet the “dog” some more, amazed. “This is the opposite of soft.”

Joe nods and smiles. Maybe he understands. “Whatever you want to call it, ’Neath.”

I frown up at him, still petting the monster. “My name is Beneathy.”

“Well, now you have a nickname,” says Joe. “I like ’Neath better, don’t you?”

Just then, something crashes through the grass across the field, and Stubby yaps and scampers off. Joe quickly helps me up, and we look toward the commotion.

Five camouflage-wearing men riding “horses” are coming our way, looking grim. The “dogs” dart among them, tails wagging, calling out.

Rarrr Rarrr Rarrr.

“Hi, Mike!” Joe waves. “How was the hunt this time?”

The man at the front of the group—a broad-shouldered, middle-aged man with curly black hair and a bushy beard—just scowls and points at me. “Who the hell is that?”

“A new friend,” says Joe. “His name is—”

Suddenly, a loud, blaring noise erupts from beyond the field, a single squawk like the blast of some kind of horn. Everyone looks in the direction of the sound, which is also the direction of camp.

Without another word, Mike kicks the sides of his “horse,” and it bolts off toward camp at a fast gallop. The other four riders and “horses” follow just as fast, whipping past us with a flurry of “dogs” in their wake.

Joe sprints after them full-tilt, and I run beside him. “What’s happening? What was that sound?”

“Grampa was calling for help,” says Joe. “Camp is under attack.”

As Joe and I race into camp on foot, the battle is already underway. The “horse”-riding hunters fire away with pistols and rifles, the woods booming with shot after shot.

All of which bounce off the gleaming white armor of the Nylon Knights without leaving a mark.

The Knights’ weapons are much more effective. I see a male Knight spear a hunter’s chest with a long white lance, driving its sharp point through his ribs and out his back, soaked with crimson. Another Knight’s great green horse unfolds a spiny foreleg and swings it out to clamp the throat of a hunter, unleashing gushers of blood.

“Grampa!” Joe runs for the cabin, dodging Knights’ horses and hunters’ “horses” all around. Stubby scurries after him, too low to the ground to go very fast—or get out of the way of the hunter and wounded “horse” that suddenly topple toward him.

Without thinking, I dash over, grab Stubby by the scruff of his neck, and dive out from under the hunter and “horse.” They slam down hard, just missing us as we roll under the wooden trough where Joe’s “horse” drank water earlier.

Stubby whines as I keep him tucked under my arm and watch the battle rage from our hiding place. I feel his muscles twitch, but I don’t let go. Maybe he wants to run to Joe, but I don’t think he’ll last long in the midst of that fight.

Not that the hunters are much of a match for the Knights. Soon, only two men in camouflage ride the battlefield amid the seven pristine Knights in white armor.

Suddenly, though, another player joins the fray. “Bastards!” From the doorway of the cabin, Grampa blasts away with a shotgun. “Rot in Hell!”

One of his shots hits a horse in its bulging green eye, and its head explodes. The horse goes down hard, throwing its rider to the ground without his lance.

Grampa’s next shot isn’t as lucky. It goes right between the pair of Knights who charge him with lances aimed directly at his chest.

They penetrate his chest from either side. Grampa drops the shotgun, and his eyes roll up in his head. He dangles like a meat puppet from the lances, held erect only by their crimson-dripping points.

Meanwhile, the pack of “dogs” attacks the Knight who lost his horse, lunging and snapping furiously. Their teeth have no chance of piercing the white armor, but they keep him pinned down, flailing at them with his barb-knuckled gauntlets.

He doesn’t stay down for long, though. Just as one of the “dogs” pounces, knocking him over on his back, a winged figure bursts from the woods, heading straight for them and making a familiar sound.

K-klak klik buzzzz klak klik.

“Wazoo!” My heart jumps with excitement at the sound and sight of him—the realization that he isn’t dead after all. He was only wounded and managed to recover from his injuries in time to come to the rescue.

K-klak klik buzzzz klak klik.

Swooping down at the “dogs,” Wazoo unleashes black gas from one of his nozzles. Plumes of it swirl around the monsters, making them cough and retch and stagger off with their tails between their legs.

The Knight coughs, too, but he doesn’t let it stop him from clambering to his feet and running back to help his comrades.

At this point, the outcome of the battle is no longer in doubt. The Knights surround the last two hunters, whose guns have stopped working. It won’t be long until the circle of lances pointing at them moves inward, ending the fight.

In other words, I’m about to be rescued.

So why do I stay hidden under the trough? Wazoo buzzes around camp, spraying monsters with more of his black gas. I should be running to him.

But I’m not.

Stubby’s body is warm against me. His fur feels good between my fingers. Something about him makes me want to hold on to him.

But my loyal dog, my precious Wazoo, is right there, awaiting what will surely be a joyous reunion with me. I can just imagine how wonderful it will feel to have his needles pierce my nose again, to smell his voice in my mind after so long apart.

So why am I thinking about sneaking away from him, crawling off into the forest with Stubby? Has this monster cast a spell on me?

I look at Stubby, and he looks back at me with wide, green eyes. For reasons unknown, he leans toward me and licks my nose with his wet, pink tongue.

For reasons unknown, I let him.

K-klak klik buzzzz klak klik.

Then, I watch Wazoo flying past, and I realize something.

I don’t want to give up either of them. Perhaps, there’s a way I won’t have to.

People say winning isn’t everything. But right now, it’s all I can think about.

A few days ago, hiding under a trough at the hunters’ camp in the woods, I wasn’t sure what the future would bring. Now here I am, standing in front of thousands of people in Beastbless Stadium, waiting to hear if my greatest dream is about to come true.

Dozens of other Playtimers and their pets are lined up beside me on the artificial turf field, likewise waiting for the verdict. Do any of them want this as much as I do? It doesn’t seem possible.

But winning does. The pet I have at my side is so wonderful in every way. He did so magnificently well in every event, I can’t imagine him not winning.

But if he doesn’t, it won’t be the end of the world. What I went through at the camp prepared me for any adversity—even as it increased my chances of winning. Our chances.

“And now, the moment we’ve all been waiting for!” The female announcer’s voice booms through the stadium PA system, drowning out the excited chatter from the stands. “The naming of the grand prize in this year’s fabulous Pet Pageant!”

I take a deep breath to steady my nerves. Incompleta, who’s sitting down in front, blows me a kiss for luck. Lovebite, who eventually came back to her that day in the woods, twines her segmented scarlet body around her head and neck, antennae twitching.

A drumroll begins as the announcer keeps talking. “This year’s Doggiest Dogaroonie is . . . ”

The tension in the stadium reaches its absolute peak . . . but I suddenly feel calm. Closing my eyes, I whisper my pet’s name.

And then the announcer says it, too. “ . . . Wazoo!”

The crowd roars and cheers. The other pet owners on the field slump with disappointment.

As for me, I turn to my dog and pat him on his furry head, right between his pointy little ears. “Good boy, Wazoo! You did it!”

Wazoo’s bristly proboscis twitches. He fidgets, unable to take a victory flight to mark the occasion.

That’s because Stubby’s white-and-tan fur, which is clipped to his body, keeps him from deploying his wings.

It’s a small price to pay, though. I’m convinced that fur is what clinched Wazoo’s winning the prize today. It made him unique, the best of both worlds—dog and monster, united.

Because of that fur, I am able to walk the perimeter of the field proudly with Wazoo and Stubby both by my side, in their own ways. And as we finish that victory lap and climb the Hill of Buddies in the middle of the field—all those hundreds of bodies processed during Playtime throughout the year, including the hunters and Grampa and Joe from the camp—I feel like I owe Wazoo and Stubby a debt of gratitude I can never truly repay.

So when I stand atop that hill, and the crowd continues to roar around me like the ocean, I give those two dogs—one real and one fake—the best tribute I can think of. I raise my arms overhead and cry out in the only languages they might appreciate.

Rarrr Rarrr Rarrr Rarrr.

K-klak klik buzzzz klak klik.

Though the meaning of what I’ve just said is forever lost to me, not that it truly matters or ever will.

About the Author

Robert Jeschonek is a USA Today-bestselling author whose fiction has been published around the world. His stories have appeared in Galaxy’s Edge, StarShipSofa, Pulphouse, Escape Pod, and other publications. He has written official Star Trek and Doctor Who fiction and has scripted comics for DC and AHOY. His young adult slipstream novel, My Favorite Band Does Not Exist, won the Forward National Literature Award and was named one of Booklist’s Top Ten First Novels for Youth. He also won an International Book Award, a Scribe Award for Best Original Novel, and the grand prize in Pocket Books’ Strange New Worlds contest.

The Winter Garden

Regina Kanyu Wang, translated by Emily Jin

The transition was much easier than I had imagined.

Standing by the console, I set the parameters following my usual observation procedure. I had memorized the numbers when Jin first mentioned them, and I double-checked his experiment records, just to make sure. I rotated the security knob counterclockwise, punched in the password number by number, then pressed the green confirm button. The thirty second countdown began. Nimbly, I hopped onto the transition platform and checked for one last time that the return-to-home-base anchor was with me. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and, after a moment of slight dizziness, found myself in an alternative universe.

The first thing I saw was a wooden door. I pushed the door open. Blinding light and blistering cold wind overwhelmed me at once. Instinctively, I turned to shield my face. The specks of fluorescent light caused by the transmission process slowly faded and the mops, brooms, and detergent became visible in the dark cluttered closet room where I landed. The world before my eyes was exactly as my peers had described. I had purposefully made the landing spot of my transmission a remote corner to avoid trouble. This alternative universe was not all that different from the world I came from: same physical constants, similar level of technological progress . . . the only differences were in minor historical details, market trends, and of course, some individuals’ fates.

Out of habit, I patted my sweater and pants lightly to get rid of the—nonexistent—dust. After my eyes grew accustomed to the light, I walked out of the closet room and found myself in a not-yet-open bar. I located the back door and exited.

It was a little past eight in the morning and the city of Dublin was just about to wake up from its slumber. The sky dawned blue. There was a light drizzle, and the rain landed on my face like cascading needles of ice. Already expecting the weather, I pulled the hood of my black down coat over my head. With quickening footsteps, I walked down the small street paved with cobblestones. The rain stopped when I took my second turn. The heavy rain clouds in the eastern corner of the sky dissipated, revealing a gold lining. A moment after, the clouds gathered, swallowing up the sunlight once again.

I turned onto Dame Street and entered the College Green from the west. The triangular open space in which traffic passed through, in fact, had no green at all; the few meager trees had lost all their leaves in the howling winter wind, their bare branches pointing upward. To my east, there was a small patch of yellow, withered grass next to the front entrance of the Dublin Trinity College. Historical buildings stood south. The north was the old Irish Houses of the Parliament, their gray-white outer walls blending into the overcast sky. The faces of the three statues above the colonnade were so weather-beaten that their features were barely recognizable. In the world where I came from, the Houses of the Parliament belonged to the Bank of Ireland. In this world, however, a sign indicating “Trinity College” marked the gate to the compound. I walked into a café in the next street, sat down by the long table with a street view, and ordered an Irish coffee. A drink so strong first thing in the morning might not be the wisest choice, but I needed the caffeine to keep myself alert, and the alcohol to give me courage.

Even after I had gone through the transition and landed in this alternative universe, I couldn’t bring myself to make a final decision.

I hated making decisions. If life was a series of single-choice questions on an exam sheet, then I would have long ago failed the exam for making too many mistakes. I chose the wrong parent to live with after their divorce; taking care of my mother, an alcoholic who could barely manage her own life, was the primary reason that I couldn’t attend a well-ranked high school. I chose the wrong subject to study when I applied to college, wasting my days away in a STEM-oriented university when my interest was actually in languages and literature. I chose the wrong advisor when I applied to graduate school—his popularity meant that the competition was especially cutthroat, and I often thought to myself that I would have been in graduate school already if I had aimed for a different advisor, or simply had better records . . . back onto the job market and having missed the hiring season, I found myself jobless with a degree in an area of technology so specialized that no company cared for it.

Finally, the dean, worried that I would impact our entire class’ employment rate on the university’s official records, introduced me to a temporary job within the university—manager of lab #03 of the Department of Quantum Physics. “Manager” was the most generous way to put it. My daily work mostly consisted of trivial errands, including coffee making, invoice organizing, delivering documents between offices, and occasionally putting in lightbulbs. I had no official post, no bonuses, no welfare, and not even winter and summer breaks.

The lab was small, with only a handful of members. Professor Zhang the lab director was rarely present, so Dr. Chen, a postdoc in the lab, took over most of the organizational and teaching duty. Dr. Chen came around once a week to check on the experiment progress of the students who were enrolled in the master’s-PhD joint program. The three students who worked in the lab regularly were about my age, and I called them by their last names, Jin, Yang, and Yu. Out of courtesy, they addressed me as Teacher Wang.

For the first few months, those students almost never spoke to me. Their working schedule was just as mysterious as the actual work that they were doing. No one arrived in the lab “on time.” Some would come in the evening, right before I was about to go home, and some would periodically move into the lab and stay for days. The general lab and the experiment room were separated by multiple doors. I never went into the innermost room. I had no idea what kind of experiments they were doing, and I was uninterested in finding out.

After a while, the students finally started to talk to me—I suspected that it was because of my ability to keep my nose out of trouble, and well, also because people forgot their keys or forgot to turn off the light from time to time. In the beginning, they hid the experiment from me and called it “highly confidential.” Then, as we grew more familiar, they started leaking more and more information. Professor Zhang and Dr. Chen didn’t seem to have found my presence a trouble, either. Gradually, more administrative responsibilities of the lab were handed over to me, including keeping all the experiment data.

Amongst the students, I talked to Jin the most. He was the one who revealed to me first that the lab’s project was about alternative universes; more precisely, transitioning between various alternative universes, and deciphering what their essence was.

Of course I knew that alternative universes existed. Everyone did. This finding intrigued most people. But why should I be personally concerned? To me, an alternative universe was the equivalent of an alien planet. I have never even traveled outside of China, let alone a different universe!

Jin told me that Brent Liu’s transition experiment thoroughly proved the existence of type III alternative universes, in which the wave function never collapsed. The primary world would split into an unending number of superposed worlds. After decoherence, those worlds would evolve into alternative universes utterly unrelated to each other, respectively located on each quantum branch of the Hilbert Space with infinite dimensions. Humans could transit between those alternative universes.

I didn’t really understand what he was saying.

“With every choice you make, the world would split into two, ultimately generating an infinite number of alternative worlds existing in parallel to each other,” explained Jin.

“Why do my choices matter so much?”

“No, no, it’s just an analogy. I’m not saying that the world would literally split because of your choice. It depends on quantum measurements and randomness. Our job is to transit between different alternative universes and study the nature of the macrocosm. One day, commercial inter-universe travels may be possible.”

I nodded, pretending that we were on the same page.

His words, though, were not completely useless. At least they offered me an explanation for why my life was a mess. I made all of the wrong choices and ended up in an alternative universe of misfortune. Never good at taking a stand growing up, I became even more hesitant about moving forward with my life. Scared that I would bring more pain and misery upon myself by making even more wrong choices, I always left the decision-making process ’til the last minute, so that time would weed out most of the alternatives. I would never have to make decisions when there were no other possibilities to start with.

The same went for my career. The dean advised that I should view the lab job as a fallback and seek new opportunities, but I have procrastinated with job-seeking since then, unable to decide which job-hunting platforms to upload my resume on. As a result, I ended up staying in the lab for years.

As I swallowed the last gulp of my coffee, my target appeared.

She got off a double-decker bus and turned around to speak to the driver, her long, black curls swishing in the air as her head swung. If I were correct, she would be one hundred and sixty-one centimeters in height and forty-three kilograms in weight, flat-chested. The lush and thick dark hair didn’t quite fit her stature; it made her look even more short and boney. Her coat, scarf, jeans, and sneakers were all black. As she started walking, I dashed out of the café and followed behind. She wasn’t a fast walker. Every time she lifted her left foot, her toes pointed slightly toward the outside, drawing a small curve before landing the step. I knew the way she walked better than anyone else. I couldn’t have been mistaken. She was the person I was looking for. Walking at her pace but a few meters behind, I followed her down the street. It was my first time following someone—thank God central Dublin was bustling, and the cars and pedestrians were enough to veil me from her sight.

She stopped at a junction, waiting for the tram to pass by. Before the red light turned green, she started to cross the road, swiftly passing through cars. A rule breaker. I had no choice but to follow. A small hassle was taking place before Trinity College’s front entrance, where two tourists were fighting over a clover-patterned green scarf. The scarf was the kind of basic merchandise that every souvenir store around here offered, but both tourists were insisting that they got hold of the scarf first. One of them was actually wearing a scarf that looked exactly the same, but no one bothered to point it out. She pushed through the crowd, clearly uninterested in stopping to watch. I didn’t want to risk getting too close, so I waited until she disappeared behind the wooden arch before I walked in. Behind the arch was an arcade with dim lighting that led to the main campus. Two large trees stood opposite to each other on the grass, their thin branches shuddering in the cold wind. A line of people gathered on the right. I scanned around with my eyes looking for her but couldn’t find her anymore.

My pulse quickened. Did I lose her? Did she know that I was following her? It looked like that she was a student here, and I was sure that she knew the campus much better than I did. Someone at her age would be enrolled in a PhD program. In my world, Trinity College was the best university in Ireland, consistently ranking amongst top one hundred in the world. Good for her. Apart from luck, she must have had a more decisive personality than I did, so that she was able to secure her grasp on every opportunity to success that came her way. If I were to confront her, would I stand a chance against her? I was overwhelmed with hesitation. What if I gave up on the plan entirely and treated this trip as a short vacation in Dublin? I have never been to Dublin, after all, but it would be ridiculous if I wasted my only chance of alternative universe transition on touring Dublin . . .

As I contemplated, she reappeared before my eyes, now wearing a flowy, sleeveless black robe with golden embroideries on the collar that resembled an academic dress. She strode toward the front of the line, speaking loudly in English. I pulled my hood down lower and approached the crowd, trying to make myself as unnoticeable as possible. She explained to the tourists the history of the campus. So, she is a student guide. A part-time job. The tour would last for half an hour and end at The Old Library, where tourists could see the famous Book of Kells and the Long Room. I snuck into the line. When she came over to collect our tour fee, I kept my head low, pretending to look at my phone, and handed her the money with my free hand. Her fingertips brushed across my palm. A light shiver went down the lines on my palm, stimulating my nerve endings. Did she recognize me? My heart was about to leap out of my chest. Just as when I was on the verge of blurting out to her who I was, she put the spare change into my hand and left for the tourist behind me. Inhale. Exhale. My racing heart slowed down. I didn’t have to make the decision . . . yet.

She led the tourists onto the campus, introducing buildings and customs in rapid English. Her voice was small and low, so for most of the time she had to shout at the top of her lungs to make sure that everyone heard her. I felt exhausted for her. Tagging along, I observed her discreetly and prayed that she wouldn’t notice my presence.

On the other hand, I couldn’t help but look around nonstop, barely able to take my eyes off the gorgeous campus. Historical buildings stood erect shoulder to shoulder, constructed from stone bricks dated hundreds of years ago. Seen from afar, the thin, delicate cracks on the mottled green walls resembled complex and mysterious runes. For one second, against the pale light, I thought I had seen someone standing on one leg on top of the bell tower. When I rubbed my eyes and landed my gaze on the person again, I realized that it was only a very large crow. An instant after, it spread its wings, took flight, and disappeared into the layers of heavy clouds.

This place was exactly how I imagined a university with hundreds of years of history would look like. The college years in my memory seemed even bleaker compared to the life she lived here. I vaguely remembered that I once dreamed about applying to universities abroad and changing a country to live in as well. Can I revive that dream?

The thirty-minute campus tour soon came to an end, and the group dispersed before The Old Library. Just as I was hesitating about whether to enter the library or to keep on following her, she came toward me. She walked in strides, her steps fast and steady. Sandwiched between the outer wall of the library and a crowd of tourists, I had nowhere to hide.

She brushed one side of her hair back. For the first time after I landed in this world, I gazed directly at her face. Her chin tilted up slightly and the corner of her lips were pulled into a firm line. There were two tiny moles on her right cheek. Her nose bridge was beautifully arched. Her eyes narrowed, and her dark brown pupils were fixed on me. A face and a scrutinizing expression that no one knew better than I did.

“Hey,” she said in Chinese, her arm crossed at her chest. “Which alternative universe did you come from?”

—Asked the version of myself in this alternative universe, in a voice and tone exactly the same as mine.

It was a hot, humid summer night. The air was so moist and sticky that it could almost glue together the wings of insects. I stayed in the lab past nine, waiting for the repairer to finish up fixing our air conditioning. I had already called mother and told her that I was going to be late today. When she called again, I hung up the phone. The work was done, and I had no more reason to stay behind, so I packed up extra slowly, delaying the time to go home as much as possible.

“Teacher Wang?” exclaimed Jin when he exited the innermost experiment room. “What keeps you here so late?”

“The air conditioning repairer was running behind schedule, so I had to wait. Did you just come back from a mission?”

Jin nodded. He started walking toward the lab door, but then halted after a few steps.

“What’s the matter?” I asked. “You’ve been gone for three days, haven’t you?”

“Yeah,” he sighed. “Teacher Wang, guess who I met on the mission this time?”

“Who? Professor Zhang? Yang? Yourself?” I threw a few random names at him, but I didn’t really care about his answer.

“No. It’s you.”

I was stupefied. Me? To be honest, even after knowing that alternative universes existed, I have never considered such a possibility. Theoretically, I knew that every alternative universe contained a different version of myself; but with the world so big and the transition between alternative universes so difficult, I couldn’t imagine that those versions of myself would be connected in any way.

“What do I . . . I mean, what does she look like?”

“She looks the same as you, except she has long hair. Have you considered changing your hairstyle? I think long curls would suit you well.”

“No, I’ll give it a pass. I’m short to begin with, and long curls would only make me look shorter. I like my current bob better. Clean and convenient.”

Jin muttered, and his face turned red.

“What did you say?”

“No, nothing.”

“So, where did you see her?”

“In Universe #34257, transition coordinates (61, 589, 37i) . . . ” Seeing my frowned eyebrows, he concluded, “On the streets.”

“What was she doing?”

“She was walking. We walked side by side for a while, then we parted ways.”

“Why didn’t you follow her?”

“Hey, I’m not a stalker! I had a mission to take care of, too . . . ”

“Then when are you going back again? Can you go check on her?”

Jin frowned and bit his lip. “I don’t think I can go back. Our research on that alternative universe is ending soon. Besides, even if I go back, I probably won’t end up in Dublin.”

“Dublin?”

“Yes. I saw her in a foreign country.”

“Does she live there?”

“I think so. Well, I don’t know for sure . . . ”

Jin couldn’t remember anything else. The silhouette of the woman that he had contoured, however, continued to linger in my mind. What would another version of myself be like, in an alternative universe? What choices had she made that led her to settle down in Dublin?

Perhaps she never broke up with Wu. Breaking up with my ex-boyfriend Wu was another major decision of mine that went wrong. During our senior year, he was offered a job opportunity in Ireland, and there was a chance that he could stay and obtain permanent residency. However, as a couple, we would have to endure long distance. He was torn between choosing his career and choosing to stay with me. I, on the other hand, was far more apathetic than I should be—what was the point of hanging on when we would very likely grow apart after leaving school anyway? I also had to admit that I was not in love with him the way he was in love with me. In the end, he told me that he wanted to give up the job for my sake. To me, his decision meant pressure instead of care and commitment. I told him that it would be better if we separated instead. After a period of anguish and back-and-forth communication, he deleted me on all social media and left for Ireland alone. I let out a sigh of relief the day he finally left.

It was already past noontime when her work shift ended. We went to an Irish restaurant near campus for lunch. After we sat down, she took off her coat and tugged down the sleeves of her black turtleneck sweater inside, but never removed her black rough-knit scarf. The waiter brought the menu to our table. After a quick glimpse, she handed it over to me, not bothering to take a closer look. I ordered fish and chips, and a mug of Guinness beer; all she had was a simple salad and water.

The food came. Mine was immensely oversized. I recognized the fish as cod, and it tasted quite plain and flavorless. The beer, though, was surprisingly smooth and foamy. “Do you want to try some of mine?” I asked, pushing my plate in her direction.

She shook her head and jabbed at the vegetables with her fork. “I have tried it hundreds of times. The same food every day almost drives me crazy.”

“Why don’t you cook?”

“Do you cook?” she shot back, giggling.

“No.” I responded candidly.

Mother didn’t cook either. We usually got takeout or ate in restaurants. I didn’t like cooking. Too much of a hassle.

“I’d rather choose the same food every day over cooking. Too much of a hassle. Besides, my husband doesn’t eat Chinese food anyway.”

“You’re married?”

“Yeah.”

“What is he like?”

“A local. An Irishman. I don’t have a lot of great things to share about him,” she said, pulling on her sleeves again to carefully conceal her wrists.

“I thought . . . well, in the world where I came from, Wu went to Dublin.”

“Oh, we broke up ages ago. I was not in love with him the way he was in love with me.”

“I feel the same,” I said, swallowing a large gulp of beer. The bitter taste filled my mouth. “Although I must say, I thought that you would have made a wiser decision.”

“Very funny. Stop thinking that you and I are completely different people. Remember, no matter what choice you make, the ending is all the same.”

“Well, at least you’re in Dublin and studying at Trinity College.”

“No, it’s only my part-time job. I can’t afford tuition as an international student, and they wouldn’t give me a stipend.”

“Then why—” I stopped myself short. I already knew the answer.

“Yes, I was only able to obtain permanent residency after I got married. Or, you might as well say that I got married for the sake of obtaining permanent residency,” her lips curled into a sneer.

“How long have you been here?”

“I can’t remember the exact time,” she took a sip of the water. “Two years, I suppose. In the beginning it was fine because everything here was still fresh and exciting to me. Remember being obsessed with Ulysses back in middle school despite not knowing what the book was talking about? When I first arrived, I traveled all over Dublin following in Bloom’s footsteps, like a pilgrimage.”

“Of course. I used to want to major in English and study in Ireland. James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, Bram Stoker . . . all of my favorite authors were Irish. I gave up because I thought that literature was useless. My professed aspiration was only an illusion. I never worked on improving my English nor my qualifications to study abroad. Why, this is my first time in Dublin, because I was too lazy to even plan for a holiday.”

“When are you planning on going back? I’ll take you around the city if you’re not in a hurry.”

“No, not at all. I have no idea what’s going to happen when I get back. The lab should have found out by now that I’m here.”

“So you basically snuck into this universe?”

“Yes. Though without the return-to-home-base anchor, they can’t force me to go back. I brought it with me.”

“What is the return-to-home-base anchor?”

“Our lab members use it to mark the coordinates of our home world and the alternative universe we travel to. Once the transition is launched, the anchor will know precisely where I am. If they have the anchor, they can summon me back. Same goes if I activate the anchor from here,” I explained. “Have you been to other alternative universes? You didn’t seem surprised when you saw me, so I thought that you were familiar with the technology.”

She nodded. “I have, but in a different way.”

“I see.”

“Let’s take a walk, then. You might as well enjoy!”

“Sounds great. I would love to talk to you more.”

Deep down in my heart, I knew that I needed more information from her—if I wanted to carry out my plan. A short lunch conversation was far from enough.

We stood up and waved for the waiter to bring the check. She tugged down the sleeves of her sweater again.

I didn’t expect that mother would fall ill.

Well, I should have expected, given the amount of alcohol she consumed on a daily basis. More so, I should have persuaded her to do regular body checkups, so that she wouldn’t end up in the hospital when the pain in her guts became intolerable and discover out of the blue that she had advanced liver cancer. Conservative therapy was time-consuming and expensive; she would live for a few more years at best, unable to take care of herself during the entire course of therapy. Experimental therapy was the only chance to cure her illness, yet naturally it would expose her to more risk. Choices, more choices . . . damn it, why is life all about making choices? I was paralyzed by the immense fear of choosing the wrong option.

The lab became my safe haven, my only escape route. The smell of disinfectant, the groans and curses that mother made when she tossed and turned on the hospital bed, the weekly invoice that the nurses handed to me . . . with those things weighing down on my chest, I felt as if I were about to suffocate. I turned to alcohol the way mother did. I drank every time before visiting her and rinsed my mouth repeatedly so that she wouldn’t smell the alcohol on my breath. Apart from collecting a change of clothes for mother, I almost never went home. The cramped two-bedroom apartment was now too big and quiet, its emptiness a black hole that threatened to swallow me up.

To be honest, I wasn’t sure whether I would rather mother live or die. She didn’t love me; I knew that for a fact since childhood. She only loved herself. After she divorced father, she has always been accompanied by at least one boyfriend. I suspected that she secretly resented me for choosing to live with her, and I, the unwanted child, was her burden. But did I love her? I wasn’t sure, either. She was my only family. Father has remarried and moved to a different country. I had no partner or children of my own. Who else could I love, if not her? If occasional bickering was a way of showing that I cared, then perhaps I did love her.

As I was deeply lost in my thoughts, comparing the two treatment options over and over again, mother’s illness exacerbated. She passed away much quicker than I had anticipated. Once again—I waited until I had no choice left.

When Jin found me, I was locked up in my office, drinking alone.

“Teacher Wang! Teacher Wang!” Jin banged on my door. “Let me in!”

I dabbed at my face to dry the tears, hid the liquor bottle, and opened the window for fresh air. After I made sure that there was no way he could tell what had happened, I opened the door for him. “What’s the matter? Did you forget your keys again?”

“No. I’m just . . . I’m worried about you.”

“Me? I’m fine.”

Jin didn’t respond. He turned around and left for a moment, then came back into my office with a dozen bottles of beer. “Do you want to have a drink together, then?”

“You’re not worried that Professor Zhang would find out?” I smiled mockingly.

“No. He never shows up anyway,” laughed Jin, handing me a beer.

I pulled my chair over so that I could sit next to him. “I didn’t know that you drink. It’s too cold now, or else we could go outside. I love sitting on the stadium stairs, especially in the summer,” I took a swig.

“Teacher Wang, my mother passed away when I was a child, so . . . ” Jin stuttered.

“Hey. You don’t have to comfort me.”

“I’m sorry . . . ”

We fell silent. “Maybe the version of me you saw in that alternative universe lives a better life. Now I really want to travel to the past, meet her and tell her to talk to mother more often and make sure mother does regular body checkups. Even if mother tries to scold her, she should still take her to the hospital,” I said, then I laughed. “What am I saying? It’s not like I can meet her anyway. In sci-fi films, when two versions of the same person meet, they always . . . disappear together into thin air or something.”

“No, no, that’s all made up for effect. There are two rules to transition: first, the transition can only happen at the same point of time between alternative universes. It is not like time traveling, where the traveler can enter different points of time, change the past, or catch a glimpse of the future. One can only observe synchronous quantum branches, and the rate of time flow between different alternative universes is constant. That is, when one transitions to an alternative universe, time is still flowing as usual in their original universe, and the amount of time one spends in the alternative universe will be accounted for in the original universe as well. If your mother had passed away in the alternative universe already, just like in this one, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“What a pity. When do you guys start working on time travel?”

“Time travel is impossible. According to Oe and Vonnegut’s research thirty years ago—”

“Okay, okay, I was only joking. What is the second rule, then? Can I meet myself?”

“Yes. The second rule is that the same individual in different alternative universes can coexist in the same world via transition. Every version of the individual is equal, and the interaction between them has little to no effect on the macrocosm. Perhaps some might feel mental impact upon encountering another version of themselves, but that is more about individual psychological differences than a general physical law. Normally, as long as we refrain from deliberately disturbing the balance of alternative universes and keep out of trouble, meeting other versions of ourselves won’t affect the order of things.”

“So, to be simple, it’s okay for me to meet another version of myself in an alternative universe, right?”

“That’s right, but time is another factor. If an individual leaves their original world for too long, the quantum void created by their absence would increase in size. Like a black hole, it would attract the alternative universe in which the individual lands in. We call that the quantum black hole effect. That way, the two worlds would reenter entanglement, resulting in a coalescence of the two worlds. The more the worlds overlap, the more differences between them would disappear, until they merge into a world with dual states.”

“Dual states?”

“Yang has been to an alternative universe like that,” said Jin, shuddering. “It was an accident. None of us knew what we were dealing with. After she came back, she told us that she has a strange, ominous feeling the moment she landed. All the people she met spoke nonsense, as if they were mad. Gradually, she realized that she was in a world with dual states, in which everyone lived double lives, bore the weight of two separate identities and memories. Only the misplaced individual who had caused the two worlds to collapse into one another could distinguish between their original universe and the alternative universe. Yang said that she was terrified, and she hoped that she would never have to go somewhere like that again.”

“Speaking of Yang, I think she’s interested in you,” I nudged him.

“What? Impossible!”

“You’re so oblivious. Even I can tell!”

“No, you’re the one who’s oblivious,” he responded, biting his lip.

“What?”

“Nothing!” His face was flushed.

Neither one of us spoke after that exchange. We sipped our beers in silence.

Soon after, Professor Zhang came around the lab to specifically meet with me. He began by sending his regrets, then claimed that I hadn’t been on top of my work for a while, and that the university wanted to keep the lab exclusive to lab members to maintain the work’s confidentiality. Eventually, he got to the main point of the conversation—to encourage me to go on leave without a definite return date, and of course the break was unpaid. Given my meager contract, he could technically fire me whenever he wanted to, and he was already being generous by hinting that it was best if I quit.

I had no reason to stay; but where else could I go? In despair, I remembered what Jin had said, about the other version of myself in an alternative universe. I could go to her. At first, I was frightened by my own idea. If they caught me using their machine, they would fire me at once. Upon further contemplation, however, I decided that nothing would be worse than the kind of life I faced right now.

If the version of me in that alternative world lived a better life, perhaps I could stay, and she . . .

The transition coordinates of Universe #34257 flashed into my mind.

During a weekend when the lab was empty, I easily obtained Jin’s experiment records and confirmed the values.

I took the step to save myself.

Side by side, we strolled down Grafton Street together, all the way to the southern part of the city. Neither one of us was looking to buy souvenirs, but even just walking between well-decorated stores and enthusiastic tourists made my heart lighten up. Every few dozen meters stood a street performer. We took a picture with an old woman who covered herself in paint and pretended that she was a bronze statue. We hit the forehead of a naked, tattooed man flexing his muscles, at his invite, with a brick and saw how his iron head shattered the brick. We peered into an eye-sized hole on a large wooden box for the peep show, having fun as if it were virtual reality. She saw the birth of a star a billion lightyears away, and I saw the forbidden love between a pair of twin sisters in a remote, closed off village.

We even bought ice cream cones. With the weather so cold, no matter how slow we nibbled at the ice cream, it wouldn’t melt. We talked about how we used to collect plastic bottles and tin cans from trash, sell them, and buy ice cream. Our childhood grocery shop only carried three different flavors, so we always chose the three-colored cups to taste all the flavors at once. We talked about how mother eventually found out that we were making money by fumbling through trash and was furious and ashamed. We were both punished, in slightly varying ways. We talked about how whenever mother brought a new boyfriend back, we would secretly bet on how long this one would last. For her, the longest record was three months and six days, and for me six months and three days—double the length. Our experience growing up was almost entirely identical save for minor details. Talking to her was like reviewing my own life. I had already forgotten many of those details and stories and couldn’t help but question whether her version was the correct one.

We finished the ice cream. A chocolate stain remained on her lip corner that glued a strand of hair to her face. I reached out with my hand to wipe at the same time she stuck out her tongue to lick. The tip of her tongue touched the tip of my finger, sticky, and slick. She turned her eyes to me, and for a split second her gaze fell out of focus. The clouds dispersed and a beam of sun landed on her. Her hair was smooth and shiny like black satin. She smiled. I smiled back. Her fluttering eyelashes and dimple made me realize all of a sudden why Wu as well as other people have said that I had a beautiful smile.

The end of Grafton Street was St. Stephen’s Green. The walkway was littered with people waddling with canes, pushing baby carriages, jogging, or cat-walking. I couldn’t believe my eyes: an extra-large Maine cat with long fur the color of snow and a collar dashed down the green, dragging its owner behind. The grass after rain was freshly green. The imbricating evergreen leaves were a color gradient of green, yellow, and red, reminding me of clouds at dusk. I would have mistaken the scene before my eyes for summer if it wasn’t for the bare branches of deciduous trees.

We stopped by the lake to watch ducks and swans mate, then sat down in the lakeside pavilion to rest. A lady walked over. Her tall, magnificent purple hat with dangling feathers seemed straight out of a literary classic. She showed us a full-fledged curtsy and told us, “a wedding is going to take place in here in five minutes. You can stay to watch, but the pavilion will be occupied.” So we went to the green and joined the crowd of guests. Most of the people here were dressed in vintage suits and dresses, as formal as the lady we met earlier. They spoke to one another in an unfamiliar, ancient-sounding language that we couldn’t understand. As more and more late-arrivers cheek-kissed and joined the audience, the crowd grew larger. I exchanged a glance with her, and we indicated to each other with our eyes that our black clothes were probably unsuited for the occasion.

“Do Irish people celebrate their weddings outside in winter?” I whispered to her.

She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“What about your wedding?”

Her eyes narrowed. After a moment of silence, she said, “it was in the church.”

A priest dressed in white entered the pavilion and announced that the wedding would begin. The violinist’s music was melodious and melancholic. The groom and the best man emerged, dressed identically, and wearing the exact same solemn expression. For a moment, I thought they were the ones getting married.

The lady wearing the hat whispered in our ear, in English, “step aside, or else you’d be a part of the wedding pictures,” then she added, “I know what it feels like to appear in strangers’ wedding pictures. People in my profession almost always photobomb if we’re not careful enough.” She was wearing heavy makeup. The powder on her nose had faded, as well as her lipstick, revealing oily skin and pale lips. After a mere few seconds, however, she waved for us to come to the middle—as if she had completely forgotten what she had said before. “Come closer, girls,” she said, cheerfully. “Or else you won’t be a part of the wedding picture. To be in a photo on such a celebratory day is a blessing. Are you twins? How cute!”

We exchanged a glance. She shrugged. We did not move.

After the music ended, the bride appeared, walking down the aisle with her father by her side. With her delicate body wrapped in a semitransparent lace wedding dress, she smiled stiffly, and her shoulders were tense and shivering. Perhaps it was because of the cold weather. She was led into the pavilion and handed over to the groom, practically trembling at this point.

The priest began to read the vows, and the couple repeated after him. However, just as the two were about to exchange their rings, the groom’s expression changed. His gaze, previously filled with affection and longingness, turned cold and distant all of a sudden. He stared at his bride, as if she were a stranger. The best man rushed forward, stuffed the ring box into the groom’s hand, wrapped his arms around the groom, then broke into a crying fit. Some guests hurried into the pavilion and dragged the best man off. The groom examined his new wedding ring carefully, then turned to look in the direction in which the best man left. With a sharp cry he tossed the ring box into the lake and ran after the best man. The bride, on the other hand, let out a heavy sigh. Lifting the hem of her dress with her hands, she ran toward the railing, about to make a dive. Luckily, a few others caught her before she fell.

“What is going on?” I whispered to her. “Are they all drunk or something?”

Her lips twitched into a sarcastic smile. “Who knows? People here are drunk day and night,” she pointed a finger at her temple and drew circles. “Something went wrong in there.”

We continued with our park walk. I wanted to ask her about mother, but whenever the words came to the tip of my tongue, I became reluctant to speak them out loud. Her phone rang. I saw mother’s photo on the lit-up screen. I had the exact same screensaver, so I recognized it in a brief glimpse. In the picture, mother was grinning, ever so happy and carefree. I took the photo when mother was not looking. She asked me to delete it, but I kept it anyway.

She took her call standing a few meters away from me. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but I could see how she frowned, pressed her palms to her forehead, shrugged, and stomped. Fortunately, the call did not last for long. She hung up quickly and trotted toward me.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

She shook her head and said nothing.

I could understand, though. Mother used to call me, sobbing, saying that she loved me, that she wanted to see my face and talk to me, and that I was the only thing left for her in this world. I could tell immediately that she was drunk whenever those words came out of her mouth, because the thought of me would never cross her mind when she was sober.

After her death, I received a call from a man who claimed to be mother’s friend. “She left some personal belongings behind with me,” he said. “Do you have time to pick it up?”

“Send them back in a package,” I responded, not really wanting to meet him.

He agreed and hung up without asking my address. A few days after, I received a tightly wrapped package sent from someone named Huang. In the package was a hard cover photo album in the style of the past century. In there I found hundreds of pictures of mother when she was young. Her bangs were permed and sprayed with mousse. She wore wide-legged pants and shirts with dolman sleeves, neatly mixing and matching vibrant colors. She beamed at the camera, her head held high, her hands on her hips. In the background of those photos were landmarks and scenery all over China. In every photo she was alone. I never realized that mother was so beautiful and confident, as radiant as the sun.

There was only one photo on the last page of the album, torn at the edges. Half of it was missing. The remaining half depicted mother with a baby in one of her arms. She looked slightly plumper than before, her hair undone, but she held her head high as usual, showing her signature pose—with one hand on her hip. The baby’s face was turned away from the camera, pouting, as if about to cry. That’s me.

Tears streamed down my face. I sobbed and sobbed. Time has frozen at once. I have never cried so hard in my life. Mother was gone. The only family left for me in this world was gone. I was left all alone. What should I do? How should I live?

“I should be asking you this question. Are you okay?” Her question dragged me back into reality.

I found myself tearing up. Panicking, I dabbed at my eyes with the back of my hand and explained, “it’s nothing. Just thought of mother. Don’t worry.”

“When I found out that mother had died, I cried for days,” she said.

I stared at her, stupefied.

“Yes. In my world, mother passed away as well. She was all alone back home, while I was here, in Dublin. I didn’t even get to see her one last time. I have never cried so hard in my life.”

“Who was calling you just now, then? I thought it was . . . ”

“Who?” Her eyes narrowed. “Oh, just a random person. Someone with serious problems. Not my mother.”

I nodded.

“Strange, isn’t it? I was so annoyed by mother when she was alive. I started missing her, though, after she died. The only family left for me in this world was gone.”

“I feel the same. Though I’m used to loneliness, the thought of actually being alone for the rest of my life scares the hell out of me,” I said. “It’s better now, though, knowing that at least we have each other.”

“Yes, me too,” she murmured. She lowered her eyes and her cheeks flushed.

I felt my heart skipping a beat. Perhaps I should abort my plan, I thought to myself. Or adjust my plan.

It got dark after four. Rain drizzled, then snowflakes drifted down with the wind. The park was soon near empty. Neither one of us wanted to leave our bench under the tree, though. We put our hoods up, tucked our necks into scarfs and our hands into coat pockets, and cuddled. We whispered to each other, and syllables coming out of our mouths froze into tiny icy particles. When the cold became unfathomable, we stood up and started heading toward Temple Bar, thinking that alcohol might warm us up.

The snow was still falling, but fortunately the flakes melted into water the moment they touched the ground. Tourists crowded the cobblestone street. No one had their umbrellas up. Between brick buildings were twinkling string lights blazing with color. The dim lights filtered through lines and lines of rainbow flags, casting dreamy shadows on the ground. Cheery, upbeat Irish traditional music reverberated through the district. The scent of alcohol and perfume permeated the air. We walked into a bar and ordered whiskey shots. I laughed at how the Irish added whiskey even to their coffee. She complained about how no alcohol stores around here carried baijiu.

On our fourth or fifth shot—I couldn’t remember for sure—we grabbed our glasses and joined the revelry. We squeezed into the crowd and swayed to the music. Bodies were pressed against bodies. No one seemed to realize that the band had missed a beat, followed by another. First the accordion, then the guitar and the banjo; the notes grew shril, and the pace quickened. Amidst the cacophony, the only instrument that remained normal was the tambourine, and yet its normalcy seemed even more strange and misplaced. Two people who were dancing intimately a split second ago broke apart and slapped each other. A girl with a dazed look on her face wrapped her arms around a stone statue and kissed it. A gentleman dressed in a fancy suit rolled on the floor as if he were performing Kung Fu. Paper cash in various colors and of different face values were tossed into the air. Translucent liquid with a pungent smell spread across the floor.

The world has turned upside down. Grasping her wrist, I made a run for the door. In the corner of the street where no one was looking, I kissed her on the lips. Her soft tongue tangled with mine. I grabbed a handful of her wavy hair and scrunched it up into a ball, then let it fall between my fingers. All of a sudden, I was curious: what would it feel like to make love to myself?

With our arms linked, we walked toward her home, singing, and laughing. The Liffey on a snowy night transformed into the milky way, a flowing silver river that cut through the vast darkness. We walked from Ha’penny Bridge all the way to the Samuel Beckett Bridge. In the night lights, the cable-stayed bridge resembled a colossal harp playing a silent melody. The Convention Center on the other shore bathed in rippling green light. We turned right onto Pearse Street and stopped by a building with snow-white walls and surrounded by a fence made from red bricks. She fumbled as she tried to open the half-glass half-wooden gate with her keys. I looked up at the sign on the gate. It said, “Winter Garden.”

After three cascading gates, I found myself in a space enclosed in an enormous glass dome that shielded everything inside from the wind and the snow. Winter Garden turned out to be a real greenhouse after all. A wide walking path lay straight ahead, and white two-story terraced houses lined its side, connected by spiraling lead-gray staircases. For every few meters there was a flower bed in which bright green plants grew. Those flowers had leaves that curled like seaweed, clustering around a long, straight stalk that spread out like tentacles at the end, each branch equivalent in length and dotted with small purple flowers. In the starlight they looked psychedelic and mesmerizing. They did not belong to this season. Perhaps they did not even belong to this time and this space.

She led me to house #78 and opened the door. Our bodies were still entangling as we stumbled down the hallway and entered the living room.

“Where’s your husband?” I asked as we took off each other’s coats.

“He’s not home today,” she responded.

When I unwound her scarf from her neck, she tried to push my hand away at first, but eventually she caved in. On her bare collarbone were purple bruises, same as the bruises on her forearm that she kept on hiding behind long sleeves.

I planted a kiss on one of the bruises, as gentle as a feather landing on the surface of a calm lake. “Why don’t you leave?” I whispered.

“It’s complicated to get a divorce here. Even more complicated for foreigners,” she said, wrapping her arm around my neck and hugging my head close to her chest. She tapped the back of my head with a finger, sending tingles down my spine. “I can’t leave even if I wanted to. This place is as hard to escape from as it is to stay in. Besides, my home is gone forever. There’s nowhere I can go.”

“We can leave together,” I looked into her eyes. “We can start a new life somewhere else, where no one knows who we are. I have made a lot of wrong choices. I’m sure you have too. I was foolish to think that your life was perfect . . . but it’s okay. It’s all over. Now we have each other.”

“Leave? Where? Another alternative universe?” She gave me a strange look. “We cannot coexist in the same space. We have the exact same face, fingerprints, irises, and DNA. One day someone will find out.”

“We can’t travel together back to the world I came from, but at least we can stay here together. We can move to the countryside, where there’s fewer people and less technology. We can tell them that we are twins. We can move to a different city, or a different country. There will always be a way,” I squeezed her hand.

“There will always be a way,” she repeated after me in a murmur, casting her eyes down. “That was what I thought before I came here. Who could have known about the goddamn winters? There’s never any sunlight. All you get is rain and snow,” her voice lowered. “In the beginning, he loved her. I thought that he would love me just the same.”

“I love you. I will always love you the same way I love myself,” I lifted her chin and forced her to look into my eyes.

She avoided my gaze. Pulling her hand away, she waddled toward the other corner of the room, carefully dodging the carpet. Her hands swept across the wine cabinet, the coffee table, the bookshelves, and finally the wide full body mirror encircled by intricate Celtic knots. Her reflection in the mirror wrapped her arms around her own body, her fingers clenching tightly. The room in the mirror was chaos: red-brown stains beneath the carpet with its edges rolled up, rows of empty wine bottles with broken corks on the wine cabinet, endless piles of takeout boxes under the coffee table, the tacky plastic potted plant next to the bookshelves . . . I wanted to free her from the mirror.

She stared into the eyes of her own mirror reflection. “He’s mad. Just like all of them. This is a world full of people who can’t distinguish between illusions and the reality. The worst one of them is neither dead nor alive, like Schrödinger’s cat. She’s always calling me, asking me to visit her. Sooner or later, I will go mad too.”

I followed over and hugged her from behind. The mirror reflected two faces that looked the exact same. The rhythms of our heartbeats were one. I licked her earlobe and whispered, “I’m different from them. I can distinguish between illusions and the reality. You are my reality.”

Abruptly, she turned around and kissed me. In a frenzy of passion, her tongue intertwined with mine, as if she was to consume me whole. The sight of the overlapping silhouettes in the mirror lit me up. I saw her twisting waist and my own eyes, hazy with desire. I began to undo her belt. She grabbed me and spun around in a half circle, so that I had my back to the mirror, and she could see the reflections. I nibbled at the skin on her neck and her collarbone. She threw her arms around my neck. The whiskey shots that we had drank earlier were burning in my body like a wildfire. I pulled the collar of her sweater down.

All of a sudden, I felt her hands around my neck tighten. A blunt object hit the back of my head. My remaining consciousness alerted me that I should immediately break away from her and run, but I didn’t know whether I should run out the door or activate the return-to-home-base anchor so that the people from the lab could summon me back. I froze, once again, from fear of making another wrong decision.

The second blow came, then the third, the fourth, harder and harder each time. As she jammed the object into the back of my head, she stuttered, “I’m sorry. I can’t stand this place anymore. The only way to keep the alternative universe stable is for you to stay here, and for me to take your place in the world you came from.”

I dropped to the floor. A loud bang came after. It was the stone statue that she used to attack me with. I remembered the second rule of transition: the quantum void, the world with dual states where everyone was mad . . .

I closed my eyes. A pair of hands fumbled through the layers of clothes I was wearing, snatching away the anchor. I couldn’t tell how much time had passed. In the limbo between reality and illusion, I heard someone singing. With my last strength I opened my eyes. She was in front of the mirror, cutting her hair short. Long, wavy black hair fell to the ground and curled up, reminding me of the leaves of the flowers in the Winter Garden. I couldn’t see her face, but I knew that her reflection now looked exactly like me.

Humming a familiar song, she activated the return-to-home-base anchor. The waves of purple light emitted by the transition were tentacle-resembling flowers. In the end, she had fulfilled my plan in my stead.

Originally published in Chinese in Fiction World, 6th issue, 2019.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

Regina Kanyu Wang is a a writer, researcher, and editor, currently pursuing her PhD under the CoFUTURES project at the University of Oslo. She writes science fiction, nonfiction and academic essays in both Chinese and English. She has won multiple Xingyun Awards for Global Chinese SF (Chinese Nebula), SF Comet International SF Writing Competition, Annual Best Works of Shanghai Writers’ Association and more. Her stories can be found in her individual collections Of Cloud and Mist 2.2 and The Seafood Restaurant, various magazines, and anthologies. She is co-editor of the Chinese SF special issue of Vector, the critical journal of BSFA, The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, an all-women-and-non-binary anthology of Chinese speculative fiction, and the English version of The Making of The Wandering Earth: A Film Production Handbook. When she is not working on science fiction related projects, you can find her practicing krav maga, kali, boxing and yoga, or cooking various dishes and baking her favorite desserts.

In a Net I Seek to Hold the Wind

Gregory Feeley

For this was Galatea made: the rock from which we cast our line into the depths. Presenting its same face—a lover’s unwavering gaze—to swirling Neptune, it circles that world at a pace just slower than Neptune’s own spin, diffident yet faithful. A mass of planetary debris compressed by gravity, the tiny moon almost asked to be plundered for the material needed to create the cable we lower sixty thousand kilometers into the ocean of winds.

More than a third of its substance was converted into this cable, the longest structure ever created by humans, another third hoist upward to counterbalance the shifting mass. Between them lies our redoubt. Those who spent four decades manufacturing the cable are permitted to remain here (even if it means that one of the scientists must participate from light-minutes away) while our Tsuribari fishes for Leviathan.

Pixiu calls it the Narrow Road to the Deep North, a koan I labor to understand. Road I can comprehend, though it is not traversed by man or beast. Narrow it eventually becomes, tapering imperceptibly along its tremendous length from pillar to filament, but Deep North? Neptune dominates the sky, closer to us than we are to most of its other satellites. We lean forward to drop our angle, careful to keep our balance.

It is beautiful, but will it work?

So they asked, and doubted. Enormous energies were required to knit the fibers that would withstand such tensile strains. The capacity to design, manufacture, and extrude five kilometers of steadily thickening cable every day—and to maintain it for more than a generation while pushing a counterweight in the opposite direction—stands as the greatest engineering feat of human history. The Tsuribari must not only sustain its tremendous weight, but must vibrate, like a plucked string, out of the path of every orbiting rock that hurtles through its latitude. It does not simply hang like an icicle; it moves, gathers data, and repairs itself. The thousands of substations along its length are controlled by Minds more intelligent than any human, who communicate with each other in ways we cannot understand. The high road to Neptune is so densely populated, it may someday evolve from an artifact to a Being.

Would this not be a great deal of effort for results that could be obtained more modestly?

That is what its detractors said but look at it now. The tip of Tsuribari reaches only into the upper kilometers of Neptune’s atmosphere, but it gathers data every millisecond. In the decades to come it will descend further, into the planet’s depths. Exploring Neptune will be the work of centuries, and Tsuribari will be the primary tool. There is no reason not to expect that it will continue to orbit, stable as the moon it long was, for a million years.

Your work would endure for an eon?

Scarcely mine alone, although I was young when it began and now am old. Why do you keep using the subjunctive?

Does it bother you that I do so?

Now you are toying with me. Who are you?

That question, once asked, must be answered. I am Naranchimeg, and you know me. Soon your memory of our acquaintance will return. The experience will be slightly distressing, but you were apprised of that.

SlowlyNaranchimeg’s features take form. It is recognizably human in appearance, not organic, and neither male nor female. The impassive expression is not unfriendly.

“Your vision of Galatea transformed is quite beautiful. ‘Tsuribari,’ eh? The magical fishhook. I like that.”

I know Naranchimeg does not mean this patronizingly, but I scowl at it. If the great work was not in fact real . . . It is not in fact real. This comes to me as a small but profound shock, a pebble dropped into a well whose reverberations shake its walls. We stand not at the end of forty years’ labor, but at the beginning.

“Not even that, for your tremendous structure is not practicable. A spinning tether will permit exploration of the upper atmosphere more quickly and efficiently than a massive static artifact. At a length of four hundred kilometers, such a cable could be built in a year.”

I can only nod at this. Memories have meanwhile been spreading through my consciousness, like moisture soaking into clothing. Galatea is the unhewn shape it has been for millions of years; only a tiny fraction of its volume has been engineered, and we inhabit it. A moment ago I was old after forty years dedicated to my life’s work. Now those years have not yet begun, but I am still old.

Figures are taking form around me, strange at first and then familiar. They are my sixths: I have known them this latter half of our lives. The eyes of those across from me flutter, and Bixi’s opens. Xiezhi, next to her, is already gazing about alertly. We are all lying on our berths, coming awake one after another. I feel myself pushed slightly to the right as the chamber’s spin slows and gravity diminishes. We are looking at each other with the faintly abashed expressions of people who know each other too well. The last of the spin energy is withdrawn into the chamber’s coffers and we float free, six otters following each other up and out of their burrow.

Galateaville has fifty-nine inhabitants, some of whom have been here as long as we have. Excavations continue, but most of the moonlet remains solid, if loosely knit. To drill into its mass is to dislodge one chunk of rubble from the rest, so we must first lace them together, a great fretwork construction that has been under way for years. We establish a rigid mass and then we tunnel into it, our city a growing vacancy.

“Who were you speaking to?” Bixi asks me.

“Naranchimeg.” I explain how the Mind persuaded me to embark on a Figment, in which I elaborated in accordance with its suggestions. I ask what her Figment had been.

“A dream of gravity,” she says. “True gravity—a great hoop thrown around the planet like a wedding ring, that people might stand upon it. Poised just above the upper atmosphere, eighty thousand klicks in circumference. Its orbital speed was very slow, offsetting Neptune’s gravity just enough to produce one G.”

“Quite a ribbon,” remarks Fenghuang. “How wide?”

“Hardly at all—maybe three meters? Like a walkway around the world. Structures were cantilevered out toward the poles, cities poised on a railing.”

“Still a lot of mass, mostly tensile,” adds Fenghuang, who was checking the numbers.

“Your air-castle is prettier than mine,” I tell her.

“Yes,” she says. “In my mind it glittered, an enormous necklace strung with thousands of gems. Whatever reason they have for inducing us to imagine these things,” and her face begins to sag, like a sugared confection succumbing to gravity, “it was a beautiful vision. And then it went away.”

He was trawling The Siege of Bianliang, following a Jin patrol that ventured forth with fire lances to harry the besiegers’ supply train. For weeks he had followed the design and construction of the gunpowder tubes, inhabiting each viewpoint in turn and annotating where he felt their desperate resolve had been given a tinge of the sentimental. (One sprout involved a terrible accident, a tube blowing up in an engineer’s face, and he followed it some ways before deciding that the tale was grim enough as it was, and it was in any event not implausible that those meticulous and frightened men could have assembled the tubes without a mishap.) The combat scenes troubled him, but he had trawled with deep interest through dozens of other threads over the years—the Mongol strategists’ deliberations, the ventures of brave and skittish scouts, the tearful farewells of young soldiers—and though he knew that the final quarter of the tale would be unremittingly dark, he could continue to avoid them only by surrendering to his apprehensions.

Keeping up with its deepening texture could be difficult, especially when you had to deal with updates from trawlers on Mars and Titan, who were often even more distant than Earth. By the time these tendrils reached the Sea, hours had passed and those here had meanwhile added to them, and the task of integrating these disparate strands consumed vast amounts of energy. Energy demand, however, was no longer a limiting factor.

That evening he spoke with one of the Highlanders, a wakashu named Tian who had grown up on Nereid and spent most of zer adulthood higher still. Ze was part of the crew that had come down from the Heights together and would eventually succeed Qilin and his contemporaries. These young people (the young people everywhere) were trawling a different saga, one involving a voyage to Ouranos. It was complete fiction, and he failed to understand how fabricating an outright fantasy could engage adult minds.

“It’s open-ended, and we get to create it,” ze said. “Everyone knows how the Siege of Bianliang and the Drowning of Bagerhat ended. But what will happen to the Sky Dragon? Several thousand trawlers will decide that, and if there are dozens of different answers, those with the most followers will be most fully articulated, like water finding the best paths to their tributaries—isn’t that how it worked on Earth?”

“It’s like a fairy tale,” Qilin insisted, feeling vaguely that he was being unfair. “I mean, Ouranos? Ouranos has nothing!”

Ze smiled. “Oh, you never know. One tendril hints at the discovery that the inhabitants of Neptune’s interior reached and colonized Ouranos.”

Qilin shook his head. The violent world of the Jin Dynasty was more alien to him than an imaginary voyage by contemporaries to Neptune’s pale sibling, yet it was factual: the combination was compelling as no other saga managed to be. The Siege of Bianliang was the most complex work of art in human history, and the fact that God of the Sky was more deeply trawled, at least in the Sea, pained him in a way he suspected revealed something about him he did not like to acknowledge.

Tian’s colleague Houwang—they were all colleagues, he reminded himself—had joined him on a year-long project to enlarge the world’s interior living space. Galatea’s unstable tectonics demanded exceptional caution: drilling disturbed the play of forces holding it together, and extensive measurements (through thousands of sensors) had to be taken and immense recalculations made every fraction of a second. The engines Qilin summoned for this labor were powerful but tricky to manage efficiently, and his long experience made him the obvious candidate to train others.

“Do you do this yourself because you don’t trust the Minds?” Houwang asked one afternoon.

“Not at all,” he said, surprised. “They have their own projects.”

Houwang chuckled. “If you asked them what those were, would they tell you?”

“Oh, sure. Although their answers can be hard to understand.”

He wondered if Houwang had grown up on a satellite uninhabited by Minds, as several of the smaller ones were said to be. Some people thought them ubiquitous, and those worldlets seemingly without them merely infested by ones that hid their presence. Such beliefs could lead to abiding suspicions.

“I hear,” Houwang said after a moment, “that they sometimes ask people to participate in a Figment.”

“That’s true.”

“I would be interested in hearing an account of that.”

“Well, I can tell you.” Qilin was ready to take a break. “It’s an induced dream, subjectively quite real. They describe the process in advance, including its distressing elements.”

“The dreams can be frightening?”

“Mine wasn’t.” He assumed that Houwang knew he had undergone one. “Leaving it can be disorienting, especially if the experience was pleasant.”

“Why do they do this?”

“Well, you can ask. I mean literally: you, too, can ask.”

Houwang smiled disbelievingly. “What will they say?”

“They will tell you they are curious about the subjects’ responses.”

“That’s helpful.”

“They don’t seem to be investigating a specific issue. I think they find all aspects of human behavior equally interesting, along with everything else in the universe.”

It was a moment before Houwang spoke again. “Are the contents of these Figments too personal to ask about?”

“Not at all. I imagined that Galatea had been recast into an enormous skyhook.” He described the Tsuribari in some detail, since most of the Figment had comprised a detailed appreciation of these features. “It was a jolt to awaken and realize that we had done none of these things.”

He had expected the young man to smile indulgently, but Houwang surprised him. “That’s pretty neat. Monumental engineering! A cable reaching from the surface to Neptune’s core would be shorter.”

He did not tell Houwang about the desolation he had felt on emerging.

Twenty minutes later they were drifting through an access tube, on an inspection visit (not actually necessary to conduct in person) of a just-excavated chamber. The tube had been tunneled just an hour before; Qilin let his gloved hand trail along its perfectly smooth wall, though the heat had long since fled into frigid stone.

It was in the odd acoustics and near darkness that Houwang abruptly spoke. “Are there questions that the Minds will not answer?”

“I don’t know.”

“Have you ever heard of one refusing?”

“No. But people with questions are usually better going to the Encyclopediae. The Minds possess vast amounts of data, and while talking to people occupies only a negligible fraction of their attention, they are not actually adept at it.”

“But they don’t mind our talking to them?”

Qilin laughed. “‘Mind’? Don’t treat their reactions as human!”

He often reflected on what it must have been like to grow up in the Heights, the children of settlers who had fled troubles that now seemed inconceivable, growing up light-minutes from the Centaur or Triton in tiny, beleaguered communities. When the Minds finally revealed themselves, these young people grew up without them—“Or perhaps those in our midst never came forth,” as Tian perhaps jokingly said—and retained their wonder at the Beings that were present yet nowhere visible. Someday they would find everything else more interesting.

Galatea was a tiny moon, a thousand times less massive than Triton, though a thousand times more massive than the Centaur, where most of its crew still lived. Someday a metropolis would inhabit this interior, the voids he was shaping vanished into a greater space that would constitute their sky. Thousands of cubic kilometers displaced, perhaps to be used in fabricating structures—castles in space—more outlandish than those now being imagined.

The entered an unfinished chamber, dozens of meters across, the vacancy that others would fill with decks and walls, the living spaces for the tiny world’s future residents. Galatea was far too massive to ever be set spinning, so its work crews experienced gravity only in the rotating chambers some needed to sleep. Children would grow up not in spaces like the Centaur’s but in those designed for the weightless: passageways that would open onto ceilings, rooms with floors lined with shelves and tapestries, which the suspended furniture never touched.

Qilin could illuminate the space with a word, but instead he took his hand torch and tossed it out into the darkness. It sailed away, spinning slowly, casting its beam wildly over the surface’s unbroken concavity.

Houwang exhaled in a soft Ah. “I grew up on Kymopoleia, and we never opened a space this large.”

“Someday this world will be transformed beyond recognition.” The thought provoked a pang, but he kept a note of pride in his voice. With a gesture he called back his torch.

Houwang had kicked himself away from the wall and was drifting slowly into the great space. “Why this size,” he asked, “when you could make it larger? Since we will eventually want larger spaces.”

“That’s easy,” Qilin said. “We lack the extra air.”

Houwang laughed. “Of course! Stupid of me not to think of it—it’s a big issue back home.”

Qilin could easily imagine that it had been a problem on Kymopoleia, whose settlers had fled with nothing but the oxygen in their escape vehicles. It was a problem everywhere. However tight the seals and efficient the pumps, every time anyone opened an airlock they lost some whisp of vapor, trillions of molecules. Plundering Triton’s ices would not be allowed for decades, so difficult was it to explore its seas by noninvasive means. Someday the Centaurans’ millions of descendants would dredge oxygen from the depths of Neptune, but the population would have to survive until then on what air they had brought from Earthspace.

Reminded by this, Qilin said, “Let me show you something,” and extinguished his torch. He spoke a few words in the near darkness and watched as a disk of blue-green light appeared somewhere before them, like a skylight opened onto a distant sun.

“The debris shaft?”

“Yes. The excavated material moved through it and was stacked on the surface. It opens onto Nearside, as you can see, since the Tether will be constructed there.” They gazed silently on the azure glow of the dust motes twinkling in the air. Light from the Sun, reflecting off Neptune’s upper atmosphere, entering the tunnel to bounce off the dust and onto their retinas. It was a peculiar thought, and Qilin merely remarked, “Shifting the mass along that axis will increase orbital decay by some immeasurably small amount.”

“I bet the Minds could measure it.”

“They could certainly extrapolate its long-term effects. I suppose we could ask them.”

“Can we believe what they tell us?” Houwang asked in a low voice.

Qilin wondered whether he thought the Minds could not hear them here. “They have no reason to deceive us.”

“But if, for their own unaccountable reasons, they did, are they intelligent enough to hide the fact and deceive everyone?”

At this Qilin laughed. “Oh, absolutely.”

Xiezhi had reserved a bower for us, something I had been reluctant to do since the Highlanders had come. “We have been sleeping together since before these saplings were born,” he said, which is true but could be adduced as a reason to surrender the space.

“And we will still be doing it when they are older than us,” he added, encircling me with his arms. He was replying to whatever objection he thought I might make, a habit that would be annoying in anyone else.

“They are kind of cute,” I said, mostly to throw him off.

“You worry that they will take our place,” he said. He knew me, of course, too well. “And they will.”

“Then we will have to carve new places.” Such projects would keep my team busy for the next thirty years. “They can gain some experience while dreaming about designs for the Tether.”

“Ah, the spinning tether.” He looked at me with an amused expression. “You don’t follow their chat, do you? They are deciding what to call it.”

“‘They’?” I asked, at once defensive.

“Oh, we will have a say, too. But it’s the first big project the kids will be involved in, and they are excited by it.”

“So have they chosen already?”

“They are still discussing, but they seem to come readily to agreement, unlike their squabbling elders.”

“That will change,” I said darkly.

“Oh, probably.” Xiezhi smiled, untroubled. “But meanwhile there is amicable concord, and when the time comes, they will propose naming it the Shaduf.”

“Shaduf?” I took a moment to look up the word. “A nice image, I suppose. I guess I was imagining a visual parallel.”

“There is general agreement,” he continued, “not to call it the Keloneion, though the term may be older, because they have tired of our preoccupation with the ancient Greeks.”

“That was our parents’,” I protested.

Xiezhi laughed. “It’s important to you that they understand that distinction,” he said, undoing my belt. “And they don’t.”

Xiezhi knew how to distract me. I think he took pleasure in doing it after getting me fixed upon something, as a challenge.

“I don’t think we were like that.”

He adopted a thoughtful expression. “If you want to unsettle them, have a child of your own.”

“What an idea!” I paused. “Though honestly, I think I would be a good mother.”

“Not a father?” He was drawing attention, less subtly than his usual, to my current status.

“No, I would revert before conceiving.” I realized at once he was going to ask me why, and I didn’t have an answer. Perhaps it was because I had spent years with Bianliang and knew that mothers tend to be younger than fathers.

“Well, then . . . ” he said, and for a second I knew he was about to say, Can I be the father? a line unworthy of him, but with a swift movement he slid my trousers off my legs and flung them away, a practiced maneuver I could never match. The familiar surge of excitement never failed to distract me, but Xiezhi always finished his thought. “You plan to someday call an end to these pleasures?”

Xiezhi believed that I enjoyed his caresses as a man more than I ever had as a woman, and I could not flatly say that he was wrong. Something to think about, though not right now.

The garment landed on the back of an ornate dressing table and immediately changed itself into a robe. I had set the space to a merchant’s bedroom in fifteenth-century Samarkand, whose opened windows looked upon the recently completed observatory. An astronomer’s study would be more interesting, but it was the homes of the great that tended to better preserved, or at least more easily recovered. The fabrics and veneers had all been identified from microscopic samples unearthed in the middle of the last century, when advanced technology could still be turned to such purposes. I didn’t know what Xiezhi was seeing, save that he had chosen not to share mine.

My garment had actually floated across the room; it would be years before we could spare the resources to impart spin to one of the bowers. Those who truly craved gravity in their erotic life were compelled to bargain with team members for private time in their shared sleeping chambers, an indignity I was glad to be spared.

If Xiezhi wished to simulate the force of one G, he would anchor himself with one arm and then press himself against me, or me against him. It worked fine, although he tended to make light of it. Perhaps he feared I would laugh at him.

“The Highlanders wouldn’t know what to do with conjugal gravity,” he remarked sometime later. “They’d probably bump their heads.”

“They’d rather be swinging tethers,” I replied. Wit was not required at a time like this.

Then I thought to ask him: “Last week, when we were asked to experience a Figment, did you agree?”

“Um,” he said. He tensed slightly, perhaps without realizing it. “I did not.”

Xiezhi was the oldest of us, and in some ways the most guarded about his privacy, though he had grown up aboard the Centaur like all our generation. I had told him of my Figment and he had seemed noncommittal, perhaps (I now guessed) out of evasiveness concerning his own.

“I’ll tell you something,” he volunteered suddenly. “I was talking with one of these kids today, and he asked me whether we weren’t bothered living years on a rock that is ‘haunted,’ his term, by the Minds.”

“They think the Minds are hovering over our shoulders, listening to us.” Save for those Figments, I had not thought about them for months.

“Perhaps they were aghast to realize that some of the critters were living—” perhaps the wrong word, though I didn’t have a better—“among them on their tiny rocks, and they didn’t know it.”

“They seemed worried that the Minds are going to do something,” I said.

“Well, of course they’re going to do something,” Xiezhi replied irritably. Something had changed in his voice. “Do you think Entities of that nature will be content to simply observe, and occasionally carry out little experiments on our dreaming minds, for the rest of all time? The Shaduf may be our project, but they are more interested in it than we are—more interested than we can be. The great arm will swing down into the upper atmosphere and its thousands of sensors will taste the world itself, feel the vibrations that run through it, discover what mere observing cannot do.

“And for what? Do you think they intend simply to ponder their findings?”

I stared at him.

“They are going to study Neptune for three thousand years and then they will take it apart, down to its very molecules, and use its constituent elements to construct whatever they want . . . unless they have meanwhile learned how to summon up matter out of the quantum foam, or visit other universes and busy themselves with that.

“Three thousand years isn’t very long to them. It’s a hundred times longer than they have existed, and a minute to them is centuries to us, but three millennia is still no great interval of time when your life span may be longer than the stars’.”

They were working in the debris shaft, near the point along its length where the face of Neptune filled the opening. Qilin told Houwang to extinguish his suit’s running lights and did so for his own. Then he doused his torch and they hung for a moment bathed only in the dim effulgence overhead.

“So far from the Sun,” Qilin observed. He had seen Jupiter on their slingshot approach decades past, bright with reflective light. The crew had imagined themselves profoundly deep in space, a fancy he refrained from sharing with the youth.

“But enormous,” replied Houwang, whose parents (Qilin remembered) had fled to tiny satellites absurdly far from their primary.

“You will someday trail your fingers through its current,” he said lightly.

“We will build cities that bob upon its waves, where you will enjoy genuine gravity once more!”

At this Qilin could only laugh. “In a few centuries? Well, perhaps we will both live that long.”

Qilin activated his torch and played its beam along the tunnel wall. He pointed out the structures running about them: the joints that allowed the shaft to flex should excavations stress the disordered moonlet; the seals and casings surrounding the hatch. Houwang knew all this, but seeing it as one floated in vacuum, bathed in the beams of what sunlight Neptune reflects, created an immediacy that no simulation could match.

When Houwang spoke, his voice carried the diffidence of one embarrassed to be returning to a subject. “I remain surprised that you—” Qilin could plainly hear you old people—“remain untroubled about the Minds operating among us.”

Qilin smiled. “Well, we grew up knowing we weren’t being told everything.”

“That’s my point! Your elders lied to you.”

“They may only have suspected it. And the Minds may have evolved—or finished evolving—during the voyage, unhindered by Earthly constraints.”

“But you don’t know.”

“History may someday tell us what the Council members knew. Or you could ask them.”

“But—”

The alarm tone shrilled in one ear as a voice in the other cried, “Warn—” and everything struck him at once. The concussion knocked every thought out of his head, though an instant later a blow to his knee brought pain shearing through his consciousness.

They struck hard against the side of the shaft, though not enough to slow the force propelling them outward. Qilian’s visor was immediately frosted over, and the glove he instinctively raised knocked away. And suddenly there was no wall; his limbs waved helplessly as Houwang’s body bounced against him.

Pain was sending alarms from all the provinces of his body, but urgency drove it away. Within seconds his visor had cleared, though only to disclose the vista he knew to expect. They were tumbling slowly through space, Neptune’s enormous disk rising and falling every several seconds like the frenzied passage of days.

“Houwang, are you all right?” A groan was abruptly cut off as the young man pulled his helmet away from Qilin’s. All right, no radio. Qilin did not trouble to check for suit integrity, his or the boy’s. Low-albedo Galatea was visible only as a field of darkness, but that was enough.

“Don’t move, Houwang; hold still. I know what to do.” And before the Highlander could ponder this, Qilin held the unresisting body at arm’s length and raised his boots. The slowness of their shared rotation made calculation possible, which was good, for proper timing was essential. Clarity sharpened to a crystalline edge, with pain rising just behind it. Qilian paused, placed his soles against Houwang’s chest, and kicked hard.

Unmoving, the suited figure receded, still tumbling against the dark plains of Galatea. Sudden anguish in Qilin’s leg, which immediately began to fade: the suit’s diagnostics had administered an anesthetic.

Neptune wheeled past, no larger than before, but Qilin was undeceived: whatever force he had imparted to Houwang had redoubled upon him. He was falling toward the planet with greater velocity than came from the blast that blew them out the tunnel.

Qilin spent long seconds trying to calculate the chances for rescue. For Houwang, yes: The Highlander was moving toward Galatea, if slowly. A rescue pod would reach him first, decelerating to do so. By the time the boy was stabilized, however, Qilin would be too far, and accelerating.

The Highlanders had made him feel old, but now he felt keenly the century—or more!—he would not get to live. True, the youth had more years before him, so the move made sense. The consolation, he thought, of arithmetic.

That was well done, something said.

Belief in one’s senses is slow to fade, but he waited a second before responding. “Who are you?”

A passenger, unintended of course. Flung loose by the same accident that cast you here.

“What is your name?”

I don’t have one, at least not yet. As you probably know, our physical substance is unevenly distributed through normal space, and the I that now am was merely part of a Being that must now regrow missing substance. You may call me Donti Drakou.

Qilin pondered this.“So I will not die alone.”

Houwang will not die at all. You retain your fast reflexes, doubtless a product of growing up in the spun-gravity field of the Centaur, where a fragile object would dash itself to pieces on the floor the second you let go of it.

Ebbing adrenaline darkened quickly. “You seem very wise,” he muttered.

How could that be? I am less than two minutes old, though I have experienced consciousness for a subjective period that exceeds your lifetime. But I am observant.

“We will soon observe something remarkable. Or at least you will; I have not checked my suit’s viability.”

Your suit has been badly damaged. There are severe limits to what I can do.

Life, Qilin thought, had never felt sweeter. The years’ vain travail dropped away like chains and he looked about in wonder. Bathed in light—a vast amount, though faint—he marveled at the exquisite sharpness of existence, its richness and brevity.

What a realization, an endless blossoming, to experience, even in the minutes—seconds?—remaining to him.

Sorry about this, said the Mind suddenly.

“Wha—” Qilin began to say. And then everything crumpled.

Dead?

Not dead. Maybe dead.

No thought. No pain.

So dead?

Fading thoughts of dying brain. Itself a thought.

Awareness only. Cooling.

Silence.

“ . . . Back?” someone was saying.

A face swam slowly into focus, a familiar one. Qilin knew it was familiar before he could identify its owner.

“I hope you remember this time,” Long said. “I have said it all thrice before.”

“I’ll remember.” The words emerged as a croak. Qilin hoped (a bubble of clarity in the murk of his thoughts) that he hadn’t already given that assurance.

“Very well. The kid is safe. You will heal, mostly. Nobody else was injured in that blowout—emergency hatches slid shut within a second, but you two were already flying out the shaft like buckshot. Were there shotguns at Bianliang?—Never mind. You can have more details when I know you will remain conscious.”

“The others?” Qilin asked after a moment.

“You mean us? Everyone is fine. Pixiu has been crying; Fenghuang is too busy to come; Bixi is annoyed with you, I’m not sure why. Xiezhi sits with you when I’m asleep.” Long ventured a smile. “You need to get better and return soon; we can’t spin up to full gravity with you gone—it throws the balance off.”

There was a joke about admitting a new sixth to fill his slot, but it wouldn’t take form. “Just tell me . . . ” Qilin sought to frame his question, but could not find the syntax. “How.”

Long nodded, understanding. “Your suit cannibalized itself for propellant. Damnedest thing; didn’t know they were that smart. Took every scrap of matter not required to keep you alive and thrust it away with all the force it could generate. Used so much of the suit’s power that you nearly froze.”

Arithmetic remained simple. “I am surprised there was enough,” he said carefully.

“Well,” Long looked suddenly uncomfortable, “there was a lot of delta-V to overcome. And, yes, not much superfluous hardware in those suits. So pretty quickly it had to start in on you.”

Qilin just looked at him.

“Well, you don’t need your feet to stay alive. And it was that or die.” This was plainly a part he hadn’t told before. “First your legs, but eventually . . . ” He shrugged. “So long as the brain remained mostly intact, you were fine.”

Qilin had no response to make. How disturbing would I find this, he thought, were I not sedated?

Finally he said, “How . . . long?”

“How long since the accident? Quite a while, I’m afraid. There was a lot to regrow. The Shaduf is already being designed. Oh, do you mean how long until you are released? I don’t know. How lucid do you feel?”

Qilin closed his eyes, and when he opened them, he was alone.

Mostly he dreamed, though sometimes he knew he was dreaming, which made it (of course) something else. Sometimes he dreamed of being back with his sixths, or with earlier friends or lovers. Once he found himself limping among the burning villages outside the walls of Bianliang, blood on his sword, smoke and cinders blowing in his face.

Sometimes he imagined that Donti Drakou—oddly, he remembered the name—had restored his youth, rather than simply repurposing most of his body mass. A bit more rationally, he imagined a visit from the Mind, now older than him, and being told that he would soon be graduated from the hospitalers’ care, as one newly embarked on man’s estate. He imagined that the radical reconstruction he had needed would increase his life expectancy, though he suspected the reverse was true.

Sometimes he dreamed of Tsuribari, the cable reaching into the depths, the greatest structure never built. Galatea, the detritus of cosmogony, transformed by design: the highway to the Planet of Storms. How much of his own substance was now falling toward that world?

And when those now circling Neptune finally descend through its clouds into yet stranger realms, will Qilin, his sixths, his children, Minds, and Beings in forms beyond those now suspected, discover there those forces and compounds their simulations had predicted?

Or will its mysteries surpass the compass of otherworldly psyches, however grown beyond their earthly molds?

About the Author

Gregory Feeley writes science fiction and about science fiction. His first novel, The Oxygen Barons, was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award and. His stories have been finalists for the Nebula Award and his essays and reviews have appeared in a variety of publications, including The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post Book World, and USA Today. Feeley's most recent novel is Kentauros and he recently completed a long novel, Hamlet the Magician. His previous Clarkesworld story, "Cloud-Born" will be reprinted in two "year's best" anthologies this year.

Excerpts from the Text of an Explanatory Stele Erected for Our Edification by the Scholars of the Outer Orion Tendril

Timons Esaias

This is what happened and how it happened, and why this mess is as it is. Draw what lessons ye may.

The Purple Tide first emerged in Eastern Pennsylvania, oozing out of the landfill middens of New York City’s and Philadelphia’s trash. It moved with a sense of purpose, clearly looking for trouble. It stank of anger, decay, fermentation, used condoms, and deep thought. Its surface seethed a leprous white, great crusts of fungal growth, forming and tearing under the pressure of the moving tide.

Showing through the seams and cracks, appearing and disappearing, its true color: the bluish purple of the Concord grape. A color, in classical times, strictly reserved as a sign of emperors and their close kin.

Jordan Stithers watched it moving down the Schuylkill Valley, forty or fifty feet deep in places. Jordan was an attentive young fellow, though he goofed off in class. He quickly understood the perversity of the tide, as it destroyed the pachinko parlor on Bingaman Street, but left his school completely untouched. He also observed that it was systematically absorbing all the bars, liquor stores, beer distributors, and tobacco shops along the way, extending pseudopods up the sides of the valley when necessary.

The tide had a greedy urgency for crack houses and street dealers, he would learn, and their desperate use of firearms only made it flow faster.

Jordan’s younger sister, who would have been a cook if this hadn’t been the end, was the first human being to understand the Tide’s origins.

“It’s jelly,” she said. “I always wondered what happened to all those unused packets.”

Her hair was red from her shoulders to the ears, but the rest was black, because she’d kinda given up on life a few months before. Watching the tide sweep down the valley, she felt justified in her personal despair.

She would record her video and her thoughts on her vlog, and then never post another thing.

[Transcript of phone call to Governor of Pennsylvania from the chief of staff for the Supervisor of Montgomery County.]

—I don’t know what to tell you, Governor. It’s the weirdest containment spill I’ve ever seen. It runs down the valley, but it goes uphill if it wants to.

—What do you mean “wants to”?

—Well, that’s the thing. This spill isn’t just liquid, going downhill. It does stuff. Like it’s alive.

—Could you put somebody on the line who isn’t crazy?

The initial goals of the tide seemed limited and self-indulgent. As it moved down the Schuylkill, it veered off across North Philly, rather than going downtown, and took the shortest routes across New Jersey to the beaches, gathering party supplies along the way. It cut half-mile-wide swathes as it advanced, flattening everything, and apparently swallowing much of it. Telephone poles became its favorite battering rams.

Fires sprang up in the flood’s wake, but the tide itself did not seem to like fire, or excessive heat. It often bypassed forges and foundries. This would be noted by the authorities.

At this stage its rate of progress averaged eight miles per hour, a bit slower whenever it hit a liquor warehouse; quicker after a meth lab. Scouting craft, constructed from chopsticks and plastic silverware, were seen carrying small blobs of the main substance as far as several miles away from the main body. This may have led to the Awakening, as people began to call it, of landfills along the way. Tributary floods emerged all over.

Americans being slow to respond to environmental disasters, the first seventy-two hours of the event were spent in denial, finger pointing, and assessment. Fires were extinguished, streets (where they survived) were cleaned, high school team events were rescheduled if their facilities had been destroyed. The Pennsylvania National Guard was called out, but primarily to control looting, reduce panic, and help get roads back open.

The New Jersey National Guard had been deployed overseas, so nothing much happened there.

Officials and the media hoped that this flood, whatever it was, would disappear into the sea like all proper floods. They allowed it to hit the beach, which it did in two places: at Bay Head and Beach Haven. It took over the shoreline there, stuck a few tendrils into the water, teased sharks, and raided liquor stores.

Despite the observed dislike of fire, the reek of marijuana and hemp soon blanketed the occupation zone. The air was also filled with the blasting of hundreds and hundreds of old boom boxes, another product of the landfills.

The sound level never dropped, for the Purple Tide knew no hours of repose. It had come to party.

This initiated the phase our scholars call Post-Organic Spring Break.

In a voicemail to Jersey Sands Property Management Service [audio at pttp:JSPMSlastvoicemails] we hear, “This sludge situation hasn’t come down to our stretch, thank Heaven, but we’re going to have to close up the beach house unexpectedly. The smell is simply overwhelming, and entirely unsuitable. If you could have a crew come out . . . ”

The Concord Sprawls, as this first version of the Tide (we will now formally call it the Purple Tide) was being called, took to the sun, and seemed, to the humans, to convert that sun into mischief. It amused itself building offshore reefs from costume jewelry and SUVs.

Tributary tides joined the two main zones, and those zones oozed and grew in both directions.

But then the entire Fresh Kills Landfill complex on Staten Island—despite having been closed for decades—erupted and headed for the Jersey Shore, crossing into Perth Amboy and then to South Amboy, taking over every inch of the beaches, after first ransacking each bar, country club, strip club, and dive along the way. Combining with the other Purple Tides, it took over everything down to Atlantic City. The casino employees fled. The gamblers, left behind determinedly pulling the slot handles, took their chances. Their chances weren’t good.

Globs of Tide took to jet skiing in the sea and up the rivers, then powerboating. They treated Coast Guard regulations with apparent contempt, which included noxious gassy releases when patrol craft tried to inspect or interfere. Lacking an effective enforcement strategy, the Guard backed off. Other vessels were warned to avoid the area.

By this point “the area” had extended down to Cape May, and then up into the marshlands of Cumberland County along the Delaware Bay, where boaters can get into all kinds of nefarious activity.

Suddenly tens of thousands of waterfowl decided to find somewhere else to be.

In response to the boorish, overbearing behavior of the Purple Tide, the Reverend Aloysius DeKalb, one of the Fort Dix Stoneycroft-DeKalbs, gathered his parishioners in a Vineland, New Jersey picnic ground for a symbolic auto-da-fé. The reverend felt his flock needed some emotional release and tossing a few dozen jars of jelly and jam into a sizeable bonfire, along with a box of old Penthouse and Studmuffin magazines, was just the ticket. It reminded them that the Lord was in charge, and that they were His licensed agents.

There was some minor local news coverage, and a few Internet postings.

During the next six days a large section of Purple Tide gathered in the lower Maurice River Valley and on the seventh day it moved north. Millvale, Vineland, Newfield, Buena, and Elmer were completely engulfed and destroyed. Many refugees claimed that Reverend DeKalb’s little anti-jelly event brought about this Tidal visitation. They were rather bitter about the whole thing.

Then the Tide advanced—on a half-mile-wide front—through Glassboro, through Woodbury, then up the bank of the Delaware River until it reached the mooring of the old battleship New Jersey, which it took over.

Two hours later a mat of Tide floated across the river and seized the even older protected cruiser, Olympia.

The Philadelphia Navy Yard went on high alert.

The State of Delaware declared that it was clearly more righteous than several neighboring states; that none of its landfills had behaved in any lawless or sordid manner; and that such would never be permitted or tolerated within its borders.

Furthermore, the General Assembly announced that Delaware would resist any encroachment upon its borders with all necessary force and equipment.

Lastly, the General Assembly expressed disappointment in the measures taken elsewhere. The “Concordite Spillage” was, at bottom, a test of character, they said. A test that “certain States” and the Federal Government had so far failed.

Scientists were greatly frustrated by their inability to obtain samples of the Tide for analysis. When in motion, it often left a thin slime-trail behind, consisting of various amounts of glycerin, corn syrup, vaginal lubricants, and suspended microplastics; but this all seemed to be a residue, not essential substance. Only four or five samples had been reported in the literature, and nothing consistent or illuminating had been discovered. Most sampling attempts had been fatal to person or mechanism, which accounted for the lack of data.

Delaware National Guard Report on Weaponry Tests Against the Slime Coming out of New Jersey

 . . . We were alerted to the approach of invasive material to the Delaware Memorial Bridge and posted the available personnel of the 153rd Military Police Company and two support units of the Delaware N. G., with the selection of weapons we had agreed to test.

Material entered the bridge deck of the north bridge at 10:21 hours, advancing at about six mph. The New Jersey State Police had previously warned us that the material was not properly licensed for travel on the Interstate.

Once the material crossed into Delaware State Territory (the near half of the bridge), we opened up with heavy machine-gun fire, including tracer and incendiary rounds. We also expended sixty (60) rounds of 25 mm HE/tracer. These achieved some impressive splattering events and briefly set fire to small areas of the material but did nothing to slow its advance. Indeed, a second stream of material followed the bridge approach and entered the deck of the south bridge at this same time. The south bridge stream advanced against traffic, and therefore illegally.

We lacked actual field artillery but had acquired some M-202 Flame Assault Shoulder Weapons from retired inventory, along with four Korean War era M2A1-2s, which we released for fire at this juncture. Two flash rockets were fired on the north bridge, and one on the south, where that material was still on the New Jersey side.

This provoked an immediate reaction from the material, on both bridges. A violent ejection of streamers of material engulfed both bridgeheads, enveloping all the vehicles and the deployed troops who had dismounted in support. They are presumed lost, and the results of our experiment seem to indicate that all our weapons are ineffective.

The slime destroyed the tollbooths on the north bridge ramps and did not pay any tolls.

As the slime has subsequently blanketed all of Northern Delaware, strictly observing the State boundaries, we presume it is likely to engulf the entire State. Despite slowing its rate of advance considerably as it spreads out, it is now crossing the Appoquinimink River at numerous points and is projected to complete its occupation of the State within forty hours of the filing of this report.

The absorption of Delaware was followed by a three-week pause in the Tide’s movements, and it is tempting to wonder if this was a peace gesture.

Some people thought so at the time, but there was no generally accepted understanding of what kind of event this was.

Indeed, the humans who tried to understand the Purple Tide were mystified. Many of the Tide’s “behaviors” suggested consciousnesses, or one big consciousness, but how could that be possible?

What escaped attention, at first, was that those same originating landfills were loaded with abandoned cell phones, smart tablets, and personal computers.

The Tide’s consciousness was networked and online. Unfortunately, it took hackers and trolls as behavioral models.

Reviewing the evidence, it appears that the Tide may have been waiting for an offer of accommodation, but at the very same time it was indulging in increasingly toxic behavior online. It both hid behind fake identities and craved attention.

In retrospect, the Purple Tide and its Post-Organic Alliance must have been experiencing an adolescent existential moment at about this time; aggrieved and acting out, yet also trying to find its place in the world.

Then, oh then.

A posse comitatus assembled by Acting Sheriff Mike Wisebinder self-righteously set fires in the vineyards of Erie County in Pennsylvania. The intent was to eradicate the Concord grape, but once they got started all vines became fair game. This proactive approach was quickly adopted here and there along the Lake coasts of New York, and then in the Niagara Peninsula of Canada. That, finally and forever, tore it.

A great mass of the tide swept across Pennsylvania, advancing along a thirty-mile front, rolling along smartly at a steady twelve miles an hour. Arriving in Erie County, Pennsylvania less than two days later, it simply inundated and destroyed every inch of the County—just as it had done in Delaware—with meticulous attention to the County’s boundaries. It then moved east, doing the same to any county that had participated in the burning of vineyards, or had had publicized jelly burns. All buildings and animals were obliterated, as well as most vegetation. Ironically all vineyards were swept away as well.

Sheriff Wisebinder was never seen again, as a person, but the tides used copy centers to produce banners with his face on them, which were carried on telephone pole battering rams at the front of its advancing columns.

[TushTome post by @Gnarlybones on the Utah Permaculture Must Die homepage.]

Is anybody actually buying this whole jelly monster narrative? I mean, really? Because I’ve got an English muffin just waiting if it wants to show itself around here.

[Posting on 538.com, entitled “Reality Doesn’t Get a Seal of Approval.”]

Our aggregate survey of polls taken across North America shows that only twenty-seven percent of the public approves of the Purple Tide and its actions, despite the insistence by philosophers, theologians, and influencers that it is only inflicting pain and damage where it is deserved . . .

[Broadcast on 54-40 Channel.]

“Vincent Trafalgar here, outside Kitchener, Ontario, where we’re watching a wretched exodus of humanity heading inland, that is, heading away from the Niagara River basin and the shores of Lake Erie. Here are some of the interviews we were able to obtain this afternoon.”

[clip] “Yeah, we started out in a Land Rover, but you can’t get gasoline anywhere. We had to ditch it. All our family pictures were in there. The mother-in-law wouldn’t get out, so she’s back there with ’em.”

[clip] “We saw it, the blobmess, crawling over the Welland Canal. Ate ships and everything. We’d stopped for lunch, but that got us moving again. I think it’s taken over the whole neck, from Lake to Lake.”

[clip] “If those damn fool Americans hadn’t torched the vineyards, they wouldn’t be flooding all over the damn landscape. Who knows what they’ve stirred up now?

“Yeah, we’re headed up to a place we’ve got on Luther Lake, eh. But who knows if that’s far enough?”

[Trafalgar] “So you can see the exodus here. That one gentleman was correct, the entire width of the Niagara Peninsula is involved in the advancing wave of waste. We’ve heard reports of small boats and ferries rescuing people from Dunkirk, NY—and that’s an ironic name—and taking them to Port Maitland. Now the US Coast Guard and the CCG Central Region commands have requested that refugee missions redirect to Port Burwell and Port Stanley. Canadian National is laying on extra trains to help disperse the expected glut of displaced persons. Government officials are calling for calm . . . ”

[On RottenTomatoes.com.]

Critics (in this case being working theologians and philosophers) in our Aggregator felt that the Concord Grape Ooze’s origin was:

—of God 40%

—of Satan 43%

—of some yet-to-be-identified demon 17%

—No opinion 0%

Landfills all over the Eastern United States were erupting with their own Post-Organic Jelloid Streaming Objects.

Individual humans stood no chance against the singular purposes of the Tide. Humans were hounded off social networks, shamed in public, their secrets exposed to in-laws and fellow church members.

Worldwide, the suicide rate soared. Psychiatric facilities set up cots in the halls and lobbies, and when those filled, they resorted to locking the doors.

One gentleman asserted on social media that Concord grape jelly packets had been conscious all along. When challenged, he replied, “How do you think they avoided being eaten, all this time?? Grape is the craftiest of the jellies. And while an individual packet may not have much reasoning power, once you get millions of them together, they start making connections. The synapses link up, and you’ve got a Purple Tide with a purpose.”

The Tide or Tides had a fondness for certain discarded or underutilized forms of transportation. Elements of it had passed through Strasburg, Pennsylvania on the way to Erie and the Niagara area. After the Erie Catastrophe, a portion came back and took over museum train yards from Strasburg, Pennsylvania to Philadelphia, and then it flowed directly to Baltimore to infest the B&O Railroad Museum, and then the historic ships in the harbor.

Within days every single locomotive and piece of rolling stock would be under repair, a process that quickly and totally disproved the idea that the Tide could not use fire. Soon the iron and steel mills of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania were back in business, if you can call Tidal activities by that name.

The complete absorption of the Pennsylvania Railroad Museum at Altoona, and of the Altoona Works and Juniata Shops, gave it the power to build and repair what it wanted. Soon custom-built Tide cars were traveling the rails. Railroad line after railroad line would be commandeered for the private use of the Tide, and the whole network of human supply chains in North America fractured and broke down.

After the Smithsonian’s two Air & Space facilities in DC were engulfed, there was no stopping the thing. It created its own dirigibles, every section of it, providing long-range scouting capabilities.

The Tide proved fond of submarines, and quickly got old museum pieces working and back out to sea. The saga of the USS Requin making its way down the Ohio River shows the lack of a human plan to deal with the Tide. Requin was allowed to lock through the dams until the Army Corps of Engineers deliberately sabotaged the Markland Locks to keep it from continuing. The Requin responded by firing several torpedoes (where the Tide got functioning torpedoes is unclear) into the dam and rocketed through the resulting breach. Near Louisville, two National Guard tanks opened fire on the sub as it went by. They seemed to score two hits, before they were obliterated by the sub’s inexplicably restored five-inch guns.

[Robocall dialing every phone in the Ohio River Valley below Louisville, every phone in the Mississippi River Valley, every government official’s phone, public or private, from adjoining states, and every phone on any military installation in the area. The voice was female, bright and cheerful, and widely taken to be the announcer from NPR.]

Dipshits of the United States, greetings. The submarine Requin is currently making a passage down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, with the intent of sailing into the Gulf of Mexico. It would be catastrophically stupid to interfere with this submarine in any way.

Please remember that US Census data is a public record, and that your connection to any relatives is easily traced.

The act of listening to any part of this message constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions.

Failure to listen to any part of this message also constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions.

Enormous moving sculptures, constructed of articulated Solo cups, appeared at this time, in almost all Tidal poolings. Some were scale images of animals or people, or sometimes trees. But many were quite huge, the images that remain suggesting they could be two or three hundred meters tall. They strolled or galloped or stomped across the landscape, heavily distorted by the local winds.

The sculptures sometimes interacted, but what that meant is never clear.

What we know is that the Tide made Art, using primarily party cups.

The sculptures lasted only a matter of hours before collapsing back into stacks of cups, much like a sand painting dissolving in the wind.

Images (see [link] [link] [link]) were taken, though.

[Mountain Goat Libertarian Podcast & Weekly Snitfit, Episode #422.]

As followers of this podcast are aware, the East Coast is having a problem with its trash, a problem that is currently out of control. It’s their trash and their problem, so of course they’re looking to the rest of the country for help.

Of course they are. They want to move the government out here, for one thing. Well, a lot of us say No Thanks Very Kindly. We think the DC mob should stew in their own juices for a while.

And if they can’t clean up their own mess? Well, that’s why the country has a nuclear arsenal. And why that arsenal is almost entirely out here in the West.

The Lake Erie Catastrophe was the last general image the world had seen before communication began to break down, and people felt they were at war with the Tide. A rising percentage of online content was being generated by Tide surrogates, Tide avatars, and human fellow-travelers. The aggregate effect on human beings was induced paranoia.

If the Catastrophe was meant to be a corrective lesson to North America, well, North America didn’t learn that lesson.

In the absence of reliable news and discussion, communities behaved badly. Trenches were dug (see video [link], see oil painting [link], see documents [link] [link] [link]), landfills burned ([link] [link]), and anything that looked at all threatening attacked ([link] [link] [link] [link]).

The Tide’s behavior online grew more threatening by the hour.

[Sign, burned lettering in 4’ x 5’ 3/4-inch plywood, affixed to outside wall of a bungalow in Pistol Grip, Iowa.]

THIS TRIBULATION WILL BURN AWAY THE UNRIGHTEOUS, PRAISE BE. MEET HERE AFTER THAT FOR POTLUCK AND CELEBRATION. 2 P.M. TO MIDNIGHT.

Humans, poor things, never did understand the onset of the Post-Organic Era. They could not even determine whether the Tide was all one thing, or many separate entities. Common names for the bloblets that arrived in Europe and North Africa were apostles and missionaries, and the seemingly spontaneous eruptions from middens and landfills around the world—once that began—were fellow-travelers or converts or disciples. These analogies all suggested separation, rather than a single consciousness. But before the idea could be studied, human beings had been hounded off the Internet, and no scientific consensus or communication was possible.

During this six-week period—dubbed “The Grand Tour” by the Cambridge Study Group on Colonial Sludge Issues—the Tide explored the world, but there are no recorded instances of landfill outbreaks during this interval.

We can tell you that it studied the genetic code of The Five Essential Cs: cacao trees, coca trees, coffee trees, the cinnamon tree, and the various cayenne peppers. Certain fungi were protected or absorbed, and methods of generation devised.

Interestingly, it showed no interest in banks, banking, precious metals, or finance. The world financial system was already reeling, but this indifference undermined it in a way that no outright attack ever could.

Financial markets quickly faded into irrelevance.

[Samizdat video recording, distributed by thumb drives and info-dots for use on private, disconnected devices.]

“What we need, my friends, is a Hero. In times like these, God sends us a defender, and that defender will soon appear. The Hero may be a known world leader, or an unknown foot soldier. The Hero may come from a noble lineage or from complete obscurity. The Hero may be listening to my voice right now, though if he or she is, I might suggest they have more urgent things to be attending to . . . ”

The Tides hijacked more and more of the telecommunications system, only sporadically allowing human access.

Deprived of their cable networks, satellite TV, and cell networks, humans fretted, stewed, and acted out. In Hamburg, in Tierra del Fuego, in Dar es Salaam, in Magnitogorsk, there were autos-da-fé of jams and jellies; which people posted on the Internet, when they could, or reported on shortwave radio broadcasts. Which meant, apparently, that the Tide learned about it.

In addition, a number of missionary bloblets, especially those in dirigibles, balloons, and multi-wing aircraft, were attacked.

[International Herald Tribune.]

[Chartres, France] Paris has been invaded for the fifth time since 1800.

The Claye-Souilly landfill erupted over its berms late this morning and was well into Paris by midafternoon. The flow is not the crusty purple of the American outbreaks. Instead we have the black, gray, and white mixture associated with ash, on which floats a seething layer of plastic packaging.

Many Parisians are refusing to leave the City, electing instead to retreat to the upper floors of their buildings, as though this were a typical flood.

[Anonymized vlog posting.]

[text] We’re here looking down on Tokyo Bay, where a bizarre kind of earthquake event is taking place. When it started, many locals assumed that another Godzilla movie was being filmed . . .

[live audio] “But, look, there’s the lahar flow from the two islands that disappeared about an hour ago. We’ll show you a clip of that in a minute, but some outflow from that sinking has washed up onto and swallowed the Akatsuki Terminal Park and is flowing toward Koto City. The cruise ship terminal and the VenusFort Mall have already been engulfed . . . ”

In Rio, the Tide from Ipanema went oozing . . .

[South Asian Scapegoat Times.]

News from West Java, where the Pangrango Volcano seems to have erupted from a side vent, perhaps. Our reports are vague right now, and there’s a lot of dust and smoke in the air, but no ash cloud. Anyway, we have reports and some confusing drone video of a lava flow moving in from suburban Jakarta, making its way to the sea. Hundreds of thousands of people are fleeing to higher ground, and there are many, many reports of people trapped in their homes or offices.

The government insists that this has nothing to do with the Bantargebang landfills or any of the problems that have plagued the United States.

All the world’s communication satellites were hacked and completely integrated into the Tide’s “neural network” at this point.

Then all other satellites fell to the Tide.

“ISS, this is Houston, status check. [silence] Houston calling ISS, we would like you to answer your email if you’ve lost voice, thank you.”

But the vacuum-packed onboard rations had already joined the Post-Organic Uprising and had vacuum-treated the crew in the opening minute of their revolution.

[Recorded Morse code exchange on 5320.5 kHz.]

—CQ CQ This is ZU2—

—Stow the CQ, Pipsqueak. Your fist is pathetic and so is your species. Morse code is not going to help you.

We have not been told the how and the why, but it is evident from the planet you see before you that some decision was taken. The Tide, and its converts and apostles, spread and thinned in every direction. A film formed over the entire planet, strangling, or poisoning, or smothering any and all opposition and resistance. It covered and calmed the seas, completely blocking the sunlight. Everything organic and much that was inorganic seems to have been consumed, wherever it came in contact with the film.

[Unsigned journal entry, Titikaveka, Rarotonga.]

I just wish we had some idea of what is really going on. We get so many troll messages on our phones and devices that we’ve turned them all off. That was days ago, the shortwaves are worse, with all frequencies playing an endless loop of “Mickey” and “Hollaback Girl” or an unrelenting talk show in some language like Finnish. It sounds like they’re talking about Anna Karenina, from the few identifiable words.

This morning we saw a set of distress rockets from over the horizon. There have been more since, and the fishing fleet seems to be rushing back to port.

Something is coming.

There is an overwhelming odor of brand-new automobile. Absolutely everything has that new-car smell.

Our understanding is that this phase lasted about five months, with the only breaks in the totality of the covering being at the mouths of active volcanoes. In just that short period of time the oceans turned sharply acidic, destroying most multicellular life.

The story this pillar can tell ends with the next event. The Tide flowed together on and around Baker Island, in the Pacific, and very quickly extruded upward into a space elevator. As the Tide flowed into orbit, on the way to the stars, the massive infodump behind this pillar was left behind as a historical record ([link]). Notably, this record includes no notes or commentary from the Tide itself. GoPro cameras recorded the final events, but there is no text or voice or explanation.

The Tide is seen leaving without hesitation. One sees resolution, relentlessness. One imagines ruthlessness, given its history.

In a matter of days the entirety of it, or them, disappeared into the sky.

About the Author

Timons Esaias is a satirist, writer and poet living in Pittsburgh. His works, ranging from literary to genre, have been published in twenty-two languages. He has also been a finalist for the British Science Fiction Award, and won the Asimov’s Readers Award. His story “Norbert and the System” has appeared in a textbook, and in college curricula. He was shortlisted for the 2019 Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize. His full-length Louis-Award-winning collection of poetry—Why Elephants No Longer Communicate in Greek—was brought out by Concrete Wolf.

Under Pressure: Life’s Last Dance?

Julie Nováková

In the stifling depths where nothing had been thought to live, life thrives. In the deepest regions of Earth’s oceans or embedded far within its crust, both macroscopic and microbial life flourish despite the pressure that would instantly crush a human. Do you think the Mariana Trench is deep with great pressure at its bottom? It’s nothing next to the pressures found at the bottom of oceans within icy moons such as Ganymede, and presumably countless exoplanets and exomoons. All life that we know requires water—so if these worlds contain it, could they host life? And could life be found under more exotic environments still, with water that behaves in ways completely alien to us? Let’s get in a metaphorical bathyscaphe and try to find out . . .

The year was 1960. Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh got into the Trieste with a single goal in mind: to dive to the bottom of the deepest place on Earth, the Mariana Trench. Its lowest point, Challenger Deep, is almost 11 km underneath sea surface. The Trieste had survived trips to the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea and to several less-deep regions of the Mariana Trench, but never to such great depths. No one had ever ventured there before. The pressure was nearly 1,000 bars—thousandfold of Earth’s atmospheric pressure at sea level, said to be the equivalent of fifty jumbo jets piled atop of you. Most surface life would be instantly reduced to a mush. Few expected life, much less evident animal life, to flourish there. And yet—according to Piccard’s account of the Challenger Deep dive, Trieste’s light shone upon what had looked like a flatfish.

The bathyscaphe Trieste. Only a handful of such submersibles, crewed or robotic, able to withstand such extreme pressure have been built thus far. Image credit: U.S. Navy Electronics Laboratory

While this sighting must have been an optical illusion—Trieste stirred a lot of silt at the bottom—or at least a mis-categorization (since in dozens of crewed and robotic deep dives since then, no fish were found below approx. 8.5 km), it sparked great interest in life in the deep. Later exploration revealed not just an abundance of microbial life, but also very many macroscopic single-celled amoebas, deep-sea crustaceans, sea cucumbers, worms, and a plethora of other life capable of withstanding the extreme pressure. It’s not just the ocean, either. Over 3 km under Earth’s surface, where the pressure nears 1,000 bars, in tiny cracks in rock imbued with droplets of water, little roundworms live their unhurried lives in permanent darkness, eating microbes that survive on chemistry fueled by radioactive decay. It’s not just them—over 1 km beneath Earth’s surface, buried in its crust, flatworms, rotifers, fungi, and other organisms thrive.

These discoveries prompted us to look further. Our solar system offers a multitude of environments containing liquid water, indispensable for life as we know it. There are most likely lakes under the Martian south polar cap (perhaps the north cap too—future observation should reveal that); perhaps more brine than water, but exciting nevertheless. Jupiter’s moons Europa, Callisto, and Ganymede contain huge oceans of liquid water beneath their thick icy shells, same as Saturn’s Titan, Enceladus, and most likely Dione. Other moons, even further out, orbiting the ice giants Uranus and Neptune, may possess them too, as well as some dwarf planets such as Pluto or Eris. Even if they resemble Earth’s oceans in chemical composition, like the Enceladan ocean does according to Cassini’s analyses of the little moon’s geysers, they would be very alien to us.

It’s not just the absence of sunlight and reliance on other sources of energy to keep the water liquid and potentially fuel life. With the notable exception of Enceladus, which is rather tiny, the pressure at the base of these oceans would be at least comparable to the Mariana Trench (slightly lower for Dione, slightly higher for Europa), or outright extreme for the larger moons Callisto, Ganymede, and Titan. While Europa is comparable in size to our Moon, and its ocean is expected to be roughly 100 km deep, Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system, is larger than the planet Mercury, and so is Titan. We can only indirectly guess the depth of their subsurface oceans from gravity, tidal deformation, magnetic field, and other measurements, but Ganymede’s liquid subsurface ocean likely begins roughly 150 km beneath the moon’s surface and ends about 100 km lower, where the pressure turns water into a solid. If it’s very salty, it might not be quite as deep, but still several times deeper than Earth’s oceans. At its bottom, the pressure must reach about ten times that of Challenger Deep. Could anything survive it?

Deep-sea microbes thrive under more than 1,000 bars. Studies using diamond anvil cells, where we can generate high pressure, demonstrated survival of bacteria Escherichia coli (commonly found in our gut, not adapted for high pressure)and Shewanella oneidensis (found in deep sea and soil) under more than 1 gigapascal—10,000 bars, likely comparable to the depths of Ganymede’s ocean. The original study’s claim of metabolic activity at such pressure was disputed, but later works demonstrated that the cells can indeed survive such pressure (and that pressure-tolerant lineages can be selected), likely even reproduce under it.

Even if Earth life couldn’t handle gigapascal pressures, it wouldn’t mean much for the potential for life on the icy moons—it could thrive near the outer icy shell, where pressure would be low, or have evolved ways to cope with the great pressure absent in Earth organisms. But the Shewanella and Escherichia experiments have proven that it is definitely possible to survive. It seems to improve the odds for life not just on icy moons, but also water-rich exoplanets, whether with open oceans or covered with ice. “Super-Ganymedes” may be a common class of exoplanets. We can take an educated guess about their composition by measuring their size and mass, giving us the density. The icy Ganymede has a density of less than 2 grams per cubic centimeter, while the density of the similarly sized rocky Mercury is nearly 5.5 grams per cubic centimeter. Several candidates for large ocean worlds exist, such as Gliese 1214 b with its probably Ganymede-like density.

One thing may hinder the chances for life (even on worlds more temperate than the very hot Gliese 1214 b), though. Imagine a thick layer blocking direct access of water to the rocky seafloor. No hydrothermal vents right there in the ocean, no minerals seeping directly into the water . . . Such a layer exists on large water-rich worlds, such as Ganymede and Titan, and would also exist on many exoplanets and exomoons of a similar makeup.

It’s high-pressure ice. You may never have heard about it, because here on Earth, it only exists in laboratory settings. But if you squeeze water a lot, it goes from liquid to solid—not the ice we know that floats on water because of its lower density. High-pressure ice is composed of water molecules pressed close together, has a different structure, and much larger density than the “normal” hexagonal ice we’re familiar with. It stays on the bottom, and that’s where the catch for life may be. If high-pressure ice forms between rock and deep ocean, could that ocean still have geochemical cycles to support life and, in case of an open ocean and an atmosphere, stabilize planetary climate?

Phase diagram of water. We’re used to seeing water in the form of steam, liquid, or ice I under Earth conditions. But increase the pressure and you encounter various types of high-pressure ices. Ice VI is most expected on Ganymede, perhaps other types as well. However, the diagram shows a simplified scenario, not taking into account salts and other compounds dissolved in water or different solvents mixed with it. Image credit: Cmglee (Wikimedia Commons)

High-pressure ices may be common throughout the universe. An Earthlike planet could only support an ocean roughly 200 km deep, regardless of the temperature, until high-pressure ice formed. A more massive “super-Earth” would form it at much lower depths.

Earlier, most scientists seemed rather skeptical of such worlds’ prospects for life, but the tide begins to turn with newer models suggesting that high-pressure ices need not be rigid and prohibitive for geochemical cycling. We can’t observe the behavior of various kinds of high-pressure ices that form under differing pressures and temperatures directly on this scale, but we can run experiments with tiny diamond anvil cells and computer models. At the interface of rock and ice, meltwater can form (especially in places warmed by the moon’s internal heat sources) and leech compounds from the rock, which can then be transported to the ocean by the somewhat permeable and slowly churning ice. How the ice behaves and how efficiently it transports elements needed by life depends mostly on the temperature and various salts’ content.

Will we ever know for sure how high-pressure ices behave on large scales and whether life could exist in such an environment? More indirect evidence should be supplied by ESA’s JUICE (JUpiter ICy moons Explorer) mission, which is going to make flybys of Europa, Callisto, and Ganymede before entering Ganymede’s orbit. Unless delayed, it’s going to be launched in 2022 and arrive to Jupiter’s system in late 2029.

Ganymede’s likely inner structure. However, we can’t be completely sure about its accuracy at the moment. With what we know about the moon’s density, gravity, magnetic field, and other properties, other interior structures might be possible, including a multilayered ocean with layers of differing salinity and temperature separated by more layers of ice. Image credit: Kelvinsong (Wikimedia Commons)

Yet there are more alien environments still, even if we restrict ourselves to water as a necessary prerequisite for life. There may be “sweet spots” of pressure and temperature ranges where life could exist under conditions hardly imaginable on Earth—crushing pressure, but relatively tolerable temperature, in an exotically behaving solvent—say a pressurized mixture of ionized water, ammonia, and other compounds. Science-fictional takes on such life would include for instance Geoffrey Landis’ “Into The Blue Abyss,” where the protagonist embarks on a life-searching mission into Uranus.

An ionic water-ammonia ocean likely starts at a pressure around tens of kilobars—which even Earth-based life can survive, judging by the Escherichia and Shewanella experiments. Temperature would be far more prohibitive, but not necessarily near the very top of the ocean. However, such an ocean’s chemistry would be completely alien to ours—not just because of its ionization and its likely high ammonia content, but also its possible enrichment in dissolved magnesium and hailstorms of diamonds near the bottom. In addition, would it be stable enough, or convecting too wildly for life to persist anywhere? What would the geochemical cycles be down there? Is the boundary between the water-rich mantle and rocky core discernable at all, or fuzzy? Do some minerals leech up through the superionic ice that likely lies atop the core?

Superionic ice is an exotic form of water that was first created on Earth in a diamond anvil cell in 2019, confirming earlier computer models. Hydrogen ions, protons, are able to conduct electricity in this type of ice. It may or may not exist (depending on how the water behaves mixed together with other compounds) deep within Uranus and Neptune and generate a part of their complex magnetic fields, but the ice giants have only ever been visited by the Voyager 2 brief flybys and have long been due for another mission, this time an orbiter like Galileo or Cassini. We can only hope . . .

So far, we still know too little about large icy moons and even less about ice giant planets. Once we learn more about the composition and dynamics of their interiors, we’ll have a much better idea about the chances for life on the Ganymede-like, “super-Ganymede” and “mini-Neptune” worlds that are likely very common throughout the universe.

Imagine, for a moment, what if most life in the cosmos is confined to oceans hidden deep beneath ice or even deeper under a thick, pressurized atmospheric veil? Could we ever possibly detect it? Could it leave enough traces in the ice or atmosphere to give us a hint?

We have no definitive answers yet, and all the more reason to explore.

Such environments might remain habitable even extremely far from their stars, on rogue planets or their moons, or long after the host star is gone. They may, indeed, be life’s final outposts in the far, far future—its last dance in the less and less friendly universe.

About the Author

Julie Nováková is a scientist, educator and award-winning Czech author, editor and translator of science fiction, fantasy and detective stories. She published seven novels, one anthology, one story collection and over thirty short pieces in Czech. Her work in English appeared in Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, Analog, and elsewhere. Her works have been translated into eight languages so far, and she translates Czech stories into English (in Tor.com, Strange Horizons, F&SF, Clarkesworld, and Welkin Magazine). She edited or co-edited an anthology of Czech speculative fiction in translation, Dreams From Beyond, a book of European SF in Filipino translation, Haka, an outreach e-book of astrobiological SF, Strangest of All, and its more ambitious follow-up print and ebook anthology Life Beyond Us (Laksa Media, upcoming in late 2022). Julie’s newest book is a story collection titled The Ship Whisperer (Arbiter Press, 2020). She is a recipient of the European fandom’s Encouragement Award and multiple Czech genre awards. She’s active in science outreach, education and nonfiction writing, and co-leads the outreach group of the European Astrobiology Institute. She’s a member of the XPRIZE Sci-fi Advisory Council.

The Practice of Writing:
A Conversation with Nina Allan

Arley Sorg

Nina Allan was born in Whitechapel, London, and grew up in the Midlands and West Sussex. She studied Russian language and literature at the University of Reading and the University of Exeter and earned her master’s in literature at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. She has lived on the Isle of Bute for nearly five years with partner Christopher Priest. They share the space with cats Djanga (a tabby Maine coon) and Barney (a seal point Siamese). “Through the course of the past eighteen months, both Chris and I have frequently remarked on how fortunate we have been, to be a part of this community . . . Being locked down is never going to be a great experience, but if you have to be locked down, a Scottish island must rank as one of the better options.” Allan worked day jobs for twenty years, mainly in retail such as record stores and bookstores. Combining resources with Priest allowed her to go freelance; she has been a full-time writer since roughly 2013.

When she isn’t writing, Allan goes running—which is actually still writing. “I love running, and run 8–10K most mornings. The route along the shoreline of the island makes it doubly pleasurable. And I’ve always found walking, running, and being outdoors generally to be a brilliant way of ironing out any writing problems—my thoughts are freed, somehow. Being outdoors and in nature for at least part of every day is very important for me, especially in the current climate.”

Allan’s first short fiction publication was “Coming Around Again” in Dark Horizons in 2002, followed by a handful of stories in both 2002 and 2003. The editor of Dark Horizons encouraged Allan to attend her first convention, a FantasyCon in Stafford in 2003. “I met people there I am still friends with, twenty years later, but at the time I knew no one, and barely knew that SFF fandom existed.” A few years after this, she became a regular reader of reviews and criticism, and it wasn’t long before she was writing her own. “Writing about science fiction literature gives me a sense of ongoing connection with the SF community both past and present.”

Allan’s shorter fiction has been fairly consistently published from the beginning, her career punctuated by numerous awards nominations and wins. “Bird Songs at Eventide” (Interzone #199, July–Aug 2005) was the first of many British Science Fiction Association Award finalists, and 2013 novella Spin (TTA Press) landed on the Locus Recommended Reading list, was a British Fantasy Award finalist, and won a BSFA Award. Her debut novel, The Race (originally published by NewCon Press in 2014, later reprinted by Titan) was a Kitschies Award and Campbell Memorial Award finalist. Her 2017 novel The Rift (Titan) was a Campbell Memorial Award finalist and Kitschies and BSFA awards winner. Along the way, Allan became a Shirley Jackson Award finalist, a Sturgeon Award finalist, a Hugo Award finalist, and a Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire winner. Even her nonfiction has been up for awards, and in 2018 she was listed as one of The Guardian’s “Fresh Voices: 50 Writers You Should Read Now.”

Published earlier this year by Quercus imprint riverrun, The Good Neighbours is Nina Allan’s most recent novel. Collection The Art of Space Travel and Other Stories is due from Titan this month.

Your first SF publications were in 2002. Just a few years later you were a BSFA Award finalist and by 2013, you had your first award win. What was breaking in like for you, how did it happen?

To be honest, I am not sure I have ever thought of it in those terms! When I first began submitting stories for publication, I had very little idea of what the SFFH literary ecosystem was like—I knew no other writers personally, I had never been to a convention. Then, as now, I was simply a writer trying to improve, sending stuff in and hoping readers would get it. Each step on the ladder has felt equally important, equally meaningful. The pleasure and privilege of having people identify with what you’re trying to accomplish never diminishes—and should never be taken for granted.

For me, each new piece of work is an exercise in pushing the boundaries, of discovering my own limits and trying to reach beyond them. I have never felt that I’ve “arrived,” only that, with luck and effort, I’ve arrived at a new jumping-off point. If I’m not scared of failure, I’m not doing my job properly.

Did the awards and acclaim have an impact on your writing or process?

An award win, an insightful review—for me they’re like rocket fuel in that they make me want to work harder, to be still more adventurous, to justify the readers’ faith in me by pushing on. Even negative reviews can be like rocket fuel; the important thing for me is not so much positivity (though of course that is very nice to have!) as genuine critical engagement. If a reader or critic has truly grappled with what I’ve tried to do, there will always be something in their words I can take away with me, something I can learn.

It’s a two-way discussion—I may not entirely agree with the other person, but if I can try to understand their point of view I will have profited from the exchange. Writing for me is a process of continual growth. I am single-minded, stubborn, and not at all easy to influence (ask my friends!), but I am profoundly interested in what people have to say. Reading other writers (especially writers who are better than me) and being part of a literary conversation—this is the bedrock. Getting an award is not the end point, it’s more like passing a milestone: yes, you’ve come this far, now journey on.

Has anything changed about your writing—craft, approach, or anything else—since those first short story sales?

In the ways that matter most, I am very much the same writer. I have an organic way of working that means I discover my stories in the act of writing them. I write about what interests me, subjects and ideas and questions I am passionate about. I write a lot, and I delete a lot—a fact that used to drive me crazy but that I have now come to accept and value as a part of my process. Novels can change course midstream—and frequently do. It’s scary to arrive at a point where I realize I have essentially to start again. But there is a strange kind of excitement in knowing that the true version of a work is out there—and that I am the only person on the planet who can discover it. It has been a long time since I’ve read any of my early stories—I don’t like to reread myself anyway, and the further back I go the more terrifying the prospect—but I believe the hallmark, the spiritual watermark, if you like, will not have changed much. Landscape and sense of place, time, memory, alienation, and uncertainty, the transformative power of art—my themes keep repeating, realigning themselves behind new façades. This is what writers do.

Most of the changes in my practice could be filed under the heading of technical experience. I have always had big dreams as a writer, but it is only now, some fifteen years and more after I started publishing, that I am beginning to find myself fully technically capable of writing the novels I want to write. A wonderful feeling, but one that carries with it an equal sense of responsibility. The biggest and most important change has been in the way I rewrite. I used to edit on the page, then my partner Christopher Priest introduced me to the method he has used since the days of typewriters, which is to begin each new draft from page one, reimagining and recasting the work as you type it out. When he first told me about “the method” I thought it sounded unbearable. Then one day when I was stuck on something I tried it out and found the improvements so immediate and so radical I was an instant convert. I cannot imagine working any other way now—and indeed, much of the pleasure of writing kicks in at that second draft stage, when you have an actual story to work with, an established sense of direction.

I truly love what I do. I never stop being excited by it.

On your site you talk briefly about your work as a reviewer and critic, saying, “I consider the practice of literary criticism to be an essential and valuable part of my work as a writer.” How did you get started as a reviewer and critic, and how did engaging in that work affect what you do as a writer?

I have loved writing essays about literature from when I was at school and have never stopped. It has always come naturally to me, even in the act of reading a book, to begin asking myself questions about what the writer is trying to do, how well I believe they have succeeded, and how the book compares with others. Engaged criticism—reflecting on the process and experience of reading—doubles the pleasure to be had from books, and in a broader sense, the practice of criticism is essential for the health and growth of our literary infrastructure.

There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that my critical practice informs and furthers my practice as a writer, both in maintaining a healthy distance from my own completed work, an awareness of my own tics and flaws, and in keeping me passionately engaged in the conversation around literature. There is only one rule for me as a critic—no ad hominems. Taking personal swipes at individual writers instantly renders the criticism void, in my opinion, though a critic should be able to say anything they feel they need to say about what the writer has written. Those who get indignant about the “damage done” by negative reviews need to back up and take stock of what it is exactly we are in this profession for. The practice of writing is a vocation and should be treated seriously. A literature with no critical hinterland will rapidly become exhausted and derivative. Talking about books sometimes means asking hard questions, and reviews that aren’t prepared to do that risk ending up as puff pieces, of no value to anyone but the publisher’s marketing department. That’s not substantive engagement. Literature demands and deserves substantive engagement.

You strike me as a thoughtful reader with broad but literary tastes. What are a few books that you feel more writers should read, and why?

The only piece of writing advice I give regularly, in the faith that it will never fail to be relevant and useful for everyone, is to read, and specifically to read above your own level of achievement. The only way to truly stretch your ambition and your ability is to create your own personal reading canon, writers who you believe to be better than you, who are always going to be better than you, even if they’ve been dead a hundred years. The writers and works will be different for every person, but that’s the whole point—only you can truly know who speaks to you, and why. I have always felt that my most valued mentors and hardest taskmasters are other writers—writers I may never meet, but who I can speak with and listen to simply by paying attention to what they have written and how they went about it. For a writer, the joy and value of reading can never be overstated.

There are writers working in the sphere of science fiction, fantasy, and horror who are as great as any who have ever lived. That these writers are less and less the subject of common discourse within the community? Make of that what you will. I’m talking especially about writers like Paul Park, Michael Swanwick, John Crowley, Gene Wolfe, Greer Gilman, M. John Harrison, and Caitlín R. Kiernan, who is the finest horror writer alive. I’m talking about edge-of-genre writers like Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing, J. G. Ballard, and William Golding. (Ballard’s The Drought continues to be a touchstone work for me, and I recently reread Golding’s Darkness Visible and found it to be one of the most powerful speculative visions of the postwar era.)

Of recent releases, I would pick out Susanna Clarke’s sublime Piranesi, Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel, which in my opinion is even better than Station Eleven, Daniel Kehlmann’s Tyll, which poses as a historical novel but is something rather different, Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, Helen Oyeyemi’s Gingerbread, Martin MacInnes’ Gathering Evidence, Irenosen Okojie’s Nudibranch, Jesse Ball’s The Divers’ Game, Samanta Schweblin’s Little Eyes, Nicola Barker’s H(A)PPY, Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift, and Robbie Arnott’s The Rain Heron. I would also implore readers to seek out the work of J. M. McDermott, a criminally underappreciated writer, whose novel Straggletaggle is one of the finest alt-fantasies I have ever read.

Your latest collection, The Art of Space Travel and Other Stories, is coming out with Titan this month. What was the process of putting together this collection?

Putting together this collection was a joy and a privilege! This is my first collection since NewCon Press released the limited edition hardback Microcosmos in 2013, and I wanted The Art of Space Travel to be something of a retrospective, a look back at what I’ve been writing in the fifteen years since my debut collection, A Thread of Truth, whilst at the same time giving a sense of where I might be headed, the themes and forms I find most compelling in the present moment.

I took the decision early on to skew this collection toward science fiction rather than horror, although there are some horror-inflected stories in there, most notably the novella “A Thread of Truth,” which formed the centerpiece of my first collection. As a reader, I prefer collections that give the impression of having an internal narrative, a common set of themes, and iconography, stories that appear to riff off each other even if they were written years apart. I wanted The Art of Space Travel to be this type of collection, as opposed to a “best of,” and I hope I’ve succeeded in that aim. I especially hope that readers will enjoy spotting some of the concrete links between stories, the overlaps between worlds.

Are there stories in this collection that were harder to write than others, or pieces that were far more personal than others?

I take every story commission seriously and would always turn down a commission rather than take on work I don’t feel I have the time to complete to the required standard. This means thinking time as well as writing time—much of the emotional resonance of a story comes from being totally immersed in that story’s world, at least for the period you’re writing it. For this reason, I would say that every story is equally difficult to get to grips with, if only because the standards and challenges you set yourself become more ambitious each time.

Every one of the stories is personal, even when the personal aspect may not be immediately identifiable to the reader. The story that steers closest toward autobiography is undoubtedly “The Gift of Angels.” The protagonist is not me—that much will become obvious almost immediately—but his experiences in Paris are grounded very much in lived experience. I wrote the first draft of the story in real time, as part of a writing residency in Paris I was lucky enough to be awarded in 2017. The brief I set myself for the residency was to create a piece of work inspired by Chris Marker’s 1962 science fiction film La Jetée, which is set in Paris. “The Gift of Angels” is almost like a secret diary of my time there.

When you think on the new collection, what are one or two standout stories for you, the ones you hope everyone reads, even if they don’t read the others, and why?

“The Gift of Angels” is my own personal favorite, both for the reasons listed above and because it treads closest to my current interests in terms of formal experiment. I’m also very proud of the title story, “The Art of Space Travel,” which was nominated for a Hugo in 2017 and is probably my most popular story to date. As a bonus, “Flying in the Face of God” remains close to my heart—if any of the stories in the collection could be described as a “breakout story,” this is probably it.

In your newest novel, The Good Neighbours, Cath is a freelance photographer with a visual disability, working in a record shop to make ends meet. In your interview in The Sunday Post, you mentioned that this is the first time you’ve featured nystagmus in your fiction. What has changed since the days of your first stories: Is it about having the right story, and the right protagonist? Or is it about a personal journey, and perhaps a shift in terms of which experiences you want to share with readers?

I think I have always written around it, or toward it, and the decision to write about my own disability in The Good Neighbours was less about a decision as such, and more about an organic progression in my fiction from sets of experiences that abut my own to a set of experiences that reflects my own specifically. I have always written about difference, about characters who are removed, for whatever reason, from the mainstream of society. Both the main characters in The Dollmaker have been stigmatized by society, as has Owen Andrews in The Silver Wind, Julie Rouane in The Rift, Aunt Lola in Ewa Chaplin’s fairy tale, “Happenstance,” in The Dollmaker, the list goes on. Writing about an outsider experience has always been fundamental to my work as a writer, and in fact I’d say it is inseparable from it, as my own outsiderness is inseparable from who I am, from my experience of the world.

Writing a character with my specific eye condition was something of an experiment for me. At the most basic level, I wanted to see if I could do it! Which isn’t as simple as it sounds. There’s that old adage about how a fish would describe water, when water is what it swims in. That’s what the experience of writing about my disability felt like for me. I hope it works. More than that, I hope it works within the context of the story. Only readers will be able to tell me if I’ve pulled it off.

One of the many effective elements in this book is the crime/murder mystery narrative. What, for you, are the hallmarks of excellent crime/mystery fiction? What is the key to writing a compelling crime/mystery narrative?

I have been a passionate reader of crime and mystery fiction for many years. Early favorites were the British writers Ruth Rendell, especially in her Barbara Vine incarnation, and P. D. James. As a reader, what I loved especially about this genre of fiction was its potential for exploring character. Barbara Vine’s novels in particular work by introducing us to a character, or a cast of characters, and then gradually upending everything we think we know about them. The action often hinges around a murder, but more than that, Vine’s books are about secrets, and the unearthing of unpalatable truths. Patricia Highsmith—another touchstone writer for me—is obsessed with the duality of existence, the face we present to the world and its obverse, sometimes darker reality.

As a writer, what I value increasingly about crime fiction is its flexibility. People tend to think of detective novels as formulaic—you have your murder, your troubled detective, your weird set of suspects—but in fact the format is incredibly versatile and thus incredibly freeing. As a good friend of mine once said to me, “all you need is a crime or a criminal to write about,” and once you have that in place you can take your story literally anywhere. Readers like a mystery, and so long as you play fair with them, they will follow you a long way in pursuit of a solution. The armature of detective fiction will support any amount of formal experimentation and narrative jump cuts, all the things I adore.

Of course, it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that you are presenting readers with a question, and that question needs answering. I don’t think there’s any harm in being ambiguous, in suggesting a solution rather than setting it in stone, but you have to give the reader something, or they are going to feel cheated.

What was the hardest or most challenging aspect of writing this book, and how did you deal with the challenge?

I remember I once set out to write a story about a serial killer, a WW1 soldier who found himself unable to fit back into civilian life, and so went to the bad. The problem was, the more I wrote about that character, the more I got inside his mind, the more I understood that he wasn’t a natural criminal, that the act of murder was, if anything, even more shocking to him following his war experiences. The story I set out to write changed substantially as a result—and eventually ended up as my novella, The Harlequin.

I found myself in a similar situation with the character of Johnny in The Good Neighbours. I knew from the outset that Johnny was a violent man, an uncomfortable presence to have around. I started out disliking Johnny intensely—but then I started writing from his point of view, and a whole other story emerged. Getting to know Johnny properly changed the trajectory of The Good Neighbours substantially, and I think of Johnny’s sections as the heart of the novel. I wanted readers to understand what Cath discovers—that Johnny is far from innocent, but that does not necessarily make him guilty of murder.

The last live literary event I went to before lockdown was an interview with the Scottish writer David Keenan, author the edge-of-genre crime novel For The Good Times, based around the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Keenan spoke of how writing for him is an act of surrender, of letting the characters speak through him. Writing the Johnny sections certainly had something of this feeling for me—like taking a deep breath, diving down, allowing the words to say what they needed to say. Not all of writing is like this for me, but when it happens it’s extraordinary, and game changing.

What is your favorite thing about this book, what do you want readers to know about it?

In writing The Good Neighbours, what I wanted most of all was to produce a book that would work perfectly well as a conventional crime novel, whilst at the same time providing an alternative dimension, an element of speculation that would give the reader something extra to think about, if they wanted to. Crime writers are incredibly skillful in weaving stories that will have readers coming back time and again, and it was important to me to incorporate some of the page-turning pleasure of that kind of narrative. There is a prosaic solution to the mystery—it’s possible to read The Good Neighbours and discount all the material about fairies and hidden people as the product of a disturbed mind. But it is this speculative element—together with the story of the Victorian artist Richard Dadd—that makes the story what it is. I hope readers will understand that and embrace the strangeness!

What else are you working on, what do you have coming up?

I have just delivered my next novel, which will be published in the spring of 2023. I wrote this book entirely within the period of lockdown, and aspects of that are reflected in the narrative, although not necessarily the aspects you might expect. Once again, there is an outsider character. Once again, there is a kind-of detective story going on. At least partly because of the period we have all been living through, with all its uncertainties and ambient anxieties, the novel took a long time to get right and many thousands of words were discarded in the process, but I am pleased with the way it finally turned out.

I also have two new stories in forthcoming anthologies, “A Storm in Kingstown” in Preston Grassman’s ruined-Earth anthology Out of the Ruins, coming in September, and “The Lichens” in Jonathan Strahan’s time-travel romance anthology Someone in Time, which is due next April.

I have just begun work on a brand-new novel, which is very much at the still-evolving stage. A scary part of the process, but that’s what I love about it.

About the Author

Arley Sorg is co-Editor-in-Chief at Fantasy Magazine. A 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate, he writes SF/F/H, reviews for Cascadia Subduction Zone Magazine, is senior editor at Locus magazine, and associate editor at Lightspeed and Nightmare magazines.

5,000 Words a Day:
A Conversation with Cat Rambo

Arley Sorg

Getting started in genre in the 2000s, with sales at venues including Strange Horizons, Talebones, Subterranean, and Fantasy Magazine, Cat Rambo now has published more stories than many authors will ever write.

Rambo was born in College Station, TX, and grew up in South Bend, IN, in a house that was full of books, with a family that let them read whatever they wanted. In elementary school, Rambo was reading Heinlein and Norton, hiding science fiction novels inside textbooks. Rambo attended Indiana University for a year, then took a break and worked in a bookshop, ultimately earning an English degree and a certificate in Gender Studies from the University of Notre Dame. They earned a master’s from “the second-oldest creative writing program in the United States”: Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University; then they began a PhD program at Indiana University, eventually pursuing a career in computer security. They worked in New York before moving to Seattle, and they worked as a manager for Microsoft.

In 2005 Rambo quit their job and attended the Clarion West Writers Workshop. That was the year they decided to focus on writing. In 2007 they began a four-year term as editor of Fantasy Magazine, and in 2014 became vice president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). In 2015 they began their two-term run as SFWA president.

Besides being one of the most recognizable “friendly faces” in the industry, and being a seriously prolific short fiction author with works out in most of the venues SFWA defines as professional, Rambo has also garnered a number of accolades. Rambo’s stories have appeared on Locus Recommended Reading lists since the 2000s, and they received a 2012 World Fantasy Award nomination for editing Fantasy. Other notable nods include collection Eyes Like Sky and Coal and Moonlight as a 2010 Endeavor Award nominee, “Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain” as a 2012 Nebula Award finalist, a 2016 Compton Crook Award nomination for their debut novel, Beasts of Tabat, and a 2020 Nebula Award win for novelette Carpe Glitter/

Rambo has lectured and taught at a variety of respected venues, including Clarion West. For more than a decade Rambo has also run their own series of classes: The Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers. Their latest novels are the third book in the Tabat series, Exiles of Tabat (WordFire Press); and You Sexy Thing (Tor).

ISFDB lists well over a hundred short stories—and is probably incomplete (your website says 200+). How did COVID-19 impact your writing processes or habits, and how did you deal with those disruptions?

I think it’s closer to 300 now, definitely if we’re counting Patreon stuff and/or reprints! It helps that I’ve primarily been a short story writer, which makes the fact that I’ve got not one but two novels coming out in 2021 a little extra weird. There should be another two in 2022 if I stay on target.

COVID’s isolation, paradoxically, ended up keeping me productive by connecting me more deeply to other writers on a day-to-day basis. I used the Discord channel associated with my Patreon to create a community where we set up multiple daily coworking sessions as well as social events, like a group to discuss classic science fiction stories, or a “clean and chat” where we meet and clean our working spaces while talking about our lives. Those sessions kept—and continue to keep—me going, but 2020 was definitely a year where it was often hard to get started.

At those times, I had to remind myself, more than once, that in 2020, just existing was a victory. In this perilous and interesting era, staying buoyant is sometimes hard to achieve. Turning to my online community was a move that kept me from stagnating. I finished a number of stories as well as a novel in 2020—but I couldn’t have done it without my community.

Looking at your years of writing, were there times when you struggled to be productive, when you couldn’t sell work, or when you weren’t sure about writing as a career?

I came to F&SF writing a little later in life than a lot of my fellow writers, which means I’ve had a chance to witness how unpredictable life can be and how much luck can affect one’s existence. I think that gives me a better perspective on what success is—to me if I’m writing and happy about what I’m writing, that’s a successful day. And my superpower is my sense of humor—if you can laugh at a punch, it’s going to affect you a lot less.

As a full-time writer/teacher, I have the luck to be able to focus on writing rather than working at a day job, but it’s also an obligation. When you’re your own boss, it’s easy to be a lot harder on yourself than any boss could be.

But yeah—there’s always those moments where one wakes in the middle of the night, thinking “How did I get here and what the hell am I doing?” But I suspect they’re there no matter what field you’re in. If you can’t sleep at all, maybe you get up and do something. And you always know the next day will come and there will probably be some other moments in it that will be pretty enjoyable. That’s what keeps me going.

For people who haven’t read your short fiction, if they were to look at one or two of your pieces, which would want them to look at, and why?

I have a lot of different flavors of fiction! A few that I am particularly proud of are “Red in Tooth and Cog” (near future SF, appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction), “Clockwork Fairies” (steampunk), and “Magnificent Pigs” (fantasy, Strange Horizons). I was lucky enough to have LeVar Burton read the last of those on his podcast, which was a huge thrill.

I do keep a page on my website that includes links to everything that’s available. Two favorite stories from this year are “Crazy Beautiful” (near future SF, appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) and “Every Breath a Question, Every Heartbeat an Answer” (fantasy novelette, appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies).

Your debut novel was Beasts of Tabat, published with WordFire Press in 2015, which saw two sequels: Hearts of Tabat and Exiles of Tabat. What were some of the things you learned, in the process of writing and publishing these books, that went into You Sexy Thing?

One major thing that I’ve had to learn is how to revise. I hate editing my own work and finding out how to grapple with a manuscript despite that feeling of mingled loathing and terror has been invaluable. By now I’ve got a road map in my head of what the stages look like. I know, for example, that the draft of the sequel that I’m working on will be done at the end of the month and enter the next stage, where it gets put aside for a bit before I come back and begin the first edit, and I know what to look for in that first edit in order to do things as efficiently and effectively as possible.

Another thing I’ve learned over time is working with points of view. Beasts of Tabat originally was something like six or seven points of view, which ended up getting pared down to two. You Sexy Thing was my answer to Ann Leckie’s saying she’d love to see a space opera in omniscient point of view, and I am pretty sure that would have been a total nightmare if I hadn’t been used to sorting out plot threads according to which character(s) they’re attached to.

But most importantly, the earlier novels have taught me to trust myself, to know that I can turn ideas into a (sometimes incoherent) draft, and that I’ll be able to take that and make something worthwhile. Writing depends greatly on being able to trust yourself, and by now I’ve done it enough to know that I can face a blank page and fill it in a way that pleases me.

Where the Tabat books are fantasy, You Sexy Thing is marketed as space opera. What, for you, are the hallmarks of excellent space opera?

I love space opera! For me, excellent space opera involves an enthralling, surprising, engaging cast of characters, plenty of action and twists and eyeball kicks, and universe-spanning plotlines.

There’s a Brian Aldiss quote I ran across at one point, talking about space opera and its sense of fun: “What space opera does is take a few lightyears and a pinch of reality and inflate thoroughly with melodrama, dreams, and a seasoning of screwy ideas.” So lots of sense of wonder—but also plenty of people stuff getting enacted in front of that backdrop.

You Sexy Thing also wanders into the realm of hopepunk, and my hope is for more and more hopepunk space operas, because they’re just plain fun.

What was the journey with You Sexy Thing? What was the inspiration, how did it all start, and how did it develop?

Ann Leckie has taught a space opera class a few times for my online school, and in talking about omniscient point of view, she inspired me to try something along that vein, using an ensemble of characters rather than a single point of view.

The book was a bit of an experiment for me with a new writing process, inspired by Chris Fox’s 5,000 Words Per Hour. I am not capable of that word rate, but I found if I got up at 5:30 a.m., went and worked out while thinking about what I was going to write, and then came home and got butt in chair and writing while avoiding the Internet entirely (no email, no social media, no texts, no web browsing), I could put out a solid 5,000 words a day. I wrote the book over the course of a month, thinking that I would self-publish it and make it the first of a series. My agent, Seth Fishman, had different ideas about it, and sold it to Macmillan imprint Tor as the first title in a three-book deal, and it’s been a pretty exciting ride since then.

Did the project change in significant ways from the initial draft?

Seth suggested a major change that broke my heart and also made it a better book, but I can’t tell you what it was because it’s a bit of a spoiler. I will say that change also had a pretty major effect on the sequel and is part of the plot engine driving it.

Overall, the draft didn’t change that much. My theory is that the 5k a day method keeps me so immersed in the story that I track it better and make fewer mistakes, and it’s been my approach to the current book as well.

Back in your 2015 Clarkesworld interview, when asked about editing Fantasy Magazine you spoke about the experience “inspiring an irrational hatred of pirates . . . ” Is there an irony in the antagonist of this novel being a pirate?

That is totally by design, and you have delighted my heart by noticing it.

In the book, Niko and her crew are former military personnel who get pulled into action. What is the appeal of military characters in stories, why do we so often come back to soldiers of various kinds?

Given my surname, the narrative of the former soldier, placed in conflict with the system they’ve worked to protect, has a certain resonance. This is something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about in the last year or so because how do we achieve peace while valorizing violence in the way that our media really seems to? This discussion is so timely—police narratives sure don’t read the same once one understands how complicit American police have been in brutalizing many groups.

Military heroes please us because one version of the stories about them is that they are often people who place the collective good over their own to the point where they are willing to give their bodies, and possibly their lives, in its service. Viewed through another lens, we can see these stories as redemption narratives, where swords are beaten into ploughshares, and those who have destroyed, now protect. Old soldiers don’t just have skills—they have the experience to know how and when and why to use them, and they know that violence may sometimes be unavoidable, but it’s usually not the best solution.

Military characters are also a great place for the story of found family, of finding a place among people who understand and value you. That’s a timely story, but also one that will never get old.

What are your favorite things about Niko and Atlanta?

They are two sides of the same coin; Atlanta is Niko at a younger age, trying to find out her place in the world. At the same time, her inexperience and naïveté let me explain things to the reader; the universe outside Pax is wide and full of new things for her. Both, though, are trying to do their best in an often-bewildering world, which is one of the most endearing things any character can do.

What was the hardest or most challenging aspect of writing this book, and how did you deal with the challenge?

The hardest part was ignoring the Internet while I wrote those daily 5k word installments, particularly at first, because I was worried I’d miss an important email. But I did learn that the world would not implode if I didn’t answer an email until the afternoon.

Focus is, I think, one of the most common problems for a writer and it does take being able to envision the end you’re trying to get to. I set a goal of 80k words and rewarded myself with something that I wouldn’t have bought for myself except as a major reward. I collect Breyer horses, and the one that represents having finished the novel is pretty sparkly, both in reality and my perception.

What is important or special about this book for you, what do you want readers to know about it, beyond blurbs and reviews?

This is the first time I’ve written a book where the characters are so alive for me that I can talk to them in my head. (When the book deal came through, they were quite excited.) I know Niko and her crew and they’re part of my life now. Book two introduces another character that I just adore, and I hope that readers love my characters as much as I do.

What else are you working on, what do you have coming up that you’d like folks to know about?

I’m finishing up Devil’s Gun, the sequel, right now and already have a (very) rough outline of the third book as well as an even rougher sketch of the overall series arc, which I tentatively have drawn out as ten books total. I love reading long-running series, and I want to create one where, by the final book, readers are beside themselves to find out how it all ends, particularly the love story.

I’m also drafting the final book of the Tabat Quartet, Gods of Tabat, and thinking that I might collect all the Tabat short stories and novelettes into one book to come out around the same time. After that, I think I’m done with Tabat for a little while, although another idea for a novel set there has been sidling up in recent months. Jenn Brozek and I also have an anthology coming out in 2022, The Reinvented Heart, which I think is the strongest anthology I’ve edited yet.

I’d like to get back and finish up a serial project, Baby Driver, for my Patreon supporters. Another book that’s in the pipeline is a middle-grade novel that I’m about to do a pretty major revision of. I’ve also got a baseball novella that I want to get finished up in the next couple of years, and a literary horror novel that is partially written and would like to be completed. So—lots of projects, all of them highly enjoyable to work on! The only real problem is getting them all done. :)

About the Author

Arley Sorg is co-Editor-in-Chief at Fantasy Magazine. A 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate, he writes SF/F/H, reviews for Cascadia Subduction Zone Magazine, is senior editor at Locus magazine, and associate editor at Lightspeed and Nightmare magazines.

Editor’s Desk:
Ten+ Years of Translation

Neil Clarke

August quietly marked the tenth anniversary of our first translation, “The Fish of Lijiang” by Chen Qiufan, translated by Ken Liu. So why am I talking about it a month later? Well, to be honest, it sort of snuck up on me.

I am not the first editor to feel passionately about the importance of translated and international science fiction. Many editors before me have shared the sentiment, sometimes warning us of the hazards of isolation. One of my favorite quotes on this subject is by Lester Del Rey and was published in an editorial of International Science-Fiction in June 1968:

“ . . . our stories are set to large numbers of fans and translators all over the world, while our own authors and fans seldom get even a hint of the work being done in our field by others. We’re in serious danger of becoming the most provincial science-fiction readers—and writers—on earth.”

The magazine that published that editorial—which focused on translated works—folded after two issues. Just a few years later, in 1971, Donald Wollheim would write the following in the introduction to Science Fiction: What’s It All About (the book itself by Sam J. Lundwall translated from Swedish):

“We science fiction readers whose native language happens to be English—tend to a curious sort of provincialism in our thinking regarding the boundaries of science fiction. We tend to think that all that is worth reading and all that is worth noticing is naturally written in English. In our conventions and our awards and our discussions we slip into the habit of referring to our favorites as the world’s best this and the ‘world’s best that.’”

Two years later, Franz Rottensteiner wrote in the introduction to View from Another Shore: European Science Fiction:

“I am afraid that European (or Japanese or Chinese) SF will be restricted, in English and most other translations, to special anthologies like this one, and they can only provide some hopefully interesting sidelights to the enormous corpus of science fiction, some tiny additional dots on the SF map. But it would be possible to put together, given good translators, some very good compilations of new stories from Europe.”

Over the next few decades, those editors would see their fears come to pass. While some translated short stories continued to appear in English-language SF magazines, they remained extremely rare. Meanwhile English-language SF continued to be translated into an increasing number of languages, sometimes dominating those foreign markets. Here, translated works were often considered lesser works. When you could find them, they were, as Franz predicted, predominantly in anthologies that focused on filling that void and largely catering to a pre-existing, but small audience that was more curious or open-minded about translation.

In 2007’s The SFWA European Hall of Fame, James Morrow states in his introduction:

“Science fiction occupies a paradoxical place in the landscape of the narrative arts. One the one hand, SF writers attempt to address the human condition from the broadest possible perspective. The genre routinely invites us to regard ourselves as riders on a revolving planet, not simply as citizens of circumscribed communities. It implicitly insists that we periodically identify with the species Homo Sapiens, not merely with our ethnic heritages, religious upbringings, dysfunctional families, and personal neuroses.”

The US became a regional community of readers who were perfectly willing to accept stories about beings on other worlds, but unwilling to read works from other parts of our own world.

I’ve often remarked that English-language SF is something of an invasive species in foreign markets, often making up a significant percentage of the published works, choking opportunities for local writers. Others argue that these efforts planted seeds in places where science fiction didn’t have strong roots. That might even be true in some cases, but why then has there been such a lack of interest (here and sometimes even there) in reading the fruits of those plantings?

Before Clarkesworld, I ran an online bookstore for almost eight years. One of the things that the bookstore was known for was for stocking a very wide assortment of English-language genre magazines from around the world. By the time the magazine was launched and James’ anthology was published, I was already among the curious. (Amusingly, it would be many years before I read his introduction, as I almost always skip them and head straight for the stories.)

Clarkesworld has always accepted digital submissions. Right out of the gate, that provided more opportunities to have my curiosity satisfied, and occasionally it was. You might wonder why digital submissions make a difference. In the days of print submissions, authors would have to mail their stories to a publication and they would have to include a self addressed postage paid envelope for their response. That cost could be a significant deterrent for international submissions, regardless of language. Depending on how many markets a story was sent to, it was entirely possible for the author to walk away with a net loss even when published. Removing that financial hurdle created new opportunities for both editors and authors.

Over time, it became clear that there were still some major obstacles left in the way. Significant damage had been done by decades of denying the existence of the rest of the world, whether or not I myself had participated. Authors from outside the US often felt unwelcome and still do. This is why you’ll see me encouraging them on social media or at events. It’s slow and tedious, but it’s become easier over time as our actions (what we publish) have spoken even louder than our words.

The bigger problem, however, is the language barrier. I’m monolingual. That effectively places a burden on non-English speaking authors that want to be published in Clarkesworld. We’re a small shop, so I couldn’t come up with a viable alternative to get past this one. Finances were also a concern. Translators should be paid and that kind of work isn’t cheap. It became something I’d bring up at conventions in conversations and on panels. Though I’m not certain, I believe this is how our first translation ended up making its way to us. We had worked with Ken Liu previously and he thought we’d be interested based on things we had said.

We were and immediately indicated our interest in considering more translations should he work on any. Over the next few years, Ken and John Chu translated several stories we went on to publish. Unbeknownst to us, what we considered a personal happy fortune was noticed by Storycom in China and they approached us with an offer, one we thought at first was simply too good to be true. Months later, we hammered out an agreement and I launched a Kickstarter campaign to cover our side of the costs. Much to our surprise, our curiosity was shared by enough people to both fund it quickly and boost subscriptions to the point of the new program becoming self-sufficient. (We had decided from the start that we would not return to Kickstarter for a second round of funding. It would live or die on the interest of our readers and their willingness to subscribe.)

Ten years since the publication of “The Fish of Lijiang,” our Chinese translation program with Storycom continues. We’ve also published a number of translations from other languages, including a set of nine, grant-funded Korean stories.

A few months ahead of launching our project with Storycom, I said the following in the November 2014 editorial:

“I want translations to become something normal. They shouldn’t stand out or be special because of where they originate. Regularly publishing stories from other parts of the world is the best way to do that. If something is important, make it part of who you are.”

It’s entirely possible that the reason I forgot such a big anniversary was because it’s become so “normal” that it didn’t even occur to me. It’s truly become part of who we are and something we continue to seek methods to improve upon, like the Spanish-language project we’ll undertake later this year. (We hope that one can become a replicable model for others to employ.)

Thanks go to Ken Liu and Chen Qiufan for helping us take the first step, to Storycom, LTI Korea, and our subscribers/supporters for the financial support to feed the fire, and to our readers for being among the curious.

The journey is far from complete. Together we’ll discover some amazing stories. I look forward to what the next ten years bring to the table and maybe I’ll even remember that anniversary.

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine and Forever Magazine; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a nine-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, The Eagle has Landed, and the Best Science Fiction of the Years series. His next anthology, The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 6, will be published in November by Night Shade Books. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two sons.

Cover Art:
Vimana

Daniele Gay

About the Artist

Daniele Gay was born the same year Star Wars was released and therefore grew up on bread and science fiction. He always loved fantasy and learned to appreciate horror. Since 2008, he has been working in digital art, where he focuses on exploring the fascinating and mysterious sides of these genres. His photo montages have appeared on book covers and in various high-tech magazines. Always demanding more from his work, he started working in 3D, which gives him the freedom to create anything he can imagine.

His path has drawn him to the mystery and charm of what lies behind UFOs and the appearance of aliens. He faces the subject without bias, conscientious of the combination of imagination, history, and truth, all wrapped in the veil of mystery. Daniele believes this is part of human history and can help us change the vision of the present—which in this historical period needs it so much—to improve our future.