Issue 60, January 2020

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© Wyrm Publishing, 2020
wyrmpublishing.com
forever-magazine.com

Introduction

Neil Clarke

####Happy New Year!

Well, I hope it is for you, at least. Me, I’m on the fast-track to surgery after my defibrillator decided to start malfunctioning in December. It’s a lead failure, which is the wire that runs into my heart. Now it needs to be removed and replaced, which carries with it some extra risks. Later this week, I’m meeting with one of the top surgeons in the region (for this procedure) to discuss what’s going to happen, but I expect the surgery to be scheduled shortly and to be out of commission for a bit while I recover. Needless to say, this has me more than a little distracted. Wish me luck!

####Until next time,

((((-Neil

The Further Adventures of Mr. Costello

David Gerrold

####Haven? Yeah, it used to be a nice place, great place even.

You could raise a podful of kids and not have to worry about traffic and cities and taxes—we didn’t have any. In the evening, we’d sit out on the front porch and watch the suns go down, double sunsets worth staying up late for—one red, one blue, and sometimes the two of them together would edge the howling green sky with orange and yellow streamers so brilliant you had to put on goggles. The best was when they lit up the spiral rings that arced across the southern sky, shimmering the night for hours.

There was a fella one time, he said, “There ain’t no Earth-like planets; there’s only wishful thinkin’.” Well, maybe so, but he never saw Haven. It’s as close to the homeworld as I ever found, and I bounced across fifty planets before finally coming to rest on this one. It’s an unlikely planet in an unlikely place—an ephemeral zone of livability around a binary dance, but somehow all the unlikelies cancelled each other out and Haven was the result. A 37-hour day, 93-percent Earth-gee, a dollop more oxygen, a thirty-seven-degree tilt on the axis which made for some spectacular seasons, and a temperate zone that stretched around the planet’s equator like a slippery cummerbund. Yeah, I know what a cummerbund is. Second time I had to wear one, it was time to move on.

I bounced lucky and ended up in a contract family with four beautiful wives and two strong husbands—well, most of the time, except when we switched around, which wasn’t too often, unless one of us wanted to get pregnant, which hadn’t happened yet because we weren’t ready to start a tank-farm and didn’t want to rent a gestation bottle somewhere else, either. As a family, we only had one rule: nobody ever goes to bed hungry or angry; the rest was details. That rule lasted as long as the contract did. Which was quite a long time, and probably would have been a lot longer if it hadn’t been for him.

Some people can’t handle contracts, no big deal to me, I like ’em when I find one that suits me. A few years in a can wrestling vacuum, you learn how to live close with others. Some people don’t learn, and that buys them a one-way ticket out the airlock. I knew several captains more than happy to sign the warrant. That’s how they got well-behaved crews.

On Haven, though, if you and a neighbor started bumping heads, either he got up and moved or you did. One or t’other. Wasn’t that hard; most of the houses were already on wheels. Our closest neighbor was a fella named Jasper, ten klicks to the west, but as long as he kept to himself we all got along fine. He was a good man, when he was a man, and a good woman the rest of the time. Called herself Jasmine then, Jas for short. Never borrowed anything she didn’t return the next week, never spoke bad of anyone, never slept in where she wasn’t invited, and didn’t deserve the shit that came down when it did. None of us did.

But that’s a story for another time and it happened long enough before Costello arrived that it doesn’t matter here. This is about Costello—him and his fancy orange suit. First we heard of him, we thought he was just another star-grazer. Folks pass through Haven all the time, get caught up in her, and start planning resorts or industries or grand utopian communities—their utopias, of course. We listen politely, then go home and get back to the real work. Star-grazers are good entertainment, not much more; though every once in a while, we have to explain to one of them how an airlock works dirtside and why it would be a good idea to build his resort or his industry or his utopia somewhere else.

We didn’t meet Mr. Costello until Midsummer Jubilee. We unhitched and drove in to Temp, short for Temporary, which was all the name that place was ever going to have. Midsummer was the best time for restocking medicines and spices and any other stuff we couldn’t lab ourselves. The weather was calm, traveling was easy, and the bots could manage the crops while we were away.

Temp wasn’t the best-stocked place, but it was a lot more convenient than driving three days to the other side of the mountain, to Settlement, and then driving three days back. We always ordered ahead anyway, and anything Temporary didn’t have, they’d get Settlement to toss it on the next truck over, so we made out okay. I’d only been to Settlement once and had no wish to go there ever again. I don’t do crowds. Not even small ones. And any place big enough to need a jail was no place I wanted to stay. I learned that lesson a long time ago.

Temp is half a day across the Rumpled Hills, up Narrow Canyon and down Abysmal, and then follow Occasional River for another half day. We leave the day before and camp overnight at Empty Meadow. We talked once about carving a road from here to there, but it was a very short discussion. Construction would use up the better part of a year and even if it might shorten our trip to only a few hours, it’d also open up the slopes for traffic. When you build a road, people drive it. And traffic would annoy the glitter-bushes enough to disrupt their breeding—plus careless tourists would encourage the horgs to aggressiveness. The conversation ended when Grampa (his title, not his description) said that roads are too much like civilization and we didn’t come to Haven to be city-folk, did we? But there wasn’t anyone in the family arguing for it anyway.

We crossed the river at the shallows and drove up onto the common track that thirty years of trucks had worn into the turf. We could tell from the ruts, wider and deeper, that traffic from the landing ports was up again. Not a good sign. Tourists are trouble; immigrants are worse, even rich ones.

Thirty klicks along, we came over the crest of the hill and there was Temporary. A busy day. Too many rigs linked in. Even worse, the Jacklins had added an extension to the public dock. Bad news, that. This was the new normal. Regular traffic. It wasn’t unexpected—there was a new station up on the southern ridge, far enough away it wouldn’t bother us and mostly good folks, tho it did make for bigger gatherings.

But Temporary was still the right size for a visit. The Jacklins had started with a six-pod spider and connected it by weather-tubes to a scattering of inflatable domes, all sizes. Each dome wrapped a different cargo drop, the leftovers from when Temporary was a landing site for a resource-development company. The Jacklins bought it after the company was persuaded to pull out by a series of unexplainable delays.

After the first winter, the Jacklins sprayed the domes with a meter of shelterfoam, so now, despite the name, the domes were permanent until further notice and sturdy enough to stand up by themselves, even with three or four meters of snow, ice, and occasionally a few centimeters of frozen carbon dioxide piled on top of that.

One of the larger domes served as a public swap and meeting place. Two of the others had long since been emptied and served now as occasional habitats for migrant workers and transients. Plus the inevitable call-boys and -girls working the western circuit. During the summer, with the Jacklins’ grudging permission, various pass-throughs and unsettleds used a few of the old mineshafts as a retreat. During the winter, too. I say grudging because it’s bad business to kill off customers, but some customers need to be killed. They used the tunnels that weren’t habitated as storehouses and winter-bunkers. The bots had dug a whole network of tubes and tunnels inside the mountain, but the topmost part of Temporary still looked haphazard, unplanned, and accidental.

Most folks land at Settlement or at the bigger port farther north where the beanstalk touches down. They put wheels on their pods and head east and then south. The dumber ones head south first, and then east. Those are the ones who come through Temporary, and sometimes we all make a bit of money off them, especially from towing them out of ditches and ravines, repairing broken axles, or just hiring ourselves out as guides to the caravans and wagon trains. A train can be as many as twenty or thirty family-rigs—standard cargo pods laid horizontal and mounted on six or more fluffy polymer spheres two or three meters in diameter, depending on the terrain. It’s standard practice to use bright colors; it helps identify your rig from a distance, especially if it’s surrounded by snow. Our family colors were Florentine, equal stripes of red and yellow on the trucks and tires.

A cargo pod makes a good house—or a truck. Or both at the same time. Whatever you need. They’re designed to be reused after landing. A standard unit can house six in comfort, eight if they’re friendly, ten if they’re small. If you’re homesteading, you can drop one or two or three on a site, depending on how many of you there are and how much room you need. You can connect as many as eight to a central nexus and call it a spider. And you can link one spider to another to make an estate; I’ve seen linked clusters and chains of twenty or more spiders, but that’s too many people for me. That’s practically a city.

Once a pod is down, after twelve hours of unpacking you’re ready to settle in; sooner if the first thing you unpack are the bots. If you’re smart, you’ll mount the rigs on wheels and give yourself mobility. As the saint says, “A man should be prepared to move fast at least three times in his life.” It’s a lot easier if you can just put the house in gear and drive to the dustoff—something I didn’t expect to do on Haven, at least not until my third or fourth rejuvenation. And that was just the way I wanted it. This planet is far enough out that people don’t drop round because they’re in the neighborhood; Haven is a destination, not a rest stop.

But as much as I dislike crowds, I will admit that other people have their uses. For one thing, making love is better with a partner. And it’s easier to find a partner in a crowd than a wilderness. If you’re looking. I’m not. Not anymore. Not since my husbands and wives picked me out of a lineup, married me, and dragged me into the living pod. It was storm season, which is also honeymoon season for most folks, so we didn’t come out for three weeks and that was only to check the anchor blocks on truck two. It wasn’t the storm making it move, so we went back in and resumed what we’d only just begun. By first thaw we’d slowed down a bit, and by spring had pretty well finished ’mooning for a while. By Midsummer, the new bots were trained well enough that we could take a week off for Jubilee. Lot of work to do before autumn, so we unchocked the bubbles on truck two, unlinked, and rolled. The break would do us all good.

As we bumped downslope, we saw a big black rig that none of us recognized—three industrial pods in a train, like a traveling factory, maybe a bio-refiner, and a couple more drones parked off-site. They had to be passing through, on their way to the richer territories southeast. The huge bulk of the rolling stock loomed over all the other vehicles like a cluster of broodysaurs.

For the most part we can tell who else is in attendance by the other rigs in the field, but sometimes we see a few strangers—not always newbies, this isn’t that kind of neighborhood, just folks just passing through on their way to places they believe are going to be better than the places they left. Over the years, we’ve seen geologists, zoologists, biologists, mappers, trappers, huskers, buskers, peddlers, meddlers, tinkers, dinkers, migrants, handicrafters, and the occasional salesman. Once in a while, even a tourist, though there isn’t really a lot to see, just trees and savannah and occasionally a horg in the distance. But you can see horgs at Settlement; they have a zoo, not a big one, but big enough to maintain a family of horgs, and if you’re a tourist, that’s what you come to see. Horgs. Once, a circus passed through, but I don’t think they made much money. They only stayed for a day. Temp is not a place where anyone stays, not for long; it’s just a place to rest overnight before heading deeper into the continent.

Grampa drove us in and found our dock. Most of the time, you just take whatever slot is open, but for Jubilee, the Jacklins always reserve key slots for local families. It’s not just a question of good will—it’s good management. When trouble breaks out, as it sometimes does, the locals are right there to handle it quickly.

The outside air was warm, by Haven standards, and clean enough that we could have parked and walked. Jackets and air filters would have been enough protection, but anyone who’s lived on Haven longer than a week knows how hard it is to keep the inside air filtered and clean with folks coming in and out all the time. And one thing you learn real fast, running an airlock costs, especially bio- and particle-filtering, and the more you run it, the more it adds up. So as a courtesy to our hosts—Mik and Jik and Tilda Jacklin, the only real permanents at Temporary—we linked to the public access and ran our own airlock.

There’s a ritual to follow. First you all go to the big common dome and say hello and share a beer and catch up on any gossip that’s happened since you last logged on to the community. Then, if you’re living in that kind of a family—I’m not, I’m in a closed contract, but some people are—you start filling out your dance card, who you’re going to sleep with tonight. Then, and only after you’ve taken care of all the social business, then you can start talking about what you’re looking to buy and what you brought to trade or sell. Otherwise, you look rude. Or worse, desperate. And people take advantage of you when you’re desperate. So it’s not a good idea to be impatient. The merchandise will still be on the shelves an hour from now, but the seller’s good feelings might not.

Finn and I always shop together. The rest of the family goes looking for practicals, but Finn and I like to start with the clothing aisles. Of course, there’s not a lot on the hangers that we can wear outside. As good as either one of us might look in a kilt or a pinafore, those are party clothes, not work detail. And Finn is a lot bigger than me, almost burly. But we still like to fantasize, and sometimes it’s fun for whoever’s being a husband this season. This trip, we contented ourselves with some fancy underwear. We’d take turns wearing it for each other.

During melting-season, that’s when the hard work begins. Especially if you’re ranching/farming. We had the long downslope of Restless Mountain, the western side, hence the spectacular sunsets. But the other side was Bareback Ridge. With that behind us, sunrise isn’t until 9 or 10am, depending on the time of year, just a few hours of bright sky first, bright enough that we can get out early with the bots and start herding the glitter-bushes up and down the fields, making sure they get more sunlight per season than they would if they just sat in one place and brooded.

We spend most of summer harvesting, then start moving the bushes up toward higher ground. It’s like herding cats in slow motion, but it’s necessary to the survival of the herd. We have to do it before first autumn, because that’s when the bushes start slowing their metabolism, saving their summer fat and closing up before long winter settles in. That’s when they’re most vulnerable to the horgs. A horg-pack can shred most of a herd in a matter of days, even digging down through the frozen ground to rip out the fatty stores at the heart of each bush.

Left to itself, a glitter-bush will take root inside a grove of tall wailing trees. It’s not that the bushes don’t like sunlight, they do, but swarms of spider-bats nest in the wailing trees, and at night, just before taking to the air, they all drop their guano. The bushes raise their roots to collect the rich fertilizer, so whenever a glitter-bush gets hungry it heads for the shade of a wailing willow, hoping to secure the best feeding spot for itself. Generally, the bushes only venture any distance into the meadows during midsummer because that’s when the intense sunlight excites them to breed.

By having the bots herd them back into the fields where we can bright them, we’re forcing two or three extra breeding cycles in a season, but that exhausts the bushes, so they strive for the trees even harder—despite us bringing them our own rich fertilizer, a lot more potent than the bat-shit they’re accustomed to. One good garbage-refiner can generate both burnable oil and a lot of nitrogen-rich granules.

A determined glitter-bush can cover almost a klick a day. But a more determined bot can herd it by using mirrors to focus even more sunlight on the bush. The bush will reverse course and head back to the center of the meadow and the rest of its community.

An individual bush will breed continually, but when they’re raised in herds, they breed in synchronized cycles, releasing clouds of spores. That’s why we wear masks outside. The air on Haven is breathable, but glitter-spores can take root in your lungs. Not hard to kill, but who wants to inhale that much ammonia?

Because we brighten them, our bushes grow taller and thicker than the wild ones and their seedpods get two or three times as big. And with the bots patrolling the perimeters, we don’t lose many to marauding horgs. Mostly, horgs don’t come up this high, but dry season always sends them uphill, so midsummer usually brings excitement as well as magic.

This year, it brought Mr. Costello.

We were still looking at clothes when Trina came to get us. Finn was holding up a blue longshirt he thought would look good on me—more of a dress than a longshirt, but it could be worn either way. I smiled in embarrassment and said I wasn’t planning to shift back for a while. He said he didn’t care, he’d buy it for me and I could wear it now, it would show off my calves. I admitted it was pretty, but when I looked at the price tag, I told him no, we weren’t that rich yet. Trina came up behind me and said it was cute and she and I could share it and yes we could too afford it and I said, “Only if Grampa approves,” and that was the end of it for now. I was still the newest member of the family and they were still spoiling me a little, but I wasn’t going to be a spoiled brat.

After Finn hung the dress back on the rack, Trina grabbed both our arms. “You don’t wanna miss this. There’s a guy bragging he’s got a better way to commit suicide.”

She dragged us into the big dome which doubled as bar, restaurant, dance floor, auction hall, and flea market, depending on the time of day. A small group had gathered around a stocky man in an orange suit. He had a thick fringe of black beard framing a round, unweathered face. He looked too innocent to be here, but here he was anyway. He had two blank-faced companions sitting at the table beside him. One was dressed in a tight black suit that looked vaguely military; the other looked like some kind of tech.

“—and when each person does their part, everybody makes money. Everybody wins.”

That’s when Tilda Jacklin came up behind him and tape-measured the width of his shoulders.

He turned around, puzzled. “What are you doing?”

“Measurin’. Makin’ sure I got a body bag your size. Ye wanna pay fer it now? Discount it ten percent if ye do.”

Give him credit, the stranger didn’t get angry. He reached up and patted Tilda on the shoulder and said, “You have a fine sense of humor, young man. Very fine. Are you looking for a job?”

Tilda smiled, shook his head, and did a quick vertical measure of the man. “Not even two meters. Got plenty in stock. I’ll put one aside fer ye.” Then he went back behind the counter and poured three beers for Finn, Trina, and me.

“What’s all that about?” Finn asked.

“Horgs,” said Tilda.

“What about ’em?”

“That’s Mr. Costello. Says he can sell ’em.”

“Really . . . ?”

“Ayep.”

“Gotta catch ’em first.”

Tilda grinned and scratched the top of his head, the way he did when he was amused. “Ayep.”

“How’s he gonna do it?”

Tilda shrugged, making that wide-eyed, stretched expression he makes when he’s reacting to stupidity. “Dunno. Says he needs two—three helpers. Says he’s got buyers upside. Says he can fill a pod every ten weeks, send ’em right up the beanstalk. That’s what he says. And he’s already scheduled two empties and a truck.”

Finn frowned, shook his head. “Ain’t possible.” Trina agreed with a snort.

I was already figuring in my head. “That’s a lot of tonnage. Even to fill one pod. He’s gotta be talking at least forty, maybe fifty head.”

“He says sixty.”

“Not possible,” said Trina.

“Ayep. But he says his buyer is payin’ three hundred a ton. So he’s lookin’ to gross fifty-thou per pod, at least six times a year, he says. Mebbe more. Temptation like that, a man’ll go beyond crazy to pure unadulterated stupid.”

“Ain’t never gonna happen,” said Finn. “No way to round up even a dozen of those bastards.”

“Ayep. Horgs is horgs.”

What Tilda said—you hear that everywhere on Haven. It’s a way of saying this is what it is and there ain’t no way of changing it. Rocks is hard, water is wet, and horgs is horgs.

Horgs are . . . well, they’re big, they’re ugly, they smell bad, and they’re meaner than anything else on the planet, even humans, especially when they’re in rut. Horgs have only one sex—they don’t mate, they fight until exhausted. Or dead. The winner stabs the loser with a spiked penis. The sperm make their way through the bloodstream to the egg sac, where a litter of little horgs gets started. Sometimes the brood-horg survives, sometimes it doesn’t.

Horgs aren’t choosy, sometimes they poke other things—even humans. When they do that, when there’s no eggs available, the sperm self-fertilizes, turns into mini-horgs, and the litter eat their way out. Not pretty. You get a couple hundred rat-sized critters. The big horgs eat ’em. And if it’s a horg with ripe eggs, they get fertilized that way. Crazy biology, but it works.

Some people think Horg meat is a delicacy. I’m not one of them. Some people say that if horg meat is fixed right, it’s delicious. They can have my share. I’ve seen what an angry horg can do. And a horny one.

But offworld, horgs are a commodity. People pay a lot for them—dunno why, there are better things to eat, but there’s a steady market. And that’s why the Jacklins do a fair business in body bags, funerals, and estate planning. There’s always some fool with a plan.

If there’s a safe way to farm horgs, nobody’s found it yet. If there was a safe way to herd them, if there was a safe way to round them up, I’d export every last horg from the planet. And most everyone else feels the same way. But we can’t, and even if we could, we wouldn’t, because you don’t take the apex predator out of an ecology unless you want it to collapse. Without the horgs, we lose the glitter-bushes and everything else that makes Haven so interesting.

It’s complicated, but horgs are essential. Spider-bat swarms feed on the insects that live on horg-droppings. No horgs, no droppings, no insects, no spider-bats, no guano. If the spider-bats starve, the glitter-bushes don’t bloom, and one of Haven’s main crops disappears. And that’s only the first domino.

But Mr. Costello wasn’t the first idjit to think he knew how to make a profit on Haven. He certainly wouldn’t be the last. We’d probably have to dig a few more holes and lay a few more wreaths at Settlement’s own Idjits’ Field before he was done. I just hoped it wouldn’t be anybody I cared about.

So, of course, it was Grampa.

He told us after second supper. We had arrayed ourselves at one of the long tables, the space next to the wall, so we had some privacy for conversation. Grampa was smiling happily about something but he wouldn’t say what. “Not here, not here,” and he resumed slurping his soup.

I started to press, but Trina shook her head. She touched her lips with a forefinger, then touched the same finger to her ear, and pointed at both the table and the wall. Someone might be listening.

I didn’t think the Jacklins would eavesdrop unless it was necessary, like someone with a history of trouble, but you never knew who else passing through might have stuck a button under the table or into the rough paneling of the big common room. So Trina was telling me this was family business and it had to stay private.

Back in the truck, Grampa tamped his pipe carefully and puffed it to life. “Well,” he said, “we found us a rich idjit. That fellow Costello. He offered to buy our entire year’s crop of glitter-bush seedpods. Twelve percent over market, plus travel and delivery expenses—”

“He’s the one says he’s going to catch and sell horgs?” asked Finn.

“Ayep. That’s the one.”

Finn shook his head. “He’ll be dead the first day he steps out the hatch—”

“That’s fine, too. I told him there’s a rich tradition of horg-wranglin’ out here, so he’d have to pay in advance. The fool didn’t even flinch. Paid the first half right then.” Grampa patted his vest pocket, as if the actual money was resting next to his tobacco. “We get the other half on delivery.”

Finn pursed his lips, looked around at the rest of us—me, Trina, Marlie, Charlie, and Lazz who’d just gone male again—then back to Grampa. “I wish you’d talked to us—”

“Wasn’t any time. Couldn’t find all of you. Had to make the deal then. Too rich to say no. And he did pay up front.” As if that settled the matter.

Grampa had seniority because he’d staked the family to get it started. He was the majority shareholder. Even better, he was smart enough with the numbers to keep us buoyant and the way he explained it, it did sound better than trucking the loads all the way to Settlement for transshipment up the beanstalk. I wasn’t going to say anything because I was the junior-est partner, but I could see by everybody’s faces I wasn’t the only one in my head about it.

“All right,” said Grampa, “why’s everybody lookin’ so twisted?”

Finn glanced at Trina, then at me—we’d seen Mr. Costello in the common dome too. He was waiting for either of us to say something, but as the second-ranking male, it was his responsibility first. “It’s like this,” he began. He took a deep breath. “It sounds like a good deal, I mean, it really does. But we saw Mr. Costello in the common room and . . . well, I don’t think he knows what he’s doing. I think he’s gonna get people killed.”

“Ayep,” said Grampa. “That’s my thinkin’, too.”

“Takin’ advantage of a dead idjit like that—it don’t sit right.”

Grampa puffed a cloud of sweet smoke. “He ain’t dead yet. And until some horg pokes him with a litter, his money’s just as good as the next idjit’s.”

Finn shook his head in resignation. He knew he wasn’t going to talk Grampa out of anything. Grampa had already made the deal. We were stuck with it.

Trina spoke up then. “It really isn’t that bad. I mean, not really. That’s a lot of money. And if he gets killed early, we’ll still have half a crop to sell. We could buy another pod or start a dome or . . . maybe even get a gestation tank and start a baby.”

“Ayep,” said Grampa.

“And . . . ” she added slowly, “ . . . if we don’t take the deal, someone else will. Then we lose twice. It’s money we don’t make and it’s money someone else makes.” She didn’t have to say who. We were all thinking the same thing.

“Yeah, okay,” said Finn. “Okay, okay.” He gave up with a shrug. “When and where do we deliver?”

“Ten days after harvest. The high savannah, the north end, Little Summerland. Then twenty klicks west into the bush. Reckless Meadow.”

Finn swiveled around and brought up a navigation display. He studied the map for a moment, scratching his head. “Terrible close to the mating fields. It’s a heavy-grazing area.”

“Ayep. If you wanna catch horgs, you gotta go where the horgs are.”

Finn turned back to Grampa, folding his arms. “He doesn’t expect us to help, does he? Because otherwise—”

“Not to worry. Told him that up front. We’re not wranglers. We’ll sell him the crop, nothing else. No bots. No riders. No shooters.”

“And he agreed?”

Grampa puffed his pipe some more before answering. “Says he doesn’t need bots, riders, or shooters. Just a couple of cargo-loaders.”

“Then how’s he plan to—?”

“He didn’t say.” Grampa grinned. “Gonna be a fun time, huh?”

With the up-front money from Mr. Costello, Grampa and Finn and Lazz bought three new bots, replacement parts, a new toolkit, two heavyweight weapons, two suits of body armor, several cases of repellents, four banks of high-powered dazzlers, a hundred meters of shock-fence, and several cases of extra fuel cells. We restocked the larders and the med-kits as well.

And we updated our libraries, too. Winter was long and brutal. We had to create much of our own entertainment. Last year, we’d staged A Midsummer Night’s Dream; this year we were plannin’ a suite of Third symphonies—we’d agreed on Beethoven, Copland, Saint-Saëns, but were still arguing about Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Shostakovich, Williams, Sibelius, and Mahler. We’d probably end up doing them all. Winter was long and brutal.

Meanwhile, Mr. Costello was busy on his own, circling around, taking advantage of the Jubilee gathering, meeting as many families as he could. We figured he was making other deals, but nobody was talking. We had a nondisclosure clause, so we assumed everyone else did, too. Eventually, Mr. Costello had some mysterious crates choppered in from Settlement and loaded immediately into his big black trucks.

Jubilee lasted two extra days; we weren’t the only ones buying and loading, and a lot of us had to wait for the trucks from Settlement to arrive with everything the Jacklins didn’t have to hand. Mr. Costello had pumped a lot of cash into the local economy and most folks were happy to tilt an extra pint or two in his name. By the time the last kegs had been drained, Jacklin’s shelves were just about spare. Everybody bought gifts for everybody. We passed out our family gifts on Goodbye Morning, right after first breakfast, just before dawn, with all the usual teasing and laughter.

Finn surprised me with that blue dress he said showed off my calves. I bought him hair and body brushes for the shower, along with the promise that I’d personally demonstrate their proper use. He grinned and said, “You didn’t buy those for me, you bought ’em for you.” I ducked my head so he wouldn’t see me smiling and blushing, but he was right.

It was tradition that we all chip in to buy Grampa a fresh supply of his favorite sweet-smelling tobacco and a new pipe to smoke it in. We couldn’t pull out until he puffed it to life and pronounced it good. “This is good,” he’d say. “Life is good. Okay, let’s roll. Let’s see what happens next.”

The trip back to Homestead was uneventful. Charlie and Marlie had been monitoring and managing the bots the whole trip. Except for one busted voltivator, swarm-confidence was high and the bushes were sparkling. It looked like an early harvest—a big harvest, too.

Glitter-bush leaves are long. Morning dew collects on the leaves, the leaves curl lengthwise to hold the wetness in. As the day heats up, the leaves dry into needles. Bite the end of a needle and you can suck out the water—not much, but you won’t die of thirst, either. Chew a lot of needles and you can rehydrate almost as fast as you sweat. That’s why horgs and all the other critters come hunting. It’s easier than searching for a water hole.

But if the needle is left alone, if no one eats it, it starts to secrete its oils into the water, and what you get is kinda like honey, only better because bees didn’t walk around in it. And if you wait long enough, each needle develops a seed within the oil-honey, and the seeds are even more valuable. That’s why glitter-bushes are such a profitable crop. The leaves are edible, the honey is perfect, and the seeds are delicious.

Not all the seeds germinate, though. Only the ones that pass through a horg’s gut. So there’s the other reason we need horgs. Just not too many. But the numbers cycle up and down, up and down, because that’s the way the whole thing works, so when they’re up, we have to cull the herds the best we can. If we get to the carcass quick enough, we’ll butcher it—but usually the rest of the herd is right there. They’re omnivores. They’re not just carrion-eaters, they’re cannibals. Another reason to be disgusted.

But if we can get in there fast enough to slice off the drumsticks, the tails, the shoulders, the flanks, the ribs, and the belly muscles, sometimes the heart and tongue, we’ll hang the meat, cure it, smoke it, age it, whatever, and maybe make a bit of cash off it. But we won’t eat it ourselves.

Some people—mostly offworlders—say horg steak is a delicacy. That’s because they don’t know horgs. They say the meat has a sweet aftertaste, probably from the glitter-bush needles. Like I said, they can have my share. The one time I tried it, I puked it all up—and I had diarrhea for three days, too. Horg is tough and greasy and gamey. You have to tenderize it and marinate it and cover it with sauce to make it edible. But there’s some people who like that, I guess. Or maybe it’s just that it’s expensive and exotic. Or maybe it’s because of the side effects. Dunno. Supposedly something in the meat is mildly hallucinogenic and just as supposedly it makes people horny, too, so even if they’re not crazy about the taste, that’s not the reason they’re eating it.

Anyway—summer storms chased us all the way back to Homestead. Not the worst we’d ever seen, but ferocious enough to slow us down. Flash floods scoured Narrow Canyon and the Rumpled River was raging impassible. We had to take the long way around, crossing at The Hump, and we spent the better part of the night parked lee side of Ugly Ridge. Frustrating to be so close to Homestead, but it couldn’t be helped.

We’d spent two extra days at Jubilee and lost another half-day coming back, but after the storm passed, the forecast promised a few weeks of milder weather, so we wouldn’t have to dock and lock the trucks. We could start rigging them immediately for the trek to Reckless Meadow.

When we finally did get back, dawn was just turning the eastern sky pink and the underside of the cloud-ceiling loomed purple. It wasn’t the best start for the day but it could have been worse. Three of the bots were mired in mud and the rest were worrying around, trying to keep the bushes from leaving the meadow.

We unpacked the new bots first, activated them, then rushed to extract the ones that were stuck. It took the entire morning, all of us scrambling to contain the herd, barely getting them settled in and re-rooted and watered before the heat of midday. We didn’t even try to plan harvest until after siesta and second lunch.

Charlie and Marlie woke up early to switch out the herding reflectors on six of the bots, installing the new harvest tools and collection baskets. I ran some numbers, and if the ground dried out enough we could complete most of the harvesting in two nights.

After harvest, the bushes would start getting hungry. We could take a few days to herd them back to the willows, or make up the time by dredging a couple loads of guano and delivering it to the meadow. That’d given us good results before, plus a head start on the next harvest, but it would also upset the local balance. We might have to let these fields go fallow for a season or two, maybe plant some darkberries up here and let the bushes gather on the lower slopes instead—that would mean extra work patrolling for horgs, but if Mr. Costello was right, he’d be thinning out the herds enough to give us a break in the up-down cycle. But using the lower slopes for a whole summer would open up a lot more range, meaning we could raise more bushes and expand the homestead.

If Mr. Costello didn’t get himself killed first.

Right now, we figured him for just another fellow with more money than sense, but if he wanted to throw some of that cash in our direction, we’d bring out the big baskets to hold it all.

As soon as the bots were charged and refitted, we set them trimming. You don’t want to take too many needle-leaves—the bushes need the water—but you want to take the fattest and sweetest pods because the horgs are picky and those are the ones they like most. Those are the ones most likely to germinate after a quick trip through the gut.

The best harvest time is siesta and afternoon, while the pods are heat-sealing. Charlie and Marlie and Lazz napped midmorning so they could work through siesta. Finn and Trina and I took the afternoon shift. We ate first supper when the shadows started stretching east and then began prepping the trucks for Restless Meadow, packing everything we knew we’d need and a bunch more stuff we hoped we wouldn’t. Always makes for an easier trip that way. We finally pulled out with five vans full of ripe pods, chilled but not frozen.

The journey down to Restless Meadow took two and a half days, stopping along the way to install several new monitoring stations and a couple of drone-nests. Skyballs are useful but the weather on Haven limits when they can fly. There’s maybe a hundred-klick range on good days, that’s a three-hour window. So we put the drone-nests in a hexagonal grid with overlapping edges and try to get coverage whenever the winds permit. We can track the local herds and are getting better at predicting the migratory packs. Some horgs migrate, some don’t—still working that out, but we think it’s the brooding horgs that get territorial.

By the time we arrived, Mr. Costello had already set up his camp, with his big black trucks parked on the slope overlooking the meadow. One of them opened onto a large deck with a roof of silk-looking fabric. There were chairs around a table, and even a pitcher of lemonade and glasses laid out.

Mr. Costello signaled us to pull up beside. We anchored our trucks, dismounted, and met him on his deck. He invited us to sit with a wave and poured lemonade for all of us as if this were just another autumn day in back-home dusty Illinois—a place we’d all heard of but none of us had ever been. What the hell, it was lemonade.

“Things are going very well, very well indeed,” he said. “You should be very pleased, very proud, indeed, yes.” One of his two associates—the one who looked vaguely military—came out then with a fresh pitcher of lemonade, and Mr. Costello introduced her. “This is Mikla. Mikla, please welcome our new partners. Please tell me if I have all your names right—”

Mr. Costello went on to explain, “Mikla will be handling the accounting, making sure that everyone is taken care of. And Jerrid, he’s our tech—he’s working on the communications gear. We have such good news to share. Jerrid has created a new communications web.”

Finn grunted. “We already have one—”

“Yes, of course. But Jerrid believes we should have a private web just for our partners. He says we need secure channels for our business operations. If other people can see what we’re doing, we’ll have competition. Don’t you think we should delay that as long as possible?”

Grampa nodded, but Finn looked skeptical. “Most folks don’t go pryin’ into other folks’ business. Ain’t polite. There’s not a lot of secrets on Haven, anyway. Maybe secrets are an offworld thing. But if it concerns y’that much, y’could just use the regular channels with a smidge of encryption. Nobody’ll bother then.”

“A very good suggestion, yes. Thank you, Finn.” Mr. Costello pretended to think about it, then frowned and said, “But don’t you think a flurry of encrypted messages might make people suspicious? Suspicious enough to want to find out what we’re up to?”

“Aye, there is that.” Finn shrugged.

“This way they won’t even know that we’re talking to each other. Wouldn’t you agree that’ll be safer for everyone?”

Finn nodded—reluctantly, but he nodded. “I see your point.”

Mr. Costello reached over and poured Finn more lemonade. “Thank you, Finn. Jerrid worked very hard to set up a private communication network for us. He’ll be pleased that you see the value of his work.”

We sat there for a while longer, exchanging pleasantries, until finally Charlie asked, “But the horgs, Mr. Costello—how do you intend to catch them? You know, it’s not safe to go out hunting them. The whole herd will turn on you.”

Mr. Costello nodded agreement. “Yes, thank you. You’re not the first to point that out. I was thinking—well, Jerrid and Mikla and I were thinking that it would be easier if the horgs came to us.”

“So you’re gonna lure ’em here with glitter-pods . . . ?”

Mr. Costello pointed down the slope. Three of his bots were already at work, installing two thick masts about fifteen meters apart, anchoring them in the ground as deep as they were tall. The pylons looked heavy enough, even our worst winter storms wouldn’t budge them. They glinted like carbonized-polycrete, the bots were wrapping them in tree-bark to hide the metallic finish. But Mr. Costello pointed past them. “You see that level area, down there? Just beyond the posts? Where the bots have laid a polycrete floor? That would be a good place to put out some glitter-pods, yes?”

Charlie shrugged. “One place is as good as another. The horgs’ll find ’em wherever.”

“How much do you think would be a good appetizer?”

“I dunno. I never thought about feeding horgs before. Mostly, I don’t want ’em feeding. Not as much as they want to, that is. They’d eat the whole crop to the ground if they could.”

“See? That’s my point. You know horgs much better than I do. So what’s your advice? If you wanted to get the horgs to come to you, how much would you put out?”

Charlie said slowly, “Well, it all depends. I guess if you want to see most of the herd, you’d put out fifty, maybe a hundred kilos. They’d finish it off right quick, but they’d make a real mess of it and the smell would keep ’em snuffling around for a while searching for leavings. Sometimes they ain’t too smart.”

“That’s what I’m counting on—that we are smarter than horgs.” Mr. Costello continued, “Why don’t we try your idea? We’ll put out a hundred kilos tonight.” He suddenly remembered something. “There are lights on top of those masts. Do you think we can leave them on? Or will the light drive the horgs away?”

Marlie leaned forward then. “I never knew a horg to resist a free meal. Once they figure out there’s food, they’ll come. And once they figure the lights are where the food is, they’ll come whether there’s food or not. Just in case.” She pushed her glass forward and Mr. Costello happily refilled it.

So that was that.

Grampa asked Mr. Costello and his partners to join us for dinner. Lazz and I cooked up a Storm—actually, the full name of the stew was Shit Storm, but not everybody got the joke so we just called it a Storm for short. It’s a familiar recipe. I’ve heard it called Leftover Stew, Ingredient Soup, Glop, Bottomless Pot, Slumgullion, Scouse, Irish Cesspool, Gutter Slime, Desperation, and Oh God, Not Again.

But Lazz is pretty good with spices and I don’t do so bad myself with the basics—rice, beans, and noodles. And we had five truckloads of fresh pods—we could serve up a mess of those as well.

Pods have another virtue in the kitchen, too—it’s one of the better tricks of Haven cuisine. You can add curry powder, red pepper, blue pepper, jalapeños, habaneros, Pot Douglahs, Trinidad Moruga Scorpions, Carolina Reapers, and a few other spices with Scoville ratings so high they melt the equipment—it doesn’t matter. You can neutralize most of the heat with glitter-bush pods, leaving only the flavor and just the slightest hint of sweetness. Mostly, though, we stop at habaneros. The other peppers are better used in horg-repellent sprays. It slows ’em down. Sometimes. But one of the attractions of Jubilee is the spice-cookout. You bring in your hottest dish and see who can eat a whole bowl of it. The survivors win free medical care until they can walk again.

We opened up our own deck, set out tables and chairs, dropped the side-silks to slow down bugs and dust, laid the table for everyone, and rang the triangle. Everyone was already gathered, but it’s part of the ritual. The weather on Haven doesn’t always encourage eating outside, but when it does, you do. We still had another hour of sunset.

Mr. Costello praised the Storm as if it was a culinary discovery of the first order. Jerrid and Mikla even asked for seconds and extra bread to mop their bowls, so we knew tonight’s Oh God, Not Again had been a success.

After they headed back to their own trucks, after both the suns had finally dipped below the western horizon, we all retreated inside for the Circle. It’s how we keep ourselves centered. We sit around the table with coffee or tea, and we go round and round until we’re done.

One by one, first we acknowledge whatever might be gnawing at us, hurts and upsets, simmering frustrations, whatever. You have to say what you want and need to make things right. Nobody interrupts. Nobody gets to offer advice. Nobody gets to play peacemaker. All of those things are arrogant and disrespectful. You have three minutes to say whatever you have to say. Then to the next person, and the next.

On the second round, whatever upsets might have come up—you get to take responsibility for your part of it, you get to offer support to those who need it, you get to be a partner to whoever needs partnership. The second round keeps going round and round until the air has been cleared and everything that needs to be said has been said.

Usually, the first round is about the frustrations of the day’s work, not about our frustrations with each other. While it’s not a firm rule, if any two people in the family have an upset with each other, they’re supposed to resolve it before we get to Circle. So first round is usually about outside annoyances and second round is about creating strength to deal with them. But if a personal upset doesn’t get resolved before Circle, if it’s that important, we deal with it there.

Finally, third round is about completion. We go around and each person acknowledges the strengths they see in the family, the gifts they see in others, the gifts they wish to be to the whole. By then we’re usually on the second or third cup of coffee or tea. We finish by all holding hands and reminding ourselves that being in the family is a gift and a privilege. Then we have whatever special dessert or treat we’ve saved for ourselves.

That’s when the real fun begins. We share all the best gossip we’ve heard, all the most interesting stories and jokes, all the news that’s come down the channels. And . . . we also take some time to make sure we’re all on the same page about the business at hand. Those discussions sometimes go on for an hour or longer.

This night, we talked about Mr. Costello and his partners. We tried to figure out who they were and what they were planning and whether or not we could trust them—and most of all, what they weren’t telling us. We speculated, we guessed, we imagined, we goggled the web and came up empty. Finally, we paired off for the night, our usual couplings, and headed to our bunks.

I lay down next to Finn and sighed, mostly happy to be with Finn, but also concerned for no reason I could identify. “What I said in Circle. I still feel that way. Mr. Costello makes me uneasy. I don’t know why. There’s just something about him.”

Finn didn’t answer immediately. He was rubbing my back, my shoulders, my neck, working out the tensions of the day. When he finished, I would do the same for him. Finally, he said, “I think it’s because he’s too nice. It’s like he’s trying too hard.”

I had to think about that for a while. “If he’s trying too hard, isn’t that a kind of lying? Maybe he doesn’t trust his own plan?”

“No, I think he trusts his plan. But I wonder if maybe the plan he’s showing us is only the top part of the plan he isn’t showing us.” He patted my shoulders affectionately. “You’re done. My turn.”

He sprawled face down on the bed and I straddled him, digging into his spine. He was all muscle and I had to use all my weight and all my leverage. After a while, I said, “You and Grampa have been here longer than anyone. You’ve seen a lot of schemers and scammers come through here—”

“Yep. Most of ’em are buried on Idjit Hill.”

“—so why do you trust Mr. Costello?”

“I don’t. But his money spends just as good as anyone else’s. What Grampa said—if we don’t take it, someone else will. So far, I haven’t seen any reason to distrust him. Maybe his manner is just the way he is.” He grunted as I worked his shoulders. “He’s a starsider. Maybe that’s how they behave on other worlds.”

I thought about my next words, decided to say them anyway. “I’ve been on a lot of planets, Finn. More than I’ve told you about. You haven’t asked and I haven’t volunteered. Because I’ve done some things—”

“We don’t care about who you were before you got here,” said Finn. “We care about who you are now. If we didn’t, you wouldn’t be in this family. You wouldn’t be here in this bed tonight. And you wouldn’t be screaming my name to the ceiling.”

“I’m not doing that.”

“Not yet, but you will—”

“First let me finish what I was going to say. I’ve bounced around a few systems and I’ve never met any starsider who behaved like Mr. Costello. No, let me say it another way. Maybe I’ve seen a few—he reminds me of some of them. Some of them ended up the guest of honor at an airlock dance.”

“You have been around—”

“If you really want to know—”

“Do I need to?” Even in the dark, I could see the expression on his face. “Or will it hurt you to tell more than it would hurt me to hear?”

I didn’t answer. That was answer enough.

He grabbed me, rolled me over on my back, and pushed my knees up toward my nipples. He leaned his weight on my bent legs so he could look down on me. “This is where I want you, right here, right now. Is that enough?”

I barely had time to gasp my answer.

Sometime after first sleep, when we were all awake for midnight meal, Lazz powered up two bots and had them dump a hundred kilos of pods in the center of Mr. Costello’s polycrete floor. The lights on the pylons blazed down from the two nearest corners. There were cameras there as well, so we had an excellent view of the entire field.

“How long do you think we’ll have to wait?”

“Dunno,” said Marlie, and swiveled to face a wall of screens. One display showed our location. Another tracked the herd. “They’re not directly downwind but they should catch the scent soon enough. See? There.” Marlie pointed. “Some of the outliers are turning.”

“They’re at least ten klicks away,” said Charlie. “That’s an hour, minimum, more likely two.”

“We gonna wait up for ’em?”

“Might could,” said Grampa. “Then again, just as easily I might could go back to sleep. If they got pods to eat, they ain’t comin’ up the hill to see what we’re doin’.” A thought occurred to him. “You sprayed those trucks good, Finn?”

“Five coats, all the worst peppers. I spent two hours in that damn suit. I sprayed until the paint blistered. If any horgs can sniff the pods in our trucks, they’re welcome to ’em. At this point, I ain’t gonna argue. My eyes are still burning. And that was two days ago.”

“Told y’to wear the goggles.”

“I did. Even with the goggles, even with the mask, even with the hood, even with the O-tanks, that spray gets through. Y’know, people have died just breathing downwind from that crap.”

“Ayep,” said Grampa, lighting his pipe and grinning.

In the morning, while Lazz and Trina fixed first breakfast, the rest of us reviewed the night’s videos. Only a few horgs showed up, mostly outliers, mostly curious. Maybe a dozen. Maybe a few more. I didn’t count. They sniffed around the piles of pods cautiously—probably the unfamiliar scent traces of machines and humans made them suspicious—but after a bit, they bent their massive heads and inhaled the pods like so much dandelion fluff.

Horgs are sloppy eaters. They snuffled around, spreading pods every which way, smashing them under their feet, smearing the honeyed juices everywhere. The monitors showed their excitement rising as the scent grew stronger. Even after the last few pods had been slobbered away, they still licked eagerly at the now-oily surface of the polycrete. If they weren’t horgs, it could have been adorable.

But they were horgs and it was disgusting.

Horgs look like the mutant offspring of a rhinoceros and a warthog, only a lot bigger and ruddier and fatter and flatter and hairier. They have sharp razorback armor all along their spines, extending from the ends of their thick flat tails forward to their thick plated skulls. That’s where the armor splits and curves downward around their jaws, finally turning into two savage curving tusks. They have big paddle-like feet, so they can swim as well as they gallop—not fast, but pretty much unstoppable. On the deep savannahs, they travel in herds that can sprawl as wide as a hundred kilometers. They have to—they’d overpower the local ecology if they massed any closer together. Few predators are big enough to bring down a horg, but there are swarms of little things that can worry one to death.

Away from the plains, in the foothills and the forests, horgs become loners. And that makes them even more vicious, because they attack everything. It has something to do with not being able to sync their biological cycles with their fellows. They turn into psychopaths.

Horgs are omnivorous. They eat everything. Mostly, they eat grass, flowers, trees, bark, glitter-bushes, wailing willows, insects, grubs, roots, fungi, mushrooms, snakes, worms, lizards, birds, carrion, and any small horgs that get in their way. Loners tend to overeat, not just because they’re hungry, but because they need to build up bulk in case of a mating fight. Away from the herd, the majority of matings are injurious or fatal.

And those are their good points.

In the morning, after first breakfast, we all walked down to the feeding deck with Mr. Costello’s group and examined the aftermath. One of the smaller horgs had lost an argument with one of the larger horgs. There were still traces of blood everywhere and carrion birds were picking at the few remaining scraps of skin and bone.

Mr. Costello found that very interesting. He didn’t approach the scavengers. They looked feisty, so he studied them from a distance. Mikla and Jerrid frowned and whispered between themselves. Finally, Mr. Costello turned back to us and waved his cigar at the bloodstains on the polycrete. “How many did we lose?”

Finn was studying the blood smears, too. He shook his head. “Hard to say. I’d have to process the video to be sure. And even then, I dunno. Once the fighting started, it was a scramble—impossible to tell what was happening. All I can say for sure is that there were a lot fewer horgs leaving than arriving. Mebbe five or six fewer.”

For the first time, Mr. Costello looked unhappy. “This was unexpected. Very unexpected.” He turned to Grampa. “This—this cannibalism. Is that normal behavior?”

Grampa shrugged. He took a moment to light his pipe while he considered his answer. “Well, there’s a lot of theories about that. Horgs get hungry, they eat what’s in front of ’em. But”—he paused to puff thoughtfully—“sometimes these critters work themselves into a feeding frenzy. Sometimes it’s hunger and sometimes it’s rage and sometimes the mating fights get out of control”—another puff, another thoughtful pause—“but in this case, mebbe you overstimulated them. In the wild, they don’t get big piles of pods. They have to work a bit for every mouthful. But you gave ’em a big fat feast. Drove ’em crazy, mebbe. Leastways, that’d be my guess.”

Grampa didn’t guess. Grampa never guessed. But Grampa rarely spoke in declarative sentences, either. He let you do the work—kind of like Mr. Costello. The difference? Grampa was Grampa and Mr. Costello was Mr. Costello. That’s the only way I can explain it.

Mr. Costello considered, then nodded his agreement. “Hm. That sounds likely. Is there a way to slow them down?”

Grampa frowned in thought. “Now, that depends on what you want to do. I don’t mind horgs eatin’ each other if it thins the herd a bit. But it sounds to me like you want to feed ’em without getting ’em all worked up and agitated, right? You don’t want ’em killin’ each other.”

“We can’t sell horgs we don’t have, can we?”

“Nope,” agreed Grampa.

And that’s how it went for a while. Back and forth, back and forth, with neither one ever quite saying anything in the clear.

Finally, Finn spoke up again—I could tell he was getting frustrated. It’s bad enough having to deal with Grampa’s roundabout talk, but having to listen to the pair of them dancing around the subject like they didn’t know what they wanted, or more like whoever said it first would have to pay extra for the privilege of saying it first—Finn was exasperated.

“Listen,” he said. “We’ll send a few bots up into the trees, have ’em bring down some branches. We’ll put ’em through the shredders and mix ’em into the pods. It’ll mean they have to do a lot more chewing. And instead of putting it all in one big pile, we’ll spread it out in a lot of little piles all over the feeding floor. We could try that.”

Mr. Costello looked to Grampa. Grampa looked to Mr. Costello. They both were nodding thoughtfully, each waiting for the other to say, Let’s do it.

Finn didn’t wait. He turned to Lazz. “Unpack the lumberjack gear. Use bots four and six, they’ll have enough capacity. Number seven can do the shredding.” Some people named their bots, Finn didn’t. He insisted that people are people, machines are machines—mixing them up gets dangerous. I had to agree with that. I’d seen what happens when people forgot. Or worse, when machines forgot.

Finn and Lazz talked for a bit about what kind of branches to cut down and how many and where. The rule was not to take from more than one tree per acre and never more than one of a kind, unless it was a monoculture. There was still too much we didn’t know about Haven’s ecology—all the different ways that all the different plants and animals interacted. Based on the evidence of history, both here and elsewhere, even stepping on a butterfly could have unintended consequences.

By the time that conversation finished, Mr. Costello’s people had adjusted their plan as well. Jerrid was directing his construction bots to put up two more towers, these at the two remaining corners of the feeding floor.

“Yes, that’s a very good idea,” said Mr. Costello. He turned to us. “You’ll have more cameras now with different angles on the creatures as they feed, so you’ll get better information on their behavior. That should be very useful.” Back to his own people. “Thank you, Jerrid. Thank you, Mikla. How long do you think all this will take?”

I spent the next part of the day with Charlie, bringing the family’s finances up to date. Mostly, I handled the day-to-day stuff, paying bills, allocating shares, ordering necessities, coordinating deliveries—if something was urgent, we’d send out a drone to pick stuff up from Settlement or Temporary, if the weather permitted flight—otherwise we’d let the goods arrive on the Monthly. Eventually, Charlie would entrust me with access to the investment portfolios. I hadn’t been married in long enough to qualify for a permanent share, but another year or two, the others would vote. If they didn’t grant permanence, it would be a gentle way of saying, You are free to leave whenever you want.”

I wasn’t worrying about it now. I’d learned that it’s more important to focus on what you can give than what you’re going to get. That works in finance almost as well as it does in bed. And that was another conversation I wanted to have with Finn—

By the end of the day, the two new pylons had been set and hardened, and the bots were more than half-done pre-chewing the night’s meal for the horgs. This time, we’d be putting out only fifty kilos of pods and a hundred and fifty kilos of shredded bark and leaves. Lazz had selected six small trees across the edges of the forest—one anchorwood, two redbarks, a whitemarch, a wailing willow, and a bower-tree. After taking a few branches from each, he’d scattered fresh seeds in fertilizer pods to apologize for the assault. Forest horgs were known to chew into all of these species during the barest periods of winter, but most of the rest of the year they ignored them, so we knew the chaff would be edible without being overstimulating.

Because of the day’s efforts, dinner was flashed from the freezer. Charlie baked fresh bread and Lazz whomped up some of his best tomato-gravy and we washed the whole thing down with Grampa’s special beer, which was only special because he said so. It had the same familiar honeyed overtaste as everyone else’s special brew.

That night’s video revealed a scattering of horgs feeding placidly. Not a whole herd, but enough to justify the effort. Maybe two dozen. The important thing, no fights broke out, although the monitors reported that the animals were experiencing more irritability than we would have liked. Lazz and Charlie decided to reduce the proportion of glitter-bush pods even more for the next day’s feed.

After second breakfast, we met again with Mr. Costello. While he didn’t express any disappointment—on the contrary, he remained delighted with the progress we were making—he did wonder aloud that the horgs were finishing the feed too quickly, leaving nothing to attract the rest of the herd. Eventually, Finn realized he was asking us to put out more food to attract more horgs. But it was our idea, of course. We had enough chaff to handle tonight’s feed, but we’d need a lot more for the days to come.

Lazz and Charlie took one of the trucks north to select more trees. They planned to hit several different groves and would be gone all day, perhaps even two days. Mr. Costello asked why they couldn’t just take whole trees from the nearby slopes and they had to explain to him that the tree roots held the soil in place. If they deforested a slope, the winter storms would wash the entire hill down into the valley below. Aside from the inconvenience that might represent to those of us who lived in the area, it could also change the migratory patterns of various small herds—and nobody would appreciate having horgs wandering through their fields. Most settlers had chosen their sites specifically to stay away from the migration routes.

Marlie and Trina put out the evening feed for the horgs, spreading it thin and wide. That took a few hours, more time than anyone expected, so the rest of us made do with sandwiches and coffee. It was a long night. Because Charlie was gone, I handled the day’s journal-keeping. Not just the personal stats and billables, but the log as well. We logged everything. The family journal was a way of not having to depend on anyone’s memory. The notes we were making about horg behavior would be very valuable—not just for us, but for anyone else who wanted to download the public half of our records. We didn’t make a lot of local money from our logs, but we had a sizable offworld audience and the royalties did add up over time. Grampa wouldn’t let us spend any royalties unless it was an emergency—that money always got folded back into the portfolio. The job was to be self-sufficient on what we could make from the land. I had a thought we might be worth a lot more than Grampa ever let on, but I had no right to ask. Not yet.

We were reviewing the videos even before first breakfast now, gathering around the displays with coffee and fresh donuts to watch an accelerated record, only slowing down to real time if something interesting or unusual popped up on any of the screens. Today we were seeing a much bigger gathering of horgs. At any given time, there were thirty-some animals on the stage, but the total was greater than that—at least a dozen moewsnuffled cautiously around the edges. Not the hundreds Mr. Costello had promised, but certainly enough to demonstrate that he could attract a crowd.

Too much of a crowd, actually. Horgs are always hungry. After cleaning the floor of the feeding deck, they started snuffling up the slope toward the trucks. While it was unlikely that any of the animals would attack the vehicles, they could still do considerable damage. They could knock a vehicle on its side and rip out the undercarriage, just out of pure horgish malevolence. There was a lot of history—with pictures suitable for Goblin Night. Also known as Gobblin’ Night, when all the mini-horgs swarmed. We usually had two or three days’ warning, enough time to get home, lock all the doors and windows, and hide under the blankets.

But right now we had curious horgs wandering up the slopes. Not far enough—not yet, not last night—but tonight? Maybe. And the next night—certainly. Hungry horgs search and scavenge. Wake up a horg’s appetite and you’re asking for trouble. Something else Mr. Costello didn’t know.

We had an emergency meeting on his deck. He served iced tea and English biscuits. “Oh my, yes, the video was very disturbing. It’s a good thing the video cameras have a three-hundred-sixty-degree view or we’d have never known the creatures were wandering up the slope. Thank you, Jerrid, for your wonderful cameras.” He looked to Grampa. “Will we have to stop feeding them now?”

Grampa didn’t bother with his pipe today. He said, “It won’t do any good. Three nights now you’ve been laying out glitter-pods. Even if the place didn’t already reek with the scent of the crushed leaves, they’ll still be coming back. Looking for more. They ain’t stupid. You train ’em to come for food, they’ll come.”

“Well . . . ” said Mr. Costello. “Well, well, well. This will be a challenge. Perhaps there’s some way to keep the horgs from wandering off the feeding floor, some way to keep them from wandering up the hill, some way to keep them where they are and away from the trucks.”

“We could put a fence up,” said Finn.

“Do you think that would work?” Mr. Costello’s face lit up.

Finn was thinking it over. “We could carve out a berm. I suppose we could have a ’dozer lifted out. It’d be expensive, though. And I’m not sure it would stop ’em. If a horg is determined to go over something, he goes over it. If he wants to go through it, he goes through it. Those paddle-feet, they have claws as long as your forearm—they’re good for slashing open each other’s bellies, but they’re also for digging into the ground, especially frozen ground—that’s how the horgs survive the outer-winters. They dig into huge communal burrows. You know those holes you saw from space, the ones that looked like craters? Horg-nests.”

Mr. Costello listened patiently to Finn’s monolog, then turned to Jerrid. “I think you packed something that might work—”

Jerrid nodded. “We have twenty bolts of carbon monofilament, triple-knit—” He looked to Finn. “It’s very lightweight and essentially unbreakable. We can spray it with shelterfoam and it’ll harden nicely.” He pointed at the silk-looking hangings that sheltered Mr. Costello’s deck. “I brought plenty, in case we needed to build a tented enclosure—”

“Ahh,” said Finn. He looked down the slope. “I see . . . we stretch a length of it between the first two towers, from one to the other and back again, then spray it to harden it, and we create a visual barrier between the feeding deck and the slope.”

“That’s a marvelous idea!” Mr. Costello clapped his hands in glee.

Jerrid looked to Finn. “You know horgs. Will it work?”

“Only one way to find out.”

Before the sun hit zenith, Jerrid’s bots were stringing the first lengths of triple-knit. By the time siesta was over, they were already prepping the shelterfoam tanks. We watched them from the deck while we ate second lunch. “That’s gonna be a tall wall,” said Grampa.

Finn said, “It’s a visual cliff. It should keep them focused on the food instead of the hill.”

Grampa puffed his pipe. “If nothin’ else, Mr. Costello has proven that you can train a horg to eat. Whether or not he can train ’em to butcher themselves, that’ll be a whole other thing, won’t it?”

Charlie and Lazz arrived late in the day with three huge trailers of wood for the shredders. They’d circled through six forests, taking branches from the outliers and the rogues. They’d left the mother-trees alone. No sense pissing off the woodlands. The trees on Haven could be friendly—or they could make life hell for you. As soon as a forest felt alarm, the surrounding trees would start releasing threat-pheromones. That would attract huge swarms of things that bite. It would also encourage local bugs and birds, lizards, and slugs to transform into their more hostile forms. An angry forest was no place for any creature not part of the rage. And if the forest got angry enough, all those different swarms would go into a feeding frenzy. Even the horgs wouldn’t be safe—that’s how the forests protected themselves from aggressive herds. Checks and balances everywhere. Don’t push the on-button if you don’t know where the off-button is.

All of us worked late into the evening, shredding wood, mixing in glitter-pods, and spreading small piles of feed across the polycrete. Well, the bots actually did the work, but we stayed up to supervise. It was a big job and we couldn’t risk a bug in our programming.

The horgs were already gathering downslope even before the last bot trotted out of the way. They snuffled and grunted, annoyed but curious. They approached cautiously. Horgs are suspicious by nature. The lights, the wall, the piles of feed—that was alien to their experience. But on the other hand, a free meal is a free meal.

Finn wasn’t certain that a single fence would deter the horgs, so he stayed up late to keep watch. He armed two bots with pepper spray and positioned them at the top of the slope. But most of the horgs were too interested in dinner to be concerned. A couple sniffed around the edges of the fence, looking to see if there was food beyond, but Finn had sprayed the perimeter upslope of the fence, and that appeared to be enough to deter further exploration.

By the time the rest of us woke up for mid-meal, Finn was ready to crash. Trina volunteered to take over the rest of the watch, and after updating the logs, I went back to our compartment in the second truck, expecting to find Finn snoring like a jelly-badger. Instead, he was awake and waiting for me.

“I haven’t showered,” I protested.

“No problem. I’ll shower with you. We’ll save water.”

There’s only one way to win an argument with Finn. You wrap yourself up in his arms and say, “Yes, honey, you’re right.” So I did. And we did. And then we did it again, just to make sure.

And finally, afterward, with me lying on top of his big broad chest, feeling very satisfied and very comfortable, I said, “Aren’t you sleepy yet?”

“I took a wide-awake.”

“Why?”

“Why not?”

“Not good enough. Why’d you stay up?” I repeated.

“For you,” he said, stroking my back. “For us. For this. I don’t want us to get so busy we forget to be us. What about you? Are you tired?”

“I’ll stay up with you. For as long as I can.”

He stroked my brush cut. “I miss your hair.”

“You liked it long?”

“Very much.”

“You never said. All right. I’ll let it grow out.” I kissed his left nipple. Then the right one, so it wouldn’t feel neglected.

He knew me too well. “You don’t like having your hair long?”

“It’s extra work, especially if I color-glow.”

“You don’t have to do it for me.”

“If it makes you happy—”

“Will it make you happy?” Even in the dark, I could see the intensity of his expression.

“Making you happy makes me happy.”

“I can see I’m not going to win this argument—”

“Oh? Are we having an argument? Wait. I’ll get my flak jacket and helmet. No kissing below the belt—”

He pulled me back down on top of him. “You do whatever you want.” He held me there for a long time, making that purring noise in his chest that attracted me to him in the first place. He never told me how he did it and I suspected an augment he wasn’t telling me about.

Finally, I lifted up, I straddled him, and looked down. “I do have to ask you something?”

“Uh-oh, I know that tone.”

“No.” I slapped his chest playfully. “This is serious.”

“What?”

“Would you like me to change back? Do you like me better as a boy or a girl?”

“I like you in my bed. Isn’t that enough?”

“No. It isn’t. I want to be the best you ever had. I want us to be perfect. I’m—” I looked at the ceiling but the answer wasn’t there, either, so I looked back to him and admitted, “It’s what you said. I don’t want us to stop being us.”

He sighed. Not quite exasperated. Not yet. But I knew that sigh. “Aren’t you happy?” he said.

“I’m the happiest I’ve ever been in my life—”

“Then why are you worrying about the plumbing?”

“Because I want to make you as happy as I am—”

“You’ve already done that.” He said, “If you want to change, then change. If you don’t, then don’t. Whichever, I’ll still find a way to make you scream loud enough to wake up Grampa.” Abruptly, he stopped and stared up at me. “Wait—are you asking me if I want to change?”

“Huh? No. I just—” My turn to stop and stare. “Do you want to change?”

“I wasn’t thinking about it. At least, not until now. Would that make you happy?”

I collapsed onto his chest, playfully frustrated. “Oh, great—I had to ask. Now we’re going to have gender confusion every time we get in bed. Finn, my sweetheart, my playmate, my lover, I am fine if you’re fine. I only asked because if it was something you wanted, it would be all right with me. Whatever—”

He kissed me lightly on the top of my head. “You can stop now. I’m fine. You’re fine. We’re fine. If you want to change, do it for you, I’ll still be fine. If you would like me to change, that might be fun, too. But for now, right now, with all this other business going on, let’s just take things one day at a time—okay?”

And that’s how that part of the conversation ended. The kissing part went on for a lot longer. And somewhere after that, I fell asleep in Finn’s arms, which was always my favorite place to fall asleep. My ears turned off as I cycled down and Finn could snore like a horg all night long if he wanted.

After first breakfast, Mr. Costello and his folks wandered over for a meeting. Nothing important, just an affirmation that everything looked like it was working out well. He agreed that we should continue feeding the horgs. The rest of the herd seemed to be gravitating this way. Perhaps within another few days we might see as many as a hundred or two hundred animals feeding each night. Perhaps we should increase the amount of feed we were putting out.

Somehow, the way he talked about things, the way he drew us into the discussion, it always felt like we were creating the plan, not him. But that was good—it gave us ownership. It put the responsibility on us to make things work. You couldn’t fault him for that.

Afterward, once that was settled, he sat down with me and Charlie and Finn and Grampa. “Jerrid has been working on something else. Mikla, too. They’re both so very smart about these things.”

We listened while he meandered his way toward the punch line.

“Y’see, this whole enterprise has to be a partnership, a team effort, don’t you agree?”

We nodded politely, already wondering where this was leading.

“And from time to time, we have to acknowledge that there are skills we need to add to the team. Jerrid pointed this out. Mikla, too. We’ve succeeded so well already. We’ve proven that we can direct the attention of a herd of horgs.”

“We can feed ’em, yes,” said Finn. He did not say what his tone suggested he was thinking: Any idjit can do that.

“If I might interrupt,” Mikla said politely. “We need to prepare for the next phase of the operation, which is to set up a processing plant for the horg meat.”

“Ah,” said Finn.

“We’ll need to bring in processing equipment, extra bots, and a team of operators.”

“Of course.”

“And that means expanding our partnership.”

“I see . . . ” Finn said. He didn’t. Neither did the rest of us.

“It doesn’t affect our contracts with you, of course. You’re already locked in as a supplier.”

Jerrid spoke up then. “Mr. Costello has negotiated contracts with several other families, all of whom are ready to provide services for processing, packing, shipping, and so on.”

“That’s a good idea,” said Grampa, nodding. “It’s convenient. And it’s good for the local economy.”

Mikla said, “However . . . the larger the team gets, the more complicated all of the interrelated accounting becomes. So—” Mikla looked to Jerrid.

Jerrid said, “We’d like to streamline the financial channels. We already have a private web, to which our new partners will be added as they come aboard, of course. We’d like to use it as our primary financial network as well.”

Finn looked to Grampa. I looked to Charlie. We all looked to each other. The question didn’t have to be asked, but I did anyway. “Why is that necessary?”

“Well, for one thing,” Mikla said, “secrecy. Just as we’re keeping our business chatter isolated, we think we should take the same precautions with our financial transactions as well. If money is moving around, other people can use that information, possibly to our disadvantage.”

“That kinda makes sense,” said Charlie.

“I always thought our existing networks were secure,” said Finn.

“For most things, they are,” said Jerrid. “But it only takes one leak to sink a ship.”

Mr. Costello spoke up then. He had been looking from one to the other of us, especially Mikla and Jerrid, with a happy expression on his face. Now he said, “Don’t you think with this much money at stake, we should take every precaution possible to protect all of our interests?”

Grampa nodded. Despite the half-scowl on his face, he nodded.

“Wonderful, wonderful. I’m glad you agree. Mikla will set up accounts for all of you today. We’ll run our own private bank—with secured deposits for all pending contracts held in an independent escrow.”

“A local escrow, please,” said Finn.

“Of course, of course. We have to make sure that everybody is well taken care of or this won’t work. Not at all. Not at all.”

After they left, we all looked at each other. “Well,” said Charlie, “it does make sense.”

Finn snorted. Grampa puffed furiously on his pipe. I said nothing. Finally, Grampa took his pipe out of his mouth and said, “Used to be, a man’s handshake was enough. All these secrets—it makes a man wonder.” He put his pipe back in his mouth and resumed wondering.

I said, “The way I heard it, a contract is a list of all the ways two people don’t trust each other.”

Finn smiled. “That sounds about right. If Mr. Costello doesn’t think other people can be trusted, maybe it’s because he knows he can’t.”

Charlie said, “I’ve been studying all these protocols, all the riders, all the guarantees. A lot of it is boilerplate, but I don’t see anything dangerous here. I’m not getting any red flags.”

Lazz hardly ever spoke. He was the quiet one, but now he said what we were all thinking. “It’s just not the way we’re used to doin’ business.”

“He’s an offworlder,” said Charlie. “Maybe he doesn’t know any better. Maybe he’s been burned before—maybe he’s learned he needs strong fences to keep horgs out of his fields.”

“That’s probably it,” said Finn. “Still, it makes the back of my neck itch.”

“I think we’re all a little uneasy here,” Marlie said. “Perhaps it’s just having so many horgs sniffing around—one wrong smell and we could have a stampede or a frenzy.”

“Yep,” said Finn. “I think I’ll spray around the trucks again tonight. All of ’em. Might want to make sure the windows and vents are sealed, too.”

The next few days, we fell into an easy routine—easy only because we were still waiting. Mr. Costello hadn’t said anything about how we were going to get the horgs into the processing plant. But each night, the crowd of horgs gathering to gorge themselves continued to grow. Trina and Marlie went off to gather more wood. This time they went southeast so as not to assault the same forests as Charlie and Lazz had visited.

By the time they got back, we were seeing 70 or 80 horgs coming out of the trees each night. They jostled past each other with the usual snuffling and grumping, occasionally giving deep warning rumbles as they milled about, but by now there was a real order to the process. The largest of the animals approached first. They sniffed around, inspecting the various piles of wood chips and seedpods on the feeding deck. When they were finally satisfied—a process that usually involved selecting the largest piles for themselves—they grunted their approval. The others then followed and feeding began.

The next day, the first trucks from Settlement arrived. We knew the Hellisons, we recognized the Herkles—they were an all-male family, except when they needed to make a baby—but we didn’t know the Maetlins except by reputation. They were big and brawny, the family you called in when you meant business. We had a little meet-and-greet when they arrived, but they were impatient to set up their camp and went straight to work.

I suppose I should mention that a lot of families go unigender except when it’s baby-making time. I can see the logic of it, it makes for a different kind of emotional stability when you don’t have all those unaligned hormonal and emotional cycles in conflict, never really achieving stability, all the different relationships having to be constantly refreshed. But I can argue the other side of it, too—high-maintenance has its virtues. It demands continual reinvention.

But even as I chugged along on that train of thought, I realized what was happening to me—I was assimilating my rejuve. My past was starting to assert itself again and my old ways of thinking and being were coming back. I’d have to watch myself now. I’d have to spend some time apart, so I found a place on the slope that was off the main paths, where I could sit and watch. That was probably a bad idea, too—but I could lose myself in the watching.

The Maetlins started by leveling an area at least as big as the feeding platform, just on the other side of the first wall. They staked it out and raised two conjoined inflatables, giving themselves a good-sized warehouse right next to the feeding floor. Shelterfoam followed, then airlocks and vents. No windows. Even before it hardened, they started off-loading various ominous-looking pieces of machinery. Too many blades and hooks for my liking. They said it would take at least a week to assemble the line.

While they did that, we prepared the biggest pot of Shit Storm we’d ever cooked. The whole family worked on it, cutting vegetables, tasting, adding spices, scrounging ingredients. Everybody contributed. The Hellisons had a half-finished kettle of turkey. The Herkles carved a big chunk of beef from the shoulder they were growing in one of their meat tanks, the Maetlins gave us a fresh spice rack, and we turned the gathering Storm into Last Chance Chili.

After we ate, the newcomers finally asked to see what we had accomplished. They didn’t look impressed, there wasn’t much to see—at least not until the horgs arrived.

By now, the assembling crowds of horgs were large enough that as the feeding subsided, many of the animals were still hungry, so they started searching beyond the feeding deck. Occasionally, several ventured around the edges of the fence and stared uphill, growling. A couple of sniffs of the ground, however, and the blistering stink of Finn’s pepper spray was usually enough to dissuade them, but it always made for an uneasy few moments.

On the third day of that behavior, we met again with Mr. Costello. The short version—it was agreed to put up another fence, this time between posts two and three. The horgs hadn’t minded the first fence, they probably wouldn’t mind the second. We’d find out soon enough.

That night, most of us stayed up late to watch the monitors. The horgs arrived as usual but didn’t immediately rush to the feeding platform. The three largest snuffled forward and sniffed the new fence, then after they satisfied themselves that it was not a threat they turned their attention to the piles of glitter-pods and wood chips. At the first satisfied grunt, the other animals trundled forward. We all breathed a sigh of relief.

But the pack was larger than ever, and Finn said, “We might have to put up a third fence soon. Look at the size of that pack—they’ll wander off the edges of the platform unless we can contain them.”

And as he said that, I realized exactly how Mr. Costello planned to conquer the herd. But I didn’t say anything. Not then. Not so anyone else could hear.

Besides—

There was something else I didn’t want to tell him. And that was more important. I knew the red-haired Herkle twins. I’d met them the week I arrived on Haven. The Herkles were one of the families I’d applied to. The Herkle boys had bedded me—but no invitation had followed. I felt used. I never shared that with anyone, not even Finn.

But in all the hustle and bustle of everyone settling in, meeting and greeting, sorting things out, sharing news and gossip, trading tools and whatever, the Herkle boys had somehow tracked me to the south end of the slope.

One of the parts of our contract with Mr. Costello—we got first dibs on the dung. Glitter-bush seeds need to pass through a horg’s gut to germinate. All that dung—there should be enough fertile seeds to start three, maybe four new meadowlands. This was a side benefit that Grampa had smartly added to our arrangement with Mr. Costello and Mr. Costello had agreed without argument. Either he didn’t understand or he didn’t care. Whatever, this was the real reason Grampa had so readily accepted Mr. Costello’s initial proposal.

See, you could follow the herds and hope to gather dung from areas rich in glitter-bushes. Or you could put out piles of feed near the herds and hope you collected the right dung. Or you could hope that a few passing animals would drop by and eat just enough pods from your crop to give you enough fertile seeds for the next season. More than that, if you had extra seeds that had been fertilized, you could sell or trade them anywhere.

Yeah, there are artificial ways to force a seed to germinate, I guess, but most folks around here don’t think much of lab-germinated. General opinion holds that lab crops are missing something, they’re stunted and flavorless. Mebbe good for industrial use, mebbe good for animal feed, but not exactly a quality product. If anybody has done a real study, I haven’t seen the report, and I haven’t seen any lab crops myself, so I have to take Grampa’s word for it.

Anyway, I went down to the south end, where three of the agri-bots were picking up the dung balls, weighing them, scanning them, and measuring the various compositions—this was all useful information about the health of the herd—and if there were any fertile seeds inside, they’d toss the dung ball into a hopper. The useless dung balls were shredded and spread, which would make it easier for the various soil bugs to go to work faster. The bots could have done the job without me—or I could have monitored their progress from the truck, but I was tired of the truck, I was tired of Mr. Costello, I wanted to get away—and I wanted to see how this worked first hand. I didn’t want to watch screens all the time.

It was a mistake—one I quickly realized. The stink on this field was bad, terrible, even under the hood I wore. But I was too proud to turn around and march back up the hill, so I followed the bots and tried to figure out how they could tell which dung balls were good and which were not. I was beginning to sense that size had something to do with it when the Herkle twins showed up.

Kind of surprising that they found me. I hadn’t gone looking for them. If anything, I’d been avoiding them, deliberately moving to the opposite side of whatever assembly they joined. So I figured they had to be tracking me specifically, and this meeting wasn’t an accident.

I was right.

I never could tell the difference between Dane and Dyne, even when they wore dissimilar earrings, even when they wore different hairstyles and hair colors. I always just called them Herkle. It didn’t matter, either would answer.

I didn’t want to talk through the hood and I certainly wasn’t going to have this conversation on any channel, wireless or otherwise. I’d learned the hard way about people listening in. Actually, I was in no mood to talk to them at all, so I marched up the hill away from them.

They didn’t take the hint. They followed me across the polycrete—which was starting to show some serious cracking from the pounding weight of the horgs—and up into the corner of the fences, out of anyone’s line of sight, before I pulled off my hood and turned around, annoyed. “What do you want?”

Both of them flashed dazzling grins. The one on the left said, “We kinda feel bad you didn’t join our family.”

“I never got an invitation.”

They looked confused. “But we sent you one.”

“No. You didn’t.”

“Yes, we did.”

“I never got it.”

They looked at each other, even more confused. “Well, uh, okay. There must have been some mix-up. But the invitation is still there, still open. Any time you want to be a Herkle—”

I didn’t have a bad opinion of the Herkles. They were mostly a good family. They kept their word, they paid their bills on time, and they were always there for anyone in need. I just didn’t have a good feeling about the twins. They acted like you weren’t allowed to say no to them, and if you did, they couldn’t understand why you’d said it. They weren’t bad in bed, though, I couldn’t say it wouldn’t be fun. And one thing was well known: the Herkles ate good.

I stood there, looking back and forth between them, trying to figure out what they really wanted—and at the same time listing in my mind all the reasons I should slap their faces and walk away.

I’d already earned some credential in Grampa’s family. And whatever happened with Mr. Costello, I could see that we were still going to do very well off this exercise. And I was happy in Finn’s bed. So the only advantage in going to the Herkle twins’ bed would be . . . what? I’d be just another toy they shared. I’d be back to zero seniority and there were over a dozen invested members in the Herkle brood, so my cut would be proportionally smaller. They were a rich family, but not so rich as to make the offer dazzling.

So . . . why the invitation? Why now?

Apparently I was taking too long. The one on the right said, “We like having you between us. Even if you don’t want to take up our invitation now . . . well, we have an empty cabin in truck three. If you want to visit tonight, we could have some fun.”

Well, that was blatant. I said, “Sorry. I’m married.”

“So are we.”

“Not to me.” And I strode away, feeling confused, frustrated, angry—and a little horny. Because, dammit, those two were gorgeous, exciting, and energetic. Also spoiled rotten.

The only thing I could figure—they wanted to pump me. For information, too. Only there probably wasn’t anything I could tell them that Mr. Costello hadn’t already.

I didn’t know if I should tell Finn about it. I didn’t want to upset him. I certainly didn’t want him to get angry. We didn’t need a fight with another family, especially not here, not now. I took a long hot shower, put on the blue dress that Finn had bought—the one he’d said we’d take turns wearing, this was the first time either of us had put it on—and went in to help with dinner. Trina noticed the dress but said nothing. Neither did anyone else. I guess they figured this was between Finn and me.

But during Circle, Grampa looked across to me and said, “You wanna dump it? Or you wanna let it fester?”

I started crying. I didn’t know why. It was everything and nothing. It was silly and I felt stupid. I thought—after all the stuff I’d been through before getting to Haven—that I’d hardened myself. Now I realized the only person I’d been fooling was me.

Next thing I knew, Finn picked me up and carried me back to our cabin. The door slid shut behind us and he put me gently down on the bed. He didn’t say anything, just popped open a water bottle and handed it to me. He sat down opposite and waited, a concerned look on his face—not judging, just ready to listen.

“I’m not a good person, Finn. I don’t know why you took me into your family, but you’re the best people I’ve ever known and I’m grateful for the little bit of time I’ve had here. You should probably invite me out now, before I hurt you.”

“You can’t hurt us,” he said. “No, that’s not true. The only way you could hurt any of us would be by leaving. We love you. We care about you. Whatever it is, we have your back.”

“Yes, that’s the right thing to say. You always know the right thing to say, but you don’t know who I really am—”

“Yes, I do—”

“I’ve been lying to you. Lying to the whole family.”

“Sweetheart, stop it. Just stop.” He tilted my head up and looked me in the eyes. “You haven’t been lying. You’ve just been afraid. With good reason. We know your real age, we know about the rejuve, we know how old you really are. We don’t care. We know what you did on Flatland, we know what you did on Myrva, we know who you were on Borran. We’ve known all along. We don’t care. We know who you are on Haven. That’s the only thing we care about.”

“You’ve known—?”

“We figured you’d tell us when you were ready. And if you never told us, well—that would be fine, too. We’ve all done things—”

“I killed people, Finn. I was—”

“Stop.” He put a finger across my lips. “Are you planning to kill anyone today?”

“No. No, of course not.”

“Then it doesn’t matter.”

“But it does—”

“Another time, another place. You put it behind you. You put everything behind you when you rejuved. You’ve got the body and the spirit—and the confusion—of a brand-new adolescent. You’ll be another ten years growing up again. But here’s the thing, sweetheart. It was necessary, it was the right thing to do—it was the only way you could abandon your past. And it’s one of the things that convinced us to take you in. Even after the way the Herkles treated you—”

“You know about that?”

“Yes, I do. The Family does. That’s one of the reasons we watch out for you so closely—we know how fragile you are. Everybody your age is fragile, even when you’re doing it for the second or third time. Because you’re so full of life and hope and energy and enthusiasm—it overwhelms all the stuff you thought you knew, all the stuff you thought was worth knowing. You know how you say, ‘I wish I’d known this when I was young’? Well, guess what—knowing it doesn’t slow down the impulsiveness of the adolescent spirit.”

He pulled me into a hug and held me close. “Now have a good cry, as much as you need to—but those had better be tears of happiness.” After a bit, after we finished kissing, too, he said, “By the way, I was right. The blue dress really does look good on you.”

“I wore it for you.”

“I know.” He nuzzled my ear. “I knew what it meant. I was glad to see it.” He helped me take it off, pulling it up over my head, hanging it carefully on a hook.

“Next time, you wear it,” I said.

“Promise,” he said.

And then we stopped talking for a while.

Two days later, we put up the third fence. It didn’t slow the horgs down. By now, they were so eager to eat they barely noticed it. They had a nice comfortable U-shaped enclosure with the biggest piles of feed located at the back wall of the U.

And it was finally obvious to everyone what the next step would be. Jerrid and Mikla were already prepping it. But right now, we were just waiting to see how many horgs would show up to feed in a night. We were counting as many as ninety.

Our camp was growing. Another dozen trucks arrived and set up shop, three more families to help with the processing, packing, and pickling. While it didn’t affect our accounting, I could see that Mr. Costello’s bank channels were picking up a lot more traffic.

So at the afternoon meeting, it didn’t surprise me that the Herkle twins—probably at Mr. Costello’s coaching—stood up and suggested we needed some rules and regulations for our settlement as well as for our business. “Just so we’ll all know where we stand. So there won’t be any misunderstandings later on.”

Mr. Costello smiled and said, “Having rules is a good thing, yes. These boys are very smart, they are.”

And because no one wanted to argue with Mr. Costello, the vote was unanimous. A committee was set up to determine appropriate guidelines for establishing property limits—and for personal boundaries, too. That was a week’s worth of wrangling, sometimes heated, because there were a lot of people here now, not everybody knew everybody, and different folks kept imagining various ways to get their toes stepped on.

We kept out of most of it. Mostly because Grampa didn’t like crowds. Neither did any of the rest of us, but Grampa was worst. He kept to his cabin a lot—enough that we were starting to worry about him. But he showed up for dinner and he was okay during Circle, so as much as we worried, we knew he was staying close and connected.

I was feeling a lot better, too. At midnight meal, I went to each member of the family and just hugged them close. There was nothing that needed to be said, the hug said it all. And they hugged me back and kissed me and told me they were proud of me, and that was the end of it. Grampa was funniest, though. He whispered in my ear, “Next time I rejuve, I’m gonna want you to wear that blue dress for me.” And I whispered back, “I promise I will.” He didn’t flirt with me often, but when he did, it was his way of saying, “You’re good with me.”

Meanwhile, after laying out the feed, five hundred kilos a night now—and more wood than we felt comfortable shredding—we focused ourselves on gathering as much horg-dung as we could. We had six bots working the downslope and we kept them out there all day and all night, only pulling them back when the horgs were around. We chilled the dung balls as fast as the bots collected them and were close to filling the first trailer. Lazz was already talking about driving it back home to empty it into the main cellar.

The Maetlins had their warehouse lit up all the time now, and one afternoon they invited everyone to walk through the installations to see how the carcasses would be hung and fed into the disassembly line, where all the separate machines would skin, cut, separate, slice, grade, and process the horg meat. They were ready to go, anytime. They just needed a horg-sized tunnel from the feeding pen into the first machine, the killing machine.

And finally, on the last day, a few more trucks arrived—looky-loos and wannabes, curiosity-seekers and even a few tourists—all of whom had heard the gossip about Mr. Costello’s marvelous horg-catching operation. They’d all come out to see this idjit get himself good and killed. Tilda Jacklin was running a pool.

Afternoon meeting got a little heated, tho. Finn and Charlie and me always attended. Trina usually stayed home with Grampa. Lazz and Marlie kept busy, monitoring the dung-bots.

This day tho, the Maetlins started talking about offal rights. You cut up a carcass, the intestines—or whatever the horgs use as intestines—spill out. The upper part of the tract is mostly full of undigested food, but the lower part is packed with dung that hasn’t been dropped. And a lot of that dung is fertilized seedpods.

By rights, that dung belonged to us, and Charlie stood up to voice our claim. The Maetlins argued otherwise. Their contract gave them rights to all parts of the creature that were not immediately saleable, and that included the undropped dung. We knew they were being paid on a per-carcass basis, plus a percentage of Mr. Costello’s sale price, a very fair deal. They were also getting the ingredients for bone meal and various fertilizers, which was their bonus. So Charlie argued that if they took the dung, they were taking part of our bonus. The Maetlins argued back that if the dung wasn’t dropped, it was still part of the animal and covered by their contract. Obviously, they knew the value of fertilized seedpods.

We already had enough to corner the market—enough to crash the market if we wanted to—but that wasn’t information anyone else knew and we intended to keep it that way. But if the Maetlins got fertilized seedpods from the undropped dung, they’d have enough to be a serious competitor. They could drive the prize down if they wanted to. And they might want to, just because they could. It wouldn’t be the first time they’d savaged another family. If they saw an advantage for themselves, they took it. That was their reputation and it was well earned. There were some abandoned farms to testify to that.

So we argued, first Charlie, then Finn. I kept my mouth shut and made notes. It got pretty ferocious there for a bit and I was afraid a fight might break out. We had a hospital truck. The Hellisons managed that. And surveillance, too. But the kind of injuries the Maetlins were capable of inflicting—I put my hand on Finn’s forearm and he sat back down.

Harm Maetlin noticed it, and I knew he was about to ask who wore the balls in our family—but Arle Maetlin stepped in front of him. The Maetlins might be feisty but they’re not stupid. A fight was the last thing they needed right now.

In fact—just the possibility of a fight sidetracked that meeting, Mr. Costello stood up and said it worried him terribly that we had gotten to such a sad position. Perhaps we needed to consider what kinds of mechanisms should be put in place?

Well, that’s how we got a police force. And a judge. And a mechanism to enforce the application of our new settlement’s rules and guidelines. It all happened so fast, it would have been head-spinning. Except Mr. Costello just happened to have the boilerplate. Because a good businessman is always prepared. And Mr. Costello was a very good businessman. He didn’t say so, he didn’t have to, but he’d been planning this from the beginning.

And that’s how the settlement got named, too. Costello. Of course. In honor of the man who made it happen.

Mr. Costello accepted the position of mayor. And judge. Of course. And as his first ruling, he cut Solomon’s baby in half. We got the offal. The Maetlins got the responsibility of running the police force. They would be paid appropriately for their efforts. The rest of us would be charged a pro-rata user fee for the provision of police salaries, as well as the billables of the judge and mayor, who—because Mr. Costello was so thoughtful and generous—would only be compensated for hours actually served.

That night, while the horgs were feeding, Jerrid and Mikla rolled the last huge section of fence around and slammed it shut with a satisfying clank, penning in a hundred and twenty-three grunting, grumbling mountains of ugly meat. The horgs were so busy scraping the glitter-pods off the deck, they never even noticed.

Almost immediately, the Maetlins started spraying liquid nitrogen into the air above the pen, forming huge clouds of cold steam. A cross-spray of water created flurries of snow, which fell onto the backs of the uneasy creatures like a quiet blizzard. And just as quickly, the horgs started huddling together, their instinctive response to winter.

The monitors showed us that their metabolic processes were slowing, slowing, turning the animals into huge docile lumps. Using nothing more than a bucket of warm glitter-pods, a single man could lead a near-slumbering horg to the receiving gate, through a short tunnel, through the airlocks, and finally into the killing room of the processing plant. Harm Maetlin had the honor of leading the first. The other beasts would follow, one at a time. When the line was fully up to speed, they’d be able to process—kill and butcher—thirty-six horgs a day.

From the hill above, cheers and applause. Mr. Costello had captured a herd. Mr. Costello was going to pack and ship several hundred tons of horg meat. Mr. Costello was going to make us all rich. Mr. Costello, hooray.

Mr. Costello!

I could still hear the clank of that last piece of fence slamming shut. That’s when the uncomfortable little itch at the back of my neck became a lot more than an uncomfortable little itch.

We watched for a bit, then walked silently back to our trucks. Nobody said much. We ate in silence. Cold sandwiches. We’d just seen the future of Haven. It wasn’t pretty.

The videos of what we’d accomplished at Costello Township were already circulating across the public webs. Within hours, new partnerships, new alliances, new collectives of all kinds would be announced—all with the intention of cashing in. The giant herds would be slaughtered, sacrificed to the greed of little men. They’d be annihilated within a generation and the ecology of Haven would collapse.

It’s okay to take one or two. It’s not okay to take a thousand or ten thousand. It’s not okay to wipe out an apex predator. I stayed up late, running simulations. Without enough mates, the horgs would self-fertilize. Without any parents to feed on them, the mini-horg swarms would run out of control. They’d decimate the countryside, eating everything they could, leaving deserts behind, and wiping out every species that depended on the devastated land. The only good news? They’d wipe out most of the human population, too.

The next morning, we had an emergency meeting with Mr. Costello. Just me and Finn, Charlie and Grampa. We told him about our fears.

Mr. Costello looked sad. Very sad. “Yes, of course. Of course,” he said. “You’re very smart to share your concerns with me. This is why I’m so glad we’re business partners. You’re all so intelligent and insightful. So please let me put your minds at ease.” He motioned to Mikla, who arrived with two fresh pitchers of lemonade, his signal that this was going to be a long but pleasant meeting.

“From the beginning, I realized that if our techniques worked, they could be copied. So I incorporated a holding company, patented the mechanics of the entire operation, and transferred the patent to the corporation. That corporation will sell licenses, materiel, and equipment to any other prospective horg-trapping collective. They will only be allowed to take a limited number of horgs in any given year. Their license requires them to sell their catch only to licensed shippers, and the corporation takes a percentage from both packagers and shippers. So there will be a limit on the number of beasts killed and the amount of meat shipped. That will also keep the prices high. The enforcement protocols are all in place. For the protection of the species . . . as well as for the protection of the market, nobody will be able to ship a ton of horg-meat off this planet without buying a license from me. Well, from my corporation.”

Finn leaned back in his chair. He looked to Grampa. Grampa looked to Charlie. Charlie shook his head.

Mr. Costello sensed our unease. Hell, even a rock would have noticed. “You still look unhappy. Did I do something wrong? How can I make it up to you? You’ve been paid, haven’t you? You even got bonuses. Was it not enough?”

“No, you’ve been fair,” Grampa said. “You kept your word.”

Mr. Costello relaxed in his chair.

“But—” Grampa continued. “To be honest, we kinda expected you to get killed. We was even bettin’ on how it would happen. You weren’t the first idjit to come down here with a brilliant idea. You probably won’t be the last. So we never expected you to get this far. But your money was good and what the hell—we went along for the ride.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“Nothing. Everything.”

I raised my hand politely to interrupt. Grampa nodded to me.

I said, “You’ve changed the world. And I’m not sure—we’re not sure it’s going to be for the better.”

Mr. Costello looked honestly confused. “Oh my. Oh dear. Yes. You must think I’m planning to leave and take all my profits with me. Oh, no. No, no, no. We’re going to lay tracks and build a railroad from Costello Town to Settlement so we can ship horg-meat all year long. Restless Meadow is perfectly situated to draw horgs off the main migratory track. This will be a permanent base for expansion. We’ll have a hospital, a school, a year-round marketplace. Eventually, we’ll extend the railroad across the continent and establish Costello Towns on every major migratory track. That’s where the other collectives will be allowed to build. Liftcore has already agreed to drop a second beanstalk, and we’ve got sites picked out for three and four as well. And you’ll be senior partners. You’ll be among the richest people on Haven. No, please don’t thank me—I’m happy to do it. Haven will no longer be a backwater world. Soon it will live up to its name. Millions of people will want to settle here.”

Well, you can’t argue with good news. And I suppose all that good news should have made us happy, but it didn’t. Finn and Grampa headed back to the truck, their footsteps quiet on the new sidewalks the Hellisons had installed.

Charlie shook his head and walked on down to Jacklins’ Outpost to see what new goods Tilda had driven in from Temp.

Me? I stood alone, shaking. Trying to figure out what to do next.

Was I the only one who could see it?

Bait and walls. First you put out bait. Something juicy. Then you put up a wall. You put out more bait, you put up another wall. Do it enough, you have a cage. Costello did it to the horgs, he did it to us. Glitter pods. Money. Something juicy. No difference at all. Bait and walls. Money and banks, then courts and police. We all get captured.

Mr. Costello saw me on the sidewalk and invited me to join him for a stroll. Some of the horgs were warming up, getting a little agitated. He wanted my opinion on whether or not they needed to be cooled again.

I didn’t know, but what the hell. I followed him.

Yes, the remaining horgs were waking up. Yes, they were getting agitated. I didn’t need the monitors to tell me that. They were hungry and annoyed. They’d definitely need to be fed and cooled. Already a few were pushing themselves against the fences, testing their imprisonment.

We climbed up onto the catwalk that overlooked this side of the pen. “Aren’t they beautiful?” Mr. Costello said. His smile was broad and beneficent. In the afternoon light, he glowed like a saint.

I had to admit—if you looked at them the right way, horgs could be beautiful.

“Someday . . . ” he mused. “Someday, there will be a city here.” He turned to me with a serious expression. “Tell me something. Do you think they might put up a statue of me?”

That’s when I kicked him into the pen with the horgs.

No one saw. And apparently someone had conveniently turned off the cameras without leaving any prints.

It was time for me to move on, anyway.

Finn caught up with me at Settlement and pulled me out of line for the bus to Beanstalk. “Like hell you will,” he said, and wrapped me in his arms.

I didn’t argue. He was wearing the blue dress.

##((

Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September-October 2016.

Innumerable Glimmering Lights

Rich Larson

####At the roof of the world, the Drill churned and churned. Four Warm Currents watched with eyes and mouth, overlaying the engine’s silhouette with quicksilver sketches of sonar. Long, twisting shards of ice bloomed from the metal bit to float back along the carved tunnel. Workers with skin glowing acid yellow, hazard visibility, jetted out to meet the debris and clear it safely to the sides. Others monitored the mesh of machinery that turned the bit, smoothing contact points, spinning cogs. The whole thing was beautiful, efficient, and made Four Warm Currents secrete anticipation in a flavored cloud.

A sudden needle of sonar, pitched high enough to sting, but not so high that it couldn’t be passed off as accidental. Four Warm Currents knew it was Nine Brittle Spines before even tasting the name in the water.

“Does it move faster with you staring at it?” Nine Brittle Spines signed, tentacles languid with humor-not-humor.

“No faster, no slower,” Four Warm Currents replied, forcing two tentacles into a curled smile. “The Drill is as inexorable as our dedication to its task.”

“Dedication is admirable, as said the ocean’s vast cold to one volcano’s spewing heat.” Nine Brittle Spines’s pebbly skin illustrated, flashing red for a brief instant before regaining a dark cobalt hue.

“You are still skeptical.” Four Warm Currents clenched tight to keep distaste from inking the space between them. Nine Brittle Spines was a council member, and not one to risk offending. “But the ice’s composition is changing, as I reported. The bit shears easier with every turn. We’re approaching the other side.”

“So it thins, and so it will thicken again.” Nine Brittle Spines wriggled dismissal. “The other side is a deep dream, Four Warm Currents. Your machine is approaching more ice.”

“The calculations,” Four Warm Currents protested. “The sounding. If you would read the theorems—”

Nine Brittle Spines hooked an interrupting tentacle through the thicket of movement. “No need for your indignation. I have no quarrel with the Drill. It’s a useful sideshow, after all. It keeps the eyes and mouths of the colony fixated while the council slides its decisions past unhindered.”

“If you have no quarrel, then why do you come here?” Four Warm Currents couldn’t suck back the words, or the single droplet of ichor that suddenly wobbled into the water between them. It blossomed there into a ghostly black wreath. Four Warm Currents raked a hasty tentacle through to disperse it, but the councillor was already tasting the chemical, slowly, pensively.

“I have no quarrel, Four Warm Currents, but others do.” Nine Brittle Spines swirled the bitter emission around one tentacle tip, as if it were a pheromone poem or something else to be savored. Four Warm Currents, mortified, could do nothing but turn an apologetic mottled blue, almost too distracted to process what the councillor signed next.

“While the general opinion is that you have gone mad, and your project is a hilariously inept allocation of time and resources based only on your former contributions, theories do run the full gamut. Some believe the Drill is seeking mineral deposits in the ice. Others believe the Drill will be repurposed as a weapon, to crack through the fortified cities of the vent-dwelling colonies.” Nine Brittle Spines shaped a derisive laugh. “And there is even a small but growing tangent who believe in your theorems. Who believe that you are fast approaching the mythic other side, and that our ocean will seep out of the puncture like the viscera from a torn egg, dooming us all.”

“The weight of the ocean will hold it where it is,” Four Warm Currents signed, a sequence by now rote to the tentacles. “The law of sink and rise is one you’ve surely studied.”

“Once again, my opinion is irrelevant to the matter,” Nine Brittle Spines replied. “I am here because this radical tangent is believed to be targeting your project for sabotage. The council wishes to protect its investment.” Tentacles pinwheeled in a slight hesitation then: “You yourself may be in danger as well. The council advises you to keep a low profile. Perhaps change your name taste.”

“I am not afraid for my life.” Four Warm Currents signed it firmly and honestly. The project was more important than survival. More important than anything.

“Then fear, perhaps, for your mate’s children.”

Four Warm Currents flashed hot orange shock, bright enough for the foreman to glance over, concerned. “What?”

Nine Brittle Spines held up the tentacle tip that had tasted Four Warm Currents’s anger. “Traces of ingested birth mucus. Elevated hormones. You should demonstrate more self-control, Four Warm Currents. You give away all sorts of secrets.”

The councillor gave a lazy salute, then jetted off into the gloom, joined at a distance by two bodyguards with barbed tentacles. Four Warm Currents watched them vanish down the tunnel, then slowly turned back toward the Drill. The bit churned and churned. Four Warm Currents’s mind churned with it.

####When the work cycle closed, the Drill was tugged back down the tunnel and tethered in a hard shell still fresh enough to glisten. A corkscrewing skiff arrived to unload the guard detail, three young bloods with enough hormone-stoked muscle to overlook the still-transparent patches on their skin. They inked their names so loudly Four Warm Currents could taste them before even jetting over.

“There’s been a threat of sorts,” Four Warm Currents signed, secreting a small dark privacy cloud to shade the conversation from workers filing onto the now-empty skiff. “Against the project. Radicals who may attempt sabotage.”

“We know,” signed the guard, whose name was a pungent Two Sinking Corpses. “The councillor told us. That’s why we have these.” Two Sinking Corpses hefted a conical weapon Four Warm Currents dimly recognized as a screamer, built to amplify a sonar burst to lethal strength. Nine Brittle Spines had not exaggerated the seriousness of the situation.

“Pray to the Leviathans you don’t have to use them,” Four Warm Currents signed, then joined the workers embarking on the skiff, tasting familiar names, slinging tentacles over knotted muscles, adding to a multilayered scent joke involving an aging councillor and a frost shark. Spirits were high. The Drill was cutting smoothly. They were approaching the other side, and though for some that only meant the end of contract and full payment, others had also been infected by Four Warm Currents’s fervor.

“What will we see?” a worker signed. “Souls of the dead? The Leviathans themselves?”

“Nothing outside the physical laws,” Four Warm Currents replied, but then, sensing the disappointment: “But nothing like we have ever seen before. It will be unimaginable. Wondrous. And they’ll soak our names all through the memory sponges, to remember the brave explorers who first broke the ice.”

A mass of tentacles waved in approval of the idea. Four Warm Currents settled back as the skiff began to move and a wave of new debates sprang up.

####The City of Bone was roughly spherical, a beautiful lattice of ancient skeleton swathed in sponge and cultivated coral, glowing ethereal blue with bioluminescence. It was older than any councillor, a relic of the dim past before the archives: a Leviathan skeleton dredged from the seafloor with buoyant coral, built up and around until it could float unsupported, tethered in place above the jagged rock bed.

Devotees believed the Leviathans had sacrificed their corporeal forms to leave city husks behind; Four Warm Currents shared the more heretical view that the Leviathans were extinct, and for all their size might have been no more intelligent than the living algae feeders that still hauled their bulk along the seafloor. It was not a theory to divulge in polite discourse. Drilling through the roof of the world was agitator enough on its own.

As the skiff passed the City of Bone’s carved sentinels, workers began to jet off to their respective housing blocks. Four Warm Currents was one of the last to disembark, having been afforded, as one of the council’s foremost engineers, an artful gray-and-purple spire in the city center. Of course, that was before the Drill. Nine Brittle Spines’s desire for a “sideshow” aside, Four Warm Currents felt the daily loss of council approval like the descending cold of a crevice. Relocation was not out of the realm of possibility.

For now, though, the house’s main door shuttered open at a touch, and, more importantly, Four Warm Currents’s mates were inside. Six Bubbling Thermals, sleek and swollen with eggs, drizzling ribbons of birth mucus like a halo, but with eyes still bright and darting. Three Jagged Reefs, lean and long, skin stained from a heavy work cycle in the smelting vents, submitting to a massage. Their taste made Four Warm Currents ache, deep and deeper.

“So our heroic third returns,” Six Bubbling Thermals signed, interrupting the massage and prompting a ruffle of protest.

“Have you ended the world yet?” Three Jagged Reefs added. “Don’t stop, Six. I’m nearly loose enough to slough.”

“Nearly,” Four Warm Currents signed. “I blacked a councillor. Badly.”

Both mates guffawed, though Six Bubbling Thermals’s had a nervous shiver to it.

“From how far?” Three Jagged Reefs demanded. “Could they tell it was yours?”

“From not even a tentacle away,” Four Warm Currents admitted. “We were in conversation.”

Three Jagged Reefs laughed again, the reckless, waving laugh that had made Four Warm Currents fall in love, but their other mate did not.

“Conversation about what?” Six Bubbling Thermals signed.

Four Warm Currents hesitated, tasting around to make sure a strong emotion hadn’t slipped the gland again, but the water was clear and cold and anxiety-free. “Nine Brittle Spines is a skeptic of the worst kind. Intelligent, but refusing to self-educate.”

“Did you not explain the density calculation?” Three Jagged Reefs signed plaintively.

Four Warm Currents moved to reply, then recognized a familiar mocking tilt in Three Jagged Reefs’s tentacles and turned the answer into a crude “floating feces” gesticulation.

“Tell us the mathematics again,” Three Jagged Reefs teased. “Nothing slicks me better for sex, Four. All those beautiful variables.”

Six Bubbling Thermals smiled at the back-and-forth, but was still lightly spackled with mauve worry. The birth mucus spiralling out in all directions made for an easy distraction.

“We need to collect again,” Four Warm Currents signed, gesturing to the trembling ribbons. “Or you’ll bury us in our sleep.”

“And then I’ll finally have the house all to my own,” Six Bubbling Thermals signed, cloying. But the mauve worry dissolved into flushed healthy pink as they all began coiling the mucus and storing it in coral tubing. Four Warm Currents stroked the egg sacs gently as they worked, imagining each one hatching into an altered world.

####After they finished with the birth mucus and pricked themselves with a recreational skimmer venom, Three Jagged Reefs made them sample a truly terrible pheromone poem composed at the smelting vents between geysers. The recitation was quickly cancelled in favor of hallucination-laced sex in which they all slid over and around Six Bubbling Thermals’s swollen mantle, probing and pulping, and afterward the three of them drifted in the artificial current, slowly revolving as they discussed anything and everything:

Colony annexation, the validity of aesthetic tentacle removal, the new eatery that served everything dead and frozen with frescoes carved into the flesh, So-and-So’s scent change, the best birthing tanks, the after-ache they’d had the last time they used skimmer venom. Anything and everything except for the Drill.

Much later, when the other two had slipped into a sleeping harness, Four Warm Currents jetted upward to the top of their gray-and-purple spire, coiling there to look out over the City of Bone. Revelers jetted back and forth in the distance, visible by blots of blue-green excitement and arousal. Some were workers from the Drill, Four Warm Currents knew, celebrating the end of a successful work cycle.

Four Warm Currents’s namesake parent had been a laborer of the same sort. A laborer who came home to cramped quarters and hungry children, but was never too exhausted to spin them a story, tentacles whirling and flourishing like a true bard. Four Warm Currents had been a logical child, always finding gaps in the tall tales of Leviathans and heroes and oceans beyond their own. But still, the stories had sunk in deep. Enough so that Four Warm Currents might be able to sign them to the children growing in Six Bubbling Thermals’s egg sacs.

There was no need for Nine Brittle Spines or the council to know it was those stories that had ignited Four Warm Currents’s curiosity for the roof of the world in the first place. Soon there would be new stories to tell. In seven, maybe eight more work cycles, they would break through.

After such a long percolation, the idea was dizzying. Four Warm Currents didn’t know what awaited on the other side. There were theories, of course. Many theories. Four Warm Currents had studied gas bubbles and knew that whatever substance lay beyond the ice was not water as they knew it, not nearly so heavy. It could very well be deadly. Four Warm Currents would take precautions, but—

The brush of a tentacle tip, a familiar taste. Six Bubbling Thermals had ballooned up to join the stillness. Four Warm Currents extended a welcoming clasp, and the rasp of skin on skin was a comforting one. Calming.

“Someone almost started a riot in the plaza today,” Six Bubbling Thermals signed.

The calm was gone. “Over what? Over the project?”

“Yes.” Six Bubbling Thermals stared out across the city with a long clicking burst, then turned to face Four Warm Currents. “They had artificial panic. In storage globes. Broke them wide open right as the market peaked. It was . . . ” Tentacles wove in and out, searching for a descriptor. “Chaos.”

“Are you all right?” Four Warm Currents signed hard. “You should have told me. You’re birthing.”

Six Bubbling Thermals waved a quick-dying laugh. “I’m still bigger than you are. And I told Three Jagged Reefs. We agreed it would be best not to add to your stress. But I’ve never kept secrets well, have I?”

Another stare, longer this time. Four Warm Currents joined in, scraping sound across the architecture of the city, mapping curves and crevices, spars and spires.

“Before they were dragged off, they dropped one last globe,” Six Bubbling Thermals signed. “It was your name, fresh, mixed with a decay scent. They said you’re a monster, and if nobody stops you, you’ll end the world.”

Four Warm Currents shivered, clenched hard against the noxious fear threatening to tendril into the water. “Fresh?”

“Yes.”

Who had it been? Four Warm Currents thought of the many workers and observers jetting up and down the tunnel, bringing status reports, complaints, updates. Any one of them could have come close enough to coax their chief engineer’s name taste into a concealed globe. With a start, Four Warm Currents realized Six Bubbling Thermals was not gazing pensively over the city, but keeping watch.

“I know you won’t consider halting the project,” Six Bubbling Thermals signed. “But you need to be careful. Promise me that much.”

Four Warm Currents remembered the councillor’s warning and stroked Six Bubbling Thermals’s egg sacs with a trembling tentacle. “I’ll be careful. And when we break through, this will all go away. They’ll see there’s no danger.”

“And when will that be?” The mauve worry was creeping back across Six Bubbling Thermals’s skin.

“Soon,” Four Warm Currents signed. “Seven work cycles.”

They enmeshed their tentacles and curled against each other, bobbing there in silence as the City of Bone’s ghostly blue guide lights began to blink out one by one.

####The first attack came three cycles later, after shift. A pair of free-swimmers, with their skins pumped pitch-black and a sonar cloak in tow, managed to bore halfway through the Drill’s protective shell before the guards spotted them and chased them off. The news came by a messenger whom Three Jagged Reefs, unhappily awoken, nearly eviscerated. Bare moments later, Four Warm Currents stroked goodbyes to both mates and took the skiff to the project site, tentacles heavy from sleep but hearts thrumming electric.

Nine Brittle Spines somehow contrived to arrive first.

“Four Warm Currents, it is a pleasure to see you so well rested.” The councillor’s tentacles moved as smoothly and blandly as ever, but Four Warm Currents could see the faintest of trembling at their tips. Mortal after all.

“I came as quickly as I was able,” Four Warm Currents signed, not rising to the barb. “Were either of the perpetrators identified?”

“No.” Nine Brittle Spines gave the word a twist of annoyance. “Assumedly they were two of yours. They knew the thinnest point of the shell and left behind a project-tagged auger.” One tentacle produced the spiral tool and set it drifting between them. It was a miniature cousin to the behemoth Drill, used to sample ice consistency.

Four Warm Currents inspected the implement. “I’ll speak with inventory, but I imagine it was taken without their knowledge.”

“Do that,” Nine Brittle Spines signed. “In the meanwhile, security will be increased. We’ll have guards at all times from now on. Body searches for workers.”

Four Warm Currents waved a vague agreement, staring up at the burnished armor shell, the hole scored in its underbelly. The workers would not be happy, but they were so close now, too close to let anything derail the project. Four Warm Currents would agree to anything, so long as the Drill was safe.

####Tension became a sharp, sooty tang overlaying every conversation, so much so that Four Warm Currents was given council approval for a globe of artificially mixed happiness to waft around the tunnel entrance. It ended being mostly sucked up by the guards, who were happy enough already to swagger around with screamers and combat hooks bristling in their tentacles, interrogating any particularly worry-spackled worker who happened to look their way.

Four Warm Currents complained to the councillor, but was soundly ignored, told only that the guards had been instructed to treat the project site and its crew with the utmost respect. Enthusiasm was now a thing of the past. Workers spoke rarely and with short tempers, and every time the Drill slowed or an error was found in its calibration, the possibility of sabotage hung in the tunnel like a decay scent. Four Warm Currents found a slip in the most recent density calculation that promised to put things back a full work cycle, but still the Drill churned.

At home, they began receiving death threats. Six Bubbling Thermals found the first, a tiny automaton that waved its stiff tentacles in a prerecorded message: “We won’t need a drill to puncture your eyes and every one of your eggs.” Three Jagged Reefs shredded it to pieces. Four Warm Currents gave the pieces to the council’s investigator.

Then, two cycles before breakthrough, black globes of artificial malice were slicked to their spire with adhesive and timed to burst while they slept. Only one went off, but it was enough to necessitate a pore-cleanse for Six Bubbling Thermals and a dedicated surveillance detail for the house.

Three Jagged Reefs fumed and fumed. “After the Drill breaks through, you’ll let me borrow it, won’t you?” The demand was jittery with skimmer venom, and made only once Six Bubbling Thermals, finally returned from the cleansing tanks, was out of sight range. “I’m going to find the shit-eater who blacked Six and stick them on the bit gland first.”

Three Jagged Reefs had been pulled from smelting after an incidence of “hazardously elevated emotions,” in which a copper-worker trilling about the impending end of the world had their tentacle held over a geyser until it turned to pulp. Staying in the house full cycle, under the watchful eyes and mouths of council surveillance, was not an easy transition. Not even stocked with high-quality venom.

“It’ll all be over soon,” Four Warm Currents signed, mind half-filled, as was now the norm, with figures from the latest density calculation. One final cycle.

“Tell it to Six,” Three Jagged Reefs signed back, short and clipped, and turned away.

Four Warm Currents swam into the next room, to where their mate was adrift in the sleeping harness. The egg sacs were bulging now, slick with the constant emission of birth mucus, bearing no trace of black ichor stains. The cleansing tanks had reported no permanent damage. Four Warm Currents sent a gentle prod of sonar and elicited a twitch.

“I’m awake,” Six Bubbling Thermals signed, languid. “I’d sleep better with you two around me.”

“They’ll catch the lunatics who planted that globe,” Four Warm Currents signed back.

Six Bubbling Thermals signed nothing for a long moment, then waved a sad laugh. “I don’t think it’s lunatics. Not anymore. A lot of people are saying the same thing, you know.”

“Saying what?”

“You spend all of your time at the Drill, even when you’re here with us.” The accusation was soft, but it stung. “You haven’t been paying attention. The transit currents are full of devotees calling you a blasphemer. Saying you think yourself a Leviathan. Unbounded. The whole city is frightened.”

“Then it’s a city of idiots,” Four Warm Currents signed abruptly.

“I’m frightened. I have no shame admitting it. I’m frightened for our children. For them to have two parents only. One parent only. None. For them to never even hatch. Who knows?” Six Bubbling Thermals raised a shaky smile. “Maybe the idiot is the one who isn’t frightened.”

“But I’m going to give them an altered world, a new world . . . ” Four Warm Currents’s words blurred as Six Bubbling Thermals stilled two waving tentacles.

“I don’t give a floating shit about a new world if it’s one where you take a hook in the back,” Six Bubbling Thermals signed back, slow and clear. “Don’t go to the Drill tomorrow. They’ll send for you when it breaks the ice.”

At first, Four Warm Currents didn’t even comprehend the words. After spending a third of a lifespan planning, building, lobbying, watching, the idea of not being there to witness the final churn, the final crack and squeal of ice giving away, was dizzying. Nauseating.

“If you go, I think you’ll be dead before you come home,” Six Bubbling Thermals signed. “You’re worth more to us alive for one more cycle than as a name taste wafting through the archives for all eternity.”

“I’ve watched it from the very start.” Four Warm Currents tried not to tremble. “Every turn. Every single turn.”

“And without you it moves no faster, no slower,” Six Bubbling Thermals replied. “Isn’t that what you say?”

“I have to be there.”

“You don’t.” Six Bubbling Thermals gave a weary shudder. “Is it a new world for our children, or only for you?”

Four Warm Currents’s tentacles went slack, adrift. The two of them stared at each other in the gloom, until, suddenly, something stirred in the egg sacs. The motion repeated, a faint but mesmerizing ripple. Six Bubbling Thermals gave a slight wriggle of pain.

Four Warm Currents climbed into the harness, turning acid blue in an apology that could not have been properly signed. “I’ll stay. I’ll stay, I’ll stay.”

They folded against each other and spoke of other things, of the strange currents that had brought them together, the future looming in the birthing tanks. Then they slept, deeply, even when Three Jagged Reefs wobbled in to join them much later, nearly unhooking the harness with chemical-clumsy tentacles.

Four Warm Currents dreamt of ending the world, the Drill shearing through its final stretch of pale ice, and from the gaping wound in the roof of the world, a Leviathan lowering its head, eyes glittering, to swallow the engine and its workers and their blasphemous chief engineer whole, pulling its bulk back into the world it once abandoned, sliding through blackness toward the City of Bone, ready to reclaim its scattered body, to devour all light, to unmake everything that had ever been made.

####Four Warm Currents awoke to stinging sonar and the silhouette of a familiar councillor drifting before the sleeping harness, flanked by two long-limbed guards.

“Wake your mates,” Nine Brittle Spines signed, with a taut urgency Four Warm Currents had never seen before. “All three of you have to leave.”

“What’s happening?”

“You’ll see.”

Four Warm Currents rolled, body heavy with sleep, and stroked each mate awake in turn. Three Jagged Reefs refused to rise until Six Bubbling Thermals furiously shook the harness, a flash of the old pre-birthing strength.

“Someone come to murder us?” Three Jagged Reefs asked calmly, once toppled free.

“You wouldn’t feel a thing with all that venom in you,” Four Warm Currents replied, less calmly.

“I barely pricked.”

“As said the Drill to the roof of the world,” Six Bubbling Thermals interjected.

Nine Brittle Spines flashed authoritative indigo, cutting the conversation short. “We have a skiff outside. Your discussions can wait.”

The three of them followed the councillor out of the house, trailing long, sticky strands of Six Bubbling Thermals’s replenished birth mucus. Once they exited the shutter and were no longer filtered, a faint acrid flavor seeped to them through the water. The City of Bone tasted bitter with fear. Anger.

And that wasn’t all.

In the distance, Four Warm Currents could see free-swimmers moving as a mob, jetting back and forth through the city spires, carrying homegrown phosphorescent lamps and scent bombs. Several descended on a council-funded sculpture, smearing the stone with webbed black-and-red rage. Most continued on, heading directly for the city center. For their housing block, Four Warm Currents realized with a sick jolt.

“The radical tangent has grown,” Nine Brittle Spines signed. “Considerably.”

“So many?” Four Warm Currents was stunned.

“Only thing people love more than a festival is a doomsday,” Three Jagged Reefs signed bitterly.

“Indeed. Your decriers have found support in many places, I’m afraid.” Nine Brittle Spines bent a grimace as they swam toward the waiting skiff, a closed and armored craft marked with an official sigil. “Including the council.”

Four Warm Currents stopped dead in the water. “But the Drill is still under guard.”

“The Drill is currently being converged upon by a mob twice this size,” Nine Brittle Spines signed. “Even without sympathizers in the security ranks, it would be futile to try to protect it. The council’s official position, as of this moment, is that your project has been terminated to save costs.”

Four Warm Currents realized, dimly, that both mates were holding tentacles back to prevent an incidence of hazardously elevated emotions. Searing orange desperation had spewed into the water around them. Nine Brittle Spines made no remarks about self-control, only flashed, for the briefest instant, a pale blue regret.

“But we’re nearly through,” Four Warm Currents signed, trembling all over. Three Jagged Reefs and Six Bubbling Thermals now slowly slid off, eager for the safety of the skiff. Drifting away when they were needed most.

“Perhaps you are,” Nine Brittle Spines admitted. “Perhaps your theorems are sound. But stability is, at the present moment, more important than discovery.”

“If we go to the Drill—” Four Warm Currents shuddered to a pause. “If we go to the Drill, if we go now, we can stop them. I can explain to them. I can convince them.”

“You know better than that, Four Warm Currents. In fact—”

Whatever Nine Brittle Spines planned to say next was guillotined as Six Bubbling Thermals surged from behind, wrapping the councillor in full grip. In the same instant, Three Jagged Reefs yanked the skiff’s shutter open. Four Warm Currents stared at the writhing councillor, then at each mate in turn.

“Get on with it, Four,” Three Jagged Reefs signed. “Go and try.”

Six Bubbling Thermals was unable to sign, tentacles taut as a vice around Nine Brittle Spines, but the misty red cloud billowing into the water was the fiercest and most pungent love Four Warm Currents could remember tasting.

“Oh, wait.” Three Jagged Reefs glanced between them. “Six wanted to know if you have any necessary names.”

“None,” Four Warm Currents signed shakily. “So long as there are Thermals and Reefs.”

“Well, of course.” Three Jagged Reefs waved a haughty laugh that speared Four Warm Currents’s hearts all over again. The councillor had finally stopped struggling in Six Bubbling Thermals’s embrace and now watched the proceedings with an air of resignation. Four Warm Currents flashed a respectful pale blue, then turned and swam for the skiff.

####They were hauling the Drill out of its carapace with hooks and bare tentacles, clouding the water with rage, excitement, amber-streaked triumph. Four Warm Currents abandoned the skiff for the final stretch, sucking back hard, jetting harder. The mob milled around the engine in a frenzy, too caught up to notice one late arrival.

Four Warm Currents screamed, dragging sonar across the crowd, but in the mess of motion and chemicals nobody felt the hard clicks. They’d brought a coring charge, one of the spiky half-spheres designed for blasting through solid rock bed to the nickel veins beneath. Four Warm Currents had shut down a foreman’s lobby for such explosives during a particularly slow stretch of drilling. Too volatile, too much blowback in a confined space. But now it was here, and it was going to shred the Drill to pieces.

Four Warm Currents jetted higher, above the chaos, nearly to the mouth of the tunnel. No eyes followed. Everyone was intent on the Drill and on the coring charge being shuffled toward it, tentacle by tentacle.

Four Warm Currents sucked back, angled, and dove. The free-swimmers towing the coring charge didn’t see the interloper until it was too late, until Four Warm Currents slid two tentacles deep into the detonation triggers and clung hard.

“Get away from me! Get away or I’ll trigger right here!”

The crowd turned to a fresco of frozen tentacles, momentarily speechless. Then:

“Blasphemer,” signed the closest free-swimmer. “Blasphemer.”

The word caught and rippled across the mob, becoming a synchronized wave of short, chopping motions.

“The Drill is not going to end the world,” Four Warm Currents signed desperately, puffing up over the crowd, hauling the coring charge along. “It’s going to break us into a brand-new one. One we’ll visit at our choosing. The deep ocean will stay deep ocean. The Leviathans will stay skeletons. Our cities will stay safe.”

Something struck like a spar of bone, sending Four Warm Currents reeling. The conical head of a screamer poked out from the crowd, held by a young guard whose skin was no longer inked with the council’s sigil. The name came dimly to memory: Two Sinking Corpses. An unfamiliar taste was clouding into the water. It took a moment for Four Warm Currents to realize it was blood, blue and hot and saline.

“Listen to me!”

The plea was answered by another blast of deadly sound, this one misaimed, clipping a tentacle. Four Warm Currents nearly lost his grip on the coring charge. The mob roiled below, waving curses, mottled black and orange with fury. There would be no listening.

“Stay away from me or I’ll trigger it,” Four Warm Currents warned once more, then jetted hard for the mouth of the tunnel. The renewed threat of detonation bought a few still seconds. Then the mob realized where the coring charge was headed, and the sleekest and fastest of them tore away in pursuit.

Four Warm Currents hurled up the dark tunnel, sucking back water in searing cold gulps and flushing faster and harder with each. Familiar grooves in the ice jumped out with a smatter of sonar, etchings warning against unauthorized entry. Four Warm Currents blew past with tentacles straight back, trailing the coring charge directly behind, gambling nobody would risk hitting it with a screamer.

A familiar bend loomed in the dark, one of the myriad small adjustments to course, and beyond it, the service lights, bundles of bioluminescent algae set along the walls, began blooming to life, painting the tunnel an eerie blue-green, casting a long-limbed shadow on the wall. Four Warm Currents chanced a look down and saw three free-swimmers, young and strong and gaining.

“Drop it!” one took the opportunity to sign. “Drop it and you’ll live!”

Four Warm Currents used a tentacle to sign back one of Three Jagged Reefs’s favorite gestures, reflecting that it was a bad idea when the young-blood’s skin flashed with rage and all three of them put on speed. The head start was waning, the coring charge was heavy, the screamer wound was dribbling blood.

But Four Warm Currents knew the anatomy of the tunnel better than anyone, better than even the foreman. The three pursuers lost valuable time picking their way through a thicket of free-floating equipment knocked from the wall, then more again deliberating where the tunnel branched, stubby memento of a calculation error.

Four Warm Currents’s hearts were wailing for rest as the final stretch appeared. The coring charge felt like lead. A boiling shadow swooped past, and Four Warm Currents realized they’d fired another screamer, one risk now outweighing the other. The roof of the world, stretched thin like a membrane, marred with the Drill’s final twist, loomed above.

Another blast of sonar, this one closer. Four Warm Currents throttled out a cloak of black ink, hoping to obscure the next shot, too exhausted to try to dodge. Too exhausted to do anything now but churn warm water, drag slowly, too slowly, toward the top.

The screamer’s next burst was half-deflected by the coring charge, but still managed to make every single tentacle spasm. Four Warm Currents felt the cargo slipping and tried desperately to regain purchase on its slick metal. So close, now, so close to the end of the world. Roof of the world. Either. Thoughts blurred and collided in Four Warm Currents’s bruised brain. More blood was pumping out, bright blue, foul-tasting. Four Warm Currents tried to hold on to the exact taste of Six Bubbling Thermals’s love.

One tentacle stopped working. Four Warm Currents compensated with the others, shifting weight as another lance of sound missed narrowly to the side. The ice was almost within reach now, cold, scarred, layered with frost. With one final, tendon-snapping surge, Four Warm Currents heaved the coring charge upward, slapping the detonation trigger as it went. The spiked device crunched into the ice and clung. Four Warm Currents tasted something new mixing into the blood, reaching amber tendrils through the leaking blue. Triumph.

“Get out,” Four Warm Currents signed, clumsily, slowly. “It’s too late now.”

The pursuers stared for a moment, adrift, then turned and shot back down the tunnel, howling a sonar warning to the others coming behind. Four Warm Currents’s tentacles were going numb. Every body part ached or seared or felt like it was splitting apart. There would be no high-speed exit down the tunnel. Maybe no exit at all.

As the coring charge signed out its detonation sequence with mechanical tendrils, Four Warm Currents swam, slowly, to the side wall. A deep crevice ran along the length. Maybe deep enough. Four Warm Currents squeezed, twisted, contorted, tucking inside the shelter bit by bit. It was an excruciating fit. Even a child would have preferred a wider fissure. Four Warm Currents’s eyes squeezed shut and saw Six Bubbling Thermals smiling, saw the egg sacs glossy and bright.

The coring charge went off like a volcano erupting. Such devices were designed, in theory, to deliver all but a small fraction of the explosive yield forward. The tiny fraction of blowback was still enough to shatter cracks through the tunnel walls and send a sonic boom rippling down its depth, an expanding globe of boiling water that scalded Four Warm Currents’s exposed skin. The tentacle that hadn’t managed to fit inside was turned to mush in an instant, spewing denatured flesh and blood in a hot cloud. All of Four Warm Currents’s senses sang with the explosion, tasting the fierce chemicals, feeling the heat, seeing with sonar the flayed ice crumbling all around.

Then, at last, it was over. Four Warm Currents slithered out of the crack, sloughing skin on its edges, and drifted slowly upward. It was a maelstrom of shredded ice and swirling gases, bubbles twisting in furious wreaths. Four Warm Currents floated up through the vortex, numb to the stinging debris and swathes of scalding water. The roof of the world was gone, leaving a jagged dark hole in the ice, a void that had been a dream and a nightmare for cycles and cycles. Four Warm Currents rose to it, entranced.

One trembling tentacle reached upward and across the rubicon. The sensation was indescribable. Four Warm Currents pulled the tentacle back, stared with bleary eyes, and found it still intact. The other side was scorching cold, a thousand tingling pinpricks, a gauze of gas like nothing below. Nothing Four Warm Currents had ever dreamed or imagined.

The chief engineer bobbed and bled, then finally gathered the strength for one last push, breaking the surface of the water completely. The feel of gas on skin was gasping, shivering. Four Warm Currents craned slowly backward, turning to face the void, and looked up. Another ocean, far deeper and vaster than theirs, but not empty. Not dark. Not at all. Maybe it was a beautiful hallucination, brought about by the creeping failure of sense organs. Maybe it wasn’t.

Four Warm Currents watched the new world with eyes and mouth, secreting final messages down into the water, love for Six Bubbling Thermals, for Three Jagged Reefs, for the children who would sign softly but laugh wildly, and then, as numbing darkness began to seep across blurring eyes, under peeling skin, a sole suggestion for a necessary name.

##((

Originally published in Clockwork Phoenix 5, edited by Mike Allen.

Some of Them Closer

Marissa Lingen

####Coming back to Earth was not the immediate shock they expected it to be for me. It was something, certainly, but I’d been catching up on the highlights of the news as it cascaded back to the ship on our relativistic return trip, and I never knew the island where we landed, when we left home twenty of our years ago and a hundred of theirs, so I expected it to look foreign to me, and it did. The Sun was a little more yellow than on New Landing, the plants friendlier.

But I never thought of myself as an Earther. Even with the new system, hardly any of us do. I thought of myself as from Montreal. Quebecoise. Canadian, even. But Earther? No. I am far more provincial than the colonists whose home I built will ever be.

I flew into the new place instead of Dorval. It looked like Dorval used to. It looked nearly exactly like Dorval used to, and I had a twinge of discomfort. The floors were curiously springy, though, which made me feel like something was different, and that was reassuring. There isn’t an Old Spacers’ Legion or anything like that to meet people like me coming in from off-planet—they did that on the little Brazilian island where we landed—but there was a department for Cultural Integration, meant for people traveling from elsewhere on Earth. They assigned me to a representative of the government, who greeted me in a French whose accent was nearly my own. To my ear it sounded more English, with the round vowels, but even with the new system I thought it might be rude to say that to a Quebecoise.

The English-sounding French-speaker gave me a key to the four-room apartment they’d gotten me, not far from the Guy-Concordia Metro station. I told her I could take the Metro to it, but she smiled and said no, they’d have to get my things out of storage for me anyway. So we did that. There were only three boxes. Once you do the math on what will keep for a hundred years, it’s a lot easier to give away the things you can’t take with you. I gave them to my sister, who died, and whatever was left, she probably gave to her son, who had also died, or her daughter, who was retired and living comfortably in Senegal last I heard. So what I had left myself fit in three small plastic boxes, all labeled “Mireille Ayotte NL000014.”

We terraformers all got two-digit numbers for our colonies, NL for New Landing, 14 because there were thirteen team members signed up before they took me.

There was never any doubt they were going to take me. It was just a matter of where I wanted to go, and I wanted New Landing because the survey probes made the plants look promising, which I think they were. When I wasn’t catching up on Earth culture for the last hundred years, I was looking at reports from the other colonies, and I thought ours did the best with plant adaptation so far.

I had to start thinking of New Landing as “theirs,” not “ours.” I could go back, of course, but by the time I got there they’d have gone on without me as well, and I’d just have the same thing as Montreal all over again: a city full of things that seem like they should look familiar, but they don’t.

They had furnished my apartment with stylish clothes and furniture, and everything felt squishy and slightly damp. There was also entertainment in my handheld, and there were more tutorials in case I hadn’t had enough of them. The cupboards were stocked with food. They thought of everything. There was nothing for me to do but hang a very old photograph on the wall and go to bed. The bed, at least, was not squishy or damp. It felt like a ship’s bunk or a colony housing bed. They could do that properly still, and so I could sleep.

My great-niece came to show me around the next day—dutifully, because of course we’d never met before to have any personal relationship. Her name was Claire-Nathalie, and her clothes looked like they’d been crumpled and left in a damp corner for a month, so I knew she was very stylish. She was absolutely correct in her manner, friendly without presuming closeness, curious without being unduly inquisitive. She offered that I could stay with her. I saw my long-dead sister in her serene features. I declined, and she seemed to expect that I would, so no hard feelings there. I told her I liked the little apartment. I almost did; certainly I liked it better than staying with a stranger.

She looked around at my things. “They’ve given you new handhelds, thank God,” she said. “I can’t think what you’d do with a hundred-year-old computer, truly I don’t.”

“Nor I,” I said. “They’ve been catching us up on the advances on the return trip. Not much else to do on the return trip but catch up.”

She relaxed a bit. “Oh, good. Much easier that way.”

“Yes.” I did not say that catching up on that much of human culture and history made me realize how very bad the agencies were at picking out which of the hundreds of novels I would actually want to read, which of the hundreds of comics would make me laugh. They could tell me the recognized classics, but hardly anybody wants those and only those.

It had also made me realize how many of the events that are news when you live somewhere are pointless when you don’t.

I did not say these things to my great-niece.

Claire-Nathalie said, “I suppose you’ll have the others, then?”

“Others?”

“The others who have returned, they’ll be . . . like a peer group for you. A community.”

I looked at her carefully. She seemed earnest. “Very few others return, dear—niece.” I almost called her dear child, but as she was perhaps three experiential years younger than me I thought that might go badly. “The colonists want to go to stay, unless things go very badly. It’s the ship crews and the terraformers who come back, and not all of those.”

“Oh.” She fidgeted, and I thought she was contemplating Sunday dinners with Old Auntie Mireille, who was not even decently old, if she couldn’t find me a buddy or two.

I had pity on her and said, “Of course there are lots of people who are interested in finding out whether they’d want to go. I expect I’ll speak to the training groups as well as possibly to some gengineering garden hobbyists.”

“Gengineering? Oh, you mean modders.”

“Modders.” I accepted the correction as gracefully as I could. “And of course there’s so much to catch up on, I expect I’ll spend the first few months just taking in restaurants and shows.”

Claire-Nathalie brightened and began to chatter away about what she’d seen and done and had done to her for entertainment, and I dutifully agreed to wander around having her favorite restaurants, theaters, and what she called “venues” pointed out to me. By the time we were taking the Metro back, I was barely answering her monolog, merely interjecting monosyllables when she seemed to want them. I could not stop noticing how much squashier the floors were in the Metro, both on the trains and on the platforms.

They had also changed the decoration to include a great deal more wood, of which I approved, and gotten rid of the glazed tile installations, of which I did not. When Claire-Nathalie paused for breath, I said something about the tiles, which she ignored, and then something about the floors.

“Oh you poor darling!” she said. “I had just no idea that you lived in the times when your footing was so unnatural. It must have been terribly bad for the feet. Did you have to have a special, what do you call them, podiatrist? I expect everybody in the past did.”

It was a moment before I could bring myself to answer. “No, in fact I didn’t know anyone who did.”

“Really? Well, that’s extraordinarily lucky, isn’t it?”

I said I supposed it was and then turned my energies to convincing Claire-Nathalie to get off at her own Metro stop and let me find my way home. They had added three lines and who knew how many stops since I’d last lived in Montreal, but it didn’t matter—any fool could listen for the stop name or poke their handheld to alert them.

Once I’d told Claire-Nathalie that, I was afraid I would be the fool who couldn’t. But I made it off the train and onto the squashy platform stairs myself. I resolved to never, ever contact her again, and possibly to ignore any attempts at contact she attempted to make. Possibly everyone on Earth would feel the same about my feet and the advisability of finding my own kind. Still, it was worth finding out.

After a few days of handheld exploration in my apartment, I ventured out in hopes of finding something, anything that looked familiar. Not far from home, I did: the Hungarian restaurant was in the same place, the striped awnings the same. Of course they had probably been replaced a dozen times since I had last seen them, and I wasn’t sure whether the name was the same or not.

I went in, and I would have sworn it was the same woman seating me, and the same cakes in the display case, although of course they had probably both been replaced with the awnings. The cucumber salad was the same, but most of the things that had had beef in them before were made with fowl or lamb. I asked the waiter.

“You are not from here, I can hear it, though your French is of course lovely,” he said in outrageously Hungarian-accented French. “Beef is almost entirely African and South Asian now. You are perhaps from Africa?”

“I have most recently come from a Brazilian island,” I said truthfully.

“Ah, Brazil!” he said. “Well, they can afford whatever they like, can’t they? And on islands one supposes it’s easier to keep the cattle isolated. But here it is all birds and sheep. They stay healthier for cheaper. It is very traditional. We have always eaten this way.”

“I see,” I said. “Thank you.”

“And would you perhaps like some cake? We have very fine cake here.”

“I see that you have,” I said, but I ordered palacsinta anyway, wondering if the farmers’ cheese inside was made from sheep milk. It was divine anyway. If I closed my eyes it was just the same. If I opened them, it was not that much different. Just little bits.

This began to bother me more and more.

I spoke at the garden enthusiasts’ club meeting, and I called them “modders” just as Claire-Nathalie had. They received me with mild hobbyist enthusiasm. They served me sweets that all seemed to have bits of pear in them. I was not changing their lives. It certainly did not change mine.

I looked on the net for former terraformer classmates who had gone off to the colonies. Only one of them had come back to Montreal: Stephane D’Abbadie, three years older than me to begin with. I had no idea how many years older he would be now. He had left while I was still in classes and come back while I was still in transit back from New Landing. I didn’t know much about his colony, Outpost. It was older than New Landing, but not by much. I had thought to catch up on Earth, but not on the handful of other colonies, and my news feeds were set to Earth, New Landing, and “general interest,” whatever that meant these days.

I thought briefly about reading up on Outpost before going to see Stephane, but I decided not to. I don’t know why I didn’t think of messaging him like a polite person, to let him know I was on my way or find out if he wanted to see me. We had been friends, but not good friends. And that was two decades and three planets ago.

When he answered the door, he looked just the same, but his dark skin was an ashier brown than I remembered, and he had started tinting his hair red over the black, so it looked like a mass of curled cherry wood shavings. I didn’t even remember what my own hair was like when he left for Outpost. I opened my mouth and found it dry and stuck.

“Hello,” he said. He didn’t move to invite me in, or even to indicate that he knew who I was.

“It’s me, Mireille, I’m back,” I said.

“I see that,” said Stephane.

“I can deal with them putting pears in everything now,” I said, “but I can’t get my head around the squashy floors in the Metro.”

He peered at me, and then a smile broke over his face. “All right, Mireille, come in.” As he made us tea and set out some grapes, he said, “You should feel grateful you’ve come home to a place where there’s snow. In all the cities where they don’t have to clear snow, the squashy floors are everywhere. They’ve decided they’re more natural.”

I tried to smile. “Natural. Everyone wants to call their pet theories natural but us, Stephane.”

He raised an eyebrow. “How do you know I don’t, after twenty-eight years?”

“Twenty-three for me,” I said. “No, but I know. Because terraformers don’t do that. We know how easily it could go one way or another. We know that we’re not in the business of natural.”

He said, “I haven’t been in the business of much of anything since I came home.”

“I haven’t figured out what I’d like to do, either,” I said. “I have my savings.”

“Yes.”

“That doesn’t fill the days.”

“No.”

I huffed a sigh of frustration. “Well, then, what are you doing?”

“Drugs and meaningless sex, mostly,” he said.

I blinked. He didn’t.

“You’re joking,” I said tentatively.

“I am, actually,” he said, and the grin returned. “No, I’ll show you what I’ve been doing, if you like. It’s not the least bit scandalous. Or at least it shouldn’t be. I’m afraid I don’t have the hang of what’s a scandal and what isn’t yet.”

“On New Landing, the amount of loafing I’ve been doing would be a scandal.”

“Outpost, too,” he said. “Come on.”

He had the keys to a shed in the back garden of his apartment building, and it was fully powered, not the tool shed I would have assumed. When he took me outside, I thought gardening, but the shed smelled of wood shavings and varnish, and sawdust scuffed under our feet.

“No squashy floors here, either,” he said, smiling. He opened a cabinet and handed me a small wooden toy, dark and light together. It had wheels and hooks.

“A train car?”

“I make wooden toys. Mostly trains. Some trucks and things. I did it on Outpost from time to time—the children loved it, but my time was mostly taken—well, you know.”

“Your children?” I asked, though I knew it was the wrong question.

“No. I never . . . ”

“Neither did I.”

“Ah, well,” he said gravely.

I fiddled with the train car, running it back and forth along my hand. “The wheels are really lovely.”

“Thank you. Do you want to see how I made them?”

I thought about it. “Why not?”

So he showed me the lathe on which he shaped the wheels, and their evenness seemed inevitable. Before I knew it, it was late afternoon, and I had carved out the rough shape of a caboose while watching Stephane do the detailing on an engine with far more in the way of scrolls and curlicues than the plain little train car he’d handed me.

“I would say let’s get takeout,” I said, “but they put lamb on their pizzas now, I expect.”

“Mutton pepperoni is surprisingly edible once you’re used to it,” he said. “The spices cover a multitude of sins. I know a place.”

We didn’t have pepperoni at all in New Landing. I don’t know how I could have forgotten it. It was worth the mutton, every bite.

“Do you sell the trains?” I asked when we’d finished the pizza.

“I haven’t tried, not here. I don’t know where I’d start. On Outpost there was always someone who wanted what I’d made and happened to have a bushel of gengineered—er, modified, sorry—plums or a new tea mug or something.”

“I still say gengineered, too,” I said. “We never stopped on New Landing. Well. Maybe they have now.”

“Maybe.”

I tried to make other friends, but the only person I could really talk to was Stephane. He didn’t seem to have other friends, either; at least there was no evidence of them. While I thought of him as the only person I could really talk to, quite often we didn’t talk about ourselves at all. He taught me to sand and carve and shape the wood, and we talked about projects, things we’d done, things we’d like to do. It was easier to come up with things I’d like to do while he was there, and I think the same was true for him.

Elsewhere it was hopeless. The clerks in shops spoke to me in English. They would break off their conversations with each other in French and ask in English if they could help me. When I answered in French they always switched back, but that had never happened to me before, not above once or twice, and now it was all the time. I think they could tell that there was something slightly different about me, and even after a hundred years, “foreign” still means “English” in Quebec.

I think that might have been comforting if they hadn’t meant me, and if their French hadn’t sounded so much more English than mine.

My only fear with Stephane was that he might think I wanted more of our relationship than I did. I have never been any good at romance—perhaps if I had, I’d have formed roots and stayed on New Landing—but we were young enough yet—well, some people were young enough yet until the day they died. But we were strong, healthy, middle-aged people. We could go back to the colonies if we liked; they’d still take us. And if that wasn’t out of the question, surely I couldn’t count on him thinking romance was.

I have always hated it when people fall in love with me. I hate having to give the speeches.

One day we were working together in the shed. It was a glorious day, the kind of bright green things turn after a hard rain. “Come on, we can’t stay in here all day,” Stephane said to me. “Come and get an ice cream.”

“Is it pear ice cream?”

“You like pear ice cream. And it doesn’t have any mutton in it. Come on.”

It was not the same ice cream shop that had been down by the river when I’d left, but it was just as good. I ordered chocolate, which came without pear, and Stephane ordered banana, which was exotic, newly revived just before our return. We sat on a bench and looked out at the St. Lawrence, and the ice cream was good, and the river was lovely. A man was making balloon animals for a passel of children, and the children looked just right, because children had always looked rumpled. One of them dropped a giraffe by the bench as she dashed past in hot pursuit of her brother.

I picked up the balloon giraffe the child had left behind. It felt like it had been dipped in syrup, but my fingers came away clean.

“It’s not nitrile,” said Stephane.

“What is it?”

“Some other flexible polymer. I don’t know. But people started getting nitrile allergies, so they replaced it the way they replaced latex before we were born. Colony kids have a lot more environmental stimulus. Not so many allergies.”

I put the balloon giraffe down again, carefully. It looked just like a balloon animal ought, lumpy and lopsided. But it was sticky.

“If everything was different, I don’t think I would have minded as much,” I said.

“You would have,” said Stephane.

“Do you think so?”

“You are perpetually minding just a little,” he said. “If it was more you’d be a malcontent.”

“Oh, thank you very much!”

“And if it was less you’d never have gone to New Landing in the first place.”

I thought about it. Perhaps he was right. I tried to remember how I’d felt when I lived in Montreal before, but I was so young then. It was mostly the feeling of being a teenager that stuck with me, and that was not the difference. So I thought about my time on New Landing. I hadn’t stayed. The others had. But Stephane hadn’t stayed on Outpost, either.

“The stars actually were closer then,” I said out loud. “It’s not that I’m saying I think they were or it felt like they were. We’re in an expansionary universe. The stars were actually closer then.”

“On the average,” said Stephane. “Galactic spirals are, by definition, not linear places. Some of the stars are closer now.”

“I suppose that’s something.”

“I think it is.”

We looked out at the canal together. It felt like a date, except that I had no desire to be on a date with Stephane. I was relieved when he grinned sidelong at me and said, “Well. Want to have another go with the lathe?”

I was getting better at it. My whorls and curlicues were not nearly as good as Stephane’s for decorating the fancy trains, but I could make every piece of the plain ones myself now, wheels and axles and the lot, and do it just as well as he did. I also roughed out the carving on the fancier work so that he had less to do, although he never minded.

It was lovely, but it wasn’t a life. Not a whole one. Not enough of one.

“Mireille, I have to talk to you,” said Stephane one day, and I set down the chisel and thought, oh, here it comes.

“All right,” I said.

“I can’t stay here.”

“What do . . . where are you going? Back to Outpost?”

“It’ll be just the same on Outpost. I’ll have been gone so long.”

I had thought of that, too. Whenever I tried to fantasize about going home to New Landing, I knew that relativity had beaten me, and it wouldn’t be home any more at all.

“Where, then?”

“One of the new ones. I had hoped you’d come with me.”

“Me?”

“You’re my friend.”

I let out a long breath. It was the right thing to say. “I want to be your friend.”

“I know it, Mireille.”

“I don’t know what else I want, though. I don’t think I want to terraform full-time any more.” I chewed on my lip and thought about it.

“No, we did that. We could have a little farm each,” he said.

“You could have a farm,” I said firmly. “I want an orchard.”

“Orchards are nice.”

“And we would be the crazy toymakers out on the edge of town, and when the terraformers really truly needed us we could help out.”

“But only when they really truly needed us.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Yes.”

“I think so.”

“I think so too.”

“What is the name of this new colony?” I asked. “If you’d meant to go back to Outpost or take me back to New Landing, you’d have said. So what’s this one?”

He grimaced. “Mesoasperia.”

“Really?”

“I’m sorry. It’s the one that’ll take us; I checked. Otherwise we’d have to wait another eight months.”

“That’s too long.”

“I know it.”

“Well, we can start poking the children to nickname it. Children are good at nicknames.”

“Children are awful at nicknames,” said Stephane. “We’ll find ourselves living on Boogerbreath Five.”

“The toymakers of Boogerbreath Five,” I said. “We’ll make them remember pepperoni.”

“And forget squashy floors and pears.”

“No, that won’t do,” I said. “The floors yes, but I can’t do completely without pears. A few pears only. Pears in moderation.”

“The pear-moderate pepperoni toymakers of Boogerbreath Five,” he said. “I think it’ll do.”

It would. I was nearly satisfied it would.

##((

Originally published in Analog, January 2011.

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

David Gerrold

####David Gerrold is the author of over 50 books, hundreds of articles and columns, and over a dozen television episodes. He is a classic sci-fi writer that will go down in history as having created some of the most popular and redefining scripts, books, and short stories in the genre.

Rich Larson

####Rich Larson was born in Galmi, Niger, has lived in Canada, USA, and Spain, and is now based in Prague, Czech Republic. He is the author of Annex and Cypher, as well as over a hundred short stories—some of the best of which can be found in his collection Tomorrow Factory. His work has been translated into Polish, Czech, French, Italian, Vietnamese, and Chinese.

Marissa Lingen

####Marissa Lingen is a freelance writer who lives in Minnesota with two large men and one small dog.

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 seven-time Hugo Award Finalist 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 Year series. His latest anthology The Eagle has Landed, was published in July by Night Shade Books. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two sons.

##((Thank you for reading Forever Magazine.