Paper of Elephants

Brenda Cooper

Eleanor watched the tourists’ faces as Siaal finished the last flourish on the painting in front of him, a bright blue streak simulating a sky. Three visitors watched the elephant hold his trunk straight up for a moment, the paintbrush clutched in his curled trunk. The small family spoke Italian but lived in America. The parents were old enough to have wrinkles around their eyes and the man hunched even though he couldn’t be over forty. His short wife had a wide torso and her mouth smiled easily but rested in a frown. The little girl might be ten. Her dark hair had been tamed into a high pony with a red ribbon that matched her jumpsuit, and dark curls dangled around her ears.

Siaal carefully twisted his trunk to drop the paintbrush into the water-bucket on a stool beside the steel easel. She stood still while the video of his work streamed to Eleanor’s watch. She checked the quality carefully, quietly. A small bright square video of a big, mud-colored animal making a small blue line of sky. She nodded and pushed Siaal lightly in the chest to signal him to back up.

The elephant did, careful not to bump Eleanor’s hastily built tripod. It held her ring light, a phone, and a small solar panel that pulled just enough juice from the African sun to power both objects. She held her breath, silently urging Siaal not to get too close to the little family. Tourists were rare since COVID-19 and then SARS-22. He turned, carefully, following her finger signals, and she let her breath out when he stood facing the visitors. He knelt briefly, a stately bow.

The little girl gasped in wonder.

Eleanor smiled and said, “He likes you,” even though it was merely a trick Eleanor had taught the young bull across the last three long months. In her experience, elephants tolerated strange people; they didn’t like them. They responded far better to people they knew.

She’d been careful and positive for months on end, and he had learned. As he stood silently, waiting, her pride in him made her feel light on her feet. She took three plum-sized marula fruits from her pocket and encouraged the tourists to each toss one toward him. The girl’s high-pitched laugh as he scooped up the yellow globe with his trunk sent glee across the grasslands.

Siaal held the fruit and lumbered toward his pen, a large enclosure made of posts and electrified metal fencing. The small family turned back to her, beaming their pleasure in the experience.

They would buy the painting; she was sure of that. And God knew, the money would help. But last night, her brother had been at her again, and she had promised to try his crazy scheme. Now might be her only chance for a while. She stood by the painting, a simple tree, a dab of yellow for the sun, and the single line of blue for sky. Remarkable only because it had been painted by an elephant. Well, and also because it had been painted by an elephant who wasn’t forced to paint. “It took three years to train him to paint,” she told her small audience. “He can do three different scenes, and he even varies them a little on his own.”

The girl’s deep brown eyes widened. “Do all elephants paint?”

A smile warmed Eleanor. “No. But they play. They can be very creative creatures in their own way. We taught him to paint so people like you would come to see him without needing to ride on him.”

The girl looked in the direction Siaal had gone. “I would be afraid to ride on him.”

“They can be gentle. I have ridden him. But it is cruel to put different riders on them every day or to make them ride in circles on ropes, which is what happens in some places that do not love their elephants.”

“Does he like to paint?” she asked.

“He seems to. He gets rewarded with the fruit and then a good back-scratch. That’s where he went. My brother David is waiting there to give it to him.”

The father glanced at his watch and leaned toward Eleanor. “Can we buy the painting?”

“No.” She smiled. “And yes. We are selling each of Siaal’s paintings as limited-edition NFTs.” She paused, decided to clarify. “That stands for non-fungible token. It means, we sell the paintings only as digital art. If you are willing to pay the minimum price, you can have the number two painting.”

He gave her a little surprised look. Not unkind. But surprised. The look in his eyes told her he understood her offer, was maybe considering.

She fished in her pocket for a lighter, held the barely visible flame to the corner of the painting.

The mother put a hand over her mouth. “I want the real one.”

Eleanor held her hand still, the flame still two inches from the paper. A little wind might take the flame to the paper, but she stood still and unreactive. Her brother David had wanted her to burn it no matter what, had said each NFT should be purely digital. She had wanted to save the paper with equal fervor. He was crazy to think this would save the elephants, and so why give up the one sure thing? Even if the tourists who watched the painting didn’t buy it, she could sell it on their website.

The girl looked confused. She sidled toward her dad.

Eleanor pressed. “If you buy the NFT, I’ll also give you the paper copy. You can be the only person in the whole world who owns the physical and the digital experience. That’s the photo,” she added, nodding at the camera and the ring light. It held the video of Siaal painting the last line of sky, and if this man bought the NFT, she would use it to take a careful photo of the painting. “That goes with the NFT.”

He frowned down at the sere grass beneath his feet.

Eleanor crossed her fingers behind her back.

“How much?”

“A thousand dollars.” Eleanor held her breath.

The mother shook her head and turned to walk away.

The little girl took her father’s hand.

They didn’t seem rich. Well, they had to be some variety of rich to be here. But not super-rich. More like a middle-class family who had stretched for a very rare vacation. Was she asking too much?

David’s voice in her head: you have to set the price high enough to attract the next buyer. The flame danced inches from her fingers; she felt the heat on her knuckle where she clutched the trigger tight, keeping the dancing flame engaged with the air and just out of reach of the painting.

She held her ground, feeling like a destructive, desperate angel. They had a month in expenses due. Maybe. A thousand dollars would cover almost another week. And if the NFT sold to anyone else, another week. Or more, if David knew anything at all. And if this family didn’t buy it? The next tourists wouldn’t be here for eight days.

The man looked down at his daughter, took her chin in his palm, whispered something she couldn’t hear. Then he straightened and returned his attention to Eleanor. “If I can have the number one.”

A smart move. Another thing David had told her not to do. He had said the two of them should buy the number one. As if they had a thousand dollars. Crazy brother.

He’d left this to her. She could choose to bluff, but they couldn’t afford to lose. So she nodded in return, and he smiled, and so did she. Eleanor let go of the trigger on the lighter and moved her hand away.

After their orange jeep drove away, she jogged to the elephant enclosures. The three elephants in the large enclosure had stripped most of the acacia trees. The sight filled Eleanor with a familiar sense of frustration and helplessness. Three elephants were all they could feed and care for by hand. Or protect, for that matter. She hadn’t had the heart to cut off their tusks, and that decision made them targets. Although she couldn’t see how anyone could stand to harm them. She adored every inch of their wrinkly faces and trunks.

When she and David came here, she was just shy of twenty, and the preserve had hosted almost a thousand animals. But then, they received regular checks from governments, from rich people, from a handful of nonprofits. Now, she was thirty-one and David was thirty-three, and they only made enough to keep ten drones fueled to watch the poachers, and money to pay three locals to act as drone-runners. Ten drones against far more poachers. Not enough.

All three of the young elephants had lost their herds. Two cows, Emma and Angel, and Siaal. All three were African elephants, with large ears and gray bodies that shaded brown in the morning or evening light. They were friends, but not a herd. With no old elephants to guide them, she and David kept them safe by keeping them close. Siaal was as close to a pet as possible for an elephant. Eleanor had trained him to paint in hopes of drawing tourists. Elephant painting had been a fad in the early 2000s, but then it came out that the elephant artists were mistreated. She had carefully trained Siaal with kindness and marula fruit. She wrote poetry and read it to him, and oddly, she thought that helped. Not that he understood the poetry, but he liked her company enough to stay near when she perched on the enclosure wall and read to him. He was lonely enough—and young enough when she started—that it worked.

Her brother came up to her from inside the pen, shadowed by Emma, who had taken to following him around and periodically tapping his shoulder with her trunk. The average male human being dwarfed David, and Emma made him look even shorter. “Well?” David asked.

“I had to give him number one, but he paid our minimum.”

He shook his head. “You are too weak,” he said, his words serious but not unkind. “This is the very first elephant painting NFT. It could be worth a lot.”

She sighed. Her brother might have gone off a digital deep end. “If only Siaal was named Jack Dorsey.”

David laughed. “Maybe we should have named him Tweet.”

She shrugged. “That’s almost a week of food for them.”

“Two days. It cost money to set up the sale.”

The breath of hope that had been fluttering around her heart faded, but she said nothing. They’d have to sell an NFT to every visitor. She still felt amazed they’d sold one. “For all of them?”

He climbed up to sit next to her. “Just this once.”

“I gave them the real thing, too.”

He returned to shaking his head. “You really don’t believe in NFTs, do you?”

“The little girl wanted it.”

His voice had a little tease in it. “You’ll see, sister.” His eyes shone. “This will work!”

She gazed out across the dusky enclosure, picking out Siaal’s bulk by the pond. Her favorite elephant needed for her brother to be right.

“You’ll see,” David whispered.

The next morning, she opened her mail while she nursed her first cup of bitter coffee. Three bills, two past due. One request for a visit. In three weeks. An older couple. Lastly, a note from the father. He thanked them for the visit, and closed the letter with, “Thank you for the NFT idea. We shared the video with Annalisa’s grandmother, and she bought the second NFT. We told her she didn’t need to because she could see ours any time. We even posted it on our FamilyOuting page. But she wanted to thank you for the visit. Support the elephants.”

Her next sip of coffee tasted better.

When she shared the note with David, his smile lit the whole kitchen. “I told you! I bet we will sell them all today.”

She wasn’t at all sure why anyone else would buy one. It was a miracle there was a grandmother willing to buy something she couldn’t possibly need just to say thank you. David had carefully explained to her all NFTs were on the digital galleries and that strangers could buy them, but why would a stranger care? But it felt so good to see him look happy that she didn’t even tell him about the bills.

The next day, the mail brought nothing but another bill. The days dragged, three hot and one unbearable. One, blessedly, with rain.

No one purchased the number three.

They went over the bills together the night before the next visitors came, guessing at how little they could get away with paying each of them to stay afloat. Well, she amended silently, to keep sinking slowly.

The anticipated tourists arrived in three jeeps, rumbling up the washboard road and sending the smell of disturbed dust high into the air. The jeeps looked battered, and the geriatric people in them creaked carefully out of the wide doors with David’s help. She had to help three of them across the uneven ground to the chairs. She did her usual morning lecture, telling the tale of how she and David, two college kids back then, came here and just couldn’t leave the elephants. Then they patiently assisted all eight tourists back into the jeeps. David sat in the lead jeep, directing them off through another dust cloud. While they were gone, Eleanor set up the easel and the ring light, fretting so much about Siaal backing up around the chairs that she rearranged them three times. It had to be perfect. She had to sell the paintings.

When the jeeps rumbled back two hours later, David jumped out and the vehicles kept going, their wheels dusting the air with bits of road as they went. He flopped down on one of the plastic chairs. “They were too tired.”

Eight visitors paid for a few days of expenses. There were more than a few days before the next tourists would come. She glanced at David, mouthing the title to one of her poems. “Damn the Hard Sharpness of the World.”

He responded with another title. “Hope for the Elephants. Thin but Real.” Well, a title and a first line.

The older couple came. Just the two of them. They enjoyed the lecture and the tour, and she fed them each a glass of cold beer while Siaal painted his boat scene. A single sailboat on a river, a high bank, two trees, and the streak of blue that he always ended with. The woman drowsed against her husband’s shoulder, her gray hair sticking to her forehead even though David had erected one of the bright blue tarps as a sunshade.

They stayed seated while Siaal backed away. He bowed to them anyway, obedient and well trained. She tossed him an extra marula and turned to the couple. “Did you like that?”

The man smiled. “I suppose you’ll sell us the painting now.” His voice sounded flat.

She spoke carefully. “If you want it. We’re turning each piece of work Siaal does to NFTs. Do you know what they are?”

The man smiled again, his smile a pale pink line that just barely curved up the edges of his face. “A way to convince people to buy things that are freely available. Not me.” He stood, holding a hand out to help his wife stand. “But we’ll give you ten dollars for the real version.”

Ten dollars? She had already checked the recording of Siaal painting. It was good. “We burn them, so that the painting only exists in digital form.” Anger drove her to tug the lighter out of her pocket and clutch it tightly in her sweaty hand.

The wife stirred just enough to hold out a hand. “Thank you for your story. The elephants are lucky to have you.”

Eleanor bit back a retort and tears and walked them to their jeep. Everything about their slim tourist trade depended on reviews. “Thank you for coming. We hope to see you again.”

As she picked up the chairs and stacked them carefully in the animal-proof brick shed, every step felt heavy and slow. After she was done, she started walking. By herself. Not a good idea in Zimbabwe, but she carried a gun and circled near the house she and David shared, a half-mile circle she repeated over and over, her steps soft on the dry earth. How were they going to keep from losing this place? What would happen to Siaal, to Emma, to Angel? The whole goddamned world ought to care, dammit. Elephants were smart, and beautiful, and social, and they felt emotions as least as deep as humans. Maybe more.

Why didn’t everyone care?

The easel and the tripod with its cheery light still stood in the cleared field. In the dusk, it looked like a pathetic attempt to brighten up a four-year-old’s artwork. An early evening breeze curled one edge of the paper. She walked up to it, stared. She checked the phone she used as a camera, found the battery full and the device on.

She pushed record, turned toward the camera, and jerked the lighter out of her pocket. Her hand shook as she spoke to the camera. “We . . . ” Her voice stuck in her throat. “We wanted to save them.” She pictured Siaal the same way they had lost so many other elephants, dead with his tusks ripped free and his body left, utterly without value to humans as soon as it lost both ivory and the light of intelligence. Tears stung her eyes. “We wanted to save them.” She moved her hand and let the flame catch the edges of the paper. The simple little boat burned quickly, the blue line the last bit of color to succumb to the rush of flame. In spite of the fact that no spark caught on the grass, it felt like the sanctuary was on fire.

Even though she probably didn’t need to, she sprayed everything down with water from a hand-sprayer they’d staged here. She felt like the sanctuary was burning all around her, but she wasn’t going to kill it herself. She lugged the easel and tripod in, tucking them safely out of the African night in a corner of the veranda.

David came in ten minutes later. He washed his hands, and as he dried them, he asked her about the sale with a simple, “Well?”

“They offered ten dollars for the paper copy. That was all.”

He pulled two pieces of bread out of the fridge and rummaged deep in its guts, emerging with a jar of peanut butter. The set of his jaw told her he felt like she did.

“I burned it.”

His words were clipped. “Good for you.”

She pointed toward the old phone. “I recorded it.” She let out a long sigh. “I’m going to bed.”

“You’re not hungry?” He opened the jar and waved it under her nose.

She stepped back. “I’m too tired to eat. I’ll see you at breakfast.”

She shut the door to her room, pulled out her journal and three colors of pens. The she spent two hours writing viciously horrid poetry before falling asleep in her clothes.

Eleanor woke empty and rumpled. She finished her first cup of coffee on the screened-in porch, watching the savannah wake up around her. The warm, dry heat of dawn was usually her favorite time, but this morning even the distinctive call of a hoopoe in the bush willow tree beside the house brought sadness instead of pleasure. Yet another piece of the savannah she would miss terribly.

She put off checking email by sweeping the porch and wiping the counters. Finally, with nothing left of her morning routine, she sat on the big wicker lounge with her tablet on her lap.

Email alerts scrolled down her screen so fast she couldn’t count them as they went. Tens? More.

She felt suddenly afraid. What if they’d been targeted by someone, or some fanatical organization? She knew of a rescue operation that shut down because a visitor accused them of profiting from misused animals. Which she knew for a fact that they hadn’t been. Emails kept scrolling in.

She put the tablet down as if it might bite her. Made another cup of coffee. Came back, her heart racing even before she took a sip.

The uneasy fast-scroll had stopped. Two thousand three hundred and seven new messages.

The top one said the NFT number twenty-three had just sold for twenty-two thousand dollars.

She just stared at it, uncomprehending. David had only made ten.

She wanted to get up and pound on David’s door. Instead, she started plowing through the alert emails. Another sale. A request for a visit. Three notifications of sales, ten social media shares, another request to come see Siaal.

She got up and found an old yellow pad and a workable pen, sorted the mail by topic, and started tallying. David would do something smart with spreadsheets later, but that wasn’t for her.

The numbers didn’t feel real. Enough money. More than enough. She would have to turn some visitors away, or rehire staff, or both.

Near the bottom of the emails, she found a note from her brother. “I shared your poetry. I didn’t want to wake you. I thought it would be fine.”

Not the crap she’d written last night? She’d been so angry. Surely it wasn’t ready to share yet! Her heart sped. Their website collected all of their social media feeds, so she opened it and found an entry from late last night titled, “Hope for Elephants.”

Thin but real, threaded like tails

to trunks. How do you keep

something too big to hide safe?

Maybe you don’t

He’d put in all five stanzas. And at the bottom, a video of her burning Siaal’s picture. Not of Siaal painting. Her, full of angry words and destruction and tears. In the video, her hair looked like she’d slept in it. Her cheeks were red, one fist clenched.

David found her stunned, twirling her empty coffee cup in her hands, staring at the squiggles on the page and no longer able to even understand them. Gray eyes full of worry, he sat beside her and scooped her into a side hug. He picked up the pad of paper and stared at her scrawled totals, eyes narrowing. He glanced at her, and she shook her head, unable to find words. Her eyes were full of water, and her hands shook as she rubbed a stray tear from her cheek.

David plucked the tablet from her lap and scrolled through the messages. Then he went to his desk, silent.

She brought him coffee, knelt by his side. Her voice came out in a whisper. “Is it real?”

He smiled and nodded, his feet tapping on the wooden floor. “I think it was the poetry. And the look on your face as you burned the picture.”

She smiled back at him and burped, rubbed at her swollen eyes.

“We told a story, and people bought the story. I put out a run on fifty NFTs and then I went to bed. Nothing had sold then. I had a shot of whisky and felt like you look.”

She fisted her hand and hit him in the chest. Lightly.

“They all sold before midnight. Our time. Morning in other places.” He stood up and paced. “It had to have been the story.”

She swallowed. “How much money?”

The number he gave her made her knees weak. She stepped into him.

He held her. “It was all you, sis.”

“No. No it was us. And Siaal.”

“And poetry.”

They went, hand in hand, to check on their charges.

About the Author

Brenda Cooper writes SF, fantasy, poetry, and an occasional non-fiction essay. She is particularly interested in robotics, climate change, and the social change that must go hand in hand with fixing the human relationship to the natural world. She is the Director of Information Technology at Lease Crutcher Lewis, a premier Pacific Northwest builder. Her love of technology, science, and science fiction combines to drive her interest in the future.

Brenda lives in Washington State with her wife, Toni, and their multiple border collies, some of whom actually get to herd sheep. She loves to exercise, garden, read, and talk with friends.

The Answer Was Snails

Bo Balder

The alien must have been reading up on humidity conditions for its terrarium, because we’d already gotten three mistings today.

I lifted my head above the mud, where I’d lain hidden since dawn. I breathed through my snorkel reed, which was nearing the end of its usefulness. Another obstacle in my already busy day.

It was midmorning. The dawn creatures stopped slithering and screeching, making it marginally safe enough to go get breakfast. The alien provided our food because the terrarium wasn’t big enough for a real ecology. And anyway, it was a hodgepodge of plants and species the alien found pleasing. Or were on sale. The alien didn’t seem particularly smart. The terrarium was a mess.

Needless to say, there were no plants or animals here I could eat. The upside was, they couldn’t eat me either, or at least, digest me. Still, the stupider ones kept trying.

I shook off that thought. I needed to focus. This was the only food I’d get today.

To reach the food dispenser, I needed to climb up out of the safety of the undergrowth and cross a stretch of gravel. Hell on the feet, since my shoes had long since died, and I’d be in full view of the flyers for at least half a minute. I hid under a pungent magenta leaf and peered up at the higher reaches of the terrarium. It looked safe for now.

I sprint-stumbled to the dispenser and banged my fist on the button. A variety of foodstuffs spilled out. Somewhere in there was a green stick that I could eat. Once, the alien had changed manufacturers, and I got very sick from the orange bar I used to eat. It took me a week of experimenting to find a new substance that was safe. I tossed out the globs and gross sticky bits that I couldn’t eat. That alone meant predators would be waking up and starting for the dispenser. There was my green bar. I had no clothes, so no pockets anymore, so I had to eat it right away or risk losing it.

The green stuff tasted of nothing, and its sticky, hardened peanut buttery texture made it hard to keep chewing and swallowing. But it kept me alive for another day. I took it one day at a time, as someone once told me, in another life.

I gobbled it down as fast as I could while I started back to the safety of the brightly striped, chittering jungle. Not to the same place as before, since I needed to get to my afternoon rendezvous with Annie as well as find new breathing reeds. I heard the buzz of a flyer approaching and managed to duck under the fronds of a fern tree just in time.

Breakfast: check. Now I had to travel to where this jungle terrarium borders on the desert one. That was tricky because sunlight started hitting the middle of the container just about then, and that woke the snails. Made them frisky. They would head for the terrarium walls, where they cleaned the glass with thousands of little sharp teeth, right across my route to the wall. And they weren’t bright enough to just eat algae. Whenever they sensed something moving, they’d ditch the algae and go after it. Maybe they’d lived like that on whatever world they came from. They were victims, just like me. Car-sized victims who would eat me or die trying.

I crept up to a point where I could see the snails. They couldn’t see me because they didn’t have eyes. Excellent movement sensors though. The group of snails moved in the right direction, away from where I wanted to go. I rose slowly. No reaction yet. I sprinted across the little beach, into the shallow stream that I had to follow to reach the other side. Several snails turned after me now. I ran faster. Almost there.

I tripped over a branch and landed flat on my face. No no no. I couldn’t end this way. I had to meet Annie. She’d be so sad if I didn’t show up. I scrambled up, dodged a giant lip of snail meat, and managed to reach the stand of giant ferns the snails always avoided. Safe.

I couldn’t stop or I’d be late. In passing, I grabbed a few reeds that I’d shape into snorkels later.

I arrived just in time to see Annie rise out of the sand and peer in my direction. If I hadn’t watched her deteriorate day by day, I wouldn’t have recognized her now, with her hair gone gray and only one eye left. We’d both become scrawny as hell. But she was my Annie always.

I slammed my hands against the glass. So did she. If I closed my eyes, I could just feel the warmth of her palms. “Annie,” I said.

She mouthed something back. We stared into each other’s faces. It was so hard. She was right there, in the desert hellscape the alien created next door to my jungle, but still completely unreachable. But for now, I took solace from her presence and told her everything about my day, even if she couldn’t hear me. She smiled, her last tooth gone since yesterday, and I smiled back.

We were still in love.

Time flew by as Annie and I pressed our bodies against the glass. After a while the vibration of the air filtration system made my fingertips tingle. Annie flagged sooner than usual.

She pointed upward, indicating it was time for her to find shelter for the dusk predators. I’d seen them. Giant crab-like creatures rose out of the sand as soon as the surface had cooled a little. At the far end of the desert terrarium, she’d found ways to hide from them.

We said goodbye and then I hurried back to my pond. I would lie a few hours submerged with my fresh reed, then I’d climb into the seedpods of a giant pea-like vine, to catch some much-needed sleep until sunrise, when it was back into the pond for me. I was tired. Tired of running around all day, never feeling completely safe, having nothing to look forward to except dozens or hundreds of identical days, until I would one day die of malnutrition, old age, or an attack.

It had to stop. As I lay in my warm, comfy mud, I thought hard. When I’d first gotten here, I’d planned to blow up the glass walls and free myself. As a former chemist, I’d expected to be able to refine the right materials from plants and minerals. But a terrarium isn’t a planet. And worse than that, without inert containers, like glass, or stone, or let’s face it, any container, it’s pretty much impossible to whip up a DIY explosive.

And when I discovered Annie, my Annie, in the desert terrarium next to me, my plans changed utterly. I could never leave her. And the look in Annie’s eyes this afternoon had made it crystal clear to me that something had to happen soon. I had to get to her.

Snails. The answer was snails.

At first, I didn’t know how to turn my daily flight from the snails into snail observation. It’s pretty much impossible, not to mention insane, to look over your shoulder when you’re running for your life. And I couldn’t get up earlier because I would be eaten by dawn creatures. At last I realized how I could create some spare time, but it would come at a cost.

“I won’t be here tomorrow,” I tried to tell Annie with gestures and sad faces. I don’t think she understood. At last, I smeared “Back day after tomorrow” onto the glass with a handful of mud.

It was harder than ever to say goodbye to her that day.

The next day, after escaping the snails, I hid and watched them instead of going to Annie. After their failed attempt to catch me, they slithered on toward the glass walls to eat algae. The suction of their wide sticky feet was so strong they could move up vertically across the glass. Their trajectory was seldom straight. They moved in lazy sine waves, doubling up on their own trails, sometimes bumping into others. Eventually they would wander toward the top of the walls, but not in any coordinated or predictable way.

Even if I could manage to climb aboard, I would have to find a way to direct the snails to the right spot. And how would I keep from falling off if the snails did a vertical climb? That was three unsurmountable problems in one fell swoop. I had no tools, nothing but my weak little nails and teeth, no containers. Mud, water, and leaves.

And alien foodstuffs!

My mind felt clearer than it had in weeks. Months, maybe. I didn’t even know how long I’d been here. I looked around. I was hiding in this spot because the snails didn’t bother me here. They refused to touch the leaves. There had to be something I could use the leaves for. I broke off a stem and sniffed the sap. Vaguely acidic, but not enough to irritate my skin. I crushed the leaves and spit on the pulp. Where the spittle had landed, it discolored from purple to orange and gave off a nasty, sulphury smell.

I wanted to see what the snails made of it. I created more stinky pulp and wrapped it around a pebble. When I tossed it to the closest snail, I missed, but the snail must have either smelled it or spotted the motion, because it turned its featureless head toward the pulp, questing, and then violently recoiled.

Good! I still needed to figure out how to violently repel a snail up the wall, but this was a first step. I imagined a reverse carrot stick contraption. If I could climb on top of a snail, I could hold the stinky pulp behind it on a stick and force it away from the stuff.

I picked out a snail with a dent in its shell. I needed one I could recognize tomorrow. But yeah, how to get on top of it? My human nails were pitiful instruments, as I’d already found out time and again. I fought my way to the jungle to where the alien had stacked some pretty colored stones. I’d tried to use them to build a shelter, but they were too smooth and polished to be stacked, even if you liberally applied mud. I’d tried hard. But as projectiles they might not be completely useless.

The rocks were so damn big and smooth I could only carry two at a time. Pretty colors my ass. I managed to lug a stack of eight to the bushes, and then I had to run to make it to my mud hideaway in time to avoid the dusk predators.

My mind whirled as I breathed through the reed tube. I was dying to continue my preparations, but I had to go to Annie tomorrow, or she would worry. I hoped she hadn’t thought I was dead.

She looked sad. I hesitated to write down my plan in case I gave her false hope. But it would be worse if I died and she didn’t know why I never came back.

“Coming over to you on snail-back.”

She brightened for a moment but then she shook her head and her shoulders slumped. She didn’t think it was possible, or real. I just knew I had to hurry before Annie lost hope and stopped evading her predators.

I crouched in position in the bushes, ready to dent a snail with my shiny decorative rocks. I started with the lightest one, like a gunner testing his range. My first throw landed short. Damn. I used to be a pretty good pitcher in high school. I looked at my skinny arm. Lack of protein, lack of exercise, lack of sleep.

I couldn’t waste too many rocks in practice throws. I didn’t have that many, and I couldn’t retrieve them unless I wanted to skip a meal. Not really an option.

I tried to remember what my father had taught me when I was a skinny kid with no muscle power. Stand just so, visualize the trajectory, use your whole arm, follow the ball.

The sapphire stone hit the chosen snail with a dull thunk. I had missed the existing dent. And I hadn’t made a new one.

A wave of hopelessness rose inside me. What was the point? All this trying and striving and hoping and planning and nothing was going to come of it anyway. I’d never get out of here. I’d never hold Annie in my arms.

I collapsed and cried like a baby. My inner clock woke me only just in time to start my dusk run.

I went back to my normal daily routine for a week or so, but even after five days I sensed my resolve rising up again and dusting itself off. Nothing had changed, but I was willing to give it another go.

I told Annie in my usual way I’d be gone the next day. She shrugged. I guess she understood by now I’d be gone tomorrow, but it didn’t make her happy. I’d tried to explain the snail plan, but she’d just looked horrified.

I waited, in hiding, for the target snail to inch by. Thunk went the ruby stone, thunk went the black and white marble one. Two hits, which was amazing, but no dent. I realized I had no idea how strong the snails’ shells were. I’d never come across shell fragments anywhere. I would have loved to find some, they’d make wonderful tools.

Did I even have a chance of breaking a snail shell?

I needed to regroup. This wasn’t going to be straightforward. I decided to bet on two things: one, practice my throwing, and two, observe the snails. Maybe I could find one with an already damaged shell.

I thought of a third way. Maybe I could glue myself to a shell instead of holding on to it. A fourth. Maybe I could hook into the softer flesh of the snail’s foot. No, that sounded like suicide.

A rumbling sound shook me out of my thoughts. What was going on? I looked up. The terrarium’s lid was being lifted. The alien was opening the lid! What would happen? If only I had a way right now to get up the glass walls. I realized I was a complete idiot. I hadn’t thought further than getting up the walls. But if—when—I did that, I’d have to face the lid on my world. There probably was one on Annie’s as well. I could never get to her. Exactly where were the filtration openings on those lids placed?

A giant tentacle descended into the terrarium. Why was it so close to me? I rolled away and hid under a dense bush. Critters living inside it started to gnaw at my skin with invisible little mouths, but I stayed put and hoped for the best.

Ah. The rocks. The pebbles. The tentacle gathered them up one by one, first the ones I’d thrown to the snails, then slithering perilously close to me, to where my stack of projectiles was. It gathered up all my laboriously lugged rocks, pebbles to it, and lifted them out of the terrarium. It dropped one right on top of the snail I’d tried to hit. The pebbles! My head felt like bursting with rage. The bloody alien cared about its pretty pebbles, and not about the poor snail it had wounded or the poor human it had imprisoned. It seemed almost like a greater injustice than what had happened to me until now.

I calmed myself down. That rage had nowhere to go except into my determination to change my circumstances.

So now what?

The lid was still open. The alien was nowhere to be seen. If only I could fly!

But then I thought of the damaged snail. It moved slowly, viscous liquid seeping out of a large crack in its shell. Now was my moment!

Frantically, I gathered up the leaves that were poisonous to the snail, mashed them, spit on them, tied them to a long stick. I was in such a hurry that I became fumble-fingered and had to do everything at least twice.

Now. I sprinted to the wounded snail, hooked my hands into the cracked shell, and hoisted myself up. The edges were sharp and gouged my palms. No matter. A little pain was nothing, and the wounds never got infected here.

I dangled the foul-smelling stick in front of the snail and it whiplashed away from it.

We were off.

I had the snail spinning around in confused circles at first, until I figured out how to steer it where I wanted to go. It was so slow! At least it seemed to me then, although they’d had me running for my life every day of my stay.

We reached the glass walls, and I directed the snail upward. The lid was still off. I could still make it.

The snail and I crossed the great stretch of wall diagonally to the corner, about two-thirds of the way up. I was sweating from swishing the stick, the anxiety, and blood dripped steadily down from my lacerated palm. The scent was confusing the snail and it was getting harder to keep it on track.

I aimed at a spot where the terraria met, roughly where I’d seen the holes on my lid. I hoped the ones in Annie’s lid would be in the same places. The snail slowed down even further. When I looked back, a trail of pale purple slime indicated our passage. It was hurt. I couldn’t allow myself to care for it. I had to reach the top.

And we did. I forced the snail from the edge of my terrarium to the closed lid on Annie’s. I let the snail rest for a moment while I checked out my options. The closest hole in the lid on Annie’s terrarium was more or less where I’d hoped it would be. I steered the flagging snail toward it. High in the distance, enormous things moved around. I didn’t let myself look in their direction, hoping that I would stay unnoticed. We were moving as fast as we could, but I still felt I was racing against the clock, against the moment the alien would come back and notice us.

We reached the edge of the hole. The snail balked, but I forced it over the edge. Slowly it slimed forward, its mobile foot searching for solid ground that wasn’t there. Almost half of it now hung over the edge, undeterred by the force field that kept the alien atmosphere out. I looked down into Annie’s terrarium. The drop would kill me.

I was paralyzed with fear, my breath wheezing painfully in my throat. I smelled sulfur. The snail kept moving. Maybe it would cushion my fall. Or I could stay here and be discovered.

At the last possible moment I threw myself backward off the snail and watched it lose its hold and then plummet.

A dull thud sounded far away. I leaned into the hole as far as I dared, staying away from the snail’s slimy trail, and found its remains on the orangey soil in the terrarium. It wasn’t moving.

I lay panting on the glass, unable to catch my breath. I was glad I’d just managed to avoid sudden death, but as soon as my panic subsided, the dire truth of my situation sank in. I was on top of a glass box in an alien environment. Not great. I had to get out of here. I started to think I didn’t need to go back into a terrarium. I could just get away from here and live in the alien’s walls until . . . until what exactly escaped me.

My lungs started to burn. I coughed, horribly and prolongedly. It took minutes for me to realize that the alien air lacked oxygen, and it was already having an effect on my clarity of mind.

I stuck my head back over the edge and sucked in the thankfully breathable air from the terrarium below. So any impulse of simply escaping and leaving Annie behind, horribly selfish as it had been, had to be ditched at once.

Now I had a whole new set of problems. The ones I’d refused to think about, before, when part one of the plan seemed barely likely to succeed. I couldn’t get down here in this hole, obviously. I couldn’t fly, I didn’t have the equipment to rappel down, et cetera. I needed to find another way in.

Far in the distance loomed hills, the ones Annie trekked to each day to stay safe. If I had to drop down from a great height, hills were the obvious place. I took a deep breath, lifted my head up and estimated the distance to the next hole. There was no way I could crawl that distance, which I’d hoped to do to stay undetected. I would have to run. Without being able to breathe. The air filters not only took out the sulfur, they added oxygen. The alien atmosphere didn’t have enough of it.

I wished I’d paid more attention to the spacing of the air holes. They hadn’t stood out to me in any way, so I reasoned they had to be spaced in the way a human would do it, in a neat and regular grid. So if I took off from this hole at a ninety-degree angle from the sides, I should hit the next one head-on.

It was hard to leave the good air. What if I didn’t find the next hole? Would I be able to turn back and find this one again in time before I suffocated?

I kept taking deep breaths, telling myself I’d go any moment now. Finally, I tricked my brain by telling myself I would only stand up for a second to scout out my route. Once I was standing, I just took off at a steady lope.

After a minute or so the urge to breathe became very strong. I couldn’t see the next hole yet. If I turned around now, I would still make it. But I didn’t. I think I knew if I turned back, I would never dare leave that hole again.

My lungs burned, I started to stagger and see spots. Where was that fucking hole?

I stumbled over my own feet and fell flat on my face. I hadn’t even managed to catch my fall with my hands. I should get up and crawl. Like now.

My fingers felt an edge. It took an age before my dull brain realized I was lying right by a hole. I pulled myself across by my fingertips. I wanted to crawl, but my legs just didn’t obey.

I came to with my head in the hole, feeling like crap. Every breath scraped sandpaper down my lungs, and I had the foulest taste in my mouth. But I was alive. I’d made it.

I started to scrabble up but lay back down. I had to look back first and mark the direction my body lay in. There would be less landmarks the farther I got across the lid. I spit on the edge, and again a foot away, and crawled around the hole until the two spittle spots lined up with my new direction.

I had to do better this time. One more near-miss like this one would kill me. I just didn’t know how to do better. All I could think of was different. I’d start out much faster, and maybe my muscles would be more efficient when they still had air? I had no idea.

I inhaled deeply three more times and started to run as fast as I could. This time I actually caught sight of the next hole while I was still running. That helped me to refrain from breathing, and I made it to the hole barely stumbling. That was great. I could do this again.

But when I’d rested and started to run again to the next hole, my legs trembled, and I wasn’t making nearly the speed I had last time. I just wasn’t fit enough. But I forced myself to keep going, and I made it to the next hole still conscious. I told myself I would just have to rest a little longer. But I cooled down quickly and started to shiver. I’d stiffen up if I didn’t get up and do it again. How many holes left? I hadn’t allowed myself to look down and estimate the distance still to go, but now I had to. I had to carefully mete out my remaining stamina.

After the fourth run, having barely made it, I blacked out with my head dangling down in the hole. I woke up with a pounding headache. For a moment I didn’t even know where I was and flailed my arms in a panic, searching for my breathing tube. While flailing, I got up, inhaled a lungful of alien atmosphere, and almost fell down the hole coughing. It wasn’t pretty.

The light had changed while I was unconscious. I hadn’t noticed before in my half-awake antics. If I didn’t make it to a hole over the hills before it was dark, I shouldn’t go on in case I missed a hole or fell in one. I looked down one last time before I started the next lap. The ground below me seemed closer. I looked back and wished I hadn’t. The distance I’d made with so much pain and difficulty seemed pitifully short.

I was so tired. And so thirsty. I had already failed in so many ways. I should have found something to carry water in at least. I stopped myself from punishing myself with these thoughts. There was no point. I was here, now, with nothing. I would have to make it work.

I marked my direction, inhaled, and set off. Darkness fell with startling rapidity, and I couldn’t see anything. But I couldn’t stop. I just went on running in the direction I’d set out in, and when I couldn’t run anymore, I would crawl.

That turned out to be tragically accurate. With burning lungs I crawled on, not knowing whether the darkness was so intense or if my eyes had stopped working. My right hand slipped down into the hole, and I’d almost crawled on. I dangled with half my upper body over the rim. Should I just let myself fall? But I couldn’t make myself jump into a dark nothing.

I must have slept because I woke in agony. My calves were spasming so hard it took all my strength to bend my feet back and relax the muscle. Then other pains clamored for my attention. My throat, my stomach, my buttocks. I was paying for my day of running. My head swam and the air seemed syrupy. Every breath hurt.

I blinked to clear my eyes of the thick gunk that had accumulated during my sleep and looked down. Heat from below already beat against my face. The ground seemed about the highest point I could see. And even if there were a higher rise somewhere else, I didn’t have the time to find out. I had to jump down and hope to find water, or I’d be dead soon. The heat in the desert terrarium wouldn’t do me any favors either.

I just couldn’t make myself do it. It was as if my body knew it would smash against the sand and break every bone. It refused to do it. No matter that I’d die up here just as surely if I didn’t jump.

Okay, I told my body, okay, I won’t do it. I just need to sit up for a second, my head is hurting from hanging upside down this long. I sat up. Sitting up didn’t engender the fear that falling did. I rubbed my neck to ease the muscle pain, and my forehead to calm the headache. I relaxed in spite of myself.

And then I just pushed off.

It was like jumping into an oven. And then I hit the floor and tumbled, slapping the floor like I’d seen in videos, trying to lose momentum. I ended up facedown in the sand. I lay still for seconds, trying to realize I was still alive. Everything hurt, but that didn’t mean too much. I moved limb by limb, testing each one before I dared sit up.

The heat was incredible. I could feel every last drop of moisture I had in my body rushing out into the parched air. It was so bright here. I could hardly see; it was all just orange sand. I didn’t know where to go, I couldn’t even tell up from down.

My ankle collapsed under me as I tried to rise. Broken or sprained, it didn’t matter, I had to walk to shade. Not that I could see any. My hip was bruised, but everything else seemed to work. But where to go? I didn’t know where to go.

I stood up gingerly, favoring my good leg, and looked around, trying to make a decision.

“Robin! Robin! Quick, over here!” a voice called out.

A piece of desert lifted up and showed me the face of Annie, lying underneath. I hobbled toward it as quickly as I could.

“Annie! How is it possible?” I croaked. “How did you know I’d be here?”

“Here, drink this, you must be so thirsty! I saw you scaling the walls on that snail, and then running over the lid.”

She was amazing. She’d dug out a shelter for herself in the sand, and it was so much cooler than the sand baking under the sun even this early in the morning. She had a kind of pouch made from animal hide with water in it, and half a green bar, clearly kneaded together from many small savings over weeks.

I drank all the water in the pouch, I couldn’t stop myself, even as I was convinced that I was going to give Annie half.

“You’re still thirsty,” Annie said. “But we can’t go for water until dusk.”

“Oh Annie,” I said.

That was all I had left in me to say. But it seemed to be enough. She snuggled up against me. In spite of all my pains and the terrible state I was in, that was enough. We were together.

About the Author

Bo Balder lives and works close to Amsterdam. Bo is the first Dutch author to have been published in F&SF, Clarkesworld, Analog, and other places. Her sf novel The Wan was published by Pink Narcissus Press. When not writing, she knits, reads and gardens, preferably all three at the same time.

Legend of the Giant

Fei Dao, translated by Ken Liu

1.

“Chi-a! Chi-a!”

Just as dawn is about to chase away the night, the silence is broken by a distant, earth-rumbling chant. A roiling, dark column of smoke snakes toward the rosy clouds. The giant, towing a rusty furnace behind him, each stride infused with pride, marches into sight from over the horizon.

Lit by the morning glow, parti-colored metal patches all over the giant’s torso sparkle and dazzle. Their welded joints resembling outsized scars, the results of decades of ad hoc repairs. Although the enormous body is no longer as imposing or magnificent as when it was new, the giant, like a battle-hardened veteran, now gives off an even more terrifying air. Coldly, he surveys the desolate surface of the planet, considering which old building to demolish today. In that brief but awful moment of silent judgment, invisible electrical charges race through the countless pathways in his cold body at the speed of light, like streams of surging lava, colliding, diverging, calculating . . . until a thought emerges, illuminating the soul like a flash of lightning. The sensation is so joyful that the giant can’t help but cry out, “Chi-a! Chi-a!”

And so, as his vast body vibrates, he charges at the skeletal remains of a building twice his height while the music player inside him begins to sing:

We workers are powerful, hey! We workers are powerful.

We’re busy every day, hey! We’re busy every day.1

Nimbly, the giant punches the building with a hand shaped like a massive drill, leaving multiple holes. Then, he smashes the other hand, shaped like a monstrous hammer, down onto the weakened structure. The building collapses with a muffled whump, a sigh from the universe. The giant continues to hammer the ruin, the thumps sounding like the heartbeat of the earth itself, not stopping until the building has been pulverized. Satisfied, he gazes down at the field of debris, motionless and erect in the swirling dust, enjoying the pleasure of labor. The world lies submissive at his feet.

Things weren’t like this when he first came to this world. But as a result of the constant replacement of his components, answers to questions such as who he is or was and exactly when he first arrived are no longer ascertainable. He dimly recalls that back then he was solid and strong, all his components factory-fresh, the entirety of his structure redolent with fragrant machine oil and shining with a comforting glint. When he strode along, his gait was steady and confident, the clack-clang of his actuators sonorous and rhythmic, with none of the noise and difficulty of his present self.

Back then he also didn’t need to force himself to make decisions. All he had to do was wait patiently until tiny bugs flew into his ear to tell him his latest mission. He enjoyed the excitement of the bugs whispering mysterious coordinates in his ear, and he even became friends with one of the little creatures. The friend had once possessed nothing more than a single nanochip, but as the result of a lab accident, he suddenly found himself capable of thinking with all his particles, thereby turning into a philosopher.

The bug told the giant that the universe is an all-encompassing web of energy, and all things in the cosmos are knots formed from energy strands. Thus, it’s necessary for the universe to undergo constant revisions, for someone to disentangle the failed knots, to redirect the flow and recombine the strands into new forms. This kind of revision, crucial to the fate of the universe, must be entrusted to the wisest people. Their orders then are passed on to giant-kind by flying bugs so that they could carry them out faithfully.

To be honest, it took the giant a long, long time to comprehend the bug’s ideas—and even then, only approximately. However, after he understood the buzzing creature’s lecture, he felt even more pride in his work.

One day, the tiny philosopher told him that civilization was going to end, and all people would be liberated. The giant could make no sense of this strange pronouncement. Following the final coordinates delivered by his friend, he entered a deep valley, but found in it no target for demolition. When he emerged, all the humans were gone, leaving behind only abandoned buildings all over the planet. The flying bug, the other giants—all were gone. He was alone with his incomprehension. Even so, after a long and arduous period of cogitation, the giant came to the decision that he had to continue hammering, drilling, pulverizing, advancing the progress of the cosmos.

He doesn’t like to think about problems on his own. He’s keener on the pleasure of drilling and demolishing the empty buildings, as well as the joy of loading his trusty furnace with the debris and watching the old, malfunctioning, out-of-place knots of energy be ground into powder. Best of all is the feeling when he shoots tongues of flames out of the nozzle in his chest, lighting the heaps of gray-white powder, melting and burning until the bright red viscous goo slowly fills the molds and hardens into translucent bricks. Neatly, he stacks these newborn knots of energy, admiring their dazzle and shine in the bright sun, waiting for the day in the future when people will return and build with them, making the universe better.

But he can’t stop thinking, either, now that he must make his own decisions. To maximize his demolition power, his frame was designed with little room for other functions, and so thinking is definitely not his forte. At first, he worked like a harvesting farmer: starting from the edge of a city, he methodically smashed one building after another, slowly pushing forward, ring by ring. It took him a year to turn a whole city into neat stacks of vitreous bricks. But then he began to have doubts about this approach. It seemed to him that it would take him at least a thousand years to clean up all the ruins on this planet, and that was time he didn’t have. The clever human planners who had directed him in the past had never revised the cosmos in such a manner. Always they had focused their revisions and corrections on small parts of each city, leaving the rest of the urban landscape intact. Was that to give the old structure of the cosmos enough time to adjust to the new? Or maybe it was because destroying a key spot in a structure was sufficient to disentangle the whole? The doubts led him to change his method. He redirected more of his resources and energy to the cogitation module, trying to develop a more rational algorithm that would tell him which buildings in a city ought to be prioritized for demolition.

One time, the giant happened to barge into an underground tunnel. There he found a powerful computer in perfect working condition. The giant provided the machine with all the data about his past missions, hoping that the computer would be able to discern from them an algorithm for rational demolition. The computer told the giant that it would take fifty years to get an answer. The giant gave up. Humans didn’t need that much time to decide on a plan, so even if the computer came up with an answer after half a century, he could not trust it. On this planet, the truth is apparently a luxury.

Not only does thinking take up a terrifying amount of energy, causing his movements to become lethargic and clumsy, he also must reckon with the fact that he cannot verify his decisions, meaning that he has no choice but to rely on his intuition. Lately, this is happening more and more. His mind is filled with ideas that abruptly pop into existence, devoid of clear derivations, but pointing the way forward. He believes that everything that is happening to him must be in service of the original goal for which he was created. In this lonesome world, he cannot doubt himself.

Thus, after a day’s labor, he always climbs to the top of the tallest building in the city he happens to be in. In his experience, such buildings don’t need to be demolished. They are typically very tough, and they have functioning energy sockets. Trailing the long power cable from the socket to the top of the building, he finds freedom from the troubling demands of cogitation by admiring the distant red sphere slowly sinking toward the horizon. He gazes into the distance, the city below his feet open and exposed, the fans attached to his torso cleaning away the layer of dirt that has settled all over him. Cocooned in serenity and warmth, the giant whiles away a comfortable night, infusing himself with energy. Thus refreshed, as he faces a new, empty city on the following day, he can experience more wonderful intuitions and make decisions that he can trust.

In the darkness, surrounded by a sky full of twinkling stars, he suddenly thinks: are there other giants like him on those distant worlds in the sky, who also spend their days in constant motion, unceasingly revising the grand energy network that is the cosmos? Such thoughts are a nice diversion, but as he has no way to verify them, they do nothing other than waste precious energy. Thus, he doesn’t like to linger on them, preferring to allow them to flash through his mind like shooting stars. He thinks of his old friend. Cogitation is so tiring and bewildering, and yet the little philosopher was so devoted to the task. He’s filled with admiration.

His routine repeats in this manner day after day, with nothing worth boasting about or looking forward to. To be sure, not everything is to his satisfaction. For instance, he can’t do anything about the dust accumulating in the nooks of his body that the fans can’t reach. And on rainy days, he can only shelter inside ruins, where the humidity causes his joints to grate and rasp in an unpleasant din. When clouds hide the stars from him at night, he tries to emit an electrical glow himself so that he appears to be a dim star suspended in the gloomy desolation.

2.

It’s not entirely accurate to say that the giant is alone.

After humans vanished, new things appeared on this planet. At first the giant thought they were soap bubbles of various sizes. But one time, he accidentally stepped on one. As he lifted his foot, he saw that the bubble somehow reinflated itself, slowly rose into the air, and then circled him a few times before flying away, its surface swirling in rainbow hues. By pure intuition, the giant believes that the bubbles are alive.

The bubbles don’t show up often. But from time to time, the giant sees them dancing in the distance while he works. The giant doesn’t mind having them there. Since they don’t interfere with his work, who they are, where they come from, what they are doing here—he doesn’t care about any of that. Whether he’s absorbed in his labor, accompanied by stirring music, or alone, gazing up at the stars and letting his mind wander, the bubbles never bother him. Even on occasions when he’s suddenly thrust into danger, they simply stand by and watch.

One day, after a long trek through a desolate, scorching desert, he finally arrives at a city on a plateau. On his way, he encountered several terrifying sandstorms, which buried him in thick layers of sand, and he had to struggle with all his strength to dig himself out. However, the sandstorms turn out to be nothing compared to what he’s about to deal with next.

The city on the plateau is filled with white walls, red roofs, black stone-paved roads, green weeds, all standing serenely under an azure sky. The sun has warmed the ground, and autumn breezes gently brush the dust off his shell. The dry air is comforting, and everything, including the giant, waits with bated breath in silence for something nameless.

Bell tolling from a distant church breaks the giant’s reverie. Abruptly, he realizes that it’s dusk, and the sun and the temperature are both dropping, with night to follow shortly. He has wasted much of the day in a dreamy, contemplative episode without accomplishing anything, a very rare thing for him. To make up for the lost time, the giant swaps in his backup battery. In the clear moonlight, he roams through the shadowy city like a ghost.

What he sees during the day makes him happy, but according to his regulations, no city is perfect. There are always flaws. Finding them and then revising them is his glorious mission. But this time, his intuition tells him that the ancient buildings around him possess a mysterious power, and that he should let them remain.

On the other hand, the city government building that resembles a feather stuck into the ground doesn’t seem to be in harmony with everything around it. He has never demolished buildings of this type; this is clearly a challenge.

All night, he stands at the foot of the slender steeple of the church, looking up at the stars, deep in thought. At the break of dawn, he finally finds the justification: to perfect the cosmos, everything must be subjected to the same rules.

And so, crying “Chi-a! Chi-a!” as is his habit, he dashes toward the feather, ready to smash it as easily as he has smashed so many other buildings. But a siren blares abruptly, and a row of red lights flare to life on the feather. Before he can check himself, a missile screams past his shoulder, striking an amphitheater behind him. The shock wave from the explosion throws him down. As he struggles to get up, a beam of bright white light lops off his left foot. Swaying, he falls down again, and he sees now that the feather has transformed into a fully armed battle robot, gazing down at him contemptuously.

The giant isn’t wholly unfamiliar with resistance to his work. Some rather plain-looking buildings in the past defended themselves against him valiantly. They shot, threw rocks, sprayed flames or acid, lobbed missiles, emitted interfering electromagnetic radiation, or even tried to destroy him with a suicide explosion. But he has never seen a building capable of transformation. The massive mecha warrior standing before him, with thick alloy armor plates extending over his elbows and twin canons over his shoulders, tells him in no uncertain terms that all other resistance he has encountered in the past now is mere child’s play. A lowly guerilla fighter has met the real army in the field, and the outcome isn’t in doubt.

After a moment of staring each other down, the war robot’s head emits another bright white beam. Instead of aiming at the giant, however, the beam bypasses him and strikes a white statue of a goddess behind. The statue melts into a pool instantly, and the killer, letting out an eerie mechanical cackle, turns and strides away. A piano solo from the killer robot’s speakers accompanies the machine’s cold, decisive steps as the cannons sweep from side to side, the strafing bullets shattering buildings and throwing up spewing fountains of earth.

The killer robot roams about, shooting aimlessly, stopping only when he’s standing before the church. After a moment of hesitation, the robot’s belly armor parts to reveal a row of missiles. But before he can launch them, he’s forced to close up the armor plates to fend off an incoming giant drill, resulting in a shower of sparks.

The robot pushes the limping giant away with the other hand. The giant stumbles a few steps before collapsing to the ground. There, unable to get up again, he can do nothing but watch as the killer robot reduces the church to rubble with missiles, the angelic figures on the roof tumbling to the ground, shattered.

Vision begins to deform; sound is no longer continuous; the flow of electrons among his innards surges and ebbs. The world turns black and white. Dancing missiles call forth blooms of thick smoke; a gray-white beam sweeps across the land, slashing and cleaving; patches of vegetation, bursting into flames like riotous revelers, light up the whole city.

Strangely, in the few seconds after the world has blacked out, amidst the fading rumbling, he manages to discern bars of Bach’s English Suites.

3.

During the next few days, battalions of white clouds pass over the plateau, casting flickering shadows below. Fresh autumn winds soon drive away the smoke and ash, leaving behind dry, scorched earth.

The giant lies still among the rubble. From time to time, he opens his eyes to gaze at the burning sun overhead and the few soap bubbles drifting about leisurely in the air. He tries in vain to move his paralyzed body, and then, in despair, closes his eyes, once again falling into the abyss of oblivion.

One time, he wakes in the middle of the night, just in time to see a giant meteor screeching overhead to fall not too far away, its impact quaking the land and starting a wildfire that lights up half the sky. He imagines the fire roaring across the plateau, turning him into a pool of molten metal. But then thick clouds cover the sky, followed by lightning and thunder, torrential rain, rising black mud that inundates the ruins, submerging his eyes.

Consciousness returns after the passage of some time. But he can’t see or feel anything, aware only of something reading his memories.

Perhaps this is what they call death, he thinks.

“Stop kidding around,” a voice says in his mind.

“Ah! You’re back?” the giant asks.

“I never expected you to be so persistent. I suppose I underestimated you.”

“I’m just carrying out my purpose.”

“If everyone understood their purpose like you, the world wouldn’t be like this.”

“What was going on with that killer robot?” asks the giant.

“He’s gone mad.”

“Mad?”

“He was built to be a weapon, with every inch of his body designed to fight. Yet he had to disguise himself as a soft feather, enduring the temptation to kill. Day after day . . . it was just a matter of time. You just gave him an excuse.”

The giant remains silent, trying to understand the meaning behind this speech.

“Where did you go?”

“We’ll get into that later. Don’t waste any more energy. I have to save you first.”

“But you’re so tiny. How can you save me?”

“Hahah! I see that you still don’t get it. A philosopher can accomplish whatever pleases him.”

In the next few days, the philosopher manages to restore the giant’s senses. A helicopter then arrives, and several spider-shaped robots descend to clamber all over the giant, fixing this and that. Finally, the giant can stand again, his body glinting under the sun.

“I’m impressed!” the giant exclaims as he tries out his new body.

“It’s no big deal.”

The morning is pleasant. After a discussion, the two friends decide to leave the open vistas of the plateau to continue the giant’s unfinished work.

Traveling day and night, they cross another large desert. Along the way, they see some massive statues gazing at them from the empty land. Even more statues lie in pieces, marked by fresh burn marks.

“He’s completely mad.” The philosopher sighs.

“We have to stop him,” says the giant, gazing at the ugly missile craters dotting the cliffs.

“Why?”

“These things should be preserved.”

“How do you know that?”

“Intuition.” The giant is thinking of how he felt when he tried to prevent the killer robot from demolishing those white buildings in the city.

“Do you consider yourself different from him?”

“I revise; he destroys. I try to perfect the universe, while he leaves behind only ruins.”

The bug lets out a sigh.

They continue on.

One foggy evening, they arrive at an ancient city, where the dilapidated buildings, caressed by the dust-laced wind, decay in comfort and ease. The giant finally voices aloud the doubt that has plagued his heart: since the philosopher is so clever and wise, why can’t the bug direct his work in the future?

The bug listlessly explains that philosophers are only responsible for explaining the world, not changing the world. The only manner in which philosophers are wiser than others is that they don’t consider themselves wiser than others.

They cross wasteland after wasteland, pass through empty village after empty village, enter city after city. Relying on intuition, the giant picks some buildings for demolition. Now, having died once and returned to life, he is even more thoughtful and composed. He takes his time to think before acting, and after he has made a decision, he no longer shouts “Chi-a! Chi-a!” because he finds the joyful chant incongruous with the nature of his work.

He swings his hammer and wields his drill in silence. Although his movements are full of energy, there’s melancholy in his heart. The buildings are lifeless, and they are flaws in the perfectible universe; yet, as they turn to dust under his hands, he can’t help but think: they once were also young; they once sheltered countless people. Admiration and sympathy fill his mind. The giant stacks the crystal bricks from the furnace in tombstone-shaped piles as he plays the Requiem, commemorating those who have been sacrificed in the advancement of the universe.

While the giant works, the bug watches him, pondering philosophical questions. At night, the bug enters one of the giant’s ears to converse, listening to the giant’s reflections as well as asking the occasional question to induce the giant to think deeper. For instance, when the giant tells the bug that after his death, he wishes the bug would erect a tombstone for him, the bug asks what sort of epitaph the giant would want on the tombstone. This question sends the giant into deep contemplation and lingers in his mind for the next few days. As the giant ponders similar questions, he begins to have more ideas, and slowly comes to the realization that the truly wise never answer questions; instead, they ask questions to lead others to explore the doubt in their own hearts. His admiration for his friend grows even more.

Sometimes, the soap bubbles follow the pair from a distance as they go about their business. When he notices them, the philosopher snickers with contempt.

On a cold winter night, the pair arrive at a small riverside town. Drifting snowflakes fill the air, and the river is frozen solid. The town appears to be a palace sculpted out of ice and snow. The philosopher, excited, dances joyfully among the feathery snowflakes, shuttling between the empty buildings and turning on every switch. Now every street and alley is brightly lit, filled with auto-automobiles promenading languidly. Even the oversized screens over the public squares are filled with dance and song, scenes from a forgotten New Year’s celebration.

The pair find a stockpile of fireworks in a warehouse. All night, sparkling explosions again and again light up the town, recalling its one-time glorious prosperity. As the bell tolls for the new year, the flying bug dances even harder in the swirling snow, singing:

Let me dance now with my shadow under the moon.

Let me take all my joy in the fleeting spring.2

The fireworks dissipate, and everything falls back into silence. A crowd of soap bubbles linger in the smoky air over the city. The philosopher, his celebratory mood spent, now begins to lecture about the serious mysteries he’s privy to.

He informs the giant that the soap bubbles are in fact a species known as the “bowing-heads.” They call themselves practical philosophers, but in reality, they are nothing more than craven fools who disgrace even the food they consume. Their “philosophy” consists of nothing more than the tenet that decay is omnipresent in the cosmos, and all civilizations are doomed to oblivion. The more complex something is, the more vulnerable it is to decay, and so complex order is a form of sin. The only way to last a long time is to adopt the simplest structure, to maintain the lowest level of civilization. The closer one is to extinction, the longer one can endure. These nihilists, with their hateful ideas, roam about the universe and destroy all civilizations they encounter. They’ve never interfered with the giant’s work so far because, from their point of view, the giant is also reducing complex structures to more basic forms. Although the giant isn’t destroying everything completely, at least he’s acting somewhat in line with the faith of the bowing-heads.

The giant asks if the disappearance of people has anything to do with the bowing-heads.

Impatiently, the bug declares that the giant is missing the point before lapsing into silence.

After that, the philosopher turns extremely moody. One day, the giant asks him if “He devoted all his life to the advancement of the cosmos” would make a good epitaph for himself. The philosopher responds with a shrieking cackle that reminds the giant of the killer robot.

The giant feels sad. He knows that cogitation is painful, and he’s worried that his friend, without heavy labor to divert his mind, may be suffering a mental breakdown.

One dusk, they find a field of debris at the foot of a tall mountain and recognize the cannons and armor plates of the killer robot. Did the bowing-heads kill him? Or did he commit suicide because he could no longer endure the torture of his own mind?

The memory of the killer robot has been erased, leaving nothing of his former glory except a few deformed metal fragments. That evening, the giant gathers the pieces, smelts them in the furnace until he has crystal bricks, and stacks the bricks into an obelisk at dawn, setting the armor plates in front at the foot of the monument.

“Maybe there is something to the philosophy of the bowing-heads,” the philosopher mumbles.

The giant is likewise infected by the melancholy. A sense of dissatisfaction rises in his mind, and he can’t recover the enthusiasm he once had for his work.

Why does he persist in demolishing certain buildings? Is this really the purpose of his existence? Is the universe truly a web woven from energy? When those ancient buildings have all been turned into crystal bricks, will the universe really be better?

There is no way to verify any of these ideas. Even his only friend, the wisest philosopher, suffers from depression. How can something like the advancement of the cosmos ever be discerned with no doubt? What else can he do so long as he exists? What should his epitaph be? These questions bother him constantly at night, and his work slows down.

One morning in April, the philosopher tells him about a dream. In the dream, the bug was an old man with white hair and beard, roaming about the world on the back of a brown ox, pondering the world’s ultimate mysteries.3 In the end, he discovered that the cosmos was emptiness, but emptiness was not the same as nothingness. The revelation ultimately still left him unsatisfied.

“Disenchantment,” the philosopher says.

The giant does not understand the dream, but the philosopher’s sighing declaration seems to him an ill omen.

On summer solstice, they sit on a prairie gazing up at a meteor shower. The philosopher, sitting in one of the giant’s ears, suddenly turns chatty—almost as though he were drunk.

“Once, I dreamed of going into space to visit distant planets. I was sure I could do so if I set my mind to it, even if it would take a lot of work. But the universe is too damned vast, endless really, while life is so limited. To pursue the infinite with the finite—isn’t that ridiculous?

“And even if you could live forever, why? I’m tired. In the end, questions like the meaning of life are nothing more than illusions philosophers trouble themselves with. For someone technical like yourself, these questions must seem like utter nonsense.

“Ha, don’t take what I say too seriously. Don’t be influenced by me at all! Just keep doing what you’re doing. Someone has to do it. Look at those shooting stars . . . so beautiful. Maybe that’s the only thing worth all the effort everyone puts into staying alive.”

“What is that thing?” the giant finally manages to break in and ask.

“Beauty.”

“What is beauty?” Although the giant has always been working toward the perfection of the universe, he finds the concept puzzling.

“You have to go find it . . . ” The philosopher sighs. “You’ll understand once you find it. I’ve had enough. Goodbye, my friend.”

He dies.

4.

After the passing of the flying bug, the giant sinks into a depression. He questions why he remains alive. It’s true that in contrast to the directness and clarity of technical workers, the philosopher was prone to speaking ambivalently, even leaving behind a riddle for his friend upon death.

What is beauty?

What he saw in that white city destroyed by the killer robot, the sight that had put him into such a reverie—was that beauty?

The fireworks bursting over the town of ice—was that beauty?

The shooting stars streaming over the broad prairie—was that beauty?

What is common among all these things?

Where can he find the answers?

The questions agitate him, depleting his desire to work. The philosopher said that beauty is the only thing that makes everyone stay alive. It seems that he must find it.

After a day of cogitation, the giant comes to a conclusion. Journeying day and night, he arrives at the tomb of the killer robot. There, he picks up the armor plates, light but strong, and puts them on. He turns to the north.

He treks without stopping, over lakes and rivers, through mountains and valleys. He doesn’t demolish anything, only seeking shelter from time to time to get out of the rain and to recharge himself. His immense frame leaves behind a long string of footprints in the desolation.

Finally, he arrives at the grandest city of all.

Before the disappearance of humans, this was a marvel of civilization, the center of the world. Although the place is now deserted and all the surfaces are marred with stains, the magnificent buildings still bear witness to the city’s former glory. The giant recalls the philosopher telling him once that below the plaza at the center of this city is a supercomputer called the Soul of the World, which holds many incredible secrets, secrets that few people ever knew, secrets whose very existence strikes terror into many hearts, secrets that are constantly guarded by the most advanced weapons.

If there’s anywhere in the world that contains the answers he’s seeking, this is it.

Although what he’s about to do is far outside his mission parameters—indeed, it seems an act of betrayal, of rebellion—the giant decides that he must give it his all. He’s prepared for the worst.

Standing in the central plaza with the blazing sun overhead, the giant can feel the waves of heat coming off his metal body, his armor plates gleaming. He hesitates, invisible electrical charges racing through the countless pathways in his body at the speed of light, like streams of surging lava, colliding, diverging, calculating . . .

Thoughts burst into existence and fade away in his mind like fireworks. He’s not satisfied with any of them. The giant finally realizes that he is a warrior, not a strategist. He can’t concoct intricate plans, anticipate every outcome, imagine complex plots. He’s only a giant.

And so, with all his actions in the open under the shadowless sun, he begins.

“Chi-a! Chi-a!”

The monstrous drill roars to life; the massive hammer is raised to the sky.

Anxiously, he looks all about himself, waiting for the defenses to kick in.

But the worst doesn’t happen. More accurately, nothing happens. No missiles, no cannons, no bright white beams of death-dealing light, no ear-shattering siren. Only the constant cry of cicadas, so persistent that anyone hearing it can’t help but become agitated. The ancient plaza, glowing under the midday sun, seems to ignore his presence altogether.

Rather disappointed, in the next moment, the giant opens his stride and dashes toward those sacred buildings. With the drill he punches several holes through the walls, weakening the structure, then he swings his huge hammer. Dust plumes erupt all over the plaza, and the once-sacred towers collapse, no different from any other kind of construction, tumbling into wreckage and ruin.

The giant combs through the rubble until he finds a tunnel marked in red. Through it he enters a vast underground hall, the size of multiple stadiums. He sees advanced equipment that he has never encountered, with robots of all sizes stuck in different poses, as though their power had shut off in a single moment in the middle of a busy workday. Instantly, the giant’s eyes settle on the egg-shaped, blue supercomputer. He turns it on with his own batteries and begins to download the data inside.

The Soul of the World was apparently shut down forcefully before the disappearance of humans, and thus it also knows nothing of what transpired after. Moreover, the giant can find nothing on the meaning of beauty in its vast ocean of data. However, his disappointment is suddenly allayed by the discovery of a declassified report.

 . . . According to the latest results in cosmic biological dynamics, decay has become a fundamental trend in the universe, and most of the unsolvable problems encountered by human societies are related to this trend. Scientists have, so far, no good solutions, but theory suggests that subjecting localized regions of a system to destruction and rebuilding may effectively promote said system’s energy cycle. Although this cannot reverse the fundamental decay of the whole, it can at least in the short-term stimulate systems into an extremely active state. The appearance of such revitalization may then stabilize the systems’ internal confidence in continued development—a result that has been proven through research in nether-system psychology.

We think it clear, therefore, that faith in our invincibility is our ultimate trump card . . .

Thus, we suggest that the following plan be immediately implemented . . .

In the lengthy, dry appendices attached to the end of the report, the giant finds an image of himself.

For a long time he stands there, unmoving, as scenes from the past rush through his mind: demolish, rebuild, demolish, rebuild, demolish, demolish, demolish, rumble, quake, chi-a, chi-a! We workers are powerful, hey! Heya hey hey! . . . He guesses maybe this is what it’s like to dream.

The near-depleted battery beeps, waking him. He realizes that night has fallen. A dim blue glow from the Soul of the World illuminates his body in the darkness. He disconnects from the computer and walks away, disconsolate. He passes through millennia-old streets to arrive at the tallest skyscraper in the city, finds an energy socket, plugs himself in, and then trails the long cord all the way to the top of the building. He sits down to think.

The report is very clear. Everything he has done is nothing more than an effort to stir a stagnant pool to give it the appearance of life. Revising the cosmic energy web, advancing the progress of the universe—how could he have believed such laughable nonsense? He recalls the philosopher’s words and realizes that his wise friend seemed to have tried to give him hints. Maybe these are what humans used to call “kind lies.” But he was so naïve. He couldn’t have guessed the truth.

Day after day, the giant sits atop the tower, doing nothing. Burning sun, metal-scraping sandstorms, torrential rain, bullet-like hail—he reacts to nothing. Sometimes at night, thunder roars over sheets of rain and bolts of lightning strike against his armor, rattling his torso. But afterward, he remains sitting in his perch, as though he has turned into a statue, oblivious of time.

One morning, the ground quakes violently, and the buildings in the city begin to fall. The whole city collapses in front of his eyes. The flow of electricity abruptly ceases.

The giant looks around, realizing that much of the city has been reduced to rubble, with only a few structures barely standing.

The swirling dust doesn’t clear even after a whole day. But the giant’s mood clears gradually in the hazy twilight.

When the sun rises again, the giant stares at the burning orb and feels his heart lift and energy surging through his body. A hazy thought comes into focus in the dawn light: from now on, I’m free.

The giant gazes upon the world with new eyes. From now on, he lives for himself. Over this desolate planet, he will only do what pleases him. If he wants to sing, he’ll sing without any care. If he wants to dream, then he’ll dream what he likes. If he wants to do nothing, then nothing he shall do. The philosopher told him to look for beauty, and this only he’ll continue to pursue. However, he no longer views the matter as crucial.

He knows that he’ll die someday, and he must treasure his limited time. He decides that he’ll leave something to the world besides the stacks of crystal bricks. Since everything he knows has to do with construction, he comes up with a pleasing plan.

He boots up the Soul of the World and inputs his request. Out of the dozen or so designs suggested by the computer, he picks the simplest: a cube. Next, he finds a flat piece of land outside the city and grades it with his drill and hammer, forming a solid foundation. He returns to the wreckage of the city, patiently gathers debris from the ground, and turns it into row after row of crystal bricks in his always-loyal, rust-red furnace. He carries the bricks to his construction site and stacks them carefully.

He works deliberately, with pride. Soon, he’ll finish an intricate tomb for his dead friend. The tomb will be praised by all who come after. He even has the epitaph picked out: “A philosopher who devoted his life to thinking.” To prevent anyone from disturbing his friend’s rest, he gathers many refined weapons from a nearby military base to arm the tomb to the teeth. With these weapons in place, the tomb will withstand the trial of time, a testament to his freedom and strength. The very thought brings heat to his pistons and recharges his batteries.

The world is the dream of those who are free, the giant thinks as he labors.

Yet, barely lit, his dream is soon overshadowed. After a few days, the soap bubbles appear to hover overhead like ghosts, spinning, shifting through the hues of the rainbow. At first they stay at a distance, but soon they move closer and closer. The giant ignores them, focusing instead on his construction, but, since anxiety is growing in his heart, he works faster. He finds dozens of batteries from a munitions factory and swaps through them so that he can work without stop, trying to keep an eye also on the soap bubbles.

Hundreds, thousands of bubbles are now swirling over him, spinning faster and faster, flickering through different shades. Finally, one day they gather into a single giant bubble that hovers in front of the giant. Gradually, the surface of the bubble, a colorful swirling phantasmagoria, clears into a fun house mirror: in the mirror is an old man with white hair and beard, riding on a brown ox, smiling at the giant.

“What are you doing?”

The giant freezes, unsure what to do.

“I’m not dead! Why are you building me a tomb?”

A panel pops off the giant’s chest. A box emerges, revealing the unmoving figure of the bug inside.

“My friend, I’m too wise to die. I’ve simply changed my form . . . into these soap bubbles. Death is life; existence is also oblivion. You don’t recognize me because you don’t understand. Stop now. Don’t struggle vainly. To endure, you must follow the flow of nature.”

Once again, memories burst into the giant’s mind like fireworks. The giant is silent for a while. Then he asks, “What is beauty?”

“Eh. Beauty and ugliness—what difference does it make? Both are mere illusions.”

The box pops back into the giant’s chest. With a sharp screech, the drill comes alive, heading straight for the rippling wall of light. With a loud pop, the fantastic image vanishes. A white puff of smoke rises from the tip of the drill, like an ice cream cone that has melted in the summer heat.

“You are not my friend,” says the giant coldly. He puts on his armor and lifts up the twin cannons.

Against the light of the setting sun, thousands, tens of thousands of soap bubbles emerge, like attendees at some bacchanalia.

The giant watches the tomb he has only begun to construct with sorrow. It’s unlikely he’ll leave much behind. The bowing-heads will probably erase all traces of him. No one to come after will know of his existence. Although he has traveled throughout the world, he has never studied the world in detail and doesn’t even know what to put on his own epitaph. But, like the philosopher said, life is limited, while the universe is without end. To pursue the infinite with the finite is a doomed task. This is perhaps the fundamental nature of life. The snowflake that melts as soon as it touches the earth; the firework that extinguishes a moment after blooming; the shooting star that lights up the sky for a flash. The destruction that looms so close terrifies him, and light reflected from a million soap bubbles turns the world hazy.

He thinks, Is death the ultimate beauty?

Happily, he squeezes the triggers, and two flaming tongues leap out to lick the polychromatic sky.

Footnotes:

1 - The lyrics are from “We Workers are Powerful,” a revolutionary song composed by Ma Ke in 1948. It draws on traditional folk music and shanties from Northeast China.

2 - A quote from a poem by Li Bai describing the poet drinking alone under the moon.

3 - This is typically how Laozi, the founder of Daoism, is pictured.

Originally published in Chinese in New Science Fiction Literature, 2011, issue 2.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

Jia Liyuan, born in 1983 in Chifeng, Inner Mongolia, China, received his Ph.D. in Literature from Tsinghua University, and served as a postdoctoral research fellow at Beijing Normal University. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Tsinghua University. He has been published academically in journals such as Science Fiction Studies, Literary Review, and Chinese Literature Today. He also pursues his interest in writing science fiction under the penname Fei Dao. He is the author of short story collections Innocence and Its Fabrications (Chunzhen ji qi suo suzao de), The Storytelling Robot (Jiang gushi de jiqiren), Chinese Scifi Blockbusters (Zhongguo kehuan dapian), and The Long Journey to Death (Qusi de manman lütu). Works translated into English include “The Robot Who Liked to Tell Tall Tales,” “The Story-telling Robot,” “A Story of the End of the World,” and “The Demon’s Head.”

Love Unflinching, at Low- to Zero-G

M. L. Clark

1

Doc tried to keep a straight face until the other human had left the examination room to complete annual license renewals. Zeddi Bobeddi, her wagging tail threatening to helicopter her off the low-G table from familiarity with these routine checkups—the treat! the impending treat!—was not making this easy.

“Okay,” said Doc, once the coast was clear, and while presenting the succulent spoonful that would distract Zeddi from her booster. “What’s mama done to you this time?”

The mods along Zeddi’s ears and snout were not permanent, but they could do permanent damage if the wrong person saw them. Long arcs of digital metallic-green wrapped Zeddi’s head in the semblance of another species entirely—and not just any species, but the Hurv: a dour administrative people, from what humanity had seen of them, who were heavily engaged in negotiations with Earth diplomats elsewhere on Aleph Station. But why this look, and why now? A party trick carried over from New Year’s? Or something more intentional?

“Oh, your mama really loves to poke the bear, doesn’t she?”

Doc patted and scratched Zeddi all over while the fine-haired basenji licked at the prize between her paws. Doc moved so swiftly that the good girl hardly noticed when her scruff was held tight, and the bone-density shot slipped in between rubs. Done and done.

As for the alien costuming . . .

Doc looked Zeddi square in those large, trusting, liquid-brown eyes.

“All right, girl. This is going to look like it hurts, but I promise, it won’t.”

When Ms. Tina Wilson of Dock Maintenance returned, Doc made it a point to be busy storing the rest of the shots, to let her notice on her own. Ms. Wilson’s panic was genuine.

“Zeddi-bear! What’s happened to your ears? Doc! Is she infected?”

Doc feigned surprise while turning back to inspect the angry red rashes that had arisen around the interfaces projecting Hurvian features from the unwitting canine head.

“I was afraid of that.” Doc whistled gravely. “You know, you can’t be too careful with this tech. Manufacturers think that, because the implants are for nonhuman use, they can get around all the usual safety checks. And what’s worse is that they’re usually right. Don’t get me wrong, some of the projections are adorable, but at what cost?”

Ms. Wilson’s eyes welled up. As she shook her head, a few droplets added to the work of the zoomers: tiny bots styled after diving beetles, who helped with station filtration by clearing away detritus, like the sort cast off by Doc’s four-legged, no-legged, two-clawed, and tentacled patients, prone to drifting about in low-G. The aim was always to catch as many of those stray hairs, husks, gobs of impressively smelly saliva, scabs, stitches, urine sprays, bits of fecal matter and upchuck, feathers, scales, skins, arboretum burrs, and dirt-clods before they slipped into station-wall crevices and circuitry where they had no right to be.

“Can you take them off? Can you fix her? Oh, my poor baby . . . ”

“Of course,” said Doc, heavily, before making a show of trying to remember where the detachment tool had been stowed in the examination room—as if its charge hadn’t been checked mere seconds before Ms. Wilson’s return.

Jude in reception had The Look when he was asked to add a zero-cost placebo to Ms. Wilson’s account, not long after Doc had finished the procedure to remove Zeddi’s implants and restore her natural, nondiplomatic-nightmare of a brown-and-white complexion. Both knew the “rash” would clear up on its own—its binding agent a nontoxic adhesive that Jude used onstage after business hours—but a week-long prescription for “mama” to administer twice-daily would hopefully make the lesson stick.

“I know, I know,” Doc winked, while scratching behind the pricked ear of the clinic’s gray-haired guardian, Skeeter. “I should’ve offered Ms. Wilson a spoonful, too.”

2

It wasn’t that Jude disapproved, exactly, but the young man was still in a place of exasperated affront that trickery was necessary; that human beings continued to be so . . . so . . .

“Human?” Doc prompted, over dinner in staff commons around the Core.

“Exactly.” Jude jabbed with his fork for emphasis. “It’s like, first contact happens—yeah? And there’s this great big hush over all the lands—for like, a split-second, right? But then comes the media spin cycle. The hot take. The alien overlord meme. The latest fashion trends. It never ends. It’s all just more fodder, more material, more excuses.”

“You were expecting, what, that we’d all ascend into a higher realm, hovering in perpetually unified grace over the cosmic miracle of first contact with other advanced species?”

Jude’s long purple bangs swung from side to side. “Uh, yeah? Kind of.”

Doc watched him fall to eating as if he had gone many days without a proper meal. Jude would have been about six when the Aleph Station project launched, a beacon of hope amid a hundred military uncertainties about all the new forms of life on the edges of human discovery. The perfect age for a kid to be thrilled by the promises of a coming utopia: a deep-space diplomatic paradise where alien species could meet and work together for the betterment of all. A haven and a respite, at bare minimum, from a range of tediously abiding injustices back on Earth, many of which Jude had worked hard to escape by training for deep-space life.

Instead, at first, Aleph had brought the Hurv out of hiding—or at least, their itinerate higher-tech bureaucrats: a group only interested in the younger species when safety regulations established eons ago were at risk of contravention by some careless newcomer who had failed to read “the signs” posted in particle-probability patterns all throughout the vacuum of local space. Even worse, the Hurv’s extensive regulations, once reviewed by human experts, proved disappointingly sensible: best-practices for energy production, waste disposal, trade-route plotting, information-sharing, materials maintenance, and disease-transfer risk-reduction that stood to benefit any species who complied as they ventured further out. There wasn’t so much as a line in the whole bloody ordinance that Earthers could sincerely claim as oppressive or an undue burden, at least not in the long or even medium run among the stars.

And yet, it was the way the Hurv had chosen to administer all their perfect little rules, after the first ship broke one in error: with all the irritation, that is, of one adult repulsed to learn that another doesn’t already know how to wash their hands—and then not only teaching them this basic skill by making a grand, severe, and highly public spectacle of the lesson, but also going over every other “basic” skill they could think of in the same degrading manner, under the pretense that they could no longer trust the other adult to know these ones, either.

Might as well have whacked humanity on the nose, Doc had thought at the time. At least it would have been over quicker.

Instead, it had taken another ten years to get Aleph Station up to Hurvian code, before those ancient administrators would withdraw the interstellar equivalent of a “New Driver” sticker from Earth and its colonies, so that diplomatic relations could begin anew between humanity and the rest of the sector’s citizen-species. Was it any wonder, then, that some humans saw no problem getting their kicks in against the Hurv when they could?

“Well . . . ” Doc offered, when Jude had paused long enough between bites to take a proper breath. “At least there’s still The Congress of Familiars to look forward to, right?”

Jude snorted, but also couldn’t help but be somewhat amused and placated by Doc’s reference to a children’s classic that had become wildly popular after first contact, in which aliens arrived and immediately started quarreling with humanity, until animal companions on all sides got fed up with their respective “higher” species and wandered off to form their own, far more harmonious republic in the stars.

Doc would never say as much aloud, but Jude was also the right age to have been someone who went into related fields—veterinary studies, animal husbandry, animal rights activism, xenobiology, nonhuman animal ethnology—because of the wonderful adventures of that movie’s protagonist. The interspecies theater troupe that Jude ran in his spare time only completed the circle of art informing life informing art in the young man’s journey.

A wounded idealism, thought Doc. But definitely not gone.

Jude set a reader by Doc’s tray after they’d both finished their meals—or rather, after Jude had finished Doc’s untouched second half, while Doc prolonged the last of a tea packet. Doc’s waning appetite had long become accepted fact between them, as was Jude’s insatiable need for fuel to match his youthful burning of the day’s candle at both ends.

“What’s this?”

“Next intake manifest.”

Doc raised a brow. “Look on your face says that something coming in will be trouble.”

“Not quite.” Jude tapped the reader, wiped his mouth, and velcroed a tab on his napkin to the tray before pushing off. “It’s what’s not coming in that bothers me. Night, Doc.”

Doc nodded back, then skimmed through the manifest, pausing only to thank the server who drifted by for their trays. It took a while to catch on to Jude’s concern: the answer wasn’t in the medical resource list, or among nutritional supplements and seasonal accessories.

“Sonuva—”

Doc looked up when it clicked, but Jude had long since left for rehearsal, and in low-G Doc couldn’t even let the reader drop with a spectacular clatter to the deck. A good long sigh and a ping to the station’s captain, to see if she had time to meet, would have to be enough.

3

Cap paced in mag-boots while reviewing the manifest. Doc had caught her in the middle of resistance training (never one to trust the booster shots to do their work alone), and a zoomer was air-skipping furiously after, to catch any perspiration wicking from bare skin as she moved. Cap preferred clean quarters and a cleaner office, so the closest she had to an animal or plant companion was a chunk of Martian rock on the corner of her desk (which she called “Spot” to drive the point home), and the zoomers she kept close by as often as possible, under the principle that an untidy mind begins with an untidy atmospheric perimeter. Doc and Cap were good friends despite both obvious moral defects on the latter’s part.

“I don’t get it,” she said at last. “I thought you’d be pleased that we have fewer Murrs coming through. If I recall, you tried to deny every last adoption request two years back.”

“I did, and you overruled me on the lot. Despite how much of a burden they are on filtration systems, I might add.”

Cap hummed agreement, but with a grimace. “You pick your battles out here, Doc. A few new alien pets being adopted by humans wasn’t it. In fact, all the eagerness among Earthers to keep Murrs of their own even helped in talks with the Usmics of the southern continent. They convinced their western and northern allies of the economic value of building more trade infrastructure on the back of that trend, instead of escalating their military presence along our species’ borders. That’s also how we got the Beam, even if they do still keep plenty of its secrets under lock and key.”

Doc let slide Cap’s use of the word “pets,” for now: outmoded lingo, but not as easy to eliminate as contaminants from the station air.

“And anyway, even if the trade deal hadn’t worked out,” Cap added, “if there are no new requests for Murr transfers, what’s the problem? It’s a trend that sorted itself out, right? I would think you’d be pleased, not looking at me like there’s a vivisectionist on the loose.”

Doc kissed teeth and glanced at the long, transparent observation wall in Cap’s office, which overlooked a command deck filled with immaculately uniformed officers going about station-ops business. Their whole realm was an affectation of order and efficiency that humanity never tired of performing, even when it fell far short of the mark behind the scenes.

“I ever you tell you about my cousin Mel?”

“Mel? Yeah, I think so. Gym rat who shipped through here last year, on his way to some extreme endurance run on Severin Six?”

“Qualifier race. Didn’t make it. Busted a knee in the high-G.”

Cap winced. “Lucky it wasn’t more.”

“Agreed. But he was still holed up awhile on the orbital transfer station, in recovery, and someone got the bright idea that he needed company to survive the slump, after going all that way out and ending up with nothing to show for it.”

“That is a bright idea, I’d say.”

“Well, okay, I guess it could’ve been. But this ‘someone’ decided to gift him a kitten, because it was small, and because they figured cats didn’t need much to do well. Not like a dog that needs to be walked everywhere, right?”

“I see where this is going. Kitten was a nightmare, huh?”

“Kitten was a kitten. It’s just that, when the novelty wears off, plenty realize they aren’t up for the commitment. Major regret syndrome. Tons of gifted cats, dogs, rabbits, birds, and reptiles are still returned to shelters back on Earth. Or worse, abandoned to the streets.”

“But Mel wasn’t back on Earth.”

“Nope. And just as he was getting fed up with the kitten, he also decided to rent a stasis-pod and wait out the rest of his recovery in transit.”

Cap tensed. “Hold up, Doc. Am I gonna like where this story ends?”

“Not one bit. So, we’ll just leave it there.”

Cap glanced again at the manifest, brows creasing as she pieced together the relevant diplomatic facts. “But . . . Murrs come from the Usmics, and the Usmics . . . Oh. Oh.”

Doc nodded. “When Earth-Usm negotiations dominated in the stream, Murrs were as high-prestige as they are high-maintenance. Once the prestige goes away . . . ”

“But so quickly? Just like that?”

“Maybe something spurred it. Maybe not. Trend cycles are mysterious.”

“Eh, sometimes. But we’re talking a high-profile interspecies alliance and a fairly recent and lucrative trade deal. Surely any humans with Murrs on board have to know how the Usmics feel about what other people do with species from their world?”

“Humans ‘surely’ know a lot of things.” Doc shrugged. “But we’re even better at using all that supposed wisdom to rationalize our preexisting preferences.”

Cap pursed her lips, considering. “How many Murrs do we have on board? And how many do you think are at risk of abandonment or . . . ?”

Doc raised a hand against the unspoken. “Forty-six, across thirty-one residential units. But that’s the trick, isn’t it? If I start a public campaign against abandonment, or worse, I might be putting ideas into the heads of people who hadn’t fully realized this was an option. Plus, what if an Usmic sees the campaign and assumes the worse is already happening to their sacred ones? Then we’re running even faster into a public-relations nightmare. No, we’ve got to be careful. There’s still time. Just not much, if new demand’s dropped to zero overnight.”

Cap shook her head. “This all strikes me as odd, Doc. Humans are fickle, sure, but we usually drop something shiny when something shinier comes along. So, what’s come along?”

Doc nodded. “Wondering the same. Wondering, too, if knowing what changed will maybe offer us a solution. I’m going to look into it, and keep you posted.”

“Ditto—on the diplomat side, mainly, but I’ll let you know if maintenance crews come across anything, too. You really think this could go nuclear?”

“Anyone’s guess. We’ll just have to hope for the best. Or at least a good exit strategy.”

“Ha.” Aleph’s captain stopped up short in her pacing, causing the zoomer on her tail to zip frantically aside. “Now there’s that trademark optimism I was missing from you.”

“Very funny.” Doc moved to shake hands. “Just don’t tell my assistant. He already thinks I’ve grown soft as it is.”

“Oh yeah.” Cap answered with a matching, solid grip: an echo in it, for them both, of a tougher time in station service. “That’ll be the day.”

Outside Cap’s office, before heading back to med-sector, Doc paused to survey the long arc of Ring that this part of the command deck overlooked: an ever-changing half-klick of commercial zoning, leisure spaces, and visitor services, all rolling gently around the station’s midsection to sustain a hefty point seven-G. “Up,” to anyone inside it, was a transparent ceiling peering straight into the Core: a squat, gray, low- to zero-G research, service, and utilities space where interspecies scientists, diplomats, and military collaborated in publicly funded facilities. Decades out from the physics classes necessary for space-vet accreditation, it still staggered Doc to imagine how, when walking along that rotating Ring, anyone would reasonably think they were being “pulled” to the deck by a “Down” force that did not exist.

And yet, this business with the Murrs was another sort of centrifugal illusion: of that, Doc had no doubt. The “pull” of the problem felt real enough—for Jude, for Doc, and now for Cap, too—but all the humans paying attention were still in the wrong frame of reference to make out any of the real powers behind it.

For now, at least. For now.

Doc’s wrist-wear pinged an emergency in the docks: another “pull,” but this time more urgent, and clear. Tapping an icon for “on-my-way,” Doc pushed off for the docks. Some days, one simply had to hope that constant forward momentum would be enough to counter the whole mess of forces—real, and imaginary—ever thrown a given body’s way.

4

Frightened whinnying could be heard all down the corridor between Holding Green to Loading 3, and Doc—go bag slung over a shoulder, moving hand over hand along service-route guide rails, picking up more speed than was generally advisable—hastened to arrive before the disaster deepened. Klaxons had been switched off to reduce panic, but emergency lights still pulsed in the dark, and when Doc emerged into the sweeping round of the station’s largest loading zone, first impressions were almost incomprehensible: lightning-livid red flashes tracing the sinuous twist of powerful musculature pumping uselessly in zero-G; similar warning glows flickering wildly in the wide, glossy-black eyes of four horses floating helplessly in a realm of neither “Up” nor “Down.” Nor were they alone in that tumultuous bow-side nether-space: intact crates, scattered riding gear, and stall-partition materials tumbled at varying speeds all around them, knocking into the walls as much as into each other, before spinning out along freshly erratic trajectories. The team’s handler, who had been knocked unconscious in the initial power-surge that had deactivated the pallet lock and sent everyone flying, also drifted in and out of range of those sixteen frantically kicking hooves.

“Hey! Doc!” Loading 3’s foreman called from the other service entrance. “We’re ready to crank it to point three-G if you want! Get ’em landed, calm ’em down—sound good?”

Doc needed a beat to recognize the man across the dim and red-washed lighting: Luis Rodriguez, one of the station’s “gentle giants,” and the proud owner of a tarantula he called Fea, “Ugly,” with the greatest of affection. Good: not the sort to panic. But Doc’s own heart rate quickened while surveying what “Down” conditions would look like in Loading 3: a narrow, rounded laneway with little room for four horses to work out their understandably ongoing agitation after touch down. There was a good chance that they would run into one another while adjusting to the strange fractional gravity, or trip into bulkheads and fallen crates and luggage, then either break their legs or trample their handler in the process—or both.

“Negative. We have to sedate and take our chances. But not with all this junk. Do you have anything you can use to clear some of the boxes—Oh! And of course . . . the handler?”

A thumbs-up in answer: “Mag-hook’s on the way! My people are getting supplies.”

Sure enough, two of Rodriguez’s workers soon emerged from the far passageway: one with a makeshift snare pole from the emergency panel between Loadings 2 and 3; the other holding a drone equipped with a large magnetic claw. While the pair enacted catch-and-secure protocols with everything around the horses, the foreman doubled back for a spine board, and Doc mag-locked on the opposite landing to load the dart gun. The clinic’s standard ketamine-xylazine cocktail usually had a longer induction time in zero-G, due to decreased cardiac output and a general propensity for blood to linger in the limbs, but with any luck, all that frantic galloping in one spot would offset this delay and bring the four to rest before they could do further damage to themselves and each other.

Emphasis on “further,” thought Doc, while studying the team’s movements after three clean hits to the shoulders and one suboptimal dart to a flank. Colic was highly probable for all of them after such a nauseating trauma, the likes of which none of their species could be expected to understand in full, but the most severe variant, colic from shifted bowels, was an especially key consideration as they bucked and twisted about in zero-G. As for the handler . . .

Well, on the plus side, long before all four horses had conked out, Rodriguez’s team had the handler cleared from the danger zone, her surface wounds treated, and head and torso carefully secured for immediate transport to citizen-care. Doc couldn’t remember her name, but also couldn’t forget the kindness and expertise with which she had tended to the male colt and three mares after docking, when Doc had come by to oversee their initial revival. Doc had more than mixed feelings about the industry this woman served—shipping show-ponies and racehorses to affluent settlers on far-flung colonies, or for direct trade with alien species that also loved to gamble with other animals’ lives—but it was hard to see any better justice in the death of someone who had at least tried to keep these creatures as healthy and happy as possible on route to their terrifying new forever-homes.

Besides, as the long lashes of the first two horses at last started to flutter shut in the emergency lighting, and as their legs pumped less furiously from side to side of Loading 3, Doc felt a twinge of new fear growing for the whole team. If the handler didn’t wake up, or if the horses’ impending bouts of colic didn’t respond easily to treatment, would their owners even pay to send another handler to finish the journey? And for all the upkeep in the interim?

Doc didn’t mind taking a hit on clinic expenses—there were always ways to finesse station donors for cases like these—but the possibility of the legal owners sending along other instructions entirely gave Doc a pretty colicky feeling, too.

On the strength of that weakening gut, Doc pinged Jude to clear the rest of the day’s schedule, just in case everything would depend on the first few hours going well.

“Sure thing,” said Jude, after a minute. “There’s only one meeting I can’t cancel.”

And when he flashed Doc a file bearing an Usmic name, Doc agreed.

“Right, of course. I guess I’ll take care of it between surgeries, if it comes to that.”

“Surgeries plural? That bad?”

Doc hesitated. The last of the horses was falling slack now, and with the handler off to citizen-care, Rodriguez and his crew stood at the ready to prep this lot for transfer, too. Doc couldn’t tell which had been more unnerving—to see the four pumping and whinnying at full intensity, or this spectacle of slumped silhouettes, drifting together in the flickering dark.

“We’ll see,” said Doc, eventually. Even on Earth, their species often proved as delicate as it was powerful—but one could doubtless say the same about them all.

5

As soon as the horses were secured in-lab and prepped for diagnostic tests that Jude could run on his own, Doc left for the arboretum, tossing Jude a salute at the door that the young man did not seem to notice, bent to his heavy workload so he could still get out in time. Doc tried not to let the lack of response dampen an already fraught mood, but it wasn’t easy. The day had been long and stressful, citizen-care still had no word on the handler’s condition, and this was a poor time of day to be meeting with anyone in the station’s nature preserve on the Ring, because most residents took their companions for walks at this hour among the foliage—and not all of those companions played well with each other when they met.

Some might even say that the Usmic was tempting fate, or itching for a fight, by bringing their Murr to the arboretum at this hour every day, but Doc was inclined to chalk up the choice more to guileless overconfidence on the part of this single, immense nerve cell that towered—or rather, wobbled—more than half a meter over the humans on board, and had such a substantial deep-space fleet to back its every movement through the sector.

“If we truly have the respect of your peoples,” Esmin of Usm had told Doc once, “then there will be no trouble for our sacred ones among your own, yes?”

Usmics communicated through fluctuations along their outer, mustard-yellow sponginess. Those who had spent even a little time on Aleph Station proved particularly capable at replicating humanity’s text-based languages, so that Chinese, Hindi, Russian, Arabic, Braille, and Roman lettering rose and receded like a palimpsest of ticker tape across whatever section was facing their conversational partner at the time. The one downside to this feat was that Doc—and Cap, and even diplomats expressly trained for Earth-Usm relations—often had a devil of a time getting a lock on any given Usmic’s intended tone.

Still, context suggested that Esmin had been quite serious that day with Doc, because in follow-up questions it became clear that the Usmic could not fathom why any of humanity’s own “sacred ones,” however well- or poorly trained they had been as pups, might sometimes be out of alignment with the wishes and “intentional energies” of their caregivers. So long as the human guardians were righteous in their thoughts, surely none of their furry friends would dare to urinate on a Murr, or mistake it for something to be collected in a game of fetch?

Murr, after all, were commonly described back on Earth as “sentient hemp,” with their Usmic name coming from the sound that their fast-growing branches made during the part of their life cycle that humans most enjoyed. A Murr in its earliest phases was endlessly malleable and eager to please and could be coaxed into growing into the most striking patterns that would then be set for life. For southern-continent Usmics, the act of cultivating a Murr into its healthiest possible formation was a great honor and responsibility—and the stigma for failure, too great to be discussed. For humans, though . . . Suffice it to say, the novelty of such a species had spurred innovation in different, often difficult directions, not least of which included the concocting of wild excuses, if ever an Usmic chanced upon an older Murr in human care and asked why it looked so unlike those raised according to southern-Usm traditions.

Fortunately, so far the Usmics had accepted every half-assed explanation given.

But how could a prematurely dead or abandoned “sacred one” be explained away, if an Usmic diplomat asked for a report on how its kindred species was doing in human hands?

“Thank you for your time, Esmin. And, ah—?”

Esmin’s spongy mass displayed a southern-continent Usmic icon, two overlapping circles with a dot over and below the intersection, for the name of the young Murr that stirred contentedly on the grass beside them. This “sacred one” had a rustling crown of bright-leafed branches set around a sturdy, soil-brown trunk, and a hefty seat of prehensile roots that it used to move, to feed, and at this moment to flick insects trying to climb its bark. Esmin flashed the English version next: “Barin,” a popular Usmic word for near-but-not-quite dualities, with spiritual allusions that many human vendors translated poorly on Earthside alien merchandise.

“Barin,” said Doc, crouching to nuzzle a root in greeting. “Barin’s looking healthy.”

Esmin’s yellowness deepened with pride. “Fresh foliage this cycle. Gleaming well.”

“Apparently. That’s what I was hoping to discuss with you, actually. Thank you so much for taking the time between trade meetings. I just feel like I don’t have enough information on file to tend to these fellows correctly if they sicken here, now that so many humans have taken an interest in their care.”

“S I C K E N ?”

The word stretched across Esmin’s surface with a wide kerning between letters that the xeno-linguists claimed suggested an Usmic’s incredulity.

“Well,” said Doc, hastily. “I mean—if there are some cycles with fresh foliage, then there must be some cycles with, you know, un-fresh foliage, am I right?”

Esmin considered.

“Sacred ones sicken with the unrighteous. Are the humans now . . . unrighteous?”

Oh boy.

With a baleful look at the now happily “murring” Murr, half its roots thumping gently on the grass, and then back at Esmin, a quivering immensity it was easy to imagine rolling right over a human in a fit of ire, Doc tried to remember that this Usmic was no different than any other overprotective fur-, fin-, feather-, or scale-parent who sometimes answered even basic questions about their “babies” aggro-defensively from the other side of the examination table.

This was just a “branch”-parent whose appeasement came with a lot more on the line.

Doc smiled broadly in reply—and wondered, in the process, how well most Usmics could read tone from human speech. “Apologies, Esmin. I misspoke. What I meant is, how do you do it? What’s your secret? Barin’s foliage is quite spectacular, possibly the best I’ve seen on the station, so I knew I had to come to you. Is it diet, exercise, a special grooming regimen?”

Esmin’s yellowness positively glowed. That radiance didn’t make it easy to read the rapid-fire text then pulsing along the Usmic’s surface in answer to this flattery, but Doc knew better than to complain. A win was a win was a win—even if Doc would have to spend a whole lot more time reverse-engineering what could go wrong for the Murrs, from Esmin’s elaborate descriptions of how to make sure that everything, instead, went absolutely right.

But after Esmin and Barin had rolled and rustled on to find their evening sustenance, Doc felt no great compulsion to leap immediately into that work, or even to return to the lab right away, and so the exhausted vet lingered on a nearby bench in the artificial glint of late-afternoon Sol-toned light. “People watching,” ostensibly—and also, to keep a finger on the pulse of things, waiting to see if even a single other Murr would show up in the human throng.

The only other citizen-species in attendance was Hurvian: a pair of the tall reptiles conversing in hushed tones, their iridescent-green hoods peeking out from behind a line of fruit trees. The rest of the visitors were Terran by origin or ancestry: human couples, solos, families with children. Rare was the human without at least one nonhuman companion; rarer still was the one among them whom Doc didn’t know to have something in a terrarium or aquarium back home, or a cat simply disinclined to partake in the public fray. There, to the left, were the nine-year-old twins with Iggy, their contentedly leashed iguana; in the distance, Mort the crow kept the chief composter company (not that he needed it, with his whole menagerie of rescues from the station’s variously departed); and dead-center in the path, Ms. Wilson and Zeddi were interacting with two dozen other humans attending to dogs all their own.

It was hard to imagine, surveying this adoring crowd, that anyone would abandon a dear companion, or else neglect it to the point where death would become an act of mercy. But for all the species’ grand declarations about other animals’ “love unflinching,” as a dusty, old Earth poet had once put it, Doc had seen too much of humanity’s fickle share of the same. Cousin Mel still thought himself a good person, after all—a person who had simply made the only reasonable choice he could in the depths of outer space—and for that matter, the clinic had sent its fair share of edge cases into that “better rest” as well.

Doc waited until the arboretum dimmed to resemble twilight, and most of the evening circus had moved on. The latecomer appeared just as Doc was making to stand, but he entered with a full-grown Murr in tow, toddling on ever-sensing roots across the pungent grasses.

Doc froze as it came closer, under lamplights winking on one by one in the dark.

Oh, thought Doc. Oh, no.

6

Jude shot Doc a puzzled frown upon the latter’s eventual, all-too-quiet return. Even wizened old Skeeter, half-drowsing on the reception desk, looked up with concern when Doc forgot to issue the standard, salutary scratch on his rump while coming past.

“Hey, Doc, your face is as long as our patients’. What’s up? Binky’s memorial service isn’t until tomorrow, you know.”

“Hm? Oh. Right, no—no, this isn’t about that. Although, the security report, did it . . . ?”

The young man shook his head. “Mx. Meru’s been cleared of negligence charges, at least by legal reckoning of these things. Records shows that Binky blocked the air vent himself, by accident with his blanket, and well, it’s not like you can explain to a dog that the CO2 will just pool around it while it sleeps, you know? Even in the clear, though, Mx. Meru’s still beside themself that they let the new boyfriend kick Binky out of the bedroom in the first place. They’d been planning to move out of zero-G months ago, but the price point, you know?”

Doc knew, and sighed. Accidents happened, and there was no point throwing more recrimination into the mix. Mx. Meru would probably never forgive themself, on some level, for their eight-year-old companion’s death—and hopefully, to the benefit of heightened vigilance with whatever critter they adopted next. All the vet’s office could do was provide Binky with a loving send-off . . . and reissue advisory warnings, station-wide, about keeping the air well-circulated in any enclosed zero-G space where living beings slept.

“And the horses?”

“Good news there, Doc. Only one’s all twisted up. Prepping him for surgery now. I gave the other three the nano-cocktail—which should also report back to us soon how severely their biomes have been disrupted. Or not at all, ideally. But I figured I’d hold off on the fourth until post-op, so we don’t mess up its baselines during surgical intervention.”

“The right call. I’ll scrub up, then, and—thanks, Jude.”

Jude squinted through his bangs. “You sure you’re all right?”

Doc considered lying, and then considered that Jude was too smart to fall for it. An actor knew acting when they saw it, didn’t they?

“Not really, no. Saw something troubling at the arboretum, but it’ll have to wait. Oh, and can you schedule Esmin and Barin for a checkup next week? And call the Cap: see if she has time for a debrief tomorrow morning?”

“Will do. Hey—and boss? No worries, eh? We’ve got this.”

Doc nodded, and clapped Jude on the shoulder, but even while scrubbing in to help the colt lying in wait, the image of that second Murr in the arboretum was hard to shake—and with it, the fear that the station’s veterinary clinic really didn’t have a handle on this at all.

It had been years since Doc last performed surgery on a patient of this size, but the exploratory part had already been dealt with through 3D-imaging, which had identified the problem as part of the intestine folding inward, and not any of the more vicious bowel torsions with higher mortality rates. Plus, there was a holo-guide to illustrate optimal maneuvers while manipulating the colt’s insides—or rather, a standardized surgical manual with high-level AI processing, into which Jude had fed specific information about this one horse’s anatomy and biochemistry, so that the system could note any critical variabilities in, say, its vascular systems or connective tissues, and offer work-arounds on the go. All of this made the operation fairly simple, all things considered—and especially compared to the horror stories that Doc’s teachers had once waxed on about, from the early days of deep-space medical care. The blood-pooling in zero-G alone back then . . . But no: now, the only real danger was irritation from the fact of surgery itself, which could lead to a sticky and inflamed outer-intestinal surface susceptible to post-op infection. There, too, though, the subsequent nano-cocktail would hopefully identify any dangerous bacterial formations in time for successful intervention.

If anything, then, Doc’s own innards became the stuff of greater contemplation, while the seasoned station vet gently freed the colt’s tract from itself. Both Jude and Doc’s doctor had noticed Doc’s deteriorating appetite in recent months, and everyone knew that digestive uptake and gastric motility were already negatively impacted in low- to zero-G—but so what? Some days the fight to keep anything alive in these vast and distant tin-can universes verged on absurdity. A case of the “hollows,” some called it—and one of the few ailments that other Terran species didn’t seem to share with humans in deep space. Lucky sods. But if the body was tired, Doc reasoned, let it be tired. Let it diffuse itself until it was as empty as the vacuum between star-stuff. Let Jude’s generation, and the next, try to keep meaning intact for them all.

With a monitoring system on the lookout for trapped fluids, surgery was made even easier by the low-G environment, which gave Doc plenty of leisure to part and manipulate key components before tucking everything back inside and closing up. In a few years, there would probably be a nano-fix for this sort of colic, too—or maybe gene therapy that could build a better upper-body wall and sturdier intestinal structures in the first place. The latter depended, though, on whether any of this would serve the owners; if these horses had a better chance of avoiding intestinal and colonic impaction, but only at cost to their agility in sport . . .

The image of the second Murr in the arboretum came to mind again: an image that Doc was still trying to process before putting it into words for the rest. For now, at least, its sheer existence seemed proof-positive that, with humans, it was always a matter of when, not if, they intervened; and almost always for self-interest. Even when selecting which other species they wanted to protect from human harm, the choice to care about one animal-outcome over countless others was itself a form of violence—however inevitable such violence might be, whenever dealing with individual consciousnesses struggling to do the best that they could.

“Doc? Doc? You okay in there?”

Doc heard Jude vaguely through the comms and blinked to attention in time to watch the auto-suture tool finish its work upon the operating table, and another station arm clean around the wound, and four station zoomers skip about to clear the air. Doc came up alongside the colt and swept its mane aside to study the long line of its neck. Blood pumped steadily, if slowly, through prominent veins under the skin of the massive three year old.

They were all so bloody young, though, weren’t they? Even the Hurv, with its initial temper tantrum over humanity’s failure to follow ancient rules, had revealed in that instant the frailty of individual life spans even when fortified by immense stores of collective wisdom. Not one among them was old enough to be immune to making basic interspecies mistakes.

“Fine, Jude. We’re good here—you can call it a night.”

Not that the young man would, of course, with dress rehearsal coming soon. But far be it from Doc to keep the animal in any of them from running its most instinctive course.

7

“What am I looking at?” said Cap, when Doc had her and Jude together for a debrief the next morning. Jude looked a touch haggard from theater work but kept his attention as much on the projection between them as possible. “A cartoon? Ad mascot?”

“Not exactly,” said Doc. “That’s a Murr.”

Cap shot the station vet an even more bewildered look. “Murrs don’t have faces.”

“Not traditionally, no.” Doc drifted into an open seat. “But then, dogs didn’t start out with all the features we find adorable, either. We bred them in certain ways, and it was in their interest to hang around long enough to be bred—at least, originally, before some breeding caused enough maladaptive traits that they needed our ongoing help to survive. Murrs aren’t much different, minus all the weaknesses bred in for looks and purity; they were also originally cultivated for the features that Usmics find most appealing in small animal companions. All those tendrils of root and branch give the impression of the Usmic spores, a life-stage they’re inclined to want to nurture to ensure maximum resilience when it’s eventually scattered.”

“Except that Usmics never actually ‘scatter’ their Murrs,” said Cap.

“No more than we expect cats and dogs to grow up and leave us to build homes of their own,” said Jude, clearing the grogginess out of his throat. “It’s just, like, an offshoot of reproductive behaviors that’ve served us—and the Usmics—pretty well, you know?”

“But not the Hurv?”

“The Hurv spend less time with their young,” said Doc. “That probably has something to do with their lack of animal companions. They don’t have the nurturers’ instinct.”

Cap snorted. “Tell us something we don’t know.”

Jude nodded along, then added: “Well, except for their pack animals, which I hear they’ve got plenty of back on their home world. But even then, like, it doesn’t help with hard labor if your pack animal has all the features of a juvenile. And since they never needed to keep herds for protein and clothing, there wasn’t any reason to domesticate an ally for the flocks, right? Even a cat’s not much use if you’re planning on eating all the house-pests yourself.”

Cap processed this with a long slurp of coffee, and a hard look at the projection. “Meanwhile, an Usmic keeps its spore cluster close for years, if it wants to. Just like us with our kids. But then what happened here? Why would someone raise a Murr to look like that?”

Jude frowned, squinting at the projection. “Nah, they couldn’t have. I’ve seen different branch formations, but . . . look, the eyes, the tongue. That can’t be natural—can it?”

“It’s not,” said Doc. “They weren’t raised this way. Someone on the station has been gene-splicing, to make them more like Terran companions. And that’s why there are no new requests coming in. Like you said, Cap—something shinier came along. So, now there’s a local underground for this subspecies. Humans prefer the familiar, after all: something they can bond with. And to hell with the consequences for the rest of us, when they do.”

Cap inhaled sharply. “Do the Usmics know about this yet?”

“Not as far as I can tell, and I get the feeling we’d all be hearing from them if they did.”

“True.” Cap leaned back, considering. “So, what do we do? Deny them licensing?”

“That won’t fix the issue with the existing ones,” said Jude. “They’re here now either way, and it might even drive up black market demand if we tried to ban them. You know how some people want things even more when they’re not allowed them.”

“Though for all we know,” the captain countered, “the Usmics might consider these mutations an abomination worthy of destruction, even for all their talk of ‘sacred ones.’ And then, well . . . that’s a solution, right? Just give them all back and let the Usmics sort it out?”

Doc and Jude’s gazes met while glancing automatically at Cap’s desk rock, “Spot.” People without companions sometimes said careless things about them without realizing it—but also, if the matter ever did come to that, would Aleph Station even have the authority to give sanctuary to any sentient life-forms that the Usmics wanted killed? Would Earth authorities and local diplomats ever allow the clinic to shelter such a strange form of political stray?

Jude coughed and turned to Doc to change the subject.

“You said ‘someone’ is doing this—but you know who, right?”

“I do. Mateas Brimli, Core Bioengineer with a passion for histories of human-hybrid experimentation: the good, the bad, and especially the grotesque. But the name matters less than what we’re going to do now, doesn’t it? Because if it wasn’t going to be him, it would’ve been someone else, eventually, now that we’ve got all these research partnerships with other citizen-species, including at least a dozen with less cultural sensitivity about the ethics of genetic modification. We apparently already have six of these new Murrs in Aleph Station, with more deliveries in progress, but, oh, Jude—you should have seen the look on this guy’s face, when I asked about it. He’d been given strict instructions not to bring the Murr out until they’d finished monitoring for serious defects, but, as you said . . . we know how people are.”

Jude squeezed the bridge of his nose, as if to tamp down the exhaustion.

“Would that we didn’t.”

Doc nodded. “And so, he thought he’d been so clever, coming as late as he did to the park, long after the usual hour when Esmin famously drops by with a Murr of its own. It was supposed to be a subtle boast to those in the know; a way of establishing himself as an early adopter of a next-gen status symbol, so that he could later bask in the prestige of it all.”

“Just the prestige, of course.” Jude rolled his eyes. “And never the responsibility.”

“But of course.”

Cap shook her head. “I’m surprised he told you anything, Doc.”

“That’s just it—he and all the rest in the test-group are bursting with pride about their modded Murrs. Their overconfidence is staggering. They truly think that if they just roll out their new companions slowly enough no one will have any reason to be upset. The new Murrs will be so fully normalized before the Usmics catch on, that any attempt at raising hell will seem outdated before it even gets off the ground. ‘Better to ask forgiveness’ at its finest.”

“And no one thinks that these modded creatures are . . . kind of ugly?” Cap squinted at the projected, puppyish face grafted into the top half of the Murr. “I kinda prefer the original, myself. They’re like overactive bonsai, you know?”

Doc shrugged. “No accounting for taste—although, I expect that there will also be a few grandstanding human purists who enjoy their Murrs as-is, too, and who might make things worse for the diplomats by raising the alarm early, trying to rouse the Usmics into an even greater fury when it all comes out. And less for the benefit of the Murrs, of course, so much as to ingratiate themselves into a superior moral position—as if that moral position would mean a damned thing the moment Usm declared war on Earth and all its outposts.”

“Oh, yeah, that sounds about human.” Cap started kneading her temples. “Well, I’ll talk to the diplomats, try to prepare them for any impending fallout, and we’ll see what we can get out of Mateas, too, but . . . I’m guessing it’s too much to ask for an upside? Anything the negotiations team could spin as a positive, if it came to that? When it comes to that?”

Jude and Doc considered. Jude, in the end, took initiative:

“Maybe they’ve been modded to . . . shed a lot less?”

A slow, wavering nod from Cap and then Doc said that this would just have to do.

8

The handler was waiting in reception when Doc and Jude returned. Only a concussion-monitoring patch on one temple hinted at her brush with serious injury. Skeeter, from his tethered perch on the counter, was yowling at her in his usual, cantankerous way—and not really in pain, or need, but choosing to share a litany of feline grievances with the “lucky” clinic visitor all the same. Possibly this was the closest he could come to saying, “Sorry, all our staff are currently indisposed, but if you’d like to wait, I’ll let them know you’ve arrived”; and if that was the case, then Doc would definitely have to see about giving the old grouch a raise.

For now, though, Doc smiled and shook hands with the arrival—Yara Dagny, from the tag on her bag—before waving her through.

“How are you feeling, Ms. Dagny? I’m so glad you’re up and about again. The horses missed you, of that I’m absolutely certain.”

“Yara—please. And thank you. Internal bleeding in zero-G’s no joke, but you’ve got some excellent doctors here, and even better diagnostic equipment. They caught irregularities elsewhere in my system, too. Pretty sure I’m leaving in even better health than when I arrived.”

“Well, that’s good to hear. And—‘leaving’? So, the flight’s been rescheduled, everything’s more or less ready to go?”

“That depends on my girls and their boy.” Yara hesitated. “And thank you, Doc, for taking such good care of them. I’ve known transfer points that would never have leaped to preventative surgery without express authorization, even with something as serious as this.”

Doc cut a hand through the air between them. “Nonsense. We vets have a code, too.”

But Yara’s answering smile—more of a tight-lipped grimace—as good as said agree to disagree. And, considering her industry’s horror stories, probably for good reason.

“Anyway—” said Doc, “Yes, the mares are doing fine, their readings are all good, with minimal biomic disruption after all; and the colt should be ready to join them tomorrow.”

“Good,” said Yara. “You have no idea how pleased their new owner will be. He’s getting on in years—one of the first to live on an extra-solar colony, half of which he owns, and after a lifetime’s work getting the whole thing up and running, he’s grown a bit senile: lost in nostalgia, always talking about the ranch from his childhood. Reconnecting him with the descendants of that childhood herd was the least his grandchildren could do, so they’ve been keen to have the team arrive in time for his ninetieth Sol.”

Now, though, it was Doc’s turn to plaster on a less-than-full-story smile. The grandkids could always have created a VR ranch—excellent verisimilitude these days—instead of shipping out four living, breathing Terran animals to a completely new environment, at great and confusing cost to their health along the way, just to appease one rich human’s longing for yesteryear. But Doc knew better than to say as much. What good would it do them now?

“I’m just glad that everyone got through the incident in one piece—or, as you say, maybe even turned out all the better.”

The right answer, considering the circumstances: Yara’s smile warmed, and the pair turned their attention to discharge forms, follow-up prescriptions, and the matter of payment. Once the clinic’s account confirmed receipt of the indemnity funds, Doc also felt a whole lot wobblier about where Yara’s complicity ended and the clinic’s own began. But what else could have been done? Where in the galaxy were noncitizen-species safe from human whims?

“Time for that Congress of Familiars?” Jude offered, once Yara had left to make final flight arrangements, and after catching the look on Doc’s face while reviewing the transfer.

“Can’t come fast enough,” Doc agreed.

Binky’s send-off was a generous and well-attended affair in the arboretum. While the chief composter oversaw the internment of Binky’s flash-frozen and pulverized remains into a soil mixture that would make it suitable for new plant-life in a month, humans who had been close to the sleek, sharp-eared, black-and-tan xolo-whippet mix took turns sharing a few endearing stories at the podium. The sudden, tragic loss of a “good boy” on Aleph Station was enough of a to-do that many of the other fur-parents had shown up expressly to turn it into a celebration of life, with games and treats and video shoots involving the rest of the nonhumans, and a screening of the derivative but thematically “safe” The Congress of Familiars IX: Marlee’s Bestest Interstellar Walk for the children.

Mx. Meru’s boyfriend was not in attendance—possibly not even in the picture anymore—but the grieving guardian still always had someone at their side, even if this meant spending most of the service patiently listening to and declining offers of fosters in need. With one persistently tedious petitioner, Mx. Meru seemed grateful when Doc intervened to inquire about the other guest’s upcoming clinic appointments—because, as Doc suggested when the browbeater then hit a hasty, flummoxed retreat, there really was nothing like a little reverse-pressure to thin a flock of scavengers, was there? Mx. Meru cracked a faint smile at this last, while Doc tried not to feel bad for having spoken ill of a whole class of essential animal. Buzzards in particular were creatures who had learned not just how to stomach but also to thrive on the hardest facts of existence, turning those facts into something that others could build beauty from again. How could Doc not admire any living beings capable of such a feat?

Jude, meanwhile, had slipped at some point from distributing care tips and wellness kits for all sorts of noncitizen-species onboard, to promoting his upcoming show in the Core. This “slip” wasn’t entirely his fault, though, gauche as that opportunism would have been. Plenty of attendees were simply as curious about production details surrounding Hello World Goodbye as they were about the best way to deck out a travel carrier for optimal comfort in zero-G, and the relative value of the latest newfangled latrine-mods when potty-training their cats. Every time Doc came past, then, the young man was fielding questions like how it felt to move through zero-G like a dolphin or gorilla, or explaining for the umpteenth time that the troupe wasn’t offering discounts for nonhuman Terrans because the whole point of the show was to fundraise for the rehabilitation center whose patients—the first nonhuman intelligences sent to interact with equivalent nondominant alien species—had inspired the script in the first place. It was a wonder that Jude had the energy for it all. Doc felt exhausted, just listening in.

Doc also considered saving Jude, too, from one particularly vexing attendee, the type blissfully unaware that he was trying to explain (badly) basic concepts about deep-space animal outcomes to a fully trained assistant vet; but then, Doc noticed a more pressing arrival at the edge of all these proceedings: the very subject of the morning’s briefing with Cap and Jude. Mateas Brimli himself. It wasn’t surprising that he would be here, really; the station’s long-term complement was by no means infinite, and anyone with a vested interest in nonhuman animal companions tended to pay attention to related events. But Doc still found the gears turning: Confront him? Chat him up? Try to reason with him? But if so, to what end?

No, there seemed little point to lecturing the barn-keeper once the horses had fled—and quite a bit to risk, Doc reasoned, if Mateas were the sort to take even the mere existence of dissent as a reason to deepen his original convictions. And yet, even as Doc came to this conclusion, Mateas had decided the matter for them: setting eyes on the vet and advancing.

Never a dull moment, thought Doc. With no small reluctance, the station vet handed off the fluffy, golden pup who had been enjoying a snooze and lazy head massage in the crook of an arm held well above the rest of the inquisitive pack—and braced for bristlier contact with one of humanity’s far wilder own.

9

“Nature fetishism strikes again, am I right?” said Mateas, the moment he and Doc had removed themselves from the rest of the boisterous throng, to walk in the dappled shade of the arboretum’s fruit trees. “All these freaks thinking there’s something so high and mighty about letting it all take its gradual course, and all of them right there with a boot to your head the moment you start to dream big without doing anyone any harm. Any harm at all!”

There, in this word salad of internal thought given messy outward form, was that “pull” again, that trick of a false force it was so easy to believe was guiding anything. But Doc knew better than to fall for any of these loaded and obscure references, all these baited lures embedded with intricate and ultimately meaningless red herrings in one isolated, agitated mind.

“I take it you’ve heard from Captain Rui,” said Doc slowly instead.

“Yes, yes, Captain Rui, that prick Mika on the trade forum, my supervisor—all of them! And for what? Captain Rui says your office flagged something on shipment manifests. Next thing I know everyone’s telling me I’m going to bring down civilization? Ha! I wish.”

Doc suppressed a flicker of annoyance that the clinic had been named directly in this. It wasn’t ideal, but it also made sense that the command staff and diplomatic team would have tried to benefit from throwing around a bit of medical authority when asking Mateas . . . what, exactly? Or had they simply gone to him to vent over what his actions could cost them all?

“I can’t speak to your conversation with the others,” said Doc. “But I do know that it would help tremendously with damage control if we had some sense of how your test subjects are doing, so we can anticipate how the Usmics might respond once they find out that we’ve been, well, as they put it, ‘unrighteous’ guardians of their ‘sacred ones.’”

Mateas laughed bitterly. “‘Unrighteous!’ Us? Unbelievable. So high and mighty.”

Doc halted in the shade of a citrus tree. “Mr. Brimli, we’re not on opposite sides.”

“No? Sure as hell could’ve fooled me.”

For a split-second then, Doc imagined a different career path, a critical moment back at the academy when someone had asked: Why study nonhuman animals? Why not other humans, when there are so many on the stations and deep-space colonies who need our care?

It wasn’t that humanity’s companions didn’t experience anxiety, depression, or a whole host of neurodegenerative diseases, too. But there was something in the way that a species with humanity’s level of mytho-linguistic tradition meant that they could and did try to rationalizeits hurt, its selfishness, its anger, and its prejudice . . . It was how someone like Tina Wilson, generally a decent human being who contributed plenty to her communities, would have become defensive, even hostile, taking the whole matter far too personally, if Doc had simply tried to tell her that Zeddi’s alien costuming was inappropriate and potentially destructive to ongoing diplomatic efforts; or how Cousin Mel would have told Doc to “fuck right off” if Doc had so much as pointed out that the kitten could have been placed in the stasis pod with him, then re-homed on return to Earth instead. Doc had a case of the “hollows,” that was true, but this existential nuisance of a condition was just one of a whole, dizzying mess of behavioral complexes that the human-oriented physician had to grapple with, when simply trying to address a body of very real health concerns, and, well . . .

Other animalities were often much easier, where all that chaos was concerned.

“I hear you,” said Doc, after Mateas had taken a moment to exhale. “How are all the new Murrs doing, anyway? It’s a really ambitious experiment, from what they tell me. You must be exhausted from all the work it would take to pull off something that incredible.”

“You have no idea,” said Mateas, heavily. He ran a hand through his hair while eyeing the station vet, as if waiting for the inevitable sign or sound of judgmental disagreement—but when it didn’t come, when all Doc did was wait patiently for him to continue, the bioengineer at last relented, at least a touch. “Well, okay, maybe a bit. But I swear, Doc, I did all my initial testing on micro-samples. I screened for all the major potential splicing issues long before I started in on full-scale test subjects. And even those ones, I put on ice the moment in their developmental cycle that something seemed to be going wrong. No suffering, right? And no death, no slaughtering of anyone’s ‘sacred ones.’ They’re all still there, waiting to be treated once the process is refined. I’m not a fool, okay? I know what I’m doing.”

Doc nodded. Believing Mateas was not important here; calming the agitated animal in him was—at least, long enough to gather the necessary intel. “Understood. The only trouble is, we didn’t know that, and how could we? We only just realized what was going on when the general population’s habits started changing. And you know how thoughtless a crowd can be.”

Mateas grunted at this last and relaxed further. Shifting the blame to “the masses” and their foolish beliefs was an easy bit of flattery to pull off. Who didn’t want to think themselves above the madding crowd? Jude, Doc—even Cap, for all her elaborate maintenance of her person and her living spaces: none of them quite escaped the allure of thinking themselves the “highest” intellects of all; and in this way, made themselves even more prone to fits of dangerous overconfidence in whatever belief or whim at any given moment struck their fancy.

“One way or another,” said Doc, as casually as possible, “we all knew this kind of work was bound to happen eventually. I mean, the way all our research was going with the outer species, am I right? And so, now we just need to figure out how to help with what you were already trying to do—to roll out these new Murrs in the least harmful way possible. To anyone. To their human companions. To you. To the new Murrs themselves.”

“Nurrs,” said Mateas, after a pause.

“Hm?”

“We’re calling them ‘Nurrs.’ Part of the plan is to argue that they’re not really Murrs anymore, so that it doesn’t matter if they don’t look like they’re supposed to. Usmics love their categories, right? So, we figure this has a decent shot of fixing everything without any fuss.”

Doc kept a straight face. That myth about the Usmics, often reinforced in mainstream media by caricatures of the southern-Usmics’ elevated language of dualities, was pervasive even on Aleph Station. It wasn’t surprising that this bioengineer would have thought it true, too: that the whole of the Usmic species, with its wide-ranging continental heritages and languages, could be reduced to a singular people fixated on surface-labels. But there was something heartening, at least, in the fact that Mateas had tried to weed out disasters and find fixes for the issue at all. This meant that, on some level, he did see a potential problem here, same as them.

Now came the tricky part: trying to get the bioengineer’s full participation and data set, so that together they could work out a better response to the coming storm.

Give me an egg-bound cockatiel or shattered ant farm over this nonsense any day, thought Doc—but for now, there was only this far messier and more delicate recovery work.

As Binky’s celebration of life was winding down, Jude caught up with Doc at Red Shaft, where a lift carried people to and from the Ring into the Core: gravity receding as they rose inward, even if other kinds of heaviness ever-lingered in the heart. Doc knew that Aleph Station looked different to Jude, on account of their respective eras on it. Where Doc still saw echoes of past military infrastructure, from the early, skittish days of even Earth’s most optimistic pursuit of trade relations with far-flung worlds, Jude would only have known station features by their more recent functions: supply depots for free medicines, collaborative makerspaces, storage facilities, and stasis pods.

Would Usmic response to the modified Murrs bring about those skittish days again? Could one spacefaring species really go to war over something as seemingly innocuous as the care and maintenance of their animal companions in alien hands?

Well, but also . . . hadn’t plenty of Earth’s local wars been fought over far less?

Jude whistled appreciatively in transit, as Doc relayed everything that Mateas had disclosed in their conversation—the extent of preliminary trials, the state and location of all frozen missteps, the real number and locations of existing “Nurrs” in station quarters, how many others were on their way, how follow-up tests were proceeding, and how many people had access to the protocols that the engineer had perfected to this point at all.

“Damn, boss, when you’re good, you’re good.”

Doc notched a brow in amusement. “And when I’m not good?”

Jude shrugged. “Well, duh, Doc. Then we’re screwed.”

“Hm. I’ll keep that in mind.”

“But, so, what now? Like, Captain Rui and the diplomats went right for him after our meeting, yeah? And then he went looking for you right away and spilled everything, and still, the problem remains the same, right? This is going to bust open wide no matter what.”

“Maybe,” Doc agreed. And yet, hearing Jude summarize the afternoon gave Doc a thought: Perhaps Cap hadn’t name-dropped the clinic just to add a kernel of authority to her own. Perhaps she’d scattered the bread crumb trail on purpose. After all, just as many humans sought out elusive or trending species for prestige, so too did many with highly active minds long to be acknowledged, eager to capture the acclaim, admiration, and envy of their peers. Had Cap and the diplomats possibly been banking on this bioengineer itching to explain his genius to whomever had the best credentials for understanding and celebrating his work?

Doc couldn’t help but smile slowly at the diversionary tactic. Usmic dualities were certainly infectious, weren’t they? But binary thinking rarely got any of them anywhere.

“Jude,” said Doc, once the lift had settled at med-sector—Doc’s stop, but not the actor’s, not on dress rehearsal day—“Save me a seat. I’ve got one more errand to run.”

“Just one?”

From anyone else, this would have seemed sarcastic, but Jude knew the vet life well.

“Just one,” Doc agreed. “At least—for now.”

10

Around the veterinary clinic were a host of other medical services, the majority for citizen-species but a few dedicated to mixed-use equipment and research labs. Human doctors, scientists, and technicians were joined here by professionals from a host of other species, including ones where medical care was less a profession and more a sacred calling. And so long as there were Hurv in talks on Aleph Station . . . there was aid for them here, too.

Doc hesitated by the front entrance to their rather stark facility, which was divided into minimalist hot, cold, and wet sectors behind a straightforward reception booth where a single Hurv reposed, large eyes drooping beneath its iridescent green hood. The thought of a Hurvian version of Jude amused just long enough for Doc to strike up the courage to knock and then enter. Fear of starting a diplomatic incident? Perhaps. But perhaps also simple discomfort in the presence of something that had made humanity feel so small for so long.

“Ah, hello. Is—the doctor in?”

The Hurv eyed Doc slowly.

“You require assistance? Information on the species you service?”

Doc was both relieved to be recognized as another professional, and inclined to laugh at the Hurv’s assumption. But then, why else would a human come a-calling to such an old, indifferent species, if they weren’t seeking some sort of wisdom from it?

“Thank you, no—not exactly. I wish to ask the plausibility of a favor.”

The Hurv’s left eye rolled to the side for a moment, as if in thought, and then the Hurv leaned in and activated an intercom.

“There’s a noncitizen specialist to see you, Healer,” said the receptionist in emphatic English. “Human.” Then, in a Hurvian tongue, it added a few syllables that Doc could not so much as interpret as belonging to a single word or a full phrase. But Doc had some guesses: “Trouble,” maybe. Or “If you want, I can eat it or send it away.” The Hurv did have strikingly long, lipless mouths with sharp teeth, and it was hard to look elsewhere, in their presence.

In the ensuing pause, Doc had plenty of time to doubt the original plan entirely. Why hadn’t the vet simply gone straight to Cap, or the diplomats, with all that Mateas had revealed, and that Doc suspected might actually help them now? Hubris, obviously. Hubris, and that pesky case of the “hollows,” that yawning absence of meaning, aching to be filled.

The Healer did not answer on the intercom, but rather emerged glistening from the wet zone, and blinking rapidly to adjust its sight as the fog cleared. It towered over humans, too.

“Yes? Human? Yes?”

The Healer fixed an impatient eye on Doc: the hallmark of a bureaucratic species that intentionally faced others with its least welcoming side showing. Maybe back on the Hurvian home world things were different. Possibly there were enclaves or whole cultures of dissidents who for millennia had resisted the tedious practicality of their peoples’ ancient ways, and advocated for free love and sang peacenik tunes in the shallows of their ancestral shores. But all the younger deep-space-faring species never got to see that side, if it existed. Never got to visit the Hurv’s home world. All of them knew the Hurv, instead, solely as The Ones Who Will Take Away All Your Toys If You’re Not Careful With How You Use Them.

And yes, maybe that hadn’t stopped individual humans from testing the extent of Hurvian patience, baiting the ancient species in passive-aggressive and self-righteous ways despite the decade-long, species-wide cost the last time someone had transgressed—and even then, only in error! But . . . on the other hand . . . why would any ever expect a cautionary tale to work with perfect consistency? When had humanity ever claimed itself to be as universally righteous as, say, the Usmics of Usm’s southern continent?

Moment of truth, thought Doc, before stepping into the moral muck with all the rest.

Mere hours on, Cap mag-locked beside Doc in the gallery overlooking the temporary theater-site, a zero-G expanse awash in faux underwater lighting, where Jude and the other “dolphins” were moving interpretively through their final test run: first, as a pod on Earth, in play and then mid-hunt; then, interacting with humans in a more confined setting, where they excelled at humanity’s strange new tactile games; next, as a pod divided, contained, sedated, and above all else confused; from there, turning into the components of a spaceship, dreaming whole-pod dreams of hurtling together toward the distant stars; and lastly, with a single dolphin—Jude—lost, alone in the vastness of night, calling uselessly about before moving symbolically, sacrificially, toward the light of an alien sun, and . . . weakening, then winking out.

“Got your report on Mateas,” said Cap, when the troupe broke for intermission. “Lots of good, actionable intel. We should be able to monitor everything with these new Murrs carefully from here on out. And the diplomats are figuring out how to break the news as gently and soon as possible, so the Usmics can’t accuse us of trying to hide anything from them.”

“Good, glad to help,” said Doc—not a little distantly, still studying the aquatic light patterns rippling silently across the stage.

“Also, I got a call from the Hurvian ambassador . . . ”

“Oh?”

“But you wouldn’t know anything about that.”

Doc side-eyed the station’s captain. “Sure you shouldn’t have your zoomers with you, Cap, before you get your hands dirty asking a question like that?”

“Oh, but there isn’t a zoomer big or strong enough to clean some of the shit we get into, is there, Doc?”

“Now who’s finally offering up their trademark optimism?”

Cap winked. “It was a good call, in any case. Very productive. The ambassador wanted me to know that, for the sake of station security and the prevention of further breakdowns in sector order, they’ll widely disseminate an offer to take these new Murrs into their own protective custody, if the Usmics have a negative reaction upon hearing about their existence.”

“Well, now. Isn’t that awfully generous of them.”

“Isn’t it, though.” Cap eyed Doc suspiciously. “And I suspect they’re only offering this because they know that they won’t actually have to deal with the new Murrs if it comes to that. The moment the southern-continent Usmics realize they have a choice between letting the humans keep them, or handing them over to a severe species that always gets its way, well . . . ”

“Why, Cap,” said Doc, pleasantly. “Why the long face? And here I thought you’d be pleased to see a problem take care of itself.”

“Uh huh. And—has it? Why would the Hurv help out? Are we really sure this’ll work?”

Doc kissed teeth while watching the stage crew prepare for the dress rehearsal’s second half. “I ever tell you about my Aunt Luli?”

Cap shot Doc a withering look. “Are all your relatives anecdotes now?”

“Aren’t everyone’s? Anyway, Aunt Luli—she never wanted an animal companion, or even much in the way of other people around. Bristly exterior, all cactus needle without the flower. Or so we thought, until one time, when I was a kid—a little kid, mind you, a real brat not minding my own business—I pointed at her chest in front of everyone and shouted, ‘it’s moving!’ Well, and so it was, because she’d apparently rescued a baby squirrel, and that little rotter ended up going with her wherever she went. Except, as it later turned out, it wasn’t exactly a clean rescue. Turned out, a neighbor had found the poor thing, but Aunt Luli hadn’t liked the way the neighbor was managing things, so, she took it upon herself to do better. And even though she could go on for days about how much of a burden the critter was . . . ”

“Mm hm. She loved it just the same, right? But—the Hurv?”

Doc cut the air lazily with a hand. A sound sequence signaled that the second half would be starting soon. “They didn’t have to leave instructions for us in the fabric of space, and they didn’t have to come running the moment we didn’t read them. But they did, because that’s the way their species shows care for its young: by leaving carefully curated guideposts and monitoring from afar. By stepping in only when necessary—but being at the ready, always, to help whenever needed. So, maybe they don’t have companions like we do—but still . . . ”

“You’re saying we’re their pets?”

Doc made a mental note to correct Cap’s term-use later. For now, the tired station vet simply hummed assent as the lights dimmed and Jude and the rest of the actors drifted into position. Tomorrow, before opening night, there would be a new hamster’s lodgings to review, a litter of puppies to fix, an elder cat to assess for gene therapy, a full schedule of “Nurr” checkups to arrange, and a ship to watch launch, if time allowed, with its team of horses headed frivolously for the distant stars. Were they missing anything? Always, in this line of work. Would Jude grind his teeth to dust over the coming trend cycles: all the petty, day-to-day provocations and predictable human grandstanding that stood to do great harm to citizen- and noncitizen-species alike? Probably.

But so and ever-spun the wheel that also kept them grounded, with all its superficial force-effects driven by a problem much older and more central to them all.

New ones would just have to wait for their own curtain call.

About the Author

Canadian by birth, M L Clark is now based in Colombia. Clark is the published author of science- and speculative-fiction stories in Analog, Clarkesworld, and Lightspeed, with work forthcoming in F&SF. Other projects pending publication include a novel in the universe of “To Catch All Sorts of Flying Things” and “Leave-Taking,” and a humanist column and podcast to launch at the end of 2021.

Rain Falling in the Pines

Lavie Tidhar

1.

Two men in dark sunglasses stepped through the doors of the Monte Carmelo. They stopped and scanned the gloomy inside. Geshem-Nofel-Ba’oranim clocked them and kept to his booth. He knew trouble when it walked through the door looking for him.

The two men were armed. Security, probably federal. That’s if Geshem was lucky, if it wasn’t someone he owed money to.

The two men stepped up to the bar.

“Looking for a Neand,” one said.

There was a sudden silence around them at the slur.

“Don’t know any First Humans,” the bartender said. She polished a glass. Kept her face carefully blank. Kept one hand on the EMP device under the counter.

“Goes by the name of Geshem.”

The Monte Carmelo sat on the edge of the First Human Sanctuary and the Federated Lands of Judea Palestina. The border wasn’t neat. The Sanctuary encompassed most of Mount Carmel, which had been home to the original First Humans a long time in the past, and it extended down to the Hills of Menashe and past Armageddon to the Jezreel Valley and into the Galilee. The Monte Carmelo sat somewhere on the border, between Druze villages and the monastery of the Carmelites, each of which had their own dispensation, so questions of authority were the sort of questions it was best not to ask. Which was what drew the sort of people who drank there to the Monte Carmelo.

“Shin Bet or Shurta?” the bartender said. Her name was Mili, and she was wired with the sort of old-school upgrades backstreet surgeons still performed over the border in Sidon or Beirut, the sort of stuff that made you a little faster and a little tougher, just like First Humans were. Geshem thought he could trust her. But he couldn’t be sure.

“I’m Cohen, this is Haddad,” the man on the left said. His hair was thinning on top. “We’re with Antiquities.”

“No antiquities here,” Mili said.

“It’s all antiquities here,” Haddad said. He had a pencil moustache. “Where’s the Neand?”

Geshem sank low in the booth. He could make a run for it, but he didn’t know into what. So he stayed put for the moment. He squished a green ball in his hand.

Mili shrugged. “You’re in the wrong place, friend,” she said.

“Not your friend,” Haddad said. His partner smirked.

“We can shut you down,” Cohen said.

“On what grounds?”

“Smuggling.”

“We’re under Carmelite protection,” Mili said. “Besides, I’m just the bartender. You want, I can sell you a beer. What did he do, anyway? This Geshem?”

Cohen shrugged. Haddad said, “Took something he shouldn’t have, didn’t he.”

“You want a beer?” Mili said.

“I don’t want a beer,” Cohen said. He and Haddad pulled out weapons. They were short snub-nosed pistols, ugly. They weren’t quite pointing them. But they weren’t being subtle about it either.

The rest of the clientele didn’t like it, Geshem knew. The Monte Carmelo catered to people who didn’t have much to do with the law. But they wouldn’t look too kindly on Geshem either, for bringing the law to this place. So Geshem slid out of the booth and came out slowly, arms raised.

“I didn’t do nothing,” he said.

Cohen and Haddad turned. Cohen smiled an ugly smile. Haddad just looked confused. Geshem smiled back at Cohen. Then he let go of the ball he was holding.

It rolled across the floor of the bar and stopped at the feet of the two Antiquities men. It was green and squishy. Geshem had bought it off of a Tiberian gene-shaman, and to be honest he didn’t know quite what to expect.

When the ball exploded it made a sort of wet whoomph sound. It splattered the two men with goo.

“Get it off me, get it off!”

Haddad squeezed off a shot. It went wide, hit the ceiling. Patrons glowered into their beers. The green stuff crawled over the two men from Antiquities, growing furry and glowing like cave moss.

Mili shouted, “No guns in the bar!” She hopped over the counter and took their weapons. Geshem ran for the door.

“Keep my tab open!” he shouted behind him.

“You’re barred!” Mili shouted. But by then Geshem was outside.

The Carmel Mountain, ancient, sacred, strewn with bones and fought over ever since Homo Sapiens first set foot in First Humans land, sloped down to the valley below. Somewhere beyond the trees was the road, a digitally federated thruway linking Gaza City and Tel Aviv to Haifa and Lebanon, cutting like a knife through the Sanctuary. But Geshem figured as long as he avoided the road, and as long as he could shake off the two Antiquities agents and get back into his peoples’ enclave, he should be fine. He laughed and ran into the trees, taking with him the backpack with the roc’s egg he really wasn’t supposed to be carrying.

2.

Geshem-Nofel-Ba’oranim didn’t even want the roc’s egg. He’d been hoping for something a little less bothersome when he made the trek to the Sea of Galilee to see the gene-shaman.

The gene-shaman was a Sapi, some old Jewish dude who was wanted across the intertwined strips of both Judean and Palestinian authorities and in a few other places besides. So like other Sapis who needed a place to lie low, he crossed into First Human territory, since Geshem’s people only got the land in the first place because it was jungly, swampy, and filled with, not to point too fine a point on it, monsters.

Relics of the old wars, specifically, from behemoths and great taninim to derelict manshonyaggers, roc nests, djinns, UXOs, mutated ants, and nanogoo swamps. Not to mention the cave bears and the killer robots.

Robots. Now there was a thing Geshem didn’t like. Call him bigoted, but he just didn’t trust them. Some even came down from Central Station into First Human land to preach the Way of Robot, and they were all about doing no harm to people even though, he thought darkly, even though what did people make robots for in the first place if not to kill people? And the other thing, whenever he met one of the old humanoid robots was, he was never sure they thought First Humans were, well, people. Even though they were always very polite and all. The problem was, they were modeled on Sapis, not Neands—pardon the slur. It was galling to be named after some German pastor.

The point being, if you were running from something or hiding from something you came to the First Humans, and for the most part, as long as you were cool you got to stay, and the gene-shaman was cool insofar as he kept himself to himself, and he knew better than to screw you on a deal—or so Geshem thought then, at least. Now he wasn’t so sure.

There were no roads and no cars going through the Sanctuary. There were no drones other than the old feral war drones that still lived there, and even the Conversation was muted across the Sanctuary, though echoes of it still fed through. Most First Humans weren’t noded, and if they had to access the virtuality they did it the old-fashioned way, with a screen or a rig or an immersion pod. So Geshem made the trek, past Armageddon, all along the Jezreel and through the mountains to Tiberias and the lake. It really was beautiful country. The heat didn’t bother him, and his genetic signature confused most of the old predators, since they were coded for Sapis, back in the days when First Humans were still extinct.

It was a long trek, though. This wasn’t Central Station with the ships coming down from orbit, though you could see them darting like fireflies in the night above the Sanctuary. This wasn’t Gaza City either, with the gleaming port and floating islands and the glass and chrome pipes that ran down to the underwater cities of the Drift. This was bad old detritus and debris land, where the bones of Geshem’s ancestors still lay deep down in the mud.

He reached Tiberias, and he saw the lake, and the monsters in the water. He sat with the gene-shaman ’round the fire and swapped stories and then they talked shop.

“You got that thing I asked for?” the gene-shaman said. His name was Lotem.

Geshem brought out the package, wrapped in waterproofed mammoth hide. Back in the Great Rebirthing, the Denisovans got much of Siberia, and this was Siberian mammoth leather, the real deal. Inside it was the stuff Lotem had asked for.

“What is it, anyway?” Geshem said.

“Latest drop from the Kunming labs,” Lotem said. “It’s just code. Genome sequencing and stuff. You know.”

“To make monsters, sure,” Geshem said.

“It’s not just monsters,” Lotem said, looking genuinely agitated. “It’s good stuff, too. Like those nano-mites that got released into the oceans to eat the Pacific Trash Vortex and the North Atlantic Garbage Patch and stuff.”

“Didn’t they go rogue and start eating all kinds of other things, like ships and subs?” Geshem said. “And then there was a story about whole islands vanishing.”

Lotem rubbed his hands together. “Alright,” he said, “so that was a bad example. I’m just saying.”

“Look, man,” Geshem said. “I don’t care what you need it for. What have you got for me, is what I want to know.”

“I got this,” Lotem said. He rummaged around in a pile by the fire and came back with the egg. The egg was about the size of a human head, and heavy. The shell was a smooth warm metal, and it glowed faintly from inside.

“What do I need with a roc egg?” Geshem said.

“It’s not your regular roc egg,” Lotem said.

“Where did you get it?”

“The Golan. Don’t ask.”

“You went over?” Geshem said, wondering if the gene-shaman was stupid or mad or both.

“It’s where all the primo stuff is, my man. Old old war stuff. But this isn’t old. It’s new.”

“It’s a roc egg,” Geshem said. He felt almost insulted. It was a long trek to the lake, and it would be a long trek back. “What do you want me to do with it, make a roc omelet?”

Lotem smiled politely at the old joke.

“It’s fertilized,” he said. “See here?” He pointed to a spot on the egg. Geshem squinted but it looked solid to him.

“Someone inseminated it with off-world wildtech,” Lotem said. “I think.”

“You think?”

Lotem shrugged. “Nakaimas from Jettisoned.”

Translation: bad magic from the last outpost on Charon. Geshem had never been off-world, though there were some First Humans on Mars. People only lived on Jettisoned because that’s what happened to them, they were jettisoned off the Exodus ships as they departed the solar system. All the wildtech in the solar system came from that lawless hell on Charon. But how some of it ended up in the Golan and inside a roc’s egg, he had no idea. The Golan has been an involuntary park for centuries, ever since a terror-artist dada bomb went off there. Not even a First Human tracker would go into the Golan.

“What’s it like there?” he said, fascinated.

“Pretty,” Lotem said. “Weird. It looks really peaceful, until something awful crawls out of the ground or swoops down on you. The shadows all fall wrong. Some of the rocks talk and some of the animals aren’t really animals, but you can’t . . . ” He fell quiet. “You can’t tell what they are,” he said.

“How did you go there and still get out alive?”

“Protection,” Lotem said. He showed Geshem the disc hanging ’round his neck, looped through with string.

“It’s a terror-artist artifact?” Geshem said, impressed. Those things were so rare as to be nonexistent. And the real stuff was more likely to kill you than protect you.

“Made by Nasu, supposedly. Someone sold it to me in the flea market in Jaffa. Didn’t know if it was genuine but . . . ” Lotem shrugged. “I got in and I got out again, so it has to be. It must null some of the worst effects of the dada bomb.”

As fascinating as all this no doubt was, Geshem realized none of this really answered his questions, which were one, what exactly the egg was, two, how Jettisoned wildtech even ended up in the Golan, and more importantly, three, what, if anything, it was worth.

Still. A trade was a trade. He took the egg, and some green goo grenades, and a handful of Sidorov embryo-mech maker beans that he was going to either sow or sell. So all in all it wasn’t a bad deal.

At least that was what he figured until the first attack came.

3.

He was deep into Sanctuary land by then and no one should have messed with him there, only there they suddenly were, four white ghosts dropping out of the trees soundlessly. Sapis with Uzis, because old guns were still the best guns.

They fired. He ducked and rolled. Humans hunting his kind—again. He felt his hatred of them rise like bile. He vanished into the trees. He put on goggles and watched ghosts with digital imprints track him. He could smell them without looking. He could smell swamp water. He ran and they followed, but the water was near. Geshem slipped into the mud. He crouched low. He whispered invocations.

The four assassins materialized soundlessly. They moved without hurrying. They had to be good to have made it this far into the Sanctuary. Combat rewired bodies, the works. But this was Geshem’s land.

When the Tanin burst out of the swamp its tail swatted trees like matchsticks. A huge mouth opened, teeth like giant blades. The assassins ran, or tried to. The Tanin’s neck whipped this way and that, the head on it like a pea at the end of a stalk. Two huge eyes burned yellow and green. They looked at the intruders dispassionately. Geshem didn’t know what ancient lab created the Taninim. This one was only a minor Tanin. The Great Taninim of old still lived, but only deep in the secret heart of the Sanctuary.

The white ghosts fled.

The Tanin fed.

After a while the Tanin slunk back into the swamp and Geshem climbed out. He found a foot and, a little later, an intact hand. He took the hand.

Filaments still twitched inside the flesh and blood. Augmented, but he knew that already. Geshem wondered who would send mercenaries after him. The fingerprints had been burned clean off. He tossed the hand into the swamp, a respectful offering to the Tanin.

He spent the night in the ruins of Afula, a Sapi town overgrown with jungle now. This was ancient First Human land. When the Sapis first came over from Africa, Geshem’s people had already been living in this place. Their stone tools still littered the ground. Whenever he found one of the worked flint knives, he held it in his hand and marveled at how well it fit, and at that continuity with his own ancient past. But Sapis bred quickly, and First Humans didn’t, and eventually only the Sapis were left of all the human races of the Earth.

He made a fire and sat all alone amidst the rotten fallen-down buildings of the Sapis. The stars shone bright overhead. He stared fascinated at the moving dots of light that were the shimmering orbitals rings and transport ships. Sapis always had to spread and conquer. They did it to the other human races and if they ever met aliens out there, they would do it to them too. You couldn’t blame them for it—it was just their nature.

A beating of wings as large as sails bellowed in the night. Geshem saw a dark shape as large as an airplane hovering against the field of stars. The creature swooped low and came to stand beyond the light of Geshem’s fire.

Huge eyes regarded him quizzically. A monstrous beak opened and closed without sound.

Like the Taninim, the rocs were really just tweaked bioweapons. They were imprinted for Sapis, not First Humans. But Geshem had never seen one of the creatures this close before.

He stared at the roc.

The roc stared at Geshem.

Geshem took out the egg.

“Is this what you’re after?” he murmured. The roc inched its head. You could get lost in its eyes, Geshem thought. The egg felt warm in his hands, alive somehow.

“You can take it,” Geshem said. He carried the egg beyond the fire and placed it on the ground. The roc towered over him. Geshem backed away, slowly.

The roc lowered its head. It examined the egg.

It cooed.

“Good roc,” Geshem said. “Good roc.”

The roc touched the front of its beak to the egg. Then it pulled back and opened two huge wings and cawed softly.

“Good roc!” Geshem said desperately.

The wings thrashed. The creature rose into the air. It circled overhead and sped east.

Geshem sat on his haunches and stared at the egg.

“What are you?” he said softly. But there was no answer.

4.

Campfire smoke rose into the setting sun as Geshem approached the settlement the next day. Armageddon rose overhead. A brook bubbled gently, and Geshem inhaled the smell of fresh pines.

“Geshem!” he heard the children crying. “Geshem’s coming!”

He grinned and opened his long arms wide as his niece, Alei-Shalechet-Noflim-Ba’stav, jumped on him.

“Uncle Geshem!”

“Shalechet,” he said, hugging her.

“Did you bring me anything?”

“Black gold to anoint your brow,” Geshem said. He had an unfortunate love for old Sapi songs. “Your forehead rhymes with eyes and with light.”

“Uncle Geshem! Come on!”

“I brought you a roc’s egg,” Geshem said. “Would you like to see it?”

Her eyes grew wide.

“Here,” he said carelessly. He opened the bag. Shalechet took the egg. An aura of visible spectrum light surrounded her head. The currents swirled and traveled down her arms to the egg. The egg shuddered.

“It’s alive,” Shalechet said. “It’s saying . . . ” Her eyes grew wider. She was noded from birth, but not with a Sapi node. Some tinkered-with bespoke thing: it was unpredictable.

“It’s cold,” she said. “It’s dark . . . It’s come from a great distance, from a place where the sun is small and cold in the sky . . . It wants to talk but can’t. It speaks in different protocols. It doesn’t understand what I am. It’s only seen Sapis before.”

“You can understand all that? How?”

“I don’t know . . . ”

She put the egg down on the ground and stared at it. “It was not meant to be here, Uncle Geshem. It was not sent to Earth for us.”

“Then who?”

She shuddered. “I don’t know,” she said. “But they will come for it.”

Geshem thought of the white ghosts in the forest.

“I think they already have,” he said.

He spent the night by the fire, under the stars. The brook bubbled. His grandfather came and sat with him then. Ruach-Noshevet-Ba’gfanim. The old man had been to Mars, had worked the Lunar-Martian trade route in his youth. A First Human on Old Mars. He never tired of telling the tales. But he came back and made a family. He wasn’t noded, but he carried a communication disc around his neck, had a full-immersion pod buried out the back way and hooked up to solar. Geshem never went into the virtuality himself. He felt better in the physicality, where the digital ghosts of the Others seldom incurred.

“This thing you brought,” Ruach said, “it has off-world code?”

“Seems so, Grandfather.”

“I heard stories, in the Up and Out,” Ruach said. “Strange rumors, even stranger code coming in from beyond the Oort. Dark entities as large as worlds, they say, amorphous filaments moving like tendrils. Or like sea anemones.”

“Sea anemones?” Geshem said.

His grandfather nodded. “Out in there in Oort.”

“Well, what are they?” Geshem said.

“Some say they were made there long ago by the Spiders who seeded the solar system with the Conversation, but they mutated into a new network, new Others with different protocols. Some say it was ‘Mad’ Rucker, the Terror-artist, who also made the boppers on Titan. Some just say they’re aliens.”

“Are they real?” Geshem said. “Or is it just a story?”

Ruach shrugged, a Sapi habit he’d picked up in the Up and Out.

“Who knows,” he said. “But there are people who believe in them. You want to watch out, Geshem-Nofel-Ba’oranim. And you want to get rid of that thing you brought back with you.”

“Soon as I sell it,” Geshem said. “I owe to those Toads from Kunming.”

Ruach nodded, another Sapi habit.

“This was not wise,” he said. “Getting involved with the Toads.”

“I am not as wise as you, Grandfather,” Geshem said, and Ruach grinned and slapped him on the shoulder, and Geshem laughed.

“No,” his grandfather said. “You are not.”

5.

The Kunming Toads started out as just another small-time outfit on the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone between Luang Namtha, Chiang Rai, Tachileik, and Yunnan. They’d since upgraded meth to Plateau and Crucifixation, turned from people-smuggling to organ-legging, and finally veered into the lucrative market of extreme gene modification. Now they were a semirespectable guild with offices in nearly every Autonomous Zone, crypto anarchy, pirate utopia, and cyberstate across Earth and the Inner System—in other words, everywhere.

The problem was, Geshem didn’t so much get the data-drop that Lotem, the old gene-shaman, had asked for. It was more that he’d stolen it.

Or, more to the point, he’d paid an uplifted octopus to do it for him.

Octopi being a highly intelligent and generally morally compromised aquatic species who lived in the Drift and were more trustworthy on the whole than dolphins, who Geshem thought of, rather uncharitably, as the vermin of the sea.

This particular octopus went by the name Shraga. He lived in the Down Below past Gaza Port. Geshem managed to get him on the third attempt, using the encryption disc Shraga gave him and hooking up to a public node. He hated using the Conversation.

Murky water, things moving in the dark.

Shraga said, “What do you want, Neand? I’m hunting snails.”

“I had some ghost-types come after me recently,” Geshem said. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you, Shraga?”

The octopus made a rude sound.

“You have land-person problems,” Shraga said. “These are not my problems.”

“I just wondered how careful you were when you stole that drop from the Toads.”

“Shraga is always careful,” Shraga said. “That’s why Shraga is still alive, Neand. Why are you still alive? Your species already died out once.”

“Listen, you eight-armed freak,” Geshem said, and Shraga laughed an octopus laugh and said, “No, you listen, Geshem. Don’t come pooping in my habitat when it’s your own that’s covered in crap. You know?”

And he cut the connection.

Which meant the Toads probably weren’t after him, so he may as well reach out to them. He made a call. A fat green-skinned man answered on the screen. Folds of fat rolled down from his face. The fat inflated. A Kunming Toad. They got the name for a reason.

“What do you want, Neand?” he said.

“Baigujing,” Shemesh said, and the Toad inflated some more.

“It’s Boss Baigujing to you,” he said.

Geshem and the Toads went back: a short, sad history he didn’t like to dwell on.

“Don’t call Sapis boss,” Geshem said.

“Hardly a . . . Sapi,” Boss Baigujing said.

“Tweaked genes, still Sapi genes,” Geshem said.

“Hey, I have like three to five percent Neanderthal,” Boss Baigujing said, sounding hurt.

Geshem wasn’t going to shrug, but he made a face.

“I got something to sell,” he said.

“Yeah? What’s that? Mammoth bones?”

Baigujing laughed at his own joke.

“This,” Geshem said. He held up the egg.

“Roc’s egg? So what?”

“Scan it.”

The Toad must have run a scan. He deflated. Cold eyes stared at Geshem through the old screen.

“How much do you want for it?” Baigujing said.

“What you offering?”

The Toad inflated. He laughed, but without much humor.

“You don’t even know what it is, do you?” he said.

“I know it’s valuable,” Geshem said. “And I have it.”

“Bad magic,” Baigujing said. He inflated again, loomed huge and green-skinned in the viewport. “Bad magic.”

“Tomorrow,” Geshem said. “Usual place. No tricks.”

“We’re respectable businesspeople,” Baigujing said.

“Business I like,” Geshem said. “It’s people I don’t trust.”

Baigujing laughed as he cut the connection.

6.

So now Geshem was running out of the Monte Carmelo with two guys supposedly from Antiquities after him and a no-show from the Toads. He never saw the two guys before.

Cohen and Haddad. They sounded like Tel Aviv lawyers.

How did they know where to find him?

Stupid question. Where else would he go to make a deal?

He hid in the pines. He pinged Shraga from a portable node—he came wired, this time.

The sound of bubbles, engine hum in the background. Shraga getting high on thermal vents from Gaza-Under-Sea.

“What do you want, Geshem? I’m busy.”

“Busy doing what?”

“I’m . . . ” Grunt. “Breaking into a . . . ” Grunt. “Sky vault.”

“What’s a sky vault, Shraga?”

“It’s a vault in the . . . ” Grunt. “Sky.”

“Like in orbit?”

“Right.”

“You ever been, Shraga?”

“There’s the Down Below and there’s the . . . ” Grunt. “Up and Out. I’ll stick to the sea, thank you. Especially since the Sapis stopped dumping quite so much crap into it.”

“Other than themselves,” Geshem said.

The octopus laughed. “I like the . . . ” Grunt. “Cities. They sparkle, Geshem. What do you want?”

“I’m being chased by Antiquities.”

“Again?”

Geshem shook his head. Was someone moving in the trees? Could they track him? They had infrared vision and gene-sniffers tuned to First Humans, all kinds of nasty things.

“It’s different,” he said.

“Different how?”

“Dunno. Can you find them for me? Cohen and Haddad.”

“Do you know how many Cohen and Haddad there are? Hold on. I’ll pull the data from the Monte Carmelo . . . Got it. Huh.”

“What?” Geshem said. The bad feeling he had just got worse.

“They are Antiquities but they’re off-world Antiquities. What did you get yourself involved in, Geshem?”

“I don’t know!”

“Where would you get off-world artifacts? You live in the . . . ” A grunt again. “Sanctuary.”

“I guess from . . . ” Geshem grunted. Maybe it was infectious. “Off-world,” he said.

“Funny!” the octopus said. “Can I see it?”

“It’s in my bag.”

“Hold on . . . Ohhh . . . ”

“Can you tell what it is?” Geshem said.

“It’s old,” Shraga said. “It’s Oort code. That stuff’s not supposed to exist.”

“Dark entities as large as planets?” Geshem said. “Tendrils and so on?”

“That’s the story.”

“You believe it?”

“All I know is it’s weird code from space,” Shraga said. “Whatever you do don’t bring it into the Drift. Alright?”

“I wasn’t planning to . . . ”

“You have two lots of people coming for you, Geshem,” Shraga said. “Did you mention ghosts? Because you have ghosts coming at you from the slopes, and you have Toads coming at you from the—oh, hey, Mili.”

The bartender from the Monte Carmelo crashed into Geshem and pushed him against a pine.

“Get lost, Shraga,” she said. “You’re about as useful as an octopus in a fight.”

“Octopi are very good fighters,” Shraga said. He sounded hurt.

“This way,” Mili said. She grabbed Geshem. He ran after her, lumbering through the trees. Mili was too tall, too graceful—too Sapi. Geshem was short and squat. They made it to the end of a clearing. An old wooden hut sat in the clearing, the house of some long-vanished caretaker.

“It should be safe inside,” Mili said.

Geshem let her lead him. Shraga had gone silent. Geshem-Nofel-Ba’oranim was keenly aware of the smell of the soil, the blueness of the skies, how quiet it was then, how quiet. He smelled it too late.

The door opened.

He turned to run.

Mili said, “Don’t.”

She had a gun pointed at him.

She pushed him into the dark inside of the hut.

7.

Three people stood within and watched him. Two were white ghosts, like the Sapis who had tried to hunt him in the Sanctuary before. The third one was different. She was barely human in form. Some extreme modification, off-world probably. He didn’t know. But still a Sapi under it all. A cocktail of bird genes: a hawk, a raven. When she spread her arms open, she had black-feather wings. A human mouth was melded with a beak.

“Geshem-Nofel-Ba’oranim,” she said. “I am Ziz.”

“What’s it to me?” Geshem said.

He looked accusingly at Mili. She shrugged, looking embarrassed.

“You didn’t know you had a bounty on you?” she said.

“We mean you no harm,” Ziz said.

“Whatever it is,” Geshem said in a low voice, “I can double it.”

Mili smiled.

“No, you can’t,” she said.

“Will you please pay attention?” Ziz said. The bird-woman sounded annoyed, which pleased Geshem.

He said, “I am a First Human, and you have no claim here.”

“I serve those who live beyond the sun and have no Earthly names,” Ziz said.

So she was one of those.

“The Masters of the Nine Billion Hells!” Ziz said.

“I’m sure,” Geshem said.

“Just give me the egg,” Ziz said.

“What egg?” Geshem said.

“Search him,” Ziz ordered. Her ghosts moved on Geshem.

He said, “Don’t.”

“Or what?” Ziz said. Her beak opened and closed hungrily.

Geshem shrugged.

“Or else it will blow up,” he said. “And us with it.”

The ghosts froze. Ziz closed her beak with a click. She stared at Geshem.

“You’re bluffing,” she said.

“I am not afraid to die,” Geshem said. “My people died out because of your people once before. None of us fear death. Or whatever those Nine Billion Hells are. So stand back, and we can talk.”

“I can do that,” Ziz said.

“I thought so,” Geshem said.

Why did Sapis always think First Humans were stupid?

The ghosts moved back and stared at Geshem without expression. Ziz shuddered and when she did her feathers changed color and became a deep golden-green.

“You’re not from around here, are you?” Geshem said.

Ziz laughed.

“Callisto,” she said.

“Outer System? Figures.”

“The voices of the entities in the dark are whispered more audibly there,” Ziz said.

“I’m sure. Why do you want the egg?”

“It belongs to us.”

“How so?”

“It has Oort code. It was not meant to . . . ” She hesitated. “It fell into the wrong hands.”

“What is it, anyway?” Geshem said. “Oort code.”

“There’s the Conversation,” Ziz said. “And then there’s that which isn’t.”

“The Quietude,” Mili said. Ziz turned sharply, her beak clicking.

“Yes,” she said.

“A shadow network?” Geshem said.

“Yes.”

“Is it true?”

He knew the Conversation was seeded throughout the solar system. It had begun on Earth and spread through near-space and across the Great Crossing to the Outer System, self-replicating Spiders clinging to rocks, converting them into further Spiders, routers and hubs, broadcasting stations, mirrors and servers . . .

How could another network exist, undetected, unknown, amidst all the teeming worlds of humanity?

“Yes,” Ziz said, just as Mili said, “No.”

“What?”

“No,” Mili said, and she moved her gun, and this time she pointed it at the bird-woman.

“You will forfeit your fee?” Ziz said.

“If this is what I think it is, then yes, gladly,” Mili said.

“What do you think it is?” Ziz said.

“A Quietude node,” Mili said. “And it’s ready to hatch.”

Ziz inched her head. The ghosts moved fast. Geshem was too slow to make it out clearly. They moved like, well, ghosts. But so did Mili.

Whatever backstreet hardwire job she’d had done was worth the money. Old military tech kicked in. The ghosts and Mili danced as their movements blurred. Then it was over, too quickly, and the ghosts lay on the ground. Mili’s leg was broken. She pointed the gun at the bird-woman.

“I’m taking him,” she said.

“I’m just here to sell it,” Geshem said. He ignored Mili. “If you have an offer to make . . . ” he said to Ziz.

“I will find you,” Ziz said. “We will always find . . . it. We just listen to the quiet.”

“Move it, Geshem,” Mili said. She pushed him out and hobbled after him. She shut the door on the bird-woman and the ghosts.

“I could cut you in,” Geshem said.

“Shut up.”

She pushed him along. He went deeper into the trees. He could feel the egg in the backpack. It was moving.

8.

He tried to make a run for it nearer the ravine. Mili blurred and then she was in front of him. Even with her leg broken she was too fast. Geshem saw it cost her, though. She burned energy bad, speeding up like this. And she was wounded. He figured he could wait.

“I won’t,” she said. “If that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I wasn’t thinking anything.”

“I can see that.”

They were deep in digitally federated quilt by then. They passed from Druze to Jew to First Human to Arab to Carmelite authority and all over again. To Geshem, this didn’t mean anything. To him, the Carmel was all his. First Humans have lived here long before the first Sapis ever came.

Evergreen. The mountain that is green all year round, as the old song went. Geshem knew where he was, where they were heading. He watched Mili, but she moved along faster now, and her leg looked better. Built-in medical nanobots repairing the damage. He was mildly impressed. Paying for this kind of wetware took some doing.

A small black thing flew overhead and spoke to them.

“Geshem-Nofel-Ba’oranim! This is Antiquities! Surrender yourself and your cargo!”

“Can’t you see she’s kidnapping me!” Geshem shouted at the drone.

“ . . . Ah,” the drone said.

“So do something,” Geshem said.

The drone extended two tiny rods and aimed it at them.

“Miss, drop down your weap—”

The drone exploded.

Geshem ducked from the rain of hot plastic.

“How did you do that?” he said.

“I didn’t,” Mili said. Something large and green and mean-looking hopped in front of them then. A Toad grinned. A tongue like a rope lashed out and snatched Mili’s gun from her hand.

Mili said, “Run!”

That lash of a tongue whipped again, caught Geshem’s arm, and pulled. Geshem pulled back and the Toad hopped over him and vanished in the pines, the tongue unspooling.

“Hey!” Geshem shouted. “I’m on your side! We had a deal!”

He heard the Toads croak laughter all around them. Geshem ran helplessly after Mili. Her leg seemed fine now, and she was even faster now than before. How did she do it?

“You stole from us, Neand!” a voice boomed.

Baigujing.

So the boss came in person.

“How did you find out?” Geshem shouted. His wrist hurt where the Toad’s tongue had touched it. Poison Toads. But their poisons were designed for Sapis, not his kind.

He hoped.

“We always find out, Geshem.”

A Toad hopped in their path and Mili blasted it with a hand cannon Geshem couldn’t recall seeing before. The Toad exploded in a wet green cloud. Poisoned bits of Toad flesh landed. Geshem shielded his face.

“I’ll sell it to you!” he screamed. “I don’t even want it!”

“We’ll take it, and kill you,” Baigujing said. Geshem saw him for just a moment. The boss Toad was huge, the size of two men, and hopped impossibly high, that grotesque body augmented with titanium muscles.

The forest was all around them then. Geshem heard something whisper through the air. Saw a ghost materialize and take out a Toad like it was nothing, a hand reaching inside the green flesh and squeezing its heart out. The ghost looked his way. Their eyes connected.

He saw dark shapes move behind the ghost’s eyes. Dark entities, as large as planets . . .

“Come on, Geshem!”

Mili pulled him on. She picked him up. She ran, leaped high, over ambushing Toads now fighting the cultists. Geshem knew what was up ahead.

First Home.

9.

“Are you kidnapping me or protecting me?” Geshem said.

“Maybe I’m doing both.”

They were holed up in the cave. Mili checked her weapons. Geshem brooded. He was tired of being mixed up in Sapi affairs.

He took out the egg and placed it on a bedding of pine needles. He didn’t know what it was. He wasn’t sure he cared. Some sort of new digital life from the cold reaches of the solar system, in the dark places where the sun was a myth. The solar system was big, and it hosted a variety of life. Base Humans and First Humans and Martian Re-Borns, uplifted octopi, and sentient robots, who was to say what was born in the Oort? All life deserved a chance. Sometimes it even deserved a second. He placed his hand on the egg and felt its warmth. There was a life there.

“What do they want with you?” he murmured. “What will they do if they take you?”

“I used to work for the Kunming Toads,” Mili said.

“Yeah? How did that work out for you?” Geshem said.

“Badly.”

He looked at her closely then. Saw the tiredness in her eyes, the taut muscles flexing, the way her fingers gripped the gun.

“Why were you bartending?” he said. “Keeping an eye out for jobs?”

“You wouldn’t believe me,” she said.

“Try me.”

“I was trying to go straight.”

She smiled. Geshem smiled back.

“I can cut you in for a half of whatever this thing’s worth,” he said.

She shook her head. “It isn’t worth anything,” she said. “Anything but trouble.”

“True.” He felt the egg again. It shuddered—and was that a tiny crack?

“So what do you want to do?” Geshem said.

“I want to see what it is,” Mili said. “When it hatches.”

“Me too.”

The sounds of battle outside. Toads versus ghosts. He wondered who’d win.

First Home. He didn’t need to look around him. It was just a cave. But more than a hundred thousand years ago, First Humans had shared this space with the new humans who came out of Africa.

They’d lived together, hunted together, cooked the meat together. Their babies were born here, and some of the babies were mixed, old human and new.

There had been love, here.

Geshem thought of that cave more often than he should. He resented the Sapis. But he couldn’t let go of the fact that it hadn’t always been war. The genes of his people lived on in Homo Sapiens, evidence of that long-ago melding.

What right did he have to decide for whatever this was, yet-to-be-born inside the egg?

“I’ll make a fire,” he said.

He set about collecting wood.

Night fell outside, slowly.

10.

When at last they came it was neither Toads nor ghosts.

Two men in cheap suits walked in and stood and watched Geshem and Mili and the egg and the fire.

“Cohen and Haddad,” Geshem said.

“Antiquities,” Mili said. She smiled. Geshem found that he liked her smile.

“Surrender the egg,” Haddad said.

“Or what?” Geshem said.

Two small, silver guns materialized in the men’s hands. Off-world weapons, made for lighter gravity. He didn’t know why those. Then he figured it out.

He looked at them with new eyes then.

“Who are you?” he said.

Mili looked at him in confusion.

“But they’re legit,” she said, “I checked them u—”

The two men smiled in unison. And Geshem knew whoever Cohen and Haddad once were, the things that were flesh-surfing them were very different.

“Now,” Geshem said.

The two men raised their guns to fire.

Which was when Ruach-Noshevet-Ba’gfanim and the rest of Geshem’s people fell on them.

The digitals riding the two Antiquities men struggled, but here in the Sanctuary there were very few resources connected to the Conversation, and even the old war drones and UXOs and robots were useless to them, being of obsolete makes and using outdated protocols: and so they had to fight with flesh alone, with fists and feet, and eventually they were subdued.

They looked up at him from the dirt. And the creature that was Cohen said, “We’ll be back for you,” and the one that was Haddad said, “We’ll be back, Geshem-Nofel-Ba’oranim.”

Then their bodies went slack, and their eyes went dull, and there was nothing there but two humans napping in the dirt.

The egg cracked then. Geshem heard it. He turned to look. Mili crouched by the egg, watching, and Geshem said, “Maybe you should take a step back—”

When the egg split right down the middle. Terrible heat escaped from within, bathing the cave in the light of a sun. Mili turned away then. She ran to Geshem. He held her hand, and they watched as something emerged from the hatching egg.

It was a wisp of darkness. A shadow that followed that blast of fire, because while true darkness exists alone, shadows are light’s children. It was small at first, but it fed. It drew from the ancient stones and the dirt and the pines and pulled matter onto itself, and it fashioned itself a body. It gave itself wings and a tail. It raised a head, long and beautiful, and two eyes as dark as space looked into Geshem’s own.

“Shalom . . . ” Geshem said.

The creature opened a beak and cried. It lunged at Geshem. Geshem fell back, alarmed.

But the creature didn’t harm him. Geshem looked up from his place in the dirt. He saw the priestess, Ziz, with an ugly curved knife in her hand. She had snuck up on Geshem while the bird was hatching. Now Ziz raised ugly talons and opened shimmering wings. She stared at the baby creature with eyes full of fear and love and avarice, and the knife dropped uselessly from her taloned hands.

“It’s . . . ” she started to say.

The creature tore out her throat. It sank its beak into her soft belly and slurped, and as Ziz collapsed the creature grew again. It beat dark wings against the entrance of that ancient cave. It turned its head, just once, and looked at Geshem. Those dark eyes, and within them he saw the coldness of the Oort, and thought he knew something of the Nine Billion Hells . . .

Then the creature cawed softly. It beat its wings and rose into the sky. For a moment it hovered against the moon. Then Geshem saw a second shape rise and join it.

“Roc . . . ” he said.

“I guess it missed its mother,” Mili said. She reached down and helped Geshem up. They stood shoulder to shoulder and watched the creature fly away, until it became just another part of the night and was gone.

11.

The stars burned on a low flame, as one of the old songs said. But Geshem sometimes longed for ancient music, the ones his progenitors must have made. They must have sung to the moon, they must have danced under the stars, right here on this land, before they went extinct. Archaeological finds could show you the bones of the animals they hunted and the tools that they made, the remnants of their homes and fires. But they could not teach you their tongue, their songs, what they believed in, how they prayed. He felt that loss acutely in himself.

“The Toads will come after you, you know,” Mili said. She was back behind bar. Geshem sat on a stool and played with an empty shot glass. He just liked the feel of it in his hands.

“I know,” he said. “But they won’t go into Sanctuary land again.”

Mili laughed. “Not if they know better,” she said. “But you can’t stay here forever.”

“I’ll work it out with them,” Geshem said. “I’ll work something out. What about you?”

Mili shrugged. “Maybe I’ll hire out again,” she said. “I was going to quit but . . . This whole thing reminded me.”

“What you’re missing?”

“Why I quit.”

She touched his hand gently. Then someone called her on the other side of the bar, and she left, and Geshem sat alone.

About the Author

Lavie Tidhar is author of Osama, The Violent Century, A Man Lies Dreaming, Central Station, Unholy Land, and By Force Alone. His latest novels are The Hood and The Escapement. His awards include the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award, the John W. Campbell Award, the Neukom Prize, and the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize.

Through

Eric Fomley and Rich Larson

Pilo’s long quiet is interrupted by a bell, the two-tone electronic chime that signals an inspection. He feels his cube start to move in the dark. He grips both sides of his bed, the square slab that is the cell’s only furnishing. He observes his emaciated reflection in the dark glass wall across from him, scabbed lips and eyes plunged deep into their sockets.

Pilo used to try to make himself more presentable when he heard the bell, tried to comb the skin flakes from his matted hair or pick the grime out from under his nails. Now he is beyond caring what the guards see.

The cube lurches up, sideways, down. There is a magnetic clack and then his wall is pressed up to another. He watches the glass turn clear, black silicate trickling away. He can make out two figures. This is vaguely interesting—normally only one guard performs the inspection.

The glass turns fully transparent and Pilo frowns. The guard is there, clad head-to-toe in aggressive textile, shifting patterns that ache Pilo’s head if he looks too closely. An enormous biomechanical insect clings to their back with spiny legs. Its lamprey tube hovers over the guard’s shoulder, to punch holes or tranquilizers into uncooperative flesh.

This is normal. What’s abnormal is the second figure, clad in the same uniform but too small for it. The aggressive textile hangs off them like baggy pajamas. They are unarmed.

“Prisoner 8403, approach the glass.” It’s difficult to tell if the filter-buzz words come from the guard’s mouth or from the lamprey tube. “You have a visitor.”

The word stabs adrenaline straight through his rib cage. Pilo is frozen for a moment. Then he crawls off the bed, falls, levers himself upright. His legs feel hollow. His head feels light. Some of it is hunger. The nozzle by the bed provides only a pale gritty paste, so sporadically that Pilo sometimes suspects a slow, calculated starvation.

Most of it is shock. He has never had a visitor here in the dark.

The visitor tugs at the hood concealing their face. “I really have to wear this fucking thing?”

Pilo flinches at the profanity, which is not permitted in the cube. The visitor must have special permissions. He is not sure if the question is for him or for the guard, but his mouth and throat are not ready to speak, so he lets the guard answer.

“That’s protocol.” Their voice buzzes like an agitated bee swarm. “You want to talk to this butcher, you follow protocol.”

The visitor puffs a laugh; it flutters the fabric of their hood. The aggressive textile stabs at Pilo’s eyes. He squints, still massaging his jaw, moving his tongue in a practice circuit around his mouth.

“So this is where you ended up, huh, Pi?” The visitor’s voice is less distorted than the guard’s. Fem-leaning, almost familiar. They look past him, to the bed, to the nozzle, to the conical water hole that serves as his sink and toilet both. “Very chic. Minimalist. You always did have an eye for interiors.”

Pilo is ready. He snorkels the last of the phlegm from his throat and speaks. “Who are you?”

The visitor doesn’t respond; for a moment he thinks his shredded whisper was not loud enough to pass through the glass. He is opening his mouth to try again when the visitor shakes their head, hacks out another half of a laugh.

“I’m not doing this,” they say. “I’m not playing this game. You know who I am.”

Pilo chews his cheek, thinking hard. “Someone whose life I wrecked,” he suggests. That is, after all, his role in most things. He is a destroyer.

The visitor cocks their head to one side. “Maybe you really don’t remember,” they mutter. “Maybe you been in here that long.”

“He’s just getting started,” says the guard. “Two centuries to go.”

“Fuck this,” the visitor says, and yanks their hood down.

The guard gives a buzzing shriek, something about necessary protocol, and the black silicate begins to swirl. Pilo throws himself against the wall, forehead mashed to glass. Just before it goes fully opaque, before the dark cocoons him, he sees someone he knows.

After the chaos of the derailed visitation, it should be a relief to return to routine. Instead, the encounter gnaws at him. He replays it ad nauseum, sifts it over, focusing on the visitor’s voice and mannerisms and the brief slice of a face he is certain he recognized. He begins to pace the dimensions of his cell, caloric energy he cannot spare.

There has never been a visitor before. There might never be a visitor again. He might be left with only the memory, and eventually his attempts to maintain his grip on it will grind it out to nothing between his palms. Then it will be him and the dark again.

Which is as it should be, of course. Him and the dark, away from everyone and everything that he might otherwise destroy.

Pilo wants to destroy something now. He clenches his fists until his knuckles ache, and pounds them against the glass. The cell hums a deep vibrato. Pilo pounds and screams until his lungs can only heave up a labored rasp.

He slumps onto the bed. He lies there for an hour or a day.

The two-tone bell chimes, the cell jolts, and Pilo nearly falls from the bed. He grips the concrete edges as the cell shifts up, down, and right. The magnets connect. Glass clacks to glass, and the shroud clears like swirling ink.

There’s only one guard standing there for another inspection. No visitor. This is normal. The guard doesn’t move or speak. This is not normal. The usual rigidity of their posture is gone. Their shoulders slouch and the lamprey tube sags with it, a dozing predator.

“Who was my visitor?” Pilo asks, even though the guards never answer questions.

The guard starts to twitch. Their fingers flutter like they’re dancing on a datapad; their arms jolt sporadically forward and then back to their sides. They take two jerky steps toward the cell but stop at the glass wall instead of coming inside to search for nonexistent contraband.

“Is she still here?” Pilo asks. “In this place?”

He squints at the guard’s hidden face, through one eye and then the other, for as long as he can stand the seething fabric. He waits to be told to shut up, to stand back, to take the position.

Instead the guard lifts their right hand to the lamprey tube—clumsy, hesitant. Then farther up, feeling behind their skull. A jagged wire protrudes from the biomechanical insect on their back. Pilo watches as the guard slowly, deliberately, twists their gloved thumb down onto it.

The blood is the brightest and most beautiful thing Pilo has ever seen through the glass. It wells out and out, a flower blooming in perpetuum. The guard puts their bloody thumb to the wall of the cell and begins to write.

Pilo’s heart hammers as the letters appear one by one, ship script. His mind whirls through narrowing possibilities as IT becomes IT’S NOT becomes IT’S NOT YOUR—

The guard pulls their red thumb back, grunts. They grapple at their head for a moment, as if to pry something out of it, then their posture stiffens. The lamprey tube flexes. Snaps.

“You vermin,” the guard says. “You waste.”

They slide their hand through the unfinished message, smearing a red jag across the glass. They turn and walk away, the inspection postponed, perhaps forgotten. Pilo stares at the streak, recites the words, and from those words he feels the shape of the one missing.

The cell shrouds again, glass clouding to black.

“Fault,” he whispers.

Pilo thought he had lost all track of time in this place, but now he is certain that the regular occurrence of the inspection bell has been delayed. He hears its phantom, a tinnitus in his ears, but the cube doesn’t move. Or maybe he is anticipating, a brainstate he’d almost forgotten, and it’s the anticipation that has slowed time to a shambling crawl.

In another life Pilo practiced meditation, but when he tries it now his body revolts. His lungs seize. His hands jump.

When his cube finally shifts, he can’t be sure if he is hallucinating or not. It glides through the dark. Stops. The glass clears. The guard appears, and this time there is no slumping, no twitching, no puppet hands dancing at their sides.

“Position,” they say, voice crunchy with distortion.

Pilo rolls his way off the bed. He assumes his position against the adjacent wall, arms and legs spread, as if there is even a single element of the cell he is capable of dismantling and repurposing into a weapon, as if his emaciated limbs are weapons themselves.

He watches in his peripheral as the glass opens and the guard enters, masked head on a wary swivel. The shifting pattern of their suit doesn’t claw so badly at his eyeballs today. The aggressive textile is more of a soft undulation. Maybe it’s glitching.

It lets him look more closely at the guard as they circumambulate the cell, checking the food nozzle and the toilet and the featureless black slab of a bed. For a moment, his stimulation-starved brain imagines his captor as a geometric skeleton wrapped in mesh musculature.

“What are you looking at?” the guard buzzes. “Eyes on the wall!”

Pilo is too slow to comply, distracted by his hallucination. The lamprey snaps forward like a jack-in-the-box and smashes his face into the wall he is meant to be watching. A small white supernova goes off behind his eyelids. He sinks, clutching at a nose that might be broken again, feeling hot copper blood seep through his fingers.

“Position,” the guard grates. “Up! Arms out! Legs out!”

Even as they say it, they drive a booted foot into his lower back. He slams into the wall again, tries to buffer the impact with his hands. They leave vermeil smears on the black glass. A malformed message darts through his mind’s eye:

IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT.

“You fecal stain,” the guard says. “You bacterial graveyard. You careless butcher.”

The words feel like a catechism. The boot swings again; this time it sucks all the air from his lungs. He doubles over, curling into himself on the cold floor.

“Up,” the guard orders. “Up, and into position.”

Pilo turns, instead, and stares directly at his captor. Ignoring the shifting patterns, ignoring the menacing lamprey. He focuses on the shape of the guard’s shoulders, which are beginning to slump, and the tilt of the guard’s head, and the dangle of the guard’s hands. He remembers the way they fluttered and jerked before they scrawled the bloody letters.

It was the same guard; he is almost sure of that now. They are all the same guard.

“What are you doing?” the guard snaps, and behind the electronic buzz, Pilo hears trepidation. He realizes that his captor has wrapped their arms around their body, mocking his fetal posture.

But when he raises one hand to wipe the blood from his bristly chin, the guard raises a hand of their own in perfect synchronization. Not mocking him. Something else.

“Stop it,” the guard buzzes, then, to someone else: “We have a situation in cell 8403, we have—”

Pilo clenches his jaw shut as hard as he can, and the guard’s insectoid voice chokes off. His pulse rushes to fill the silence. His heart pounds fragile ribs. Pilo knows he must be dreaming this. He must be tossing and turning on the bed, waiting for the two-tone bell to chime.

He lifts his right hand high into the air. The guard mimics like a marionette, makes an angry gurgle deep in their throat. The lamprey thrashes, but it can’t attack without the guard’s permission, and the guard, some way, somehow, can’t give permission without Pilo’s.

Slowly, slowly, he puts both hands to his own neck, where the seal of a mask would be if he were wearing one. His fingers find an intangible pressure hook. The guard’s fingers find a real one.

The guard’s mask peels away, and Pilo sees the same face he sees in the black glass. Scabbed lips, sunken eyes. He stares at himself. The guard-self stares back.

“What did I do?” he asks. “I can’t remember anymore.”

The guard-self twitches, hocks. A glob of saliva smacks the floor between them. “You vermin,” the guard-self murmurs. “You stain.”

The catechism is back, but Pilo thinks he is losing the faith. He turns to the clear glass, peers into a dark and empty corridor.

IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT.

“Position,” he tells the guard-self. “Sorry.”

Pilo traverses the corridor as quickly as he can in the guard’s heavy boots. He has not walked much, and already his shins are aching, his knees are clicking. A stitch burns under his bottom rib. He left the guard’s weaponry on the floor of the cell, afraid to touch the writhing insectile thing, but he took the mask. It turns his panting into an anguished electric whine.

The corridor is all corners, a maze of black glass folded in on itself, and even though Pilo has no memory of being brought to his cell, he remembers this labyrinth in intimate detail. He can envision the other cells shuffling somewhere above him in the dark, an elaborate dance.

But when he reaches the junction, left and right open to him, he has not even a shred of intuition for which way leads to an exit. He halts there, gasping for breath.

“Left.”

He startles. It’s the visitor’s voice, as crisp inside the mask as a whisper in his ear. She’s the one who started all this, who set off this reaction chain, and he knows, gut-deep, that she is making a mistake. If she knew what he did, she would not be trying to help him.

“Who are you?” Pilo asks, again.

“I’m the person who says left and then you go left,” the voice answers.

Pilo lingers a moment longer. “What happened in the cell? With that guard?”

Unasked: why did he have my face?

“Fuck if I know,” the voice says. “You’re the one with the blueprint, Pi. I’m working with fragments of fragments here. One of which says . . . ”

Pilo nods, even though she is not there to see it. He goes left.

Up ahead, a cell is docked to the corridor for inspection. Pilo slows his stride on the visitor’s suggestion, trying to make his spine straight, his head high. If he moves like a guard, maybe they won’t question the bare space on his back where the bug should be.

“Just walk straight past,” the visitor says. “Don’t even look in.”

But when he comes to the stretch of transparent glass, he can’t help turning his head. The cell is identical to his, the same featureless slab of a bed, the same nozzle for food, the same hole for shit. The guard is inspecting. The prisoner is in position on the wall.

Pilo sees his own gaunt face in profile. His veins frost shut.

All the guards are him. All the prisoners are him, too. Either he’s hallucinating, losing his mind in the dark of his cube, or—

“Keep moving,” the visitor hisses, and he realizes he’s stopped.

But it’s too late. He’s already drawn attention: his prisoner-self stares balefully at him and his guard-self follows suit, head tilting, evaluating. Pilo feels the guard’s eyes trace the space where a lamprey tube should be. Feels surprise transmute to suspicion.

“Malfunction,” Pilo says, by way of explanation.

The glass walls start to wail, an alarm that shivers through the air and into his bones. Red lights strobe the corridor, and Pilo runs.

The buzzing shouts of the guards echo through the maze; he can’t tell if they’re coming from ahead or behind as he turns left, right, right, left again, following the visitor’s clipped commands. His feet ache and his muscles are eating themselves. He’s tired, so tired that the bed in his cell would feel like heaven instead of hell.

“Stop at the corner,” the voice orders. “Get low.”

He throws himself down and watches as two guards barrel past him, lamprey tubes bobbing. One of them gives an electric bark: prisoner 8403 unaccounted for, the destroyer is loose. Pilo’s heart thumps hard. His tongue flicks at the dried blood above his lip. He wonders what the beatings will be like if they catch him.

“Almost there,” the visitor says. “Left again.”

Pilo takes two tries to get up off the floor, then staggers onward. He is certain the guards have turned around, certain he can hear their footfalls converging on him. The corridor narrows, branches a final time, and ends. The visitor has betrayed him. He’s been led to a corner and left for dead.

Then he sees the stump of a maintenance ladder hanging down from the shadows. He limps to the base, leans against the rungs to catch his breath. When he looks up, he sees nothing but blackness.

“They’re coming, Pi,” says the voice. “You have to start climbing.”

Pilo pushes his forehead against the ladder. Gasps in. Out.

“Go up, Pi. You have to go up.”

He takes another ragged breath. He pictures all the cells moving through the dark, all the prisoners and guards wearing his face. The prison is well made, but he knows what it is, now. The thought has been building and building in the back of his skull.

“This is all a sim,” he says hoarsely. “A deepsim.”

For a moment there’s no reply, and he thinks maybe the channel is one-way only. Then he hears a snort of static.

“Yeah,” the visitor says. “Big twist. But those guards are still going to tune the shit out of you, and it’s going to feel very real.”

One dread mixes with another in Pilo’s simulated stomach. Maybe he shouldn’t be escaping at all. Maybe he was put in that cell for a good reason. He is, after all, the destroyer.

“Come on, Pi.”

The voice is harsh and pleading at the same time, and he finally recognizes it, one realization unlocked by another. Her name sails to him across a void. He falters for a moment, frightened he might be wrong. His jaw works.

“Kess?” he asks.

Her voice thickens. “Yeah. Yes. Now climb, for fuck’s sake.”

He steps onto the first metal rung.

Pilo is a carcass. His limbs tremble; his head lolls with exhaustion. His hands gave out a dozen rungs ago, grip strength sapped to nothing, so he has to use his elbows, hooking them around each bar. It’s slow. Agonizing. The sound of the guards is gone for now, but he has Kess in his ear, urging him along.

The higher he climbs, the more he remembers about her. It begins with her face, the one he saw so briefly during the visitation, bright black eyes and high forehead. He sees it now from a variety of angles. Shifting haircuts, creeping tattoos, a hundred different expressions but most often a wide grin he knows was the precursor to a wild warbling laugh. Her voice has no trace of a smile in it now.

He pauses on the ladder to catch his breath but ends up wasting more of it on a question. “We’ve known each other a long time,” he says. “Are we friends?”

“We were friends.”

Pilo remembers a tangle of twisting corridors, walls and ceilings swathed in moss, hydroponic gardens above and rusty maintenance tunnels below. A party with no gravity, chasing trembly globes of grain alcohol through the air. Bubble-shaped habs with soft warm beds. Viewports to a starry void.

“Colony ship,” he says. “The Germinal.”

“The Big Germ. Yeah.”

But he knows that’s not Kess’ nickname for it. Someone else calls the ship that, someone who is only a blur in his peripherals. Nearly every memory he has of him and Kess has a third person in it, too. Faceless, ghostly, hard to look at. Like the guards and their aggressive textile.

“Why was I put in here?” he asks, because he doesn’t want to ask about the third person.

Her voice tightens, and now he can picture her face doing the same. “You know that better than I do.”

“I’m a criminal,” Pilo says, with a numb familiarity. “A bad one. The guards, you know, when they think I’m not listening—they call me the destroyer.”

“Very dramatic,” Kess says. “We’re all destroyers, Pi. We’re all damaging each other at all times.”

“No. What I did—”

“We’re all each other’s entropy.” Kess’ voice is flat. Heavy. “What you did wasn’t special, Pi. It was fucked up, but it wasn’t special.”

Pilo feels a dart of dread and excitement mingled. “You know what I did?”

“So do you,” Kess says. “You just buried it in this fucked-up place.”

Pilo senses it then, a memory-as-predator, a dark gray shape circling below him. “They also call me a fecal stain,” he says. “The guards. That one maybe suits better.”

He gathers his strength and starts climbing again, moving away from the labyrinth but also from the predator.

Kess puffs a small laugh, just a ghost of the one he remembers. “No,” she says. “You’re not getting me like that. Kess is all love today.”

Pilo’s next reach feels wrong. Suddenly he is clinging to the rungs to stop from plummeting, headfirst, toward the hatch that used to be above him. His gut floats outside his pericardium. Fluids circle in his inner ear, chasing each other like snapping dogs.

Nograv. It’s been a long time since he was in nograv.

“You hit the edge of the Newt field,” Kess says. “Nice and light from here to outside.”

Pilo feels a shiver through his sternum, feels his heartbeat accelerate. He always knew, vaguely, that this was a prison ship. But going outside means going onto the hull. And if there is one place he should not go, should never go, it is the hull.

Pilo hears electric bellows echo up from below.

“Guards found the ladder,” Kess says. “Hurry up.”

Pilo’s mouth opens and shuts. He tries to think of a way to explain to Kess, whose birthday is exactly one month before his, whose dark eyes peer out from a cloud of freckles, why he should not go to the hull. Why even the idea of it fills his empty belly with chunks of ice.

But he doesn’t know, so he resumes his climb, hand over hand, weightless as a spider.

There is an antechamber at the end of the ladder, a small red-lit bulb where he sheds the guard’s aggressive textile and dons a bright orange hullsuit instead. There is something horribly familiar about it. When the fabric shell slithers and tightens, adjusting to his dimensions, he feels a brief spike of panic.

But if he doesn’t go to the hull, he’ll end up dragged back to the cell. Back to the four black glass walls, back to eating gritty paste from a nozzle, back to the beatings and inspections. He puts on the helmet; it seals with a smell like burning plastic.

For a moment he’s blind. Then the filtration system hums to life and whisks the fog of his breath away. The hud shows him his oxygen full, his suit intact.

“I’m waiting outside, Pi.” Kess’ voice echoes in his helmet. “Go time.”

Pilo’s feet are frozen. Kess is not the only thing waiting for him on the other side of the airlock. He can feel the memory-predator lurking out there, too, filing its teeth. If he goes onto the hull, something very bad is going to happen.

“Why?” he asks, through a tightening throat. “If this is a deepsim, and you’re in the code, why can’t you just turn it off?”

“Because some clever prick loaded it with fail-safes,” Kess says. “The only way out is through.”

Pilo can hear thumping and shouting through the vestibule door. The guards have reached the top of the ladder, guards who all have his face.

“I programmed it, then,” he says, with a sick feeling of inevitability. “I put myself in here.”

A clang on the door. The guards have caught up.

“Now or never, now,” Kess says. “I did a lot of fucking work to rig this up, so respect my craft, will you?”

Pilo reaches for the airlock.

The pursuit is slow motion; it would be comical if Pilo were not exhausted and terrified. The hullsuit hud shows a swarm of moving red blots, and through his faceplate he sees them as guards coming from every direction, crawling not just from the airlock but from hidden crevices all across the hull of the prison ship. The biomechanical insects are detached from their hosts, skittering on their own skeletal legs.

They don’t want to let him go.

“Nearly there,” Kess mutters. “Nearly, nearly.”

He’s heading for the engines, all the way aft, where Kess said she is waiting for him. His breath is a ragged ghost, rattling through the helmet filter. He knows he should be breathing in slow even sips, knows he simmed a hullwalk or something like it in another life, but his lungs are singularities. His heart is a hummingbird.

He’s been in the cell too long. The deepsim has rules, and it’s harder to bend them now that he knows he wrote them. The rules say his body has wasted away, fed on itself. He can feel it with every trembling step, but he can’t stop because his jailers are converging now, making him adjust course over and over.

Pilo waves his arm in the void, focused on the nearest guard, but the guard only speeds up, snarling through his faceplate. The marionette trick won’t work again. Waste of a second, waste of a calorie. Pilo redoubles his efforts. Drives his aching knee upward, feels the clack of the magnetics releasing, pitches forward, sets his boot, feels the clack of the magnetics taking hold—

Blood thrums through his neck. Pulses behind his eyes, which he keeps pointed down, never up, both to be sure of his footing and to avoid looking into the endless black. The guards and the bugs aren’t the only things chasing him. He can feel the predatory memory out there, circling, circling.

“You’re there, Pi. You see me?”

Pilo feels the rumble of the prison ship’s engine under his feet. He blinks the stinging sheet of sweat from his eyes, searches for a shuttle suckered to the hull.

“No,” he says, with panic mounting his chest, crushing his ribs. “Where?”

“Look up,” Kess says.

Pilo does not want to look up, but he does it. When he cranes his head back, when he sees the thicket of ice and dust, lit an eerie yellow by the dregs of some distant supernova, his heart almost stops.

The predatory memory crashes through his skull.

“Beautiful, isn’t it,” says Rhetta.

The three of them are huddled around the viewport, looking down—or up, or sideways; they’re in nograv—at a massive helical shard of ice and dust. Pilo’s optic nerve is still throwing spots, from too much time in sim, but the tiny explosions of shimmering color only add to the ethereality.

Rhetta is right, as usual. The comet was worth seeing live.

“Fucking payload, is what it is,” says Kess, emphatic on the curse just so Rhetta will make a face. “Think of all that water.” She offers Pilo a fist. “And Pi’s going to harpoon us right onto it.”

Pilo knocks fists, smiles, but Rhetta somehow detects the churn in his belly.

“How’s the program coming?” she asks. “Still killing Kess’ bugs?”

During his brief snatches of sleep, Pilo has been having nightmares about enormous biomechanical insects. His subconscious could stand to be more subtle.

“It’ll be ready by contact,” he says. “I should get back in there.”

Pilo knows no colony ship is truly self-sustaining, no matter how precise its recycling of gas and matter. Entropy is always gnawing at the edges, poking its fingers through the gaps, and there are always unforeseen disasters: micrometeorites, reactor failures, blight in the hydroponic gardens.

Pilo knows that the Germinal has been limping for decades now, and that the comet is a gift they can’t afford to waste. The thought pounds at his temples as he works, as hours meet hours, as his fingers begin to twitch and cramp on the phantom data-pad.

Kess did the best she could with the corrupted base program, but it’s still teeming with error potential. He seals one gap and another opens. Even with the sim-to-real time exponential maxed out, with every minute outside an hour in here, they’ll barely make the launch window.

When he finally emerges from the simpod, Rhetta is waiting with the green tea he asked for. “Kill count?” she asks, holding out the cup.

“Eight-thousand, four-hundred and two,” Pilo says. “Which leaves one. The worst one.”

“The grapple trigger,” Rhetta guesses. “Kess said it was a real cuss, cuss, extra cuss.”

Pilo takes the tea. “It’s ancient. Won’t talk to anything else. We haven’t chunked a moving comet in about a century, and we saw this one so late—” He breaks off, blinks at Rhetta from across the steaming crater of his cup. “Simming it, the grapple works seventy-eight percent of the time. Not nearly high enough when we only get one attempt.” He inhales. “But there’s a physical trigger, too.”

Rhetta looks at him for a long moment, then the wrinkles slacken around her eyes. “I’ll do it. I’ll ride it down.”

Pilo gives a hoarse laugh. “The physical trigger’s fully exposed, you’d be in a hullsuit and tether—”

“Done hullwork since before you were born, Pilo.”

“This is different. I can’t ask you to do this.”

“So don’t. I’ll just cussing do it.”

Pilo watches through electric eyes as the harpoon makes its approach. The engineers put it together from scrap, bits of the Germinal slagged and reprinted as metal shell, drift-engine, spike-toothed grapple. There is a tiny bright orange spot against the pig-iron gray, a single exposed hand poking out from the hutch the engineers soldered at the last possible moment.

The ship took census; Rhetta’s request to babysit the trigger was approved, but not by everybody. Pilo can feel Kess beside him in the simpod. He can almost feel the stiff anger in her limbs, feel it radiating off her, heating the neuroconduction fluid.

The harpoon’s engine flares pale blue, a final burn to match velocity. This is not a sim. Pilo has to remind himself of that, over and over. This is not a rehearsal. This is the show.

This is the show, and the grapple’s not deploying. Pilo prays to an amoral universe. The grapple continues not deploying. They are in the twenty-two percent, and now Rhetta realizes that, realizes it’s her line. Pilo watches her crawl, slowly, cautiously, out from the hutch. The engineers placed as near the trigger as possible. She only has to move three meters. Pilo’s adrenaline sections them to millimeters.

One eternity goes by. Then another. Then he sees the minute motion, a gloved hand gripping and twisting, and the grapple deploys.

It burrows into the ice, hooking deep. Pilo feels a flood of triumph, of relief, of gratefulness, just before a jagged shard of frozen water comes loose, at an angle the sim never accounted for, and slices the arm of the bright orange hullsuit open.

Entropy finds the gap, and inside the simpod Pilo can’t stop screaming Rhetta’s name.

“You remember, now.”

Kess’ voice rocks him back to reality, or unreality. Back to the layer of consciousness cocooned in what was meant to be a therapy sim, before he twisted it beyond all recognition and locked the door behind him. Back to the punishment he devised for himself when nobody else would do it.

He is standing on the hull of the prison ship, boots magnetized to metal. The guards have circled up around him, penning him in. None of it is real. None of it matters. Only Rhetta matters: every time he blinks his eyes he sees her writhing, sees frost creeping across the inside of her faceplate.

His fault. His fault. His fault.

“It should’ve been me,” he rasps.

“Yeah. People always say that, Pi.”

Pilo feels his simulated lungs heaving, head spinning. “No,” he says. “It should have been me. I was simming it from almost the start. I knew the physical trigger was the better option, so I was simming the crawl, the placement, there was no time to rig something else—” He sinks to a crouch, the void crushing down at him from all angles. “I was so fucking scared. And I knew all I had to do was mention it, all I had to do was ask Rhetta to bring me tea—because that’s how she is. How she was.”

“I know, Pi.” Kess’ voice is brittle flint. “You told us this. We told you to do your fucking therapy. And instead, you sealed yourself in the simpod and turned it into some good old-fashioned self-flagellation. Took me three months to find my way in.”

“Why did you?” Pilo chokes. “What you wrote on the wall—you know that’s not true.”

“I didn’t want to, at first. I thought, you know, your choice.” She pauses. “And I was angry. I still am so fucking angry. But it’s not doing me any good.”

Pilo pictures his body in the simpod, maybe hauled all the way to triage to monitor his vitals, to hook an intravenous to his trembling arm. He remembers he was intending to die in here.

“I should go back,” he murmurs. “Back to the cell.”

“No.” Kess snaps the word. “Not a chance. Not after I did all this work.”

“You’re part of it,” Pilo says. “You must be. Part of the punishment. Getting me so close to escaping, then making me remember—”

“I didn’t make you remember shit. Your brain did.” Kess’ voice trembles. “We’re not friends right now, Pi. We won’t be for a long time. Maybe forever. We’re not going to hug and cry when you wake up. But I need you out here anyway. The ship needs you.”

Vibrations move through his boots as the guards creep closer. Pilo sees his own face in all directions, sneering, jaundiced by the helmets’ yellow faceplates. Their boots clack and shiver. He can see their lips moving and hear the words in his head: you careless butcher, you fecal stain, you coward, you destroyer.

“I don’t deserve that yet,” Pilo says. “I don’t deserve to be out there.”

“Nobody deserves anything,” Kess says. “Hiding here torturing yourself isn’t helping Rhetta’s family, or me, or anyone else on the Germ. Trust me.” Her voice cracks. “Just fucking trust me, Pi. For once.”

Pilo’s chest aches. “I trust you,” he says. “Tell me what to do.”

“Jump.”

“Into the comet?” Pilo asks in a sob, knowing what he will see there, knowing he will find Rhetta’s writhing body, her open mouth growing ice.

“Through the comet,” Kess says.

Impossible. He’ll be impaled on a frozen spar, crushed in the shifting floes. The deepsim has rules, all sims have rules—

“Just cussing do it.”

Pilo inhales. Exhales. He remembers a younger Rhetta slithering into her hullsuit, adjusting the baggy orange textile. Eyes bright, alert. Routine maintenance, but eager for it anyway, eager to get out of the Big Germ for a little while and see the stars.

He crouches down and demagnetizes his boots. Then, with his last shred of strength, he kicks off the hull. The guard-selves reach for him, wailing, suddenly panicked. The bugs gnash their lamprey teeth. He leaps through a dozen grasping hands, past a dozen metallic mouths, and floats free.

He glides toward the comet, and the comet pulls him in. Suddenly he’s accelerating, plunging downward, upward. He shuts his eyes tight, feels a cloud of frozen particulate wash across him, precursor to the drifting chunks that can tear him apart, and then—

Stillness.

Pilo has to squint, even through his auto-dimmed faceplate. He is drifting in empty space, no ice, no dust, no comet. He has an unimpeded view of the supernova. There’s a figure silhouetted against it, waiting in the middle of the ruined star.

Kess reaches out her hand.

Pilo’s long quiet is interrupted by the electric bleat of his heart monitor, by the gurgle of his simpod draining. He opens his eyes.

About the Author

Eric Fomley lives in Garrett, Indiana with his wife and three children. His fiction has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Galaxy’s Edge, Flame Tree, and Inferno! Volume 6: Tales from the Worlds of Warhammer.

Rich Larson was born in Galmi, Niger, has lived in Spain and Czech Republic, and currently writes from Grande Prairie, Canada. He is the author of the novels Ymir and Annex, as well as the collection Tomorrow Factory. His fiction has appeared in over a dozen languages, including Polish, Italian, Romanian, and Japanese, and his translated collection La Fabrique des lendemains won the Grand Prix de L’Imaginaire. His short story “Ice” was recently adapted into an Emmy-winning episode of LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS.

A Well-Worn Path

AnaMaria Curtis

Norami still has a few veeberries in the fridge, but her sister wants fresh.

“It’s been fifteen years since I’ve had them off the vine,” Leona says from across the kitchen counter, taller and far more persuasive than Norami remembers.

Norami takes the ones she has out of the fridge, pops one in her mouth. The taste blooms sharp and familiar, tangy and sweet. “I picked these two days ago. They’re fresher than practically anyone can get.” She doesn’t know why she’s arguing; she wants Leona to come berry-picking with her, wants the forest to wrap its arms around her sister and tell her to stay.

Leona leans over the counter, setting her chin on long arms. “Did I tell you about the one time I managed to get veeberries?” She doesn’t wait for Norami to shake her head; they both know she hasn’t. “I was on leave from Xunan at the time—a whole month off that fucking ice planet—and I went to Descan Station with a couple friends. We’d all been eating prepackaged food while we searched for plants with any nutritional value whatsoever, and all I could think about were veeberries.”

Leona looks off to the side, eyes soft. “I dragged my friends all around the station looking for them and found them in a specialty tea shop, of all places. They had them freeze-dried, I guess to add them to tea as a kind of ridiculous expensive garnish. They cost thirty-five hundred kenels—can you believe that? Thirty-five hundred kenels for five hundred grams of dry berry mush. The texture of them wasn’t right, obviously. They just sort of melted away, but the taste . . . I don’t know, it brought me back a bit.” Leona rolls her eyes. “Cried the whole time I ate them, of course. Ridiculous.”

Norami rolls another berry around on her tongue and smiles at her sister. “Of course we can pick fresh.” She doesn’t know how long Leona will stay—she seems destined for some city apartment or sparkling space station—but she wants to show her sister all the good things about this place, about home, while she’s here.

“I have an extra suit,” she says. “But I just patched up a rip in one of the legs, so you’ll have to be careful.”

Leona snorts. “We’re picking veeberries, Mi, of course we have to be careful.”

And so it goes.

Norami puts her jacket on over her overalls, thick plastic-lined canvas, and reaches for a scarf. For the first time in over a decade, her sister does the same thing next to her. Norami watches her for a moment, the tallness of her, the youth, the shock of her light hair. She wants to tell Leona to put it up or into braids, always the older sister, but she knows better than that.

Norami tries to hold the moment in her mind, tells herself not to hope for an easy future here, where her sister shrugs into jackets and conversations like it’s nothing, like it’s all muscle memory and open doors.

She tells herself not to worry, too, but in the forest a little worry is a good thing.

Norami’s back door opens almost directly into the forest, just a dozen meters between the steps and the first trees. The trees are tall, and the forest is dense and sparse by turns—still and quiet and almost uniformly dark. Norami once spent a quarter of a year trying to find and name all its colors that weren’t green and found mostly purples and blues, shadows on shadows. She wonders sometimes that the suns’ light ever reaches the forest floor.

As they reach the forest’s rambling edge, Norami can’t resist the impulse to reach for her sister’s hand. Gloved fingers gripping gloved fingers, she says it lightly, almost like a joke.

“You remember the protocols, right?”

Leona faces away from her, but Norami can sense her eyes rolling regardless. “Yes, I remember. V is for venom. No punctures, no marks, keep the antivenom close.” She reaches into her pocket and pulls out the blue injection pen.

Norami pats her own pocket and feels a matching pen. She doesn’t tell Leona how much it hurts, even as the antivenom kicks in. The pain is searing bright, totally consuming, and the hallucinations that come with it so convincing that Norami still isn’t sure of some of her memories, nearly two decades later.

When Norami stared down the Young Explorers application essay prompt—describe a challenge you faced and how you overcame it—a year after the veeberry sting, she couldn’t write about anything else. It was rolling admissions, open to anyone twelve to fifteen, and Leona had already gotten in, the first time she was doing something Norami hadn’t done first. Norami was balancing the lingering aches and weakness from the veeberry toxins with sisterly confusion at the shift. Leona was going out and away, to the stars, to planets unseen, and Norami echoed with anticipatory loneliness and thought maybe she wanted to go too.

The veeberry sting gave her context when the rejection came, just as Leona was packing to go to training—rejection hurt, but there was no pain like a veeberry sting.

Her application is the only thing she ever really kept from Leona. Norami’s happy here, now, but she couldn’t face it at the time, her rejection slinking after her sister’s success.

Alven is an old planet, settled early and quickly forgotten for newer ones with more to offer, but its depths hide all the extremes explorers abandoned it for. It’s a Level Nine planet, full oxygen after three generations, and its forests are the only place veeberries and melor mushrooms grow. Its fields grow round gantry fruits low to the ground, and the forests took well to apple seeds. Its generous atmosphere and the lack of known animals other than insects made it an easy bio-planet—low industry, high sustainability; low population, high yield.

In the town where Norami and Leona grew up, people mostly work at the processing factory, preparing food for long journeys to more populous planets or the school. Quite a few are foragers like Norami, but in the way it always is, they’re mostly older. The arrows of Alven all point up and away. Not everyone goes out like Leona—that is to say, triumphant, the whole town talking about their success—but a lot of them leave one way or another. It’s so easy. They just have to follow the food, follow the recruiters, follow all the well-trod trails out.

After Leona shipped off, Norami left town and apprenticed for a forager for a few years. She was an ideal apprentice, eighth generation on Alven, lungs perfectly accustomed, feet spread wide and soft to accommodate the moss. The boots from off-planet don’t really fit her anymore, and her hands have gone long-fingered and tough. She has a mild acquired resistance to veeberry venom and a smooth, silent way of walking between vines. She sees perfectly well in the low light of a forest, relies on the softness of bark and the bright pop of mushrooms and berries. Her trails lead in, not out.

Norami leads the way, her blue headlamp making gentle shadows between the trees. The tree trunks in this part of the forest, near the edge, are hung with light green vines always reaching for the light. She’s worn a branching trail to the patch over the years, and she follows the path mindlessly even where it’s not visible.

Behind her, Leona seems to be finding every stone and log on the way.

“This gear is heavy,” she says after she rams her toe into a softly rotting branch that hasn’t done anything to her. “There are much lighter, more durable materials you could use.”

Norami doesn’t like to talk in the woods, but there’s no point trying to be silent now. “Back-planet foragers aren’t quite as high on the priority list for new materials as planet forces.” Perhaps she should feel bitter about it, but the words come out matter-of-fact. Norami hesitates, weighing her words against her wants. “We can always go back if you want. The berries will still be there another day.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Leona says. “I’ll get used to it.”

Norami doesn’t know what to do with the little blossom of hope that gives her. She hasn’t asked Leona how long she means to stay, and she finds in the moment that she doesn’t want to know, can’t bear to ask. She kicks a drying piece of moss lightly with the toe of her boot instead. It’s another twenty minutes to the berry patch, and that’s at her pace, not Leona’s.

She wants things to be good here for Leona, wants someone with the eyes of an outsider and the heart of a local to judge this place worthy and interesting the way Norami knows it is. The forest seems to curl in around them, soft lower branches curving upward toward them, leaves reaching toward the harsh plastic of their jackets, a caress and maybe also a warning. And Norami wants. To be judged worthy, a path worth following after all.

But not yet. She can’t push Leona yet. She has to give the forest a chance to speak for itself. Veeberries are a good first step. There’s nothing like them, not anywhere.

At the fork in the trail by the thick old droram tree, Norami turns to Leona to ask her what path she wants to take—through the forest or along the stream—but her sister is still several steps behind her. The soft beams of Norami’s blue light hit Leona’s face, and Norami sees tears on her cheeks, her fingers glistening as they curl around a dangling leaf.

“You okay?” Norami asks.

Leona straightens, wipes across her eyes with the back of her hand. “Of course.”

Norami lets it go and takes her on the path through the forest.

As they walk, Norami asks Leona about Kabbel and Xunan. She wants to know what her forest is up against.

Leona walks behind her, but Norami can hear her straightening up, her voice taking on the authoritative tone of someone who’s traded tales for drinks in plenty of space stations.

Leona tells her about the caves and canyons on Kabbel, worn through centuries of water and acid, the first time they crossed the great chasm and burrowed through the caves, a team of just four of them. She describes the stark beauty of the planet with breathless phrases that tumble out of her mouth fully formed. Norami can just imagine a listener leaning forward, eyes wide, wanting more. The team got stuck in a series of caves that opened onto a cliff, and Leona had to lead them back out the way they’d come, rationing the food and water and oxygen they had, shivering in light plasticky blankets. She narrates a climb up an icy slope, the literal light at the end of the tunnel, and by the time she’s done telling the story, she’s side by side with Norami, ponytail swinging jauntily, face half-blue in the light.

Norami is riveted despite herself. “That sounds horrifying.” Not that there aren’t worse fates in the forest they walk in, but she knows how to avoid those.

Leona shoots her a sideways grin. “Oh, that’s not the worst thing that’s ever happened to me. The worst thing, the most painful, was before I ever left Alven. You know the one, the time I got stung by veeberries.”

She says it so casually, so practiced, so sure of herself, that for a moment Norami is frozen in confusion rather than disbelief. Leona continues.

“You remember, Mi,” she says. “I was only twelve years old; you were fourteen. We were finally going berry-picking with Dad. We had metal buckets and thick gloves and coats, and I had just started my growth spurt. The berries were amazing picked off the vine, and I wasn’t paying as much attention to the vines as I should have been. My jacket rode up when I reached up to move a branch out of the way, and a vine snuck right into the gap in the side of my overalls and got me right in the stomach.

“It hurt so much.” Leona closes her eyes, as if she is remembering. She’s pulled several steps ahead of Norami now.

“I could have died,” she says. “I probably should have. Dad only barely got the injection pen to me in time, and I still screamed and screamed.”

And then she stops talking, and the silence rises, slow and heavy. Norami barely breathes. Leona is well ahead of her now, leading the way, wandering onto and off of the path Norami made, guided a little by the angle of the light behind her, but now she stops.

“What?”

The forest seems to lean in around Norami for a moment, and part of her wants to sink back into it, to not say anything, to let Leona carry her story forward. But she shrugs the trailing vines and branches off and steps back onto the path.

“The thorn got me on my shoulder,” Norami says, “not my stomach. The doctors said that’s why I made it—took longer to get to my organs.”

Leona takes a step toward her, and Norami can see that her eyes are wide, and her face is open. The story she’s just told is real to her, memorized through tellings. Leona would swear that she remembers the feeling of the branch on her hand, the moment the vine slipped beneath the hem of her jacket.

How long has she believed this? Is it a story she told her team members on planet surfaces, keeping them awake and alive throughout long, hostile nights? Did she bring it to the cafeteria at the Young Explorers program, her invitation to society there, her memorable hook? When Norami’s thoughts turn to the Young Explorers program, she sees it all at once. Norami’s rejection came with a note telling her not to apply again, something she didn’t think much about at the time, but now . . . There are people out there who think Norami’s a liar and a thief. Leona has been telling herself—and others—this story for a long, long time.

Norami reaches out to her sister, but stops, hand hovering, as it all catches up to her in a slow, rolling crunch of betrayal. Leona couldn’t even let her have her own pain. That’s what strikes Norami as unfair about it. That she didn’t even have to live through it. That she has all her own stories now, but she still took Norami’s.

“You only remember the screaming because that’s all you were there for,” she says. “If it had happened to you, you would remember the pain.” She swallows. “It would be the only thing you’d remember.”

“I didn’t,” Leona says, her expression jumbled and changing. “I don’t . . . ”

Norami’s arm is still half outstretched. She curls it back inward and holds her hand against her chest, the weight of it a comfort.

“Don’t what? Don’t remember the one time you weren’t the center of everything?” Norami flinches as she says it, not because it’s too mean but because it’s too true. It reeks of desperation.

“How dare you,” Norami says, and her voice cracks.

Leona presses her lips into a flat line for a long, silent moment. Norami reaches out to touch a tree to one side of her, pressing her soft fingers into the rough, flaky bark. These tiny pinpricks of pain against her fingertips she is at least used to.

“I wasn’t the center of things,” Leona says.

Norami snorts. “After you left, everything revolved around the letters and videos you sent from training. Dad would read up on all the articles about the new planets you were going to. Even now, when I go into town, people ask me how you are.” She pauses, searching her sister’s face for something she can’t quite name—guilt, maybe, or understanding.

“You really don’t remember?” she asks.

Leona tilts her head. Her words are quiet. “I don’t know.” She looks around her, seeming to take in the darkness, the straightness of the trunks, and the bluish green of the leaves for the first time. “Every time I said it, it felt familiar.” She shakes her head, a soft, wondering motion. “I could swear I felt it.”

It’s not quite an acknowledgment, not quite an apology. It’s a half-extended hand. And Norami is tired of taking the extra step forward.

She nods at the path. “Just follow that to the berry patch. I’ve lost my appetite.” After a moment, she takes the light off her head and hands it to Leona. She can make her way well enough without it.

Leona takes the light without looking at her. “Thanks.”

Norami keeps her grip on the lamp for a second too long, makes Leona tug it away from her. “Be careful,” she says.

Norami has a short string of postcards, clear pictures taken by Leona with three lines of message on the back of each, of every planet her sister has helped build. Kabbel, and Lenton, and Xunan, and Dahled, and Pormi, bright beads on a short necklace, worlds’ worth.

To think that Norami has spent most of her life in the same dozen square kilometers of Alven forest while her sister was exploring the stars. That’s the way everyone in town says it, anyway. Poor Norami, who couldn’t make it out, just burrowed herself deeper in instead.

That’s what Norami does after she leaves the path, turning away from Leona and her bright light, just walks farther into her own forest, her own small, unending adventure. The only sounds are the slow ripples of leaves and moss where she steps and the uncouth rustle of her plastic pants and jacket. She walks slowly, wraps her hand around branches, touches the edges of oval leaves with gentle fingers, lets her eyes adjust.

Often Norami plays games with herself when she walks the silent woods. Sometimes she’s hunting for treasure, sometimes she’s a spy from one of the films they get on old transports, and sometimes she’s herself, a professional forager. But sometimes she’s an astronaut, exploring a new planet’s surface, taking notes on everything she notices, ready to return to her ship or call for her comrades at a moment’s notice.

She knows it’s not really like that. Leona has been very clear about that in her messages. “It’s hard work,” she says, and Norami believes it. But she knows, too, that Leona’s face lights up when she talks about the first year or so on a new planet; building shelters; monitoring oxygen levels; navigating uncertain new terrain; searching for intelligent, communicative life; helping decide what zoning a new planet will get.

Norami reaches the bank of the small stream and stops to watch the water. She’s not really in a leaping mood. If she goes to the right, she can take a long loop back to the house. If she goes to the left, she’ll reach the veeberry patch and Leona.

Of course, she could always turn back the way she came.

Leona is always leaving, too. Learning and loving new places, processing overwhelming amounts of information and passing it on to the next team, the next phase. Going, going, going, giving up everything she’s worked for and starting over again.

And that’s why Norami thinks she may have a chance at keeping Leona after all. Here, with the stream running clear and melodious at her feet, she doesn’t regret the suspiciously worded rejection letter from the Young Explorers program at all. She’s grateful for it, in a roundabout way. Norami has a favorite spot by the bank of this stream, under a weeping westoon tree, where she likes to look through the leaves, dappled purple and red, and listen to the forest. She has fresh fruit whenever she wants it and a cookbook expanding with note cards stuffed between pages. She has new mushroom patches to find, old vines to clear out, trails to break and maintain. Norami has her whole life to know her forest.

At the stream, Norami turns left.

“Good picking?” Norami asks when she sees her sister, a cylinder of blue plastic.

Leona nods and shows Norami her bucket, already half full, but doesn’t speak. She’s moving quickly and carelessly. Still upset, then. But after another moment she looks back at Norami and smiles a little, so maybe she’s glad Norami came back.

Norami picks a spot a few meters away and starts picking herself. A few vines twist toward her curiously, but she stills and lets their interest fade. The berries are the size of her thumb, bright orange, fleshy, and very soft. Just looking at them creates an anticipatory pang in Norami’s mouth, the sensation of taste coming before the first yellow-green fruit.

She swallows three berries before she tries to speak again. “So,” she says, “did you know I applied to the Young Explorers program? I had to wait a year after you applied because I was still in and out of the hospital, recovering.”

Leona stills, almost drops her bucket. “Oh,” she says faintly. “I never thought about recovering.”

“Well, yeah, because you made it all up for your essay and forgot all the boring parts.”

Silence. A few gentle thunks as Norami drops more berries into her bucket.

“I’m not telling you because I wish I’d gotten in, you know.” Norami reaches down for another clump of berries. “I don’t. I’m glad I stayed. I’m telling you because I want us to be honest with each other.”

“I’m glad you don’t regret it,” Leona says, pausing with a hand full of berries halfway to her bucket. Her mouth twists. “It wasn’t always great on my end either.” She sighs. “I still wish I hadn’t, though. I mean, I always wanted . . . ” She stops, lets the silence hang, stuffs a berry in her mouth.

Norami turns away, to give her time to come up with whatever she’s thinking through, hoping she’ll get Leona’s honesty in return for her own. She picks another few berries, trailing a gloved finger over a rounded green leaf on her way down to her bucket.

Norami feels the scream before she hears it. The hairs on her arms and the back of her neck stand straight up, and the shiver rushes through her before the sound does.

“Leona!” she gasps, but her sister can’t answer because her sister is lying on the edge of the berry patch, screaming. It seems to be the only thing her body can do. Leona’s convulses in great bursts, her body’s only purpose to scream, and breathe, and scream again. The inside of her throat will be ribbons before all this is over.

Norami scrambles for her injection pen, jams it into her sister’s side, falls to her knees. The bright purple thorn is still stuck in the outside of her sister’s thigh, just where the patched stitching of her overalls leaves a tiny gap. The green-yellow-orange of the berries, almost glowing, and the malevolent purple of the thorns seem to surround them. Norami pulls Leona back, drags her away from the berries, and undoes her overalls. She stares at the thorn, twice the length of a fingernail, curved and vicious.

Leona has stopped screaming, a bad sign. Her fingers are starting to stiffen.

Quickly, not decisive so much as choosing not to think, Norami plucks out the thorn and puts her mouth to the wound. She sucks and spits and does not swallow. She’s resistant, not immune. When her spit doesn’t glow slightly purple, she stops. She refastens Leona’s jacket.

Norami’s body is shivering in recognition, the echoes of pain reverberating through her after decades. In Leona’s open, unseeing eyes, Norami recognizes it. The rushing pain, clarifying and destroying, a tidal wave of hurt. There’s a slight orange smear at the corner of Leona’s mouth.

Norami drags her sister up so that Leona’s back is against hers and locks her arms around her sister’s shoulders. Leona’s head falls back onto Norami’s left shoulder, and Norami keeps count of the beat of her breaths, each exhale proof that her sister is alive in her slowly stiffening body. If she can reach the house fast enough, the nearest med-pod isn’t far.

When Leona comes to, she will be changed by the pain. Things will seem clearer to her. She will wake in a hospital bed, her blood running purple-tinged red in the clear IV lines, and she will see Norami and smile. Or maybe she will turn away, remembering and ashamed.

But even then, she will come around. Her light hair will fan over the dark blue pillow, and she’ll lift her head and tell Norami that she wants to stay, that she’s sorry. She will probably cry, which means Norami will too.

Her apology will be eloquent but unnecessary, Norami thinks, navigating around a log on the path, careful of her sister’s trailing legs. Norami will smooth her hair and say she’s glad she was there when it happened, that she understands. The pain, yes, but also the theft.

Norami does understand. She makes herself understand, weaves words into the space her sister left after “I always wanted.” Leona lived life on perpetual adrenaline, and with danger and excitement close to hand at every moment, how else could she make something like home compete with her adventure? How else could she explain why the forest made her cry?

Maybe Norami is delusional, trying to make herself the winner in a competition her sister moved past years ago. But maybe she’s right.

In the hospital room, the morning light on her face, Norami will tell Leona what she was going to say before she says it. That the story started out as a lie and turned into a truth, made Alven just as dangerous and interesting as the surface of every new world she landed on. That the fifteen-year Explorers term grew homesickness like an invasive sickle weed, and the story was her only defense. It was a tether to the tiny world she came from, an arrow curving back against the odds, a well-worn path heading home.

About the Author

AnaMaria Curtis is from the part of Illinois that is very much not Chicago. She's the winner of the 2019 Dell Magazines Award and enjoys starting fights about 19th century British literature and getting distracted by dogs. You can find her on Twitter at @AnaMCurtis.

The Mermaid Problem

Carrie Sessarego

Almost everybody knows what a mermaid is, right? Human above the waist, fish on the bottom, oftentimes beautiful and seductive, sometimes terrifying and murderous: these creatures have appeared in a standardized form in Western art for hundreds of years. However, a deeper look at mer-lore shows a bounty of ancient and modern ways of thinking about beings who bridge the gap between earth and water.

Stories about merfolk and other hybrid or shape-changing water beings can be divided into two broad categories:

I really want to have sex!

This is where you find your beautiful and seductive beings—mermaids, sirens, selkies, and undines, as well as the modern lore of shifter romance and erotica. A common subset of this category is: I wanted to have sex and now I’m dead! Which is where we place sirens, mermaids, and others who sing sailors to their deaths after presenting an attractive initial appearance and/or voice.

Kids, I’m telling you for the last time, don’t play by the river/pond/bog/ocean!

Here we have terrifying beings—kelpies, finfolk, and many variations on monsters with a semi-human form that drag the unwary into the water, such as Jenny Greenteeth and the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Within these categories there is almost infinite variation and interpretation. Mermaid and related stories are about sexual exploration, love of the other, forbidden love, and curiosity. They can also be about body positivity, ancestral memory, and liberation. They can be about the unpredictable and horrifying dangers of the water, a medium we can’t survive in, don’t fully understand, and can’t live without. They can be terrifying, adorable, seductive, and silly, sometimes within the same story.

Mermaids have a long history, but the most iconic mermaid in Western literature is the unnamed “mermaid” from the Hans Christian Andersen story “The Little Mermaid” (1837). Andersen’s story features a mermaid who is beautiful in accordance with White Victorian ideal: that is to say, pale, somewhat slender, and graceful, with large, expressive eyes and long, flowing hair. This image of the mermaid can be seen in the original illustrations for Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid,” by Vilhelm Pedersen, as well as the original illustrations for J. M. Barrie’s classic, Peter and Wendy (1911), by Francis Donkin Bedford and countless examples of visual art dating from the era of the Andersen story through today. This is also the way mermaids look in most movies, including Splash (1984) and The Little Mermaid (1989).

Many modern characters have challenged our image of the mermaid by introducing mermaids that do not fit the stereotypical mold (distinct from the many water-based spirits and deities of non-Western cultures) and fat or curvy mermaids. In Julia Ember’s novel The Seafarer’s Kiss, mermaids in the north carry a substantial amount of blubber that helps them survive the cold. In their society, fat is considered an attractive and necessary adaptative attribute. The pod of mermaids in Thirsty Mermaids (a comic by Kat Leyh) consists of two fat mermaids and one skinny mermaid, all three of whom express nothing but positivity about their bodies. In real life, the Society of Fat Mermaids exists as a place of support for plus-size mermaid cosplayers and performers.

Meanwhile, mermaids of color are increasingly found in Western literature and other media. The Chinese movie, The Mermaid (2016), is about mermaids who live off the coast of China and who are Chinese in appearance and language. The novel A Song Below Water, by Bethany C. Morrow, explores coming of age issues and racial justice through the lens of two teenage Black girls, one of whom is a siren and one of whom performs as a mermaid. The Deep, by Rivers Solomon, features Black mermaids in a searing yet joyful story of ancestral memory, liberation, and romance. The Saudi Arabian movie, Scales (2021), uses mermaids to explore gender roles in a dystopian Middle Eastern village.

The mermaids’ close relatives, sirens, are often depicted today looking like mermaids, but they did not start out that way. Sirens first appeared in Greek mythology. They had the upper bodies of women and the tails, wings, and feet of birds, with considerable variation regarding the woman/bird ratio. They sang and played instruments, luring sailors to dangerous shoals, and causing their deaths. Homer includes them as a menace in the Odyssey. Over time, sirens were pictured as looking less and less like birds and more and more like people. At some point in the Middle Ages, they began being described with the tails of dragons or fish and wings of a bird. Eventually the story solidified until sirens and mermaids became virtually synonymous.

An example of the siren/mermaid hybrid may be seen in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011). These sirens are beautiful women from the waist up with fish tails from the waist down. They use their physical attractiveness and beautiful voices to seduce pirates. When the pirates reach for them, the sirens grab them, drag them underwater, and devour them with their previously concealed sharp teeth and their superhuman strength. In the movie, they are referred to as mermaids, with only their voices and feeding patterns suggesting that “siren” might be a more accurate term.

Another example of the “mermaids but murderous” type of siren is found in the television series Siren (2018–2020), in which sirens are portrayed as the alpha predators of the sea despite their appearance, which is attractive to humans. In this show, the siren song can be used for healing, but it can also be addictive to humans, causing them to compulsively search for the song and ultimately drown themselves. Another version of the song can cause immediate injury or death.

Most siren fiction plays up the sexual attractiveness of the sirens, but author Mira Grant uses them as an avenue for scientific conjecture and creature-feature horror. In her novel, Into the Drowning Deep, sirens live in the recesses of the Mariana Trench. They use their ability to mimic the voices of people, ships, and marine animals to lure prey. These sirens are fully adapted to deep-sea life. Their faces and curving rib cages bear some resemblance to human women, and they have eerily humanoid lips, but there the resemblance to humans ends. They have internal organs that allow them to feed on the ocean’s surface and then return to the depths without suffering from pressure changes, they have powerful tails, they secrete a protective mucus like hagfish, they have thin, bioluminescent tendrils that resemble hair, and they have “a fishhook forest of teeth” as well as claws. This reimaging of sirens in a more scientifically plausible way allows the menace in the book to seem both otherworldly and completely realistic, the eerie mimicry of human voices and words a true violation of the trust of gullible humans filled with unearned hubris.

Sirens and mermaids usually fall under the “I want to have sex” category, with their stories usually depicting them as sexually alluring at least some of the time, with sirens crossing over into “I wanted to have sex and now I’m dead” territory. Mermaids and sirens share these categories with the lesser-known undines (sometimes spelled “ondine”) and other freshwater cryptids.

In Western literature, the undine legend was immortalized in an 1811 novella, Undine, by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué. In this novel, a wandering knight meets a young woman named Undine. She has no soul but wins one when she marries the knight. She warns him not to deceive or criticize her near water. When he breaks this promise, she is forced to return to the water. The knight, believing her dead, arranges to marry her rival, but Undine returns on his wedding day, and he dies. Says Undine, “My tears fell on his heart until, for very sorrow, it broke.”

Undine was inspired by two sources. The first was works of Paracelsus, a Renaissance-era alchemist who described four elemental beings (also called nymphs in his system) who occupy a space between fully corporeal and fully spiritual. Gnomes are the elemental beings of Earth, Sylphs of Air, Salamanders of Fire, and Undines of Water. These beings don’t have immortal souls but can gain them if married to a human being. However, should an undine marry a human, and the human mistreat her while they are on the water, she will be forced to leave him, and should he betray her, she will kill him.

The second source was the legend of Mélusine, a being resembling a mermaid said to inhabit streams and holy wells in France. The legend of Mélusine has many variations but usually involves a nobleman who finds a beautiful maiden in the forest. She agrees to marry him on the condition that he never look at her when she is bathing herself or their children. Eventually he breaks the oath and sees her (or in some variations, one of the daughters) with the tail of a serpent, dragon, or fish, causing her to swim or fly away.

“Mélusine” and “Undine” are words that can be used as the name of a specific character or a more general word for that type of character—thus “undine” usually refers to either the character in the novella or to any freshwater beautiful female elemental, and “mélusine” is either a specific character from legend or any freshwater mermaid-like being that has the upper body of a woman and lower body of a mermaid with a double fish tail, a serpent tail, or a dragon tail. For example, the famous Starbucks Company logo is a classic image of a mélusine.

Undine was a popular novel upon its release, and inspired poems, stories, operas, and ballets. Most recently, it inspired the movies Ondine (2009) and Undine (2020). The medical condition central hypoventilation syndrome, a condition in which people lose the ability to regulate their breathing automatically, is also known as Ondine’s curse.

One of the legacies of Undine was its impact on Hans Christian Andersen. Many factors went into Andersen’s story “The Little Mermaid,” a story which has arguably had the single greatest influence on modern Western mermaid lore. One of those factors was Andersen’s dislike of the use of the immortal soul as a plot device in Undine. Andersen thought that an eternal soul should not be bestowed on a being simply because of love. In his story, a mermaid hopes to win the love of a prince and thus acquire an eternal soul, just as Undine does. However, in Andersen’s story, the prince dooms the mermaid by wedding another. The mermaid is then offered a chance to win a soul through good deeds in a sort of ghostly afterlife. In a letter, Andersen wrote:

I have not, like de la Motte Fouquet in Undine, let the mermaid’s gaining an immortal soul depend on a stranger, on the love of another person. It is definitely the wrong thing to do. It would make it a matter of chance, and I’m not going to accept that in this world. I have let my mermaid take a more natural, divine path.

A final example of freshwater cryptids is the nixie. These beings, from Germanic lore, are freshwater cryptids who bridge the gap between sirens and undines. They sometimes look human and other times look like mermaids. Lorelei, who shares her name with a large rock formation on the Rhine River, is a famous nixie who sings a beautiful song, siren-like. She lures men to their deaths by shipwreck on the rock that bears her name.

Returning to the ocean, we find selkies, the mysterious seal-men and women from the Scottish coast. These beings live their lives in the sea as seals. However, sometimes, they come onto the land, take off their coats, and assume human form. This is most common with selkie women. Should a human man steal the selkie’s seal skin, then she must follow him home and be his wife. But if she ever finds where he has hidden the skin, then she will run back to the sea with it and never be seen again.

The Secret of Roan Inish (1994) and the animated Song of the Sea (2014) tell selkie stories in a modern setting (The Secret of Roan Inish is set post-WWII and Song of the Sea is set in the present day). Both movies tell stories of separation, grief, and healing. The 2009 movie Ondine, mentioned above and set in the present day, combines ondine and selkie legends in a modern-day story about a mysterious woman, Ondine, who is believed to be a selkie. This movie uses the selkie myth as a way for Ondine to craft her own story about her origins, her personal power, and the life she wants to have. There is even a story about selkies in space. The Twins of Petaybee series, by Anne McCaffrey and Elizabeth Ann Scarborough, includes a selkie scientist who transforms into seal form in order to explore an alien planet’s ocean.

Selkies are rarely cruel to humans. However, finfolk from Finnish folklore are a crossover between “Kids, I’m telling you for the last time, don’t play by the water!” and “I want to have sex!” Finfolk, found in the Orkney Islands, live most of their lives in their underwater city, as creatures like mermaids. But when they want to wed, they kidnap a human and take them to a hidden, magical island where the human must live out their days. To do this, finfolk adopt various disguises. Sometimes they adopt the forms of beautiful mermaids to seduce fisherman. Other times they appear as animals or plants, attempting to entice the human into approaching them so that the finfolk can grab the human. Finmen even appear as fishermen in row boats, or as empty boats free for the taking. But the greedy human who comes too close will find him or herself captured and dragged beneath the waves for procreation purposes.

Although we’re focusing on Western mermaids, particularly those from Western European folklore and media, stories of merfolk appear all over the world. The universality of these stories suggests certain universal feelings and impulses. For instance, people want sex and fantasize about it, while also fearing the dangers of following temptation. Yet many mermaids and related stories are less about the drive for sex and more about the drive for companionship and a sense of belonging. For instance, The Little Mermaid of Andersen’s tale doesn’t just want to have a sexual life with her prince—she wants to belong in the human world. She also wants to be part of something even greater, longing for a kind of eternal immortality.

Stories about merfolk and their relatives also represent a universal longing to bridge the great gap of understanding between the earthly world of humans and the aquatic world, a world in which we cannot survive, and yet also cannot live without. These stories are resilient and adaptable, overlapping and blending into one another, transcending genre limitations.

There are mermaids in horror (Mermaid Down, from 2019, and The Lure, from 2015) and mermaids in science fiction (Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters, by Aimee Ogden, 2021). The romance genre abounds with mermaids. Mermaids populate children’s stories, live performance, visual arts, and adult erotica. Transcending artistic and physical mediums, mermaids and undines, sirens, and nixies, and all the other water-beings who challenge and seduce us remind us that the watery world is, and has always been, a place of wonder and mystery.

About the Author

Carrie Sessarego is the resident "geek reviewer" for Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, where she wrangles science fiction, fantasy romance, comics, movies, and non-fiction. Carrie's first book, Pride, Prejudice, and Popcorn: TV and Film Adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre, was released in 2014. Her work has been published in Interfictions Online, Pop Matters: After the Avengers, The WisCon Chronicles Vol. 9, Invisible 3, Clarkesworld Magazine, and two volumes of Speculative Fiction: The Year's Best Online Reviews, Essays and Commentary. She spends her time wrangling her husband, daughter, dog, and three cats.

Breaking Out of the Box:
A Conversation with Cadwell Turnbull

Arley Sorg

Cadwell Turnbull was born in Chevy Chase, MD and moved to his parents’ home island of St. Thomas when he was still an infant. He moved to Pittsburgh to attend La Roche University and earned a degree in professional writing. He returned to St. Thomas for a year and worked as a substitute teacher, and then taught in South Korea for a year. Afterward, he worked as a media coordinator for AmeriCorps and as a journalist on St. Thomas while attending NC State University.

Turnbull earned a creative writing MFA in fiction and an English MA in linguistics. One of his teachers was author John Kessel, who introduced Turnbull to Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, books that became important to Turnbull’s debut novel, The Lesson. Turnbull attended Clarion West in 2016.

Cadwell Turnbull’s work is complex: sophisticated speculative fiction with a literary flair and a deep interest in things that matter. His work usually tackles socially charged issues, and often draws on the experience of moving from place to place, and of a layered sense of otherness. NPR’s review of No Gods, No Monsters says, “There’s race and sexuality and class and collectivism . . . There’s the overarching idea of othering those who do not look like us or live like us or love like us . . . ” and Tor.com says, “Turnbull refuses to smooth over or shove aside the complexity of the everyday world we live [in] . . . Turnbull doesn’t let the reader forgot how diverse and beautiful the world was, nor how complicated and thorny . . . No Gods, No Monsters is a staggering achievement of literary craftsmanship . . . ”

Turnbull’s first published story was in Nightmare Magazine in 2017: “Loneliness Is in Your Blood” (reprinted in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 edited by N. K. Jemisin and John Joseph Adams), followed by “Other Worlds and This One” in Asimov’s and “A Third of the Stars of Heaven” in Lightspeed, also in 2017. Blackstone published Turnbull’s debut novel The Lesson in 2019, which received glowing reviews from nearly every respected industry outlet you could think of. The Lesson was included in “Best of 2019” lists for Library Journal, Kirkus, and Publishers Weekly. The novel also landed on the Locus Recommended Reading list, was long listed for the Massachusetts Book Award, short listed for the VCU Cabell Award, and won the 2020 Neukom Institute Literary Arts Award for Speculative Fiction in the Debut category.

Turnbull lives in Raleigh and teaches creative writing at NC State University. No Gods, No Monsters is his second novel, and has received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Library Journal, and Booklist.

You are relatively new to the scene, but your fiction has landed well with discerning readers, and you’ve garnered really lovely reviews. When you start working on a piece of shorter fiction, what is important to you; what is the initial focus?

I’d say that my stories start two major ways. I either have an idea first, and then I find the characters and the setting that will help me flesh that idea out (and also conceal the idea). Or I get interested in a particular kind of person. Usually this is still tied to some idea but through theme. I am asking: how would this particular kind of person respond to this particular sort of event?

Either approach always ends in some sort of character study, and the structure of the story hinges around a moment of revelation or confrontation, for the character or the perceived reader. For me, plot is the little steps toward revelation or reckoning. Often those steps are quiet because I think the world reveals itself most in quiet moments. If I’m lucky I’ll stumble across something loud enough to feel like a proper climax, where the big action in the moment also offers revelation.

There’s a third approach. I am always finding thematic connections between stories, and sometimes I lean into those, play them up. Or I create a character I like, but they’re a side character, and then I can’t help but write about them. Lots of my stories end up being triptychs or having sequels or exist in the same universe as other stories.

With a dozen short stories published and very likely more on the way, do you feel like there are themes you tend to write, do you see any consistent elements?

I think I jumped the gun here a little. I am a conspiracy theorist at heart. Everything is connected. And I most definitely return to themes again and again until I feel like I am asking the right questions.

A big one is sibling relations with some knot of tension or conflict at the center. Familial relationships fascinate me because no one in the world understands you more and less than a close family member—a paradox I can’t help but explore over and over.

Other stories focus on people hitting up against a certain aspect of society, some disparity or pocket of alienation that causes them to act against that system. Usually, the action is relatively small but meaningful to that individual.

Existential dread shows up a lot. Something shifts in a person’s life that causes them to question reality itself. In one of my more recent stories, it is a body-swap. In another one it is a spontaneous act of teleportation that doesn’t happen again.

Also, moments of social change. That tends to be the subject of my novels, but my short stories hit up on this almost as often.

Are there elements of writing that are harder for you—and how do you deal with those elements? Or are you fairly well-rounded in your work?

I am certainly not well-rounded, though I try to lean on the study of craft to help me with my deficits. I love structure, but I’m not always great at plot momentum. I go where I go, linger in places I maybe shouldn’t. I am also not great at description. Some of this is stubbornly deliberate, but sometimes I don’t describe things that might help a reader. I seldom describe what people look like, and what I reach for I don’t like, so it often goes away in revision.

You have this new project called Many Worlds, a “collaborative shared multiverse project,” which just launched. How did it come about, and what is the central concept?

Well, it came about because I felt like there needed to be an answer to intertextual narrative that wasn’t large, heavily funded franchises. I’ve always been interested in multiverses as a speculative concept. I wanted to create something that focused on the worlds and not just iterations of people (though there’s tons of fun to be had there, too).

I also wanted to incorporate some of the things I love about cooperativism and apply it to what is often a solitary art form. Short fiction writers spend a lot of time creating these big worlds, only to spend just several thousand words in them. I thought: wouldn’t it be great if a writer could offer up their worlds as a sandbox for other writers inclined to write within it? And then: what if it wasn’t just one world, but many? And then: what if there were many other authors doing the exact same thing? A big interdimensional sandbox for writers to play in together.

A cosmic entity called the Simulacrum ties Many Worlds together. And of course, there are travelers that move between worlds. The mechanism for travel is a bit strange, and because there’s a bunch of us, there’s a bunch of directions we’ve been taking this aspect of the narrative in.

On the Many Worlds site there’s a list of “Previously Published Many Worlds Stories,” which came out at a variety of places, such as Asimov’s, Lightspeed, and James Gunn’s Ad Astra. What is the relationship between those stories and the Season One content?

Some of them aren’t related at all. The project is designed to produce stand-alone stories and tie-in stories. Occasionally we may use a world of a stand-alone story as a short-term destination in a tie-in story, but how that works isn’t always central to the tie-in story’s plot.

What previously published stories do is establish some prestige for the whole project. Authors bring work in that they’re proud of and this makes the whole project better.

I will say that one of my previously published stories is important to Many Worlds on a meta-narrative level. I finished “Shock of Birth” while I was still setting up the project. It was a bit of luck that the story got picked up by Asimov’s.

Are there connections between Many Worlds and your latest novel, No Gods, No Monsters?

No, they aren’t connected. No Gods, No Monsters does feature its own multiverse, but with different mechanics. Fortunately, there’s all sorts of ways to design multiverses. I am pretty sure I am going to design more.

What are the things you learned in writing debut novel The Lesson that you brought to No Gods, No Monsters?

Mostly structure. They’re very similar structurally. The Lesson follows several points of view during a moment of change. That structure was a discovery. I didn’t really know what I was doing.

No Gods, No Monsters was an earnest attempt to try to both push and improve on the approach. I wanted a narrative that valued each character, gave weight to each of their concerns, in relation to but also independent of what someone from the outside might view as important. I wanted to center the people. I also wanted to somehow move the plot better while doing that. I wasn’t completely satisfied the first time, so I tried it again.

How did No Gods start—what was the inspiration, how did the project develop, and did the final book end up being different in significant ways from the initial idea(s)?

The inspiration was part, “Hey, I want to write an urban fantasy, what would that look like?” And part, “Hey, this urban fantasy is a good setting for a lot of other stuff I’ve been thinking about for the last decade or so.” It was a natural progression of weaving old ideas with new ones. It really felt like the story just rose from my subconscious, bit by bit, with all these great connections. Not a dream like The Lesson, but dreamlike.

Early on, I knew I wanted the book to be told by a narrator I’d been coming back to for years. I only had one story published about the narrator, but I’d written others. Like The Lesson, that published story eventually made its way into the book because I realized that it was essential as an origin story. That changed the voice of the book somewhat, but it also made me think a lot about how a voice, even a narrator’s voice, might change over years. I was always interested in a personified, third-person narrator, but I became interested in what might happen if characters in a story knew more than that narrator. That also changed the book.

The Lesson was set in the US Virgin Islands, deliberately centered in and tapping into the culture you grew up with. No Gods keeps some connection to the Islands but also reaches into other locales. Is that connection, and cultural visibility, just as important with No Gods as it was with The Lesson?

When I was in graduate school, I kept trying to write stories that used my own linguistic context as the authoritative voice of the story, even when the story was outside of the Virgin Islands. We get dominant culture narratives all the time that use the dominant lens to tell stories about “exotic” places. I wanted to do the inverse of that, tell a story set within another context, through a nondominant lens. I struggled with it a lot. I still don’t think I got it exactly right.

I realize this sounds theoretical. Really, it was more of an emotional/experiential thing. No matter where I go, I bring myself. It felt important to me to do this in my writing. I’ve always felt like the choice being posed to me was to either write about home or write about elsewhere. Either choice felt like a box to break out of. My real-life experience is liminal, so No Gods became liminal, too.

One of many things No Gods does is interrogate the idea of the monster. Why is this important?

I love horror movies, but I’m also a scaredy cat. The way I’ve been able to keep watching horror is to associate with the monsters. If I can find something to empathize with, I empathize. If I can’t empathize, I try to understand their guiding principles. Often enough, a monster is something that has become twisted due to some trauma or tragedy. That’s something I can always connect with. I think a lot of marginalized people can connect with that.

One of the subtler layers at play, for me, is the idea of power. The narrative explores the ways that power manifests, is used, is exploited, and so on. Power is rarely a simplistic concept. Is this accurate—is it deliberate or important?

There’s a moment in the novel where a young child hears someone discussing “malevolent” and “benevolent” powers and the child thinks the two words sound the same, “like sisters.” The child doesn’t completely know how profound an observation this is, but it is my hope that the reader does. Wielding power is dangerous no matter how it is used, for good or ill. There are unintended consequences. Sacrifices are required.

In our world, power is unevenly distributed. Is that inherent? Can one assert oneself without affecting the assertions of others? Even if there was a clean equivalent exchange, I don’t think we’d know it. And it would be atypical.

In the novel there are two organizations on opposing sides of a power struggle. One, in my mind, is concerned with a greater good. What that is and who must be sacrificed in the name of it is a major concern of the series.

What is your favorite thing about this book and its characters?

The thing I love, that I got excited about while writing, is also the thing that may be immensely frustrating to readers. I find the older I get, the murkier human interactions are. I think it goes back to the question of power. I love that everybody in the story is controlling information, that it is being weaponized for both noble and not-so-noble gains. I don’t always like it in real life, but I wanted the story to match the world I experience. Personal motives are just as murky, and I love that all the characters are struggling with what they should be saying and why. Every character is navigating the messy area between selective truth and selective silence. It isn’t painted as evil because sometimes it is protective. Sometimes it is even loving. One of my characters makes this decision with his parents. He decides that protecting them from difficult realities is more important than deeper intimacy with them. It might be misguided, but that’s not the point. We all do this. All the time.

No Gods is book one of the Convergence Saga. Can you tell us anything about the next book?

Each book is several years apart and is focused on a particular moment in the monster emergence. No Gods is the reckoning. We Are the Crisis is the backlash once the world generally makes up their mind about what is happening. The focus is the social change, told through the characters. But many of the characters will also be invested in finding answers to better-understand the monster world. They’ll find some of what they’re looking for, and some of what they’re not.

What else are you working on, what do you have coming up for new readers and fans?

Right now, it is mostly just the book. Many Worlds will be an ongoing thing, and hopefully we’ll have a running list of newsy things to share. I also have been working on a project with Realm Media. That should be announcing soonish. Until then, I’ve been keeping a lid on things.

At least one story in an anthology. Maybe a couple more if I can get my act together. A novella I worked on with my students that I’m hoping to find a good home for. That’s it, I think.

About the Author

Arley Sorg is co-Editor-in-Chief at Fantasy Magazine and a 2021 World Fantasy Award Finalist. He is also senior editor at Locus Magazine, associate editor at both Lightspeed & Nightmare Magazines, and a columnist for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He takes on multiple roles, including slush reader, film & book reviewer, and more. He conducts interviews for multiple venues, including Clarkesworld Magazine and his own site. Arley grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado, and studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in Oakland, CA but can sometimes be found on Twitter as @arleysorg. In non-pandemic times, Arley usually writes in local coffee shops. He is a 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate.

The Freedom of Science Fiction:
A Conversation with Tobias S. Buckell

Arley Sorg

Tobias Samuel Buckell was born in Grenada. He grew up there, as well as on the British Virgin Islands and the US Virgin Islands. He moved to Ohio as a teen, after Hurricane Marilyn destroyed the boat his family lived on. Buckell attended Clarion in 1999 and shortly after graduated from Bluffton University with an English degree.

Buckell sold “The Fish Merchant” to Science Fiction Age via Clarion instructor Scott Edelman, also editor of the magazine. “In Orbite Medievali” was a Writers of the Future finalist, and by 2002, Buckell had a dozen short stories published, including “A Green Thumb” in Analog. Buckell was a finalist for the Astounding (then Campbell) Award for Best New Writer in 2002.

Debut novel, Crystal Rain (Tor), began his four-book Xenowealth series in 2006 and was a Locus Award finalist for Best First Novel. Sequel Ragamuffin was a Prometheus and Nebula awards finalist. But this was just the beginning. His fiction has landed him on nominee and short lists for the Sidewise Award, the WSFA Small Press Award, the Sturgeon Award, the Eugie Award, and the Hugo Award. In 2019, he won a World Fantasy Award for The Tangled Lands (Saga), a novella collection put together with author Paolo Bacigalupi.

Tobias S. Buckell is known as a thoughtful author with incredible range, shifting from fantasy to weird to hard science fiction at will. He’s written powerful narratives rich with subtext as well as bestselling video game tie-ins. In 2019 he added It’s All Just a Draft to his already impressive bibliography, a nonfiction book about writing. He currently serves as the vice president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

Buckell lives in Bluffton, Ohio with his wife and twin daughters. He is an instructor at the University of Maine’s Stonecoast MFA in creative writing. After fifteen years freelancing, he recently joined the English department at Bluffton. “It is my huge new experience,” he says, “and there’s little room for much more. I play Ultimate Frisbee (badly) on the weekends.”

Buckell’s latest novel is A Stranger in the Citadel, an Audible Original published May 2021. His latest collection, Shoggoths in Traffic and Other Stories, is to be published in November 2021 with Fairwood Press.

ISFDB has your first publication as “The Fish Merchant” in the March 2000 Science Fiction Age, while your site lists one title earlier: “Waiting for the Zephyr” in Jackhammer in June of 1999. Either way, you’ve been writing and publishing for over two decades. What does it take to stay in the game for so long and to sustain a career?

Jackhammer was one of the first online paying magazines I knew of and it used to be edited by Rachel Henderson Moon (IIRC). That was the first check I ever got for a piece of written fiction, back in 1999. I was a junior in college, and the eight dollars paid for a first date and the laundry quarters so I could clean up for it! And since then, I’ve just always been submitting stories. What does it take? A deep commitment to persistence, I think.

A few weeks ago, I did an interview about the ups and downs of a writing career. I wrote an article on my Patreon about how I view my career as having a series of roller-coaster moments, or that it’s like a stock market, with bull and bear runs (but over time slowly rising on average as you get more and more tools and experience). I can think of five, if not seven times, that my career felt like it had stalled or slumped from my point of view being inside the machine. And the only thing I did was just keep sending things in to see if someone would take it. I just kept making things even when people weren’t breaking down my door to ask for them.

I have submitted things, whether stories or novels, nine hundred and sixty-seven times. I count now that I have well over seven hundred and fifty rejections. I honestly really do view those rejections as progress, proof that I’m swinging for the fence. It sounds trite, because whenever I get together with others who’ve been doing this for more than a decade, we all remember amazing talents who just . . . stopped. And I get why: better jobs, more security, other hobbies, burning out on the chaos of publishing, the way publishing’s fundamentals change every five to ten years. There are great reasons to not break your heart doing this. I am just one of the ones who kept making, revising, submitting, and seeing where that lead me.

In retrospect, there’s a ton of stuff I wish I’d done differently, ways I could have maybe shone a bit brighter or been smarter. But I know after over twenty years, the only person I’m racing is me, and I get my best work done by keeping my head down, focusing on my lane, and focusing on staying in the game while trying to tell stories I care about. I’m going for the “wait, he’s still around?” career plan! It’s been good to me.

I have so many ideas still, also. I have a notebook with easily fifty plus story ideas in it, and it’s always growing faster than I can draft them! I guess when I stop being able to see something and have it suggest a story or novel idea, that’s when I’ll know it’s time to stop. But I’ve never been able to turn that voice off, so here we are!

The original publication dates of stories in your new collection, Shoggoths in Traffic, reach all the way back to the year 2000. Is there an organizational principle at work behind which pieces are in the collection—do you see a theme, or underlying elements?

I worked really hard on what order the stories appear. Shoggoths is like this mixtape I spent weeks thinking about for someone special. The stories are all fantasy stories, but the kinds of fantasy pieces that are delivered to the reader in careful stages with varying moods. I’m hoping the reader goes on a journey from fantasy intruding on our world as it is today, into weirder and weirder pieces, and then back again into slantwise looks at our world today through the lens of fantasy.

How did the collection come about, and what was putting it together like?

I realized a while back that I had a ton of uncollected short fiction just . . . out there. I think it was three hundred and fifty thousand words of it. Between my Patreon, where I write and post stories for people frequently, and the fact that I started saying yes some years back to way more short fiction commissions, when novel publishing and I were in the doldrums, I had somehow created this body of short fiction. So, what to do?

My agent, the awesome Hannah Bowman, and I, we put our heads together. I started mining all the stories and creating some sample groupings and spent a few weeks working on tables of contents for three or so of these various possible collections. My agent started reaching out. Patrick Swenson at Fairwood had done some cool collections for friends of mine, and they’ve said good things. So, I’m super excited. Patrick worked hard to make the look and feel of the collection come together just the way I dreamed. In fact, one of my favorite pieces of reference art for what the cover could be is what he figured out how to buy for the actual cover.

Does your collection reveal a career trajectory, or perhaps a shift in style or skill? Since 2000’s “Spurn Babylon,” originally published in Nalo Hopkinson’s anthology Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root, all the way up to “Brickomancer,” which is an original piece, do you feel like your writing has changed in specific ways?

I was a twenty-year-old college junior when I wrote “Spurn Babylon,” and now I’m in my forties, so I dearly hope I’ve gotten a little bit better at writing them? The stories are mixed in, there are a handful from early in my career, and then a handful from my Patreon, and then another handful come from commissions for original anthologies. Deep down, I hope the collection shows a curated look at my range and what I’m capable of. But mainly, I hope it engages.

What are the top stories that you are excited for people to read in this book—perhaps those which were most challenging to write, or which are most important to you—and why?

It’s always strange because I can never tell ahead of time what will have the most impact and what had the biggest effect on me to write. I deeply, deeply love “Sundown,” the weird western story, because the real-life story of Willie Kennard is amazing, and I can’t stop thinking about it. Most challenging to write were the two anchor stories, “A Different Kind of Place” and “Zombie Capitalism.” Before the current chaos of the pandemic, I was struggling to process some of the same behavior and beliefs that I was seeing, but preemergent, and those stories took a lot out of me. And I hate that they ended up being so predictive.

In terms of writing short fiction, what is important for you when you write—what are you focused on the most?

There’s so much you juggle as a writer that it feels more like a basket of varying things I focus on. I often focus on what I want a reader to feel when I write something, a mood, a sensation, a feeling. Failing that, it’s sometimes a mood or sensation that I want to invoke in myself. Sometimes a purge, like trying to process anger, or pain, to see if there’s something there narratively that I can transmute. That sounds very airy and a little woo, because when I teach, I’m often talking about story components, structure, and threads like that. But the fun thing about a story is that it is short, so you can be indulgent and start one with just a vague impression and see where it may take you. What I love about short fiction is just how much freedom I have. If I want to construct a story with a lot of structure and outline it, I can. Or I can grab the slightest idea and just try it out. I love that.

I was in the back of a class when Sofia Samatar at Shared Worlds, a teen writing camp, happened to mention a story could use anything for structure. Even a grocery list. And within a minute, I’d sketched out a story idea around a grocery list that I later sold to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Short fiction begs you to experiment and play, and I love it for the breadth of possibilities.

Is there anything else you’d like readers to know about Shoggoths in Traffic?

It comes out in November, and I’ve seen a few really nice reviews already, so I’d love for people to take a peek at it and see what they think.

In 2019 at the World Fantasy Convention, you had just won your first World Fantasy Award for The Tangled Lands. Through the course of your career you’ve received a number of major nods and nominations. Do the awards nominations and wins have an impact on your writing, your process, or productivity? Do you feel like they have an impact career-wise?

I really appreciated sharing that moment with you. I’d never won an award before, and I’d made my peace at the time with never winning one, and I’d really come to value the fact that I’d been nominated for awards and that my stories had been reprinted a bunch. It can be so easy to focus on what you’re not achieving, or what’s missing, and miss just how amazingly lucky it is to see your work in print and have it read by people. So, winning the World Fantasy Award, no joke, I didn’t expect it, it rocked me pretty hard!

I don’t know if it’s had an impact, career-wise. It certainly hasn’t hurt! I’m grateful for all the work I did to not focus on things outside of my control, because we often can get stuck on wanting that thing that lets us know we “made it” or that suddenly accelerates everything. But the day after I won the award, I still had work due, my bank account was the same. There’ve been some new gigs, and maybe they came from that win? Or maybe it’s just all a drip, drip, drip accumulative stalagmite of a career. That’s what it feels like to me!

I will say this. I’ll never forget the time my first Halo novelization came out and a high-level SMOF stopped me a Worldcon sometime after to explain that I’d never be up for an award again for doing that. At the time it scared the crap out of the baby writer I was then, I’ll be honest. I don’t know if I’ve changed any minds, but I’m super grateful to have been nominated for awards since.

But when I write, I am not thinking about awards. I’d just end up like the millipede that, when asked how it walks, promptly falls over. Stories that I think might get attention when I’m done sometimes do, sometimes don’t, and others I thought were fun sometimes are quickly forgotten, and others get a ton of attention. What I’ve learned from that is . . . just keep making stuff. It could be that more generations of awesome writers appear who surpass me in totality, and I never get nominated for anything again, and that would be just great for the field! I’ve made a pact with myself to focus on enjoying my process and keeping on writing no matter what may come.

You have several collections and well over seventy-five short stories out at various markets. As mentioned, you’ve received a certain amount of acclaim. Are there one or two short stories that you thought would make more of a splash, which really excited you or meant a great deal to you, but which just didn’t get noticed the way other pieces did?

Oh, yeah, I have a number of those, totally. I deeply, deeply love my short story “By the Warmth of their Calculus,” and I am writing a novel based on it. I really had hoped the story would make more of a splash, because I put so much into it. It just lit me up, all the cylinders fired while in the middle of that one. The other story I most recently hoped would get more attention is “Scar Tissue.” It came out from Slate in their Future Tense series that they partner with Arizona State University for, right as the shutdowns happened. No one read it. It’s about parenthood, and AI, and bodies, and I thought it was a story that twenty-year-old author me would never have had the chops to even attempt.

This is why you have to focus on what you can control. I loved writing the story, and I got paid to do it. There’s the win. You never know what is going to happen, some of it far, far out of your control. So, I got paid to write something cool. That is just cool, and I’m grateful for these opportunities.

We see a fair number of writers utilizing Patreon and similar platforms. Is Patreon a good model for authors, is it the future of publishing? Or is it a tool some may find to be ineffective?

Some may find it to be ineffective because you have to have a following to begin with, or you have to work hard to publicize it. And that locks out a lot of people. If you run a Kickstarter, you’ll notice like twenty to thirty percent of your Kickstarter backers come from outside of your circles because Kickstarter shows backers of one project other projects. Patreon’s discoverability is a disaster, and they really tend to promote their winners. Because of that, I see more mid-career and late-career authors getting a lot out of it than beginners, whereas on Kickstarter I see more first-time ideas find success. However, Patreon offers a chance to get repeating, monthly income, which is so important for authors.

Honestly, I’m still floundering around with Patreon, so I’m not the best to look to for advice!

Earlier this year you also had the release of Audible Original A Stranger in the Citadel. What are the advantages and the challenges of an Audible Original release?

The advantage is that Audible markets it to their massive base of listeners! I imagine this is the most read book of mine now, based on the number of reviews on Audible. I loved working with my editor, Steve Feldberg, there, and I loved that they asked Janina Edwards to read it. Her performance is so amazing!

The challenge is that we agreed to an audio-only exclusivity period, so a print version can come out later this year, but it’s a delay. And many publishers won’t look at it because they want audio rights and won’t consider a book without them. Finding someone to bring out a print version has been more of a search than I expected.

The story centers on Lilith, whose life is upended when a librarian comes to town, and the secrets of Lilith’s father are revealed. What is your favorite thing about Lilith, and what was the most challenging aspect of writing her?

So many of the reviewers at Audible hated Lilith, but so many for the characterization I was trying to do. Lilith is a bit sheltered, and at the same time, she’s a part of a system that’s complicit in oppression. That’s a tough character to depict, and I appreciate that I got the room to explore that in this book. The book is about Lilith’s journey out of ignorance and into understanding how her world really works, and her impact on it. There’s growth and journey there, and that was challenging to write at times.

What are some of your favorite things about Ninetha and the world you’ve created?

I loved the postliterate world of Ninetha. I’ve always been attracted to worlds where Earth is a hazy memory, and they’re slowly uncovering clues about the past. I don’t know why I keep coming back to stories like that, I can’t help myself. I love a fantastical, mythological-feeling world, where we’re no more than an echo.

We talked a bit about this title back in 2019. You described it as a “deeply weird project” and like “Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 meets Stephen King’s The Dark Tower.” Besides the title (originally The Musketress) did this story change in important ways, from when you first conceived and started working on it to final product?

I think I stayed pretty close to the fever dream that bloomed inside of me when I told you about my weird project! The title changed because they pointed out to me it sounded like an American frontier novel, so it became A Stranger in the Citadel. But it still hewed close to that description!

What is the heart of A Stranger in the Citadel to you, what is important for readers to know about it?

It’s about growing up, but not in that “coming of age” sort of way, but about becoming more realized, mature versions of who we could be.

What else are you working on, what else do you have coming up that you’d like readers to know about?

I’m working on a novel based on my story “By the Warmth of their Calculus,” where people live around a dust ring with counterrotating bands who sail “dust ships” around while trying to avoid being killed by machines hunting for anything technological. I guess my pitch would be Master and Commander in a living dust ship meets The Expanse? I hope it’ll find its way to publication! It’s fun working on it.

There’ll be another short story collection in 2022, I just signed a contract for that. It’ll be all spacey science fiction stuff. I’m looking forward to people, again, seeing the range of stories there. And there’s a whole fantasy novel I have about dead gods that are being mined so that mages can snort their bone dust or drink their blood to cast spells. I need to revise that so it can go out. I love the world in there, I put months into creating it with big charts and thousands of words about history and lore in my note files, but I really need a deep revision and it’s been tough to find the time and space to dig deep into a rewrite these days. Sometimes the new words are faster and easier for me than trying to untangle a draft that needs another big pass. We’ll see what wins out, the weird SF novel or the weird-ass fantasy!

About the Author

Arley Sorg is co-Editor-in-Chief at Fantasy Magazine and a 2021 World Fantasy Award Finalist. He is also senior editor at Locus Magazine, associate editor at both Lightspeed & Nightmare Magazines, and a columnist for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He takes on multiple roles, including slush reader, film & book reviewer, and more. He conducts interviews for multiple venues, including Clarkesworld Magazine and his own site. Arley grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado, and studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in Oakland, CA but can sometimes be found on Twitter as @arleysorg. In non-pandemic times, Arley usually writes in local coffee shops. He is a 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate.

Editor’s Desk: Fifteen

Neil Clarke

We were told we wouldn’t last a year, but here we are at our fifteenth anniversary issue and I have to say that it feels really good. To be fair to our early critics, the landscape for online fiction was more like a slaughterhouse back in 2006. While a lot of that was simply poor planning, a significant part of the problem was the lack of infrastructure to support such activities. Digital subscriptions, Patreon, Kickstarter, membership software, and most of the mechanisms that fund online fiction today simply didn’t exist and there were far fewer people reading online. Advertising? You’d be lucky to get pennies. That’s not to say that no one succeeded. Corporate funding, wealthy patrons (sometimes the editor/publisher), and other charity models existed, but had problems of their own. In fact, if it were not for the collapse of one corporate-funded publication, SciFiction, Clarkesworld may never have existed.

At the time, I ran Clarkesworld Books, an online bookstore. My passion for short fiction manifested itself there as a very large magazine section of over a hundred titles. Sometime in 2005, I started offering publishers the opportunity to include free sample stories on our website as a means of promoting magazines to our customers. In July 2006, I met up with Sean Wallace (then editor of Fantasy Magazine, one of the publications I was working with) at Readercon and we started discussing the impact of that experiment, the recent demise of SciFiction, and a post-mortem on several of the other recent losses in online publishing. A few hours later and sleep-deprived, we had a business model in mind and we decided to go for it. By the end of the weekend, the magazine was fully-staffed and three months later, our first issue dropped.

Issue one of Clarkesworld, like all the issues from our first year, contained two stories of less than four thousand words each and a cover. We paid well-above market rates and the slim contents were to keep our budget in-check. The startup money came from my marketing budget for the bookstore and was supplemented by PayPal donations from readers, but the trick that pushed us into the black was the annual anthology (Realms: The First Year of Clarkesworld) published at the end of the year. Soon after, the bookstore closed, but those anthologies continue today. Subscriptions, however, have long ago replaced them as our primary source of income. (Quick plug: We just published Clarkesworld Year Twelve: Volume One and Volume Two. The Year Thirteen volumes will follow before the end of 2021.) Why an anthology? From the start, our plan was to follow the readers and, at that time, print was the dominant medium for short fiction.

After our first year, we introduced non-fiction features. A few months later, we followed the readers again and launched a very basic version of our podcast. By our third year, we brought in Kate Baker to become our Podcast Director and a few more months before the podcast would start including every story. A couple of years later, we introduced our Kindle subscriptions, which after five hundred subscribers, allowed us to include a third story.

The sixth anniversary of our founding (July 2012 at Readercon) would end up fundamentally changing the direction for Clarkesworld and my outlook on life. On the first day of the convention, I suffered a “widowmaker” heart attack. Fortunately, the hotel was a block away from one of the best cardiac hospitals in the Northeast. They saved my life, but not before significant damage was done to my heart. Without modern pharmacology (and listening to my doctors), I wouldn’t have survived a year.

A brush with death changes you. What you value and want in life becomes much clearer and what doesn’t fit becomes easier to let go. It’s housecleaning on a major scale. Over the course of weeks of recovery, a couple of big things became clear to me:

The day job that I had loved for so long no longer meant anything more than a paycheck for me and was a significant source of distress. My passion had jumped to the magazine, which I was happily editing from my hospital bed.

The original business model for the magazine had a fundamental flaw, one that we overlooked because we loved the work and had other jobs to make a living. In essence, we had “reinvested” our earnings back into the magazine to make it bigger, not more profitable. The budget, therefore, didn’t provide adequate staff compensation for the work being done.

The first item made it clear that I needed an exit route. The second item identified an obstacle towards achieving that goal. I recognized that it would take some time and started working on the second item right away. Nine years later, we still aren’t done. What makes it even worse is that this problem is rife across online magazines and as the owner of one of the oldest magazines, I feel somewhat responsible for my role in helping establish that pattern.

We didn’t immediately downsize or freeze future growth in the magazine. Our staff was already small and those kinds of changes would have been counterproductive. Instead, I opted for a path that would be more purposeful and proportional. For example, one significant change in the time since has been with our work in translation. Everyone here considers this to be important work, but it comes with additional costs, particularly since we’re committed to equal pay (not split) for translators. It’s an area of growth that could have withered on the vine without increases in our paid readership, support from Storycom, and grant opportunities like the one received from LTI Korea. What we’ve learned in the process has improved the overall health of the magazine.

Five years after my heart attack, my wife returned to the workforce, creating an opportunity for me to leave my day job and focus more exclusively on editing Clarkesworld and anthologies. The four years since haven’t been easy. Aside from the pandemic impacting the last two years, I’ve had multiple medical issues disrupting my schedule, and significant jumps in my insurance premiums. I’ve always known this wouldn’t be easy, but I have no regrets. I love this job and count every step forward as a victory. That we can continue moving forward after fifteen years is an amazing feeling and getting to work with so many talented people isn’t bad either.

Looking back, I’m quite grateful for everyone that has supported us and even those who didn’t (proving you wrong was a different joy). That said, I will always have a special place in my heart for those authors that were willing to work with us in our first year:

Sarah Monette, Lavie Tidhar (who returns again in this issue), Ian Watson and Roberto Quaglia, Vylar Kaftan, Catherynne M. Valente, Jenny Davidson, Elizabeth Bear, Erica L. Satifka, Jay Lake, Sharon Mock, Barth Anderson, Carrie Laben, Jeff VanderMeer, Michael De Kler, Paul G. Tremblay, Jetse De Vries, Holly Phillips, David Charlton, Cat Rambo, Darren Speegle, Ekaterina Sedia, Darja Malcolm-Clarke, Caitlín R. Kiernan, and M P Ericson.

The magazine was unknown, and I recall being told by “pro” authors at the time that online venues were for “newbie” authors and low-quality work. You took that jump with us and I think we proved them wrong.

Our in-house anniversary was in July and I thanked our staff in that issue, but I’m compelled to acknowledge their work once again. I’d also like to call out the two people who have been with me the longest: Sean Wallace and Kate Baker. They are like brother and sister to me and have been there for me through the best and worst. I am truly surrounded by amazing people.

So what’s next? If I’ve learned anything, it’s that I have to pace myself. As I mentioned, we’re still not where we want to be with regards to staff pay, so that remains a high priority. I’m also picking up the pieces from all the projects pushed to the side during this year’s medical adventures and trying to determine the best path forward. That includes things like the remaining Clarkesworld anthologies, a couple of other anthologies, the Spanish language submission project, and even re-evaluating our subscription prices. I don’t have specifics for you now, but conveniently, that gives me something to talk about next month.

Thanks for reading and listening! Thanks for showing us what is possible through your ongoing support.

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 this November by Night Shade Books. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two sons.

Cover Art: Mermay 2021

Alexander Thümler

About the Artist

Alexander “Minze” Thümler is a german Concept Artist and Illustrator. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in design in 2014, he started working in the entertainment industry. His portfolio includes design works for animated movies, cover artwork, game art, and more created with digital painting tools such as Photoshop, ProCreate, and the 3D software Blender.

Minze’s is streaming his personal and some commercial work on Twitch, sharing his process with others and creating a co-working atmosphere. In his spare time he love’s creating architecture and nature studies on location with a digital tablet as well as traditional drawing techniques. For a few years he’s been developing a fantasy graphic novel based on his bachelor’s thesis.