Clarkesworld Magazine

Issue 109

Table of Contents

And If the Body Were Not the Soul

by A.C. Wise

Ice

by Rich Larson

The Father

by Kola Heyward-Rotimi

Egg Island

by Karen Heuler

Summer at Grandma’s House

by Hao Jingfang

War, Ice, Egg, Universe

by G. David Nordley

The Peacock Cloak

by Chris Beckett

Sunless Worlds

by Tomas Petrasek

Radiant Metafiction: A Conversation with Catherynne M. Valente

by Chris Urie

Another Word: Love Song for a Saturday Morning

by Alethea Kontis

Editor’s Desk: The Sad Truth About Short Fiction Magazines

by Neil Clarke

A-boushi-ya

Art by shichigoro-shingo

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2015
www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

And If the Body Were Not the Soul

A.C. Wise

Ro shoulders the courier bag, leaving the bike chained at the entrance to the Zone. Even here, at the edge, dampness permeates—the air green like a receding tide. The pavement is patchwork. Brick and stone shows through tears in the asphalt, wounds no one bothered to heal once the aliens moved in, once it was clear humans would never move back into the neighborhood and it became the Zone.

Weeds grow in the gaps, flourishing in the damp. Ro places each boot carefully, avoiding the puddles reflecting sodium streetlights. On either side of the street, buildings stand with their doors shuttered against the gathering twilight. Some are ragged against the emerging stars, top layers blown away, evidence of the violence that emptied the neighborhood, made it unfit for human habitation, and eventually turned it into the Zone. But close to the ground, the world is still whole. If Ro doesn’t look up, it’s as though nothing has changed.

Except the Zone is haunted by waiting. The sense of impermanence is palpable—like the refugee camps and shanty towns of the early century, the ones the government planned to empty after the last great flood, or hurricane, but never did. The Zone was meant to be a way station, a temporary solution until the Immies (the word tastes dirty even in Ro’s mind, hateful, ugly, but there isn’t a better one because the aliens have never given the humans their true name) could be fully integrated into life on Earth. And yet . . .

Ro shrugs against the weight of emptiness and broken promises. At least Xal’s light is still on, welcoming. A bell over the door jangles; stepping inside, Ro can’t help smiling at this incongruously human touch. It’s like the shelves behind the glass counters, crammed floor to ceiling with human knick-knacks and oddities no Immie could possibly want, and no human would come here to buy. Charming, but sad in a way, too. Lonely.

It takes Ro a moment to pick out Xal’s form against the crowded shelves. Today, Xal’s flesh is the color of sand. It reminds Ro of the fish that disguise themselves from predators by lying flat against the ocean floor. There are variations, tiny glints of light. It is brown only in the way pigeons are simply gray, full of tones unseen until it is pointed out they were there all along.

“Hi.” Ro sets the courier bag on the counter—this time full of gamboling ceramic kittens—and places the delivery slip on top.

Xal doesn’t respond, which isn’t unusual for an Immie, only for Xal. Ro hesitates. Payment is stacked neatly on the counter, as always. Perhaps Xal simply doesn’t want to talk. Ro turns, hiding disappointment.

::Tone—Plea/Imperative: Ro. Wait.::

Xal’s voice is changeless, only the tone-statement betraying the edge of panic. There are no human or even human-like features to convey pain. But now that Ro looks closer, it is written in the restless knotting of limbs hanging beneath the bulk of Xal’s body.

Ro steps forward. Xal shifts, flickering in and out. Barely visible one moment, then sharply outlined the next. Sinuous lines gleam damp, twisting through a host of colors Ro can’t begin to name. Ro’s breath catches. There, an extra wetness, almost hidden by the tangled lines, a gash leaking fluid, smelling of salt.

“What happened?”

::Tone—Statement/Fear: An accident.:: Ro hears hesitation in Xal’s tone; in a human, it might sound like a lie. ::Tone—Statement/Honesty: An attack. In the human district, not far over the line. Just looking.::

Colors roll; Xal fades in and out again.

“You were attacked?”

::Tone—Affirmative/Sorrow: Yes.::

“What can I do to help? Is there someone I can call?”

::Tone—Alarm/Negative: No.::

“Okay.” Ro holds up his hands, palms out, hoping Xal will understand the human gesture and feeling helpless.

Xal’s body clenches, shuddering, furling tight around the wound. A sound like keening, like an in-drawn breath, like music, traces Ro’s jaw and spine. Then the sound stops and Xal unfolds, becoming more solid.

The wound already looks less, but still, a tremor ripples out from Ro’s center. Disgust. Ro clenches teeth against the reaction, a reflexive hatred for the uselessness of all flesh. It isn’t fair; Xal is wounded, Xal needs help, and this isn’t the time. And yet the bone-achingly physical reaction remains, rooted in the very thing causing the revulsion. Flesh. Ro shudders, stepping closer to the counter as if to step away from skin, from muscle, leaving disgust behind.

::Tone—Statement/Sincere: The pain is less. Ro. Thank you for staying.::

A limb uncurls, a jerky, reflexive motion as though Xal is not entirely in control yet. It brushes Ro’s hand, braced against the countertop. A new sound, a new quality of pain, laced with surprise. Xal draws back, but not before the touch sparks—a snap like an electric shock and a taste like lemons.

A scream locks in Ro’s throat. A sensation of dislocation without motion. A space of falling or flying, existing between the moment of contact and Xal’s touch withdrawn. Ro blinks away patches of violet light until the shop comes back into focus, bracing for a horror that never comes.

The lightness of Xal’s touch, unlike anything human. Ro lets out a breath, coming back to center.

Xal’s limbs are knotted in a new pattern now, anxious.

::Tone—Statement/Fear: Ro. Apology. Pain was not intended.::

“No. I . . . ” Ro’s breath—ragged—calms, but not fast enough. “It didn’t hurt. I don’t . . . ”

Flying. Falling. Ro struggles to process the sensation of Xal’s limb, solid yet ephemeral. The memory of the touch remains, like a lost tooth wanting to be probed. It is a moment of slipping out from under the weight of skin and bones, of being somewhere else, yet wholly here.

Ro tries to draw back from the sensation, but there is nothing to withdraw from.

::Tone—Query/Fear: Not hurt.:: Xal’s voice again. Ro’s mind thrums to an absence, reaching again for revulsion where there is none.

“No. I should just . . . I’m sorry.”

Ro turns, bell jangling. The green scent of the streets is an assault, the slickness underfoot designed to trip un-careful steps. Even the shorter buildings lean in, edges all jagged. They outline an empty space, something that cannot be defined.

On the edge of hyperventilation, Ro bursts out of the Zone. Leaving the bike behind, leaving everything. Not questioning the source of the fear, just running. Then stopping, leaning against a building, a stitch lacing between two ribs.

“Ro?”

Ro looks up, blinking, human buildings and a single figure resolving. Audra slows her bike, dropping one foot to the pavement. The courier satchel at Audra’s hip is empty; Ro remembers the bag left with the delivery in Xal’s shop, the bike chained to a post at the entrance of the Zone.

“Are you okay? You look like you’re about to faint.”

“I . . . ” Ro falters, tries again. “Something happened.”

“What?”

There are no words. Only lemons and the snap of electricity. Ro rubs the spot Xal touched, chasing ghosts.

“Come on.” Audra swings her leg over the courier bike, twin to the one Ro left behind. A tilt of her chin indicates the café across the street, glowing warm in the twilight. “We’re getting some tea into you. My treat.”

Audra keeps a space and silence between them. Ro is grateful. But Audra’s gaze still slides in Ro’s direction, questioning. Inside the café, Audra pushes a cup of tea across the table.

“What happened?”

“I was making a delivery to Xal.” Ro hesitates, seeing an expression of distaste Audra is not quick enough to hide. “Xal was attacked, outside the Zone.”

The muscles between Ro’s shoulder blades tense, waiting for Audra to ask what an Immie was doing outside the Zone. But the question doesn’t come, and Ro swallows guilt at putting venom in Audra’s mouth before continuing.

“Xal was hurt and . . . accidentally touched me.”

Audra’s eyes widen. Small fingers of panic tap at Ro’s ribs from the inside. Xal’s tone-statements make things so much simpler. With Audra, Ro is lost. Is she jealous? Angry?

At last year’s office holiday party, Audra drunkenly tried to kiss Ro. They had only known each other a short time, and so it was Ro who mumbled apologies and made the effort to explain.

It’s not you, it’s me. I’m not . . . I don’t really date. I don’t like . . . And there, the explanation faltered. Because what could Ro say that Audra would understand? Audra was wholly comfortable in her skin, more so than anyone Ro had ever met. She dated men and women in equal numbers; affection—casual and intimate—came to her as naturally as breath. She drank the world in through her fingertips and remained thirsty for more.

So how could Ro explain a hatred of touch, of flesh? The discomfort of even having a body, let alone one identifying with a single, narrow gender and responding to others sexually?

How could Ro explain it then? How can Ro explain it now? How that night, Ro hadn’t fled, but had remained horrified. How this night, Ro had fled, but wasn’t disgusted.

Audra shakes her head. Amazement? Ro still can’t tell. Xal’s touch was accidental; would emphasizing that help? Audra has been kind, understanding; Ro doesn’t want to see Audra hurt, but the gulf between them is so vast.

Audra wraps her hands around her mug. Steam rises between them. She does not look at Ro.

“So what happened?”

“It tasted like lemons. And it was like being somewhere else.”

“Xal tasted like lemons?”

“No. I mean. I don’t know. Haven’t you ever smelled something and had the taste hit you at the same time? I’m explaining it badly.”

“No.” Audra draws the word out. She looks at her hands, her expression guarded, like she wants to say more, but silence stretches between them.

Ro feels a pang of guilt, threaded with a flutter of panic, imagining Audra wants to put her hand over Ro’s. A comforting gesture; it’s what Audra would do if she was sitting with anyone else. Ro has seen it, the way Audra leans into their other co-workers—a nudge from her hip to emphasize a joke, a sympathetic hand on an arm, a head, comfortably resting on a shoulder. Even when it isn’t sexual, Audra is so casual with her body; Ro can’t begin to understand it.

“I have to go back for my messenger bag,” Ro says, abrupt, standing.

“But . . . ” Hurt flickers in Audra’s eyes, this time unmistakable.

“I’m sorry,” Ro says.

It feels like fleeing again. The phantom of Xal’s touch lingers, but it doesn’t have half the weight of Audra’s gaze. Still, Ro rubs the spot again, pushing out the door. A light drizzle mists the air. Hairs rise on Ro’s arm, catching the moisture. Ro rubs harder, half expecting to see translucence and hollow bones like glass—flesh both there and not there in the aftermath of Xal’s touch.

Instead of going back to the Zone, Ro goes home, climbing three flights to a small apartment, boots heavy on each step. Guilt prickles, and with it, something else. Curiosity.

Ro crosses to the window, touching the glass. It’s cool, and condensation forms a halo in the shape of a hand. Drawing away, there is a space left—defined by the imprint of four fingers, a palm, a thumb. And in the place of flesh, droplets of water cling to the window, heavy with the light and shimmering like stars.

Nerves flutter in Ro’s stomach. The memory of rain glistens on the bike, still chained at the Zone’s entrance. Ro brushes fingertips over the metal frame in passing. Never has the walk to Xal’s shop seemed longer. Never has the jigsaw of uneven pavement, brick, and stone seemed such an impediment.

Ro tries to think of anything written or said about physical contact between humans and Immies, but comes up empty. If it’s done, it’s a private thing. Does everyone taste lemons, feel the snap of electricity? The Immie community is so small. Maybe Ro is the first, the only one.

But who is there to ask? The other couriers don’t travel into the Zone. Scarcely any humans do. Ro has never seen another human walking the shattered streets. Which makes the kitschy human ornaments crowding the walls in Xal’s shop even sadder.

Ro pauses, wondering if Xal has ever made a sale, if the shipments Ro regularly delivers ever leave the shop again, or only sit there gathering dust.

Why, Ro wonders. Aliens came to their world. Shouldn’t people be excited, curious? But they don’t seem to be. It’s not fear exactly, but more a way of not seeing, Ro supposes. Turning a blind eye to what is inconvenient, uncomfortable. Like the government pretending the Zone is only temporary. Like the refugee camps that never empty. Like racial tension, poverty, homophobia. If the problem is ignored long enough, perhaps it will simply go away.

Ro pauses before pushing open Xal’s door; the bell jangles. The courier bag, now empty, waits on the counter. And Xal waits behind it, limbs no longer bunched in pain, but held inward careful, betraying tension. Ro’s throat is dry; it takes a moment to get the words out.

“How are you feeling?”

There’s no sign of the wound. Ro can’t tell whether it’s healed completely, or whether Xal is simply hiding it. Limbs fold and unfold, a rippling effect unsettling the first time Ro saw it. Now it’s almost comforting.

Today, Xal is gray-green, but with shades of violet. Ro thinks of sea anemones, rocks grown over with lichen, algae stirred by gentle waves.

::Tone—Relief/Query: Unhurt, now. Are you well.::

Ro nods.

“I’m sorry for running out yesterday. It’s just . . . ” Trying to explain things to Audra was awkward enough. They share common language, context.

“I forgot my bag.” Ro points; it is a cowardly change of subject, but safer ground.

Ro touches the bag, but makes no move toward the door. Xal seems watchful, even without visible eyes. But what else? Hurt? Confused? Ro is suddenly aware of standing stiff, one arm crossed to hold the opposite elbow, lips parted as if to speak. Flesh again—bodies speaking a language Ro can’t understand. It’s all so useless. So . . .

“I want you to touch me again.” The words come in a rush too quick for regret. Heat suffuses cheeks, another betrayal, and Ro almost flees.

But the shop bell stays silent. Ro’s boots remain planted on the floor.

“I mean if . . . it didn’t hurt you? If . . . if it’s okay.”

Pulse beats under jawline, at wrists and elbows. Xal furls and unfurls, the there and not there-ness coming across as deliberation, physically rolling and weighing the request.

::Tone—Hesitation/Query: It does not hurt. Why do you want this.::

“I don’t know.”

It’s the most honest answer Ro can give. A paradox blooms, a strange, fractal bruise centered at the site of Xal’s last touch. It spreads outward, re-writing Ro’s hardwired code. Ro wants this. No, Ro needs this.

“What was it like for you?” Ro’s eyes slide closed; it’s easier to speak this way, even if it means having to ignore the extra weight of tears just starting to frost lashes. “I don’t want to impose, is what I mean. I don’t normally like . . . But this was different. I tasted lemons.”

The ache is physical—a desire to step off the edge, precisely because it is unsafe, unknown. There are blank spaces defined by broken buildings, by the ghost of a handprint. They are defined by lack—not by something missing precisely, simply by something not there. They are possibility, made manifest.

In that brief moment, Ro had the sense of Xal’s touch being like the ideal of falling into the night sky, being weightless and rushing so fast between stars their light draws blood. That paradox bruising Ro’s skin—the contradiction of making the unknown known and erasing the infinite possibility—is too attractive.

“I can’t explain.” Ro’s throat aches around the inadequacy of words.

A heartbeat. A space of silence. Eyes open. Ro consciously remembers to breathe. Xal is watchful, even without eyes. There is the same sense of consideration in the roiling movements, colors flickering, limbs furling and unfurling.

::Tone—Statement/Uncertainty: It is curious. No other humans come here. To touch would be to know more.::

Ro lets out a rush of breath.

“You’re sure?”

::Tone—Anticipation/Fear: The store is closed.::

At first, Ro doesn’t understand. Then Xal touches a switch and the lights dim, leaving only the faint glow of emergency lighting. Understanding crashes in: This is agreement, consent. Xal is giving them privacy.

::Tone—Anticipation/Fear: Ro. Put your arm on the counter.::

Ro hesitates only a moment, breathes out, then rests both arms, wrist up, on the glass. In the dimness, Xal is both easier and harder to see. Red light from the emergency exit sign traces contours and makes flesh the color of water over gray-green stone glow.

Ro tries not to flinch, pressing arms against the countertop to keep from shaking. Xal’s . . . arm? Leg? Is there a human word for it? Extends slowly, waits the space of a heartbeat, then surrounds Ro’s flesh, passing through and into it.

The shop tilts. A scent like violets and seaweed, like gunpowder, fills the air. There is no weight to Xal’s touch, yet pressure builds in Ro’s bones. A sense of fullness pushing outward, but without pain.

Xal flickers, slow, slow, fast, slow, unfolding, folding, turning. There and not there. Ro feels it too, absent and present, within the shop and elsewhere. An elsewhere that cannot be described.

Part of Ro reaches for something to anchor to in the here and now—long division, the names of past presidents, a list of capital cities. The larger part spins outward, spiraling from a weightless center, out through rings of stars, arms flung wide against the dark. Fragments of unknown worlds tumble past. Everything is vast and Ro is small and for a moment the sense of it is crushing.

“No.” Ro jerks back, the word slipping out.

::Tone—Query/Concern: Ro. Are you hurt.::

Xal’s shop snaps back into focus. Ro crashes back into a body too small to hold the sense of stars, and their loss is just as terrible as their presence.

“I’m . . . ” A ragged breath. Ro places a hand over the skin Xal touched; it is solid, real. Colors ripple across Xal, the salt-scent in the room intensifying.

::Tone—Shame/Sincerity: Apologies. I did not mean to cause pain.::

“No. You didn’t. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have . . . ”

Under the salt-scent, the smell of violets and gunpowder. Ro’s flesh prickles, as though swept by a cool breeze; the hairs rise. A sense of pressure, reaching, but never quite arriving, haunts the space between Ro’s bones. It isn’t desire—that’s too simple a word, too human. But there is wanting, need unfulfilled.

“I want to try again. Please.”

::Tone—Statement/Confusion: You were hurt.::

“No. It didn’t hurt. I was just scared. But I want to try again.” Ro’s pulse thumps, arms trembling as they are pressed against the counter once more. “Please?”

Color and movement speaks doubt as it rolls across Xal’s flesh—storm clouds, and the scent of oncoming rain. Dust—Ro can almost taste it. The same doubt fills Ro, but it can’t end here. Ro reaches after something to keep the moment from slipping away, and lands on Xal’s curiosity.

“What did you feel?”

::Tone—Statement/Uncertainty: Sunlight. A plank of wood. Many planks of wood. Water. Sunlight on water. The sensation of limbs in water. Smoke and charcoal.::

Hesitation between Xal’s words, searching for concepts to capture such simple, human things. The memory comes rushing back to Ro, sitting on a dock at the lake, toes trailing in the water, a grown up grilling hot dogs in the background and the air filling with shrieks as other children dove and splashed in the water. A slice of childhood, pulled through Ro’s skin and transferred into Xal’s mind through touch.

“You saw my memories?”

More hesitation, then, ::Tone—Agreement/Affirmative: Yes.::

The information makes Ro’s head swim. Could it work both ways? An alien childhood, if there is even such a thing, slipping into Ro’s skin. There’s so much Ro doesn’t know about Xal, about the Immies in general. The need to know is overwhelming.

Ro looks to where Xal’s eyes would be on a human, trying to communicate need. The absence of Xal’s touch is a pressure as great as the touch itself. It’s only a matter of quality, of flavor—not better, or worse, just different.

Xal reaches out again. A sigh, a musical tone so unlike the sound of pain from the night before traces the length of Ro’s spine, the curve of Ro’s jaw. Touch.

A needle, a thread draws through Ro’s skin, stitching it with the light of the universe. The taste of bitter greens, the feel of velvet, the scent of wood smoke. Ro’s mind substituting human concepts for unimaginable things. Nebulae bloom against Ro’s closed eyes.

“Oh.” The word escapes in a breath. Language and thought failing. Space simultaneously narrows to the point of contact between them, and expands beyond calculation.

“Oh.” There are no other words. “Oh.”

Again and again as the world spins away from them and Ro flies and falls.

“Hey.”

Ro turns toward Audra’s voice, still holding the coffee pot. The scent of it, just on the edge of burnt, fills the small courier office above the shed where their bikes are racked.

“Careful. You’re going to spill.” Audra points, and Ro starts, realizing the coffee is perilously close to the edge of the mug.

Even before the first sip, Ro is shaky, nerves taut and singing.

“Sorry.” Ro replaces the coffee pot, sips scalding heat.

“Are you okay?” Audra frowns. “You look exhausted.”

Ro doesn’t remember returning to the apartment last night, only waking in a tangle of sheets this morning, eyelids sticky, limbs heavy. The world keeps wanting to slide away; the edges of Ro’s vision glimmer with light, like a migraine coming on, only without pain.

“Any new jobs come in since yesterday?” Ro asks instead of answering Audra’s question.

Even seen peripherally, Audra’s concern is clear. There are no mirrors in Ro’s apartment, but Ro imagines the shadow-bruises of sleeplessness, improperly combed hair.

“A few.” Audra hands over the clipboard before pouring her own mug of coffee. Her knuckles are white, gripping the handle. It is a gesture of restraint; Ro has seen it before. If Audra doesn’t anchor herself to her mug, she will reach out a comforting hand to touch Ro’s arm.

Evasion tastes as sour as a lie. Audra only wants to help, but what can Ro say? Audra might understand, but she might as easily be hurt. She might think Ro is sick, wrong for wanting this inexplicable thing, and that would be unbearable. It’s not that kind of desire, but it’s too hard to explain. There are no words for what it is, at least none that Ro knows.

“Mind if I take the Thayer Street drop?” Ro’s voice cracks.

The sound is covered with more sips of coffee—too quick. The heat doesn’t help the flush coming to Ro’s cheeks. The truth must be written everywhere on Ro’s skin, the evidence of Xal wrapped around and through, highlighting the translucence of bones, hollowed like glass.

Ro is clattering down the stairs to the bike shed almost before realizing it.

“Ro!” Audra follows, and Ro isn’t quick enough—fingers shaking and clumsy—to strap the package to the back of the bike and leave before Audra blocks the door.

“What happened?”

Ro doesn’t answer. Can’t. Tears sting, hot and bright, but don’t fall.

“Ro.” Audra’s voice is soft. She weaves between the bikes, comes within a few inches of Ro, and reaches out. But at the sharp intake of breath, she stops, her fingers falling short of brushing Ro’s wrist.

“Sorry. I forgot.” Audra looks down, then back again. The hope in her eyes is crushing.

Ro shifts, putting the bike between them, and feels guilty doing so.

“I went back to see Xal.” Ro swallows, gripping the bike.

Audra’s eyes widen, drawing light from the gaps where the door of the shed doesn’t quite fit. All the darkness in them reminds Ro of falling through the stars. There is a sound that isn’t quite a sob, and it takes Ro a moment to realize its source.

“Are you hurt?”

Ro gives a shake of the head, slight, but easier than words.

“What happened?”

Ro’s lips press tight, fighting the sense of being overwhelmed without understanding its source. The loneliness of being trapped in a single body with its weight of flesh—Ro has always known it, but until feeling the alternative offered by Xal, it was bearable. Now the world is open, a wound no amount of thread can stitch closed.

Audra’s fingers circle Ro’s wrist, insistent this time. Ro’s mouth flies open, but Audra’s grip tightens.

“Please. I want to understand.”

The need to touch is written clearly in Audra’s eyes, as clear as Ro’s desire to pull away. Ro lets out a shuddering breath, doesn’t move. Pulse beats between them, in Audra’s fingertips, in Ro’s wrist. Maybe this is a language Audra can read; maybe Ro doesn’t need to say anything at all.

Audra exhales, letting go, and Ro’s pulse falls back into a regular rhythm. How can Xal’s touch soothe, being so alien, while Audra’s induces only panic? Most of the world would consider it wrong, broken. But Ro knows it isn’t. There is no weight to Xal’s touch, no expectation.

“I’m sorry,” Ro says, and at the same time, Audra says, “I’m sorry.”

Breath and silence fills the shed. They look at each other across the bike between them. The light coming through the gap around the door shifts, leaving Audra’s face in shadow, stealing the illusion of stars from her eyes, but catching sylph-like in her dark curls.

Ro’s chest tightens. There are no words that won’t make things worse. It’s not you, it’s me, will only give Audra the impression Ro thinks the opposite.

If human touch could communicate the way Xal’s does, Ro would understand. And maybe, for Audra, it does. Maybe Audra experiences the world through the tips of her fingers, gives away pieces of herself with each touch, but gains just as much in return, never diminishing.

But Ro cannot say this, cannot ask without fear of giving Audra hope. It’s not that Audra has ever pressured Ro, or implied that maybe if Ro just tried it, met the right person, then things would be different. It’s that sometimes, Ro catches Audra looking and thinks there is a glimmer, faint, but wistful—wishing things were different between them—and it makes Ro’s heart ache.

“Tell me,” Audra says, taking a step back, putting more space between them. She crosses her arms, holding herself in, holding back.

Audra isn’t pulling back, running away, and relief surges through Ro. Whatever else they may be, at the core, they are still friends. The realization that Audra won’t leave, won’t shun, no matter what, brings a surge of emotion. It’s almost like love, vast and complicated, but even the thought of the word comes thick with ghosts—meanings and expectations layered upon it by all the lips that have spoken it before. Ro pushes it away and, halting, tries to explain. Audra listens, never interrupting.

“Do you think there’s something wrong with me?” Ro asks, needing to hear the words aloud, needing to taste them in order to let them go.

“No.” Audra’s tone is firm, but she looks lost as well. Scared. “I just don’t want you to get hurt, okay? Promise me you’ll be careful?”

Audra hugs herself tighter. Ro nods, pressing lips together, tasting salt even without tears. The promise means nothing; they both understand. This is unknown territory, and there is no way to travel it without gathering bone-deep scars.

Sirens shatter Ro’s sleep. Pulse jack-rabbiting, pushing away sweat-tangled sheets and the remnants of a dream, Ro stumbles to the window. The sound is tied to the dream—one of being very far away, but very close, stretched thin, no blood or bone, no muscle, only skin and nerves pulled taut like a sheet over the world.

On the street below, red and blue lights spin in time with Ro’s pulse. A sudden spike of pain. Ro clasps the wound, but there’s nothing there.

Xal.

Pain arcs again, bringing flashes of violence, memories not Ro’s own.

Xal.

Jacket and pants pulled over rumpled pajamas. Feet shoved into unlaced boots. Clattering down three flights of stairs. Ro’s courier bike leans outside the apartment’s outer door. Grabbing it, Ro is gone. Falling. Flying. Pedaling madly into the night, toward the flashing lights.

The whole city is wet, smearing in Ro’s peripheral vision.  Two cop cars park askew across the main entrance to the Zone. Ro stops the bike, lets it fall. A knot of people huddle, pointing. The cops struggle with a man whose hands are secured with a plastic zip tie. He thrashes, resisting as they push him toward the nearest car.

“Fucking Immie got what it deserved, slurping and lurking around our streets. They need to fucking stay where they’re told or go the fuck home.”

Light skips off shards of broken glass, blood red and deep blue. The man throws his head back; the cop’s nose makes a sickening crunch as bone connects with bone. Swearing, the cop lets go, but her partner is quick, sweeping the man’s legs and dropping him. The second cop gets a knee in the man’s back, holding him down against the tongue of uneven pavement extending from the mouth of the Zone. The man continues swearing, lips spit-flecked.

“Fucking Immie. I hope it’s dead.”

Ro breaks into a run, ignoring a muffled shout from the cop with the broken nose. The door to Xal’s shop hangs open. Ro nearly slips in slickness trailing across the floor. Xal never made it to the safety behind the counter, and instead lies knotted in front of it, limbs drawn together in the universal language of pain.

There is no hesitation. Ro kneels, folding around and over Xal. Shockwaves of pain radiate outward, but Ro doesn’t let go. Stars spin, razor bright. The smell of matches, freshly-struck; a taste like a battery held on the tongue; the persistent thrum of rain.

“It’s okay. It’s okay.”

Ro repeats the words, trying to stay conscious, trying to soothe. Xal’s pain is overwhelming, an assault of sensation. Lighthouse flash. The taste of apples. Green-wet stone. Stairs spiraling down.

Desperate, Ro tries to pour sensation back into Xal—more childhood memories—introduce a new thread into the loop of feedback flowing between them. But the images keep coming, pounding Ro like fists, like stones. It’s impossible to concentrate. The rasp of wool, black crayons melting in the sun, the taste of cherries. The touch-taste-smell correlation stutters. Xal’s control slips, no longer translating sensations into human terms.

Ro screams. A note, sheer sound, shearing bone from bone, sloughing flesh. Ro’s mind reels, trying to process what there are no words for.

A body—Ro’s, Xal’s, both, shudders. Collapses inward. Spins outward. The rush of wind, hot and dry and wet all at once. The crushing cold between stars. Stretching impossibly thin-fast-long across a cord of silver and all of it is everything all at once. Then, nothing.

Scraps torn from a quilt, broken fragments of a mirror, numb fingers trying to piece them back together and failing. Surfacing. Ro approaches a reflection etched on the underside of waves, surrounded by a distorted view of sky and trees and sunlight on the other side. Lips almost touch lips—reality kissing reflection—then Ro sinks again. A stream of bubbles, like pearls, like laughter, trail behind.

Hands. A voice. Audra’s?

Wheels hum fast through sterile corridors; too-bright lights overhead. Sharp-jabbed needles. Medicine smell. The steady pulse of machines. Then nothing again.

Ro comes back from very far away. The simple task of cracking open an eyelid is monumental. Dry lips part.

“Water?”

A straw touches swollen and bruised lips. Ro sucks greedily until the straw is withdrawn.

“Not too much too fast. The doctors said.”

Ro turns, head even heavier than eyelids. Audra perches in a chair next to the bed, holding the water glass awkwardly in her lap. She looks as though she’s about to cry, or has just stopped.

“I should call the nurse.”

“Wait.” Ro tries to remember—in the haze of moments between then and now, was Audra’s name spoken in answer to the nurses asking if there was someone they should call?

“What happened?” Ro tastes blood from cracked lips.

Audra holds the water out again, automatic.

“The police found you and Xal curled together on the floor. It looked like you’d been beaten to a bloody pulp. They thought you were dead.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Were you attacked?”

“No. Xal was hurt. I . . . ”

There is no word for it, but Ro feels one trying to take shape on a tongue not meant for such sounds.

“You have to stop this. Promise me you’ll stay away from Xal.”

“I can’t.” It isn’t what Ro means to say, not meaning to say anything at all.

For a moment, Ro is afraid Audra will storm out, but she only crosses her arms tight around her body.

“Ro, what are you doing?”

“I don’t know.” Ro’s voice cracks. “I really don’t.”

Ro lies back on the pillow, closing eyes before they snap open again.

“Is Xal okay?” It hurts, but Ro turns toward Audra.

“Xal is fine, as far as I know.” Audra stiffens, her tone brittle and sharp.

Hurt shines in her eyes. Her mouth opens, but she closes it again, standing.

“I’ll go get a nurse.”

Audra’s shoes click and silence falls in their wake. Weary and bruised in ways that have nothing to do with skin, Ro curls into a ball, trying to recreate a knot of limbs so woven over and under and through each other they become one.

Ro toys with the hospital bracelet. It’s been three days, and Ro’s wounds have vanished as though they never existed. Still, Audra insisted on riding in the cab back to the apartment, and now perches on the arm of Ro’s battered couch, watchful.

“What exactly did Lena say?” Ro paces to the window.

“She just suggested you might want to take some time off, for your health.”

“And she couldn’t be bothered to tell me in person?”

Ro glances back as Audra shrugs, looking uncomfortable.

“I’m sure she’s just worried. We all are.”

The slope of Audra’s shoulders and the way she studies her feet keeps Ro silent. Don’t shoot the messenger.

“I’m not fired?”

Audra shrugs again. Of course word has spread. Ro declined the opportunity to talk to reporters doing follow-up stories on the attack, but it doesn’t matter. The stories are still out there, painting Ro as a misguided loner, the victim of an alien attack, a pervert. Maybe Lena is right to be wary, the other couriers right to withdraw. All except Audra.

“Come with me,” Ro says.

Audra looks up, alarmed. “What?”

“Come with me to see Xal.”

If others understood what Ro experienced, maybe they wouldn’t be afraid. Maybe things can change. And where better to start with than Audra, living through touch—hand brushed to arm, palm squeezed to palm? Maybe this is something Ro can give Audra, like a gift. Something to bring them closer together in a way that balances both of their needs. And Xal, lonely, hungry for human experience. Ro’s pulse speeds with the thought.

“Please? Trust me?”

Ro knows it isn’t fair. Audra has offered so much, unasked—what right does Ro have to ask this in return? Because there’s no way to explain to Audra without showing her what it is Ro is trying to do.

“Okay.” Audra stands.

“Now?”

“Sure.” Audra’s smile holds an edge of sadness. “Why wait?”

The streets are silent, dusk just starting to fall. They walk with hands in pockets, watching their feet, watching the streetlights increasingly reflected as they draw closer to the Zone. Ro hears the hitch in Audra’s breath as they cross the line.

“It’s okay.” Ro glances back, trying for a smile. “It’s an imaginary border.”

Audra nods, looking sheepish. Ro tries not to hold too tight to the fragile ball of hope, lest it shatter.

The shop bell jangles; behind the counter, Xal unfolds—a gesture Ro interprets as turning to face them.

::Tone—Alarm/Joy: Ro. You are not hurt.::

“Not anymore.”

Xal knots and unknots, an anxious gesture.

“This is Audra, my . . . friend. Is it okay that she’s here?”

::Tone—Formal/Greeting: Audra. Welcome.::

“Hi.”

“I brought her here . . . ” Ro falters under the combined weight of Audra and Xal’s attention. “Audra is worried about me. I want her to understand. I thought . . . ” Ro tries not to blush, tries not to panic.

Audra comes to the rescue, stepping forward while keeping careful space between her body and Ro’s. Her voice carries a hint of nerves, but not outright fear.

“What happened the night you were attacked?”

::Tone—Statement/Query: It is not fair to be restricted. Why cross the stars to see only one small corner of a different world.::

Ro’s breath catches.

::Tone—Statement/Anger: Your government promises change. We will be free to go where we please. Nothing changes.::

Xal grows, unfolding new dimensions. Ro’s heart trips on the truth of the words, cracking. Again, it is a sensation too big to express, to hold. Human words are all too fraught. Ro needs an anatomy like Xal’s, one to unfold and express everything mere flesh cannot contain.

Audra glances at Ro, eyes shining but cheeks dry. Ro holds her gaze, then nods, heart cracking again. There is understanding in Audra’s eyes, not fear. The way Audra and Xal both watch Ro is like being re-written—blood and bones, skin and heart. Ro is most surprised by Audra. Humans, it seems can unfold to reveal new dimensions, too.

Audra pushes her sleeves up and rests her arms on the counter.

“I want to understand.”

Xal flickers, shifting attention to Ro, asking an unspoken question.

Ro’s voice shakes slightly, addressing them both. “It’s okay. It’s safe. No one will get hurt.”

Xal unfurls, encompassing Audra’s arms. Ro releases a breath at the same time Audra sucks one in, sharp, but containing more surprise than pain. It is the sound of plunging into a cold lake on a hot day—pleasure and shock rolled into one.

Audra blushes, the non-colors of Xal rippling across every bit of exposed flesh. The back of her neck is a sunset in deep sea shades; her arms are the color of starlight on a pond. She is there and not there. The scent of cherries and running water leak into the air.

“Can I . . . ?” Ro doesn’t finish the sentence.

Perhaps Ro closes the space, or perhaps Xal and Audra entwined unfold to welcome Ro—a circle, a thread, a knot without beginning or end.

Sparks jump the gap between Ro’s bones, suffusing flesh with light, like an x-ray, only brighter, more beautiful. Ro feels Audra’s body, Xal’s, all three occupying the same space and time. A moment of suffocation, a moment of panic, then everything opens with a smell like just-damp laundry snapping in the breeze. The shop warps, new segments forming like fractals of water freezing into ice.

A pulse beats, not Ro’s own. A sensation belonging to—it must be Audra, because the memory—sharp and present—is so human. A bicycle, fiercely pedaled with bare feet to the crest of a hill before hands and feet are removed. It’s like flying—the glorious, stomach-dropping feeling of the world falling away, the rush of wind, the warmth of light and being suspended beautifully between earth and sky. Ro feels it, filtered through Audra’s flesh; from within, her body doesn’t feel an impossible weight against her bones. Ro understands, viscerally, how Audra revels in being blood, muscle, bone.

“Oh.” Ro wants to dig fingertips into Audra’s flesh, into Xal’s, and hold onto this moment forever. But too soon, the connection is broken.

“Wow.” Audra is the first to step back. “That was . . . intense.”

Her pupils are dilated, her breath fast. Ro steps back as well, chill with a fresh awareness of the space between them. Something in Ro aches to close the gap, but the familiar horror is there as well: it wouldn’t be the same, couldn’t ever be the same, inside this skin.

“You’re glowing.” Audra smiles.

Bits of light dance at the edges of Ro’s vision.

“It’s beautiful.” Audra takes a half step, but stops.

Ro’s throat is closed—thick. Eyes squeeze shut, a deep breath, then Ro looks at Audra again just in time to catch the tail-end of disappointment, the smile fading. The back of Audra’s neck blushes, just blood colors now, the deep sea faded as she turns to Xal.

“Thank you.” The faint quiver in her voice might be the after-shock of touch, or something else.

::Tone—Formal/Pleased: You are welcome. Audra. Thank you for sharing memories and experience of your world.::

The ache lessens in Ro’s throat, fading to a sensation more like a bruise than a fresh wound.

“The night you were attacked, the first night, it wasn’t the first time you left the Zone, was it?” Audra’s question surprises Ro.

::Tone—Statement/Truthful: No.::

“How many times?”

Ro grips the counter, watching Audra and Xal. How is it they understand each other so well, so quickly? Or is it only that Ro’s own curiosity blocked out certain aspects of Xal. Or perhaps because Audra is more used to processing sensation, she was less overwhelmed. Now that Ro thinks about it, it’s obvious. How could Xal have been happy—how could any Immie be happy—confined to the Zone? All the times Ro traveled to Xal’s shop, never once thinking Xal might want to leave, experience the wider world. Ro’s skin flushes hot, but neither Xal nor Audra is paying attention.

::Tone—Statement/Truthful: The attack happened the fifth time.::

“Where were you going?” Audra leans forward; Ro leans, too, gravity pulling them both toward Xal’s center.

Concentric rings spread across Xal’s flesh, as though from a dropped stone. Now Xal is the color of moss, of sunlight, filtered through pine trees.

::Tone—Statement/Confidential: Some are patient, but not all. There is a group who would see the Zone change, the border gone.::

“Who?” Both Xal and Audra turn as though they’d forgotten Ro.

::Tone—Statement/Anger: It is a small group. One is in your city government, working to change things from within. But it is too slow. Others would wait. Not all are so patient.::

Not all, Ro thinks. Like Xal, restless, hungry for change.

“Is that why you’ve been leaving the Zone alone? Trying to start fights?” Again, Ro is surprised at Audra’s words, her insight. How willfully blind has Ro been? How much time has been wasted that could have been spent helping?

::Tone—Statement/Defensive: Violence is noticed. It is the quickest way to change.::

“We want to help,” Ro speaks before Audra can, but glances to the side to see Audra’s lips pressed into a thin line. Breath held, waiting for Audra to object, but she does not.

Xal rotates without moving, encompassing both Audra and Ro with eye-less attention.

::Tone—Formal/Request: Will you leave the Zone with me. To meet with my friend in the government.::

“Is that wise?” Audra glances at Ro.

“I think we should do it.”

Audra hesitates, frowning, then shrugs, moving toward the door. Ro hurries to catch up. The air sings between them—Ro, a string pulled taut, thrumming a note of excitement, Audra simply tight, her note as yet un-played.

“You don’t have to do this.” Ro’s voice is low so Xal, following behind, won’t hear.

Audra shakes her head, but doesn’t answer. She keeps her hands in her pockets, gaze fixed on the wet stones.

“Hey!” The shout draws Ro up short, bringing the realization they’ve crossed out of the Zone.

Xal crowds behind them, all three looking toward a knot of men and women emerging from the bar across the street.

“You can’t be here.” One of the men points at Xal.

To Ro’s surprise, Xal slides past them, gathering limbs together the way a human would draw themselves up to stand tall.

::Tone—Fear/Pride: It does not break any laws.::

Of course not; the rules are all unwritten, enforced by silent consent, by looking the other way. Ro’s fingers clench—a body caught between fight and flight, heart pounding.

“Fucking Immie! Get back in the Zone.” Another man joins the first, the rest of the group bunching closer.

“We should go back,” Audra says.

“No.” Ro turns deliberately, walking away from the group, further away from the Zone.

Xal and Audra follow, the weight of hostile gazes tracking them. Fear and hope mix in equal parts. Xal is right—if they spark enough conflicts, people can’t continue to look the other way. A bottle explodes, glass spraying at their feet.

“Keep walking,” Ro murmurs, picking up the pace.

A second bottle flies, higher this time, bouncing off Ro’s shoulder before hitting the ground.

“I’m calling the cops.” Audra pulls out her phone.

Pounding footsteps, then one of the men grabs Ro’s shoulder. Instinct brings Ro’s hands up to break the contact with a shove. The man reels on slick, neon-stained pavement and loses his balance, landing hard. One of the women in the group laughs, nervous, unsteady.

Another projectile glances off Ro’s cheek, stinging. Ro touches the spot and fingers come away wet with blood. Audra whispers into her phone, voice low and urgent. Xal moves again, a solid mass between Ro and Audra and the group of men and women. The man Ro accidentally knocked down gets to his feet, his face red.

For a moment, no one moves. The red-faced man’s fingers curl, his jaw clenched. Ro sees the moment of decision, but isn’t fast enough to shout a warning.

It doesn’t matter. Xal is there, then not. The man’s blow never lands and he stumbles, but keeps his feet this time. One of the women casts about for something to use as a weapon.

“We have to get out of here,” Audra says.

Xal holds a line between the two groups of humans. More people emerge from the bar, some merely curious, others spoiling for a fight.

“We’re about to have a full-blown mob on our hands.” Audra plucks at Ro’s sleeve, not touching flesh.

This time, Ro doesn’t see the moment of decision, or even where the punch comes from. Fist connects with jaw, and Ro hits the ground. Shouts, feet scuffling. Someone yells. Ro looks up in time to see Xal lift one of the men, tossing him away. Xal’s colors and movements speak anger and distress.

A siren cuts through the night, freezing everyone in place. As the cop cars stop, bodies scatter. Ro stands. Audra and Xal move closer, the three of them alone making no attempt to flee as the cops climb from their cars.

“It might be a while, are you sure you wouldn’t . . . ” The officer assigned to babysit them glances nervously between Audra and Ro, trying to pretend he doesn’t see Xal at all.

They’re in an empty interrogation room, out of the way. They’ve given their statements, declined to press charges, and been assured no charges are being leveled against them, though the cop delivering the news didn’t look happy about it. He’d looked even less happy when Ro requested sanctuary, using the police station as a safe space to meet with Xal’s friend. Ro credits Audra with charming him into reluctantly agreeing.

“No. We’re fine right here.” Audra smiles sweetly, seeming to enjoy the way Xal’s presence makes the cops uncomfortable, now that the immediate danger has passed.

The officer withdraws, and Audra pours two cups of coffee from the carafe he leaves behind. In the corner, Xal ripples in silence. Ro’s cheek is sore, but the blood has dried and there will be no lasting damage.

But the bruise goes deeper than Ro’s skin. Something has changed, but not changed enough. There has to be more; Ro feels it, the seed of an idea starting to grow. Talking to Xal’s friend is a first step, but they have to push harder if they want real change.

“I want to go to the Immie homeworld,” Ro says, voicing the growing notion in a remarkably even tone. Xal and Audra register surprise—human and inhuman.

“There should be ambassadors on both sides working toward change. You’re right, Xal, violence gets attention, but we can do better than that.”

As the words stop, Ro’s cheeks burn. Said aloud, it sounds ridiculous.

::Tone—Statement/Uncertain: It might be arranged. Humans have never been, but it is not impossible.::

Xal unfolds from the corner, moving closer to the table in the center of the room. Audra puts her hand on the table, near but not touching Ro.

“Ro?”

Ro turns.

“If Xal can arrange it, if it’s possible, I have to go. I’m sorry.”

Audra’s hand moves, not withdrawing, fingers curling in on themselves, a knot of confusion and pain.

“I’m sorry,” Ro says again. And again, words are inadequate. For just a moment, Ro considers bridging the gap, touching the back of Audra’s hand, but it wouldn’t be the same. They shared a moment with Xal, but there’s still too much space between them. Necessary space, space Ro cannot bridge.

“I thought . . . ” Audra looks down, studying the table’s faux-wood grain. “Maybe because of what happened . . . ”

The lines of her body pull inward. It hurts Ro to look at her, but their truths are too different. Audra must know that.

“I can’t change who I am.” Ro doesn’t look away from Audra, hoping she’ll understand.

One of Audra’s shoulders lifts and falls again. It might be agreement, dismissal, or shrugging off an absent touch.

“If I go, what will you do?” Ro asks.

“I don’t know.” Audra traces circles on the fake wood; Ro can almost feel it through the tips of Audra’s fingers. “We’ll see what happens with Xal’s friend. Maybe I’ll join the cause. Maybe I won’t. I’ll keep working, and life will go on.”

Audra looks up, and her expression does something complicated. Her eyes are bright, but the light in them reminds Ro of reflections glinting off broken glass.

“My life doesn’t begin and end with you, you know.” The edge of a smile touches Audra’s mouth. “I do have other friends. Family.”

The smile becomes a grin. “I like you, Ro. We’re friends. I’ll miss you, but you’re not breaking my heart.”

Ro’s pulse trips. Audra sounds sincere, Ro believes her, but at the same time Ro doesn’t have enough experience to differentiate the temporary sting of rejection from something deeper. Maybe if Ro leaves and comes back, things will be better. Maybe they can learn a mode of friendship—better, deeper—one that doesn’t cause either of them pain.

Audra’s fingers uncurl. She presses her palm flat against the wood.

“Are you . . . ” Ro hesitates, uncertain how to end the sentence: Are you sure? or Are you okay?

Xal shifts closer, body forming a complicated pattern. The colors chasing across Xal’s skin are sunlight, leaves, and the sensation of flying, not falling. Xal unfurls a limb, brushing the back of Audra’s hand with the briefest of touches. The air smells of tangerines and Audra’s eyes widen, as if Xal whispered something just for her.

Audra draws her hand away from the table, pressing it to her heart. Ro feels it, the steady thump of blood and life and warmth inside Audra’s skin. On the table, the ghost outline of Audra’s hand remains. Footsteps approach the door, but Ro’s attention remains fixed on the table. The fading shape, the memory of touch, outlines possibility. It is everything.

About the Author

A.C. Wise’s short fiction has appeared in Apex, Uncanny, Shimmer, Clarkesworld, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2015, among other places. In addition to her fiction, she co-edits Unlikely Story, and contributes a monthly Women to Read: Where to Start column to SF Signal. Her collection of inter-linked short stories, The Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron Saves the World Again, is out from Lethe Press in late October 2015.

Ice

Rich Larson

Sedgewick had used his tab to hack Fletcher’s alarm off, but when he slid out of bed in the middle of the night his younger brother was wide awake and waiting, modded eyes a pale luminous green in the dark.

“I didn’t think you were actually going to do it,” Fletcher said with a hesitant grin.

“Of course I’m going to.” Sedgewick kept his words clipped, like he had for months. He kept his face cold. “If you’re coming, get dressed.”

Fletcher’s smile swapped out for the usual scowl. They pulled on their thermals and gloves and gumboots in silence, moving around the room like pieces of a sliding puzzle, careful to never inhabit the same square space. If there was a way to keep Fletcher from coming short of smothering him with a blanket, Sedgewick would’ve taken it. But Fletcher was fourteen now, still smaller than him but not by much, and his wiry modded arms were strong like an exoskeleton’s. Threats were no good anymore.

When they were ready, Sedgewick led the way past their parents’ room to the vestibule, which they had coded to his thumb in penance for uprooting him again, this time dumping him onto a frostbit fucking colony world where he was the only unmodded sixteen-year-old for about a million light years. They said he had earned their trust but did not specify exactly how. Fletcher, of course, didn’t need to earn it. He could take care of himself.

Sedgewick blanked the exit log more out of habit than anything, then they stepped out of the cold vestibule into the colder upstreet. The curved ceiling above them was a night sky holo, blue-black with an impossibly large cartoon moon, pocked and bright white. Other than Sedgewick and his family, nobody in New Greenland had ever seen a real Earth night.

They went down the housing row in silence, boots scraping tracks in the frost. An autocleaner salting away a glistening blue coolant spill gledged over at them suspiciously as they passed, then returned to its work. Fletcher slid behind it and pantomimed tugging off, which might have made Sedgewick laugh once, but he’d learned to make himself a black hole that swallowed up anything too close to camaraderie.

“Don’t shit around,” he said. “It’ll scan you.”

“I don’t care,” Fletcher said, with one of those disdainful little shrugs he’d perfected lately, that made Sedgewick believe he really truly didn’t.

The methane harvesters were off-cycle, and that meant the work crews were still wandering the colony, winding in and out of dopamine bars and discos. They were all from the same modded geneprint, all with a rubbery pale skin that manufactured its own vitamins, all with deep black eyes accustomed to the dark. A few of them sat bonelessly on the curb, laid out by whatever they’d just vein-blasted, and as Sedgewick and Fletcher went by they muttered extro, extros den terre. One of them shouted hello a few beats too late.

“Should run,” Fletcher said.

“What?”

“Should jog it.” Fletcher rubbed his arms. “It’s cold.”

“You go ahead,” Sedgewick said, scornful.

“Whatever.”

They kept walking. Aside from the holos flashing over the bars, the upstreet was a long blank corridor of biocrete and composite. The downstreet was more or less the same plus maintenance tunnels that gushed steam every few minutes.

It had only taken Sedgewick a day to go from one end of the colony to the other and conclude that other than the futball pitch there was nothing worth his time. The locals he’d met in there, who played with different lines and a heavy ball and the ferocious modded precision that Sedgewick knew he wouldn’t be able to keep pace with long, more or less agreed with his assessment in their stilted Basic.

Outside the colony was a different story. That was why Sedgewick had crept out of bed at 2:13, why he and Fletcher were now heading down an unsealed exit tunnel marked by an unapproved swatch of acid yellow hologram. Tonight, the frostwhales were breaching.

Most of the lads Sedgewick had met at last week’s game were waiting at the end of the exit tunnel, slouched under flickering florescents and passing a vape from hand to hand. He’d slotted their names and faces into a doc and memorized it. It wasn’t Sedgewick’s first run as the new boy and by now he knew how to spot the prototypes.

You had your alpha dog, who would make or break the entry depending on his mood more than anything. Your right-hand man, who was usually the jealous type, and the left-hand man, who usually didn’t give a shit. Your foot-soldiers, who weathervaned according to the top three, ranging from gregarious to vaguely hostile. Then lastly your man out on the fringe, who would either glom on thick, hoping to get a friend that hadn’t figured out his position yet, or clam right up out of fear of getting replaced.

It was a bit harder to tell who was who with everyone modded and nobody speaking good Basic. They all came up off the wall when they caught sight of him, swooping in for the strange stutter-stop handshake that Sedgewick couldn’t quite time right. Petro, tall and languid, first because he was closest, not because he cared. Oxo, black eyes already flicking away for approval. Brume, compact like a brick, angry-sounding laugh. Another Oxo, this one with a regrowth implant in his jaw, quiet because of that or maybe because of something else.

Anton was the last, the one Sedgewick had pegged for alpha dog. He gripped his hand a beat longer and grinned with blocky white teeth that had never needed an orthosurgery.

“Ho, extro, how are you this morning.” He looked over Sedgewick’s shoulder and flashed his eyebrows. “Who?”

“Fletcher,” Sedgewick said. “The little brother. Going to feed him to a frostwhale.”

“Your brother.”

Fletcher stuffed his long hands into the pockets of his thermal and met Anton’s gaze. Sedgewick and his brother had the same muddy post-racial melanin and lampblack hair, but from there they diverged. Sedgewick had always been slight-framed and small-boned, with any muscle slapped across his chest and arms fought for gram by gram in a gravity gym. His eyes were a bit sunk and he hated his bowed nose.

Fletcher was already broad in the shoulders and slim-hipped, every bit of him carved sinew, and Sedgewick knew it wouldn’t be long before he was taller, too. His face was all angles now that the baby fat was gone: sharp cheekbones, netstar jawline. And his eyes were still reflecting in the half-lit tunnel, throwing light like a cat’s.

Sedgewick could feel the tips of his ears heating up as Anton swung his stare from one brother to the other, nonverbalizing the big question, the always-there question, which was why are you freestyle if he’s modded.

“So how big are they?” Fletcher asked, with his grin coming back. “The frostwhales.”

“Big,” Anton said. “Ko gramme ko pujo.” He pointed over to Oxo-of-the-jaw-implant and snapped his fingers together for support.

“Fucking big,” Oxo supplied in a mumble.

“Fucking big,” Anton said.

The cold flensed Sedgewick to the bones the instant they stepped outside. Overhead, the sky was a void blacker and vaster than any holo could match. The ice stretched endless in all directions, interrupted only by the faint running lights of methane harvesters stitched through the dark.

Brume had a prehensile lantern from one of the work crews and he handed it to Anton to affix to the cowl of his coat. It flexed and arched over his head, blooming a sickly green light. Sedgewick felt Fletcher look at him, maybe an uneasy look because they’d never been outside the colony at night, maybe a cocky look because he was making a move, going to ruin something for Sedgewick all over again.

“Okay,” Anton said, exhaling a long plume of steam with relish. His voice sounded hollow in the flat air. “Benga, benga, okay. Let’s go.”

“Right,” Sedgewick said, trying to smile with some kind of charm. “Benga.”

Brume gave his angry barking laugh and slapped him on the shoulder, then they set off over the ice. The pebbly gecko soles of Sedgewick’s gumboots kept him balanced and the heating coils in his clothes had already whispered to life, but every time he breathed the air seared his throat raw. Fletcher was a half-step behind the lot of them. Sedgewick resisted the urge to gledge back, knowing he’d see an unconcerned what are you staring for sneer.

Thinking back on it, he should’ve drugged Fletcher’s milk glass with their parents’ Dozr. Even his modded metabolism couldn’t have shaken off three tablets in time for him to play tag-along. Thinking even further back on it, he shouldn’t have had the conversation with Anton and Petro about the frostwhales where Fletcher could hear them.

Under his feet, the texture of the ice started to change, turning from smooth glossy black to scarred and rippled, broken and refrozen. He nearly caught his boot on a malformed spar of it.

“Okay, stop,” Anton announced, holding up both hands.

About a meter on, Sedgewick saw a squat iron pylon sunk into the ice. As he watched, the tip of it switched on, acid yellow. While Petro unloaded his vape and the other units circled up for a puff, Anton slung one arm around Sedgewick and the other around Fletcher.

“Benga, aki den glaso extrobengan minke,” he said.

The string of sounds was nothing like the lessons Sedgewick had stuck on his tab.

Anton shot a look over to Oxo-of-the-jaw-implant, but he was hunched over the vape, lips tinged purple. “Here,” Anton reiterated, gesturing past the pylon. “Here. Frostwhales up.”

He said it with a smile Sedgewick finally recognized as tight with amphetamine. He’d assumed they weren’t sucking down anything stronger than a party hash, but now that seemed like an idiot thing to assume. This was New fucking Greenland, so for all he knew these lads were already utterly panned.

Only one way to find out. Sedgewick gestured for the vape. “Hit me off that.”

Petro gave him a slow clap, either sarcastic or celebratory, while he held the stinging fog in his lungs for as long as he could, maybe because Fletcher was watching. There was only a bit of headspin, but it was enough to miss half of what Oxo-of-the-jaw-implant was saying to him.

“ . . . is the area.” Oxo plucked the vape out of his slack hands and passed it on. “See. See there, see there, see there.” He pointed, and Sedgewick could pick out other pylons in the distance glowing to life. “Fucking danger, okay? Inside the area, frostwhales break ice for breathing. For break ice for breathing, frostwhales hit ice seven times. Den minuso, seven.”

“Minimum seven,” the other Oxo chimed in. Anton started counting aloud on his gloved fingers.

“Got it,” Fletcher muttered.

“So, so, so,” Oxo-of-the-jaw-implant went on. “When the frostwhales hit one, we go.”

“Thought you’d stay for the whole thing?” Sedgewick said, only halfway listening. The cold was killing off his toes one by one.

Anton gave up at twenty and sprang back to the conversation. “We go, extros,” he beamed. “You run. You run. I run. He runs. He runs. He runs. He runs. Here . . . ” He gave the pylon a dull clanging kick. “To here!”

Sedgewick followed Anton’s pointing finger. Far off across the scarred ice, he could barely make out the yellow glow of the pylon opposite them. His stomach dropped. Sedgewick looked at his brother, and for a nanosecond Fletcher looked like a little kid again, but then his mouth curled into a smile and his modded eyes flashed.

“Alright,” he said. “I’m down.”

Sedgewick was a breath away from saying no you fucking aren’t, from saying we’re heading back now, from saying anything at all. But it all stuck on his ribs and instead he turned to Anton and shrugged.

“Benga,” he said. “Let’s go.”

The handshakes came back around, everyone hooting and pleased to have new recruits. Fletcher got the motion on his first try. When the vape made its final circle, Sedgewick gripped it hard and stared out over the black ice and tried to stop shivering.

Sedgewick knew Fletcher was faster than him. He’d known it like a stone in his belly since he was twelve and his brother was ten, and they’d raced on a pale gray beach back on Earth. Prickling fog and no witnesses. Fletcher took lead in the last third, pumping past him with a high clear incredulous laugh, and Sedgewick slacked off to a jog to let him win, because it was a nice thing, to let the younger brother win sometimes.

Occupied with the memory, Sedgewick was slow to notice that the eerie green pallor of the ice was no longer cast by Anton’s lantern. Something had lit it up from underneath. He stared down at the space between his boots and his gut gave a giddy helium lurch. Far below them, distorted by the ice, he could make out dim moving shapes. He remembered that frostwhales navigated by bioluminescence. He remembered the methane sea was deeper than any Earth ocean.

Everyone tightened the straps of their thermals, tucked in their gloves, and formed themselves into a ragged line that Sedgewick found himself near the end of, Fletcher beside him.

Anton waltzed down the row and made a show of checking everyone’s boots. “Grip,” he said, making a claw.

Sedgewick threw a hand onto Brume’s shoulder for balance while he displayed one sole and then the other. He leaned instinctively to do Fletcher the same favor, but his brother ignored it and lifted each leg precisely into the air, perfectly balanced. Sedgewick hated him as much as he ever had. He glued his eyes to the far pylon and imagined it was the first cleat of the dock on a rainy gray beach.

Under their feet, the ghostly green light receded, dropping them back into darkness. Sedgewick shot Oxo-of-the-jaw-implant a questioning look.

“First they see ice,” Oxo mumbled, rubbing his hands together. “They see ice for thin area. Then, down. For making momentum. Then, in one by one line . . . ”

“Up,” Sedgewick guessed.

On cue, the light reappeared, rising impossibly fast. Sedgewick took a breath and coiled to sprint. His imagination flashed him a picture: the frostwhale rocketing upward, a blood-and-bone engine driven by a furious thrashing tail, hurtling through the cold water in a cocoon of bubbling gas. Then the impact quaked the ice and Sedgewick’s teeth, and he thought about nothing but running.

For two hard heartbeats, Sedgewick fronted the pack, flying across the ice like something unslung. The second impact nearly took his legs out from under him. He staggered, skidded, regained his balance, but in that split second Petro was past him. And Anton, and Oxo, and Oxo, Brume, Fletcher last.

Sedgewick dug deep for every shred of speed. The ice was nowhere near smooth, scarred with pocks and ridges and frozen ripples in the methane, but the others slid over it like human quicksilver, finding the perfect place for every footfall. Modded, modded, modded. The word danced in Sedgewick’s head as he gulped cold glass.

The green light swelled again, and he braced before the third frostwhale hit. The jolt shook him but he kept his footing, maybe even gained half a step on Oxo. Ahead, the race was thrown into relief: Brume’s broad shoulders, Anton’s thrown-back head, and there, sliding past gangly Petro for the lead, was Fletcher. Sedgewick felt hot despair churn up his throat.

His eyes raised to the pylon and he realized they were over halfway across. Fletcher pulled away now, not laughing, with that crisp bounding stride that said I can run forever. Then he glanced back over his shoulder, for what, Sedgewick didn’t know, and in that instant his boot caught a trench and slammed him hard to the ice.

Sedgewick watched the others vault past, Anton pausing to half-drag Fletcher back upright on the way by. “Benga, benga, extro!”

The fourth frostwhale hit, this time with a bone-deep groaning crack. Everyone else had overtaken Fletcher; Sedgewick would in a few more strides. Fletcher was just now hobbling upright and Sedgewick knew instantly he’d done his ankle in. His modded eyes were wide.

“Sedge.”

All the things Sedgewick had wished so savagely in the night—that the doctor had never pulled Fletcher out of his vat, that Fletcher’s pod would fail in transit to New Greenland—all of those things shattered at once. He swung Fletcher up onto his back, how they’d done as kids, and stumped on with lungs ragged.

The fifth impact. Sedgewick’s teeth slammed together and fissures skittered through the ice. He spared only a moment to balance himself, then stumbled forward again, Fletcher clinging fierce to his back. At the far pylon, the others hurtled to the finish, whooping and howling from a dozen meters away now, no more.

They all seemed to turn at once as the sixth impact split the world apart and the frostwhale breached. Sedgewick felt himself thrown airborne in a blizzard of shattered ice, felt himself screaming in his chest but unable to hear it, deafened by the shearing boom and crack. Some part of Fletcher smacked against him in midair.

Landing slammed the wind out of him. His vision pinwheeled from the unending black sky to the maelstrom of moving ice. And then, too big to be real, rising up out of the cold methane sea in a geyser of rime and steam, the frostwhale. Its bony head was gunmetal gray, the size of a bus, bigger, swatched with pale green lanterns of pustule that glowed like radiation.

Cracks webbed through the ice and something gave way; Sedgewick felt himself slanting, slipping. He tore his gaze from the towering bulk of the frostwhale and saw Fletcher spread-eagled beside him, a black shadow in the burning lime. His lips were moving but Sedgewick couldn’t read them, and then gloved hands gripped the both of them, hauling them flat along the breaking ice.

Oxo and Oxo made sure they were all pulled past the pylon before anyone got up off their belly. Sedgewick, for his part, didn’t even try. He was waiting on his heart to start beating again.

“Sometime six,” Anton said sheepishly, crouching over him.

“Go to hell,” Fletcher croaked from nearby, and in a moment of weakness Sedgewick choked up a wavery laugh.

They washed home on a wave of adrenaline, caught up in the rapid-fire conversation of the New Greenlanders who still seemed to be rehashing how close Sedgewick and Fletcher had come to getting dumped under. Every single one of them needed a send-off handshake at the living quarters, then they slunk off in one chattering mass.

Sedgewick couldn’t keep the chemical grin off his face, and as he and Fletcher snuck through the vestibule and then ghosted back to their temporary shared room, they talked in a tumble of whispers about the frostwhale, about the size of it, and about the ones that had surfaced afterward to suck cold air into massive vein-webbed bladders.

Sedgewick didn’t want to stop talking, but even when they did, climbing into their beds, the quiet felt different. Softer.

It wasn’t until he was staring up at the biocrete ceiling that he realized Fletcher’s limp had swapped sides on the way back. He swung upright, unbelieving.

“You faked it.”

“What?” Fletcher was rolled away, tracing the wall with his long fingers.

“You faked it,” Sedgewick repeated. “Your ankle.”

Fletcher took his hand off the wall, and the long quiet was enough confirmation.

Sedgewick’s cheeks burned. He’d thought he had finally done something big enough, big enough to keep him on the greater side of whatever fucked-up equation they were balancing. But it was Fletcher feeling sorry for him. No, worse. Fletcher making a move. Fletcher manipulating him for whatever kind of schemes floated through his modded head.

“We could have both died,” Sedgewick said.

Still turned away, Fletcher gave his perfect shrug, and Sedgewick felt all the old fury fluming up through his skin.

“You think that was a hologame?” he snarled. “That was real. You could have deaded us both. You think you can just do anything, right? You think you can just do anything, and it’ll fucking work out perfect for you, because you’re modded.”

Fletcher’s shoulders stiffened. “Good job,” he said, toneless.

“What?” Sedgewick demanded. “Good job what?”

“Good job on saying it,” Fletcher told the wall. “You’re ashamed to have a modded brother. You wanted one like you.”

Sedgewick faltered, then made himself laugh. “Yeah, maybe I did.” His throat ached. “You know what it’s like seeing you? Seeing you always be better than me?”

“Not my fault.”

“I was six when they told me you were going to be better,” Sedgewick said, too far gone to stop now, saying the things he’d only ever said alone to the dark. “They said different, but they meant better. Mom couldn’t do another one freestyle and to go off-planet you’re supposed to have them modded anyway. So they grew you in a tube. Like hamburger. You’re not even real.” His breath came lacerated. “Why wasn’t I enough for them, huh? Why wasn’t I fucking enough?”

“Fuck you,” Fletcher said, with his voice like gravel, and Sedgewick had never heard him say it or mean it until now.

He flopped back onto his bed, grasping for the slip-sliding anger as it trickled away in the dark. Shame came instead and sat at the bottom of him like cement. Minutes ticked by in silence. Sedgewick thought Fletcher was probably drifting to sleep already, probably not caring at all.

Then there was a bit-off sob, a sound smothered by an arm or a pillow, something Sedgewick hadn’t heard from his brother in years. The noise wedged in his ribcage. He tried to unhear it, tried to excuse it. Maybe Fletcher had peeled off his thermal and found frostbite. Maybe Fletcher was making a move, always another move, putting a lure into the dark between them and sharpening his tongue for the retort.

Maybe all Sedgewick needed to do was go and put his hand on some part of his brother, and everything would be okay. His heart hammered up his throat. Maybe. Sedgewick pushed his face into the cold fabric of his pillow and decided to wait for a second sob, but none came. The silence thickened into hard black ice.

Sedgewick clamped his eyes shut and it stung badly, badly.

About the Author

Rich Larson was born in West Africa, has studied in Rhode Island and worked in Spain, and at twenty-three now writes from Edmonton, Alberta. His short work has been nominated for the Theodore Sturgeon and appears or is forthcoming in multiple Year’s Best anthologies, as well as in magazines such as Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, F&SF, Interzone, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed and Apex.

The Father

Kola Heyward-Rotimi

Madhav Tamboli almost missed the vein. It was hard to inject the antidote while surrounded by his praying colleagues. He tried to blend with the others, rocking with the noise of the priest at the altar. Madhav punctured his skin and gasped; the chemicals crawled from the needle through his blood vessels. It was a feeling like ice crystallizing just beneath the surface. He set his jaw and refused to shudder.

After he made sure there were no prying eyes, Madhav stashed the narrow syringe into an inside pocket. He felt the antidote curl around his lungs, making each breath harder than the last. It turned less severe, though every inhale tugged at his innards. The Children of Confucius hadn’t told him it would affect his breathing. But it was only fair, he had kept information from them as well. He knew they wouldn’t have agreed to the LSD coursing through his mind. It hadn’t fully hit him yet, though each emotion was crumbling at the edges. The turbulence was just around the corner, a supercell brewing along the horizon.

It was better this way. Madhav didn’t want to remember the next few hours accurately.

The priestess’ voice grew and wavered, falling like waves through the mass of engineers crying silently to the words. The last words they would ever hear. There was such a peaceful look on all of their faces. Upturned lips, accepting of imminent death. He tried his hardest to mimic that look of docility. He really did.

But his damned knees hurt. The bronze floor was mercilessly solid, and he could feel every jolt and vibration from the giant engine only yards below. So much raw energy clawing at the thin fabric of their cloaks. Nobody seemed worried about that. They were all going to die in the next minute anyway.

The sermon finished and the priestess stepped down from her pedestal. She was so young for a woman of the church. Neck and breasts still firm, no signs of decay. Madhav stared at the front of her cassock, imagining cleavage. He stifled a giggle. So sinful. How much farther was he from Goddess’ Kingdom now? But he lived by different rules these days. Why else would he be here, not fearing his death?

Only the ship’s groaning could be heard when the priestess walked away. She had left a little device on the altar, encrusted with jewels and gold-trimmings. A pretty wooden box, set in a glowing spotlight which seemed to come from nowhere. Their life’s work sat in an oaken package, the seeds of Goddess. Madhav swallowed dryly.

It was only them. Caught in this metal sphere, around twenty men and women. He knew most of their first names, knew some of their last names. Knew all of their nicknames. Madhav and his colleagues used to chat over coffee, bringing up the latest political scandal to distract themselves from the mounds of work on their desks. Sometimes they’d just talk about a wedding that only certain people were invited to, gossip about if a random coworker’s kid was really as smart as she claimed he was.

They shed tears of joy as the hiss of neurotoxin filled their eardrums.

Madhav focused on his hands. He counted his fingers. Anything but think about how many ounces of Sarin was being pumped into the air. He had taken what they had told him would be the antidote. If it worked, he would watch as his peers’ lungs went slack. If it didn’t he would be gasping for oxygen in a heartbeat.

A bulky man named Timothy fell on his back with a wheeze. A few others followed his lead. And Madhav was still breathing. Fast as fuck, but still breathing. He kept staring at his dark skin, watched the neurotoxin glisten along his forearms like dewdrops. Pretty.

Static burst in his left ear. And the Children of Confucius came through on the other end, franticness barely restrained through the airwaves.

“Go.”

Madhav was on his feet, Madhav was reaching for the altar. Hands outstretched like a sinner begging for salvation, stumbling towards the light of divine providence. The box sat there as the glow from above gradually waned. The dewdrops on his arms trapped the escaping light, glittering along his body. They were bright as hell. Couldn’t stop looking at them.

He reached the box when the last engineer crumpled to the floor. Goddess, it was beautiful. Shining amber in his glow, edges soft like an oil painting from Origin Earth. Madhav caressed it like he would’ve done to the priestess. Barely touched the surface, lingering over bright spots of interest. He soaked in the jewels’ resplendence. He couldn’t help tearing up at his life’s work.

The Children broke the silence, cutting into his ear with their white noise screeches.

“Is it secure?”

“Yeah, yeah it’s secure.”

Did he always sound like that? His words fell from his lips and tumbled to the bronze floor, fracturing on impact. They scuttled to the dark curves of the room, leaving only their imprint on the surface of his retinas.

“Get out of there,” they said.

Madhav swung around to see the wall behind him crack open. It was a silent explosion, no smoke. He could taste the smell of burning metal. A few corpses slid across the room. He cradled his bejeweled child as he leapt over twitching legs.

The hallway was so clinical and sharp. All grays and blacks and whites, no more curved bronze. Monitors stuck out at awkward spots, relaying beautiful data which curled around the ceiling like tobacco smoke. Symbols of Goddess everywhere, an endless grid of Earths printed above his head. Each one from the original empire, rendered in an elegance that only minimalism could convey. He saw Pangeas, he saw Laurasias, he saw Gondwanas. Pure, holy planet worship.

Fuck that. As the Children of Confucius said, throw divinity and gods into the fire.

Then he heard the sirens, and he heard the static screaming in his ear. The Children weren’t happy with him just standing there, they needed him to move. They said that there were people right on his trail, dammit, they were moving in fast. He was gonna be shot through with bullets if he didn’t get his ass moving. So he chose a direction and started running.

The hallway kept curving around and all that he looked for was the hatch. That’s what they told him should be his priority. That was his only way out, his only way to escape with his baby. The box was still there in the crook of his arm, more polished than his engagement ring.

Engagement ring. He still wondered what the point of that relationship had been. She was modestly beautiful, definitely. When she put her hair up in just the right way and shimmied into something with muted colors like an ocean bed. Her eyes always caught him, though. Green and irresistible because they only had an interest in him. Curved perfectly, like the rest of her.

He had met her on the job, and he had died with her on the job. No, that’s not true. His heart was still pumping while hers lay dead in that bronze room. Her body was lifeless and cold while his gleamed under the fluorescent lighting above.

Madhav should have said goodbye to her. Maybe before the priestess had started talking, maybe when they had been beginning to kneel. Because it would have been nice to say how much he had loved her, how much she had meant to him and all of the required sentiments before the toxins had choked her oxygen flow. He could have cried like he was doing now, held her close for a minute so that all of his friends from work thought he cared.

He had loved her, right?

“Hurry up,” the Children said from behind their radio waves. He was unlocking the hatch.

A crack and a hiss and he was inside. The hatch closed behind him, killing the sirens. His heart still hammered against his ribs, though. So he found a place to lay the box in the tiny cockpit, covering a curved LCD screen wedged between a spectrum of switches and wires. The dashboard was such a simple layout, spread before him like a map. Clusters that led to nowhere. Routes which circled in on each other like Ouroboros, like Shiva statues his great-Grandparents brought from their Earth. Nothing close to the 3D lattices he toyed with while creating his child. His fingers flew through the perfect sequence, letting the cockpit hum to life.

“Make sure to broadcast your distress signal,” the Children said. “Detach from the Reborn Cathedral and don’t stop for anything. We’ll rendezvous with you where we deem safe. Good luck.”

“Thank you.”

Madhav triggered detachment, and felt the jolt of his pod separating from the cathedral. He flipped on a monitor as he leaned back in a worn leather seat, watching the rear camera view. The dark circle of the hatch receded, just a speck on the smooth hull. The cathedral was a cosmic Leviathan, glittering with antennae outcroppings and small tinted strips, reinforced glass ports. The gaudiest object in space, engraved with the name of each corporation and religious denomination involved in its production. He knew that his and his colleagues’ names were stamped on there somewhere, probably where all the school kids could point and gawk when they opened up the structure like an amusement park.

There was a screech which vibrated through the cockpit, and white shards spun into view of the camera. Narrow construction girders, or what was left of them. Flying about at deliberate trajectories. Sperm cells.

Security collected in black crevices of the cathedral’s hull, submerging him in hail requests. They were gray spikes, twice the length of his pod and flying towards him at relativistic speeds. A plume of gasses evaporated from their hulls, revealing the turret mounds placed on their sides. Smooth as hell, they flew around the Cathedral and lined up in grids; Madhav saw their weapons’ heat maps on a small screen hooked to the side of his chair. He thought of replying with the pre-recorded message the Children had given him. No, he could do better. He held down the record button.

“Don’t shoot me, don’t puncture this vehicle. Because I have the seed here with me, I have a baby Goddess. And it’s my responsibility to keep her safe, because I created her and cried over her and bled for her until she was perfect, until she was something any of us would be proud of. So you don’t take a child from her father, you don’t take her from me. Or I’ll destroy her. I really will, I’ll smash open this fucking lid faster than you can put your railguns on rapid-fire. Long live the universe with no Goddess. Don’t shoot me.”

He collapsed in the chair as his voice was broadcast on repeat. The box—his baby—demanded his attention. The reflections of the screens made fractal patterns along the wood. Always shifting, becoming something more complex than he could fathom before devolving into primitive geometries. Madhav watched it as he glided away from the cathedral.

They were still screaming at him through the little ear piece. They weren’t happy about something, probably about how he handled himself back there. Probably something about his improvised message. But he was drifting on lysergide now, Madhav could have cared less.

They didn’t use to scream at him. Like those years ago when he had walked into their hideouts, where the Children offered him a smoke like he was a long lost brother.

They had talked to him in a way that made just so much sense. What sermons used to be when he had been a kid, a level of directness and practicality that left him bawling like a toddler. They had said what he had always been afraid to confront. Something that, if true, would force him to realize how much of his life was wrong.

The ruins of the Corealis Empire wanted him and his fiancée and eighteen other geniuses to rebuild a god, and bring back the old order. But the Children of Confucius wanted change.

Eons later, and he found himself here. Averting his ritual sacrifice, stealing the blueprints for Goddess, and escaping from dozens of military drones. The Children blared at him, asking him why the hell he wouldn’t respond.

Madhav laughed until his throat went sore.

Alarms flared in the cockpit, telling him how close the cathedral’s warning shots came to puncturing his hull. He couldn’t bring himself to concentrate on that. Instead, just like before, he reached for the box. He lifted it slowly, gently. Placed it in his lap. And he started laughing again.

Years. Devoted to this box. Just to watch himself steal it from its purpose, and take it to death. Because Goddess was bad. Having Her watch over them was what led to fracture, what led to their ancestors being whisked from their Earths.

Staring into the grains of wood, he saw the stars. The same stars that he would watch from the lower orbital ring. The ones that he and she would sit and watch. The two of them had been enmeshed in wires, making out under the faded 4K display he would prop up each night. Have that night sky on repeat, yeah. Let her strip under digital stars.

Staring into the jewels, he saw the music. The corporate ditty that came out vaguely warped over ancient speakers. Those ceiling speakers rattling with repeating sax riffs and slow vocals, static filling the negative space. Always that same song, commercial battle cry of some long-forgotten brand. He and his boys would eat under the music’s shade, talking about whatever their teenage hormones demanded of them.

All of these times were ones of beautiful decay. A fusion of perfection and desperation that was only possible because Madhav lived in shit. Because he lived in the world that Goddess conceived. Now he was taking that beauty away.

The Children had always told Madhav how much of a pawn he was in the fallen empire’s plans. How much more he could accomplish if he finally accepted what he had doubted since he first put on his Sunday best.

But he couldn’t resist a look at divinity, so Madhav pried open the lid. The eye of Goddess stared back at him.

It went on infinitely, blues that kept getting brighter the closer he looked. Like stained glass, an endless hall of windows. Each time his pupils shifted focus, the orientation altered. The colors lightened, darkened, flew across the spectrum. It spread out from the box, trickling along his wrists. He let it pool in the curve of his palms, staring at his childhood.

He was nude in front of it. No, in front of Her. This was him, Madhav Tamboli, all out in the open. Every thought, action, regret, and wish spilled from his chest and fell out like a burst dam. They were all pinpoints of light and shadow, covering the dashboard. His life would not stop. More pieces flew from him to make this mosaic of a person. It drew on memories he could barely remember; when his cousins sung to each other over the hum of the TV, when he helped Nana with dinner. These were given equal weight as the monumental events, the ones he would brag about at cocktail parties and in coworkers’ beds. They all glared at him with a frankness he could not separate from.

Madhav had to look at Goddess to look at himself. And he realized how special She truly was. The spinning lights surrounding him told the truth, like a whirlwind of emotions and honesty that wouldn’t stop stripping him away. She meant more than he could understand. And this was only Her seed, not even Her matured form. Not as the glorious woman She had used to be, an elegant machine spinning off into the void.

Glass shattered in his mind and the alarms increased in volume. He contacted them, the Children of Confucius, his voice laced with something he couldn’t understand.

“I made a mistake. A huge mistake. Right now, I’m holding my child in my hands and She’s crying. Because I see the true way now, I see what I must do. And it’s not this. No, it’s not this. Brothers and sisters.”

He paused as a metal slug punctured the inside of the cockpit. The hole in the ship sealed itself, saving him milliseconds before the capsule decompressed. He turned back to his ear piece.

“Brothers and sisters, I am the father of Goddess.”

He input new coordinates, throwing the ear piece to the ground. He did not need to hear their whining. No, what he needed to focus on was escape. Escape from the ruins of the empire. Escape from the Children of Confucius. It was time to find salvation. Give birth to Genesis, become Jesus and Buddha and Olodumare. Bring Her back like it was supposed to be. Go back, back to Earth. It might not be his Earth, or his great-Grandparents’ Earth. But it was an Earth, a holy planet. And it would do. He would return to the motherland. Landing in fields of saccharum and sunlight. Taking with him the baby, returning to the planet that always started it all. No matter what dimension, no matter what time period. Earth was at the center, the beating heart of the multiverse.

The camera view blurred as his pod took to his new directions. The cathedral swung out of sight, and only a map of dense stars could be seen. He settled into his chair, preparing for deep sleep, as he and Goddess sped into the night. He ignored the shots at his ship, he ignored his ETA of one hundred and twenty-four years. Instead, he let the ship cradle him. Let the ship drop the temperature. Let the ship hook him up to yards of IV tubes and needles and medical probes. Even more chemicals entered his bloodstream, chilling his body until it was as if somebody hit pause.

Even if he made it to Earth, to India, it would take him more than a century. But time was irrelevant. He had found faith again. Madhav smiled as his body froze to a standstill.

The father of Goddess flew into hyperspace.

About the Author

Since an early age, Kola has loved to put the words and people from his imagination straight into the word processor. He currently resides in Durham, North Carolina and attends the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics. Kola is working on expanding and developing his fictional setting, along with completing the first draft of his novel. He also enjoys the posthuman ascendance struggle, like the rest of us. This is his first published story.

Egg Island

Karen Heuler

Audra Donchell’s right arm was 3D-printed; she’d lost the original in a scooter crash when she was a teenager. That was years ago; she had a number of arms she could take off and put on; she could remodel them and change their color. A different color for every day.

All the parts worked smoothly; all she had to do was think—or not think, simply imagine—and her arm moved and bent, her fingers picked and pinched and tapped. There was a certain distance to it, but she had finally adapted to the slight sensation of objectivity that had been her original experience with it. The other great thing about her 3D arm was that it could hold heavy objects, like her suitcase, for longer times than her other, natural, arm could.

Carrying her case effortlessly, she took the supertube to the heliport, then took the copter to the helipad that used to be an oil platform. There was a party there—teenagers, how tiresome—so she took a glider to Stepoff Point, the last bit of land before the ocean.

Her destination was a small spot on the planet where the natural evolution of plastic was taking place. She was interested in plastics and she was interested in this development; she thought (as many did) that plastics had in many ways shaped the present and would save the future. She was nearing thirty and it was time to think of how she could contribute to life; she might get a clue from this visit.

The skimmer from the Stepoff Point took over four hours to get to Sister Island and on its way passed four other floating islands, reclaimed and now habitable. She saw one that seemed to be connected pieces. “That island over there,” she said to the pilot, pointing. Pilot was, of course, a useless term. The skimmer was on auto, but the unions demanded qualified help in case of emergencies. “Is that a reclaimed island?”

“Not yet,” he said. He was middle-aged and pale (good sunscreen implants), with sinewy arms and a half-smile, half-frown combination that was charming. “It’s still just garbage.”

She studied it with interest. Garbage had been outlawed, of course, but garbage still existed, washing down off mountains, washing out from waste piles disturbed by weather or earthquakes or construction projects, or coming up again after ocean dumping. She saw plastic bags and buoys and fishing nets and plastic cups and bottles and wrappers of various kinds. They floated along together.

The pilot leaned towards her. “I’ve made islands,” he said. “I spent years making islands. The place we’re going to—I worked there. There were a bunch of us, volunteers, young kids, full of the thrill. We wove the plastics together. We caught the bags and cups and straws and toothbrushes, and we made them into the islands.”

“The islands are great,” she said. She wanted to make a good impression, so she was very enthusiastic. “I’ve always been fascinated. I put in a request over a year ago for it—you know, the event. On Egg Island.”

The pilot looked at her for a moment. “I made Egg Island. Not me alone, of course. But the islands—I made the islands.”

She was quiet for a few minutes, out of awe and a sense of embarrassment. The skimmer roared over the water. They passed vast clumps of Sargasso. A few flying fish raced them, then veered off.

“You made Egg Island,” she said finally. She felt close to tears and tapped the back of her hand to give herself just a drop of endorphins. “Tell me about it. I’ve been longing to go to Egg Island ever since I first heard of it.”

He nodded and they introduced themselves. His name was Wen Wickler. The skimmer thrummed, even creating some kind of wind, despite the fact that they were entering the doldrums, that place far out in the ocean where all the winds died and all the garbage gathered.

“I was 30 when I came out here,” Wen said. “I was burning with the need to heal the earth. I had watched my mother’s farm blow away with the drought. You weren’t born yet, but my generation faced it all: too little clean water, soil that had been poisoned by pesticides, animal extinctions. And garbage, garbage everywhere. We had filled in every nook and cranny, it seemed, and it leached out and got into the water tables. Too much of what we lived in was dirty and dangerous. We looked to the seas.

“The first volunteers got some backing by some big polluters who had to do it by law, and we took trawlers to the ocean and began to pick up all the floating plastics. We did that for a few years, but the garbage went on for miles. And where were we supposed to put the plastics? We talked about it and it seemed reasonable, eventually, to go with what was already happening. It was collecting in patches, in islands of its own, all the plastics, the lost stuff, the things from tsunamis and from ocean dumping, the lost things and the forgotten things, just drifting out to the doldrums and bumping into one another.

“We trawled and gathered and sorted. Lots of plastic ropes to tie things together. Nets to tie things together. Cups to be part of the ‘earth’ of the island. We sifted and netted and wove and strung together. It took months, years; we weathered it and built a spongy sort of island and then built shacks on it from boogie boards and construction debris that floated out from the disasters occurring everywhere. We took dolls and toys and made little sceneries; we took buckets and plastic bottles and began to collect rainwater (not much) and began to make evaporation coils to make drinking water from the sea. We set up small farms in plastic bins, and began to tie seaweed to the shores of our islands. We kept weaving into it, pushing down the cups and plastic shoes and child’s shovels and whatever we found, weaving it deeper and deeper and spreading it out. Islands. We made islands.” He stopped and shook his head.

“I’m so impressed,” she said. “We learned about that in school. I always dreamed of being like you someday.” She made a modest sound. “I kind of forgot that, though. I went into industrial plastics, after my accident.” She shrugged, lifting her 3D arm a bit. “I got waylaid. My generation—all we know is plastics. Your generation—you saw things, didn’t you? Surprising things?”

“We saw the changes start,” he said huskily. The boat bobbed forward. Out in the distance, she could see the first of the islands. She wanted it all to slow down; she wanted to hear what he had to say. All of this was magic, was storytime; the first plastic islands, the change. The change over. The first sightings.

“I wanted to see the eggs,” she said finally. Her voice was soft; she didn’t want to seem egotistical, to gather importance from her desire. Because in front of her, here was someone who had probably been one of the ones who figured out what was happening. He was heraldic.

He pushed a button on the dashboard of the boat. She had no doubt it was, strictly speaking, unnecessary. The skimmer could do it all by itself. He was insignificant now. One of the people who had discovered the eggs, now a token pilot on a ship that didn’t need him.

“I took some classes after the farm failed. I thought at first it was just a question of learning what to do. That we could fix it,” he said. “I didn’t realize how much there was to fix. We knew the waters were rising, we saw that the shore was disappearing. But I was inland. I was landlocked. Of course there were water restrictions, even there. But one year snow geese fell from the sky and convinced me that I had to do something. I ended up here. I knew nothing about this.” He shrugged. “But I could listen and I could work. We had discussions all the time, how to proceed, what made most sense.”

“I heard there are eels on Sister Island now,” she said. “Birds come sometimes.”

He nodded. “The jellyfish are the real indicator. They’re easy to catch and study. Microfibers are everywhere, you know, but they’re hard to spot and the earliest teams didn’t have microscopes. But we could see the small plastic beads—Styrofoam and microbeads, breakdowns of the soft plastics—under the hoods of the jellyfish, even along the arms and tentacles. From what we could see, doing no harm.”

She looked at her own arm and flexed it. “I’ve read there are jellyfish bigger than whales.”

He laughed. “Haven’t seen that. Not here, anyway. Things are relatively predictable here.”

“What was the first thing you saw that gave you a clue?” Audra asked.

He squinted slightly. “We caught fish to eat, of course. And we saw the plastic pieces. We couldn’t see the microplastics, as I said. But a piece of plastic line; a plastic wheel off a small toy—things like that. A few of the fish were damaged, but there were others that seemed to incorporate the stuff without harm. Those were interesting.” He grinned.

Audra sighed. “I wish I’d been there. I mean, what an experience! I can’t wait to see the island. I hear there’s a research center. I know it’s just a shack, but it’s still amazing to me that people live there. They made it work.”

“Well, we all made it work,” he agreed.

“Oh yes, of course, sorry.” When he didn’t continue, she said, “Are you here for the laying?”

He nodded.

“I suspect I only got permission because of my arm,” she said and flexed it.

He looked impressed. “That must be handy,” he said. “I suppose you can control it to the nth degree?”

She grinned. “To the nth,” she said.

By now they were close to Sister Island. Brother Island could be seen in the distance, still a few days away, floating with the faint currents or what little wind there was. Egg Island was smaller and therefore harder to observe over distances, but the currents were predictable enough.

She saw a figure waiting by the slip. “That must be Johncy,” she said and waved with her true arm. She caught Wen noticing that. “Emotions seem to go out my natural arm. Always have, always will.”

“Of course. It’s called appropriate use. The organism finds its job. It adapts. We’re thankful for that. It’s what might save us.” He smiled. “And it doesn’t seem to hurt, does it? The plastic?”

“No.”

He watched the shoreline intently. “After all this time, after all the harm, plastics might be a solution. It’s a strange thing for my generation to think about.”

He stood leaning against the controls, tapping one absent-mindedly, slightly weathered and not entirely used to having the world surprise him. Her 3D arm had been an improvement in her life and had been offered to her soon after her accident. It was common enough by then. But she believed she understood what he meant. “Bodies accept almost everything, don’t they?” she said finally.

They landed at what passed for a pier—a projection of plastic gas tanks roped together to make a sort of fork jabbing into the sea. Wen steered in while Audra studied the geography. The main structure on the island was made of a series of cabins or rooms, lightly constructed of all kinds of materials. There was a plastic picnic table outside and molded plastic chairs. Wen handed up their bags and four large black duffel bags. “The gear,” he said to Johncy, who grabbed the bags as Wen handed them up. Then Johncy reached a hand out and grabbed her, and steadied her as she stepped on the island.

She turned to him and saw he had one brown eye and one clear eye.

“My god!” She couldn’t help herself. “I’ve never seen a plastic eye before. I thought my arm was special.” She laughed. “I’m sure it takes a lot more refinement to make an eye.”

Johncy smiled and nodded. “I was only the second to have one; the first was a monkey. One who’d lost her eye from a disease; don’t worry, it wasn’t tortured. It lived for a few more years, till the monkey fungus got it. But I got this eye.” He held a hand out to help Wen up. “Wen, good to see you. It wouldn’t be the same without you.” He turned to Audra. “You know he discovered the turtles, don’t you?”

“He didn’t exactly say.”

“Too modest. Or too secretive?” He laughed. “He always insisted that only plastics get told about the turtles and this island. We’re very protective.”

She turned to consider Wen. “You’re plastic too?”

“My heart,” he said easily. “If you lean in real close you’ll hear a different sound, more like a shush than a normal heart. It’s been running for about five years now. We don’t have a good idea about stress factors on plastic when it’s internal. One of the reasons Egg Island is kind of an obsession with me.”

A young woman came paddling up in a plastic kayak and pulled into the other tine of the fork. “Egg is coming along,” she said, clearly delighted. “I think it will be early this year. It’s right behind Brother and to the east.”

“It’s good you came when you did,” Wen told Audra. “I wasn’t going to come ‘till tomorrow. I might have missed the sight of it. I love watching it arrive.”

The woman’s name was Kit, and she, along with Johncy and Michael, showed Audra around. They walked on the rippling island with absolute assurance, explained how they placed plastic straws and coils to reclaim water, how they dried seaweed in racks and baked it in solar ovens into a kind of bread. A modest vertical garden grew herbs, tomatoes, and beans.

“I brought extra water,” Wen said. “And some groceries. And eggs, of course,” he said, winking. That brought a round of applause and laughs from the staff.

The island was almost a quarter-mile around, so its motion was relatively minor, but it made her dizzy. They promised her she would get her balance by morning.

Water splashed a little during the night, and occasionally a fish would flip out of water, or something would fall off the island. Once she heard voices offshore, so she supposed that the staff went for swims, and that must mean that the oil slicks had moved off for a while. Or they accepted being covered in oil. Or there was another alternative she knew nothing about. She slept.

She did have her sea legs the next morning, rolling a little as she walked over the woven plastics, watching her step, but no longer in any way queasy. They grabbed plates and cups of coffee (also Wen’s gift) and sat staring out to the east.

“I think,” Michael said, and stopped. Everyone seemed to freeze, cups or forks in hand, just looking. They held a collective breath.

“Yes,” Wen said. “Yes. That’s Egg all right.”

They stood up. They stared at the island, watching it slap gently through the waves, pushed by a twist in the current, by the merest suggestion of wind. Audra thought it seemed to be aware of them, to be heading for them deliberately, even though she knew of course that the island itself was passive. Still, she was filled with expectation; they all were tense with anticipation, pulling out cameras and logbooks and charts from previous years.

Audra stayed by Wen’s side. “When will it happen? Is it always at night?”

“So far,” he said. “How long is ‘always’ under these circumstances? It’s been eleven years now, and I was the first to see it. Among the first, technically, I suppose. But I saw it, shook my head to clear it, saw it, and called the others. A wonderful thing.”

“Will the island be here tonight, then?”

He shook his head. “Probably not. But tomorrow, yes, I think so.”

She spent the day doing the chores she’d been assigned, which included watering the garden. The reclamation straws dripped slowly, and she had to be careful to replace any bucket she took with another bucket immediately; not one drop of water could be lost. The plants poked up through plastic tarps, so that the soil would hold the water as long as possible. The tarps were lifted an hour a day to avoid mold or fungus in the soil. This was done by hand; they stood around, tarps lifted, holding corners or centers, chatting about the next things to do or any topic that came up.

“Does your arm ever bother you?” Michael asked her.

She looked down at it; it had become familiar, it had become a part of her. “No,” she said. “Not at all. It’s part of me now.”

He smiled. “I have a leg,” he said. “Works perfectly, too.”

The others nodded. They each had a replacement part. “I sometimes forget about it,” she said. “Though it can do more, lift more, have more force, than my original arm. So I think I’ve been improved.” She grinned.

They told their stories, one by one, what they lost and how they had gained a replacement. “To think,” Wen said, “how much damage we’ve done with plastic; how much we’ve destroyed. And how plastic might turn around and save us, in return.”

“We’ve lost a lot; I won’t deny we’ve lost a lot. It was a hard lesson. The world is changed,” Michael said.

“The world is always changing,” Wen said. “We just have to find a direction for it.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Audra said, laughing, “it seems to have found its direction on its own.”

They contemplated that for a while, gazing off to Egg Island as the sun set, wishing for the morning.

And in the morning it was there, a few hundred yards away, a faint new slap of water hitting plastics. Egg Island was a looser island than Sister Island, and there would only be a day or so to weave plastic ropes into it, to maintain some kind of integrity to it as they went forward. Some swam over, dragging ropes and nets behind them; some paddled over on foam boards. They pushed aside the plastic eggs, looking like mottled Easter eggs that lay strewn over the surface. They pushed some down into the matted debris, and used the coils of ropes and plastic bags they’d brought over from Sister Island to sew the island together. They walked carefully, but even so they had to rescue each other from patches where their legs went through. It was safer to kneel and inch their way around, patting and tucking, pushing ropes down and through and up again.

They worked quickly and efficiently, patch by patch, tightening the island so it would maintain integrity, aware that the island would only be here briefly. “This part needs help,” someone would call out, and one or two people would nod and kneel their way across to that section, pulling pieces together, working like weavers on a giant, watery loom.

The island landed up against their own island, and they took a break, went home, ate quickly, and went back to work. One particularly bad section required a ladder laid flat on it to hold their weight as they worked to restore it. On the far side, a wide fish net with ballast had been caught and dragged along; they hoisted it up and wove it in. A hairnet, Audra thought briefly and then tied her section into the mass of the island.

They worked for two days that way, barely speaking, pushing in lines and pulling them out, sewing the island, tugging at it, patting it and pushing it.

Egg Island was still moving even as it rested against Sister Island; it had its own volition, its own imperative to move, move, move on.

“Soon,” Johncy said. “I think tomorrow,” and they nodded, exhausted, and slept without further discussion. The constant work had tamped down their sense of anticipation, but now it rose again and even as exhaustion overtook them, they slept fitfully, waiting for dawn.

The island was now just touching on the east end of Sister Island; it had shifted slightly all night long, touching and moving the length of Sister Island. They could feel the tactile way the two islands met, a handshake, a rub on the shoulder, the smallest, most basic communion. Not that anyone believed the islands were alive. They were part of a new order, however. The earth was ingesting the plastics and mixing the plastics and finding a new use for them. The unnatural was becoming the natural. The order was changing and it hardly mattered whether it was for better or for worse.

And in the midst of all the change, strange new beauties occurred.

They worked all day and kept vigil when the dark fell and the moon rose. They sat and murmured on their own moving island, talking of nothing important. Things they’d seen, books they’d read, odd places they’d been. But their conversations only lasted a few minutes and they would pause and listen. Their ears played tricks on them; their eyes saw shapes that turned out to be yet another plastic bag, with trapped air bubbles, a child’s toy, a piece of Styrofoam, all things that they gathered and saved. “If you see a plastic arm wash by,” Audra said, “please save it for me!”

“Or a leg!” Michael cried.

“I think a plastic eye would be hard to spot,” Johncy said.

And then the first sea turtle appeared, breaking out of the water, its reptile head prehistoric and determined. On Sister Island, the people stiffened and pointed and got to their feet and stepped over onto Egg Island, now close to detaching itself from Sister Island. The turtle dragged itself up Egg Island slowly, thick flippers pushing against discarded flashlights and computer keyboards and the tarps and pails of the island, its shell toughened and knobbed with small pieces of plastics. And then another and another, all huge and gnarled, and they moved across the discarded plastics that had been thrown into the sea and had grown into the sea. One by one they inched their way forward, their backs stippled with plastics that had latched onto their animal bodies, seamless and as irreproachable as Audra’s arm, as Wen’s heart. It was a selective turn in the usefulness of flesh, in the utility of plastic. Omnipresent now, polluting what had formerly been pristine, pierced by the shoot, the claw, the plow, plastics had threaded their ways back into life.

The turtles selected their space and shifted, pushing their great bodies back and forth, having found the spot where they would lay their eggs, which had gathered bits of microbeads in the process of forming. The eggshells had once been smooth; they now had a granular quality to them, like sand in paint. Was it an evolutionary device, making them unpalatable to predators? The turtles’ massive heads looked straight ahead, mouths slightly open from their efforts. These mouths ended in sharp beaks, and their infants would only emerge when their own beaks were strong enough to pierce the mix of plastic and calcium housing them.

Audra leaned delicately from where she stood on the edge of Sister Island and patted the head of a turtle that had chosen a spot near her. She patted it with her 3D arm. She felt the turtle’s damp knobby head, then let her hand move down to its carapace. The leatherback’s shell was not as hard as other turtles’. It had bony plates beneath the skin on its back, and Audra could feel irregularities on the plates, a feel of edges and lines that felt, to her delicate 3D fingers, familiar; related. Bits and pieces of plastics had worked through the turtle’s skin to the plates below. The turtles, the eggshells, her arm, Wen’s heart: all connected, all synchronous.

The whole event was over in less than an hour. The eggs were laid, the turtles covered them with any loose debris so that they would remain hidden among the other types of plastic overlaying and underlaying the island. They heaved themselves around and used their massive flippers to drive themselves forward, until finally they slipped back into the ocean. Heads could be seen leaving steadily away from the island, and then the heads dipped silently, one by one, and were gone.

The moon was setting, running a light on the ocean. A few oil slicks picked up muted rainbow colors and the merest movements of the waves broke the colors up like a sophisticated painting. A single turtle head surfaced and disappeared again.

“I want to live here forever,” Audra thought, picking idly at the garbage closest to her. It seemed her arm, the 3D arm, was intent on sifting and sorting.

Egg Island pulled away slowly, like a lumbering train obeying strict laws. It wavered and washed in the setting moon’s last luminous light.

On Sister Island, they joined hands and rejoiced at the beauty of the world.

About the Author

Karen Heuler’s stories appear in literary, fantasy, and science fiction magazines regularly and have won various awards, including an O. Henry. Her 2014 novel, Glorious Plague, was about a strangely beautiful apocalypse, and her second story collection, The Inner City, was chosen as one of the best books of 2013 by Publishers Weekly.

Summer at Grandma’s House

Hao Jingfang

He pondered silently: the chain of unconnected actions that had determined his doom and destiny had been of his own creation.

After this summer, I finally understand what Camus said of Sisyphus.

I never looked at the word “fate” this way before. In the past, I always thought that either it was prearranged, and all we had to do was follow along; or that it didn’t exist at all, so we had to devise our own path in life.

I didn’t realize there might be a third option.

A

In August, I leave for my grandmother’s home in the country, fleeing ruckus like Newton fled the Black Plague. I want a quiet summer, nothing more.

The taxi drives out of the city, then along the dusty highway. I stuff my big, empty backpack under the seat and slump against the window.

Really, I’m not running away from anything earth-shattering. My graduation from college is going to be delayed a year. I broke up with my girlfriend. On top of that, I’m feeling a touch of ennui, leaving me unable to take interest in anything. The last one scares me a bit, but other than that, there’s nothing big. I’m not given to drama.

Mom approved. Find someplace to fix up your spirits, she told me, and come back ready for another go. She thought I was really tormented, which wasn’t true. There’s no way I could get her to understand that, though.

My grandmother’s little two-story bungalow sits at the foot of the mountain, its red roof hidden in the dense treetops.

A small chalkboard hangs from the wooden door. Written on it is: “Zhanzhan, I’ve gone shopping. The door is unlocked, so come in on your own when you arrive. There’s food in the fridge.”

I try pulling on the door handle, but it doesn’t budge. It doesn’t turn either, even when I twist harder. I can only sit on the steps and wait.

Grandma’s getting muddle-minded with age, I think. She must have locked the door by habit when she left, then forgot about it.

Grandpa passed away early. My grandmother’s lived here ever since she retired. Mom and Dad wanted to buy her a house in the city, but she turned down all their offers. She said she was used to living alone, as she pleased. She disliked the noise and clamor of the city.

For all her life, Grandma was a college professor; her mind and body were still sound. So Dad agreed. We keep saying we’ll spend a holiday here, but either Dad would be busy, or I’d have something planned with my schoolmates and couldn’t cancel.

I hope Grandma can still take care of herself on her own here, I think to myself, sitting on the steps.

Grandmother finally returns in the evening, quickening her strides when she sees me in the distance. She smiles at me. “Zhanzhan, when did you arrive? Why didn’t you go in the house?”

I dust off my butt and stand up. Grandma walks up the steps, shifts all her bags to her right hand, and pushes the door with her left hand, on the side closer to the hinges—opposite from the handle. Just like that, the door swings open, no fuss. Grandma walks in first, holding the door open for me.

My face flushes a little. I hurry in after her. It looks like I was overthinking things earlier.

Night descends. Night in the countryside is quiet and tranquil, just the dance of tree shadows cast by the moon.

Grandma quickly prepares dinner. The rich fragrance of beef fills the small house. After a long day of travel, the smell makes me ravenous.

“Zhanzhan, bring me the mayonnaise in the kitchen, please.” Grandma carefully sets a tureen of steamed eggs with mushroom on the table.

My grandmother’s kitchen is spacious and decorated in soft colors. Soup simmers on the stove, wreathed in steam.

I pull open the fridge, only to get a shock: inside of the fridge is a baking tray, and the inner walls glow red with heat. A row of apple pastries are crisping on the tray. The sweet smell of butter and honey assaults my face.

Turns out this is the oven. I hurriedly push it shut.

Where’s the fridge, then? I turn around. There’s a glass-windowed metal door under the stove—I assumed that was the oven. I walk over and pull it open, and discover that it’s a dishwasher.

So I pull open the dishwasher, and find that it’s a water purifier; pull open the water purifier, and find that it’s a trash can; open the trash can, and find that it’s filled with a broad selection of CDs, neatly sorted.

Finally I realize that the “heating unit” under the window—I thought it looked like a radiator in its ridged casing—is, in fact, the fridge. I locate the mayonnaise, and make sure to open the lid and sniff it, just to make sure the jar doesn’t actually contain condensed milk. Only after I’ve checked do I return to the dining room.

Grandma already has bowls and chopsticks set out. The instant I sit down I start stuffing my face.

B

I spend the next few days furiously learning how to identify everything.

Almost nothing in Grandma’s house has a function that matches what you’d expect from the form. The coffeepot is a penholder, the penholder is a lighter, the lighter is a flashlight, the flashlight is a jam container.

That last one gives me trouble. It’s the middle of the night when I get up to go to the bathroom. I unthinkingly grab the “flashlight” in the living room, only to get a handful of jam. In the darkness, the wet stickiness on my hand scares the sleep right out of me. When the realization dawns, my first instinct is to get a tissue, but the tissue box is filled with white sugar. I reach for the lamp. Who could have guessed that the table lamp is fake, and that the switch is actually a mousetrap?

With a sharp pa, I find myself in an awkward situation. On my left hand is jam dipped in white sugar. On my right hand is a table lamp smeared with cheese.

“Grandma!” I call softly, but don’t hear a reply. I can only climb the stairs, keeping both hands lifted in front of me. Her bedroom is dark, but yellow-orange light seeps from a small room at the end of the hallway.

“Grandma?” I try, outside of the room.

Following muffled scrapes of table and chair, Grandma appears at the door. She looks me over and bursts right into laughter. “Come with me,” she says.

The room turns out to be much larger than I thought. The lights are bright, and it takes my eyes a moment to adjust. Only then do I see that this is a lab.

Grandma takes an oddly-shaped little key from a drawer and frees me from the table-lamp-mousetrap. I lick my fingers. The cheese still smells delicious.

“Why are you doing experiments this late in the night?” I can’t help but ask.

“With bacterial colony growth, I have to take observations every hour.” Smiling, Grandma leads me over to a milk-colored countertop. A neat row of round Petri dishes lie on the counter, each filled with a translucent substance that looks like medicinal cream.

“Is this . . . nutrient agar?” I’ve done similar experiments at school.

Grandma nods. “I’m observing the movement of transposons in the bacteria.”

“Transposons?”

Grandma opens one of the Petri dishes on her end. She hefts it in her hand and says, “They’re pieces of DNA capable of encoding reverse transcription enzyme, which allows them to migrate along DNA, breaking away or re-integrating themselves. I want to use them to insert synthetic genes for drug resistance.”

Grandma sets the lid back on. “But I don’t know if it will work. This Petri dish is exposed to the air, providing a low-humidity environment. The one next to it is submerged in a sugar solution. The one after that has been enriched with extra ATP.”

I follow her example and open the Petri dish closest to me. “What are the conditions in this one?”

I dab my cheese-covered fingertip on the agar. I know that having plenty of nutrients makes cells reproduce faster, which should speed up the genetic integration.

“Zhanzhan!” Grandma hesitates, then says, “That’s the control sample. It’s not supposed to have any added factors.”

I’m always like that, full of assumptions when I do things, and careless ones at that.

One time, when Jingjing and I fought, she said that I always went about things impulsively, inconsiderately, immaturely. She’s right, I think. She was complaining about the way I always forgot to call her, but I know my problem goes further than that. Jingjing’s a person with lots of plans, and the capability to carry out each one of them reliably, but I’m the total opposite. When I try to carry out my plans, they always go wrong, as sure as bread lands butter-side down.

Without a control, Grandma will have to redo the whole experiment. She can keep observing, technically, but at the least she wouldn’t be able to use it in proper published results.

I’m panicked, unsure of what I should do, but Grandma doesn’t seem to be angry at all.

“It’s no big deal,” Grandma says. “I could use a sample with added cholesterol anyway.”

And Grandma really does take out a marker pen, makes a note on the lid, and keeps on observing.

C

The next morning, Grandma makes sweet osmanthus flower porridge. The morning sun is lovely shining down on the countryside. The only sound for miles around is birdsong.

Grandma asks me if I have any plans for these few days. None, I say. That’s the truth. The only thing I might want to do is think about what I might want to do.

“Your mother says your graduation was delayed because of English, but I don’t see how that could be the case. Weren’t you an English major before you switched? You should be quite good at English.”

“I didn’t test past the fourth level,” I mumble. “I forgot to register in junior year, and this year I forgot the test date.”

I gulp down the porridge with my head lowered, and stuff up my mouth with a sandwich.

I’m not afraid of any English exams, no, but that might have been why I failed to take them seriously. As for my change in major, that’s starting to look like another mistake. I switched to environmental studies, only to discover I didn’t care that much about the environment. Then I fled to hardware engineering in junior year, and attended a year’s worth of biology too. The result was today: I was jack of all majors, master of none.

Grandma cuts me another half slice of bacon. “What did your mother say before you came?”

“Nothing in particular. She just wants me to take a breather here, and read some books on economics if I have the time.”

“Your mother wants you to study economics?”

“Yeah, she says that no matter what company I end up working for, knowing a bit of economics will come in handy.”

My mom thinks that I should set a target, then study whatever I needed to get there. But I was lacking in precisely that department. None of the big goals I set ever lasted more than a few days before I nixed them, which left me without any impetus to work on the tasks at hand.

“You shouldn’t worry too much about the future.” Seeing that I’ve finished eating, Grandma begins to clear the table. “Just like the nose didn’t evolve to prop up glasses.”

Jingjing told me the same thing. “The nose evolved for the purpose of breathing,” she said. God sculpted us all into our own unique forms, so we shouldn’t worry about what other people thought, and stand firm on who we were. So Jingjing left the country, in accordance to who she was. But I was missing that sense of unique purpose too. God never got around to telling me who I was.

My mind is elsewhere as I help clear the table. The leftover porridge splatters all over the floor. My face immediately heats.

“Don’t worry, it’s no big deal.” Grandma takes the pot from me and fetches a mop.

“ . . . It’s flowed into the corner. Won’t that be hard to mop up? Do you have a cloth for cleaning the floor? I’ll do it,” I say, embarrassed.

I think of the way Mom would crouch and meticulously wipe down the crevice where the floor met the wall. Our house was always squeaky clean. Mom hated nothing more than my brand of haphazardness.

“It’s no big deal, really.” Grandma mops up the center of the dining room. “We’ll leave the corner as is.”

She notices that I’m at a loss. “I’m accident-prone myself,” she laughs. “I spill things everywhere. That’s why I laid down culture medium for growing fungi next to the walls. This way I’ll have material for my experiments.”

I bend down to look by the wall. There really is a band of pale green fuzz stretching around the room. From a distance, it looked like decorative trimming along the perimeter of the floor.

“Sweet porridge is ideal, actually. We might even get mushrooms.”

She sees that I’m still awkwardly standing in place, so she adds, “How about this? If you don’t have anything in particular to do these few days, do you want to help me grow fungi?”

I nod without hesitation.

It’s not just because I want to make up for the mess I made. More than that, I feel I need to change how I spend my days. Up until now, my life has been incoherent and scattershot. I haven’t been able to commit to any one of the well-trodden paths in life, or chart my own course. Maybe what I need is opportunity, even accidentally.

D

Grandma likes to say that purpose comes afterward.

Grandma rejects any form of teleology, from animism to vitalism. She doesn’t believe that evolution has a destination and dislikes explanations like “eyes grew eyelashes to keep dust out.” She doesn’t even think cells evolved membranes for self-protection.

“The enclosing membrane came before the cell could exist,” Grandmother says. “Same with G protein-coupled receptors. It became light-sensitive rhodopsin in the eyes and olfactory receptors in the nose.”

It’s a sort of Darwinism, I suppose: first mutation, then selection. First the protein, then the chemical reaction in which to participate. First the ability to encode an enzyme, then the sensory organ that uses the enzyme.

Existence precedes essence, I think the saying goes?

A few evenings later, good news comes from Grandma’s lab: the NTL reagent stain finally reveals the protein we’re looking for in the cytoplasm. A molecular weight test with the centrifuge confirms this. The transposons have successfully reverse transcribed their payload.

After several days of continuous pursuit and observation, you let out a breath at that kind of result. As I help Grandma clean up the lab, I ask, “What gene were we inserting, anyway?”

“A cell suicide signal,” Grandma says placidly.

“Wait, what?”

Grandma bends to sweep up the bits and pieces under the experiment counter. “This experiment was primarily meant as cancer treatment research. Cancer cells are simply cells that don’t die when they should, as you know.”

“Huh.” I pick up the dustpan. “Does that mean you can apply for a patent now?”

Grandma shakes her head. “I don’t want to do that yet.”

“How come?”

“I don’t know if this kind of reverse transcription might have delayed side effects.”

“What do you mean?”

Grandma doesn’t immediately answer. She collects the test tubes and wipes the counter clean. I tie up the trash bag and follow her downstairs to the garden.

“I suppose you haven’t heard the hypothesis of how viruses evolved? Transposons promote genetic recombination inside a cell, but on the loose outside of the cell, they can become viruses, like HIV.”

The summer breeze is warm and dry, but I involuntarily shiver.

So viruses split off from cells themselves. It makes me think of the square root calculator turned execution device in Wang Xiaobo’s book. There’s the same dark humor to it.

I understand Grandma’s attitude, but I can’t help but feel a little dissatisfied deep down. “Still, this technology could cure cancer. Aren’t you afraid someone will beat you to the patent?”

Grandma shakes her head. “What does that matter?”

Peng. At that moment, a thump comes from the other side of the garden.

Grandma and I hurry over, only to see a pudgy, sweaty face emerge from the other side of the garden fence, among the climbing roses.

“Hello . . . I’m terribly sorry, I was trying to rearrange my flower rack, but my hand slipped, and I smashed up your flowers by accident.”

I look down. He dropped a container of chrysanthemums, the flowerpot lying in pieces. Underneath are Grandma’s azaleas, an equally gory sight.

“Oh, right, I just moved here. I’ll be your neighbor from now on.” The fat middle-aged guy is nodding on autopilot. “I really am very sorry, ma’am. It’s my first day here and I’ve already given you trouble.”

“Don’t worry, it’s no big deal.” Grandma smiles genially.

“I’m terribly sorry. I’ll bring you flowers tomorrow to replace it.”

“It’s no big deal, really. I can take the opportunity to extract some chloroplasts and anthocyanin from the leaves and flowers. Don’t mind it.” Grandma bends down as she speaks and starts picking up flowerpot shards.

I stand in the yard, the summer night cool around me. My mind is a jumble.

I’ve discovered that Grandma’s catchphrase is “it’s no big deal.” It might be that most things in Grandma’s eyes really are no big deal. Fame, influence, personal property—none of them matter much at Grandma’s point in life, admittedly. She does whatever she feels like, and to her, it’s enough.

But what about me? I think.

What am I going to do once the summer’s over? Return to school, everything the same as before, and meander around for another year until graduation?

I know that’s not what I want.

E

When next morning comes around, I help Grandma take care of the shattered flowers, extracting the chlorophyll with acetone. With that, Grandma enthusiastically adds a new member to her enormous team of test subjects.

I spend the entire morning mentally battling with myself. Close to noon, I finally make my choice. No matter what, I think, I should first go to the patent office and ask a few questions. Conveniently, the guy next door comes over in the afternoon to make amends. I take the opportunity to run off on my own.

The website gave clear directions to the patent office, and I find it easily. The four-story building is plain but stately, the lobby quiet and well-lit. A graceful, pretty girl sits behind the receptionist’s desk, reading a book.

“H-hello, I’d like to apply for a patent.”

She looks up and smiles. “Hello. Fill out the form over there, please. What are you patenting?”

“Uh, an anti-cancer biological factor.”

“Then you’ll want to head to Hall 3, the Biology and Chemistry Office.” She points toward the right. As I turn, she muses to herself, “Strange, why are there so many people applying for anti-cancer factors today?”

I spin right back around. “Wait, there was someone else before me?”

“Yes, an older man came just this morning.”

My heart lurches. I sense something’s not quite right.

“Do you know what technology he was patenting, specifically?”

“I don’t know, I’m afraid.”

“Was it a drug, or something else?”

The girl sighs. “I’m just a college student working here for the summer. It’s not my business to look at the applications. You should go in and ask yourself.” With that, the girl lowers her head once more and resumes scribbling and underlining.

I bend over to look. It’s a book of English vocabulary. “You’re memorizing vocabulary?” I ask, trying to get her on my side. “I’m doing that too.”

“Oh? You’re a college student?” She raises her head and looks me over curiously. “And you already have something to patent? That’s impressive.”

“Ah . . . no, you’ve got it wrong.” My face flushes a little. “I’m just looking in on behalf of my academic advisor. Do you remember what that older guy looked like? I think my advisor might have come here already without telling me.”

“Hmm . . . he was short, on the plump side, kind of bald. I think he was wearing a yellow jacket. I don’t remember anything else.”

Like I suspected. No wonder I noticed something was off when I left the house.

The middle-aged guy next door arrived with his flowers just then. I took the flowerpot from him, and when he went to open the door for me, he pushed on the side of the door closer to the hinges without hesitation. Someone here for the first time wouldn’t have known to do that. I understand now. Last night wasn’t purely chance. He must have accidentally knocked over the flowers while eavesdropping.

He really has no sense of decency, coming over again today, I think. I need to hurry and tell Grandma. He probably thought that we wouldn’t be applying for a patent and would never find out. Good thing I came here.

“Leaving already?” the girl calls out as I head for the door. “Here’s a pamphlet, then. It has an introduction to the patent office and an explanation of the application process, plus contact information.”

I manage a smile. I accept the pamphlet, stick it in my pocket, and stride quickly out the door.

F

I rush home only to find Grandma in her lab like usual, calmly looking through her microscope. She’s a quiet, steady island amid a chaos of river torrents.

“Grandma . . . ” I force my panting and puffing under control. “He stole your Petri dishes . . . ”

“Back from somewhere? Where did you go, to end up so dusty?” Grandma looks up, smiling, and brushes at my jacket.

“I went—” I fall silent, unsure of how to explain my trip to the patent office. I change tack. “Grandma, that fat guy next door stole your Petri dishes and applied for a patent.”

Unexpectedly, Grandma only smiles. “It’s no big deal. I can continue my research just fine. Moreover, like I told you, the experiment we conducted was very crude and preliminary. The results can’t be put into application as they are.”

I look at Grandma, at a loss for words. Is it actually possible for someone to be so easygoing? Grandma doesn’t seem to concern herself with things like intellectual property and monetary gain at all. I silently take the pamphlet out of my pocket and hold it in my hands, folding and unfolding it.

“Don’t worry about that for now. First come and look at this.” Grandma points to the microscope in front of her.

I take a halfhearted peep through it. “What is it?” I ask, offhandedly.

“Genetically engineered photosynthesizing bacteria.”

I perk up. This sounds interesting. “How did you do it?”

“I simply reverse transcribed genes from the chloroplasts into the bacteria. They’ve already expressed many of the proteins, although I’m sure there are still problems present. If we can overcome them, maybe these bacteria can be used as a source of alternative energy.”

As I listen to Grandma’s placid, happy voice, I suddenly get a strange and dreamlike feeling. It’s like I’m cocooned in a layer of fog, while her voice is coming from a long distance away. I look down. I’m rubbing the pamphlet between my fingers. I need to make a choice.

Grandma’s still talking. “As you know, I’ve laid down a lot of culture medium on the floors. I plan to replace more material so I can grow the bacteria all over the house. If it works, we’ll have a use for porridge leftovers and everything. As for the actual electricity generation, you were the one who gave me the inspiration. Cell membranes normally have high fluidity, which makes it difficult to capture the high-energy electrons generated from photosynthesis. However, if we add large quantities of cholesterol molecules, we can just about stabilize the membrane. In theory, we can use micro-electrodes to position . . . ”

I stand there woodenly. I’m not really paying attention to Grandma, just catching fragments here and there. This discovery might have even bigger future applications. But my brain is a worse jumble than before. I can’t concentrate enough to listen anymore. “You’re bringing up all the things I did wrong,” I say awkwardly.

Grandma shakes her head. “Zhanzhan, do you still not understand?” She stops, looking into my eyes. “Every day, every moment, countless random events will occur. You’ll pick one of many possible restaurants to eat at, take one of many possible buses, see one of many possible advertisements. And at that point in time, you can’t classify them as good or bad, right or wrong. They take on worth only in the future. What we do at this moment in the present gives meaning to another moment in the past . . . ”

Grandma’s voice sounds light and drifting. I can’t react to it in time. Chance, time, meaning, future, the words spin in my head. I think of Borges’, “The Garden of Forking Paths.” Yu Tsun must have felt what I’m feeling, the decision uncertain but fomenting in my heart, even as enigmatic words wisp into my ear . . .

“ . . . biology is based on just one set of principles: random events and directional selection. What’s doing the selection? What allows some events to stick around and prove to be beneficial? The answer is perpetuation alone. If a protein can persist, it will persist. It will claim a position in the course of history, while other proteins appear and then disappear at random. The only way to make a step you’ve taken ‘correct’ is to take another step in the same direction . . . ”

I think of myself, of the fat guy next door, of Mom and Jingjing, of the four years I spent in a muddle, of my dejection and conflict, of the bright and shining lobby of the patent office. I know I need an opportunity.

“ . . . that’s why, if we can make use of them, cheese and spilled porridge and broken-off flowers don’t have to be bad things at all.”

And I make my choice.

G

After that summer, I get an internship at the patent office. I learned of the opportunity from the booklet.

It’s not very easy to find a proper job here, but they’re always looking for college students to take care of odds and ends—fortunate, that I haven’t graduated yet. The work at the patent office isn’t hard, but it requires a bit of knowledge from every field—fortunate, that I was so aimless in my studies at college.

An’an—the girl I met the first time I came here—is now my girlfriend. We fell in love while studying together for the English exam—fortunate, that I hadn’t passed the fourth level. An’an says that I seemed polite and shy on first impression, which she found charming—I didn’t tell her that it was due to nervousness and a guilty conscience. Everything seems to have worked out like magic. Even the things I felt bad about ended up helping me.

Taking it a step further, I can even say that my inner turmoil was a good thing—if it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t have gone to Grandma’s house, and everything that came after wouldn’t have happened. Looking back, everything from before was all linked together into one chain.

I know that no one planned this for me. Fate doesn’t exist. I chose all of it.

It’s a strange feeling. We always think we can choose our futures, but that’s not true. What we really can choose is our past.

I chose the lunch I had a couple of years ago, made it a lunch different from the thousand other possible lunches. Likewise, I chose whether my time at college was a mistake.

Maybe accepting reality is just another name for staying true to yourself. Who are you, really, other than the sum of everything that’s happened?

A year has passed. With a happy mindset, I’ve done great at my work. The patent office has accepted me as a full-time employee. I’ll start my job in the fall.

I like it here. I like learning bits and pieces from all sorts of subjects. Besides, I’m no good at making long-term plans, or carrying them out. The work here is just one case after another, no need for looking far ahead. Plus, I have the same job as Einstein, which is pretty awesome.

After a year of repeated experiments and observations, Grandma is applying for patents for her anti-cancer factor and photosynthesizing walls. Several large companies have already expressed interest. Grandma isn’t interested in contract negotiations, so I’ve taken on the responsibilities of a middleman. Fortunate, that I work for the patent office.

Oh, right, I forgot to mention. The fat guy next door didn’t steal the Petri dishes with the anti-cancer factors after all. He thought he found the incubator, but it was actually an ordinary wardrobe. The real incubator looks like a dresser.

So you never know what something’s really meant for, Grandma says. Turns out she knew from the beginning. Turns out she knew everything from the beginning.

Originally published in Chinese in Science Fiction World, 2007.

Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

About the Author

In 2002, Hao Jingfang was awarded First Prize in the New Concept Writing Competition. She gained her undergraduate degree from Tsinghua University’s Department of Physics and her Ph.D. from the same university in Economics and Management in 2012. Her fiction has appeared in various publications, including Mengya, Science Fiction World, and ZUI Found. She has published two full-length novels, Wandering Maearth and Return to Charon; a book of cultural essays, Europe in Time; and the short story collection, Star Travellers. Her fiction has appeared before in English translation in Lightspeed and Uncanny.

War, Ice, Egg, Universe

G. David Nordley

I shall start four cycles before the Westerian invasion, the threat of which I then appreciated only as a source of support for my research into the source of lightstone.

My third-molting-father, Professor Colonel Threeclickson, had come to express his worries about my slow field work in the deepest part of the long valley that gave our land its name, some eight-to-the-fourth body lengths from the University. His fronds drooped toward the ice and he glowed with white noise as all the hairs on his four long legs vibrated in disharmony. Reaching over with a long arm, he lifted up my head.

“Up there,” he said, waving his three remaining arms upward. “The answers lie above.”

I could not nod agreement with his pincer under my mandible like that, but managed a polite “Yes, sir,” from my spiracles.

He let go and I brought my head down again, but only to the level of my upper thorax.

Threeclickson’s spiracle covers clapped. “You are always staring at the ice, Loudpincers. Elevate your ambitions.”

I bent my neck up again so my head was at the level of his. “Sir. The ice is where we find the lightstone that takes our instruments up there. If we knew where lightstone came from, we might be able to find more of it, and, perhaps, even ascend ourselves, without dying first.”

Threeclickson seemed mollified; the hair on his legs settled down and assumed their normal texture. “Your logic is right, but be wary of becoming too indirect. You know that Professor General Icescriber has proposed building an ascent sphere of ice?”

I shivered with the thought of such an adventure as well as from lingering fears from larvahood myths about the eater of disobedient souls in the land of the dead. “Yes . . . uh, sir . . . I’ve seen drawings of it. It’s one arm thick all around with polished areas to see through; it should resist crushing and let us get really high—if we can find or make enough lightstone to lift it.”

Threeclickson laughed with staccato slaps of his spiracle valves, which made his upper thorax sparkle. “I rather supposed that would appeal to you. At my third molting, I shared that ambition. There is some promising related research that, however, must be held among the staff for now . . . ” He trailed off. “But the water above is not friendly to life. As a body goes up, its heavy parts are compressed and we cannot breathe easily above eight to the fifth body-lengths. It is, after all, the realm of the dead . . . Well, Loudpincers, have you looked at the latest lightstone research?”

“Goodphaser thinks it works its way up from further below.”

The professor huffed currents out of his spiracles. “So much is obvious.”

“Softtipspawn has a theory that lightstone might be connected with the periodicity of icecover plant growth,” I ventured.

“Pure speculation. I know she is a friend of yours, but biology isn’t Softtipspawn’s field. Major Lecturer Tightpincers is a zoologist, however, and she is pretty sure that lightstone is excreted by an unknown species of giant iceworm—little iceworms have long been known to feed on concentrated minerals released from warmfall water as it freezes.”

I tried to imagine a huge worm tunneling through solid ice and couldn’t, so I maintained a respectful silence. Threeclickson and Tightpincers were thick, and if rumors were to be believed, might spawn together next feasting season.

“I can tell you don’t think much of that one,” Threeclickson said, accusingly.

“Sir . . . it’s very difficult to observe anything in a warmfall,” I said. “The warm water makes one slow or even unconscious.”

“She surrounds herself with ice before going in and is usually conscious for long enough to note what happens. I must admit there has been a problem getting others to replicate this. Well, what else have you found out?”

I recited my research. “Lightstone comes in many varieties and varies in lifting power per unit volume, though it takes a sensitive balance to see the difference. Lightstone with the most inertia lifts most strongly. Some people have timed the rise of lightstone through the ice to the surface by protecting the surface over them from variations and taking measurements every feast cycle. They drift upward at varying rates, usually less than one over eight-to-the-fourth body lengths in a cycle.”

“Brightpincers and Loudlegs,” Threeclickson replied. “They’re visiting from Great Warmfall. And they’ve also shown that solutions of ground lightstone are the same as found in iceworm excrement, by the way. Well, what conclusion do you draw from all of this?”

I hesitated, not sure I should tell Threeclickson all my cosmological speculations, but vanity spoke. “I think they might be concentrated by living things, not living in the ice, but rather on the other side of the ice. There could be another shell of water beyond this one, further out from the center. Like an egg of ice with many shells. But that’s just speculation,” I hurried to add.

“And not original. There is a long history of stories about beings from the underworld. Unfortunately, they are tales to make larva more attentive.”

I opened my pincers. I could not help that. “I need more data. Since I’ve covered almost all of the base’s allocated research area, the only way to get more is to go, well, deeper. Lightstone comes from somewhere.”

Another spiracle flap. “Well, I haven’t seen any giant iceworms either, so maybe. But be careful who you say that to; I would not want to see my molt-son ridiculed.” He waved his fronds. “Going down to go up! The Mystical Church would love it. But your logic seems unassailable.”

He waved an arm toward the west; a dim glow of noise marked the direction of our neighbors in Crossvalleys. “I wish our Long Valley were likewise unassailable. But Highfronds’ Westerian Empire draws nearer. They are absorbing Crossvalleys—see the glow of their war machines? We are getting refugees daily.”

I shivered. Crossvalleys was but a thirty-cycle hike from Long Valley, and only Lushole lay between them and us. “We are no match for the empire in population,” I said.

“Aye, but do we just allow ourselves to be eaten or enslaved? Our one hope lies in better weapons, and that means better research. So, do your research, but keep in mind the needs of defense; the research must pay off soon, Loudpincers. There is not much time. Goodcycle.”

“Goodcycle, sir.”

He scrabbled off among the hillocks and ridges of the research field, lit in sparkles by the myriad sounds of nature. Pompous as he was, it was good for him to journey so far and take so much time with me. The bottom of Long Valley was very isolated; it was too prone to enervating warmfalls to be settled, so he’d come some distance from the comforts of civilization.

I wanted to find more lightstone, of course, but that was only part of the ancient question that had gripped my imagination. How deep could I go? The bottom of Long Valley’s eponymous rift was by all accounts as far from the center and the land of the dead as one could get in the ice. It was kept clear by a periodic warmfall, so I had a good head start.

What was below the ice? Theology had long held that our universe was a bubble in an infinite volume of ice, and academic cosmology had no better suggestion, so the question itself was a minor heresy, but priests did not have the standing in Long Valley they had in Westeria. Some radical geometers had offered the idea that the ice was finite but unbounded; if I could dig down forever I would end up coming up on the other side of the universe, just as if one kept going west with the current from Long Valley, one would eventually reach Long Valley from the east side. That closure was of two dimensions and required three, the greater closure would be in three dimensions and require four.

The idea made my head ache. I didn’t believe it, anyway. Something came up through the ice to make the plants grow. That something did not come down from the center, because you could cover the plants and they would still grow. And they would still grow according to the regular cycle. To me, this meant that something different had to lie below, something that changed with the cycle.

I took my prized lightstone axe from my thorax pouch and carefully tied its tether to my abdomen belt against its tendency to fly upward. I followed the path back to my pit, contemplating the universe. Icesplitter’s model of weight held that water pushed things less dense than it out from the center, giving us weight and keeping us firmly on the ice.

It seemed to me that unless there were something pushing the ice toward the center, the universe would explode. Therefore, there should be a layer of water, or something, beyond this one. Perhaps more. The “layer” that lay beyond our layer must generate, or at least transmit, lightstones. And if I could find it, my people might have what they needed to defend themselves.

I checked my surface stores and rappelled down a knotted rope to begin again my painstaking routine: thirty swings of the axe, then wait for my body to recharge itself as the ice chips settled back down. Then do it again. It took me a demicycle to lower the pit floor by a quarter arm.

With each new level reached, I gently laid my ear fronds on the hard, cold ice-viewer, chirped a command to my vibrators, and watched for the dull fuzzy spots that would signify lightstones.

A quarter-cycle went by. Then I noticed something strange; not a dark, hard reflection spot that would signify a lightstone, but rather that half of my field of view seemed dimmer than the other half.

I raised my body on all four legs and directed my attention to the viewer itself. Designed from Valleyscraper’s sonic wave theory of vision, it had eight-squared cones, each widest at the bottom and narrowing to a small plunger and plate arrangement at the top, on which one laid one’s fronds. It multiplied by two times eight squared the slight motion of the waves emerging from ice in contact with the wide ends of the cones to those fronds in contact with the narrow ends.

The fluid in each cone was under a slight pressure, and if it leaked, the amplification would be somewhat less intense; and I would perceive that part of the wave front as being dimmer. But I could not think of anything that would cause half the cones on one side to leak.

The viewer was anchored to the ice by a heavy tube frame; if the pressure on one side were not the same as on the other, there might be a difference. With effort, I braced all my legs and lifted the viewer off the ice; it did not seem unbalanced.

Still, I examined it at a wide range of frequencies—and nothing looked wrong.

I might, I realized, be sounding the edge of a huge object buried deep beneath the ice, its faintness due to depth, or softness. I went to the viewer and chirped for illumination. The dark half was still there. I moved the viewer slightly and chirped again. The edge stayed where it was—so it lay in the ice and not in the viewer.

Was it, I wondered, the edge of a physical change in the ice at that level? A field of soft ice? I thought I would have to expand my pit to test that hypothesis, and that would take cycles of work. But as I went to move the viewer to make room for digging, I tilted it and had an inspiration.

Suppose I dug my pit with a slightly concave bottom? I could move the viewer around scanning through the ice at various angles, looking thus in a different direction in each place and greatly expanding my field of view. I hastened to work.

It took another quarter cycle, but there was definitely something down there. It was huge, it was distant. It, I dreamed, might be a giant lightstone, more than enough for thousands of weapons. But I would never get to it before the Westerian armies got to us; I would need help to dig down quickly. I went off to find Threeclickson, snacking on local iceweed as I went; no time to stop for a meal now!

I found Threeclickson in his office with General Councilor Sharpfronds and four others.

“Loudpincers! Just the young body we need. You have saved me the trouble of sending for you. You know the general. I would like you to meet as well Professor Lieutenant Farfronds, Mr. Crushpincers, Mr. Eightfold Longtail, and Goodmother Quickfronds.”

“Goodcycle, all. Need? I have just come to tell you I’ve found something of potentially immense value, what is possibly a huge lightstone buried deep in the ice.”

Spiracles flapped in humor. “What would you say, Loudpincers, if I told you we have gained access to where we shall not have to dig for lightstone?”

I waved my pincers upward in a questioning posture.

“Precisely. If you come into the courtyard, we shall show you. Are you curious?”

I decided to set my news aside for a moment; I had delivered it and need not argue or expound on its importance, and the possibility of a journey to the center excited me. I nodded agreement and followed the Colonel and the General.

The university offices form a hexagon, the center of which is an open area twenty bodies across. Much of the military development that we would rather others not hear was done there, and as such an invitation to enter was a mark of great trust—something I even more greatly appreciated as I approached its entrance, secured by three military personal and two sets of woven stiffplant doors.

We negotiated this gauntlet one by one and found in the open space beyond, with sonic beams illuminating it from all sides, a vast sphere, fully three bodies across. A windlass even larger than it was stood next to it. A small fortune in netterbug web fiber must have been wound around it.

“Young Loudpincers,” Sharpfronds’ said. “There is a steady rain of lightstone skyward; it all must collect in the center. But how far is that? Now Prof. Major Crossfronds has received an echo from his instrument.”

“An echo?” Were there layers above as well as layers below?

“Almost three times eight-to-the-fifth body-lengths above us is a reflection.”

“Not a temperature ghost,” Threeclickson added. “Something real that does not move. The center itself, or at least something that might stop lightstone on its way to the center.”

I looked at the sphere and the windlass. Then I spotted its propulsion system: a small net filled with a fortune’s fortune of lightstone waving gently in the current above the sphere, straining to drag the sphere upward.

My leg hair vibrated in spite of myself. “You mean to go where the dead go to reclaim the lightstone?”

“Exactly,” Threeclickson said. “And you must come too.”

It was said gently, as if in invitation, but it was an invitation, I realized, that I dared not refuse now that I knew what technology would accomplish this trip. Besides, if I had been told everything with a free choice, I would have begged to go.

“When?” was all I asked.

They were all still for a moment, and in the dark silence, the thumps of distant war machines made the horizon glow. Threeclickson waved an arm in Sharpfronds’ direction.

“There must be no delay,” Sharpfronds said. “We go as soon as provisions are loaded, in about thirty clicks. What you need will be on board, so there is no need to gather anything; however, I should not dismiss the danger.”

He cupped his fronds toward each of us in turn. No one wavered that I could sense.

“Good. If you have affairs to settle, you, I, and all of us should do what we can in the time we have to resolve them. There are sonotube cubicles around the perimeter which you may use.”

“You are going yourself, General?” I asked, not knowing then how impertinent that was.

Sharpfronds turned, then waved an arm, dismissing any idea of offense. “My style is to lead from the front, Loudpincers.”

With that, he departed.

I stood and looked in wonder at the sphere for a few clicks, then proceeded to the perimeter.

From the standpoint of few affairs to complicate things, they had chosen me well. I had only my eggmother to tell and my project for an inheritance. Eggmother was away, so I called the university recorder, who took my message for her and recorded my will. For the project, there was nobody but Softtipspawn. Because she was an early teacher of mine, our relationship was still a bit spiny and for her to consider spawning with a student was to mix things better not mixed. But I would be a student no longer in a few cycles, and her eggs carried an intelligent heritage. We were of similar age, three moltings each, and this was thought best for reproductive success. If she would not get my seed, at least she would get my data; that in itself was seed for something.

The next step was the hardest. One wants, more than anything, for one’s existence to have meaning. My discovery would, perhaps, cause my name to be immortal. But if it fell into the hands of the Westerian Empire, every being in the universe would be in jeopardy. With great reluctance, I told the recorder to place my will among the things that would be destroyed should the university fall to the empire. Not until that moment had the impending invasion really hit home.

A horn pulsed deep long waves. Our departure signal, probably, though I had not been told that. I left the cubical and headed for the sphere. There, Mr. Crushpincers directed me toward a hinged section of the sphere. He was, despite his name, quite small.

“It is a hatch. Pull it outward,” he said.

I did as he said and it opened easily, almost pulling itself from my fingers as it swung hard toward the ice. “It seems too heavy to be strong,” I said.

“It has many layers of fiber joined with a glue made from iceworm skin. It is both stronger than ice itself and heavier; this is a secret which you must keep now.”

I moved the door back and forth, thinking about how strong and heavy it was. “If we have this, what do we need of lightstone weapons?”

Crushpincers clicked with good humor. “Not as much, certainly. But we need lightstone for much more than for weapons; we need the lightstone to fly over the enemy. A lightstone-levitated gondola with four archers could neutralize an eight of eights of infantry, if even a quarter of their load of poisoned daggershells found the target.”

The instinct of a daggershell was to seek the ice at as high a velocity as its water jets would take it, its hard, notched shell penetrating deep enough to hold it until its next molting. They could stab completely through a thorax and still stick in the ice below. Many cycles ago, I had come close to being under one, and the wonder and fear at hearing its bright landing so close to me was one of my strongest youthful memories. To us such a thing as a weapon spoke of our desperation. To actually swim above the ice levitated by lightstone fired my imagination.

“What a project! Are you coming along?”

“No, someone must mind the windlass, I fear. Now you’re the last, so on your way.”

I nodded and entered the sphere. My companions were on benches against the side around the equator of the sphere, each with a portal that had been invisible from outside. Cabinets, no doubt filled with the equipment we would need, lay under the benches. I took the remaining free bench and looked around.  

I felt I had entered some new and strange universe. The inner wall was smooth to even the highest frequencies, like an egg. Apart from the benches, the cabinets, and a cylinder covered by what sounded to be a taut drumhead at the very bottom, it all seemed very stark and featureless.

“We ascend,” Sharpfronds said. Only the slightest motion betrayed the truth of what he said.

“Loudpincers,” Goodmother Quickfronds said. “I have prepared something for us all to take that will ameliorate the effects of the rising pressure. I assure you, despite what it tastes like, that it will not harm you—I have taken it several times myself in pressure chamber tests.”

“Pressure chamber?” I had never heard of such a thing.

Quickfronds raised her fronds in pleasure. “It lies beneath the north side of the University. We carved a cylindrical room, then froze a plug that, after some grinding, matches the opening almost exactly. The ‘almost’ we take care of with a caulking paste of crushed iceweed. A great screw can push the plug down, compressing the water beneath it.”

I made postures of admiration. “This must have been in work for some time.”

Sharpfronds clicked his spiracles. “It has. Fortunately. Dr. Quickfronds is our greatest expert on this, and we trust her to keep us alive. Now let me show you another wonder. Crushpincers?”

“Yes, General?” The voice had a tinny quality, missing some of its lower register glow, but it was clear and understandable. But where was Crushpincers?

“How far?” Sharpfronds asked, directing his voice to the drum.

“Two eight cubed and six bodies of line out,” the voice answered, lighting up the drumhead.

Crushpincers must be outside the sphere, I thought. Observing the play out of the tether line. But, I remembered, the reel was on the ice, and we’d been rising for some time. We’d have gone through the reflecting layer beyond which unaided acoustic senses could not see. So how?

Sharpfronds leg hair vibrated in excitement. “Good show. Loudpincers and everyone, there is enough tension in the line to carry the sounds we make, as amplified by the big drum head you see in the center. Another drum is attached to the line by small lightstone rollers, so that Crushpincers’ voice can vibrate the line and carry up to us. The same works in reverse.”

“Crushpincers is still on the ice?” I said, half asking, half stating.

“Yes,” Sharpfronds said.

I could think of nothing to say. The implications of being far, far above the ice and still being able to talk to those below ran riot in my mind. Speaking tubes ran only a few eights of body lengths before the voice faded to inaudibility. Beyond that, messengers had been needed.

We rose and rose. There was no way to keep track of cycles, save through the voice of Crushpincers or one of his students from the drum below; but they told us that two had passed. Dr. Threeclickson said, based on his geometrical analysis, that we had ascended a hundredth of the distance to the mathematical center. Sharpfronds said we should reach something soon; occasional holes in the reflecting layer had revealed another reflecting layer at about this distance.

We were all feeling somewhat ill. The pressure, Goodmother Quickfronds said, was compressing the heavy fluid cavities in our bodies, interfering with our ability to produce energy. We would be able to tolerate it based on the pressure chamber experiments, for quite some additional distance. But it would be uncomfortable until we got used to it.

I felt tired, a little woozy, and lighter and lighter. I began holding onto my shelf instinctively, as if to keep from floating off it like I was made of lightstone. The very physics of my body was changing; it was as if I was being drawn to the land of the dead. Should we really be doing this, I wondered.

To keep my mind off my innards, I tried discussing cosmology with Quickfronds, explaining to her my idea that the universe was like an egg with multiple shells.

“Egg, universe—it’s an interesting analogy,” she said. “Shells exist to keep out parasites, but allow water and dissolved heavyfluid to enter and nourish the embryonic larva. The larvae exist between the shell and the center, which has nourishment, but is not alive. An idea is a bit like an egg, too, I think. It should stay in the shell of one’s mind until it is ready to emerge, no sooner, no longer. A real egg has only one shell, Loudpincers, and hatches only once. And before crèches and culling, most larvae were eaten when hatched. If our universe is like an egg, are we really ready to crack its shell?”

War, ice, egg, universe—individuals were laid, hatched, lived and died. But everything else seemed to stay the same. “For how long have nations rose and fell, for how long has knowledge been won and lost, how many generations of soldiers have died fighting over the same ice?”

Quickfronds nodded. “For longer than we know. Sometimes a warmfall will expose relics; Steadylegs of Crossvalleys has looked at the distribution and frequency of such finds and thinks warmfalls are less frequent now than when they were deposited, and the ice is on average a few body lengths thicker. But there is no discernible change in these rates for the five and three-eighths great greatcycles for which we have records.”

I imagined all my research lost to the Westerian invasion and then, greats of greatcycles later, being duplicated by someone else, only to be lost again.

“What happens to a larva that stays too long in its shell?”

“The worms come, in time. An eggshell is not forever.” Quickfronds waved an arm around her, “Our present shell only seems like it. Your analogy of the egg seems to repeat itself on several scales, and both in abstract and concrete. There may be some wisdom in it on how the universe does things.”

“Thank you, Goodmother.”

She nodded and turned away, signaling the end of conversation. I, too, was having trouble concentrating as what the pressure of the ascent was doing to my body distracted me. On and on we went, and we grew quieter and more unsure. How much cable did Crushpincers have on the reel? I couldn’t remember.

If we did not find something soon, I thought, we might be in no shape to do anything with it.

“Comrades,” Professor Lieutenant Farfronds called. “Something lies . . .

The impact came as a surprise, throwing us off our shelves.

“ . . . ahead of us.”

We floated together into a jumble on one side of the sphere. Or the bottom, now, for, pulled however gently, we stayed there. It felt as if up had become down and down, up.

Then, before anyone could even groan in astonishment, the sphere began tilting back and forth, and we slowly rolled as a mass to the top. After much embarrassed and apologetic moving of limbs, we sorted ourselves out into a rough circle around the top.

General Sharpfronds gathered himself, jumped and swam up to the drumhead, and latched on. “Crushpincers!” he bellowed.

There was no response. The sound transmittal system depended on tension, I realized. And now there was none. We rocked slowly, feeling upside down and helpless.

Finally, there was some more rocking and a kind of sucking sound. The motion of the sphere changed, now feeling like it was tethered again as opposed to sitting on something.

“General? Anyone?” Crushpincers’ tinny voice sounded.

“Thank goodness,” Mr. Longtail sighed.

“We’re here, Crushpincers. We’re seemingly, uh, upside down, but everyone seems okay. Ah, Goodmother?”

“It was a gentle crash, we should all be undamaged.”

“I’m undamaged,” Sharpfronds echoed. Others followed his lead.

“Good.” Crushpincers voice came after a discernible delay. “We noted when the line went slack, but there is some lag since you are so far up. I have had to reel you back a little to restore tension to the tether, but you should still be close to what stopped you. Can you open the top hatch?”

It was at our feet now; top had become bottom.

“We shall attempt that presently. Thank you, Crushpincers.” Sharpfronds waved a limb at us. “It seems we have arrived.”

“We should gather the lightstone quickly,” Goodmother Quickfronds said. “I don’t know how long our physiology will hold up under this pressure.”

Actually, I felt somewhat better than I had earlier. Perhaps my body was adapting to the new conditions. I was conscious of, well, slowness, in my thought and movements. But quality seemed unaffected.

Sharpfronds nodded. “Loudpincers, Farfronds, unscrew the latches. Longtail, wind up the beacon.”

We all jumped to our tasks, though I wanted a look at the beacon. Wind-up implied a spring of some sort; I had never heard of a spring driving a beacon before. The threat of the Empire had made the University busy indeed, and I found myself very curious about things that, apparently, no longer were to be hidden from me.

But first things first. I went to work on my latches. As I did so, the sphere began to develop a slight monotonic glow; the beacon, I presumed. Soon the hatch swung aside, and revealed “below” us a vast, smooth, featureless plain starkly lit by the tone of the beacon. I didn’t see anything at all that looked like lightstone.

“So that is the land of the dead. Not quite what we were told before molting, is it?” General Sharpfronds said. “No eater of souls, no pleasure gardens, and no piles of lightstone, either.”

“No, sir,” said Farfronds. “It looks like another layer of ice, though darker, less reflective.”

“The multishell cosmology,” Professor Colonel Threeclickson said. “When the lightstone hits it, it must work its way through to another layer of water, perhaps one that is inhabited. As for the darkness, we have no idea what our layer looks like on the other side. It could be a debris field.”

My leg hair wilted. That was my idea and Threeclickson had stolen it. I felt vindicated but disappointed that I had not gotten any recognition.

“And what happens to the dead?” Longtail asked. “I have a bad feeling about this. It is not what we expected. If we cannot see any lightstone, perhaps we should go home.”

Silence greeted that remark. Not finding the lightstone made the expedition a failure and could have grave consequences for our nation.

“The area of this land must be over eighty percent of the area of our land.” Professor Threeclickson said.  “We can only see a small portion. Where do the warmfalls come from? We should take more of a look.”

“You are welcome to stick your head in the crack,” said Longtail.

“I volunteer,” said Lieutenant Farfronds.

“Thank you,” General Sharpfronds said. “But I would like one experienced soldier to remain aboard the sphere at all time. Since I shall have to make the decision of what to do, I shall get the information first hand. Your orders, Farfronds, are that if anything happens to me, have Crushpincers pull you all back. You hear that, Crushpincers?”

“I hear, General. May I suggest that, in that event, we pull back a little way and reevaluate. We would not want to lose you.”

“Oh, bother that. Very well. Pull back a little and, Farfronds, you do as you think best. But should I meet my end up or down there, whatever it is, honor me by making sure that nobody else meets a similar end.”

“Sir!” Farfronds replied.

“Enough discussion. Ware above, as below!”

Sharpfronds let go of the communications drum and dropped slowly through the hatch and onto the plain. So far, so good. But then he kept going into it, though very slowly.

“Soft!” he said. “Like so much rotten tissue. Slime. I’m sinking into it! Totally unexpected! Throw me a line, quickly.”

Farfronds leaped up to the cabinets below our benches and clinging with three arms managed to open a cabinet with one, extract a coil of rope, and toss it down to me. “Loudpincers! Tie an end to the latch and throw the coil down at Sharpfronds.”

A glance down at Sharpfronds showed only his head and fronds still echoing above the surface. His voice holes were beneath it, but he had two of his arms just on the surface, waving slowly back and forth, trying to swim in it, it seemed. He could keep that up only so long, I realized. He was suffocating.

I glanced up in time to catch the coil of rope, but instead of just throwing it down to Sharpfronds, I followed the coil and lowered myself claw by claw toward the surface. The exertion made me incredibly tired.

General Sharpfronds had vanished entirely just as I reached the surface; there was nothing to show that he’d caught the coil. I began to lower myself into the surface, head first, to keep my spiracles above for as long as possible. Voices called to me to stop, but there was no time to argue.

The material was viscous, clinging, and dense. I tried chirping to see, but the viscous mass seemed to absorb every sound I made; it was as black as deafness.

I reached as far down as I could with my upper arm, feeling my energy wane as the substance began to block my spiracles. I felt something, and grabbed and held. It could be Sharpfronds’ limb. Or something else entirely. Something long dead.

Shuddering, I held on and began to back. Slowly at first, as the holding and the motion took every available bit of energy I had. But as more of my spiracles emerged into clean water above, I felt a little more strength.

Then the rope started to move up. My comrades must have seen me try to back out, I thought, and helped by pulling the line in.

My head broke into the water and I started rising faster. I shook myself back and forth to try to clean my fronds and vision returned. What I had in my hand was definitely someone’s wrist, just inward of his pincers.

I looked around for a moment as my flapping spiracles desperately tried to restore my energy. In the monotonic glow of our beacon, every bump in the surface cast long, exaggerated shadows. One of the shadows moved, undulating toward me. I had to stare for seconds to be sure of what I was seeing; the rise in the surface was huge.

Suddenly, the slime fell away and a great round hole slowly broached above the slime, then waved right and left before descending again. The hole appeared to be a mouth with six huge triangular teeth around its rim, pointing inward. The Eater of Souls, I thought—mythology come real.

Clinging with both hind arms, I reached down into the slime with my other arm, grabbed my prize, and pulled. With the group above pulling as well, an entire arm emerged: pincer, wrist, and up to the second joint.

The huge surface undulations moved nearer. Not enough time, I thought, not nearly enough time. But I continued to pull. Suddenly, the strain on my arms seemed to double and I had to cling, both to rope and the arm, with all my remaining strength. The eater? One slice of those teeth and I would be left holding only an arm, if that.

But before I let go, I saw that the arm I held was emerging rapidly now; we were being pulled faster from above. The winch, I thought. They must have told Crushpincers to reel us in. The General—for it was he—began to emerge. He came clear; thorax, head, abdomen, and his limbs trailing limply, but still in one piece, the muck streaming away from his body.

The slime swelled up next to us and a great arch, the upper part of the eater’s mouth, broke the surface and rose inexorably up beside us. Slime fell away from two, then three huge triangular teeth.

This would be very close, but the general’s body was free now and we were rising even more rapidly than the eater’s mouth. Maybe it would miss. I freed one hand from the General’s arm and got ready to try to bat or push us away. Hopeless, perhaps, but I would not give up.

Then something large and bright fell rapidly from above—incredibly quickly, the speed of its passage creating a brilliant wake behind it. I recognized it; it was our bag of lightstone, the one on top of the sphere that suspended us up/down from the ice. What a thing to see lightstone as falling, but that was the current perspective.

It struck the mouth just a body length from me and cracked it, caving it in between two huge triangular teeth. The mouth tore open, its parts waving uselessly. Dense material began to flow from the wound toward the center. Then we were above it, and rising (falling?) rapidly with the sphere.

I was pulled into the hatch, still holding the unconscious General Sharpfronds by his arm.

I released him to Goodmother Quickfronds and collapsed near the hatch with my limbs tucked under me, chrysalis style, shaking uncontrollably. My hands, my head, my body had plunged into the remains of others, accumulated over the ages. Even as I lay there, pieces of the dead clung to me. I had sought treasure in their land and they had guarded it well. I had seen the eater of souls itself. I abandoned myself to my shudders, and lost conscious thought.

When I woke, I had been cleaned. Also, I floated; down had become ambiguous again. There was no need to chirp for vision; the hull glowed with many sounds—a sign of a robust slipstream. Were they reeling us back so rapidly? Crushpincers must have an eight of helpers turning the wheel!

Professor Lieutenant Farfronds came over to me and touched me with a limb. It was the gesture of an equal and a friend, and without his saying anything, I realized my status had changed. “The General survives, for now. But we are all in great danger; we have lost our lightstone and our fall toward home is too rapid. There is no tension on the tether. Indeed, it trails behind us now. We shall have to do something desperate, and soon, and we may not survive. I wanted to talk to you a moment first.” He raised a pair of limbs. “I speak to you as one who, despite my professor title, has always been more of a military person. I have fought the bandits in the countercurrent reaches, and I have witnessed courage, so I know it when I see it. Some will judge this expedition a failure, for the loss of lightstone. But I think we have found a good and courageous soldier.”

“Thank you, sir,” was all I could think of saying.

He nodded, touched me again, then swam over to Goodmother Quickfronds and the General.

Some time passed, then Professor Colonel Threeclickson called us to attention, the first time he has said anything for some time. While he was the ranking officer after the incapacitated Sharpfronds, he’d let Lieutenant Farfronds, who must have been far more experienced in emergencies, take charge of details. But apparently there were responsibilities of leadership and rank that one does not duck.

“Companions . . . ” He hesitated.

I clenched my pincers. It would, I thought, be so like Threeclickson to make some kind of acerbic, imperious, cautionary speech or lecture now, putting us all on notice. But there was no time for that. I had always feared him more than respected him, and now when a greater fear ruled, I had little confidence in him.

“Companions, if we stay with the sphere until it falls to the ice, we shall be crushed. Therefore, we shall have to abandon it. Lieutenant Farfronds, tell what must be done.”

Short and to the point? While his logic remained, the manner did not seem to be that of the Threeclickson I’d known.

Farfronds crawled quickly up to the hatch, then dropped toward the drum, spreading his limbs and fingers as he did so. He did not fall rapidly.

“See,” he said. “The more area you present to the water, the slower you fall. And, after a certain amount of time, no matter how long you fall, you do not fall any faster. Our bomb-throwers call this ‘terminal velocity.’ If you spread yourselves wide enough and so fall slowly enough, you should land on the ice uninjured. You must only have the courage to do it.”

Neither I, nor anyone else, had the instincts of a floater or a swimmer. It was our nature to cling to the surface, anchored by our weight, to not be swept away by currents. I grabbed my bench all the more tightly as I listened to what Farfronds said. I saw the glow the walls of our sphere emitted from its too-fast passage and could easily imagine the crunch as it hit.

“How much time?”

I could barely hear that voice, but I recognized it immediately. General Sharpfronds was back with us.

Farfronds raised his upper arms. “Soon, sir. We have no idea of how far back we’ve come. We could strike at any moment.”

“Very well. Open the hatch.”

“General, you aren’t ready yet . . . ” Goodmother Quickfronds said.

“Am I ready to be crushed?” His voice seemed a bit stronger. “I will lead us out. You will come next.”

“Me!” Quickfronds exclaimed.

There was a moment of quiet. Then Sharpfronds said, “I may have need of you when I hit the ice.”

There was some nervous clicking of pincers at the General’s small joke, but it seemed to break the tension. Farfronds motioned to me, and I joined him in undogging the hatch. But when we were done, we couldn’t budge it.

“Pressure,” Threeclickson said. “The sphere is at the pressure of high above. We must let it out to open the hatch.”

Lieutenant Farfronds scrabbled down from the hatch, reached into the cabinet below his bench, and pulled out a military spear. Then he stabbed the tip directly into the communications drum. The sound of its ripping almost blinded me, and I felt an immediate and terrible discomfort all through my body, as if I were about to explode. Groans filled the sphere, but gradually the pain got less. Also, I suddenly realized I was back to my normal weight, and almost fell from my hand-hold near the hatch. What did pressure have to do with how much I weighed? Compression, I remembered. As my body expanded and gained more volume, it fell more rapidly.

“Loudpincers, the hatch!” Farfronds shouted. I pulled with as much strength as I had, and it opened, grudgingly at first, with a bright hiss of water jetting through the crack. Then it opened more easily. I reached down, to take the General’s hand—he was too weak to climb up to the hatch.

Before he left, he gave what might be his final command, “Follow quickly, all of you.” Then he was gone.

Goodmother Quickfronds quickly leaped up and followed him. After a moment of hesitation, Professor Colonel Threeclickson followed. Mr. Eightfold Longtail, however, stayed clinging to his bench. Lieutenant Farfronds went over to him.

“Go, now! You must.”

Longtail shuddered in denial.

Farfronds tried to pry his pincers from their grip, but got nowhere.

“Get out of here, Loudpincers,” he told me.

Again, I disobeyed orders, dropped from the hatch and tried to help pry Longtail loose. But it was hopeless. I touched Farfronds and drooped my fronds.

He nodded. “Go. I will follow.”

This time I did go, leaping for the open hatch and pulling myself out and through almost in one move. The scream of the water passing by it made the falling sphere below me visible, if in a wavy, uncertain way. Below, to my right, I could make out the courtyard of the university—too close, I thought. I spread my arms and legs as Farfronds had told me, and my fall slowed immediately.

I stared at the sphere, receding below. Where was he? There! A dark shadow appeared in the glowing slipstream, and began sliding off to the right.

The sphere suddenly exploded in a million frequencies of sound and went dark. I chirped, and saw the ice below me, coming up too fast. Now my height and fall were very real; every muscle in my body tensed with terror. I struggled for control and stretched myself as much as possible and flailed at the water with my claws, trying to swim back. At the last moment, I put all eight limbs down to break my fall.

The landing was an anticlimax; I didn’t hit any harder, I thought, than if I’d landed after jumping as high as I could. Terminal velocity, Farfronds had said. I had learned, I thought, a great lesson of mind over instinct. Feeling myself whole, I chirped in the general direction of where the sphere hit, saw it, and headed that way to see what I might do to help poor Longtail.

On my way, I saw a bright crunch, chirped, and recognized Colonel Professor Threeclickson. Of course, having left the sphere before I did, he would have had longer to fall. I went over to him, and ascertained that he had come through the fall as well as I had.

Then I told him the bad news. “Sir, Longtail wouldn’t leave the sphere. I was headed over to see what I could do.”

“You should stay back, Loudpincers. You would not want to see what must . . . Forgive me. You have already . . . I . . . Yes, let us go see what we can do.”

Threeclickson had asked me to forgive him. I sensed again that whatever happened now, my life had changed greatly.

Goodmother Quickfronds landed just then and scuttled over to us. We told her what had happened. “Threeclickson, tend to the General when he comes down. Rest should be all he needs, and a little cleaning off. Loudpincers, you’re young and strong. Come with me.”

We were halfway to the wreckage before I’d realized how easily Quickfronds had given orders and how uncomplainingly Threeclickson had obeyed. Five cycles ago, he had been the terror of my life. An act for the benefit of the student, I surmised, by one whose real nature was to defer to others. Yet I almost felt sorry for him.

We reached the crumpled sphere and found our way in through a hole in the wreckage. Lt. Farfronds, of course, had gotten there before us, but there was nothing to be done. A jagged section of the hull had neatly severed Longtail’s abdomen from his thorax. He had, uselessly, extricated himself and tried to hold his severed half against the wound, but that, Quickfronds said, only hastened his death, as certain fluids from the nether part should not mix with those in the thorax.

Quickfronds turned to us. “Should you ever find yourself in such a situation, do what you can to stem the bleeding from the thorax. You will still die, but may have as much as a cycle or two to say and do whatever last things you have to say or do.”

Threeclickson and General Sharpfronds arrived next. We removed the unfortunate Longtail from the wreckage and all stood vigil for an eighth of a cycle as his body became light and ascended to the land of the dead, to become part of that slime in which I had been briefly immersed. I shivered, thinking about what I had touched. I thought of my conversation with Quickfronds as I watched Longtail ascend. If our universe was an egg with a single shell, what lay outside? What laid it?

We were a sober group back at the University, arms at sides, fronds still. General Sharpfronds, now much recovered, addressed us along with several military commanders and university staff.

“Gentlepeople, we took our best shot at it. We learned much of cosmological and perhaps theological interest, though the eater of souls we encountered seemed a very physical creature. Looking at echoes, I might have worn a rope and been pulled back with much less bother. But such an encumbrance could itself have been risky. Again, we took our best shot.

“Now we are in a very grave situation. Lushole has fallen; nothing remains between Long Valley and the empire. Highfronds has delivered an ultimatum: we should submit peacefully as inferiors to his superior government, or be crushed by his armed forces. We have five cycles to reply.” The General snapped a pincer in contempt. “He has that little respect for our ability to improve our defenses significantly in that time. Hubris may be his undoing. Highfronds is a charismatic leader—do not underestimate him. But the juices of his abdomen run his mind, and we shall make that our advantage. We will do the unexpected, the unanticipated. We will fight creatively.

“The good news is that our war floaters are ready. With enough lightstone to float a dozen of them, we should be able to even the odds and make advance against us too expensive for them. If we can float all thirty, we may be able to repel them without significant loses of our own; a result that might guarantee our independence for some time. But that is a still-sealed chrysalis; we need more lightstone, for we can float only one as things stand.

“Lieutenant Lecturer Loudpincers has found a possible source of lightstone deep within the ice.”

There were murmurs in reaction to this news, creating far more of a stir when it came from the General’s voice holes than it when it had come from mine only a few cycles or so ago. But I barely noticed: Lieutenant Lecturer Loudpincers, he had called me. Graduation eight times eight cycles early and a field commission, too!  If only I proved worthy of it.

The General continued. “It will take some time to dig it out, six to seven cycles. We will move civilian population and the war floaters deep within our territory, back in the cracks where they will be hard to find and may easily defend themselves. The University hexagon we shall turn into a citadel, capable of holding out for a hundred cycles against any attack machines we have heard of the Westerians possessing. They may yet come up with some new weapon to save, or revenge, our people—but that is a very faint hope indeed. Our best chance lies with the war floaters.

“General Highthorax and General Stronglegs have prepared maneuvers and delaying actions which might give us three cycles or so beyond the ultimatum date. In that time, which will be purchased with the lives of the brave, we must find Loudpincers’ giant lightstone, section it and launch the war floaters. Unless someone has a better idea.”

Dark silence covered the gathering.

“The sacrifice will be great and the timing very, very tight. So we had best start digging.”

Later, when I happened to be close to the General, I told him, again, that what I had was a theory, a speculation, at best a good idea. “Now soldiers will lose their lives on the idea that it is true.”

“So you tell me now that you think you’ve oversold your idea,” he said this with cold stillness.

I trembled; I had never been so frightened.

But General Sharpfronds rested a pincer on my arm, the reassuring touch of a father on a larva. “I am not so molt-damaged that I did not recognize the risk; nor did you mislead anyone by stating possibilities as certainties. The one certainty, which everyone in this country knows now, is that without some miracle, we are all slaves or dead. Well, miracles occur in combat as well as in craft, but they are done by soldiers who have hope. If we had not had your lightstone find to give them hope, we would have had to invent something of less substance.

“But I would prefer not rely on miracles of any kind, so let us get about the digging. We have some equipment here that will be useful; my people will take care of it. Refresh yourself and be out there in an eighth cycle.”

I nodded, then, remembering my new status, clapped my pincers, military style. “Yes, General.”

I headed for my student quarters, perhaps for the last time. I tried to contact Softtipspawn, but she had already been evacuated. Whatever happened, nothing would be the same. I gathered a few mementos to fit in a pouch, then lay on my bench and rested.

When I arrived at my dig the next day, General Sharpfronds’ people had spread a great panoply of cloth and pipes around my hole. After a moment, I recognized it—a warmdrill. If one seals a certain flatweed against the ice so that water cannot flow through it, in time a heavy compressible fluid will collect at its roots, against the ice. This fluid, if allowed to flow into a container of dead plant material, will displace the water with its very heavy essence. Such heavy fluid makes plant material grow very hot, and water is pumped through that heat. The hot water, forced down by means of bellows, cuts through the ice rapidly. As a mere student, I had never had access to such inner University wonders. As the chief of a potentially nation-saving emergency project, I had as much special equipment as could be conveniently placed in the area.

We drilled cylinders, a body length deep at a time. First we carved a circle in the ice and made it deep, then, with a special sideways-facing nozzle, we cut in horizontally and so detached the cylinder from the ice. Ropes were frozen into each cylinder, and it was hauled up. Then the process was repeated.

In the distance, the glow of the battle of the University had began to light the sky.

Down the shaft went, just spinward of the large mass I so fervently hoped was lightstone.

“Water,” someone yelled. “We’ve struck water.”

My first thought was multishell cosmology. My second was about how wrong that first thought had proved far above.

“Melt water, not seawater,” the person in the bore shaft yelled, as if he could read my thoughts.

“Great central heavens!”

There was silence. “What is it? Can you see it?”

No answer.

I turned to one of our draftees, Premother Longlegs, a first-molt apprenticed to a sweettree farmer, now a refugee. “Longlegs, go tell General Sharpfronds that we’ve reached the objective, but something strange has happened.”

Someone had to go down. There were only four of us above. Who to send?

At that moment, for some reason, I thought of General Sharpfronds and his pronouncement: “My style is to lead from the front.” The organizing had been done; what remained to be done was below.

“Tell him that I’m going down to investigate. Platoon Sergeant Shinyclaws will be in charge, up here, until I get back.”

Like most officers who rose via the academic rout, I’d taken special pains to learn the names and procedures of the pure warriors; but was still uncomfortable. A seasoned troop might be holding his spiracles in amusement at how I did things, but Longlegs was as new to this as I was. She snapped a claw as if she were at drill, turned, and was off.

“Sir!” Shinyclaws said. She was a veteran, and there was a sharpness to her voice that made me worry that she resented my rapid rise; she perhaps didn’t take in the three moltings of academic training that had preceded my one act of physical courage. I should, I thought, deal with it now.

“Sergeant Shinyclaws? I’m new to this, I know, but we’re very pressed for time. If you’re unhappy, I’m sorry. I didn’t choose the circumstances.”

“Oh, sir. Not that at all. Well, not with you at any rate. I’m maybe a little unhappy because I’m not at the front. I’m still of egg-laying age, I’m afraid, and the General Professors are looking ahead to replenishing the population. But if we don’t . . . I mean there won’t be any point.”

I thought about that. Both positions had a logic to them. I thought it through. “Shinyclaws, the work behind the lines still has to be done. By having that done by females of egg-laying age, the Generals cover two needs with one action. Personal happiness is secondary in such times. Sorry.”

“Yes sir. I understand. But I would rather die fighting them now than be overwhelmed here and forced to bear their eggs later.”

I could only nod. I had not realized the full implications of her assignment.

“Anyway, Lieutenant, ah . . . ”

“Loudpincers.”

“Loudpincers, sir. You’ll be wanting to take a runner down with you, sir. Betterthinker would be my choice.”

“Right, thank you. Carry on, Sergeant.” The optimistically christened Betterthinker was actually one of the slower troops on the uptake, but he was fast and strong. “Betterthinker!” I shouted. “Come on. You’re with me.”

We’d built a tripod over the hole and a tube of rope netting hung down from its apex, enclosing the hot water tubes. The netting also functioned as a ladder of sorts, and on these we descended.

As we went, I reminded myself of who was below. It was the third shift; Sergeant Raspyclaws, Mr. Icefronds, the water jet technician, and able soldier Larvasaver. None were evident as I reached the level of my suspected giant lightstone. The shaft went further down; the plan had been to approach the lightstone from the bottom.

Only a half body-length or so of ice separated me from it and I could easily see it by holding my fronds and mandibles against the ice and chirping. It certainly looked like a lightstone; its rugged surface was full of shiny pits and sharp edges. But it was huge—several body lengths across, at least.

I felt warm water at my abdomen. My first thought was that it was the cutting water, but that had been turned off some time ago. The warmth was enervating; I wiggled my abdomen to increase water flow, then switched my body around, hanging upside down so my spiracles would be in higher, cooler water.

The warm current was issuing from the horizontal shaft. I moved down further so my fronds could see through it. The warmth made me forgetful and fatigued, and I had to fight to concentrate on moving each limb, but I persisted in descent.

Finally, I was level with the shaft, chirped, and saw the thing hanging below the giant lightstone. It was long, rounded at each end and unnaturally smooth, as if turned from a lathe.

On the ice in the shaft beside it lay the bodies of my crew. If I went to them now, I would probably suffer the same fate. I turned and began to climb up the cutter’s suspension ropes, but could only move a little at a time. I had to get to colder water.

“Betterthinker. The ropes. Pull me up.”

I was incredibly tired. If I let go right now, I would literally fall asleep. A very pleasant . . . .

The ropes jerked upward, again and again. I should let go. No, I should hang on. It was getting cooler. I was thinking again.

I resumed climbing, and spotted my savior amidst a jumble of rope and tubes. “Good, Betterthinker. I’m awake now.”

“Handholds, sir. On the wall. I need to let go.”

I saw the notches in the ice and grabbed onto them with two claws as I let go of the ropes with the others. As soon as I had detached myself from the ropes, they slid back down. Betterthinker had, I realized, pulled up not just me but the whole cutting apparatus as well, weighted as it was with superheavy fluid tanks. Well, Sergeant Shinyclaws had said he was strong.

I looked at the tubes and ropes, straightened out again. If they were to pipe down cold water instead of warm, I might stay awake long enough to rescue my colleagues. But I would need something to keep the cold water around me. I scrambled back up the shaft as fast as my legs and arms would take me.

Tailoring is a skill the career military know well, I found out. We took one of the woven flatweed covers and made a rough tube of it for my body, cutting slits to allow my limbs to stick out and tying it around my neck and around a heavy fluid tube just beyond my abdomen. We knew how much tubing the cutter had used, and coiled twice as much for me. The tube served two purposes; to give me cold water to keep me awake, and, in an emergency, they would be able to pull me back with it. I also took the end of a coil of rope, in case something or someone else would need to be pulled back.

With Sergeant Shinyclaws and Ordinary Soldier Bristlelegs pumping cool water around me, I headed down again. It seemed to go more quickly this time, despite my encumbrance. Though I could feel the heat on my head, I had not the slightest loss of energy. The cloth tube that surrounded me, however, puffed up and deflated with each push of the bellows above in a way that would have caused amusement, had the mission not been so serious.

I traversed the horizontal tube quickly and reached the bodies of my comrades. Asleep or dead, I could not tell, but I dragged each one back to the shaft and harnessed each to the spare line. Then I called for Betterthinker to haul them up.

Then, alone, I encountered the wondrous object that had apparently followed the lightstone up through the ice. It was as wide as the shaft, and its warmth had melted a path all the way up to the lightstone. The thought of the lightstone reminded me of how much we needed it, and how quickly. The entire crew, I realized, would need cold suits like mine. No matter how curious I was, there was no time to investigate. We could work around the thing, whatever it was.

Lightstone! It must be after the lightstone just like my compatriots and I had been after lightstone in our ill-fated expedition less than three cycles ago. Less than a three cycles? It seemed like a greatcycle ago. The thing seemed like more proof of layered cosmology—but, the layers were different. Alien. My mind was dizzy with change and happenings.

No time, no time to investigate. I turned to leave the shaft and get help.

“We’ve struck water—meltwater, not seawater. Great central heavens!”

I turned back. It was Sergeant Raspyclaws’ voice, much more clearly than I had heard it at the top of the shaft, but it came from the object. There must be beings inside the thing, I thought, from the next layer; it seemed obvious; the large object was their version of the sphere I had ridden to the land of the dead. They were trying to talk to me, but all they knew of my language was what Sergeant Raspyclaws had shouted—so they were repeating that. Could they see me, somehow? I saw nothing from them but that burst of language.

Time, I had no time. But maybe they could help. Help us in our war? How. Perhaps they could carve lightstone—they were apparently after it themselves.

Perhaps they wanted it for themselves.

Where did my greatest hope lie? I decided to invest a few moments and pointed to myself. “Loudpincers.”

“Loudpincers,” it repeated in a golden burst.

I showed them my body parts: pincers, claws, fronds, arms, legs, and mandibles. I shouted LOUD and whispered soft. I backed up for go and went forward for come. I showed them ice, water, and lightstone. I tried “cold water” spilling some from my suit, and “warm water” waving my arms around. It repeated everything correctly and I said yes. I wished it would make an error so I could teach no.

I curled up in a chrysalis posture. “Sleep,” I said. I unfolded myself. “Awake.”

“Hot water sleep.” It said.

“Yes.” I was getting somewhere.

“Cold water sleep.”

“No, no. Hot water makes sleep.”

“Cold water makes awake.”

“Yes. Cold water makes awake? Question. Yes. Answer.” Would it understand inflection? “Cold water makes awake. Statement. Hot water goes down? Question.”

“Come Loudpincers up?”

“Yes.” It was quick, picking up everything, forgetting nothing.

But I was getting tired and running out of time. How could I ask them to help?

I chipped some ice and showed them “take” and “move.” They understood.

“Loudpincers take lightstone up.”

“Lightstone go up?”

I moved my arms frantically, upward as fast as I could.

“Yes, up. Loudpincers take lightstone up fast!”

The effort wore me out. I felt warm. Then I noticed that the pulses of cold water in my tube had stopped. That could only mean the empire had arrived. I had only moments of consciousness left, time for one last plea. I took my ice chipper and swung it at my head, stopping just short.

“Kill. Kill above. Cold water stop.”

Silence greeted that. What an idiot I was. What could our problems possibly mean to them?

Unable to stand any longer, I collapsed to the floor of shaft.

“Help,” I said. How does a person alone act out help? “Help.” I tried to move an arm . . .

I woke with cold water flowing into my tube again. My first thought was relief—perhaps we had won above. My next thought was that the Westerians had figured out that I was down here and were on their way to enslave me. I found strength enough to chirp. My tube, I saw, was now running into a squarish hole in the alien thing and providing a steady stream of cold water. Hovering around me, swimming, were tiny circular things with little claws. One of them stopped in front of my fronds.

“SEEN-DEE,” it said, pointing to itself with one of its tiny claws. “Cyndi help?”

“Yes,” I said. “Cyndi help.” Then I remembered the situation above. What hope for them there’d be now, I had no idea. But I had to ask.

“Cyndi help kill above?

“No, no, Cyndi no kill.”

They could not understand, not yet. They could not understand my nation being raped and enslaved, its heroes and my friends rising to the land of the dead. They would understand in time, but too late, too late.

“Cyndi help above sleep?” it said.

“Great center, that would work! Yes. Help above sleep. Stop kill. Stop war.”

It was not done simply. The Iceprobe, for that was what they called it, had to back off and come back at an angle to intercept our shaft. There was no room in it for me; I clung to the lightstone while all this happened, and nearly fell asleep again. But before I did, Cyndi brought me a small squarish pack, which she fixed onto the back of my tube. It took water in and pumped it out, cold, into the tube feeding my cold suit. For this reason, I was the only one awake to witness much of the defeat of the Westerian army, for Cyndi’s artificial warmfall put our soldiers asleep as well.

It was not done instantly. The Iceprobe could swim on jets like a daggershell, but it was alone and the Westerians had overrun almost everything. But they had bypassed the University after Crushpincers stopped their effort to breech its walls, intending to starve it out later. And they had been slowed by the deeply cracked area in the far east where General Sharpfronds had planned Long Valley’s last stand. The terrain and our deployment had broken the massed Westerian armies into smaller groups, and Sharpfronds’ creative engineering had worsened the obstacles.

There was time to talk; Cyndi learned our language quickly, forgetting nothing and able to understand more and more of my descriptions. I learned that Cyndi was not the tiny machine, nor in it, but existed far from it and talked to us and the machine as Crushpincers had talked on the drum, but without a tight line. She is female—indeed she told me that should she reproduce she would retain the egg in her body and a larva would emerge from her abdomen. Horrifying, but natural to them—and having been in the land of the dead, I am no longer squeamish. She did everything quickly; she came from a place, she said, which had cycles called “DAZE” that were only a fifth of a real cycle.

“How long such wars repeat?” she asked.

I gave her Quickfronds’ assessment of great-greatcycles and thickening ice.

She was quiet for some time, then said. “That long be eight to the fourth times our notched history maybe. Stop war cycle now be good. Possibly”

We went to the university first, putting asleep the army that besieged it. Crushpincers had ascended, but the university walls were still held by students and old professors. I was acclaimed a temporary general by the chancellor, and under my command, the university folk made cold suits and sortied out. The line that had tethered the sphere on its journey to the land of the dead was put to another use, shackling a Westerian army. We left eight to guard eight-cubed.

There was no rest. Each Westerian battalion we encountered presented its own problems. We ran out of lines and had to come up with new ways of shackling. Cyndi at first objected to the threat of violent force in restraint. But as she heard the tales of rape and dismemberment and saw the evidence, she exhibited fewer qualms. We ran soon out of Long Valley guards for captured Westerians and had to change our strategy to find more of our own people. In this, my senses proved superior; I spotted and recognized the glow of a battle. We went there and put both armies to sleep.

That was the end of my generalship; the army we found was commanded by Goodmother Quickfronds, whom I was very glad to see. But the fact that she was in charge of an army spoke volumes on how many had floated above while I had been teaching Cyndi our language.

I expressed my sorrow and apologies that I had not succeeded more quickly.

“You have saved us,” she told me. “You must not berate yourself for not dying uselessly.”

“Colonel Goodmother, I could have argued more strongly to dig for the lightstone first.”

“The center seemed like a better idea at the time,” she said. “What was done was done.”

Cyndi interrupted this. “Colonel Goodmother Quickfronds . . . your title . . . healer? Know bodies?”

Quickfronds turned her attention to the tiny machine. “I did research at the University. In better times, I healed. Now I bring death.”

“No longer. Teach me. We end this less time.”

After a long talk, Cyndi asked for as much inedible vegetation as could be found or spared. We put it in the hole in the Iceprobe’s side. An eighth of a cycle later, a cloud of very tiny machines issued forth. Two cycles later, all the Westerian soldiers that remained marched home in shackles.

Such is my history. Of those of us who ascended to the land of the dead, only Goodmother Quickfronds and I survived the war. General Sharpfronds died at the front even as his contingency plans were being executed, even as I remembered his leadership style. He has a large and deserved memorial outside the university.

But perhaps as great a story was how blustery, inadequate Professor Colonel Threeclickson and a student battalion held off an entire Westerian brigade at the entrance to the northern crack into Long Valley with warmdrills and bombs hastily made from daggershells and tricks of chemistry for half a cycle. Most of our population was able to flee in that time he bought with his life.

What remains is another story. It is the story of contact with the outer shell, where down is up and up is down; of many eggs, some of ice, some of lightstone, some of heavyfluid. It is the story of the beings who exist around other centers at vast distances that circle great hot centers of heavyfluid producing an energy we can only vaguely sense as heat. It is the story of meeting Cyndi in person, standing on the top of a cave of ice, head down and telling me how she thought I was upside down. She is tiny for so powerful a being, only an eighth of a standard body length, even in the lightstone covering she must use in our water. It is the story of her ‘STAR,’ ‘SOL’ and her center ‘URTH,’ which she assured me had places here and there where I could exist quite comfortably. It is the story of all that has changed us so much and of which so many have written about with much more grace and elaboration than I.

Was my meeting with Cyndi an incredibly lucky coincidence? Certainly it was to me, but it was less so from other views. She was coming anyway. Given our species, she would likely have come during a war; it happened to be the Westerian invasion. She found the thinnest ice to seek inward, I found the thinnest ice to seek outward; the location of our meeting was no coincidence. Yes, the survival of the Long Valley nation was determined by mere fractions of a cycle, but, patriotism aside, that is probably not crucial to the greater story. Cyndi’s people are explorers. Contact was going to happen in some random way; it went this way.

Now, nothing can ever be the same. Between war and contact, it will be a long time before our scientists catch up to the standards of Cyndi’s people. Our academics are as new larvae in learning and our military traditions but an unfortunate history. But this is not without promise.

Allow me but two items of postwar personal interest. The first is that, a greatcycle after I returned to the University, I had a visitor I had never expected to see alive again. A female veteran with a half-regenerate arm appeared in my door with a military click.

“Colonel professor, do you remember me?”

“Shinyclaws?” I was astounded.

“The same. I was captured, but they didn’t think a female would sacrifice an arm to escape. I linked up with General Highthorax in defense of the southern cracks. We were winning when your alien girlfriend came along and spoiled the game.”

“Oh?” I’d heard the story. “Casualty ratio?”

“Maybe ten of them to every one of us. Defense versus offense, and we had a prepared position and daggershell archers.”

“And how many of you were left before sleep came?”

Spiracles flapped in amusement. She knew she’d been caught. “Two eights of us. Against eight to the fourth of them.”

“I’m proud to have known you.”

She came up to me. “How much do you mean that?”

Suddenly I realized that I was the one who had been caught. “Well, a lot.”

“Enough to give me your sperm?”

It wasn’t, by any means, the first offer I’d had. But it was the first one I accepted.

The second and last thing I have to say was that, before Doctor Cynthia Lord Mallagues left to explain her actions to others of her kind—which I gathered would take some explaining—she made an appearance in the Westerian capital that will not be forgotten for a long time. As a result, the Westerian empire is no more, for they no longer have emperors there.

The Westerians executed Highfronds themselves. They have a unique method in that land; the abdomen and the limbs are severed and the thorax is tied off. What remains is lightened by pressed flatweed and ascends, still conscious, up and into the land of the dead.

I am, perhaps, the only one alive who can truly appreciate what that means.

Story notes:

This was inspired by Europa, but isn’t specifically set there. At the time of its writing, the Europa ice layer is estimated to be too thick, and Jupiter too far from the sun, for any significant transmission of light through the ice, or hopes of penetrating it with something like the “iceprobe” above. It was rather conceived to be a satellite of what we now call a “warm Jupiter,” at an unspecified (in Earths frame of reference) distance and time from here and now. But just recently (December, 2013), we have received word of the discovery of geysers on Europa’s southern pole. So the ice may not be so thick, after all at least in some places. Time and exploration will tell.

The ice bottom buoyancy-pinned ecosystem described here has some Earthly analogs in polar regions, but here, it is the dominant one with the local sense of up and down reversed from our gravity-dominated environment. This was more difficult to write than one might think, as conventional ideas of up and down were difficult to suppress. One really has to imagine oneself in the environment.

Are these aliens “too human” in character if not in form? At some point, one has to admit that one is writing a story for human beings to read and to whom they will be able to relate. But I think there is an argument for a certain universality in the underlying motivational programming of intelligent beings; we see much of ourselves in the behavior of life around us, even that whose last common ancestor lived hundreds of millions of years ago. One might expect to see reciprocity, hierarchies, collective aggression, and even sacrifice for the sake of the greater gene pool. Such traits have survival value here and may have survival value elsewhere as well.

—GDN, Jan. 2014

First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, October/November, 2002.

About the Author

G. David Nordley is the pen name of Gerald David Nordley, an author and consulting astronautical engineer. He lives in Sunnyvale, CA. A retired Air Force officer, he has been involved in spacecraft orbital operations, engineering, and testing as well as research in advanced spacecraft propulsion. As a writer of fiction and nonfiction, his main interest is the future of human exploration and settlement of space, and his stories typically focuses on the dramatic aspects of individual lives within the broad sweep of a plausible human future. Gerald is a past Hugo and nebula award nominee as well as a four-time winner of the Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact annual “AnLab” reader’s poll. His latest novel is To Climb a Flat Mountain, and the latest book is a collection, Among the Stars, available from Brief Candle Press in print or ebook through Amazon.com. The latest new publication at this writing is “Last Call” in How Beer Saved the World 2, due from Skywarrior Press, 2015.

The Peacock Cloak

Chris Beckett

Grasshoppers creaked, bees hummed, a stream played peacefully by itself as it meandered in its stony bed through the quiet mountain valley. And then Tawus was there in his famous cloak, its bright fabric still fizzing and sparking from the prodigious leap, its hundred eyes, black, green, and gold, restlessly assaying the scene. Tawus had arrived, and, as always, everything else was dimmed and diminished by his presence.

“This world was well made,” Tawus said to himself with his accustomed mixture of jealousy and pride.

He savored the scents of lavender and thyme, the creakings and buzzings of insects, the gurgling of the stream.

“Every detail works,” he said, noticing a fat bumblebee, spattered with yellow pollen, launching herself into flight from a pink cistus flower. Passing the object he carried in his left hand to his right, Tawus stooped to take the flower stem between his left forefinger and thumb. “Every molecule, every speck of dust.”

Painfully and vividly, and in a way that had not happened for some time, he was reminded of the early days, the beginning, when, on the far side of this universe, he and the Six had awoken to find themselves in another garden wilderness like this one, ringed about by mountains.

Back then things had felt very different. Tawus had known what Fabbro knew, had felt what Fabbro felt. His purposes had been Fabbro’s purposes, and all his memories were from Fabbro’s world, a world within which the created universe of Esperine was like a child’s plaything, a scene carved into an ivory ball (albeit carved so exquisitely that its trees could sway in the wind and lose their leaves in autumn, its creatures live and die). Of course he had known quite well he was a copy of Fabbro and not Fabbro himself, but he was an exact copy, down to the smallest particle, the smallest thought, identical in every way except that he had been rendered in the stuff of Esperine, so that he could inhabit Fabbro’s creation on Fabbro’s behalf. He was a creation as Esperine was, but he could remember creating himself, just as he could remember creating Esperine, inside the device that Fabbro called Constructive Thought. Back then, Tawus had thought of Fabbro not as “he” and “him” but as “I” and “me.”

And how beautiful this world had seemed then, how simple, how unsullied, how full of opportunities, how free of the ties and regrets and complications that had so hemmed in the life of Fabbro in the world outside.

Tawus released the pink flower, let it spring back among its hundred bright fellows, and stood up straight, returning the small object from his right hand to his dominant left. Then, with his quick gray eyes, he glanced back down the path, and up at the rocky ridges on either side. The peacock eyes looked with him, sampling every part of the visible and invisible spectrum.

“No, Tawus, you are not observed,” whispered the cloak, using the silent code with which it spoke to him through his skin.

“Not observed, perhaps,” said Tawus, “but certainly expected.”

Now he turned southwards, towards the head of the valley, and began to walk. His strides were quick and determined but his thoughts less so. The gentle scents and sounds of the mountain valley continued to stir up vivid and troubling memories from the other end of time. He recalled watching the Six wake up, his three brothers and three sisters. They were also made in the likeness of Fabbro but they were, so to speak, reflections of him in mirrors with curved surfaces or colored glass, so that they were different from the original and from each other. Tawus remembered their eyes opening, his brother Balthazar first and then his sister Cassandra, and he remembered their spreading smiles as they looked around and simultaneously saw and remembered where they were, in this exquisite, benign and yet to be explored world, released forever from the cares and complications of Fabbro’s life and from the baleful history of the vast and vacant universe in which Fabbro had been born.

They had been strangely shy of each other at first, even though they shared the same memories, the same history and the same sole parent. The three sisters in particular, in spite of Fabbro’s androgynous and protean nature, felt exposed and uneasy in their unfamiliar bodies. But even the men were uncomfortable in their new skins. All seven were trying to decide who they were. It had been a kind of adolescence. All had felt awkward, all had been absurdly optimistic about what they could achieve. They had even made a pact with each other that they would always work together and always make decisions as a group.

“That didn’t last long,” Tawus now wryly observed, and then he remembered, with a momentary excruciating pang, the fate of Cassandra, his proud and stubborn sister.

But they’d believed in their agreement at the time and, having made it, all Seven had stridden out, laughing and talking all at once, under a warm sun not unlike this one, and on a path not unlike the one he was walking now, dressed so splendidly in his Peacock Cloak. He had no such cloak back then. They had been naked gods. They had begun to wrap themselves up only as they moved apart from one another: Cassandra in her Mirror Mantle, Jabreel in his Armor of Light, Balthazar in his Coat of Dreams . . . But the Peacock Cloak had been finest of all.

“I hear music,” the cloak now whispered to him.

Tawus stopped and listened. He could only hear the stream, the grasshoppers, and the bees. He shrugged.

“Hospitable of him, to lay on music to greet us.”

“Just a peasant flute. A flute and goat bells.”

“Probably shepherds up in the hills somewhere,” said Tawus, resuming his stride.

He remembered how the seven of them came to their first human village, a village whose hundred inhabitants imagined that they had always lived there, tending their cattle and their sheep, and had no inkling that only a few hours before, they and their memories had been brought into being all at once by their creator Fabbro within the circuits of Constructive Thought, along with a thousand similar groups scattered over the planets of Esperine: the final touch, the final detail, in the world builder’s ivory ball.

“The surprise on their faces!” Tawus murmured to himself, and smiled. “To see these seven tall naked figures striding down through their pastures.”

“You are tense,” observed his cloak. “You are distracting yourself with thoughts of things elsewhere and long ago.”

“So I am,” agreed Tawus, in the same silent code. “I am not keen to think about my destination.”

He looked down at the object he carried in his hand, smooth and white and intricate, like a polished shell. It was a gun of sorts, a weapon of his own devising. It did not fire mere bullets. It destroyed its targets by unraveling, within a chosen area, the laws that defined Esperine itself, and so reducing form to pure chaos.

“Give me a pocket to put this in,” Tawus said.

At once the cloak made an opening to receive the gun, sealing itself up again when Tawus had withdrawn his hand.

“The cloak can aim and shoot for me, if need be,” Tawus muttered to himself.

And the cloak’s eyes winked, green and gold and black.

The valley turned a corner. There was an outcrop of harder rock. As he came round it, Tawus heard the music that his cloak, with its finely tuned senses, had detected some way back: a fluted melody, inexpertly played, and an arrhythmic jangling of crudely made bells.

Up ahead of him three young children were minding a flock of sheep and goats, sheltering by a little patch of trees at a spot where a tributary brook cascaded into the main stream. A girl of nine or ten was playing panpipes. In front of her on a large stone, as if it were the two-seat auditorium of a miniature theater, two smaller children sat side by side: a boy of five or so and a little girl of three, cradling a lamb that lay across both their laps. The jangling bells hung from the necks of the grazing beasts.

Seeing Tawus, the girl laid down her pipes and the two smaller children hastily set their lamb on the ground, stood up, and moved quickly to stand on either side of their sister with their hands in hers. All three stared at Tawus with wide unsmiling eyes. As he drew near, they ran forward and kissed his hand, first the older girl, then the boy, and finally the little three-year-old whose baby lips left a cool patch of moistness on his skin.

“Your face is familiar to them,” the cloak silently observed. “They think they know you from before.”

“As we might predict,” said Tawus. “But you they have never seen.”

The children were astounded by a fabric on which the patterns were in constant motion, and by the animated peacock eyes. The boy reached out a grubby finger to touch the magical cloth.

“No, Thomas!” her sister scolded, slapping the child’s hand away. “Leave the gentleman’s coat alone.”

“No harm,” Tawus said gruffly, patting the girl on the head.

And the cloak shook off the fragments of snot and dust that the child’s fingers had left behind.

Ten minutes later Tawus turned and looked back at them. They were little more than dots in the mountain landscape but they were still watching him, still holding hands. Around them, unheeded, the sheep grazed with the goats.

Suddenly, Tawus was vividly reminded of three other children he had once seen, of about the same ages. He had hardly given them a thought at the time, but now he clearly saw them in his mind: the younger two huddled against their sister, all three staring with white faces as Tawus and his army rolled through their burning village, their home in ruins behind them. It had been in a flat watery country called Meadow Lee. From his vantage point in the turret of a tank, Tawus could see its verdant water meadows stretching away for miles. Across the whole expanse of it buildings were burning and columns of dirty smoke were slowly staining the whole of the wide blue sky a glowering oily yellow.

When was that, Tawus wondered? On which of the several different occasions when fighting had come to Meadow Lee? He thought it had been during one of his early wars against his brother Balthazar. But then he wondered whether perhaps it had been at a later stage when he was in an alliance with Balthazar against Jabreel.

“Neither,” said the Peacock Cloak. “It was in the war all six of you waged against Cassandra, that time she banned chrome extraction in her lands.”

“Don’t needlessly interfere. Offer guidance where necessary, head off obvious problems, but otherwise allow things to take their own course.”

It would be wrong to say these were Fabbro’s instructions to the Seven because he had never spoken to them. They were simply his intentions which they all knew because his memories were replicated in their own minds. When they encountered those first villagers, the Seven had greeted them, requested food and a place to rest that night, and asked if they were any matters they could assist with. They did not try and impose their views, or change the villager’s minds about how the world worked or how to live their lives. That had all come later, along with the wars and the empires.

“But did he really think we could go on like that forever?” Tawus now angrily asked. “What were we supposed to do all this time? Just wander around indefinitely, advising on a sore throat here, suggesting crop rotation there, but otherwise doing nothing with this world at all?”

The Seven had begun to be different from Fabbro from the moment they awoke. And paradoxically it was Tawus, the one made most completely in Fabbro’s likeness, who had moved most quickly away from Fabbro’s wishes.

“We can’t just be gardeners of this world,” he had told his brothers and sisters, after they had visited a dozen sleepy villages, “we can’t just be shepherds of its people, watching them while they graze. We will go mad. We will turn into imbeciles. We need to be able to build things, play with technology, unlock the possibilities that we know exist within this particular frame. We will need metals and fuels, and a society complex enough to extract and refine them. We will need ways of storing and transmitting information. There will need to be cities. On at least one planet, in at least one continent, we will have to organize a state. ”

The Six had all had reservations at first, to different degrees, and for slightly different reasons.

“Just give me a small territory then,” Tawus had said, “a patch of land with some people in it, to experiment and develop my ideas.”

In his own little fiefdom he had adopted a new approach, not simply advising, but tempting and cajoling. He had made little labor-saving devices for his people and then spoken to them of machines that would do all their work for them. He had helped them make boats and then described spaceships that would make them masters of the stars. He had sown dissatisfaction in their minds and, within two years, he had achieved government, schools, metallurgy, sea-faring, and a militia. Seeing what he had achieved, the Six had fallen over one another to catch up.

“How come they all followed me, if my path was so wrong?” Tawus now asked.

“They had no choice but to follow you,” observed the Peacock Cloak, “if they didn’t wish to be altogether eclipsed.”

“Which is another way of saying that my way was in the end inevitable, because once it is chosen, all other ways become obsolete. To have obeyed Fabbro would simply have been to postpone what was sooner or later going to happen, if not led by me, then by one of the others, or even by some leader rising up from the Esperine people themselves.”

He thought briefly again of the children in front of the ruined house, but then he turned another corner, and there was his destination ahead of him. It was a little island of domesticity amidst the benign wilderness of the valley, a small cottage with a garden and an orchard and a front gate, standing beside a lake.

“He is outside,” said the Peacock Cloak, whose hundred eyes could see through many different kinds of obstacles. “He is down beside the water.”

Tawus came to the cottage gate. It was very quiet. He could hear the bees going back and forth from the wild thyme flowers, the splash of a duck alighting on the lake, the clopping of a wooden wind chime in an almond tree.

He raised his hand to the latch, then lowered it again.

“What’s the matter with me? Why hesitate?”

Clop clop went the wind chimes.

“It is always better to act,” whispered the cloak through his skin, “that’s what you asked me to remind you.”

Tawus nodded. It was always better to act than to waste time agonizing. It was by acting that he had built a civilization, summoned great cities into being, driven through the technological changes that had taken this world from sleepy rural Arcadia to an age of interplanetary empires. It was by acting that he had prevailed over his six siblings, even when all six were ranged against him, for each one of them had been encumbered by Fabbro with gifts or traits of character more specialized than his own pure strength of will: mercy, imagination, doubt, ambivalence, detachment, humility.

True, he had caused much destruction and misery but, after all, to act at all it was necessary to be willing to destroy. If he ever had a moment of doubt, he simply reminded himself that you couldn’t take a single step without running the risk of crushing some small creeping thing, too small to be seen, going about its blameless life. You couldn’t even breathe without the possibility of sucking in some tiny innocent from the air.

“The city of X is refusing to accept our authority,” his generals would say.

“Then raze it to the ground as we warned we would,” he would answer without a moment’s hesitation. And the hundred eyes would dart this way and that, like a scouting party sent out ahead of the battalions that were his own thoughts, looking for opportunities in the new situation that he had created, scooping out his next move and the move after that.

There had been times when his generals had stood there open-mouthed, astounded by his ruthlessness. But they did not question him. They knew it was the strength of his will that made him great, made him something more than they were.

“But now,” he said to himself bitterly, “I seem to be having difficulty making up my mind about a garden gate.”

“Just act,” said the cloak, rippling against his skin in a way that was almost like laughter.

Tawus smiled. He would act on his own account and not on instructions from his clothes, but all the same he lifted his hand to the latch and this time opened it. He was moving forward again. And the eyes on his cloak shone in readiness.

Inside the gate the path branched three ways: right to the cottage, with the peaks of the valley’s western ridge behind it, straight ahead to the little orchard and vegetable garden, left and eastward down to the small lake from which flowed the stream that he’d been following. On the far side of the lake was the ridge of peaks that formed the valley’s eastern edge. Some sheep were grazing on their slopes.

Clop clop went the wind chimes, and a bee zipped by his ear like a tiny racing car on a track.

Tawus looked down towards the lake.

“There you are,” he murmured, spotting the small figure at the water’s edge that the peacock eyes had already located, sitting on a log on a little beach, looking through binoculars at the various ducks and water birds out on the lake.

“You know I’m here,” Tawus muttered angrily. “You know quite well I’m here.”

“Indeed he does,” the cloak confirmed. “The tension in his shoulders is unmistakable.”

“He just wants to make me the one that speaks first,” Tawus said.

So he did not speak. Instead, when there were only a few meters between them, he stooped, picked up a stone, and lobbed it into the water over the seated figure’s head.

The ripples spread out over the lake. Among some reeds at the far end of the little beach, a duck gave a low warning quack to its fellows. The man on the log turned ‘round.

“Tawus,” he exclaimed, laying down his field glasses and rising to his feet with a broad smile of welcome, “Tawus, my dear fellow. It’s been a very long time.”

The likeness between the two of them would have been instantly apparent to any observer, even from a distance. They had the same lithe bearing, the same high cheekbones and aquiline nose, the same thick mane of gray hair. But the man by the water was simply dressed in a white shirt and white breeches, while Tawus still wore his magnificent cloak with its shifting patterns and its restless eyes. And Tawus stood stiffly while the other man, still smiling, extended his arms, as if he expected Tawus to fall into his embrace.

Tawus did not move or bend.

“You’ve put it about that you’re Fabbro himself,” he said, “or so I’ve heard.”

The other man nodded.

“Well, yes. Of course there’s a sense in which I am a copy of Fabbro as you are, since this body is an analogue of the body that Fabbro was born with, rather than the body itself. But the original Fabbro ceased to exist when I came into being, so my history and his have never branched away from each another, as yours and his did, but are arranged sequentially in a single line, a single story. So yes, I’m Fabbro. All that is left of Fabbro is me, and I have finally entered my own creation. It seemed fitting, now that both Esperine and I are coming to a close.”

Tawus considered this for a moment. He had an impulse to ask about the world beyond Esperine, that vast and ancient universe in which Fabbro had been born and grown up. For of course Fabbro’s was the only childhood that Tawus could remember, Fabbro’s the only youth. He was naturally curious to know how things had changed out there and to hear news of the people from Fabbro’s past: friends, collaborators, male and female lovers, children (actual biological children: children of Fabbro’s body and not just his mind).

“Aren’t those memories a distraction?” the cloak asked him through his skin. “Isn’t that stuff his worry and not yours?”

Tawus nodded.

“Yes,” he silently agreed, “and to ask about it would muddy the water. It would confuse the issue of worlds and their ownership.”

He looked Fabbro in the face.

“You had no business coming into Esperine,” he told him. “We renounced your world and you in turn gave this world to us to be our own. You’ve no right to come barging back in here now, interfering, undermining my authority, undermining the authority of the Five.”

(It was Five now, not Six, because of Cassandra’s annihilation in the Chrome Wars.)

Fabbro smiled.

“Some might say you’d undermined each other’s authority quite well without my help, with your constant warring, and your famines and your plagues and all of that.”

“That’s a matter for us, not you.”

“Possibly so,” said Fabbro. “Possibly so. But in my defense, I have tried to keep out of the way since I arrived in this world.”

“You let it be known you were here, though. That was enough.”

Fabbro tipped his head from side to side, weighing this up.

“Enough? Do you really think so? Surely for my mere presence to have had an impact, there would have had to be something in Esperine that could be touched by it. There had to be a me-shaped hole. Otherwise wouldn’t I just be some harmless old man up in the mountains?”

He sat down on the log again

“Come and sit with me, Tawus.” He patted a space beside him. “This is my favorite spot, my grandstand seat. There’s always something happening here. Day. Night. Evening. Morning. Sun. Rain. Always something new to see.”

“If you’re content with sheep and ducks,” said Tawus, and did not sit.

Fabbro watched him. After a few seconds, he smiled.

“That’s quite a coat you’ve got there,” he observed.

Many of the peacock eyes turned towards him, questioningly. Others glanced with renewed vigor in every other direction, as if suspecting diversionary tactics.

“I’ve heard,” Fabbro went on, “that it can protect you, make you invisible, change your appearance, allow you to leap from planet to planet without going through the space in between. I’ve been told that it can tell you of dangers, and draw your attention to things you might wish to know, and even give you counsel, as perhaps it’s doing now. That is some coat!”

“He is seeking to rile you,” the cloak silently whispered. “You asked me to warn you if he did this.”

“Don’t patronize me Fabbro,” Tawus said, “I am your copy not your child. You know that to construct this cloak I simply needed to understand the algorithm on which Esperine is founded, and you know that I do understand it every bit as well as you.”

Fabbro nodded.

“Yes of course. I’m just struck by the different ways in which we’ve used that understanding. I used it to make a more benign world than my own, within which countless lives could, for a limited time, unfold and savour their existence. You used it to set yourself apart from the rest of this creation, insulate yourself, wrap yourself up in your own little world of one.”

“I could easily have made another complete world as you did, as perfect as Esperine in every way. But any world that I made would necessarily exist within this frame, your frame, and therefore still be a part of Esperine, even if it’s equal or it’s superior in design. Do you really wonder that I chose instead to find a way of setting myself apart?”

Fabbro did not answer. He gave a half-shrug, then looked out at the lake.

“I’ve not come here to apologize,” Tawus said. “I hope you know that. I have no regrets about my rebellion.”

Fabbro turned towards him.

“Oh, don’t worry, I know why you came. You came to destroy me. And of course it is possible to destroy me now that I’m here in Esperine, just as it was possible for you and the others to destroy your sister Cassandra when she tried to place a brake on your ambitions. In order to achieve her destruction you found a way of temporarily modifying that part of the original algorithm that protected the seven of you from physical harm. I assume you have a weapon with you now that works in the same way. I guess it’s hidden somewhere in that cloak.”

“But knowing it doesn’t help him,” whispered the cloak through Tawus’s skin.

Another duck had alighted on the water, smaller and differently colored than to the ones that were already there. (It had black wings and a russet head.) Fabbro picked up his binoculars and briefly observed it, before laying them down again, and turning once more to his recalcitrant creation.

“Be that as it may,” he said, “I certainly wasn’t led to expect an apology. They told me the six of you set out in this direction armed to the teeth and in a great fury. You had a formidable space fleet with you, they said, and huge armies at your back. They told me that cloak of yours was fairly fizzing and sparking with pent-up energy. They said that it turned all the air around you into a giant lens, so that you were greatly magnified and seemed to your followers to be a colossus blazing with fire, striding out in front of them as they poured through the interplanetary gates.”

Tawus snatched a stone up from the beach and flung it out over the water.

“You are allowing yourself to be put on the defensive,” warned the Peacock Cloak. “But remember that he has no more power than you. In fact he has far less. Thanks to your foresight in creating me, you are the one who is protected, not him. And, unlike him, you are armed.”

Tawus turned to face Fabbro.

“You set us inside this world,” he said, “then turned away and left us to it. And that was fine, that was the understanding from the beginning. That was your choice and ours. But now, when it suits you because you are growing old, you come wandering in to criticize what we have achieved. What right do you have to do that, Fabbro? You were absent when the hard decisions were being made. How can you know that you would have done anything different yourself?”

“When have I criticized you? When have I claimed I would have done something different?”

Fabbro gave a short laugh.

“Think, Tawus, think. Stop indulging your anger and think for a moment about the situation we are in. How could I say that I would have done something different? What meaning could such a claim possibly have when you and I were one and the same person at the beginning of all this?”

“We began as one person, but we are not one person now. Origins are not everything.”

Fabbro looked down at his hands, large and long-fingered as Tawus’s were.

“No,” he said, “I agree. It must be so. Otherwise there would only ever be one thing.”

“You made your choice,” Tawus said. “You should have stuck to it and stayed outside.”

“Hence the armies, hence the striding like a colossus at their head, hence the plan to seek me out and destroy me?”

Fabbro looked up at Tawus with an expression that was half a frown and half a smile.

“Yes,” Tawus said. “Hence all those things.”

Fabbro nodded.

“But where are the armies now?” he asked. “Where is the striding colossus? Where is this “we” you speak about? An awful lot of the energy has dissipated, has it not? The nearer you got to me, the faster it all fell away. They’ve all come back to me, you know, your armies, your brothers, your sisters. They have all come to me and asked to become part of me once again.”

Some of the eyes on the cloak glanced inquiringly upwards at Tawus’s face, others remained fixed on Fabbro, who had lifted his binoculars and was once again looking at bird life out on the lake.

“Fire the gun and you will be Fabbro,” the Peacock Cloak told its master. “You will be the one to whom the armies and the Five have all returned. Your apparent isolation, your apparent diminishment, is simply an artifact of there being two of you here, two rival versions of the original Fabbro. But you are the one I shield and not him. You are the one with the weapon.”

Fabbro laid down his field glasses and turned towards the man who still stood stiffly apart from him.

“Come Tawus,” he coaxed gently, patting the surface of the log beside him. “Come and sit down. I won’t bite, I promise. It’s almost the end, after all. Surely we’re both too old, and it’s too late in the day, for us to be playing this game?”

Tawus picked up another stone and flung it out into the lake. The ripples spread over the smooth surface. Quack quack went the ducks near to where it fell, and one of them fluttered its wings and half-flew a few yards further off, scrabbling at the surface with its feet.

“The armies are irrelevant,” Tawus said. “The Five are irrelevant. You know that. For these purposes they are simply fields of force twisting and turning between you and me. The important thing is not that they have come back to you. No. The important thing is that I have not.”

Fabbro watched his face and did not speak

“I gave their lives purpose,” Tawus went on, beginning to pace restlessly up and down. “I gave them progress. I gave them freedom. I gave them cities and nations. I gave them hope. I gave them something to believe in and somewhere to go. You just made a shell. You made a clockwork toy. It was me, through my rebellion, that turned it into a world. Why else did they all follow me?”

He looked around for another stone, found a particularly big one, and lobbed it out even further across the lake. It sent a whole flock of ducks squawking into the air.

“Please sit down, Tawus. I would really like you to sit with me.”

Tawus did not respond. Fabbro shrugged and looked away.

“Why exactly do you think they followed you?” he asked after a short time.

“Because I was in your image but I wasn’t you,” Tawus answered at once. “I was like you, but at the same time I was one of them. Because I stood up for this world as a world in its own right, belonging to those who lived in it, and not simply as a plaything of yours.”

Fabbro nodded.

“Which was what I wanted you to do,” he said.

The day was moving into evening. The eastern ridge of peaks across the water glowed gold from the sun that was setting opposite them in the west.

“After the sun sets,” Fabbro calmly said, “the world will end. Everyone has come back to me. It’s time that you and I brought things to a close.”

Tawus was caught off guard. So little time. It seemed he had miscalculated somewhat, not having the benefit of the Olympian view that Fabbro had enjoyed until recently, looking in from outside of Constructive Thought. He had not appreciated that the end was quite as close as that.

But he was not going to show his surprise.

“I suppose you are going to lecture me,” he said, “about the suffering I caused with my wars.”

As he spoke he was gathering up stones from the beach, hastily, almost urgently, as if they had some vital purpose.

“I suppose you’re going to go on about all the children whose parents I took from them,” he said.

He threw a stone. Splash. Quack.

“And the rapes that all sides perpetrated,” he said, throwing a stone again, “and the tortures,” throwing yet another stone, “and the massacres.”

He had run out of stones. He turned angrily towards Fabbro.

“I suppose you want to castigate me for turning skilled farmers and hunters and fishermen into passive workers in dreary city streets, spending their days manufacturing things they didn’t understand, and their evenings staring at images on screens manufactured for them by someone else.”

He turned away, shaking his head, looking around vaguely for more stones.

“I used to think about you looking in from outside,” he said. “When we had wars, when we were industrializing and getting people off the land, all of those difficult times. I used to imagine you judging me, clucking your tongue, shaking your head. But you try and bring progress to a world without any adverse consequences for anyone. You just try it.”

“Come on Tawus,” Fabbro begged him. “Sit with me. You know you’re not really going to destroy me. You know you can’t really reverse the course that this world, like any world, must take. It isn’t only your armies that have fallen away from you, Tawus, it is your own steely will. It has no purpose any more.”

But the cloak offered another point of view.

“Destroy Fabbro and you will become him,” it silently whispered. “Then you can put back the clock itself.”

Tawus knew it was true. Without Fabbro to stop him, he could indeed postpone the end, not forever, but for several more generations. And he could rule Esperine during that time as he had never ruled before, with no Fabbro outside, no one to look in and judge him. The cloak was right. He would become Fabbro, he would become Fabbro and Tawus both at once. It was possible, and what was more, it had been his reason for coming here in the first place.

He glanced down at Fabbro. He looked quickly away again across the lake. Ten whole seconds passed.

Then Tawus reached slowly for the clasp of the Peacock Cloak. He hesitated. He lowered his hand. He reached for the clasp again. His fingers were trembling because of the contradictory signals they were receiving from his brain, but finally he unfastened the cloak, removing it slowly and deliberately at first, and then suddenly flinging it away from himself, as if he feared it might grab hold and refuse to let him go. It snagged on a branch of a small oak tree and hung there, one corner touching the stony ground. Still its clever eyes darted about, green and gold and black. It was watching Tawus, watching Fabbro. As ever, it was observing everything, analyzing everything, evaluating options and possibilities. But yet, as is surely proper in a garment hanging from a tree, it had no direction of its own, it had no separate purpose.

Across the lake, the eastern hills shone. There were sheep up there grazing, bathed in golden light that picked them out against the mountainside. But the hills on the western side were also making their presence felt, for their shadows were reaching out like long fingers over the two small figures by the lake, one standing, one seated on the log, neither one speaking. Without his cloak, in a simple white shirt and white breeches, Tawus looked even more like Fabbro. A stranger could not have told them apart.

A flock of geese came flying in from a day of grazing lower down the valley. They honked peaceably to one another as they splashed down on the softly luminous water.

“When I was walking up here,” Tawus said at last, “I met three children, and they reminded me of some other children I saw once, or glimpsed anyway, when I was riding past in a tank. It was in the middle of a war and I didn’t pay much heed to them at the time. I was too busy listening to reports and giving orders. But for some reason they stuck in my mind.”

He picked up a stone, tossed it half-heartedly out into the lake.

“Their ruined home lay behind them,” he went on, “and in the ruins, most probably, lay the burned corpses of their parents. Not that their parents would have been combatants or anything. It was just that their country, their sleepy land of Meadow Lee, had temporarily become the square on the chessboard that the great game was focused on, the place where the force fields happened to intersect. Pretty soon the focal point would be somewhere else and the armies would move on from Meadow Lee and forget all about it until the next time. But those children wouldn’t forget would they? Not while they still lived. That day would stain and darken their entire lives, like the smoke stained and darkened their pretty blue sky. What could be worse, when you think about it, than filling up a small mind with such horrors? That, in a way, is also creating a world. It is creating a small but perfect hell.”

He snatched up yet another stone, but, with a swift graceful movement, Fabbro had jumped up and grasped Tawus’s wrist to stop him throwing it.

“Enough, Tawus, enough. The rebellion is over. The divisions you brought about have all been healed. The killed and the killers. The tortured and the torturers. The enslaved and the enslavers. All are reconciled. All have finally come back.”

“Everyone but me.”

Tawus let the stone fall to the ground. His creator released his hand, sat down again on the log and once again patted the space beside him.

Tawus looked at Fabbro, and at the log, and back at Fabbro again. And, finally, he sat down.

The two of them were completely in shadow now, had become shadows themselves. The smooth surface of the lake still glowed with soft pinks and blues, but the birds on its surface had become shadows too, warm living shadows, softly murmuring to one another in their various watery tongues, suspended between the glowing lake and the glowing sky. And more shadow was spreading up the hillside opposite, engulfing the sheep one after another, taking them from golden prominence to peaceful obscurity. Soon only the peaks still dipped into the stream of sunlight that was pouring horizontally far above the heads of the two men.

“Everyone but you,” Fabbro mildly agreed, reaching down for his binoculars once more so he could look at some unusual duck or other that he’d noticed out on the water.

Tawus glanced across at his Peacock Cloak, dangling from its tree. That tawdry thing, he suddenly thought. Why did I choose to hide myself in that? The cloak was shimmering and glittering, giving off its own light in the shadow, and its eyes were still brightly shining, as if it was attempting to be a rival to those last brilliant rays of sunlight, or to outglow the softly glowing lake. It was all that was left of Tawus’s empire, his will, his power.

He turned to Fabbro.

“Don’t get the wrong idea,” he began. “I don’t in any way regret what . . . ”

Then he broke off. He passed his still trembling hand over his face.

“I’m sorry, Fabbro,” he said in a completely different voice. “I’ve messed it all up haven’t I? I’ve been a fool. I’ve spoiled everything.”

Fabbro lowered his binoculars and patted Tawus on the hand.

“Well maybe you have. I’m not sure. But you’re quite right, you know, that I did just create a shell, and it was your rebellion that made it a world. Deep down I always knew that rebellion was necessary. I must have done, mustn’t I, since whatever you did came from somewhere inside me? Rebellion was necessary. I’d just hoped that in Esperine it would somehow take a different path.”

Only the highest tips of the peaks were still shining gold. They were like bright orange light bulbs. And then, one by one, they went out.

First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, June, 2010.

About the Author

Chris Beckett’s short stories began appearing in 1990, with “A Matter of Survival” in Interzone, and have since been published regularly on both sides of the Atlantic. He has published two short story collections, The Turing Test and The Peacock Cloak. The Turing Test won the Edge Hill short fiction award in 2009, a rare instance of an SF book winning a non-SF literary award. His four novels to date are The Holy Machine, Marcher, Dark Eden and Mother of Eden. Dark Eden won the Arthur C. Clarke award in 2013. Chris Beckett has three grown up children and lives in Cambridge, England with his wife Maggie.

Sunless Worlds

Tomas Petrasek

Life stories of planets seem to be as eventful as life stories of men. Even a brief glimpse upon the known exoplanets shows that even such large and respectable heavenly bodies are not spared from the ruthless struggle for life. There are many cosmic phenomena that can spell doom for a planet. Stars can destroy or expel them when they die explosively, but often, planets become their own enemies—during their youth, when they grow and migrate, they often come too close to their siblings and get into a conflict of gravitational perturbations. Resulting upheaval may be world-shattering indeed. In a previous article, we explored the fate of planets surviving on eccentric orbits, which is one possible outcome. The other worlds unlucky enough to be thrown out into the void are usually considered lost for good, doomed to slowly freeze in the infinite darkness and eternal oblivion. But do they really give up so easily?

Free-floating interstellar planets are also known by many poetic nicknames such as rogue, nomadic, orphan or even Steppenwolf worlds. Strictly speaking, they are not planets at all, as they do not orbit around a star anymore. The term “planemo” standing for “planetary mass object” is recommended sometimes. But the term “planet” means “wanderer” in ancient Greek, which fits those nomads well, maybe even better than the ordinary planets going in circles. Besides the many names, hardly any facts are known about the real likeness of those bodies, as they are hard to discover and even harder to study. We can be reasonably sure that they are common, but without observation, their nature and numbers remain highly uncertain.

Consider a gloomy vision: a planet similar to our own, left alone in the dark. Such a world would cool rapidly: thickening crust of ice would cover the oceans, and even the atmosphere would eventually collapse into frozen state, maybe except a thin envelope of noble gases. Complex life would become impossible—everything dependent on sunlight or photosynthesis-generated oxygen, which means almost all multicellular life, would be forced to extinction. But the internal energy of the Earth, the primordial heat trapped in the core and the incessant decay of radioactive elements, would maintain liquid water in the deepest ocean trenches, in microscopic pores of rocks and in rare volcanic oases. Bacteria, archea, and some eucaryotes might thrive there, creating a biosphere not unlike the hypothetical biospheres of Mars or Europa. However, the classical criterion of planetary habitability, namely, the presence of abundant surface water, is not met.

David J. Stevenson from California Institute of Technology in Pasadena was the first to notice that young protoplanets ejected even before they got any chance to mature must be quite different from such “frozen Earth.” Because they are so young, they have warmer interiors and ample reserves of radioactive elements. Furthermore, they can have thick insulating atmospheres of light gases. In our Solar system, we observe atmospheres of hydrogen and helium only on gas giant planets, which were massive enough to keep them in spite of solar wind, heat, and ultraviolet rays. But even Earth- or Mars-sized planets may retain light gases from the primordial nebula in substantial amounts before their parent star ignites and sweeps them away. In his 1999 study, Stevenson estimated that Earth-mass planets should be able to keep nebular atmospheres constituting up to 0.1—one percent of their total mass! The point is that the planets which are ejected early enough should never lose these massive nebular envelopes, which would retain their internal heat as an insulating blanket. In this case, geothermal heat alone could be sufficient to maintain liquid water oceans on the surface. It works just like the greenhouse effect on Earth, only the heat is not coming from the sun, but from below, and the amount of greenhouse gases counts in hundreds or thousands of atmospheres.

The lower atmosphere would exhibit convection, which means weather. In increasing altitudes and decreasing temperatures there would be cloud layers made of water, ammonia, and methane. The upper atmosphere would be clear, calm, and frigid, with temperatures around thirty Kelvins. The surface environment would certainly be conductive to life, as organisms thrive under similar pressures in our oceans and hydrogen and helium are not poisonous. It would be dark down there, however. No starlight could pierce the thick gaseous envelope, and the only source of light would be an occasional lightning or volcanic eruption. The sources of energy available to living things would be limited to chemical compounds generated by geothermal processes, radioactive decay, and maybe electrical discharges or cosmic rays.

The Earth is bathed in oxygen atmosphere, and most living things seek reduced compounds and oxidize them to gain energy (in our case, the “fuel” is plant sugars, but there are bacteria oxidizing inorganic matter, such as iron or hydrogen sulfide). On the rogue planet life of this kind would not work at all, as the atmosphere would be reduced, and hydrogen-rich. Instead, organisms would seek rare oxidized molecules. Trace amounts of oxygen could be created when radioactivity breaks down water molecules, and volcanoes could emit carbon dioxide, which could be used by methanogenic bacteria that transform it to methane and water by combining it with hydrogen.

Even on a highly radioactive and volcanic planet, energy sources would be poor, and regardless of open seas of warm water, any organisms living there would be scarce and simple. Although sunless planets may be common, just a small fraction of them would have an atmosphere just right to keep the surface neither too hot nor too cold (although this is also a matter of time, as even the hot planets would cool down eventually as they lose their internal heat).

The study of Abbot and Switzer (2011) considered airless, ice-covered bodies. They found out that the ideal planet of this kind should be larger than Earth (to provide more heat) or be more water-rich (thicker oceans leave more room for thick ice blankets on the surface and liquid water below) or both to maintain large amounts of liquid water and possibly life. Even Mars-sized planets with oceans under ice become possible with a layer of frozen CO₂ on the surface, because it makes an excellent insulation even in the solid state. And as other authors have shown, with chemicals (salts or ammonia) serving as antifreeze, even Pluto-sized bodies can maintain layers of cold liquid inside.

The recent imagery of Pluto and Charon supports this view, as it shows young craterless surfaces, as would be expected in bodies hosting underground oceans and substantial sources of internal energy. Tidal heating from interaction between several orbiting bodies would help, too. A moon on an eccentric orbit may provide the planet (and itself) with a substantial, but only temporary heating, lasting up to hundreds of millions of years, before the orbit is circularized. That’s nice, but biospheres probably need longer timescales to develop and thrive. More complex systems of multiple bodies would be perhaps better suited to provide a reliable source of tidal heat.

Could we detect planets lost in space? Gravitational microlensing (observing the unlikely occurrence when the gravity of the planet bends the light from a background star, making it brighten for a while) is the method of choice, and first bodies which are probably rogue giant planets have been found this way in 2011. The problem is, that microlensing is a unique event, offering us a glimpse that will never repeat, and there is no way to gain more knowledge about the exact nature of the objects in question. Young and hot giant planets (and brown dwarfs) can be detected by their infrared glow, but the planets that interest us the most, the small and cold ones, emit virtually no radiation, except for a weak microwave and far infrared signal. If they have a magnetic field, its interactions with interstellar medium or planetary satellites could be a source of radio emissions, offering another way to discover them. But our instruments are not yet powerful enough to achieve this goal, unless we are lucky and have such a planet directly in our cosmic backyard.

The interstellar space is probably full of scattered objects of various sizes, ages, and compositions, even more diverse than the familiar bodies of our Solar system. And they should be plentiful. Even our Solar system, where the planets have gotten along quite well, without major conflicts, might have lost a planet as large as Neptune (and likely many more smaller ones), as was shown by the Nice model of Solar system evolution. In other planetary systems, the losses might have been much more dramatic. In the Galaxy, the number of rogue giant planets should be at least comparable to the number of stars, with uncountable myriads of smaller bodies ranging from super-terrestrials down to stray boulders of ice or rock. Some of them became rogues as stillborn embryos, still shrouded in the envelope of primordial gases, while others became nomads in their old age, when they abandoned their dying stellar parents. Rogue giant planets would be almost impossible to distinguish from brown dwarfs, which differ only by their origins—they are born from their own nebula and therefore can form independently on a star, unlike a true planet.

This “interstellar jungle” can be especially interesting if one considers the implications for interstellar travelers. Even the simplest life forms could do it, drifting frozen through space either freely or protected within comets or meteorites. Although the known organisms could conceivably travel this way, they most probably would not survive—in the frozen state, even the toughest of them would be slowly killed by ionizing radiation during the eons necessary to cross the interstellar gulf. But what if they hitched a ride on a planet? In a warm liquid environment, bacteria fight radiation quite well, and they could live there happily for billions of years—they could travel to another galaxy without even noticing. Dispersal of life from such bodies to other worlds would be next to impossible, however.

For macroscopic, intelligent travelers, rogue planets could make vital stops on the dangerous voyage to other stars, or even respectable colonization targets on their own. For any civilization capable of building artificial habitats and mastering nuclear energy, interstellar objects would be as valuable as any “normal” planet. That would make interstellar traveling a much less formidable task than we usually think.

Maybe the (sunless) day will come, when a human or post-human will set his foot on a barren, cryogenic surface in the dim light of the Milky Way, to make his living in the eternal night. Will there ever be intelligent beings daring enough to dive into the murky depths of a superdense atmosphere, to disturb the billions-years-old darkness of an orphan world and to search there for a spark of life?

About the Author

Tomas Petrasek, born 1984, is a Czech scientist, astronomy advocate and science fiction writer. He has published two non-fiction books about astronomy, one novel, and several short stories. He currently works as a neurobiologist at the Czech Academy of Sciences.

Radiant Metafiction:
A Conversation with Catherynne M. Valente

Chris Urie

Sometimes a short story can contain an entire solar system. Catherine M. Valente’s “The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew” is one such story. Published in the August 2009 issue of Clarkesworld, it served as the spark for her latest novel.

Radiance, out from Tor Books on October 20th, is a wildly ambitious novel that not only encompasses an inhabited alternate history solar system, but the relationship between a daughter and father. Told through bookending bits of metafiction, the story of Severin Unck, a documentarian and the daughter of the famed filmmaker Percival Unck, sets readers orbiting around the complexities of this unique solar system and family. There are callowhales swimming the seas of Venus, a Pluto with nutritious night-blooming lilies, a moon where silent silver screen dreams are created, and a mysterious disappearance.

Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen works of fiction and poetry. She is the winner of the Andre Norton, Tiptree, Mythopoeic, Rhysling, Lamda, Locus, and Hugo awards in addition to being a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards.

Radiance is constructed of layers and layers of gossip column press snippets, audio transcripts, interviews, and more. What made you switch up styles on a chapter-by-chapter basis?

Radiance is such a big story. I knew it from the moment I put the period on the first paragraph of the original short story, “The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew.” It’s massive in terms of worldbuilding, scope, the cast of characters, the stakes. It’s probably the most ambitious thing I’ve ever written.

And it took me years to figure out how to tell that story. In many ways, I had to become a better writer in order to take it from a piece of short fiction to a novel. I had to give myself permission to do certain things, use certain tricks—like including scripts, audio, shifting POV, and the other ephemera and metafictional elements you mention. It’s pretty much a postmodern free-for-all. At first I kept thinking: I can’t just describe what’s onscreen in a movie inside the book. That just makes it look like I’d rather be making a movie. I had to get to a point where I could say: I actually can do that because it’s my book and that’s the right way to do it.

Though I will say, I didn’t really switch up every chapter. Each part of the book is strongly structured, alternating the four main narrative throughlines—Severin Unck, the disappeared filmmaker, Anchises St. John, the boy she rescued grown to a bitter man, Mary Pellam, the young ingenue, and Erasmo St. John, Unck’s lover and director of photography—with sections of ephemera, one for one. There is a pattern, I swear! The parts of the book are all symmetrically structured.

Radiance is a novel in large part about the magical act of seeing and hearing. About who gets to see and hear and speak. About the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to become who we want to be, in order to heal grief, in order to connect with others. There was no way it could ever have just one protagonist’s voice. And given that the world is an alternate history—but not just an alternate history, a decopunk alternate history—but not just a decopunk alternate history, a decopunk alternate history involving a pulp SF style inhabitable solar system, I had a lot of information to convey just to establish the status quo. In the real world, we know a culture by its output; by its theater and its gossip, what its young people long for, what its aristocracy defends. What better way to communicate all that than by simply listening in?

So we get the most popular radio drama broadcast through the Solar System, we get the gossip hounds (it’s hard to express the power they had in old Hollywood when most now treat them as a joke) hunting down rumors of murder and secret homosexuality and studio malfeasance, the diary of an actress coming to the Moon for the first time, the advertisements made to encourage Americans to settle Pluto. And throughout, the shifting, changing film Percival Unck keeps trying to make about his daughter’s disappearance, flitting through genres and styles, desperate for one that will make the story make sense. And all these together create the voice of a culture on the brink of change, many perspectives, many voices, as though we’re listening to everything come through the transom on some Neptunian outpost.

What films inspired or influenced Radiance

Oh, goodness. A Trip to the Moon and Metropolis, obviously, influenced the aesthetic enormously. Un Chien Andalou, the 1925 Phantom of the Opera, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Lodger, the Fairbanks Robin Hood, early animation like Snow White . . . and then as the novel moves through other genres, noir, gothic, children’s fantasy, detective films, movies like The Maltese Falcon, Touch of Evil, Murder on the Orient Express, Rebecca, The House of Usher, Fantasia. Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story. Several of the found footage horror films of recent years like The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity, and Cloverfield. There’s even a bit of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? hiding in there.

I suppose the shorter answer would be: all of them?

What drew you to black and white era of filmmaking?

There is something uniquely beautiful about black and white film. It glows away imperfections, its light is otherworldly and strange, and it still communicates a kind of cultural authority to us. Black and white is serious art. Black and white means business. And yet it took such a wild circus of techniques to pull off—the bit about Virago Studios painting everyone black and white is drawn from real life. Color shows strangely on black and white film sometimes, and George Méliès, ever the perfectionist, had everyone on his lot painted so what he saw would be what the finished film would show. Shooting in black and white was very difficult and still is if you’re not just using an Instagram filter. But it looks instantly like Art to us.

Plus, I was really angry at Thomas Edison.

At this point, I think most people are well aware that Edison was a terrible human being. Though we tend to focus on Tesla and electricity, his underhandedness stretched far further. He really was a proper supervillain, in a way. I was reading a book about old Hollywood, and the men who founded the first four major studios, and became interested in why Hollywood itself had become the center of filmmaking, when it was so far from New York, the cultural and financial center of America.

It turns out, the answer is: California was just far away enough that Edison couldn’t do whatever he wanted. He really did own all the patents on color film and sound and video recording, and really did pursue them viciously. Ultimately, filmmakers had to run away to even make and show a film without paying Edison enormous sums of money. I found the idea of what might have happened had that situation persisted, despite such runnings away, fascinating. After all, patents today are used to crush new companies and industries. It’s not much of a stretch at all. Of course, corporate studios could always pay the price, but that would mean only schlocky blockbusters would have sound. “Real art” would slowly become silent, and then the studios might chase that authenticity, and give up sound to get the shine of the artiste.

Combine all this with an issue I’ve always been interested in: the idea of what a science fictional or fantasy world produces as art. What is speculative fiction to that world? What is realism? And you have Radiance. Silent films and wild planets.

What was it like growing up as the daughter of a filmmaker? How did it influence the story?

The very first seed of the story was an interview with Mark Z. Danielewski in which he talked about what a profound influence his father, a cinematographer, had been on him as a writer. And I thought: Huh. My father was a director and I’ve never written about that at all.

My mother was, too, actually. They met at UCLA and at one point my father was pursuing film directing while my mother directed theater. Some of my earliest memories are of my mother wearing black all the time and going to something called “rehearsal,” which just sounded like another planet to me.

Ultimately, my dad went into advertising and my mom became a political science professor, but my father absolutely gave my siblings and I childhoods steeped in movies like developing chemicals. Our home movies were all beautifully shot and directed. We all know how to find the camera. In the 80s, life wasn’t as constantly recorded as it is now. But we have all been filmed since birth, more or less. We speak to each other in movie quotes—common now, but not so much when we were kids. Movies are the lifeblood of my family.

Radiance is a story about a father and a daughter and the cameras between them. It’s not the story of my father and I, but it draws much from the experience of being raised by someone who could look at life as a scene, reshoot the occasional heartwarming moment, and talk to his kid about structure while she ate Frosted Flakes.

What were some of the challenges of expanding the original Clarkesworld story into a full novel?

One of the biggest was the ending. You can be coy about an ending in short fiction. You can be coy in a novel, but it tends to piss people off a little. Hell, it pisses me off unless it’s done absolutely perfectly. I didn’t want to pull a LOST and not provide answers. So I had to decide what happened to Severin. But the ambiguity of her was part of what I loved about the story, so it was very hard for me to come down firmly, in a solid science fictional not hand-wavy way, on the central question of the book.

This was also the first time I ever pulled out the old trick of getting down the structure on index cards and putting them up on my wall to keep it all straight. Radiance seems complex on the surface, but it’s really a fancied-up thriller, and getting myself in that mindset, rather than in the long, elegant strokes of a short story, was quite tough.

But it was never hard to fill the space. Radiance was always squeezed into that short story. Making it into a 450-page novel was mostly a matter of giving everything room to breathe.

Why did you change the name of Bysshe in the short story to Severin in the novel?

*laughs* Well, I suppose this is a little embarrassing. Initially, my idea for the aesthetic of the short story was more “romantic poet” than art-deco. So Percival’s daughter was Bysshe, after Percy Bysshe Shelley.

But I did a couple of readings of the story, and once I started writing the novel and reading bits aloud (something I think all writers should do), I noticed I was wincing when I said her name. Because it doesn’t sound as nice as it looks on paper? It sounds soft and flaccid and like it’s sort of apologizing for being said. That’s not Severin at all. And also sounds a little like you’re saying “bitch” with a lisp?

So I figured, if you wince saying the protagonist’s name, that can’t be good, because girl, you are gonna have to say that name a lot. So I chose Severin because it, too, is a traditionally masculine name, and it shares a root with severe. Plus, I can say it without wincing.

With its complex narrative style, do you think Radiance could become a film? If so, who would you like to play Severin?

I do! I think an enterprising screenwriter would have to pare it down to a more core concept (or else make it a television series) but I think the story of a filmmaker disappearing on a Venus infested with giant whale-aliens would make a lovely movie, with the silent film aesthetic but without the silence. It’s a book about movies, after all. Half the novel is scripts!

I think Jessica Brown Findlay or Tuppence Middleton would make a fantastic Severin. If they’re busy, there’s an Australian actress named Becky Lou Church who would be utterly perfect. Maybe Chiwetel Ejiofor or Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje for Erasmo, Carey Mulligan for young Mary Pellam, Emma Thompson for older Mary, Colin Firth or Bill Nighy for Percival? I think Iwan Rheon would be a great Anchises. I CAN DO THIS ALL DAY.

Is an author a director, an actor, a screenwriter, or a bit of all three?

All of the above! Plus lighting designer, special effects supervisor, set builder, cinematographer, all the actors, film editor, craft services, stuntman, and probably best boy since hardly anyone knows what that is. (It’s like a manager for the lighting or grip department.)

All of the planets in the solar system you’ve created are utterly unique and beautiful. What inspired them?

Well, the watery Venus came straight from Zelazny, most directly The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth. But a lot of authors in the pulp era fancied Venus a waterworld, and it was wanting to recreate that pulp idea with a 2015 literary sensibility that fueled Venus.

The others, in a strange way, came from genre. I thought about what genres the different planets made me think of: Mars, obviously a Western. With all that dust, it would be a perfect place for ranches and cowboys and boom-bust towns. Pluto is clearly a hothouse gothic world. Uranus felt so noir in my head—the cold, the distance, the dark, neon lights reflecting in the ice. Neptune is associated with water, of course, but I loved the idea of massive cities moving like ships over the oceans. Jupiter’s gravity seemed a perfect match for a kind of Grand Central Station, so I left it a gas giant, unlike the others, where I wanted people to be able to plant their feet. (For all the fantastic unreal elements, there is actually quite a bit of carefully thought-through science in Radiance, I promise!)

And the Moon has been the great spotlight in the sky for millions of years. Where else would you put the movies?

About the Author

Chris Urie is a writer and editor from Ocean City, NJ. He has written and published everything from city food guide articles to critical essays on video game level design. He currently lives in Philadelphia with an ever expanding collection of books and a small black rabbit that has an attitude problem.

Another Word:
Love Song for a Saturday Morning

Alethea Kontis

Saturday morning cartoons began sometime in the 1960s and ran until the fall of 2014. For over fifty years, from roughly 8 AMuntil noon, children in the United States sat in observance of this weekly ritual with an anticipation second only to Christmas morning.

Being one of these children myself, I speak from experience.

Every week, by appointment, we frolicked in commercially sponsored Elysian Fields. We witnessed at least six impossible things before the sugar-filled breakfast we had prepared with little or no help from our parents. Saturday morning was Our World, Our Time, and we each stood proudly as noble defenders of this magical domain.

Even now, the League of Saturday Morning will defend their favorite shows with equal vigor. Just ask them. We are incredibly passionate when it comes to this little Technicolor corner of our history.

Saturday morning cartoons originated with both strip and rack comics, movies, and toys. Some introduced us to role-playing games (hello, Dungeons and Dragons). Some were unique to the small screen (thank you, Warner Bros. and Hanna-Barbera). Some were even based on candy (who would have thought the adventures of The Gummi Bears would be so much fun?).

Unfortunately, the passing of those halcyon days was inevitable. The FCC began requiring a minimum amount of educational programs on broadcast networks. They forced limits on commercial content, killing advertising revenue. DVRs, subscription services, and the internet provided children with whatever they needed whenever they wanted.

And we—those of us who are “adults” now—accepted it. We grew up and moved on. We sold that house to developers who bulldozed it and made a strip mall. We knew we could not bring it back because—in today’s technological climate—it would not have the same effect. We gave birth to a gaggle of humans striving for convenience and instant gratification. The modern world is their candy store.

But I believe our children, and future generations, will be the worse off for its loss. Yes, it might be argued that those hours spent in front of the boob tube were already washing our brains clean of inspiration and original thought, but I choose to argue the opposite side. Not only did Saturday morning cartoons open our minds to possibilities of the impossible, but their scarcity also forced us to appreciate them more.

Studies have shown that the scarcity of certain items increases their desirability. It’s a fairly basic psychological tenet that has become the basis for hundreds of love songs: we want what we can’t have. Flooding the market with webcomics and animation your child can create on your home computer are some of the main reasons those of us with spending money are reluctant to pay $4.50 for rack comics anymore. Every other blockbuster movie or high-budget television show is about superheroes. Impossibility has become commonplace.

Back when impossibility was the realm of Saturday morning, children were forced to use the rest of the week to dream up their own adventures, to challenge themselves beyond the limits of their paltry human existence.

There is a certain Zen inherent in a scheduled lifestyle—part of the freedom of childhood. There is considerably less stress when one knows what to expect in one’s life. (Those of us who choose a freelance lifestyle are just Hatters at the Tea Party.) In those early days, children had no choice but to get up and move on when programming ended. With the advent of VHS, children taught themselves scheduling and electronics in order to keep from missing the shows they loved that ran simultaneously on different networks, extending that morning ritual for a few more precious hours.

These days, the programming never stops. The difficult task of prying children away from small screens in the 1980s has become an almost Herculean undertaking. And the quality of said programming choices leaves much to be desired.

“Saturday morning cartoons had a heart and charm to them I feel modern cartoons lack,” says Patrick Kramer, a stage actor in the local Nashville theater scene. “Creators now strive so hard to be snarky and weird for weird’s sake and I think it’s a detriment to the art form.”

Being subjected to these cartoons on a regular basis certainly opened our young minds to realms of endless possibilities. If Duck Tales featured a backwards world full of rubber streets and stone tires and dinosaurs, we happily suspended our disbelief and let the story play out. So many great things have already been inspired by comics: Donald Duck himself has been given credit for raising sunken ships, and the opening sequence to Raiders of the Lost Ark. Inventors all over the world have attempted emulating ACME rocket skates, helicopter hats, and slingshots into space.

Coincidentally, it was an episode of Duck Tales that inspired author Eugene Myers to consider creating his own custom Saturday morning for his son. “The nephews were trying to trick Scrooge into thinking it was Saturday instead of Friday so they could get their allowance early, and part of their ruse included playing a VHS tape of Saturday morning cartoons. I figure I have so many DVDs of cartoons I grew up with…that I could compile shows into several hours of programming.”

The children of today may have much healthier eating habits, but will they be able to think outside the cereal box? How comfortable will they be imagining the impossible? Will the lack of Saturday morning cartoons stifle their dreams? All that clever, colorful nonsense is still out there. Only time will tell us if the weekly ritual was part of the revelation.

I sometimes imagine a post-apocalyptic dystopia in which the death of civilization can be traced back to the demise of Saturday morning cartoons. It is a dark and scary place. But if I wasn’t a member of the League of Saturday Morning, perhaps I wouldn’t have imagined it in the first place.

About the Author

New York Times bestselling author Alethea Kontis is a princess, a goddess, a force of nature, and a mess. She’s known for screwing up the alphabet, scolding vampire hunters, turning garden gnomes into mad scientists, and making sense out of fairy tales.

Alethea is the co-author of Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Dark-Hunter Companion, and penned the AlphaOops series of picture books. Her short fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in a myriad of anthologies and magazines. She has done multiple collaborations with Eisner winning artist J.K. Lee, including The Wonderland Alphabet and Diary of a Mad Scientist Garden Gnome. Her debut YA fairy tale novel, Enchanted, won the Gelett Burgess Children’s Book Award in 2012.

Born in Burlington, Vermont, Alethea now lives in Northern Virginia with her Fairy Godfamily. She makes the best baklava you’ve ever tasted and sleeps with a teddy bear named Charlie.

Editor’s Desk:
The Sad Truth About Short Fiction Magazines

Neil Clarke

Did you know that there are only three genre fiction magazines that completely support themselves from the revenue they generate? These are Analog, Asimov’s, and the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, collectively known as the Big Three. Others, like Tor.com and Subterranean (now closed), are supported by the revenue of their parent companies. Below them are four more groups: the non-profits (like Strange Horizons and Beneath Ceaseless Skies); the hobbyists or beginners (typically characterized by low or no pay for authors); the aspirants (they pay authors SFWA-qualifying rates or better, but haven’t found reliable way to cover that cost); and the conceivable (the aspirants that have learned to generate enough revenue to cover costs, but not adequately compensate their staff). Today, I’d like to talk about the first and last two groups, but primarily the latter.

For starters, I know there are people who will nitpick the categorizations I’ve created. If that’s what you’re going to focus on, you’ll probably miss the point of this editorial. None of those categories are meant to diminish the value or quality of a market. It’s simply a way to break them up in terms of the current state of their business models. Don’t get hung up on the names. I’ve gone through a dozen permutations and will likely go through a dozen more in the months ahead.

Since I haven’t labeled the first two examples, let’s group them together and call them the professionals. It would also be fair to call them the old guard professionals, organizations that have their foundation in the pre-ebook print world. Yes, some of them have launched digital magazines, but these businesses established themselves first in the print world. None of these organizations have their foundation in the digital world. This is not a criticism. It is a simple observation. To their credit, each has learned to embrace the industry’s transition to print and digital. That’s what good businesses do. They adapt to market shifts or die.

Clarkesworld published its first issue nine years ago this month. During that time period, I’ve paid very close attention to what has been happening within this corner of the short fiction field. Within that nine-year window, the lion’s share of new genre magazines have launched from a digital foundation. Sure, some of us dabble in print, but our business models are very digital-oriented. This is largely due to financial- and distribution-related issues. The amount of money necessary to launch a print-based aspirant-level market with national distribution is staggering. You could fully-fund a digital publication for well over a year with the same amount and that’s not even taking into consideration warehousing expenses, the headaches caused by the distributors and their antiquated returns system, or the USPS and their continually increasing postal costs. Even though none of the digital-native publications have risen to the ranks of professional, the smart money these days is to launch digitally. (Note: There have been new and even some old print magazines that have failed within this window.)

In the pre-digital world, which happens to be most of my life, there were always new magazines coming and going. Without the digital options available, they adapted in other ways. Small print runs, hand-selling at conventions, mailing parties, and lower pay for authors and artists were routine. While many dreamed of reaching that professional tier, it was often clearly out of reach and as a result their expectations had to be more realistic. Quality and readership for publications were more variable and the overwhelming majority never left the hobbyist/beginner group. None of them reached the ranks of the professionals.

Just like in the rest of the industry, digital publishing has considerably lowered the bar to entry and it has completely altered the landscape for genre magazines. The aspirants category is larger than ever, and may even be growing at a rate faster than the number of new readers and writers entering the field.

There are two reasons to be worried about this:

1. Quality

If the number of quality stories isn’t growing as fast as the number of stories publishers need to fill all their slots, then quality must dip to fill the void.

2. Sustainability

If the number of readers willing to pay for short fiction isn’t growing as fast as the financial need of the publishers, the field begins to starve itself.

I’m singling out the aspirants here because they are the most at-risk. Their financial foundation is the least stable of the groups I’m focusing on, so they are the most likely to fall victim. In the long term, the danger also extends up the food chain and endangers the conceivables and the professionals. It’s considerably less likely to significant alter the trajectory of the publications further down the chain.

Without a doubt, the lowered bar has triggered a boom period in short fiction. Most of the time that’s been quite exciting, but more recently I’ve found myself noticing some worrisome trends that could be signs of a market correction looming on the horizon.

Over the years, I’ve consulted on a number of new publishing projects. I generally start by telling people that they need to have a metric for knowing when to quit. For example, how much money are you willing to lose? It’s a business, not your baby, so you need to know when to fold. There’s no shame in this and you can always try again later. Our history is littered with magazines that couldn’t make a go of it for some reason or another.

The second thing I tell people is to start small and grow. You are only asking for trouble if you try to be everything you aspire to all at once. Map out where you want to be in three years and slowly work towards it by building the revenue and readership you need to justify it. Even if someone hands you a big check, you still need to plan wisely and think about more than just the next year.

Lately, I’ve started seeing projects to resurrect dead magazines or save those that couldn’t get enough subscribers to sustain their ambitious goals. It’s uplifting to see our community rallying around these causes, but are we setting ourselves up for a fall in the process? Are we simply delaying the inevitable, like what happened with Realms of Fantasy? (For those who don’t know, Realms of Fantasy was a print magazine that kept coming back from the dead because there were people passionate enough about it to want to see it continue, but not enough to make it a viable business.)

But what can any of us do about it? Here’s a few suggestions:

Subscribe to or support any magazine that you’d be willing to bail out if they were to run aground. Just-in-time funding is not a sane or sustainable business model. If you want them to succeed, then be there before they need you.

If a magazine doesn’t offer subscriptions or have something like a Patreon page you can support them financially through, encourage them to do so.

Encourage SFWA to raise their qualifying rate for short fiction. Why? Given the small explosion in markets that are paying that rate, it’s clearly too easy for publishers to earn that badge. Yes, that rate is a badge of honor for publishers. Seriously though, the authors deserve better.

Don’t support new (or revival) projects until they clearly outline reasonable goals to sustain the publication after their initial funding runs out.

Introduce new readers to your favorite stories and magazines. This is particularly easy with so many online magazines being freely available at the moment. We need more short fiction readers if all this is to remain sustainable. This plays into my comments on short fiction reviews last month.

As I’ve worked on this piece, it’s been hard not to get depressed about the odds for any conceivables breaking into the ranks of the professionals. If we’re entering a phase of market compression, and I think we are, the hill will only become steeper. I’d love to see Clarkesworld be the first to cross over, but I’ve learned to be realistic about this business and appreciative of what we have achieved in the last nine years. I appreciate everything our readers have done to support us and hope you’ll continue to stick with us on the road ahead. We can’t do it without you. None of us can.

I consider many of the editors at the other magazines to be friends and colleagues. While I may not agree with some of their business practices (and they mine), they have my respect and best wishes. The sad truth about short fiction magazines is many of them won’t be around ten years from now. The good news is that the market always corrects itself and someone else—sometimes even someone who’s tried before—steps up to replace the fallen with something new.

One more time before I go:

Subscribe.

Support.

Thank you.

About the Author

Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, Forever Magazine, and Upgraded; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a three-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). The innagural edition of his Year’s Best Science Fiction anthology series will be launched by Night Shade Books in 2016. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Cover Art: A-boushi-ya

shichigoro-shingo

About the Artist

shichigoro-shingo (Shingo Matsunuma) is a freelance illustrator and graduate of Tama Art University (Department of Painting, Oil Painting Course) in Tokyo. His work has been featured on clothing, advertising, and the covers for books and albums.