Issue 51, April 2019

© Wyrm Publishing, 2019
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forever-magazine.com

Introduction

Neil Clarke

Welcome to the April 2019 issue of Forever Magazine!

I don’t normally have much to say for these introductions and between travel, family events, and just general chaos, it’s been difficult to carve out the time for writing. I also have my 24th anniversary and a funeral coming up this week, so I’m sure you can understand me having fewer words.

My year of frequent travel continues this month with a trip to Seattle for Norwescon, where I’ll be working at their writing workshop and participating in programming as “Honored Professional.” I don’t get to the West Coast all that often, but I’ll be out there twice in the next two months. (The other is the Nebula Conference in LA.) I’m looking forward to catching up with people I seldom get to see in the East. If you’re at either, please say hi!

Until next time,

-Neil

The Potter of Bones

Eleanor Arnason

The northeast coast of the Great Southern Continent is hilly and full of inlets. These make good harbors, their waters deep and protected from the wind by steep slopes and grey stone cliffs. Dark forests top the hills. Pebble beaches edge the harbors. There are many little towns.

The climate would be tropical, except for a polar current that runs along the coast, bringing fish and rain. The local families prosper through fishing and the rich, semi-tropical forests that grow inland. Blackwood grows there, and iridescent greywood, as well as lovely ornamentals: night-blooming starflower, day-blooming skyflower and the matriarch of trees, crown-of-fire. The first two species are cut for lumber. The last three are gathered as saplings, potted and shipped to distant ports, where affluent families buy them for their courtyards.

Nowadays, of course, it’s possible to raise the saplings in glass houses anywhere on the planet. But most folk still prefer trees gathered in their native forests. A plant grows better, if it’s been pollinated naturally by the fabulous flying bugs of the south, watered by the misty coastal rains and dug up by a forester who’s the heir to generations of diggers and potters. The most successful brands have names like “Coastal Rain” and emblems suggesting their authenticity: a forester holding a trowel, a night bug with broad furry wings floating over blossoms.

This story is about a girl born in one of these coastal towns. Her mother was a well-regarded fisherwoman, her father a sailor who’d washed up after a bad storm. Normally, a man such as this—a stranger, far from his kin—would not have been asked to impregnate any woman. But the man was clever, mannerly, and had the most wonderful fur: not grey, as was usual in that part of the world, but tawny red-gold. His eyes were pale clear yellow; his ears, large and set well out from his head, gave him an entrancing appearance of alertness and intelligence. Hard to pass up looks like these! The matrons of Tulwar coveted them for their children and grandchildren.

He—a long hard journey ahead of him, with no certainty that he’d ever reach home—agreed to their proposal. A man should be obedient to the senior women in his family. If they aren’t available, he should obey the matrons and matriarchs nearby. In his own country, where his looks were ordinary, he had never expected to breed. It might happen, if he’d managed some notable achievement; knowing himself, he didn’t plan on it. Did he want children? Some men do. Or did he want to leave something behind him on this foreign shore, evidence that he’d existed, before venturing back on the ocean? We can’t know. He mated with our heroine’s mother. Before the child was born, he took a coastal trader north, leaving nothing behind except a bone necklace and Tulwar Haik.

Usually, when red and grey interbreed, the result is a child with dun fur. Maybe Haik’s father wasn’t the first red sailor to wash up on the Tulwar coast. It’s possible that her mother had a gene for redness, which finally expressed itself, after generations of hiding. In any case, the child was red with large ears and bright green eyes. What a beauty! Her kin nicknamed her Crown-of-Fire.

When she was five, her mother died. It happened this way: the ocean current that ran along the coast shifted east, taking the Tulwar fish far out in the ocean. The Tulwar followed; and somewhere, days beyond sight of land, a storm drowned their fleet. Mothers, aunts, uncles, cousins disappeared. Nothing came home except a few pieces of wood: broken spars and oars. The people left in Tulwar Town were either young or old.

Were there no kin in the forest? A few, but the Tulwar had relied on the ocean.

Neighboring families offered to adopt the survivors. “No thank you,” said the Tulwar matriarchs. “The name of this bay is Tulwar Harbor. Our houses will remain here, and we will remain in our houses.”

“As you wish,” the neighbors said.

Haik grew up in a half-empty town. The foresters, who provided the family’s income, were mostly away. The adults present were mostly white-furred and bent: great-aunts and -uncles, who had not thought to spend their last years mending houses and caring for children. Is it any wonder that Haik grew up wild?

Not that she was bad; but she liked being alone, wandering the pebble beaches and climbing the cliffs. The cliffs were not particularly difficult to climb, being made of sedimentary stone that had eroded and collapsed. Haik walked over slopes of fallen rock or picked her way up steep ravines full of scrubby trees. It was not adventure she sought, but solitude and what might be called “nature” nowadays, if you’re one of those people in love with newfangled words and ideas. Then, it was called “the five aspects” or “water, wind, cloud, leaf, and stone.” Though she was the daughter of sailors, supported by the forest, neither leaf nor water drew her. Instead, it was rock she studied—and the things in rock. Since the rock was sedimentary, she found fossils rather than crystals.

Obviously, she was not the first person to see shells embedded in cliffs; but the intensity of her curiosity was unusual. How had the shells gotten into the cliffs? How had they turned to stone? And why were so many of them unfamiliar?

She asked her relatives.

“They’ve always been there,” said one great-aunt.

“A high tide, made higher by a storm,” said another.

“The Goddess,” a very senior male cousin told her, “whose behavior we don’t question. She acts as she does for her own reasons, which are not unfolded to us.”

The young Tulwar, her playmates, found the topic boring. Who could possibly care about shells made of stone? “They don’t shimmer like living shells, and there’s nothing edible in them. Think about living shellfish, Haik! Or fish! Or trees like the ones that support our family!”

If her kin could not answer her questions, she’d find answers herself. Haik continued her study. She was helped by the fact that the strata along the northeast coast had not buckled or been folded over. Top was new. Bottom was old. She could trace the history of the region’s life by climbing up.

At first, she didn’t realize this. Instead, she got a hammer and began to break out fossils, taking them to one of the town’s many empty houses. There, through trial and error, she learned to clean the fossils and to open them. “Unfolding with a hammer,” she called the process.

Nowadays we discourage this kind of ignorant experimentation, especially at important sites. Remember this story takes place in the distant past. There was no one on the planet able to teach Haik; and the fossils she destroyed would have been destroyed by erosion long before the science of paleontology came into existence.

She began by collecting shells, laying them out on the tables left behind when the house was abandoned. Imagine her in a shadowy room, light slanting through the shutters. The floor is thick with dust. The paintings on the walls, fish and flowering trees, are peeling. Haik—a thin red adolescent in a tunic—bends over her shells, arranging them. She has discovered one of the great pleasures of intelligent life: organization or (as we call it now) taxonomy.

This was not her invention. All people organize information. But most people organize information for which they can see an obvious use: varieties of fish and their habits, for example. Haik had discovered the pleasure of knowledge that has no evident use. Maybe, in the shadows, you should imagine an old woman with white fur, dressed in a roughly woven tunic. Her feet are bare and caked with dirt. She watches Haik with amusement.

In time, Haik noticed there was a pattern to where she found her shells. The ones on the cliff tops were familiar. She could find similar or identical shells washed up on the Tulwar beaches. But as she descended, the creatures in the stone became increasingly strange. Also, and this puzzled her, certain strata were full of bones that obviously belonged to land animals. Had the ocean advanced, then retreated, then advanced again? How old were these objects? How much time had passed since they were alive, if they had ever been alive? Some of her senior kin believed they were mineral formations that bore an odd resemblance to the remains of animals. “The world is full of repetition and similarity,” they told Haik, “evidence the Goddess has little interest in originality.”

Haik reserved judgment. She’d found the skeleton of a bird so perfect that she had no trouble imagining flesh and feathers over the delicate bones. The animal’s wings, if wings they were, ended in clawed hands. What mineral process would create the cliff top shells, identical to living shells, and this lovely familiar-yet-unfamiliar skeleton? If the Goddess had no love for originality, how to explain the animals toward the cliff bottom, spiny and knobby, with an extraordinary number of legs? They didn’t resemble anything Haik had ever seen. What did they repeat?

When she was fifteen, her relatives came to her. “Enough of this folly! We are a small lineage, barely surviving; and we all have to work. Pick a useful occupation, and we’ll apprentice you.”

Most of her cousins became foresters. A few became sailors, shipping out with their neighbors, since the Tulwar no longer had anything except dories. But Haik’s passion in life was stone. The town had no masons, but it did have a potter.

“Our foresters need pots,” said Haik. “And Rakai is getting old. Give me to her.”

“A wise choice,” said the great-aunts with approval. “For the first time in years, you have thought about your family’s situation.”

Haik went to live in the house occupied by ancient Rakai. Most of the rooms were empty, except for pots. Clay dust drifted in the air. Lumps of dropped clay spotted the floors. The old potter was never free of the material. “When I was young, I washed more,” she said. “But time is running out, and I have much to do. Wash if you want. It does no harm, when a person is your age. Though you ought to remember that I may not be around to teach you in a year or two or three.”

Haik did wash. She was a neat child. But she remembered Rakai’s warning and studied hard. As it turned out, she enjoyed making pots. Nowadays, potters can buy their materials from a craft cooperative; and many do. But in the past every potter mined his or her own clay; and a potter like Rakai, working in a poor town, did not use rare minerals in her glazes. “These are not fine cups for rich matrons to drink from,” she told Haik. “These are pots for plants. Ordinary glazes will do, and minerals we can find in our own country.” Once again Haik found herself out with hammer and shovel. She liked the ordinary work of preparation, digging the clay and hammering pieces of mineral from their matrices. Grinding the minerals was fine, also, though not easy; and she loved the slick texture of wet clay, as she felt through it for grit. Somehow, though it wasn’t clear to her yet, the clay—almost liquid in her fingers—was connected to the questions she had asked about stone.

The potter’s wheel was frustrating. When Rakai’s old fingers touched a lump of clay, it rose into a pot like a plant rising from the ground in spring, entire and perfect, with no effort that Haik could see. When Haik tried to do the same, nothing was achieved except a mess.

“I’m like a baby playing with mud!”

“Patience and practice,” said old Rakai.

Haik listened, being no fool. Gradually, she learned how to shape clay and fire it in the kiln Rakai had built behind the house. Her first efforts were bad, but she kept several to store her favorite pieces of rock. One piece was red iron ore, which could be ground down to make a shiny black glaze. The rest were fossils: shells and strange marine animals and the claw-handed bird.

At this point in the story, it’s important to know the meaning of the word “potter” in Haik’s language. As in our language, it meant a maker of pots. In addition, it meant someone who puts things into pots. Haik was still learning to make pots. But she was already a person who put stones or bones into pots, and this is not a trivial occupation, but rather a science. Never undervalue taxonomy. The foundation of all knowledge is fact, and facts that are not organized are useless.

Several years passed. Haik learned her teacher’s skill, though her work lacked Rakai’s elegance.

“It’s the cliffs,” said the old potter. “And the stones you bring back from them. They have entered your spirit, and you are trying to reproduce them in clay. I learned from plants, which have grace and symmetry. But you—”

One of Haik’s pots was on the wheel: a squat, rough-surfaced object. The handles were uneven. At first, such things had happened due to lack of skill, but she found she liked work that was a little askew. She planned a colorless, transparent glaze that would streak the jar—like water seeping down a rock face, Haik suddenly realized.

“There’s no harm in this,” said Rakai. “We all learn from the world around us. If you want to be a potter of stones, fine. Stones and bones, if you are right and the things you find are bones. Stones and bones and shells.”

The old potter hobbled off. Should she break the pot, Haik wondered. Was it wrong to love the cliffs and the objects they contained? Rakai had told her no. She had the old potter’s permission to be herself. On a whim, Haik scratched an animal into the clay. Its head was like a hammer, with large eyes at either end—on the hammer’s striking surfaces, as Haik explained it to herself. The eyes were faceted; and the long body was segmented. Each segment had a pair of legs, except for the final segment, which had two whip-like tails longer than the rest of the animal. No one she had met, not travelers to the most distant places nor the most outrageous liars, had ever described such an animal. Yet she had found its remains often, always in the cliffs’ lower regions, in a kind of rock she had named “far-down dark grey.”

Was this one of the Goddess’s jokes? Most of the remains were damaged; only by looking carefully had she found intact examples; and no one else she knew was interested in such things. Had the Goddess built these cliffs and filled them with remains in order to fool Tulwar Haik?

Hardly likely! She looked at the drawing she’d made. The animal’s body was slightly twisted, and its tails flared out on either side. It seemed alive, as if it might crawl off her pot and into Tulwar Harbor. The girl exhaled, her heart beating quickly. There was truth here. The creature she had drawn must have lived. Maybe it still lived in some distant part of the ocean. (She had found it among shells. Its home must be aquatic.) She refused to believe such a shape could come into existence through accident. She had been mixing and kneading and spinning and dropping clay for years. Nothing like this had ever appeared, except through intent. Surely it was impious to argue that the Goddess acted without thought. This marvelous world could not be the result of the Great One dropping the stuff-of-existence or squishing it aimlessly between her holy fingers. Haik refused to believe the animal was a joke. The Goddess had better things to do, and the animal was beautiful in its own strange way. Why would the Goddess, who was humorous but not usually malicious, make such an intricate and lovely lie?

Haik drew the animal on the other side of the pot, giving it a slightly different pose, then fired the pot and glazed it. The glaze, as planned, was clear and uneven, like a film of water running down the pot’s dark grey fabric.

As you know, there are regions of the world where families permit sex among their members, if the relationship is distant enough. The giant families of the third continent, with fifty or a hundred thousand members, say there’s nothing wrong with third or fourth or fifth cousins becoming lovers, though inbreeding is always wrong. But Haik’s family did not live in such a region; and their lineage was so small and lived so closely together, that no one was a distant relative.

For this reason, Haik did not experience love until she was twenty and went down the coast on a trading ship to sell pots in Tsugul.

This was an island off the coast, a famous market in those days. The harbor was on the landward side, protected from ocean storms. A town of wood and plaster buildings went down slopes to the wooden warehouses and docks. Most of the plaster had been painted yellow or pale blue. The wood, where it showed, was dark blue or red. A colorful town, thought Haik when she arrived, made even more colorful by the many plants in pots. They stood on terraces and rooftops, by doorways, on the stairway streets. A good place to sell Rakai’s work and her own.

In fact, she did well, helped by a senior forester who had been sent to sell the Tulwar’s other product.

“I’d never say a word against your teacher, lass,” he told her. “But your pots really set off my trees. They, my trees, are so delicate and brilliant; and your pots are so rough and plain. Look!” He pointed at a young crown-of-fire, blossoming in a squat black pot. “Beauty out of ugliness! Light out of darkness! You will make a fortune for our family!”

She didn’t think of the pot as ugly. On it, in relief, were shells, blurred just a bit by the iron glaze. The shells were a series, obviously related, but from different parts of the Tulwar cliffs. Midway up the cliffs, the first place she found them, the shells were a single plain coil. Rising from there, the shells became ever more spiny and intricate. This progression went in a line around the pot, till a spiked monstrosity stood next to its straightforward ancestor.

Could Haik think this? Did she already understand about evolution? Maybe not. In any case, she said nothing to her kinsman.

That evening, in a tavern, she met a sailor from Sorg, a tall thin arrogant woman, whose body had been shaved into a pattern of white fur and black skin. They talked over cups of halin. The woman began brushing Haik’s arm, marveling at the red fur. “It goes so well with your green eyes. You’re a young one. Have you ever made love with a foreigner?”

“I’ve never made love,” said Haik.

The woman looked interested, but said, “You can’t be that young.”

Haik explained she’d never traveled before, not even to neighboring towns. “I’ve been busy learning my trade.”

The Sorg woman drank more halin. “I like being first. Would you be interested in making love?”

Haik considered the woman, who was certainly exotic looking. “Why do you shave your fur?”

“It’s hot in my home country; and we like to be distinctive. Other folk may follow each other like city-building bugs. We do not!”

Haik glanced around the room and noticed other Sorg women, all clipped and shaved in the same fashion, but she did not point out the obvious, being young and polite.

They went to the Sorg woman’s ship, tied at a dock. There were other couples on the deck, all women.

“We have a few men in the crew this trip,” her sexual partner said. “But they’re all on shore, looking for lovers; and they won’t be back till we’re ready to lift anchor.”

The experience was interesting, Haik thought later, though she had not imagined making love for the first time on a foreign ship, surrounded by other couples, who were not entirely quiet. She was reminded of fish, spawning in shallow water.

“Well, you seemed to enjoy that,” said the Sorg woman. “Though you are a silent one.”

“My kin say I’m thoughtful.”

“You shouldn’t be, with red fur like fire. Someone like you ought to burn.”

Why? wondered Haik, then fell asleep and dreamed that she was talking with an old woman dressed in a plain, rough tunic. The woman’s feet were muddy. The nails on her hands were untrimmed and long, curling over the tips of her fingers like claws. There was dirt under the nails. The old woman said, “If you were an animal, instead of a person, you would have mated with a male; and there might have been children, created not as the result of a breeding contract, but out of sexual passion. Imagine a world filled with that kind of reproduction! It is the world you live in! Only people use reason in dealing with sex. Only people breed deliberately.”

She woke at dawn, remembering the dream, though it made little sense. The woman had seemed like a messenger, but her message was obvious. Haik kissed the Sorg woman goodby, pulled on her tunic and stumbled down the gangway. Around her the air was cold and damp. Her feet left prints on dew-covered wood.

She had sex with the Sorg women several more times. Then the foreign ship lifted anchor, and Haik’s lover was gone, leaving only a shell necklace.

“Some other woman will have to make you burn,” the lover said. “But I was the first, and I want to be remembered.”

Haik thanked her for the necklace and spent a day or two walking in the island’s hills. The stone here was dark red and grainy and did not appear to contain fossils. Then she and her kinsman sailed north.

After that, she made sure to go on several trips a year. If the ship was crewed by women, she began looking for lovers as soon as she was onboard. Otherwise, she waited till they reached a harbor town. Sometimes she remained with a single lover. At other times, she went from one to another or joined a group. Her childhood nickname, long forgotten, came back to her, though now she was known as “Fire,” rather than “Crown-of-Fire.” She was a flame that burned without being burned.

“You never feel real affection,” one lover told her. “This is nothing but sex for you.”

Was this true? She felt affection for Rakai and her family at home and something approaching passion for her work with clay and stone. But these women?

As we know, men are more fervent and loyal lovers than women. They will organize their lives around affection. But most women are fond of their lovers and regret leaving them, as they usually must, though less often in modern times; and the departures matter less now, since travel has become so rapid. Lovers can meet fifty times a year, if they’re willing to pay the airfare.

Haik enjoyed sex and her sexual partners, but left with no regrets, her spirit untouched.

“All your fire is in your sexual parts,” another partner said. “Nothing burns in your mind.”

When she was twenty-five, he family decided to breed her. There was no way she could refuse. If the Tulwar were going to survive, every healthy female had to bear children. After discussion, the senior women approached the Tsugul, who agreed to a mating contract. What happened next Haik did not like to remember. A young man arrived from Tsugul and stayed with her family. They mated till she became pregnant, then he was sent home with gifts: fine pots mostly, made by her and Rakai.

“I won’t have children in my pottery,” Rakai said.

“I will give the child to one of my cousins to raise,” said Haik.

She bore female twins, dun colored with bright green eyes. For a while, looking at them, she thought of raising them. But this idea came from exhaustion and relies. She was not maternal. More than children, she wanted fossils and her pots. A female cousin took them, a comfortable woman with three children of her own. “Five is always lucky,” she told Haik.

It seemed to be. All five children flourished like starflower trees.

Rakai lasted till Haik was almost thirty. In her last years, the old potter became confused and wandered out of her house, looking for long-drowned relatives or clay, though she had turned clay digging over to Haik a decade before. One of these journeys took place in an early winter rain. By the time the old woman was found, she was thoroughly drenched and shaking with cold. A coughing sickness developed and carried her away. Haik inherited the pottery.

By this time, she had developed a distinctive style: solid, squat pots with strange creatures drawn on them. Sometimes, the handles were strange creatures made in molds: clawed birds or animals like flowers with thick, segmented stalks. Haik had found fossils of the animals still grasping prey. In most cases, the prey was small fish, so the creatures had been marine predators. But her customers thought they were flowers—granted, strange ones, with petals like worms. “What an imagination you have!”

The pots with molded handles were fine work, intended for small expensive plants. Most of her work was large and sturdy, without handles that could break off. Her glazes remained plain: colorless or black.

Though she was a master potter, her work known up and down the coast, she continued hunting fossils. Her old teacher’s house became filled with shelves; and the shelves became filled with pieces of stone. Taking a pen, Haik wrote her name for each creature on the shelf’s edge, along with the place where she’d found this particular example. Prowling through the rooms by lantern light, she saw eons of evolution and recognized what she saw. How could she fail to, once the stones were organized?

The first shelves held shells and faint impressions of things that might be seaweed. Then came animals with many limbs, then fish that looked nothing like any fish she’d ever seen. Finally came animals with four limbs, also strange. Most likely, they had lived on land.

She had a theory now. She knew that sand and clay could become solid in the right circumstances. The animals had been caught in muck at the ocean’s bottom or in a sand dune on land. Through a process she did not understand, though it must be like the firing of clay in a kiln, the trapping material turned to stone. The animal vanished, most likely burnt up, though it might also have decayed. If nothing else happened, the result was an impression. If the hollow space in the stone became filled, by some liquid seeping in and leaving a deposit, the result was a solid object. Her clawed bird was an impression. Most of her shells were solid.

Was she too clever? Could no one in her age imagine such a theory?

Well, she knew about clay, about molds, about minerals suspended in water. What else is a glaze? There were people in her village who worked with mortar, which is sand that hardens. There were people in nearby villages who used the lost wax process to cast.

All the necessary information was present. But no one except Haik used it to explain the objects in the Tulwar cliffs. Why? Because her kin had barely noticed the fossils and were not curious about them, did not collect them and label them and prowl around at night, looking at the pieces of stone and thinking.

Life had changed through time. It went from the very odd to the less odd to the almost familiar. In a few places on the cliff tops were animals that still lived. So, the process that led to the creation of fossils was still happening or had stopped happening recently.

How much time had this taken? Well, the old people in her town said that species did not change; and as far as she knew, there were no traditions that said animals used to be different. Oh, a few stories about monsters that no one had seen recently. But nothing about strange shells or fish. So the time required for change was longer than the memories of people.

Think of what she had learned and imagined! A world of vast periods of time, of animals that changed, of extinction. Hah! It frightened her! Was there any reason why her people might not vanish, along with the fish and plants they knew? Their lineage was small, its existence precarious. Maybe all life was precarious.

One night she had a dream. She was standing atop the cliffs above Tulwar Town. The houses below her looked very distant, unreachable. There was nothing around her except space, stretching up and down and east over the ocean. (The forest was behind her, and she did not turn around.) Next to her stood an old woman with white fur and dirty feet. “You’ve come a long way,” she said. “Maybe you ought to consider turning back.”

“Why?” asked Haik.

“There is no point in your journey. No one is going to believe you.”

“About what?”

“My creatures.”

“Are you the Goddess?” asked Haik.

The woman inclined her head slightly.

“Shouldn’t you look more splendid?”

“Did Rakai look splendid? She worked in clay. I work in the stuff-of-existence. I wouldn’t call it clean work, and who do I need to impress?”

“Have things really died out? Or do they exist somewhere in the world?”

“I’m not going to answer your questions,” the old woman said. “Figure existence out for yourself.”

“Do you advise me to turn back?”

“I never give advice,” the Goddess said. “I’m simply telling you that no one will believe you about time and change. Oh, one or two people. You can get some people to believe anything, but sensible people will laugh.”

“Should I care?” Haik asked.

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” the Goddess said. “But as I’ve said already, I don’t give advice.”

Then she was gone, and Haik was falling. She woke in bed in Rakai’s house. Outside her window, stars blazed and gave her no comfort.

She thought about her dream for some time, then decided to go on a voyage. Maybe her problem was lack of sex. Her best pots went into wicker baskets, wrapped in straw, along with large plates, some plain, but most with strange creatures painted on them: her lovely bird with claws, the many-legged bugs, fish that wore plate armor instead of scales, and quadrupeds with peculiar horny heads.

When a ship arrived, going north, she took passage. It was crewed by Batanin women, so she had plenty of sex before she reached their destination. But the feeling of loneliness and fear remained. It seemed as if she stood on the edge of an abyss, with nothing around her or below her.

She got off in a harbor town inhabited by the Meskh, a good-sized family. Although they had a port, they were farmers mostly, producing grain and dried fruit for export, along with excellent halin.

Her pottery brought good prices in Meskh Market. By this time, she was famous as the Strange Animal Potter or The Potter of Shells and Bones.

“You are here in person,” her customers said. “This is wonderful! Two famous women in town at once!”

“Who is the other?” Haik asked.

“The actor Dapple. Her troop has just given a series of plays. Now, they’re resting, before continuing their tour. You must meet her.”

They met that night in a tavern. Haik arrived escorted by several customers, middle-aged women with dark fur. At a table in the middle of the room, surrounded by dark Meskh women, was someone tall and slender, broad shouldered, her fur pale silver. Introductions were made. The actor stood. In lantern light, Haik could see the silver fur was dappled with small, dim spots. It was rare for people to keep their baby markings, but a few did.

“Hah! You’re a lovely one,” the actor said. “Red fur is unusual in this part of the world.”

Haik sat down and told the story of her father, then how her mother died and how she had grown up in Tulwar Town. When she finally stopped, she saw the Meskh women were gone. She and Dapple sat alone at the table under the flaring lamp.

“What happened?” Haik asked.

“To the others? Most had the good sense to leave. Those who did not were removed by members of my company.”

“And I didn’t notice?”

“I don’t believe,” said Dapple, stretching, “that you are a person who notices much outside your interests. The Meskh have loaned us a house. Why don’t you come there with me? We can drink more halin and talk more, if you wish. Though I have spent the past half an ikun imagining what you look like without clothing.”

They went to the house, walking side by side through the dark streets. Inside, in a courtyard full of potted trees and lit by stars, they made love. Dapple pulled some blankets and pillows out of a room, so they weren’t uncomfortable. “I have spent too much of my life sleeping on hard ground,” the actor said. “If I can avoid discomfort, I will.” Then she set to work with extraordinary skillful hands and a mouth that did not seem to belong to an ordinary woman made of flesh, but rather to some spirit out of ancient stories. The Fulfilling Every Wish Spirit, thought Haik. The Spirit of Almost Unendurable Pleasure.

The potter tried to reciprocate, though she knew it was impossible. No one, certainly not her, could equal Dapple’s skill in love. But the actor made noises that indicated some satisfaction. Finally, they stopped. The actor clasped her hands in the back of her head and looked at the stars. “Can you give me a pot?”

“What?” asked Haik.

“I’ve seen your work before this, and I would like a keepsake, something to remember you.”

At last the flame felt burning. Haik sat up and looked at the long pale figure next to her. “Is this over? Do we have only this night?”

“I have engagements,” Dapple said. “We’ve arranged our passage on a ship that leaves tomorrow. Actors don’t have settled lives, Haik. Nor do we usually have permanent lovers.”

As in her dream, Haik felt she was falling. But this time she didn’t wake in her bed, but remained in the Meskh courtyard.

The Goddess was right. She should give up her obsession. No one cared about the objects she found in cliffs. They did care about her pottery, but she could take leave of pots for a while.

“Let me go with you,” she said to Dapple.

The actor looked at her. “Are you serious?”

“I have done nothing since I was fifteen, except make pots and collect certain stones I have a fondness for. More than fifteen years! And what I do I have to show? Pots and more pots! Stones and more stones! I would like to have an adventure, Dapple.”

The actor laughed and said, “I’ve done many foolish things in my life. Now, I’ll do one more. By all means, come on our journey!” Then she pulled Haik down and kissed her. What a golden tongue!

The next morning, Haik went to her ship and gathered her belongings. They fit in one basket. She never traveled with much, except her pots, and they were sold, the money in a heavy belt around her waist.

Next she went to the harbor mistress. Sitting in the woman’s small house, she wrote a letter to her relatives, explaining what had happened and why she wasn’t coming home.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” the mistress said as Haik rolled the letter and put it in a message tube, then sealed the tube with wax.

“Yes.” The letter was to go south on the next ship, Haik told the mistress. She gave the woman half her money to hold, till the Tulwar came to claim it.

“This is a foolish plan,” the harbor mistress said.

“Have you never been in love?” Haik asked.

“Not this much in love, I’m glad to say.”

Haik had started for the door. Now she stopped. The shutters on the room’s windows were open. Haik was in a beam of light. Her red fur shone like fire. Her eyes were as clear and green as a cresting ocean wave. Hah! thought the harbor mistress.

“I’m thirty-two and have never been in love, until last night,” Haik said. “It has come to me recently that the world is a lonely place.” She slung her basket on her back and walked toward Dapple’s borrowed house.

A strange woman, thought the harbor mistress.

The actors’ ship left on the afternoon tide, Haik with them, standing on the deck, next to her new love.

At this point, the story needs to describe Dapple. She was forty when Haik met her, the first woman to train as an actor and the first person to assemble an acting company made of women. Her early years had been difficult; but by this time, she was successful and self-confident, a fine actor and even better playwright. Some of her writing has come forward to us, though only in a fragmentary condition. Still, the words shine like diamonds, unscratched by fate.

Dapple was her acting name. Her real name was Helwar Ahl, and her home—which she rarely visited—was Helwar Island, off the northeast corner of the Great Southern Continent. For the most part, she and her company traveled up and down the continent’s eastern coast, going as far south as Ettin, where she had many friends.

They were going south now and could have taken Haik’s letter, though Haik hadn’t known this. In any case, their ship was a fast trader, bound for Hu and not planning to stop on the way. East they went, till the coast was a thin dark line, visible only when the ship crested a wave. The rest of the time, they were alone, except for the peshadi that swam in front of them and the ocean birds that followed.

The birds were familiar to Haik, but she had never seen a live pesha before. As the animals’ sleek backs broke the water’s surface, they exhaled loudly enough so Haik had no trouble hearing the sound. Wah! Wah! Then they dove, their long tails cutting through the water like knives. They had a second name: blue fish, which came from their hide’s deep ocean color. Neither death nor tanning dimmed the hue, and pesha leather was a famous luxury.

“I had a pair of pesha boots once,” said Dapple. “A wealthy matron gave them to me, because they were cracked beyond repair. I used them in plays, till they fell into pieces. You should have seen me as a warrior, strutting around in those boots!”

Years before, a dead pesha had washed up on a beach in Tulwar. They’d all gone to see it: this deep-sea animal their kin had hunted before the Drowning. It had been the size of a large woman, with four flippers and a tail that looked like seaweed, lying limp on the pebbles. The old men of Tulwar cut it up. Most of the women went back to work, but Haik stayed and watched. The flesh had been reddish-purple, like the flesh of land animals; the bones of the skeleton had been large and heavy. As for the famous skin, she’d felt it. Not slimy, like a fish, and with no scales, though there were scaleless fish. She knew that much, though her kin no longer went to sea.

Most interesting of all were the flippers. She begged a hind one from the old men. It was small, the hide not usable, with almost no flesh on the bones. “Take it,” her senior male relatives told her. “Though nothing good is likely to come from your curiosity.”

Haik carried it to her teacher’s house, into a back room that Rakai never entered. Her fossils were there, along with other objects: a bird skeleton, almost complete; the skulls of various small animals; and shells from Tulwar’s beaches. Laying the flipper on a table, she used a sharp knife to cut it open. Inside, hidden by blue skin and reddish-purple flesh, were five rows of long, narrow, white bones.

She had cleaned them and arranged them on the table as she’d found them in the flipper. The two outer rows were short, the thumb—could she call it that?—barely present, while the three middle rows were long and curved. Clearly, they provided a framework for the flipper. What purpose did the outer rows serve, and why had the Goddess hidden a hand inside a sea animal’s flipper?

“Well,” said Dapple after Haik told this story. “What’s the answer to your question?”

“I don’t know,” said Haik, afraid to talk about her theories. What did she know for certain? A group of puzzling facts. From these she had derived a terrifying sense of time and change. Did she have the right to frighten other people, as she had been frightened?

Beside them, a pesha surfaced and exhaled, rolling sideways to eye them and grin with sharp white teeth.

“Rakai told me the world is full of similarities and correspondences. The Goddess is a repeater. That’s what they always told me.”

“And a jokester,” said Dapple. “Maybe she thought it would be funny to make something that was a fish in some ways and a land animal in others.”

“Maybe,” Haik said in a doubtful tone. “I tanned the flipper hide and made a bag from it, but couldn’t use the bag. It seemed dishonorable and wrong, as if I was using the skin from a woman’s hand to keep things in. So I put the pesha bones in the bag and kept them on one of my shelves; and I made a pot decorated with peshadi. It was a failure. I didn’t know how living peshadi moved. Now, I will be able to make the pot again.”

Dapple ruffled the red fur on her shoulder. “Like fire,” the actor said gently. “You burn with curiosity and a desire to get things right.”

“My relatives say it will get me in trouble.”

“The Goddess gave us the ability to imagine and question and judge,” the actor said. “Why would she have done this, if she did not intend us to use these abilities? I question the behavior of people; you question rocks and bones. Both activities seem chulmar to me.”

Then as now, chulmar meant to be pious and to be funny. Dapple’s voice sounded amused to Haik; this made her uneasy. In Tulwar, after the Drowning, piety took the form of glumness, though the people there certainly knew the meaning of chulmar. They did not mean to turn their children away from enjoyment of the world, but so much had been lost; they had become afraid; and the fear is the end of piety.

The ship continued south, till it was far past the Tulwar coast. During this period, Haik was preoccupied with love. Hah! It had struck her like a strong blow in battle! She could think of little except Dapple’s body: the four breasts, surprisingly large for a woman who’d never borne children; the rangy limbs; the prominent nipples, the same color as the “far-down dark grey” strata at home; and the place between the actor’s legs, which was a cave of pleasure. Haik could model a breast in clay, make a covered pot of it, with a nipple for the handle. But how could she replicate the hidden place? Or Dapple’s mouth with its golden tongue? It could not be done, especially now, with her kiln far behind her. Better not to think of pottery.

They made love often, usually on deck, under blazing tropic stars. She was drunk with love! Love had made her crazy, and she did not care!

Five days south of Tsugul Island, the ship turned west. They came to the wide harbor at Hu, guarded by white shoals. The peshadi were gone by then; the birds had become more numerous. A low green coast emerged from misty rain.

Haik and Dapple were on deck. Peering forward, Haik made out the buildings of Hu Town: white and blue, with red or green roofs. Fishing boats lined the harbor docks. Their furled sails were red, white, green, and yellow. “A colorful country.”

“That’s the south,” said Dapple in agreement. As lovely as always, the actor was leaning on the ship’s rail, looking happy. “People in the north call these folk barbarians, who lack refinement and a sense of nuance. But drama is not made of nuance.” She raised an arm and brought it down. “It’s the sword blade descending, the cry of understanding and anger and pain. I could not write the plays I write, if I didn’t visit the south.”

They tied up among the fishing boats, empty in mid-afternoon. The acting company went on shore, Tulwar Haik among them. She had never been this far south. The people in the streets, dressed in bright tunics and kilts, were an unfamiliar physical type: broad chested, with short thick limbs. The women were taller than women in the north, towering a full head above their male relatives. Everyone had grey fur, and Haik got many sideways glances.

“I could lose you,” said Dapple with amusement.

“They’re ugly,” said Haik.

“They are different, dear one. When you get used to them, they will begin to look handsome.”

“Have you had lovers here?”

Dapple laughed. “Many.”

Their destination was an inn built around a courtyard. There were potted trees in the courtyard: skyflower and starflower and a kind Haik did not recognize, which had silver-blue leaves and frilly, bright yellow flowers. Several of the pots had been made by Rakai; one had been made by her, an early work, not bad in its way. She pointed it out to Dapple.

The innkeeper appeared, a huge woman with arms like tree limbs and four enormous breasts, barely concealed by a vest. “My favorite customer!” she cried. “Are you going to perform?”

“Most likely, yes. Haik, this is Hu Aptsi.” Dapple laid a hand on Haik’s red shoulder. “And this beauty is my new lover, Tulwar Haik the potter. She has given up her pots to travel with me, until we tire of each other.”

“Never!” said Haik.

“Excellent work you do in Tulwar,” the innkeeper said. “I have neighbors who say nothing good comes from the north. Dapple and pots and flowering trees, I say.”

They went into the common room and settled around tables. A round clay hearth bulged out of one wall. Logs burned in it. The innkeeper brought a large metal bowl, filling it with fruit juices and halin, then heated an iron rod in the fire and put the glowing tip in the full bowl. The liquid hissed and steamed. The innkeeper served. Haik wrapped her hands around a hot cup, sniffing the aromatic steam, thinking, I am far from home, among strangers, about to drink something for which I have no name. She tasted the liquid. Delicious!

“It will make you drunk quickly,” said Dapple in a warning tone.

Beyond the room’s windows, rain fell in the courtyard, and the potted trees quivered. I am happy, Haik thought.

That night, as she lay in Dapple’s arms, she had a dream. The old woman came to her again, this time with clean hands and feet. “Existence is made to be enjoyed. Always remember that.”

“Why did you kill my mother and my other relatives?” Haik asked.

“A storm killed them. Do you think every gust of wind is my breath? Do you think it’s my hand that crushes every bug and pulls every bird from the sky?”

“Why did you make things that die?”

“Why do you work in clay? Sooner or later, all your pots will break.”

“I like the material.”

“I like life,” the Goddess said. “And change.”

The next day, Haik helped the actors set up their stage in a warehouse near the docks. Rain still fell. They would not be able to perform outside. The acting company was large: ten women, all from northern towns. Five were full members of the company. Three were apprentices. One was a carpenter; one made the costumes; though both of these last could fill small parts when needed. They all worked together easily. It was Haik who was awkward and needed to be told what to do. “You will learn,” said Dapple.

Midway through the morning, she disappeared. “Off to write,” said the carpenter. “I could see her thinking. These southerners like rude plays, and that isn’t the kind of thing we usually do, except when we’re down here. You’d think they’d like hero plays; they have plenty of real heroes among them. But no, they want comedy with lots of penises.”

Haik could think of nothing to say.

They ate their evening meal in the inn, a light one, since acting should never be done on a full stomach. Then they went back to the warehouse, through still-falling rain. There were lamps on the walls around the stage. The wide, dark space beyond the lamplight was full of people. The air stank of oil, damp fur, and excitement.

“We know our business,” said Dapple. “You keep off to the side and watch.”

Haik did as told, leaning against a side wall, below a lamp that cast a yellow, flickering glow. Because she rarely thought about her appearance, she did not realize how she looked, her red fur and green eyes shining. Half the women in the audience wanted to have sex with her, half the men wished she were male. How could a woman of her age be so naïve? By thinking too much and living too long in the glum family Tulwar became after the Drowning.

The play was about a sul with an enormous penis. Dapple played him in an animal mask. The penis, of which he was so proud, was longer than she was and limp, so it dragged on the ground. The sul tripped over it often, while he bragged about his masculine power and the lovers he’d had, all men of extraordinary beauty and talent. Once he was established as an irritating braggart, a tli appeared, played by the company’s second actor. The two animals got into a betting contest, and the tli won the sul’s penis, which struck the audience as funny. Getting it off was a problem, which struck the audience as even funnier. Finally, the sul stormed off, bereft of his male member and vowing revenge.

Now the tli delivered a soliloquy, while holding the huge limp object. Fine to win, the tli said, but he had no use for a penis this large. His own was adequate for his purposes; and the sul would come back with friends and weapons to reclaim the penis. This was the problem with giving in to irritation. What was he to do? How could he escape the vengeance of the sul?

At this point, Dapple reappeared, wearing a sleek blue mask, the open mouth full of sharp white teeth. She was a pesha, she announced, an early version of this species. She lived in shallow water, paddling and catching fish. She wanted to move into the ocean, but her tail was too small; she needed a new one, able to drive her deep into the water or far out over the waves.

“I have just the thing,” said the tli, and showed her the sul’s penis. “We’ll, sew this on your backside, and you’ll swim like a fish. But in return for this gift, you must carry me to safety; and once you are able to dive deeply, I wouldn’t mind having some of the treasure that’s sunk in the ocean.”

The pesha agreed, and the two animals attached the penis to the back of Dapple’s costume. Then she did a dance of happiness, singing praise of the ocean and her new life.

The other actors joined them with blue and white banners, which mimicked the motion of water, through which Dapple and the tli escaped, dancing and singing.

When everyone was gone, and the stage was bare, Dapple returned as the sul, along with two more sulin. “Foiled!” they cried. “We can’t follow. Your penis is assuredly gone, dear relative. You are not going to be socially popular in the future.”

That was the end of the play, except for a final dance, done by the tli, surrounded by the rest of the cast, waving golden banners. These represented the treasure he had gained. As for the grateful pesha, she was happy in her new home, and with luck the penis would not retain any of its old qualities.

The audience stamped their feet and made hooting noises. Clearly, the play had gone over well.

Haik thought, yes, she was certain that things could turn into other things. But not, in all likelihood, a penis into a tail. And change was not a result of trickery, but time.

People came to talk with the main actors. Haik helped the carpenter and costume maker clean up.

“Ettin Taiin,” said the carpenter. “I didn’t know he was in town.”

“Who?” asked Haik, putting the tli mask in a box.

“The lame man.”

She looked around and saw a short fellow limping toward the stage. His fur was grey, turning silver over the shoulders and on the face. One eye was missing; he didn’t bother to wear a patch over the empty socket.

“He is the foremost war captain among the Ettin,” the carpenter said. “And they are the most dangerous lineage in this part of the world. Dapple calls his mother ‘great-aunt.’ If you find him scary, as I do, then you ought to meet the old lady!”

There was no way for him to reach Dapple, surrounded by admirers. He greeted the carpenter and the costume maker by name, without glancing at them directly. Good manners, thought Haik.

“Is Cholkwa with you?” asked the costume maker.

“South, among the savages of the Cold Ocean Coast. I sent men with him for protection, in case the savages didn’t like his comedies. May I ask about your companion, or is that rude?”

“We can hardly object to rudeness, after the play we’ve done,” said the carpenter.

“I laughed so hard I thought I would lose control of my bladder,” said the one-eyed man.

The costume maker said, “This is Tulwar Haik the potter. She’s Dapple’s new lover.”

The man lifted his head, apparently in surprise. Haik got a glimpse of his sunken eye socket and the remaining eye, which blazed blue as a noon sky. His pupil had expanded in the dim light and lay across the eye like an iron bar. “The Potter of Strange Animals,” he said.

“Yes,” said Haik, surprised to be known in this distant place.

“The world is full of coincidences!” the soldier told her. “And this one is pleasant! I bought one of your pots for my mother last year. She can barely see these days, but she likes the texture of it. She especially likes to feel the animals you have used for handles. Birds with clawed hands! What an idea! How can they possibly fly?”

“I don’t think they did—or do,” said Haik.

“These birds exist?” asked the soldier.

Haik paused, considering. “I have found their remains.”

“You don’t say. The world is full of two things, then: coincidence and strangeness. Considering the Goddess, this can’t be called surprising.” He glanced toward Dapple. Most of the admirers had gone. “Excuse me. I want to give her news of Cholkwa. They just missed each other. His ship left two days ago; and I was planning to ride home, having stayed with him till the last ikun. But then I heard that Dapple had arrived.”

He limped away.

“He and Cholkwa are lovers,” said the carpenter. “Though the true love of Cholkwa’s life is the actor Perig. Perig’s old now and in poor health. He lives on Helwar Island with Dapple’s kin, who are my kin also, while Cholkwa still travels. Male actors are as promiscuous as women.”

Haik finished putting away the masks. The pesha mask was new, she realized. The blue paint was still tacky, and the shape of the head had been changed, using cloth and glue.

“We keep blank masks,” said the carpenter. “Then, when Dapple has a sudden idea, we can add new animals.”

“This is something I can do,” Haik said. “Shape the masks and paint them.” She glanced up at the carpenter and the costume maker. “Unless the work belongs to you.”

“We all do many things,” said the costume maker. “If you stay with us you’ll find yourself on stage.”

When everything was packed up, they went back to the inn, sat in the common room and drank halin. The Ettin captain, who came with them, had an immense capacity. He left from time to time to urinate, but never got noticeably drunk. The idea of coincidence was stuck in his mind, and he talked about how it worked in war, sometimes to his benefit, sometimes against him.

There was the time he went to attack the Gwa and met their warband on the way, coming to attack Ettin. “We both picked the same exact route. So there we were in a mountain pass, staring at each other with mouths open. Then we fought.” He spilled halin on the table and drew the disposition of troops. “A bad situation for both of us! Neither had an advantage, and neither had a good way to retreat. I knew I had to win and did, though I lost an eye and a brother; and enough Gwa soldiers escaped, so we could not surprise them at home. A nasty experience, caused by coincidence. Doubtless the Goddess does this to us so we won’t take our plans too seriously; a good captain must always be ready to throw his ideas away.”

When he finally left, walking steadily except for his limp, Dapple said, “I have sworn to myself; I will put him in a play some day. That is what a hero is really like. I’ll have to make up a new story, of course. His life has not been tragic. He’s never had to make difficult choices, and everything he’s wanted—fame, the affection of his relatives, the love of Cholkwa—has come into his hands.”

Well, thought Haik, she was certainly learning new things. The man had not seemed like a hero to her.

The next evening, they did the play a second time. The warehouse was packed, and Ettin Taiin was in the audience again. Haik watched him as he watched the play, his expression intent. Now and then, he laughed, showing white teeth. One was missing, an upper stabber. Doubtless it had been lost in battle, like his eye and his leg’s agility. Haik’s male relatives fought nothing except the forest predators, which were not especially dangerous. When men died in the forest, it was usually from small creatures that had a poisonous bite or sting; or they died from accidents. Old people told stories about pirates, but none had attacked the northeast coast in more than a generation. The Tulwar feared water and storms.

Now, Haik thought, she was in the south. War was continuous here; and lineages vanished from existence, the men killed, the women and children adopted. A family that lacked soldiers like Ettin Taiin would not survive.

This idea led nowhere, except to the thought that the world was full of violence, and this was hardly a new thought. In front of her, Dapple tripped over the sul’s long dragging penis and tumbled into a somersault, which ended with her upright once again, the penis wound around her neck. The audience hooted its approval. The world was full of violence and sex, Haik thought.

Once again the captain joined them at the inn. This time he drank less and asked questions, first of the actors, then of Haik. Where exactly was her family? What did they produce besides pots?

“Are you planning to invade us?” she asked.

He looked shocked. “I am a soldier, not a bandit, young lady! I only fight with people I know. The purpose of war is to expand the size of one’s family and increase the amount of land held by one’s kin. That should always be done along existing borders. You push out and push out, gathering the land and the women and children immediately beyond your borders, making sure the land is always contiguous and protected—if possible—by natural barriers. Any other strategy leaves you with a territory that is not defensible.”

“He’s not planning to invade you,” Dapple said in summary. “Your land is too far away.”

“Exactly,” the captain said. “Bandits and pirates use different tactics, since they want valuable objects rather than land and people. We’ve had both in the south and dealt with them.”

“How?” asked Haik.

“The obvious way is to find where they came from, go there and kill all the men. The problem is, you have to do something with the bandit women and children. They can’t be left to starve. But obviously no family wants members with bad traits.”

“What do you do?”

“Adopt them, but spread them among many houses, and never let any of them breed. Often, the children turn out well; and after a generation, the traits—bad or good—are gone. This, as you can imagine, is a lot of work, which is a reason to kill enough men so the bandits will think twice about returning to Ettin, but leave enough alive so the women and children are provided for.”

The carpenter was right. This was a frightening man.

Dapple said, “The Tulwar are foresters. For the most part, they export lumber and flowering trees. Haik makes pots for the trees.”

“Do you have children?” the captain asked Haik.

“Two daughters.”

“A woman with your abilities should have more. What about brothers?”

“None.”

“Male cousins?”

“Many,” said Haik.

The captain glanced at Dapple. “Would it be worthwhile asking a Tulwar man to come here and impregnate one of our women? Your lover’s pots are really excellent; and my mother has always liked flowers. So do I, for that matter.”

“It’s a small family,” said Dapple. “And lives far away. A breeding contract with them would not help you politically.”

“There is more to life than politics,” said the captain.

“The Tulwar men aren’t much for fighting,” said Haik, unsure that she wanted any connection with Ettin.

“You don’t mean they’re cowards?”

“Of course not. They work in our wild backcountry as foresters and loggers. They used to sail the ocean, before most of my family drowned. These kinds of work require courage, but we have always gotten along with our neighbors.”

“No harm in that, if you aren’t ambitious.” He grinned, showing his missing tooth. “We don’t need to breed for ambition or violence. We have those talents in abundance. But art and beauty—” His blue eye glanced at her briefly. “These are not our gifts, though we are certainly able to appreciate both.”

“Witness your appreciation of Cholkwa,” said Dapple, her tone amused.

“A great comedian, and the best-looking man for his age I’ve ever seen. But my mother and her sisters decided years ago that he should not be asked to father Ettin children. For one thing, he has never mentioned having a family. Who could the Ettin speak to, if they wanted a breeding contract? A man shouldn’t make decisions like these. We do things the right way in Ettin! In any case, acting is not an entirely respectable art; who can say what qualities would appear among the Ettin, if our children were fathered by actors.”

“You see why I have no children,” Dapple said, then tilted her head toward the carpenter. “Though my kinswoman here has two sets of twins, because her gift is making props. We don’t tell our relatives that she also acts.”

“Not much,” said the carpenter.

“And not well,” muttered the apprentice sitting next to Haik.

The captain stayed a while longer, chatting with Dapple about his family and her most recent plays. Finally he rose. “I’m too old for these long evenings. In addition, I plan to leave for Ettin at dawn. I assume you’re sending love and respect to my mother.”

“Of course,” said Dapple.

“And you, young lady.” The one eye roved toward her. “If you come this way again, bring pots for Ettin. I’ll speak to my mother about a breeding contract with Tulwar. Believe me, we are allies worth having!”

He left, and Dapple said, “I think he’s imagining a male relative who looks like you, who can spend his nights with an Ettin woman and his days with Ettin Taiin.”

“What a lot of hard work!” the carpenter said.

“There are no Tulwar men who look like me.”

“What a sadness for Ettin Taiin!” said Dapple.

From Hu Town they went west and south, traveling with a caravan. The actors and merchants rode tsina, which were familiar to Haik, though she had done little riding before this. The carrying beasts were bitalin: great, rough quadrupeds with three sets of horns. One pair spread far to the side; one pair curled forward; and the last pair curled back. The merchants valued the animals as much as tsina, giving them pet names and adorning their horns with brass or iron rings. They seemed marvelous to Haik, moving not quickly, but very steadily, their shaggy bodies swaying with each step. When one was bothered by something—bugs, a scent on the wind, another bital—it would swing its six-horned head and groan. What a sound!

“Have you put bitalin in a play?” she asked Dapple.

“Not yet. What quality would they represent?”

“Reliability,” said the merchant riding next to them. “Strength. Endurance. Obstinacy. Good milk.”

“I will certainly consider the idea,” Dapple replied.

At first the plain was green, the climate rainy. As they traveled south and west, the weather became dry, and the plain turned dun. This was not a brief journey. Haik had time to get used to riding, though the country never became ordinary to her. It was so wide! So empty!

The merchants in the caravan belonged to a single family. Both women and men were along on the journey. Of course the actors camped with the women, while the men—farther out—stood guard. In spite of this protection, Haik was uneasy. The stars overhead were no longer entirely familiar; the darkness around her seemed to go on forever; and caravan campfires seemed tiny. Far out on the plain, wild sulin cried. They were more savage than the domestic breeds used for hunting and guarding, Dapple told her. “And uglier, with scales covering half their bodies. Our sulin in the north have only a few small scaly patches.”

The sulin in Haik’s country were entirely furry, except in the spring. Then the males lost their chest fur, revealing an area of scaly skin, dark green and glittering. If allowed to, they’d attack one another, each trying to destroy the other’s chest adornment. “Biting the jewels,” was the name of this behavior.

Sitting under the vast foreign sky, Haik thought about sulin. They were all varieties of a single animal. Everyone knew this, though it was hard to believe that Tulwar’s mild-tempered, furry creatures were the same as the wild animals Dapple described. Could change go farther? Could an animal with hands become a pesha? And what caused change? Not trickery, as in the play. Dapple, reaching over, distracted her. Instead of evolution, she thought about love.

They reached a town next to a wide sandy river. Low bushy trees grew along the banks. The merchants made camp next to the trees, circling their wagons. Men took the animals to graze, while the women—merchants and actors—went to town.

The streets were packed dirt, the houses adobe with wood doors and beams. (Haik could see these last protruding through the walls.) The people were the same physical type as in Hu, but with grey-brown fur. A few had faint markings—not spots like Dapple, but narrow broken stripes. They dressed as all people did, in tunics or shorts and vests.

Why, thought Haik suddenly, did people come in different hues? Most wild species were a single color, with occasional freaks, usually black or white. Domestic animals came in different colors. It was obvious why: people had bred them according to different ideas of usefulness and beauty. Had people bred themselves to be grey, grey-brown, red, dun and so on? This was possible, though it seemed to Haik that most people were attracted to difference. Witness Ettin Taiin. Witness the response of the Tulwar matrons to her father.

Now to the problems of time and change, she added the problem of difference. Maybe the problem of similarity as well. If animals tended to be the same, why did difference occur? If there was a tendency toward difference, why did it become evident only sometimes? She was as red as her father. Her daughters were dun. At this point, her head began to ache; and she understood the wisdom of her senior relatives. If one began to question anything—shells in rock, the hand in a pesha’s flipper—the questions would proliferate, till they stretched to the horizon in every direction and why, why, why filled the sky, like the calls of migrating birds.

“Are you all right?” asked Dapple.

“Thinking,” said Haik.

At the center of the town was a square, made of packed dirt. The merchants set up a tent and laid out sample goods: dried fish from Hu, fabric made by northern weavers, boxes carved from rare kinds of wood, jewelry of silver and dark red shell. Last of all, they unfolded an especially fine piece of cloth, put it on the ground and poured out their most precious treasure: a high, white, glittering heap of salt.

Townsfolk gathered: bent matriarchs, robust matrons, slim girls and boys, even a few adult men. All were grey-brown, except the very old, who had turned white.

In general, people looked like their relatives; and everyone knew that family traits existed. Why else select breeding partners with so much care? There must be two tendencies within people, one toward similarity, the other toward difference. The same must also be true of animals. Domestic sulin came in different colors; by breeding, people had brought out variations that must have been in the wild animals, though never visible, except in freaks. She crouched in the shadows at the back of the merchants’ tent, barely noticing the commerce in front of her, thinking difficult thoughts.

Nowadays, geneticists tell us that the variation among people was caused by drift in isolated populations, combined with the tendency of all people to modify and improve anything they can get their hands on. We have bred ourselves like sulin to fit in different environments and to meet different ideas of beauty.

But how could Haik know this much about the history of life? How could she know that wild animals were more varied than she had observed? There are wild sulin in the far northern islands as thick furred and white as the local people. There is a rare, almost extinct kind of wild sulin on the third continent, which is black and entirely scaly, except for a ridge of rust-brown fur along its back. She, having traveled on only one continent, was hypothesizing in the absence of adequate data. In spite of this, she caught a glimpse of how inheritance works.

How likely is this? Could a person like Haik, living in a far-back era, come so near the idea of genes?

Our ancestors were not fools! They were farmers and hunters, who observed animals closely; and they achieved technological advances—the creation through breeding of the plants that feed us and the animals we still use, though no longer exclusively, for work and travel—which we have not yet equaled, except possibly by going into space.

In addition to the usual knowledge about inheritance, Haik had the ideas she’d gained from fossils. Other folk knew that certain plants and animals could be changed by breeding; and that families had traits that could be transmitted, either for good or bad. But most life seemed immutable. Wild animals were the same from generation to generation. So were the plants of forest and plain. The Goddess liked the world to stay put, as far as most people could see. Haik knew otherwise.

Dapple came after her, saying, “We need help in setting up our stage.”

That evening, in the long summer twilight, the actors performed the pesha comedy. Dapple had to make a speech beforehand, explaining what a pesha was, since they were far inland now. But the town folk knew about sulin, tli, and penises; and the play went well, as had the trading of the merchants. The next day they continued west.

Haik traveled with Dapple all summer. She learned to make masks by soaking paper in glue, then applying it in layers to a wooden mask frame.

“Nothing we carry is more valuable,” said the costume maker, holding a thick white sheet of paper. “Use this with respect! No other material is as light and easy to shape. But the cost, Haik, the cost!”

The bitalin continued to fascinate her: living animals as unfamiliar as the fossils in her cliffs! Her first mask was a bital. When it was dry, she painted the face tan, the six horns shiny black. The skin inside the flaring nostrils was red, as was the tongue protruding from the open mouth.

Dapple wrote a play about a solid and reliable bital cow, who lost her milk to a conniving tli. The tli was outwitted by other animals, friends of the bital. The play ended with Dapple as the cow, dancing among pots of her recovered milk, turned through the ingenuity of the tli into a new substance: long-lasting, delicious cheese. The play did well in towns of the western plains. By now they were in a region where the ocean was a rumor, only half-believed; but bitalin were known and loved.

Watching Dapple’s performance, Haik asked herself another question. If there was a hand inside the pesha’s flipper, could there be another hand in the bital’s calloused, two-toed foot? Did every living thing contain another living thing within it, like Dapple in the bital costume?

What an idea!

The caravan turned east when a plant called fire-in-autumn turned color. Unknown in Tulwar, it was common on the plain, though Haik had not noticed it till now. At first, there were only a few bright dots like drops of blood fallen on a pale brown carpet. These were enough to make the merchants change direction. Day by day, the color became more evident, spreading in lines. (The plant grew through sending out runners.) Finally, the plain was crisscrossed with scarlet. At times, the caravan traveled through long, broad patches of the plant, tsina and bitalin belly-deep in redness, as if they were fording rivers of blood or fire.

When they reached the moist coastal plain, the plant became less common. The vegetation here was mostly a faded silver-brown. Rain fell, sometimes freezing; and they arrived in the merchants’ hometown at the start of the first winter storm. Haik saw the rolling ocean through lashes caked with snow. The pleasure of salt water! Of smelling seaweed and fish!

The merchants settled down for winter. The actors took the last ship north to Hu Town, where the innkeeper had bedrooms for them, a fire in the common room and halin ready for mulling.

At midwinter, Dapple went to Ettin. Haik stayed by the ocean, tired of foreigners. It had been more than half a year since she’d had clay in her hands or climbed the Tulwar cliffs in search of fossils. Now she learned that love was not enough. She walked the Hu beaches, caked with ice, and looked for shells. Most were similar to ones in Tulwar; but she found a few new kinds, including one she knew as a fossil. Did this mean other creatures—her claw-handed bird, the hammer-headed bug—were still alive somewhere? Maybe. Little was certain.

Dapple returned through a snowstorm and settled down to write. The Ettin always gave her ideas. “When I’m in the south, I do comedy, because the people here prefer it. But their lives teach me how to write tragedy; and tragedy is my gift.”

Haik’s gift lay in the direction of clay and stone, not language. Her journey south had been interesting and passionate, but now it was time to do something. What? Hu Town had no pottery, and the rocks in the area contained no fossils. In the end, she took some of the precious paper and used it, along with metal wire, to model strange animals. The colors were a problem. She had to imagine them, using what she knew about the birds and bugs and animals of Tulwar. She made the hammer-headed bug red and black. The flower-predator was yellow and held a bright blue fish. The claw-handed bird was green.

“Well, these are certainly different,” said Dapple. “Is this what you find in your cliffs?”

“The bones and shells, yes. Sometimes there is a kind of shadow of the animal in the rock. But never any colors.”

Dapple picked up a tightly coiled white shell. Purple tentacles spilled out of it; and Haik had given the creature two large, round eyes of yellow glass. The eyes were a guess, derived from a living ocean creature. But Haik had seen the shadow of tentacles in stone. Dapple tilted the shell, till one of the eyes caught sunlight and blazed. Hah! It seemed alive! “Maybe I could write a play about these creatures; and you could make the masks.”

Haik hesitated, then said, “I’m going home to Tulwar.—”

“You are?” Dapple set down the glass-eyed animal.

She needed her pottery, Haik explained, and the cliffs full of fossils, as well as time to think about this journey. “You wouldn’t give up acting for love!”

“No,” said Dapple. “I plan to spend next summer in the north, doing tragedies. When I’m done, I’ll come to Tulwar for a visit. I want one of your pots and maybe one of these little creatures.” She touched the flower-predator. “You see the world like no one else I’ve ever met. Hah! It is full of wonders and strangeness, when looked at by you!”

That night, lying in Dapple’s arms, Haik had a dream. The old woman came to her, dirty-footed, in a ragged tunic. “What have you learned?”

“I don’t know,” said Haik.

“Excellent!” said the old woman. “This is the beginning of comprehension. But I’ll warn you again. You may gain nothing, except comprehension and my approval, which is worth little in the towns where people dwell.”

“I thought you ruled the world.”

“Rule is a large, heavy word,” said the old woman. “I made the world and enjoy it, but rule? Does a tree rule the shoots that rise at its base? Matriarchs may rule their families. I don’t claim so much for myself.”

When spring came, the company went north. Their ship stopped at Tulwar to let off Haik and take on potted trees. There were so many plants that some had to be stored on deck, lashed down against bad weather. As the ship left, it seemed like a floating grove. Dapple stood among the trees, crown-of-fire mostly, none in bloom. Haik, on the shore, watched till she could no longer see her lover or the ship. Then she walked home to Rakai’s pottery. Everything was as Haik had left it, though covered with dust. She unpacked her strange animals and set them on a table. Then she got a broom and began to sweep.

After a while, her senior relatives arrived. “Did you enjoy your adventures?”

“Yes.”

“Are you back to stay?”

“Maybe.”

Great-aunts and uncles glanced at one another. Haik kept sweeping.

“It’s good to have you back,” said a senior male cousin.

“We need more pots,” said an aunt.

Once the house was clean, Haik began potting: simple forms at first, with no decoration except a monochrome glaze. Then she added texture: a cord pattern at the rim, crisscross scratches on the body. The handles were twists of clay, put on carelessly. Sometimes she left her handprint like a shadow. Her glazes, applied in splashes, hid most of what she’d drawn or printed. When her shelves were full of new pots, she went to the cliffs, climbing up steep ravines and walking narrow ledges, a hammer in hand. Erosion had uncovered new fossils: bugs and fish, mostly, though she found one skull that was either a bird or a small land animal. When cleaned, it turned out to be intact and wonderfully delicate. The small teeth, still in the jaw or close to it, were like nothing she had seen. She made a copy in grey-green clay, larger than the original, with all the teeth in place. This became the handle for a large covered pot. The body of the pot was decorated with drawings of birds and animals, all strange. The glaze was thin and colorless and cracked in firing, so it seemed as if a film of ice covered the pot.

“Who will buy that?” asked her relatives. “You can’t put a tree in it, not with that cover.”

“My lover Dapple,” said Haik in reply. “Or the famous war captain of Ettin.”

At midsummer, there was a hot period. The wind off the ocean stopped. People moved when they had to, mouths open, panting. During this time, Haik was troubled with dreams. Most made no sense. A number involved the Goddess. In one, the old woman ate an agala. This was a southern fruit, unknown in Tulwar, which consisted of layers wrapped around a central pit. The outermost layer was red and sweet; each layer going in was paler and more bitter, till one reached the innermost layer, bone-white and tongue-curling. Some people would unfold the fruit as if it were a present in a wrapping and eat only certain layers. Others, like Haik, bit through to the pit, enjoying the combination of sweetness and bitterness. The Goddess did as she did, Haik discovered with interest. Juice squirted out of the old woman’s mouth and ran down her lower face, matting the sparse white hair. There was no more to the dream, just the Goddess eating messily.

In another dream, the old woman was with a female bital. The shaggy beast had two young, both covered with downy yellow fur. “They are twins,” the Goddess said. “But not identical. One is larger and stronger, as you can see. That twin will live. The other will die.”

“Is this surprising?” asked Haik.

The Goddess looked peeved. “I’m trying to explain how I breed!”

“Through death?” asked Haik.

“Yes.” The Goddess caressed the mother animal’s shaggy flank. “And beauty. That’s why your father had a child in Tulwar. He was alive in spite of adversity. He was beautiful. The matrons of Tulwar looked at him and said, ‘We want these qualities for our family.’

“That’s why tame sulin are furry. People have selected for that trait, which wild sulin consider less important than size, sharp teeth, a crest of stiff hair along the spine, glittering patches of scales on the sides and belly, and a disposition inclined toward violence. Therefore, among wild sulin, these qualities grow more evident and extreme, while tame sulin acquire traits that enable them to live with people. The pesha once lived on land; the bital climbed among branches. In time, all life changes, shaped by beauty and death.

“Of all my creatures, only people have the ability to shape themselves and other kinds of life, using comprehension and judgment. This is the gift I have given you: to know what you are doing and what I do.” The old woman touched the smaller bital calf. It collapsed. Haik woke.

A disturbing dream, she thought, lying in darkness. The house, as always, smelled of clay, both wet and dry. Small animals, her fellow residents, made quiet noises. She rose and dressed, going to the nearest beach. A slight breeze came off the ocean, barely moving the hot air. Combers rolled gently in, lit by the stars. Haik walked along the beach, water touching her feet now and then. The things she knew came together, interlocking; she achieved what we could call the Theory of Evolution. Hah! The Goddess thought in large ways! What a method to use in shaping life! One could not call it quick or economical, but the Goddess was—it seemed by looking at the world—inclined toward abundance; and there was little evidence that she was in a hurry.

Death made sense; without it change was impossible. Beauty made sense; without it, there couldn’t be improvement or at least variety. Everything was explained, it seemed to Haik: the pesha’s flipper, the claw-handed bird, all the animals she’d found in the Tulwar cliffs. They were not mineral formations. They had lived. Most likely, they lived no longer, except in her mind and art.

She looked at the cloudless sky. So many stars, past all counting! So much time, receding into distance! So much death! And so much beauty!

She noticed at last that she was tired, went home and went to bed. In the morning, after a bad night’s sleep, the Theory of Evolution still seemed good. But there was no one to discuss it with. Her relatives had turned their backs on most of existence after the Drowning. Don’t think badly of them for this. They provided potted beauty to many places; many lineages in many towns praised the Tulwar trees and pots. But their family was small, its future uncertain. They didn’t have the resources to take long journeys or think about large ideas. So Haik made more pots and collected more fossils, saying nothing about her theory, till Dapple arrived late in fall. They made love passionately for several days. Then Dapple looked around at the largely empty town, guarded by dark grey cliffs. “This doesn’t seem like a good place to winter, dear one. Come south with me! Bring pots, and the Ettin will make you very welcome.”

“Let me think,” said Haik.

“You have ten days at most,” Dapple said. “A captain I know is heading south; I asked her to stop in Tulwar, in case your native town was as depressing as I expected.”

Haik hit her lover lightly on the shoulder and went off to think.

She went with Dapple, taking pots, a potter’s wheel, and bags of clay. On the trip south—through rolling ocean, rain and snow beating against the ship—Haik told Dapple about evolution.

“Does this mean we started out as bugs?” the actor asked.

“The Goddess told me the process extended to people, though I’ve never found the bones of people in my cliffs.”

“I’ve spent much of my life pretending to be one kind of animal or another. Interesting to think that animals may be inside me and in my past!”

On the same trip, Haik said, “My family wants to breed me again. There are too few of us; I’m strong and intelligent and have already had two healthy children.”

“They are certainly right in doing this,” said Dapple. “Have you picked a father?”

“Not yet. But they’ve told me this must be my last trip for a while.”

“Then we’d better make the most of it,” Dapple said.

There had been a family argument about the trip; and Haik had gotten permission to go only by saying she would not agree to a mating otherwise. But she didn’t tell Dapple any of this. Family quarrels should be kept in the family.

They spent the winter in Hu. It was mild with little snow. Dapple wrote, and Haik made pots. Toward spring they went to Ettin, taking pots.

Ettin Taiin’s mother was still alive, over a hundred and almost entirely blind with snow-white fur. But still upright, as Taiin pointed out. “I think she’ll go to the crematorium upright and remain upright amid the flames.”

He said this in the presence of the old lady, who smiled grimly, revealing that she’d kept almost all her teeth.

The Ettin bought all the pots Haik had, Taiin picking out one with special care. It was small and plain, with flower-predators for handles, a cover and a pure white glaze. “For my mother’s ashes,” the captain said quietly. “The day will come, though I dread it and make jokes about it.”

Through late winter, Haik sat with the matriarch, who was obviously interested in her. They talked about pottery, their two families and the Theory of Evolution.

“I find it hard to believe we are descended from bugs and fish,” Ettin Hattali said. “But your dreams have the sound of truth; and I certainly know that many of my distant ancestors were disgusting people. The Ettin have been improving, due to the wise decisions of my more recent ancestors, especially the women. Maybe if we followed this process far enough back, we’d get to bugs. Though you ought to consider the possibility that the Goddess is playing a joke on you. She does not always speak directly, and she dearly loves a joke.”

“I have considered this,” said Haik. “I may be a fool or crazy, but the idea seems good. It explains so much that has puzzled me.”

Spring came finally. The hills of Ettin turned pale blue and orange. In the valley-fields, bitalin and tsina produced calves and foals.

“I have come to a decision,” the blind old woman told Haik.

“Yes?”

“I want Ettin to interbreed with your family. To that end, I will send two junior members of my family to Tulwar with you. The lad is more like my son Taiin than any other male in the younger generation. The girl is a fine, intelligent, healthy young woman. If your senior female relatives agree, I want the boy—his name is Galhin—to impregnate you, while a Tulwar male impregnates Sai.”

“It may be a wasted journey,” said Haik in warning.

“Of course,” said the matriarch. “They’re young. They have time to spare. Dapple’s family decided not to breed her, since they have plenty of children; and she is definitely odd. It’s too late now. Her traits have been lost. But yours will not be; and we want the Ettin to have a share in what your line becomes.”

“I will let my senior female relatives decide,” said Haik.

“Of course you will,” said Ettin Hattali.

The lad, as Hattali called him, turned out to be a man of thirty-five, shoulder high to Haik and steel grey. He had two eyes and no limp. Nonetheless, his resemblance to Taiin was remarkable: a fierce, direct man, full of good humor. Haik liked him at once. His half-sister Sai was thirty, a solid woman with grey-brown fur and an excellent, even temperament. No reasonable person could dislike her.

Dapple, laughing, said, “This is Ettin in action! They live to defeat their enemies and interbreed with any family that seems likely to prove useful.”

Death and beauty, Haik thought.

The four of them went east together. Haik put her potter’s tools in storage at the Hu Town inn; Dapple took leave of many old friends; and the four found passage on a ship going north.

After much discussion, Haik’s senior relatives agreed to the two matings, impressed by Galhin’s vigor and his sister’s calm solidity, by the rich gifts the Ettin kin had brought, and Haik’s description of the southern family.

Nowadays, with artificial insemination, we don’t have to endure what happened next. But it was made tolerable to Haik by Ettin Galhin’s excellent manners and the good humor with which he handled every embarrassment. He lacked, as he admitted, Taiin’s extreme energy and violence. “But this is not a situation that requires my uncle’s abilities; and he’s really too old for mating; and it would be unkind to take him from Hattali. Who can say how long she will survive? Their love for each other has been a light for the Ettin for years. We can hardly separate them now.”

The two foreigners were in Tulwar till fall. Then, both women pregnant, the Ettin departed. Haik returned to her pottery. In late spring, she bore twins, a boy and a girl. The boy died soon after birth, but the girl was large and healthy.

“She took strength from her brother in the womb,” said the Tulwar matriarchs. “This happens; and the important child, the female, has survived.”

Haik named the girl Ahl. She was dun like her older sisters, but her fur had more of a ruddy tint. In sunlight, her pelt shone red-gold; and her nickname became Gold.

It was two years before Dapple came back, her silver-grey fur beginning to show frost on the broad shoulders and lean upper arms. She admired the baby and the new pots, then gave information. Ettin Sai had produced a daughter, a strong child, obviously intelligent. The Ettin had named the child Haik, in hope that some of Tulwar Haik’s ability would appear in their family. “They are greedy folk,” said Dapple. “They want all their own strength, energy, solidity and violence. In addition, they want the beauty you make and are.

“Can you leave your daughter for a while? Come south and sell pots, while I perform my plays. Believe me, people in Hu and Ettin ask about you.”

“I can,” said Haik.

Gold went to a female cousin. In addition to being lovely, she had a fine disposition, and many were willing to care for her. Haik and Dapple took passage. This time, the voyage was easy, the winds mild and steady, the sky clear except for high, thin clouds called “tangled banners” and “schools of fish.”

“What happened to your Theory of Evolution?” Dapple asked.

“Nothing.”

“Why?”

“What could be done? Who would have believed me, if I said the world is old beyond comprehension; and many kinds of life have come into existence; and most, as far as I can determine, no longer exist?”

“It does sound unlikely,” Dapple admitted.

“And impious.”

“Maybe not that. The Goddess has an odd sense of humor, as almost everyone knows.”

“I put strange animals on my pots and make them into toys for Gold and other children. But I will not begin an ugly family argument over religion.”

You may think that Haik lacked courage. Remember that she lived in an era before modern science. Yes, there were places where scholars gathered, but none in her part of the world. She’d have to travel long distances and learn a new language, then talk to strangers about concepts of time and change unfamiliar to everyone. Her proof was in the cliffs of Tulwar, which she could not take with her. Do you really think those scholars—people devoted to the study of history, mathematics, literature, chemistry, and medicine—would have believed her? Hardly likely! She had children, a dear lover, a craft, and friends. Why should she cast away all of this? For what? A truth no one was likely to see? Better to stay home or travel along the coast. Better to make pots on her own and love with Dapple.

They reached Hu Town in early summer. The inn’s potted trees bloomed scarlet and sky-blue.

“The Potter of Strange Animals!” cried the innkeeper. “I have bought five of your pots for my trees.”

Indeed, the woman had. Haik wandered around the courtyard, admiring her own work. Four were the kind she’d made when she first returned from the south, decorated with scratches and glazed white or black. The fifth had an underwater scene, done in low relief. Beaked fish swam around the top. Below them, rising from the bottom of the pot, were long sinuous plants. Haik had named them “ocean whips.” It was possible that they were animals; once or twice she had found shadows that might be mouths with teeth. Between the plants (or animals) were segmented bugs. The glaze was dark blue with touches of white.

“This is more recent,” Haik said.

“I bought it because you are the Potter of Strange Animals. But I prefer the other pots. They set off my trees.”

Who can argue opinions about art, especially with someone who has bought five large pots?

Dapple’s company was at the inn, having arrived several days before. Haik knew all of them, except the apprentices. For a while, they traveled through the little coastal towns of Hu, Tesh, and Ta-tesh, performing comedies and now and then a tragedy. These last were a surprise to Haik, especially the tragedies about women. They were so subdued! Instead of tumbling and rude jokes, there were small gestures, turned heads, a few words spoken quietly. The actors wore plain robes in sober colors; their faces were unmasked; most of the time, the music came from a single flute. Its sound reminded Haik of a thread floating on moving water, coiling and uncoiling in the current.

“It’s my observation that women suffer as much as men,” said Dapple in explanation. “But we are expected to be solid and enduring. As a result, our suffering is quiet. I’m trying to show it in the way it happens. Hah! I am tired of loud, rude comedies! And loud, sad plays about the suffering of men!”

At last, in far southern Tesh, they turned inland, traveling without merchants. The borders between Ettin and its eastern neighbors were all quiet. The various families had been allies and breeding partners for generations; and none tolerated criminal behavior. By now, it was late summer. The plain baked under a sun like polished brass. The Ettin hills were hot and dusty. When they reached Hattali’s house, it was with relief. Household women greeted them. Men took their tsina and the packs of props and costumes. Their rooms opened on a courtyard with two bathing pools. The water in one was colorless and cold. The other bubbled, bright green. The entire acting company stripped and climbed in. What a pleasure! Though both pools were crowded. Well, thought Haik, she’d take a slow bath later, soaking the travel aches from her muscles and bones.

When they were done and in fresh clothes, a woman came for Dapple and Haik. “Ettin Taiin wants you to join his mother.”

“Of course,” said Dapple.

They went through shadowy halls, silent except for birds calling in the house’s eaves. They sounded like water running over stones. The woman said, “Thirty days ago, Hattali fell. She seemed unharmed, except for damage to one foot. It drags a little now. But since the fall she’s been preoccupied and unwilling to do much, except sit and talk with Taiin. We fear her great strength is coming to an end.”

“It can’t be!” said Dapple.

“You know about old age and death. We’ve seen them in your plays.” Saying this, the woman opened a door.

Outside was a terrace, lit by the afternoon sun. Hattali sat in a high-backed chair, leaning against the back, her eyes closed. How old she looked! How thin and frail! Her warrior son sat next to her on a stool, holding one of his mother’s hands. He looked at them, laid Hattali’s hand gently in her lap and rose. “Cholkwa is in the north. I’m glad to see you, Dapple.”

They sat down. Hattali opened her eyes, obviously seeing nothing. “Who has come, Tai?”

“Dapple and her lover, the potter.”

The old lady smiled. “One last play.”

“A play, yes,” said Dapple. “But not the last, I hope.”

A look of irritation crossed Hattali’s face. “Did the potter bring pots?”

Haik excused herself and went to find her pack. Now she understood the house’s quiet. Most likely, the children had been sent out to play; and the adults—she passed a few in the halls—moved softly and gravely. A matriarch like Hattali, a woman with so much dignity, should not be bothered with noise, while deciding whether to live or die.

When Haik returned to the terrace, Hattali seemed asleep. But the old woman took the pot Haik put in her hands, feeling it with bony fingers. “What is it?”

“There’s a skull on top, a replica of one I found in stone.”

“It’s shaped like a tli skull,” Hattali said.

“A bit, but the teeth are different. I imagine from the teeth that the animal had scales, not hair.”

Hattali exhaled and felt more. “On the sides of the pot?”

“The animal as I imagine it must have been, when alive. I found the skull first and made a pot that Dapple bought. But now I have found the entire animal, and it wasn’t the way I showed it on the first pot. So I made this.”

“The animals are in relief?”

“Yes.”

“What do they look like, if not tli?”

Haik thought. “An animal about as long as my arm, four legged with a tail. Spines protrude along the back, as if the animal had a fin there like a fish. That was the thing I did not imagine: the spines. And the tail is different also, flat from side to side, like the tail of a fish.”

“What color is the glaze?”

“Black, except the skull, which is white.”

“Tai,” said the old woman.

“Mother?”

“Is it beautiful?”

“She is the Potter of Strange Animals. The pot is strange, but well made.”

“I want it for my ashes.”

“You will have it,” he said.

She gave her son the pot. He turned it in his blunt, strong-looking hands. Hattali turned her blind face toward Haik. “You must still believe your crazy idea, that we are descended from bugs.”

“That the world is old and full of change, yes,” said Haik.

“Sit down and tell me about it again.”

Haik obeyed. The old woman listened as she explained about beauty, death, and change.

“Well, we have certainly improved our lineage through careful breeding,” said Hattali finally. “The child your kinsman fathered on Sai is a fine little girl. We hope she’ll be as clever as you are, though I’m still not certain about your idea of time and change. Why didn’t the Goddess simply make people? Why start with bugs?”

“She clearly likes bugs,” said Haik. “The world is full of them. They are far more common than people and more varied. Maybe her plan was to create a multitude of bugs through beauty and death, and we are an accidental result of her breeding of bugs.”

“Do you believe that?”

“No. She told me we have a gift no other living creature had: we know what we do. I believe this gift is not an accident. She wanted comprehension.”

Haik was wrong in saying this, according to modern scientists. They believe life is entirely an accident, though evidently an accident that happens often, since life has appeared on many planets. Intelligent life is far less common, but has clearly appeared on at least two planets and may be present elsewhere in a form we do not recognize. It also is an accident, modern thinkers say. This is hard for many of us to believe; and Haik, living in the distant past, could hardly be expected to bring forward an idea so disturbing.

“Well, you certainly ought to listen to the Goddess, if she talks to you,” said Hattali. “When will I hear your play, Dapple?”

“It will take a few days to prepare.”

The matriarch tilted her head in acquiescence.

They left Hattali then, going back to their room. “I want you to make masks for a new play,” Dapple said. “Five of your strange animals. They interest Hattali. Sit with her while you work, and tell her about your ideas. Taiin is an excellent man. None better! But her illness has got him frightened; and his fear is not helping her mood. Maybe she knows what she’s doing. Maybe it is time for her to die. But I wonder if the fall has frightened her as well as her relatives. A woman like Hattali should not die from fear.”

“Has she no daughters?”

“Two. Good women, but not half what she is, and she’s never gotten along with either. The love of her life has always been Taiin.”

He left the next morning, called to the western border. Gwa scouts had been seen. Their old enemies might have heard that Hattali was dying. What better time to attack?

“They expect that grief will break me,” Taiin said, standing in the house’s front court, dressed in metal and leather armor. A sword hung at his side, and a battle axe hung from a loop on his saddle. “It may, but not while there’s work to be done.” He swung himself onto his tsin easily, in spite of age and his bad leg. Once settled on the animal, he looked down at Haik and Dapple.

“She is the last of her generation. What people they were, especially the women! As solid as stone walls and towers! I have lived my entire life in their protection. Now, the walls are broken. Only one tower remains. What will I do, when Hattali is gone?”

“Defend Ettin,” said Dapple.

He gathered the tsin’s reins, grinning. “You’re right, of course. Maybe, if I’m lucky, we’ll capture a Gwa spy.”

A moment later he was through the house’s gate, moving steadily along the dusty road, his men following, armed and armored.

“You may be wondering about his last remark,” Dapple said.

Haik opened her mouth to say no.

“There are men who take pleasure in raping prisoners before they kill them. Or in harming them in other ways. I have suspected Taiin is one such. Now I’m certain.”

This was how he’d deal with his grief at Hattali’s illness: by making someone else’s end unpleasant.

“Beauty and death,” Dapple said. “This is the way the Goddess has organized her world, according to you and your bones.”

They spent the next several days on Ettin Hattali’s terrace. The weather remained dry and sunny. Haik worked on the masks, while Dapple sat with paper and brush, sometimes writing, more often listening.

There was a folding table next to Hattali’s chair. The matriarch’s relatives brought out food and drink. In any ordinary circumstance, it would have been rude to eat while conversing with other people, especially guests, but the old lady had not been eating. Good health always goes in front of good manners.

At first, Hattali ignored everything except water, brought in a glass goblet. This she held, turning the precious object between her bent fingers.

The first mask was the animal on Hattali’s funeral pot: a long narrow head, the jaw hinged and moved with a string, the mouth full of pointed teeth. Snap! Snap!

The skin would be mottled green, Haik decided; the eyes large, round, and red. There were existing animals—small hunters with scaly hides—that had triangular pupils. She would give this creature the same. The spines on the back would be a banner, supported by a harness over Dapple’s shoulders. Hah! It would flutter when her lover danced! As she worked, she described the mask to Hattali.

“Have you ever found large animals?” the old woman asked.

“Not complete. But large bones, yes, and teeth that are longer than my hands. The layer they are in is high on my native cliffs and was laid down when the country was above water. They were land-dwellers, those animals, larger than anything living now, at least in the regions I’ve visited, and with teeth that remind me of birds’ teeth, though more irregular and much larger.”

“What eyesight you have!” Hattali exclaimed. “To see into the distant past! Do you really believe these creatures existed?”

“They did,” said Haik firmly.

Gradually, as their conversation continued, the old lady began to eat: hard biscuits first, then pieces of fruit, then halin in a small, square, ceramic cup. Hattali was sitting upright now, her bony shoulders straight under an embroidered robe. Hah! She was licking her fingers! “Can you write, Haik?”

“Yes.”

“I want you to write down your ideas and draw the animals you’ve found in stone. I’ll have one of my female relatives make a copy.”

“You believe me,” said Haik in surprise.

“Most of what you’ve told me I knew already,” Hattali answered. “How could any woman not know about inheritance, who has lived long enough to see traits appear and reappear in families of people, sulin, and tsina? But I lacked a framework on which to string my information. This is what you’ve given me. The frame! The loom! Think of the patterns the Ettin will be able to weave, now that we understand what the Goddess has been doing with sex and death and time!” The old woman shifted in her chair. There was a cup of halin next to her on the folding table. She felt for it, grasped it and drank, then reached for a piece of fruit. “I have been wondering whether it’s time for me to die. Did you notice?”

“Yes,” murmured Dapple.

“The blindness is hard to endure; but life remains interesting, and my kin tell me that they still need my judgment. I can hardly refuse their pleas. But when I fell, I thought—I know this illness. It strikes women down like a blow from a war club. When they rise, if they rise, who can say what the damage will be? Paralysis, stupor, the loss of speech or thought.

“This time the only damage was to one leg. But I may fall again. I have seen relatives, grave senior female cousins, turn into something less than animals—witless and grieving, though they do not remember the cause of their grief. Maybe, I thought, it would be better to stop eating now and die while I am still able to choose death.

“But I want your book first. Will you write it for me?”

Haik glanced at Dapple, who spoke the word “yes” in silence.

“Yes,” said the potter.

The matriarch sighed and leaned back. “Good! What a marvel you are, Dapple! What a fine guest you have brought to Ettin!”

The next day, Haik began her book, drawing fossils from memory. Fortunately, her memory was excellent. Her masks went to the costume maker, who finished them with the help of the apprentices. It was good work, though not equal to Haik’s. One apprentice showed real promise.

The old lady was eating with zest now. The house resumed the ordinary noise of a house full of relations. Children shouted in the courtyards. Adults joked and called. Looking up once from her work, Haik saw adolescents swimming in the river below the terrace: slim naked girls, their fur sleeked by water, clearly happy.

By the time the Ettin war party returned, Taiin looking contented as he dismounted in the front courtyard, the book on evolution was done. Taiin greeted them and limped hurriedly to his mother’s terrace. The old woman rose, looking far stronger than she had twenty days before.

The war captain glanced at Dapple. “Your doing?”

“Haik’s.”

“Ettin will buy every pot you make!” the captain said in a fierce whisper, then went to embrace his mother.

Later, he looked at Haik’s book. “This renewed Hattali’s interest in life? Pictures of shells and bones?”

“Ideas,” said Dapple.

“Well,” said Taiin, “I’ve never been one for thinking. Ideas belong to women, unless they’re strategic or tactical. All I can be is thankful and surprised.” He turned the folded pages. “Mother says we will be able to breed more carefully, thinking of distant consequences rather than immediate advantage. All this from bones!”

The actors did their play soon after this, setting their stage in the house’s largest courtyard. It began with a fish that was curious about the land and crawled out of the ocean. In spite of discomfort, the fish stayed, changing into an animal with four legs and feet. Hah! The way it danced, once it had feet to dance with!

The fish’s descendants, all four-footed animals, were not satisfied with their condition. They fell to arguing about what to do next. Some decided that their ancestral mother had made a mistake and returned to water, becoming animals like peshadi and luatin. Others changed into birds, through a process that was not described; Haik knew too little about the evolution of birds. Other animals chose fur, with or without a mixture of scales.

One animal chose judgment as well as fur.

“How ridiculous!” cried her comrades. “What use are ideas or the ability to discriminate? You can’t eat a discrimination. Ideas won’t keep you warm at night. Folly!” They danced away, singing praise for their fur, their teeth, their claws.

The person with fur and intelligence stood alone on the stage. “One day I will be like you,” Dapple said to the audience. “No spines on my back, no long claws, no feathers, though I had these things, some of them at least, in the past. What have I gained from my choice, which my relatives have just mocked? The ability to think forward and back. I can learn about the past. Using this knowledge, I can look into the future and see the consequences of my present actions. Is this a useful gift? Decide for yourselves.”

This was the play’s end. The audience was silent, except for Hattali, who cried, “Excellent! Excellent!” Taking their cue from the old lady, the rest of the Ettin began to stamp and shout.

A day later, the actors were on the road. They left behind Haik’s book and the new masks. Dapple said, “My play doesn’t work yet, and maybe it never will. Art is about the known, rather than the unknown. How can people see themselves in unfamiliar animals?”

Haik said, “My ideas are in my head. I don’t need a copy of the book.”

“I will accept your gifts,” said Hattali. “And send one copy of the book to another Ettin house. If anything ever happens here, we’ll still have your ideas. And I will not stop eating, till I’m sure that a few of my relatives comprehend the book.”

“It may take time,” said Haik.

“This is more interesting than dying,” Hattali said.

The story ends here. Haik went home to Tulwar and made more pots. In spite of Taiin’s promise, the Ettin did not buy all her work. Instead, merchants carried it up and down the coast. Potters in other towns began to imitate her; though they, having never studied fossils, did not get the animals right. Still, it became a known style of pottery. Nowadays, in museums, it’s possible to find examples of the Southern Fantastic Animal Tradition. There may even be a few of Haik’s pots in museum cabinets, though no one has yet noticed their accuracy. Hardly surprising! Students of art are not usually students of paleontology.

As for Dapple, she continued to write and perform, doing animal plays in the south and heroic tragedies in the north. Her work is still famous, though only fragments remain.

The two lovers met once or twice a year, never in Tulwar. Dapple kept her original dislike of the place. Often, Haik traveled with the actor’s company, taking pots if they were going to Ettin.

Finally, at age fifty, Haik said to her senior relatives, “I am leaving Tulwar.”

The relatives protested.

“I have given you three children and trained five apprentices. Let them make pots for you! Enough is enough.”

What could the relatives say? Plenty, as it turned out, but to no avail. Haik moved to a harbor town midway between Tulwar and Hu. The climate was mild and sunny; the low surrounding hills had interesting fossils embedded in a lovely, fine-grained, cream-yellow stone. Haik set up a new pottery. Dapple, tired of her rainy home island, joined the potter. Their house was small, with only one courtyard. A crown-of-fire tree grew there, full-sized and rooted in the ground. Every spring, it filled their rooms with a sweet aroma, then filled the courtyard with a carpet of fallen blossoms. “Beauty and death,” Dapple sang as she swept the flowers up.

Imagine the two women growing old together, Dapple writing the plays that have been mostly lost, Haik making pots and collecting fossils. The creatures in those hills! If anything, they were stranger than the animals in the cliffs of Tulwar!

As far as is known, Haik never wrote her ideas down a second time. If she did, the book was lost, along with her fossils, in the centuries between her life and the rediscovery of evolution. Should she have tried harder? Would history have been changed, if she had been able to convince people other than Ettin Hattali? Let others argue this question. The purpose of this story is to be a story.

The Ettin became famous for the extreme care with which they arranged breeding contracts and for their success in all kinds of far-into-the-future planning. All through the south people said, “This is a lineage that understands cause and effect!” In modern times, they have become one of the most powerful families on the planet. Is this because of Haik’s ideas? Who can say? Though they are old-fashioned in many ways, they’ve had little trouble dealing with new ideas. “Times change,” the Ettin say. “Ideas change. We are not the same as our ancestors, nor should we be. The Goddess shows no fondness for staying put, nor for getting stuck like a cart in spring rain.

“Those willing to learn from her are likely to go forward. If they don’t, at least they have shown the Great Mother respect; and she—in return—has given them a universe full of things that interest and amaze.”

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, September 2002.

The Woman from the Ocean

Karl Bunker

It was a morning in early winter when she came to the village. She came on foot, along the shore road from the north. Michael’s cabin was the first one on this road, and he was stoking the morning fire when he was startled by a banging at his door. He got up and was just reaching for the latch when the door opened and she came in.

She was hunched over with her arms tight across her chest. She walked past him without speaking, barely glancing at him, and sat down cross-legged in front of the fire. Michael closed the door and stood looking at her for a moment, frozen by surprise. Then he saw she was shivering, so he got a blanket from his bed and put it over her shoulders. Her clothes were strange, bright with colors that he’d never seen in any fabric. They were also too thin to be any protection against the cold.

He squatted beside her. “My name is Michael,” he said quietly, and after a moment she turned her head to look at him.

She had a strong face, with high cheekbones and a wide jaw, and her skin was brown. When she looked at him, her eyes darted over his face as if she was searching for something. “You speak English,” she said. “Or something like it.” She made a short, unhappy smile. “What place is this?”

She had a strange accent, and it took Michael a moment to understand what she had said.

“This is our village, on the inner coast of the cape. My name is Michael, I’m a carpenter, and you’re in my home.”

“What cape?” she asked.

“The—the big cape . . . ” he stammered. “The one on the ocean.”

“The big cape. The one on the ocean,” the woman repeated. Then she turned back to the fire and pulled the blanket closer around herself. “Fuck,” she said.

Michael waited a little while, then asked, “Are you from far away?” He realized then that he could smell the ocean in her hair and on her clothes. “Were you on a boat?” he asked. “Did it sink?”

“Yes. Something like that. We crashed into the ocean. Only a few of us got out of the lander before it sank, and no one else could make the swim. I spent all day going up and down the shore calling, looking for them, but there was no one . . . Then it got dark, and I started walking . . . All of them . . . only seventy-eight of us were left, and now they’re all dead. Philip, Zhang, Gabriela, Mary, Lester . . . All dead, all dead . . . all . . . dead . . . ”

Her head dropped as she said these last words, and soon Michael saw she was asleep. He moved close to her, then picked her up with one arm at her back and one behind her knees. She made a soft grunting sound when he lifted her, but didn’t wake up. He laid her in his bed, putting two heavy blankets over her and pulling them up to her neck. Then he left the cabin, closing the door quietly behind him. He was back a few minutes later with Susan, who was the old woman of the village.

“She’s not like anyone I’ve ever seen,” Susan whispered as they stood over the sleeping stranger. “I’ve seen brown skin before, but not on a person with such straight black hair. What color are her eyes?”

“Brown,” Michael said. “Light brown. Almost exactly the color of her skin, and large, like a child’s eyes.”

“Are they now?” Susan said, drawing out the words and smiling at Michael. “She looks about your age, Michael, and very healthy. Perhaps the sea has sent her to you, in return for your poor Emma.”

Michael looked at Susan, one eyebrow arched.

“I know,” she said. “You don’t believe in that sort of thing. And neither do I, come to think of it. But it sounds nice. As I get older I’m learning to find comfort in things I don’t believe.”

The woman slept until past midday; then she appeared at the doorway to the half of the cabin that was Michael’s workshop. “Could I have some water?” she asked. “And maybe something to eat?”

“Of course!” Michael said. He came quickly out of his shop and poured water from a pitcher into a mug, handing it to her. He asked her to sit at his small table and began assembling a meal.

“My name is Kali,” the woman said as she sat down. Michael brought her bread, cheese, a bowl of thick soup. As Kali ate she gestured at her surroundings. “It looks like two people live here.”

Michael sat down across from Kali. “I . . . had a wife. She died last year.”

Kali picked up the clay mug of water in front of her and looked into it. “From what? Do you know? Typhoid? Dysentery? Consumption? Evil spirits?”

“She had a pain in her chest. In the end she couldn’t breathe. Susan, our medicine woman, couldn’t help her.”

“Must not have been evil spirits, then,” Kali said. Then she glanced up, meeting Michael’s eyes briefly. “I’m sorry.”

She drank from the mug, then looked at it, turning it in her hand. “Where was this made? Your clothes, the fabric they’re made from, the tools you work with—where do all these things come from?”

“My cups and dishes were made by a potter named Jim. A woman named Ann is a weaver and seamstress; she made most of my clothes. My tools—“

“The fiber for the cloth—the cotton, or whatever it is,” Kali interrupted, “is it grown nearby or does it come from somewhere else?”

“Traders . . . it’s brought by traders.”

“Itinerant traders? People from outside your village?”

“Yes.”

“And where do the traders get it? Where is it grown?”

Michael lifted his hands with the palms up. “It comes from . . . far away, outside the village. Sometimes the traders come on the road from the south, other times they have boats that go up and down the coast. Was your boat a trader boat?”

“How do you pay for the cloth? By barter? Do you do everything by barter?”

“We . . . give different things in exchange for what they bring. It depends on what we have, and what the traders want.” Michael smiled uncertainly, his eyes on Kali’s face.

“Can you read?” Kali’s voice was sharp and she was holding the heavy mug in both hands, squeezing down on it so that her fingertips whitened. “Can anyone read? Have you ever heard of anyone who can read?”

“I’m sorry . . . That has something to do with markings, doesn’t it? A trader showed me something once—marks on a piece of plastic—I couldn’t see what they meant.”

Kali took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Oh brave new world, that has such people in it,” she said. Then she stood up suddenly. “I need to go out—to look at this village of yours.” She bent and reached across the table until the tips of her fingers touched Michael’s hand. “Thank you Michael,” she said. “Thank you for your hospitality, and I’m sorry for being rude with you.”

As she was walking to the door, Michael called after her. “It’s cold. Take this.” He held a deerskin jacket out to her, his eyes on the jacket rather than Kali.

“Your wife’s,” Kali said. “Thanks. I’ll bring it back.”

“No need,” Michael said, but Kali was already out the door, pulling it closed behind her.

It was late afternoon when she came back. She knocked on Michael’s door, waiting for him to open it this time. “I met the woman—Susan—in the next house down the road,” she said. “She took me around, introduced me to lots of people. Everyone was very pleasant, very kind. Susan said I could stay with her until . . . until I can support myself, I guess.” She walked through the main room of Michael’s cabin, to the doorway that led to his workshop. “Susan told me that you had an apprentice until recently.”

“Yes, Alan. He decided to go back to fishing.”

“A long time ago,” Kali said, “a long, long time ago, I used to do some woodworking. Many of the tools were different then, but I was good at it, and I can learn, if you would be willing to teach me.”

That night Kali was in Susan’s cabin, sitting at her table. “Michael is a good man,” Susan said as she put a plate of stew in front of Kali. “You will like working for him. He is very kind, very gentle, and good-looking too, don’t you think?” There were gaps in her teeth when she smiled.

Some time through the night Susan woke to the sound of Kali quietly crying. She got up and knelt on the floor beside the straw-padded pallet that was Kali’s bed, stroking the younger woman’s hair. “Poor child, poor child,” she whispered.

Kali sat up, wiping under her nose with the back of her hand. “I’m sorry I woke you,” she said.

Susan made a loose gesture with her hand, sitting down on her heels.

“I don’t know if I can do this, Susan,” Kali said. “I mean live here, in this village, in this world. I just don’t know if I can do it. I don’t know if I even want to try.”

“This . . . world?”

Kali brought her knees up underneath the long nightgown that Michael had given her and folded her arms across them. “This isn’t my world, Susan. It’s changed so much . . . The world I came from, like all the people I knew, is dead. It died hundreds of years ago.”

“Michael’s wife’s name was Emma,” Susan said. “She came from another village, far away, a place where the crops had failed. Many people died and others, like Emma, left to find a better place. She was very sad at first; she felt that she had lost everything. But Michael made her happy. He made her laugh.”

“You have a one-track mind, Susan,” Kali said.

Susan smiled, her old face looking impish. “You say hundreds of years ago. You don’t look like someone who has lived hundreds of years. Do people not grow old where you come from?”

“We were on a long journey. The only way to make the journey was to use machines that caused us to sleep for many years without getting older. We were like Michael’s wife; we were looking for a far-away place where we could live. But we never found it. We only found dead, unlivable places. So finally we gave up and started back. Our ship was deteriorating, and couldn’t last forever. But while we were away, things here changed. Things became very different.” She tilted her head and rested it sideways on her folded arms. “Things became very different.”

“So where you come from—the time you are from—it was during the machine times?”

“The machine times?” Kali asked. “Yes, I suppose that must be what you call it. Tell me what you know about the machine times.”

“Only that it was long ago, and people then had giant machines that could do anything. Now the machines no longer work, and all we know of them is what we are told by traders who go to the old places and bring back metal and plastics.”

“Hm,” Kali grunted. “And do you know about wars?”

“Wars . . . ” Susan repeated, mouthing the word in a way that suggested it was a sound with no meaning.

“People killing people, in large numbers.”

Furrows deepened in Susan’s face. “People? Which people? Killing . . . which people? And why?”

“That’s a very good question, Susan.” Kali lay back down on her side, pulling her blankets up and closing her eyes.

The next morning Kali went to Michael’s cabin. He took her to his workshop, and they talked about his work, his tools, different kinds of wood, the various items he made and what he hoped to get for them in trade. They worked together all day until it began to get dark. As Michael was lighting a candle, Kali looked around the cabin. “Is that a musical instrument?” she asked, pointing at an object hanging on a wall. “Do you play it, or did it belong to your . . . ”

“Yes, I play it sometimes,” Michael said.

Kali took the instrument off the wall and brought it to Michael. “Would you play something for me?”

Michael sat on a chair near the fire and laid the instrument across his legs like a zither. He plucked at its strings, his right hand moving up and down the fretboard. After a few bars he began to sing in a soft, dry voice. When he finished the song Kali asked him to sing another, and another after that.

“How did you learn these songs?” Kali asked.

“The first one is old. People in the village taught it to me. The other two are mine. I made the last one as a gift for my wife.”

“That one was my favorite,” Kali said. She stared into the fire for a time, and then turned her face to Michael. “I want to talk about some ideas with you, Michael. As sort of an experiment, okay?” When Michael nodded she went on. “First, do you know that there are—there used to be—ways of marking down music on paper—or on animal skins, let’s say.”

“You mean like writing?”

“Yes, like that. But with different marks for musical notes as well as words. If I wrote down your songs, you could share your music with everyone.”

“I do share my music with everyone,” Michael said. “I teach my songs to anyone who asks.”

“But what about other people? What about people you might never meet, people far away, people in the future, after you’re gone? If you wrote your music down, it could last forever. Isn’t that a lovely thought?”

Michael frowned, as if struggling to understand. “But . . . who are these people? Why would they want to know my songs?”

An edge came to Kali’s voice. “Some people would want to. Not everyone, but some people would see them and love them. Can you see the beauty of that idea?”

Michael started to speak, stopped, started again. “It seems . . . strange. Why would I give something to someone I don’t know, someone I’ve never even met? Someone who has never asked me for the thing I’m giving? If I could see this person, if he told me he wanted to learn my songs, then I would understand . . . ” His voice faded.

Kali turned back to the fire. “Oh brave new world,” she said quietly.

Michael let her sit in silence for a time. He put some dried leaves into a pot of water hanging over the fire and then poured out two mugs of tea. “Can you tell me something about . . . where you came from?” he asked.

Kali said nothing for a long time. She continued to look into the fire, blew onto her tea, sipped it a few times. “We thought the world was ending,” she said finally. “There were too many weapons; too many terrible, horrific weapons. It was becoming too easy to destroy too much of the world, too quickly. Everything was going to hell when we left. We kept listening to news transmissions as we went out and out. Things only got worse. It looked like the world, the whole world, was going to die. We thought we might be the only survivors.”

Again she paused for a long time. “And then someone, or something, decided to save the world, and they came up with the virus. The favorite theory on the ship was that it must have been an AI. Some machine was given, or gave itself, the problem of how to save humanity, and the virus was its solution.”

“Vi-rus?”

“A kind of disease, Michael. A sickness. A sickness that was created, and one that didn’t make people sick. Instead it affected their chromosomes in a way that changed the brains of every new baby that was born. Just a small, small change . . . ”

“This sickness changed people?” Michael asked. “Is that why people today don’t know how to make machines? Did it make us stupid?”

“No, no. Not like that. It didn’t change you like that.” Kali twisted around to look toward one of the cabin’s windows, a square of oiled animal skin that let through some of the dusk’s waning light. “Are there wolves around here, in the forest?”

“Yes.”

“And mountain lions—big cats?”

“Yes, those too.”

“Wolves live in packs,” Kali said, “while mountain lions are solitary. People are more like wolves, wouldn’t you say?”

“You mean because we live in groups? Yes, I guess so.”

“In my time we would say that humans are a social animal. The virus changed that. Not very much; just a little. Just a little adjustment. Being social creatures doesn’t only mean that we live in groups. It also affects how we think. Or rather it used to. That’s what changed, Michael. The genetic expression of social instincts has been reduced to the point that those instincts no longer carry over into abstract reasoning.”

Michael rubbed his chin. “I don’t . . . ”

“I know you don’t understand those words, Michael. What they mean is that you—your people—don’t have the concept of belonging to a larger community—a community that includes people you don’t know, people who aren’t standing in front of you. You can’t think of people who are far away as being a part of your social group. Your brain doesn’t work that way. You can interact with people who are standing in front of you, but that’s all. Your instinct to social behavior doesn’t extend beyond that.”

There was no comprehension in Michael’s face, but Kali went on, looking down at the floor, talking more to herself than to him. “There was a brilliant purity to the solution. It was probably the least invasive thing, the smallest possible change you could make to human nature and still make war impossible. People are as intelligent, as aggressive, as passionate as they ever were, but they won’t make war. Wars happened because people thought in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’. There was an ‘us’ that was right and a ‘them’ that was wrong. An ‘us’ that was righteous and a ‘them’ that was infidel. So that’s what was erased from the human brain. After the virus, the concept of a ‘them’ was erased. But the concept of ‘us’ is gone too.”

Kali sighed, and there was a tremble in her breath. “And so . . . Now there is no war. And there is no science, no literature, no history, no scholarship, no learning of anything that can’t be taught by one person to another, face to face. And you will do your woodworking today and Jim will make his pots and Ann will weave cloth, and you will all go to sleep tonight and wake up tomorrow morning and go to sleep tomorrow night and wake up the next morning and the next and the next and the next, and nothing will ever, ever, ever change.”

Michael got up and hung his instrument on the wall. Standing, looking down at Kali, he said, “Things change, Kali. You came here; you came to my door. That was a change. For me at least, that was a very great change.”

Kali and Michael were married in the following spring, and in the fall she gave birth to a daughter. It was not an easy birth, and as Kali gripped Michael’s hand in her right and Susan’s hand in her left, she shouted out curses against the world, against the village, against Michael and Susan, against herself. But when the baby was finally delivered and laid on her belly, she became like all mothers, crying with joy and delight and love for the new life she’d brought into the world.

Years passed. Kali became well-liked by her neighbors; she was known as a woman who worked hard, who knew many strange things and yet was ignorant of many common things, who entertained children with wonderful stories, and who seemed to always be haunted by a sadness that she could never share or explain. Her daughter was named Asha, and as the girl grew older Kali began teaching her to make the marks of writing. She also would spend long periods talking to her daughter, asking her questions, challenging her answers, all the time her face taut and intense, perhaps even frightened.

One day when Asha was eight, as happens with all mothers and their children, Kali and Asha quarreled. Asha screamed the angriest of the few angry words she knew and threw down the slate that Kali had been using for her writing lessons. As Kali bent to pick up the pieces of the slate, tears were already welling in her eyes. That evening she sat sullenly at the table, eating nothing, barely speaking. “The virus is still active,” she said to Michael after Asha had gone to bed. “It infected me, changed my chromosomes, and so Asha’s brain is butchered, just like yours, just like everyone’s. I guess I’ve known it for a long time now, but I was hiding it from myself.”

“Our daughter is perfect,” Michael said. “She is beautiful and smart, and she’s going to grow up to be a wonderful woman like her mother.”

Kali glanced up at her husband, her face haggard, her eyes edged with red. “No, not like her mother, Michael. For whatever difference that makes. I don’t know what I was hoping for anyway. What difference could one child make, or a dozen? And what did I want? A return to the old days, with the world ready to destroy itself? No, Michael, there’s nothing of me in your daughter, and she’s better off that way. Let her be one of you. Let me be the last of an extinct species, a species that failed and died out long ago.”

Later, as her husband and daughter slept, Kali left the cabin and walked down the road that had first brought her to the village. When she reached the beach she walked out into the ocean with her clothes on and swam toward the horizon. She swam away from her family, from all the people she had come to know and feel fondness for. She swam away from the peaceful village, from the world of harmony and no war, where cups and bowls were made by a potter named Jim, where a woman named Ann wove cloth, where Susan still dispensed her medicines and her advice. Kali was a strong swimmer, and she cut cleanly through the breakers and was almost out of sight of land before her strength gave out.

Michael did not marry again. He was devoted to his daughter and lavished all his love and attention on her. As she grew older she would sometimes speak about people in the world outside the village in strange ways, almost as if they were people that she knew. Her father only smiled at this, and didn’t criticize her for her odd ideas.

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, July 2014

The Residue of Fire

Robert Reed

“My face,” said the human.

“Yes.”

“Make the count, please.”

Legs rigid, the jeweled eyes stared at the never-moving sun. But the 31-1 was also searching his memories for the friend’s face. An army of sensors linked the subject’s mind to a bank of diagnostic AIs. The human watched quantum whirlpools breaking out inside each one of his singholes, every swirl growing larger and brighter. An inventory was being taken, but the 31-1 wasn’t counting. Counting was an act that had to cross time, and time was a falsehood, an illusion. As far as the alien was concerned, he was simply chasing a reality where the answer was known, and that was the juncture when every whirlpool was linked with the central mind, and having experienced that reality, the creature felt confident enough to offer a considerable yet very reasonable tally.

The human’s face was unique in a thousand ways, but after that, completely unmemorable. He wasn’t large for his species, but the lanky body gave him a tall man’s build. His hair was gray, the skin deep brown, and eyes that were blue in the night were black in this glorious morning/afternoon light.

“What are my faces doing?” he asked.

“Many drink tea beside your tree,” the 31-3 reported. “Others drink beside our river. And I see three faces enjoying beverages elsewhere onboard the Great Ship. Poured into a single cup, all of that tea would create an ocean.”

Ash laughed at the joke.

His companion appreciated that reaction. Telemetry proved so, as did the front leg’s sudden flexing.

Inspired by the subject, Ash decided to brew a fresh pot. But his supplies were indoors, and he had to drag his own cables into his home with him, and then drag them out again.

In the midst of those chores, the alien offered the word “Urgency.”

“Yes?”

“I see urgency inside you.”

Ash was studying the 31-1’s mind, and in the same way, his friend was privy to the quantum noise inside a tiny, nearly immortal human brain.

“I see emotions that are controlled but distracting,” the alien said. “Some portion of the universe can’t be ignored, yet you wish that portion were as far from you as possible. Which leads you into urgency.”

“I’m scared,” Ash confessed.

“Quite a lot scares your species. But in this case, an impressive terror is living inside you.”

To the 31-1s, the universe was a sequence of fixed, eternal realities. Each reality was spectacularly detailed, encompassing the tiniest quantum event as well as the farthest stars. Like photographs inside an infinite album: That was how the universe was organized. The most similar realities stood next to each other, close enough to touch. To the 31-1s, there was never any need for time. Time was an illusion embraced by weak species. Humans, for instance. Seconds and centuries were cheats that helped the humans navigate through the realities. And in the same fashion, the 31-1s lacked any concept of motion. They couldn’t run or even imagine running. No creature walked or swam or fell. Ash certainly didn’t balance on narrow legs, and data cables didn’t leave drag marks in the dust. These two good friends were simply passing from one mathematical purity into the next, and the next, and a trillion other nexts. And then they reached a reality where the human had his water and blisterwing tea and a favorite pot and two well-used cups.

“Urgency,” the alien repeated.

“Is that what you see inside me?”

“In your head. Considerable urgency.”

But the fear wasn’t enough to make him stop doing what he loved. Kneeling in the shade behind the young bristlecone, Ash arranged bits of dried foliage before applying a spark.

“I see us talking in this fashion just once,” said the alien.

“Now,” said Ash.

There was no “now.” But better than most, this 31-1 understood what the impossible word meant to his companion.

“Why ask about your faces?”

“To test your memory,” said Ash.

“You don’t need tests. Your memory knows our minds very well.”

Here was the key to quite a lot. Ash came to this habitat to study one unusual species. He intended to stay for a few years, no longer, but then he fell in love with the changeless weather and that low, never-moving sun. That’s when he planted the bristlecone that had finally grown enough to cast a reasonable shadow. And with the native rock, he built the hearth where a new fire stood protected from the hot, unending wind.

Ash lived inside a comfortable cave just a few steps away, and this habitat was a much larger cavern. The 31-1s’ home was built from granite and hyperfiber and convincing, interwoven illusions. What looked like a K-class sun was fixed to a distant wall. What wasn’t sky wore the pinks of airborne dusts. To a human eye, the scene was baked in perpetual dawn or twilight. But of course the locals had no sense of day and night. They lacked any instinct that told them that any sun should move. What looked like glass roadways clung to the canyon walls, and there were hundreds of 31-1s below them, each passing from one reality to the next, and below everything and everyone was a sturdy little river that was equally fixed in time. Water didn’t flow, and the 31-1s did not walk. But if that river found its way into a man’s mouth, he tasted the glaciers hiding on the world’s night side. That mixture of cold pleasure and rock flour made for a delightful tea, and that was another factor in Ash’s decision to linger in this good place.

Ash offered his companion’s name. Which wasn’t a word, but a smell. Each 31-1 had a distinct, birth-given odor never replicated by others, and Ash released the odor twice, for emphasis. Then he said, “This is my reason. Your body is more likely than most to exist outside this habitat.”

A truth, yes. The alien’s mind and the front leg agreed with Ash.

“And your memory isn’t your only talent,” the human continued. “Those eyes see much more than my two light-eating pits.”

Praise for the obvious wasn’t praise. Yet the creature was quite pleased with the words.

“I will pay you,” Ash said. “I need to show you a certain face, and then you’ll go out into the Ship and look for that face.”

“The Ship is rather large,” his friend mentioned.

Not only was the Great Ship bigger than worlds, it was full of vast caves and tunnels and oceans and wilderness.

“I can narrow down the possible universes. Because I know where he lives.”

“This is a human face?”

“Very much so, yes.”

The alien applied what he knew about the tea-drinking creature. “Is this human face attractive?”

“Some would find him quite handsome, yes.”

The silence stretched out while the 31-1 imagined a breeding tale about his friend and this unknown human. At least that’s what Ash assumed. Despite experience and this very sophisticated equipment, he still lacked the power to see anyone’s detailed thoughts.

Perhaps that magic always would be impossible.

“No,” said Ash. “The situation isn’t what you imagine.”

“I’m imagining quite a lot,” the alien warned.

The fire was growing quickly, but Ash didn’t like its shape. That’s why he shoved both hands into the flames, burning his fingers while he restacked the white and red coals.

“What is the truth?”

“The man happens to be lovely, but that doesn’t matter,” Ash said. “He recently arrived on the Great Ship, and his only purpose is to find me. My sources have warned me about that. And his business is very simple.”

The alien’s front leg stiffened.

“He wants to kill me,” said Ash, charred fingers hanging the pot and water on a convenient hook. “My death is the singular focus of his life.”

“You want me to find him,” the alien said.

“Yes.”

“And study his motions?”

His friend was a remarkable 31-1. Just mentioning the possibility of motion proved that much.

“No,” said Ash. “What I want is for you to deliver a message. ‘The man you want is ready to die for his crimes.’”

There was a pause. Then his friend said, “Death is impossible.”

“So you claim.”

The alien was odd among the 31-1s. But the obvious still needed to be shared. “There are countless realms where we do not exist. Does that mean we are dead? No, that’s nonexistence. But there are also countless realities where we are eternal, free of seconds and free of every fear.”

What a horrible, dangerous notion, thought Ash.

Watching the old copper pot, and wishing his tea would hurry. Just a little faster, please.

The human made ten thousand teas across the Ship, and the same human had also just arrived inside the World. Which was not the genuine World. This was a carefully sculpted room buried inside a starship found empty and claimed by humans as their own possession. Owning the Great Ship meant humans were a fabulously wealthy species, but this single man owned little. The 31-1s paid quite a lot to live under this false, convincing sky, and this human gave the 31-1s most of his meager funds for the privilege of sharing their home.

The human’s scent meant nothing.

“Ash,” was the simple sound worn on all occasions. And it was a useless sound before the 31-1 purchased a translator wise enough to interpret both languages. Unfortunately, not every word could be made into its perfect reflection. That limitation was noticed early on. “Early on.” There. The concept of time insisted on finding its way into conversation and into his thoughts, and the largest surprise was how impossible thoughts gave this 31-1 so much pleasure.

“Ash is the residue of fire,” the 31-1 declared.

“I certainly am,” the human agreed. Then he laughed, although his companion didn’t yet understand that sound or the expression on the face.

In another reality, perhaps. But not now.

“Now,” he said.

“What did you say?” asked Ash.

“Nothing. I’m sorry. My translator is cheap and foolish.”

The false World was one deep canyon and a very steep river with glass roadways strung between homes and the public places. The native plants were dark gray and unlovely, resembling fans and walls and other efficient, sun-obsessed shapes. The larger animals were proteinaceous jewels riding an odd number of legs, and like the 31-1s, their physiologies made them immune to normal aging and normal instincts. And there were always a few alien visitors who paid to see the oddness and stare at the illusionary sun. And there was a point on the river where a human and the cold water would end up touching.

In a sequence of realities, Ash’s hands went into the river and out again, and some of what he caught found its way to his mouth.

“Delicious,” the human declared.

It was pleasure hearing your water praised. Was that true for every other species?

“I’m here to learn,” the human said.

“About my kind,” the 31-1 guessed.

“Everything is interesting,” Ash claimed. “Your species, yes. And in particular, those exceptional minds.”

Fresh praise, another pleasure.

“I’ve heard explanations,” Ash said. “But maybe your answer is different. So I’m asking. What does the name ‘31-1’ mean?”

Nobody asked this question. This was a silly question with only one answer. The 31-1’s nervous system was robust and swift, its physiology close to unique. Thirty-one redundant singholes lay inside that long, spectacular body. Each singhole existed for no purpose but remembering everything. And in his center, perfectly meshed with those relentless memories, was a mind that took the smallest question seriously.

Wishing to be generous, the 31-1 began to explain that simple name.

But Ash was ignoring him, his two tiny eyes watching a screen held in his two ridiculous hands.

The 31-1 interrupted himself. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“Almost nothing,” said the human. The screen was dropped, and he looked up at a great face covered with jeweled eyes and jeweled teeth. “There’s no such creature as ‘happens,’ and actions are not possible. I know what we are. We’re matter and energy arranged in a sequence of fixed existences, and events are the products of illusion. The same way that time is an illusion.”

“I don’t believe you,” said the 31-1.

The screen changed colors, yet the human continued staring at the creature standing before him.

“Your species is quite stubborn when it comes to time and motion,” the 31-1 continued. “Freedom from time isn’t your opinion, but it is mine. No seconds, no strides. This is where I exist, because this is my place, where I belong, and I am glad for all of it.”

That triggered another laughing incident. “This won’t get easier,” Ash mentioned. “But I need to learn. If I can master your species, I could do anyone.”

“What does ‘do anyone’ mean?”

“My profession,” Ash began. Then after some consideration, he said, “I make a modest living by peering inside other minds.”

The 31-1 knew this already. Except what he knew was rather different from “peering inside other minds.”

“You’re doubtful,” the human observed.

“You see doubt?”

“And curiosity. And a powerful need for honesty too.”

“There are incidents inside my mind. Eternal scenes where your customers speak about you and your unusual profession.”

“Which customers?”

“I see their faces. Show me faces, and I will tell you.”

“I don’t care who. Just tell me what they believe.”

“You are an interrogator. In other realms, you are given humans tied to horrible acts, and you place them where they deserve to be, and you make them admit to their crimes.”

“That,” said Ash, “was a very long time ago.”

The 31-1 didn’t contest the remark.

Human shoulders lifted, then fell again. “I’m talking to your species. Asking about each of you. And some tell me that you rather enjoy standing outside this pretend world. More than anyone else. Is that true?”

The 31-1 never relished being outside his home, but there was pleasure in summoning the courage to travel. The Great Ship was full of marvels that would never be seen here, and what wasn’t unpleasant was often amazing. And by comparison, nothing in this World was amazing. And the same was true in the original World, his left-behind home.

“I don’t know the minds of others,” said the 31-1. “What pleasures them and what they believe are mysteries. But I think you know the minds of others.”

“My face,” Ash said.

“Yes?”

“During your travels, have you ever seen my face?”

Every question had a perfect, truest answer. But the task of memory was very difficult. Past upon past needed to be examined. Time wasn’t crossed to reach the answer. Time was nothing but an exercise in mad mathematics, like imaginary numbers and existence without substance. And there were ten trillion realities that were strung together, this 31-1 emitting a series of translated sounds. Those sounds told the human, “I’ve seen your face three times other than this time.”

Ash was studying the screen. Then he was looking up at his companion, showing his teeth. “You remember me.”

“And rather a lot more than you.”

“I remember seeing you once,” Ash said. “And thinking to myself, ‘God, that is one splendid creature.’”

The 31-1 was bathed in prideful pleasure.

He didn’t want to leave this moment.

What did that say about him?

Every species was carried by its narrative, by a long history and endless accommodations to the impossible. Every species could be understood partly and only partly, and that meant your own species too. Living with the 31-1s had changed Ash. He was absolutely more aware of being human. But there were incidents—not moments—where he felt separated from time. Change inside the universe was unthinkable. Realities were pressed close to one another, and he was free and eternal, sharing the world with wise neighbors who were rather less peculiar than one tribe of upright, uptight mammals.

Ash was born on Mars. Humans wasted their affections on balls of warm rock and hot metal, and the entire body wore that very arbitrary name. But of course nothing lived inside a planet, and no planet ever wished to be named. To the 31-1s, names were granted only to those places where living bodies stood, and their original World was a ribbon. Woven from eternal memory, the ribbon was that precious narrow and very rich boundary between brutal cold and incinerating heat. No creature walked; motion was a ludicrous concept. But sturdy legs stood everywhere in the World, every timeless life embraced by the beauty, and that was the vision that the very best dreams gave to Ash.

Hundreds of billions of planets were tidally fixed. On most of them, life was forbidden. The suns were too close, and even the night side was a blistered wasteland. But there were planets where life thrived inside the narrow middle zone. Plants or something like plants were fed by the low sun, the climate more reliable than not. But those fertile zones were often too narrow or too fragmented to support complicated, mind-ruled life. And the difficulties didn’t end with the richer planets. A bully sun might spit flares or otherwise butcher what couldn’t flee. Moons changed orbits, turning or tipping the planet in less-than-ideal ways. And the continents could be drowned under deep oceans or shoved in and out of paradise by the amoral tectonics.

The 31-1s were unusually blessed. The planet beneath them was massive, but it wasn’t as wet as most superterran, ocean-swaddled bodies. The daylight side was punctuated with volcanism and deep basins, and an ice sheet covered the night side, fattened by whiffs of steam from the sun-bathed regions. Every glacier eventually pushed towards the heat. Moraines and loess mountains ruled the boundary, ice melting into rain clouds and rivers, and that’s where the 31-1s stood. Where the sun was low, the air agreeable. They stood where they belonged, and concepts such as days and forever didn’t apply, because forever was a single day, and that had to be part of the story explaining what they were.

But only a small part. After all, the galaxy was full of changeless circumstances. Yet there was no second example of these creatures, and that’s why the 31-1s were spectacularly precious.

In his dream, Ash wore a 31-1 body. Enormous and filled with keen excitement, he felt close, very close, to that point where he would be transformed, existing inside a multitude of realms and every good memory always in reach. But he inevitably grew nervous, and that always made him tremble. Trembling was motion; motion wasn’t permitted. Ash woke just enough to realize that the delicious nap was nearly finished. Laying in the shade of the immortal bristlecone, he struggled to keep his eyes closed. The meanings of the universe. The alien world that he had never seen for himself. What flavor of tea he would boil next. Those were the great thoughts that filled a busy, happy mind.

But then he was entirely awake, and without fail, some piece of his mind insisted on remembering Mars and its long terrible war and the Cold that was waiting for every man.

Objects were responsible for nothing but their locations, fixed and outside time. The giant starship didn’t plunge through a vacuum at any fraction of light-speed. No, the Great Ship was set where it was needed, where the universe demanded it to be, and the competent mind inside the Ship had found a rich location, and that’s where he remained. Rigid as a statue, he stood inside a succession of brilliant days and the nights that were nearly as bright as day. The avenue beneath him was paved with glowing shells and frozen resins. The locals were dissimilar in appearance from one another and relatively poor compared to the typical passenger. These creatures had never seen a 31-1, and in many cases, they did not see this 31-1. They were too busy or too indifferent to notice his existence in one place and another place and a third midway between the two. They didn’t see him watching faces for the one face that mattered. But of course all faces mattered, each being a mask obscuring long rich lives that he would never understand. Not in any reality worth the calculation, that is.

Days and nights. Days and nights. Calculating the passage of time was unnatural. Ash’s good friend had to struggle to count one hundred days and ninety-nine nights, and he still wasn’t convinced by the numbers. And if he didn’t find the man here? He would allow the universe to carry him back to Ash and further instructions. In another hundred days, perhaps. But that was too much of a calculation, casting numbers into the future. 31-1s were happiest when they conquered one piece of ground, living on their stored fats, watching every indifferent beast that was here and then elsewhere and then back again.

This was important work, but it wasn’t fun work.

Exhausted and bored, this 31-1 felt like a different creature than before. The alien faces had stopped being new. His mind kept returning to an eternal, left-behind World. The genuine sun was pinned to the perfect salmon sky, a fine dry wind blowing from wastelands. Airborne salts gave the wind its flavor, and friends were standing with him. Voices that would never escape him kept offering their advice and their scorn. What was he doing? Leaving the World was insane. That was without question, and they said so and said so and said it again.

The 31-1 felt as if he had stopped using his eyes. Only his perfect mind mattered, and a very long existence lay under him, straddled and complacent.

But he was wrong. The face that he wanted had appeared inside this reality. Existence returned to this tiny place and one promise. The 31-1 passed through the next sequence of realities. Sometimes he felt the illusion of walking, but not now. He was motionless as the Great Ship gracefully shifted its position around him, leading him towards an existence where two strangers would collide on this busy, shell-paved avenue.

What would be said?

Humans managed conversation easily, but only because they were oblivious to how impossible conversation was. Countless words, endless poses, and each reality offering crushing ramifications. The 31-1 had gathered up several viable strategies. Instead of offering the truth, he would befriend this stranger with typical words, or maybe he would beg for small favors or large sums of money. Unless he offered nothing but his close, unwelcome presence as the human continued his migration through realities. That would put the burden of the first word on human shoulders, and that solution might be best.

But the most likely strategy was to grab the man with one of his five hands, shaking him while saying, “The man you want is ready to die for his crimes.”

Life was fixed and eternal. 31-1s understood that, just as they knew how the obliteration of a body and mind could never erase a life’s existence.

Yet this 31-1 felt nervous. Which was very uncharacteristic of his kind. He was so nervous that his great eyes were focused on the pretty shells beneath his five bare feet. He didn’t see the human standing before him. The stranger was waiting to be run over, or he was just waiting. Like Ash, he was a brown creature with a slight build. But he was far more handsome, at least by human measures. And instead of black-blue, his eyes were brown rimmed with a fine snowy whiteness.

“What are you?” the human asked.

Was any question more difficult than that?

Before the universe offered answers, the human added, “You’re a 31-1. I’ve heard about you.”

It was a pleasure, recognizing interest in the voice.

Yet the 31-1 decided to do nothing for as many futures as possible. That meant standing in the open, feeling the false light of a five hour day closing into darkness. Feeling even more than nervous now. This human wanted to kill his friend, and a succession of realities left him wracked with terror.

To this vengeful stranger, the 31-1 said, “I’m busy. I must leave.”

“Ah. By any chance, do you live nearby?”

“Yes.” Another lie. Which was a skill shared by every 31-1. Since lies were truths in other realms.

“I’ll see you again, perhaps, and we can chat,” the human said.

He was smaller than Ash and sweet-faced. That sweetness wasn’t apparent for another fifty days. By then, the 31-1 had become a little more expert in the expressions and manners of human beings. Ash was a stoic, intensely private creature. But this very pretty human was the opposite of stoic or private. He easily shared details of a long life and the worlds seen, reaching back to his childhood, and then he quietly spoke about his red world and the war that took hold of his homeland, and he described the suffering seen and the suffering experienced firsthand.

The sweet face was weeping.

The lovely mouth opened and said nothing and then closed again. For the first time, the human had no words to offer.

The 31-1 looked at the cold tea on the table between them. And he studied everything else that he had ever experienced.

“Someone is hurting you,” said the timeless creature. “Now and in the past too.”

“Very badly,” the suffering man agreed.

A series of silent realities took hold, not a word spoken.

Then with a thread of mucus leaking from the nostrils, the human produced the holo of the torturer who had done unspeakable things to him.

The universe was a sequence of perfect photographs.

Ash lived inside that image.

“As I understand it,” the man began. Then he paused to breathe, gathering himself before saying, “31-1s have remarkable memories for faces.”

“And for quite a lot more than faces,” his companion agreed.

“You might have seen this face before,” the sweet man suggested.

“I see him now, yes,” said the 31-1.

“Now?” Not understanding, the man twisted his head, looking one way and then another.

“I know where he lives. That’s what I mean.”

“Will you tell me where?”

“No,” said the one who smelled like nothing else in existence. “But I will take you to him. Now.”

The AI whispered.

“The man approaches.”

A warning was delivered.

And Ash understood that this was his last day of life.

Doubt didn’t exist. The premonition smacked him and then left him feeling hopeless, the pain growing blacker and hotter until it was unbearable, until his heart raced and his skin was clammy wet and both hands shook and his legs could barely hold him upright. Three seconds. That’s how long he had to endure the worst of it. Three seconds, which felt like an enormous span. Ash was never more human or more enveloped in time than when one of these awful, inevitable premonitions grabbed up his soul.

Exactly on schedule, the trembling eased. By the ten second mark, his breathing had slowed and his heart remembered that it didn’t have to beat so hard, and rising up on his toes, Ash tested the legs that still missed the sluggish gravity of their home world. The dry wind stole away his sweat. One hand was steadier than the other, and it rubbed the back of its nervous mate while he listened to the wind playing with the bristlecone’s gnarled branches.

“Of course this is my last day,” he thought. “Since I never leave and the sun never sets . . . ”

There. The incident was finished.

Except the voice returned. Once more, the security AI said, “He approaches, and I can’t see all of him.”

The human was obvious, but one of his pockets was shielded. Ash saw the same scans and agreed with the machine. There was enough room inside that pocket for a small but still thoroughly illegal plasma gun. Exactly the kind of tool to use if you wanted to obliterate another man’s bioceramic mind.

Ash walked past the bristlecone, out where flat ground turned into empty air. Two figures were walking together on the narrow glass road. They were far below, several hours away. The 31-1 was leading, but the human didn’t need any help. Ash didn’t have to read minds to know that. The man had an urgent stride and he kept looking up at Ash’s home, and despite knowing it was foolish, the man insisted on occasionally touching the pocket, feeling the gun that would deliver a world of retribution.

Ash retreated, kneeling beside the hearth.

The idea of tea made his mouth taste foul, his stomach ache. But that reaction wouldn’t last. The hearth needed to be cleaned, and he was desperate for some small chore to help pass the time. Bare hands swept the ashes and a few still-warm coals into a bucket that had no other job. Hands and then wrists turned white, and when the bucket was full, he stood and carried it downwind, upending it on a ridge that always caught the wind, allowing the finest ashes to be blown away in the next minutes, leaving the rest to be washed away with the occasional downpour.

The white on his fingers tasted like salt and like earth. He licked three fingertips clean and then washed everything else.

Then he sat with his back against the bristlecone, the sun filling his eyes.

Arsia Mons. It was easy to assume that he chose this patch of ground and its false sun because they triggered memories of his Martian home. But the truth was that he didn’t need reminders. He never stopped thinking about Arsia Mons, about the weather and the scenery that he had loved. A shield volcano with a huge caldera, the mountain’s high reaches were famous for their cold dry air and the bristlecone forests. Brought from the Earth, the trees were tweaked until they thrived with the high carbon dioxide levels and the strong UV flux, and then other people tweaked them again, allowing them to live forever. Human cells; plant cells. In a universe full of aliens and odd biologies, those two lineages were just slightly different versions of the same cells, and humans had a need for handsome trees that served as immortal friends.

In those days, Ash wore a different name. And in front of that other name was the noble label of Doctor.

An academic, he lived in a small university with his spouse and many friends, good work and eager students from all parts of the solar system. The Doctor kept his focus away from the political troubles of the world below. A few government people came to the university seeking help. His colleagues said, “Yes,” and then moved away, throwing in with the war effort. Or they said, “No,” and were allowed to remain neutral in a struggle that seemed awful, but only because it was still so young and small.

That university was famous for its odd thoughts and arcane fascinations. Some colleagues invented weapons, but more important, others invented the surveillance and propaganda tools used against underground foes.

Bioceramic brains. They were Ash’s passion, the reason for every professional success. Immortal flesh needed a mind that could carry huge amounts of memory, crossing millennia while retaining the sum total of a life. But the bioceramics weren’t devised by humans. They were just the latest species to borrow technologies old before trilobites ruled the Earth. Intercepted broadcasts delivered the magic, and save for a few odd faiths and enclaves, humanity had thoroughly embraced the technology. Except nobody understood them perfectly. Indeed, there were days when the Doctor uncovered one or two secret talents hidden in the finer workings of these ancient machines.

University life continued, the Martian war grew worse, and the government suffered from errors and bad luck. One major problem was that prisoners couldn’t be interrogated with any hope of success. Bioceramic minds were too tough, their owners too certain of their own invincibility. Death was always a threat, yes. But the modern body didn’t suffer horrible pain, and the ageless minds couldn’t be bored or sleep deprived into madness, or fooled in any of the traditional ways.

The Doctor had opinions about how to break a man. Indeed, working with student volunteers, he proved concepts that would revolutionize the entire business of making an enemy confess.

Publishing his work, he fully expected the government to send agents to beg for his advice, if not his out-and-out aid.

And he would say, “Yes.”

Or, “No.”

He wasn’t certain how he would answer the pleas. But the moment never came. Mars ignored him, even when he sent messages of support and teases of possibility. According to the government’s resident experts, his work was too experimental and far-fetched. And silly and shallow as this was, that’s why he became angry. The noble professor was pissed by the insult, and that was when he decided to travel to Ganymede, attending a minor conference where he would meet with colleagues who understood what a good mind was being carried on his shoulders.

The Doctor was homebound when Arsia Mons was attacked. An experimental starship had been hijacked. A substantial quantity of metallic hydrogen spiked with antimatter was liberated above the mountain’s caldera. The immortal bristlecones burned, and the university was destroyed, every mind obliterated in a fire that was briefly hotter than the interior of most stars.

A few days later, the new widower tried to cross the ravaged landscape. He couldn’t walk far. The energy was drained from his legs, his soul. Sitting in cold sunlight, this expert of the mind again offered his aid to his world. But because both sides were guilty and both sides were incompetent, he didn’t commit to either cause. This innately clinical man understood what mattered. The war had to end. And he was prepared to end it by himself, if necessary.

That’s what he told the world below.

Sitting where fire had obliterated wood and soil, homes and souls, he said, “Whoever comes to me first, wins me.”

Then, speaking to himself as much as any audience, he added, “Ash is my name.”

“My face,” said the human.

“Yes?”

“Where do you see my face?”

In the shadow of the young bristlecone. The face was between two odd hands and a deficient mind: Not a generous assessment, but that was how the 31-1s regarded their human landlords.

This 31-1 threw his focus on those hands.

Working together, the hands held a tangle of wires and sensors. That was Ash’s weapon of choice. A third hand was holding an expensive, profoundly illegal gun. The two human faces were pointed at one another. Both of their wet little bodies were sucked and blowing air. One man wanted his air to carry meanings, and placing those realities into a string, the 31-1 absorbed the voice while his translator interpreted all of those painful noises.

“What you did to me, you had no right, I want you dead, the hurt you caused, for me and everyone, torturer, goddamn torturer, I’ll kill you now, you shit, where you stand, shit bastard.”

Ash’s face didn’t hide its pain. The man exhaled, and the translator said, “He sighs,” and then Ash let the wires fall to the ground.

“We aren’t alone,” Ash said.

The furious man kept talking.

“A witness is watching us,” Ash warned.

The cursing continued until the man was breathless. That’s when his face turned just far enough to look at the 31-1. The 31-1 had walked all of this way, and he was standing beside the sad, angry humans. The furious man looked pale, but in the same reality, the 31-1 saw something else. In those eyes, there was a radiant, sick and intoxicating joy.

“Where do you see my face?”

Ash and his face were beside a tall table. Drinks waited in glasses and various humans stood at the table and drank. Ash was holding the hand of the man beside him. This 31-1 had never been among humans before. He didn’t know any of their names and very little about the species. He would never guess about the relationship between the men, or care. But other realities existed, moored in places deficient minds called “the future,” In those places, this 31-1 appreciated that the men were lovers, and a willing and competent translator was able to offer up the words that the 31-1 had overheard.

Both men saw the long, five-legged alien.

“There walks beauty.”

“A 31-1.”

“Is that its name?”

“The species is, yeah.”

“Why that name?”

“I don’t know.” That human male sipped his drink and showed his smiling teeth, and he said, “But they have incredible minds, I know. Something you might like to research, if you get the chance.”

The other man said, “Maybe,” and then sipped hot water filled with cooked leaves.

“Where do you see my face?”

In the shade of the bristlecone. The torturer and his victim were standing close enough to touch each other, but they didn’t. Death was impossible. The 31-1 might flirt with time, but he understood that nothing could erase the existence of those two humans. Yet here he was, the witness, feeling as close to terrified as he had ever been. Intriguing, wasn’t it? Fear and the impossibility of guessing what would happen next: That is what made him more alert than ever. The realities were being sliced thinner than ever. That’s how it felt. Everything important was visible to him, and that included how fingers and the thumb held the terrible gun that could lead to a reality where a human mind was transformed into light and vapor.

“You don’t want to leave a witness,” said Ash.

The 31-1’s good friend was terrified. That showed in his stiff face and those huge eyes and the tone of his voice. Sunshine colored the drops of sweat that lay hard as jewels on a face that in every other existence looked composed.

Ash said, “You should kill the 31-1 first.”

What did that face say?

“That would leave enough juice to finish me off too.”

No, the 31-1 realized that his fear could grow worse.

It was worse.

But the furious man laughed at the suggestion. “No, I’ll shoot you and then I’ll kill myself. I don’t care what he sees.”

“Sees and remembers for ten million years,” Ash said. “Is that what you want? To have this moment locked inside that alien mind?”

“I want you to die.”

“And you’re promising to follow me into death.”

The other man started to respond.

“To stop your pain,” Ash said.

The plasma gun needed a stronger grip. The next realities were centered on fingers wrapping tight around the small handle.

“But if your pain is so awful, why are you alive today?” Ash asked. “All these centuries and no end to your suffering. Yet you managed not to kill yourself. Because you needed to kill me first. Just that possibility was enough. Is that what you’re claiming?”

“Yes.”

“No. You’re wrong and you’re silly.”

The other man become less angry and more angry.

How was that possible?

“Your misery hasn’t been that awful,” Ash said. “I mean, you tolerated it. Didn’t you? You were able to function. It’s not as if you haven’t lived for decades carrying that gun with you, and all it would have taken was one dark thought and the press of the finger . . . and you would be dead and past pain and free.”

“Shut up,” said the angry man. His face was taut and the lips started to bleed where teeth cut into the flesh.

“Maybe you came here for some reason other than revenge,” said Ash.

The other man spat blood, saying, “No.”

“Yes.”

“Never,” he said. “No.” Then he was blowing air without speaking, eyes wide and lost and very simple.

“What else am I?” Ash asked.

Then he paused, and the other man asked, “What’s that?”

Ash took a deep breath and exhaled, and then he said, “In the entire galaxy, who knows your mind better than me? And who has the necessary skills to take away all of your misery?”

The angry man stopped breathing, and his eyes closed tight.

“This is my offer,” Ash said. “I’ll do that first. I’ll work at your mind until both of us are satisfied. You’ll be free of pain, and I’ll be happier too. Then you kill me. If you wish. And our friend will watch it happen, or you can use my private home to do whatever you want to me.”

The other man opened his eyes, and with both of his hands and both arms, he pointed his gun at the torturer.

Ash seemed smaller, his eyes narrow and wet.

“How?” the vengeful man asked. “How can you take my pain away?”

Ash knelt.

And then Ash stood, hands filled with his weapon of choice. “You’ve done nothing for centuries but suffer and chase me,” he said. “But meanwhile, I’ve applied my time to learn all kinds of useful tricks.

“So what do you say, my friend?

“And where do you see my face?”

In the highest branches of a bristlecone that has grown up the canyon wall and down the canyon wall. Its roots drink from the river, and Ash sits where he can see a sun that isn’t as bright as it should be. And the wind is weaker than ever. And something about the voice and eyes and the look of the ageless skin . . . something in all of that has changed.

“I see you everywhere,” the 31-1.

Offering one of his hands to that odd human hand, knowing just how it feels when they touch.

Originally published in Extrasolar, edited by Nick Gevers.

About the Artist and Authors

Ron Guyatt (ronguyatt.com)

Ron Guyatt is a self-taught artist and professionally-taught graphic designer from Toronto Canada. He attended George Brown College for Design Foundation where he completed with Honors and then followed with his three-year diploma in graphic design at George Brown College.

Inspired by Art Deco, film and science fiction he loves to design posters & create illustrations. His work as been featured in magazines such as Games TM, Level, and Playstation Magazine and worked with clients like EA, Digital Devolver and Bioware.

His Forever cover art is available for purchase as part of his space poster series at: fabledcreative.bigcartel.com/category/space-posters

Eleanor Arnason

Eleanor Arnason was born in Manhattan and grew up in New York, Chicago, London, Paris, Washington DC, Honolulu, St. Paul and Minneapolis. She received a BA in art history from Swarthmore College and did graduate work at the University of Minnesota, before quitting to learn about life outside art museums and institutions of higher learning. She made her first professional sale in 1972 while living in the Detroit inner city. Since then she has published five novels and over thirty works of short fiction. Her fourth novel, A Woman of the Iron People (2001), won the James Tiptree Jr. award for gender-bending science fiction and the Mythopoeic Society Award for adult fantasy. Her fifth novel, Ring of Swords (1995), won a Minnesota Book Award. Since 1994 she has devoted herself to short fiction. Her story “Dapple” won the Spectrum Award for GLBT science fiction and was a finalist for the Sturgeon Award. Other stories have been finalists for the World Fantasy, Hugo and Nebula Awards.

Karl Bunker

Karl Bunker’s short stories have appeared in Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Analog, Interzone, Cosmos, The Year’s Best Science Fiction, The Best Science Fiction of the Year, and elsewhere. He lives in a small town north of Boston, MA with his wife, sundry pets, and an assortment of wildlife.

Robert Reed

Robert Reed is the author of nearly three hundred published stories, plus more than a dozen novels. He is best known for his Great Ship stories, including The Memory of Sky. And for the novella, “A Billion Eves,” which won the Hugo Award in 2007. He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska with his wife and daughter.

About Forever

Forever Magazine is edited by Neil Clarke and published monthly by Wyrm Publishing. Subscription information is available on our website at forever-magazine.com.

Neil Clarke (neil-clarke.com) is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine (clarkesworldmagazine.com), Forever Magazine, and The SFWA Bulletin; owner of Wyrm Publishing; and a six-time Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). His anthologies include Upgraded, Galactic Empires, More Human Than Human, The Final Frontier, Not One of Us, and the Best Science Fiction of the Years series. His next anthology is The Eagle has Landed, which will be published in July by Night Shade Books. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Thank you for reading Forever Magazine.