- Author Page
- one last shot at redemption
- Horse myth
- Give Us This Day
- The Fields and the Fire
- Like A Knife
Above his head arches a dome of stars set on a field of blue enamel. They are a fairly accurate representation of the major constellations, although Kochab, rather than Polaris, has been emphasized with a double ring. Either ancient, or deliberately formed to appear so. The other figure is female, and seated facing right. She is veiled and bends over what appears to be a table or a workbench, although the objects upon it are concealed by her hands and the framing motif. The pattern in her flounced skirt is, upon closer inspection, composed of letters and words engraved along the lines of the embossed folds. Not all form coherent words or phrases; however, the following can be made out:
It was almost anticlimactic - after all that dreaming about the possibilities for extraterrestrial life, all those attempts at stretching the minds of astronomers and Earth's greatest thinkers; after all those suggestions that the first living things found on another planet would probably be single-celled bacteria, or isopodic, or sentient clouds within the atmospheres of gas giants; after all those exhortations that mankind must, must beware of falling into the trap of anthropocentrism - that they were humanoid.
Not exactly, of course, like the actors in rubber foreheads that filled old television shows. But the Solectum - the best approximation of their name a human mouth could produce - were tetrapedral, with the hind limbs specialized for locomotion and the forelimbs for manipulation, and cephalized, dependent mainly on the sense of sight for navigation and sound for communication. In the face of all those facts, the exoskeleton, the obligate marine and littoral lifestyle, the pincers and myriad spines were almost irrelevant. The brain read them as "people" without another thought, and extended that empathy that the predictions had also targeted with unwarranted pessimism.
Communication were established with greater ease than anyone had previously believed possible - after all, since their language was auditory-based it was little different to translate phrases into Nichizhic than to translate them into another human language. And though this was a more hesitant conclusion, they seemed, in many psychological ways, to approach mankind as well. At the very least, the first awkward transmissions certainly suggested that the Solectum were as excited to finally meet real live aliens as the humans were, filled as they were with phrases that translated into things like "fullest respect" and "mutually beneficial" and "great pleasure" and -
After that, bases were set up with surprising speed - one just outside of Geneva, Switzerland, for the Solectum researchers to inhabit while investigating humans in situ, and one near the coast of Aske' (called Hakel-239k to the humans)'s largest ocean, for the opposite situation. It served, depending on rotation, somewhere between one hundred and two hundred biologists, chemists, physicists, forensic architects, anthro(they were going to have to come up with a new word, now, weren't they?)pologists and sociologists, administrators and geologists, all yearning to understand this new world, with its new inhabitants.
Though strictly speaking the atmosphere within the base maintained the same partial pressures as a temperate sea level atmosphere upon Earth, it felt thicker, curiosity exhaled like carbon dioxide. Mankind flung itself into first contact the same way it had approached every other new development in its history - with a mix of apprehension and fumbling eagerness, hungry for its first taste of a world beyond its own bowshock.
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Dr. Joseph McFarlane, xenologist, was sitting cross-legged on a beach in a turquoise afternoon. Out of respect for Joseph's obligately-terrestrial nature, the conversation was taking place above the surface of the water; his three Solectum interlocutors occasionally submerged themselves under the shallow waves to re-wet their gills. To call what he was doing specimen collection, like the xenobiologists he could see wading a few hundred meters further along the beach with their knives and nets and bags, would not have been far from the truth, although it required only a dictation machine and a tablet for him to take notes with. Joseph's specialty was narrative, and myth, and particularly how cultures created their self-images through etiological tales. To which end, his specimens were stories, in part or in full, and only out of necessity did he have to speak to living beings, in whom they were contained.
Viukth, Skephe, and Onor seemed positively delighted to volunteer, and to have someone to whom even the most basic of their fairytales would seem new and fresh and interesting. They had been telling stories and stories into his dictaphone all morning, and occasionally interrupting each other with corrections, or variations, or excited commentary. It was really very endearing, seeing these mature aliens' sheer glee at revealing their culture - although perhaps they thought the same of him, how cute it was that a human would come down and sit in their sand for the sole purpose of listening.
- and then Get'ko took xyr mate and they travelled to the Rkea seamount, and xe built a home, just according to xyr specifications. And xe had twenty-six children, who xe always brought up according to what xe had learned: to always be prepared, for the sea is bigger than any one of us and is not safe, even for the best of the wildspeople, and how to hunt and gather and run their own homestead so that even so, they could coexist with it. And they lived happily there, until they did so no longer. Viukth lifted xyr lowest pair of palps in the gesture that roughly correlated to a grin.
"Thank you, Viukth." He jotted down a few codes onto the tablet. "I liked that one, quite a lot."
Will it be helpful?
"Absolutely."
Skephe made an abortive movement forwards, but then, perhaps realizing that it would be very forward of xem to touch the human without permission, drove xyr forelimbs down at the edge of the water instead, splattering drops all over his knees. What do you want to hear next?
"Allow me just a second." Joseph flipped the window to the notes he had written the day before, to hopefully guide his comparison of Solectum myths with human ones. He scrolled down through the list of ATU codes and personal shorthand, finding a blank space where…
Had he really missed this? The absolute most common theme of all? That would definitely skew his data.
"How did - how have you always been told the world came to be?"
What do you mean?
"All this." He indicated their general surroundings. "Aske'. The sun. The moons. The ocean. Have you any tales about their origin, or have they simply always been here?"
Skephe tapped xyr pincers together. Not the one we worked out with your physicists, regarding nebular collapse…
"No, no. Before your people had discovered that process."
Ah, that one. The cosmogony. Xe splashed water onto xyr face and smoothed back xyr clusters of antennae. Well, before there was everything, there was nothing. The universe was entirely empty, except for Kykyk. They had learned quite early on that the Solectum were overwhelmingly monotheistic, with only a few isolated societies adding other deities to the number, and those seemed to be later, convergent evolutions, surrounded by apotheotic legends. The ancestral state was, almost definitely, monotheism, and it had been highly conserved. Kykyk was one of the names held by the single god in Nichizhic, though there were many more that were used to try and highlight xyr different aspects when needed.
And Kykyk was alone, and xe was lonely. And so xe called for there to be rain, and the rain fell for a million years until it had filled up the sea. But there was nothing in the sea, and so Kykyk called for there to be stone, and the stone rose up from below to make the borders of the sea. And xe moulded the land into seamounts, and shelves, and canyons, and beaches, and cliffs, but there was still nothing on them. So Kykyk took xyr harpoon and stirred the sea, stirred it until it began to make bubbles, which coalesced into plants, and animals, and some of them xe lifted onto the land and some of them xe left in the water. And xe told the ones that were on the land to migrate, and climb up the cliffs and into the marshes and plains, and have many offspring, so that xe might not be lonely when xe climbed upon the land. And the same things xe said to the ones that were in the water, so that xe might also have companionship when xe swam within the ocean.
And when they had taken xyr words to heart, and departed to find their niches, Kykyk sank to the seabed, contented, and xe unbound xyr face, for the power of xyr presence is greater than the heat of a hydrothermal vent, and very little can withstand it. But xe saw that there were still some few animals that had not yet departed, and as the warmth of xem flooded out into that region the creatures were caught within it, and overturned in the convection. And Kykyk took up again xyr veil to cover xemself, and xe grieved, believing that xe had slain the things that xe had but barely made.
But the creatures spoke, and there were eighteen of them in all: "We die not," they said. "You have not slain us, but now that we have seen you, lord - must we depart? For you are more beautiful than everything else in the ocean, and in your pincers is life. How then may we be separated from it?"
And Kykyk was pleased, and spoke to them. "Nonetheless to you I say the same: go out, and migrate, and have offspring. Exult in your existence as I exult in it, for as companions I love you, and as beings I have placed within the waters.
"Yet your place shall be special unto me, for you have seen me as I am, and know me, as I know you. You shall never be apart from me, though you swim to the ends of the sea; my glory shall radiate through all the waters within the world, for I am Kykyk the maker, and hold you ever in my heart." And these eighteen were our first ancestors, and from them come all of us that lived or live or ever shall.
"And then what happened?" he asked.
His interlocutors chittered with confusion. What do you mean, and then what happened? they asked. We migrated, and had offspring, and built towns and cities. And now we are as we are. Was this not implied?
"Of course." Joseph bowed his head self-consciously. "I do apologize."
I mean, we have more specific ones about how Kykyk changed the world after. Like how xe made the Great Fan for the sake of the flatfishes, if you want those, when a turbidity current wiped out their niche in the north -
"Slow down!" Laughing, he clicked the dictaphone back on and pulled up another page for his notes, typing Great Fan at the top and hoping he would remember what that meant when it came time to annotate. "All right. I'm ready now."
Well, back when -
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(See, on Earth, here is what would have happened then:
Once the earth had been fashioned and made firm, and the waters set to encircle it, and the sun and moon placed in the sky, and the first man had been made, the gods would have made a woman, and named her All Gifts, and sent her to the first man, providing her with a jar which she was never to open. But she would have defied them, thinking she knew better than they did, and would have released upon herself and her husband and all her descendants after her death, and illness, and misery, leaving them clutching nothing but hope, and even that in vain.
Or the first man would have forged for himself weapons, once the god taught to him tool-making, and would have slain all those around him in his barbarity. And his god, in shame, would have turned his face from him, and retreated to the faraway heaven.
Or the god would have simply buried mankind in a hole, after they became too arrogant and claimed themselves above him.
Or sent the message of death to them through an intermediary lizard, when they did not observe his voice, and they would be burned to ashes.
Or the god would have built himself a garden, and set it at the centre of the new-made world, and filled it with all manner of goodly things. Every flowering plant, and every bush that gives its fruit for food, every singing bird and beast that runs upon the ground, all living things that are or ever have been in the world would have inhabited this paradisiacal place. And at the centre of it the god would have planted a yam tree, whose leaves would have been as wide as the elephant's ears, and green as emeralds, and whose flowers would have opened as the sun going up in scarlet at the dawn. And giving to mankind all the world, the god would have forbade them only to eat of this tree, saying that if they did, they would surely die. And mankind would have stolen a yam and eaten anyway, and brought down their own doom upon their heads.
Or it would have been a banana. Or a quince. Or an apple.
Whatever way, this is what the human myths would have said, from the very beginning: we are broken, and we know we are broken. We have wronged our gods, and this wrong follows us age after age, step after step. What a distinction we bear! - to have carved out a hole where our own spirits should be, and to bleed ruin from the wound through all our history.
And to be so unrepentant of the deed that we do not look upon these tales as moral lessons; we have no hope that they shall teach us to refrain from sinning, only to explain why it occurs.)
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Sitting on his small cot that night, in the quarters he semi-shared with two other researchers (semi- indicating that extra sheets had been hung from the support beams of the base, producing more private, if smaller, stalls for each inhabitant), Joseph looked back over his notes. There was something that had been prickling in his mind throughout the afternoon - as he had returned for lunch, and gathered more tales until the sun had been sinking, and then returned to the base again for dinner, and had joined in an impromptu game of Kemps (biologists against geologists against sociology-sphere), and was still poking insistently at his brainstem now.
As species went, the Solectum had very little intraspecific, extended-phenotypical diversity. Across all their world, they spoke only twelve languages, which shared enough resemblances to be very clearly all in the same language family. Their architecture was similar, and their tools; family structure consistently encompassed a single mated pair and their descendants for two generations, but no farther. Some of this could be accounted for by the reduced habitat variability in the ocean as opposed to on land, without its specific biomes - but that did not seem sufficient, to explain the entirety of their homogeneity.
After Skephe had told him that cosmogonical myth, he had asked for others - had even taken advantage of the Solectum's offering of their non-material archives (more easily translated, and less easily damaged) to do a preliminary trawl for potential variations on it. Nothing. Every society on Aske' seemed to tell that same tale, with those same elements, to explain where the world had come from.
Joseph could not in good conscience call it strange - after all, how many species' narrative traditions had he access to for comparison? Only humans, and a sample size of one did not statistical significance make - but nonetheless, something inside him rebelled. Would not allow him to chalk this discomfort with the apparently universal Solectum cosmogony simply up to different selective pressures, or different psychologies. Surely, there was something more significant about it.
No folklorist would be caught dead without a collection of tales to use for comparison, even if he had to strip them all down to the bare essential ATU codes to fit them on his hard drive. Maybe re-reading a human cosmogony would help him determine what was rubbing him the wrong way? And even if it didn't, even if this turned out to be an unwarranted curiosity, it could help kick his brain out of the rut. Joseph saved and closed his notes and found an ancient reference folder, clicking through a nested row until he found the one he had labelled Origin/Etio. A chain of downloaded documents, notes, and scans descended ladder-like from it when he opened it.
Nyambe and Kamunu, of the Lozi.
The theft of fire, Prometheus, and Epimetheus, of classical Greece.
Genesis.
He read until his eyes began to tire, and he feared his head would rattle with words if he shook it, and the teeth of the gears of his thoughts had slid together and meshed, oiled-smooth. Of course Joseph McFarlane, xenologist, had been blinded. But Joseph McFarlane, layman, blew out a wondering breath and lifted his head, staring unseeing at the bright sheet before him.
No wonder their cosmogony had seemed truncated - the Solectum had no origin-of-death myth, no myth of a fall or a rebellion against the divine. No concept of having been reduced from a state greater than they were now. No - they were as they had been in their first ideal form, still, changeless and pure.
A lot of ink, paper, and bits had been spilled, when those first hesitant transmissions had arrived, on what first contact would mean to taxonomy, or botany, or to societal structure, or to philosophy. Only a very small portion of that had targeted spirituality. But even back when mankind had thought itself the only sapient species in the whole universe, the Church had wondered whether aliens would have also been redeemed through Jesus. Would they have needed it? Would they have had an Original Sin?
…apparently, no.
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Joseph sat back down,
He lifted his hand back out of the water - not especially sure why, because it was not as though the Fall was going to seep black and sticky as petroleum out through his skin and pollute their crystal-clear bay.
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Meep! Meep! Meep! The tiny alarm on his watch dragged Joseph back into unpleasant consciousness. Cracking an eye, he fumbled for his left wrist and hit the button. The sound obediently died.
He peered at the small face. 8:10 AM. The same as he set it every single day, and Aske' had less of an orbital tilt than Earth, so it matched up fairly well to the solar cycle every single day too. Sunrise would have been the better part of an hour ago. Enough time for his circadian rhythm to start in on the waking-up procedure.
Maybe it had missed it, today. He felt like lead weights had been attached to his limbs - no, further, injected inside his bones. It hurt, to hold up his head. It hurt to breathe. To exist.
Somehow, he managed to turn over, until he was staring at the ceiling. On the other side of the hung sheet
He glanced again at his watch. 8:30. Twenty minutes wasted, but if he hurried, or neglected breakfast (no hardship there, even thinking of food -), he could be almost back on schedule. If he could just get up. If -
9:10.
10:10.
12:00. Boots through the hallways, clattering of equipment as people returned for lunch. Someone said something, out in the hallway; a guffaw in response that lanced through the walls, and his skull. Joseph winced.
They clattered away again, and he was grateful. He squeezed his eyes shut again.
3:00.
5:00. More people, or maybe the same ones. Dinner. Distantly Joseph thought he should probably force himself to join them - would someone worry, if he hadn't been seen for an entire day? Not to mention that he hadn't eaten either previous meal.
Oh well. It wasn't as though he deserved to eat, anyway.
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You were not there, Viukth admonished, the next day. Why were you not there? You could have told me. I would have done something else, and my parent and grandparent too, than wait all morning, if you'd told me.
Joseph scrubbed his hand over his face. "I apologize," he sighed. "If I had -"
Viukth softened. Were you unwell? xe asked.
He had never been well. Sin-sick and poisoned since the day he was born - since before that. Since he had been conceived by monstrous parents into a monstrous species on a world they had dragged sullied down into the Fall with them. Never once in his life had he even entered into sight of wellness, but because it was not technically a lie (and that was shame too, stuck burr-like into his throat, that he think that made it in any way better) - "Yes. I was."
But you are better now?
No. "Yes." As though it were that easy. As though he could simply thrust a hand into his chest cavity and pull it out, that sin, that terrible heritage, like it were a worm that had dug into his flesh and not something worked into every atom of his body. As though he would not have to be destroyed and built again, to be free, and he were not selfish enough to still wish for such an existence.
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We die not, they had spoken to Kykyk, in that first moment of acceptance. And throughout all their history had maintained that communion, that relationship never changing or fading.
And what had mankind taken up, for itself? Even knowing its truth?
And ye shall surely die.
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Somehow, he found himself standing before the door of the base chaplain. It was the middle of the morning, which meant he ought to have been working, either in his own small quarters or out in the field again - but what had he really expected? No work had been getting done anyway, these past weeks, and there would be no worth in it even if he did.
"How can I face them again?" He was too tired to try and stop his voice from shaking, or the tear from pressing its way between his right eyelids and meandering down his cheek. "When I am - this?
"We were not made for death," he said, "nor born ever to die."
"John?"
"Tolkien, actually." Father Gahol smiled.
"He shouldn't have had to!" The intensity of it startled even him, and instinctively his hand jerked up, like it could catch the words and cram them back between his teeth.
"Why should he." He shouldn't.
"But if, as you have said to me, you have already been rejected - what would you have to lose, in the attempt?"
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Aske' had a wide variety of climates, of course, and it was pure coincidence that their base had been set up in one that was generally equivalent to subtropical. So the night was warm, and filled with the smells of plants that the botanists would surely have begun to name and categorize, even if he had not yet seen that information. With no light pollution, the stars were an uncountable trail of crystals between the branches of the trees, and he thought he saw a limb of a moon peek through near the horizon.
Joseph sat down on a protruding root, although, thinking about it, it would likely have been more appropriate penance to stand.
It didn't feel like God was there. Truthfully, it hadn't felt like God was really there since he had first set foot on Aske', seen its foreign constellations and twin moons. Although consciously he knew that God had to be everywhere, beyond mere galactic geography - it was all to easy to think that now, finally, they had gone beyond his reach. Beyond the depths of Earth's oceans, and beyond Earth's dawn, which were the furthest places of which the psalmist had deigned to speak.
"I - tell me this was not your intent," he croaked. "That you did not bring us to the Solectum, now, just - just to show
"Let me go to them again -" Something was tearing, inside his chest, and the pain of it dragged him down to his knees, heedless of the dirt grinding into his palms. "And not be afraid. That everything I am saying and everything I am doing is evil, and we will leave an injury upon them that cannot ever be healed, like we left upon -" Indigenous humans, of every land. The oceans and forests and in the rape of the pit-mines and smelters, all that hunger and destruction that he didn't know how to stop, that millennia and millennia of history had proven was all men ever did and so all they could ever do -
"I want to be able to do good things. Is even that -" and the words were obliterated as the dam he had struggled to maintain failed, and the black-hole weight of his monstrosity tore howling away. Joseph screamed, not like a dying creature screams, but like a mountaineer fallen down a crevasse screams: the death extended by the sight of the ropes, and the ladders, and companions' outstretched hands, all promising a salvation seen but slipped from the grasp. Screamed until his body, overwhelmed, revolted and crumpled itself into Aske's earth - at God. At nothing. At the silent rejection he knew was all he had ever deserved - until his body, armed with no theology but a billion years of instinct, reached up and pressed his brain down into unconsciousness.
The planet revolved slowly around its axis. The moon he had glimpsed trapped in the branches mounted to its zenith, and its twin followed, and then they turned and began to descend. Small things with many legs scrambled over him and back into the leafmould. Chittering animals scurried through the branches above.
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There had once been many candidates for most isolated church in the world: although Capilla de Nuestra Señora de las Nieves was most southerly, and Tserkov' Svyatitelya Nikolaya Chudotwortsa most northerly, the number of small islands in the Southern and Pacific oceans that had their own small parishes made such considerations depend significantly on the interlocutor's definition of "isolated".
And, frankly, "the world" as well. Now, there was much less debate on the matter, because it circumscribed far less space. Akse' had but one chapel in the base, and one chaplain to preside over it. Currently, twenty-six people more than filled it. Perhaps Akse's days were slightly shorter than those on Earth, but if the Gregorian calendar did not match it did not lie either; today was the first Sunday after the first full moon after the first full moon after the twenty-first of March, which meant
Joseph did not know why he was still here among the faithful - or, frankly, among the living. He wondered when (if) he would eventually get forcibly discharged.
His watch had died several days ago, and although without its control he had found what little reliability he had left dissolving he had not been able to muster the energy to fix it, so it was set on a permanent 5:00.
"Exalt, let them exalt," Father Gahol began, "the hosts of heaven -"
"Rejoice, let Mother Church also rejoice -"
"O happy fault, O truly necessary sin of Adam, which gained for us so great, so glorious a Redeemer!"
The teardrop of molten wax welling atop his taper spilled suddenly. It evaded the rough-edged cardboard flower through which the stick had been thrust and worked its way slowly, steadily down, burning across his knuckles and down between his fingers.
"So what," spoke Father Gahol, "what is the point of all this? Why are we even Christian in the first place? What is it we are proud to proclaim?"
(The candle would not peel away from his hand as easily as an aluminum rung, or a nylon rope, or gloved human flesh; the wax stuck, and bound his grip fast as nails.)
Listen: here is a story.
In the last days of the Great Journey, there lived a woman named Istustaya. She was known among all the People for her cleverness and her strength, and they thought her a leader among them, and loved her. All her life she had lived on the Journey, in the spaces between the worlds glimpsed like campfires out in the depths, and that was not so long - only recently had she wedded her first husband, the young and beautiful Senno, and was now with his children.
And now the People drew nigh to their latest destination, which loomed teal and diamond before them,
And they put forth their power, and made within the void a doorway, And as the People took their first steps onto this new world and strange, the first of the birthing-pangs came upon Istustaya.
As the horizon first began to pale into the dawn, she gave birth to her firstborn child, a boy, with hair black as black as midnight and eyes tightly shut against the light. And as the twilight gave way to the sunrise, and many of the People came out of their tents and looked up in surprise and wonder at the great light of their new world, she brought forth her secondborn, a girl, who wailed and blinked at the sudden brightness, revealing eyes pale and sharp as glass.
But her daughter came into the world not only to the sunrise but to the sound of her mother's screams, because Istustaya's flesh tore at her bearing, and her blood could not be stemmed. Not the efforts of the midwife nor the prayers of Senno availed, and in the first morning of the new world she died.
The midwife took the children and bore them to Senno, saying that the duty of their naming fell now to him, as closest blood.
His son he named Kerhitt, for he said: "From him shall flow forth my descendants, and by his token he shall provide for me in my old age." And his daughter he named Sala, saying: "It shall go bitter with her, for before her first cry she has taken away Istustaya, whom I loved above all else." And in his grief he cursed her: "In this she has forfeited these: that the earth should bring forth for her food, and produce wells of sweet water. Ever shall she eat at others' labour and sufferance, and live in others' homes." And he neglected to cut the runes of her name into the records, so that upon her death it would be as though she never were, and to ensure his lineage should pass instead to Kerhitt.
So it was that as the people worked to establish their habitation on the new world, the children grew, and it went with them as Senno had spoken. For Kerhitt became a young man, tall and strong, and excelled at all that he set his hands to - the spinning and the weaving of cloth, and the running of a farmstead. And his hair remained black as midnight, and his eyes as polished jet, so that many of the young women among the People thought that they would fain take him for their husband, and they came to Senno bearing offerings of token, and he would be forced to arbitrate between them, for just as he had wedded Istustaya for the love of her purely and not for her dower, so too did he desire for his son.
And Sala became a girl, and then a woman, despite that she was given only the end-scraps of the food at each meal, and only rags to wear, and that she slept before the hearth upon the stones, for neither would her father give to her a bed. Her hair and her eyes and skin darkened not at all, and remained pale as ash, so that the People said of her, “She is dressed eternally for death.” None took her on as apprentice, for her hands were ungentle; the animals hissed and struggled when she attempted to shear them, and the seeds that she planted grew thin and straggly.
And they mocked her, calling her nameless, and nothing. For Senno’s curse had not been kept a secret
Listen: it is said that when Sala went out into the wilderness, she went there to die.
No food did she take nor waterskin, only her clothing and her knife of clear glass. She departed in the morning before any others had awoken, that she might not have to face again the judgement of their eyes, and setting the settlement of the People behind her she walked straight as she might. As the day turned to its zenith she walked, and as it sank down into afternoon, and into purple twilight. Only once all had grown so black that the ground could not be seen before her did she stop, and working only on touch she knelt upon the grass and drew her knife from its sheath, and found the place where her life beat in her throat.
And she said to herself: “I am still close to the settlement, and I do not want to give any of them the satisfaction of knowing that I have died. I will go out one further day,
And when she awoke, she was no longer alone.
About her stood a herd of animals, unlike to any she had seen before - not like the small livestock the People had brought with them from the Journey, that were kept in cages at the sides of homesteads to give meat and hair, the blind aíea and the stocky b'meidh. These were tall, with slender limbs and graceful necks forming arching shadows against the stars, and there was light trapped in their wide dark eyes and in the hairs that lined their tall ears.
And Sala thought to herself then that the People she knew were surely not the only people here, and now - although the tales told by those elder recalled other races encountered on the Great Journey, in other places and worlds and times, she knew she would never see them, for if one thing could be said of the People truly it was that they could be driven never back. But might these not be people too, she thought, and might there not be others somewhere on the plains?
One of the creatures bent its head, and nosed her with its velvet muzzle, and the warmth of its breath blew away the frost that had formed on her cheek. Sala seized its mane and stood, wobbling with hunger, and because it was a moonless night she could see little of the surrounding terrain. But the creature turned and began to walk away, and bound to it by finger and hair and knowing not what else she ought to do, Sala followed with it. And finally she felt the long neck dip below her hand, and heard the soft slurping of water as it drank, that soon multiplied as the rest of the herd drew up around them.
She dropped to her knees and fumbled forwards, and her hands struck the edge of a banked fen, and then the cold of a stream. And Sala scooped up mouthful upon mouthful of water in her palms, and spilling it down her arms and over her knees she drank until she was satisfied.
She went where the herd went, and drank from its rivers, and where it lay down to sleep so did she, and when it rose and passed away again she passed with it. She scavenged flesh from carcasses and stole honey from the hives of bees, scored the bark of birch-trees to drink their golden blood, reached into nests to eat eggs and into dens for pups.
And it came to pass that upon a day Sala espied the horns of an antelope among the grass, and as the herd was feeding, the tearing of stalks loud behind her, she approached it.
Wicked talons slashed past her face, scored her arm. They were so sharp that at first there was no pain, just a very clear message: this was the eagle’s carcass, she was the interloper, and she must leave.
And eventually the seasons changed, and the winter began to blow in southwards, and the herd turned and began to migrate back to where the grass was not hidden by snow and the sun shone still
Sala seized the foal around its neck, and it cried.
And she crested the hill just as the sun came up in a riot of scarlet and orange, and she flung wide her arms and laughed to the sky. “See!” she cried. “I am not nothing! I have lived in the empty lands, and wandered far, and I have survived - more than that, I have grown strong! No longer am I Sala Sennodhitár, who cast me aside; no longer am I nameless. I am the Daughter of Heaven, and I deem myself strong. My name is written into stone, and cloud, and time - I need not be remembered within the records, for I shall remember myself.” And she thrust her spear-hand towards the sky, and the sun blessed the edges of the blade crimson.
It came that one year the winter again approached from the north, and Sala turned her herd before the snowline and went back southwards. And it befell that one day she rode up over a swelling ridge, and looking down saw nestled at the base of its flank a village, and smoke rose from its chimneys. The layout of the streets, and the gentle hills that surrounded it smote familiar into her memory, if not exactly the same, for she had found again the settlement of the People beyond expectation, that she had left years before.
A man exited one of the doorways and made his way to the nearby kennel, leaving a faint grey trail of footprints like a smoke-smudge in the snow behind him. Silent on that ridge she watched him water the b’meidh that inhabited it and lowed gently, and when he turned she caught sight of his face and knew him for her own brother Kerhitt - now garbed as a married man, and grown into the beauty everyone had expected.
The line of the sunrise descended into the valley, palmsbreadth by palmsbreadth. Illuminating her, but not yet the buildings or people below. And again into her mind returned her father's words: You shall eat of others' labour, and live in others' homes.
Her hand tightened around the shaft of her spear. For she knew the People did not know true conflict - their knives were tools only, and all they needed they could produce. But she had grown, and was after her time in the wild stronger and fiercer than all of them in sum.
And Sala smiled.
The second-worst thing to hear on a spaceship was somebody screaming. Devan shot to his feet, pliers clattering onto the mesh of the floor, and ran in the direction of the noise. A couple of smaller panicked cries followed it; he rounded the bulkhead to see Soo-jeung frantically trying to hold back an expanding stream of mealy white spraying from a panel at her.
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, it just -“
“What happened?”
“It just ruptured, I’m sorry, I didn’t -“
“Quit apologizing!” He grabbed her shoulder and hauled her away, over to the bench. What was she thinking, working so close to the capacitor cells without her gloves on? Daniel had obviously been slacking on reminding them all. He pulled her soiled sweater off, turned on the tap, and yanked her wrists under it. The water split over her hands, white chunks turning slick and sliding off and down the drain.
“Did it get anywhere else?”
“Yes, on the other terminals and onto the deck and
“On you, Soo-jeung.”
She shook her head, eyes wide. “No. No, I don’t think so.”
Good. She was staring at him too, so it didn’t look like any fumes or flecks had gotten in to irritate her eyes. Belatedly, he realized that some of that deer-in-the-headlights look might be the result of his brusqueness and not her own fear of being poisoned.
…And that it was a fairly good thing nobody had been watching them, because without context, manhandling and undressing one of the engine girls would look really bad, especially when done by a man old enough to have daughters of his own. He let go of her wrists. Daniel was going to have his hide, and not only because that spill would probably take more than a shift to clean up and would then be passed onto his undeserving head.
She went to withdraw her hands. “No, no, stay under there.”
“But it’s going to corrode that whole circuit, I need to -“ she protested.
“No, you don’t.”
“All right, that’s probably enough. You can take your hands out now.” She did, and he turned off the tap and handed her the towel to pat herself dry. “Let me see again.” She held out her arms, where red weals were already starting to rise up.
Ideally she should get binny leave for a couple of days, or at least some sort of task that was less physical, to allow that skin to heal. If he called down Samarra she would almost certainly corroborate that assessment. But there was no point - she wouldn’t keep to the leave anyway even if she was given it, so they might as well not waste Samarra’s time. “Does it hurt?”
“A little.” It would more tomorrow. He soaped up
He supposed he had no place casting aspersions against Soo-jeung’s workaholism, though, since he would do the exact same thing in her place. The engine was a cruel mistress - she convinced you she could not go even one day without you, made you crazy about being with her, inside her, like the whole universe would make sense if you could only map out the circuits of this little part of it. She made everything boring but you and her and the unhorizoned space stretching out all around you.
Everything went black.
“Devan? What’s going on?” he called.
“Dunno, looks like power’s gone but I was at the bench, I didn’t see -“
“Then why isn’t the alarm -“
Shreeeeeeeeeeeeee! the box on the bulkhead wailed.
“Never mind!” Daniel shouted over it.
“And turn that thing tabernak off!”
The girl said something. Soo-jeung listened, then turned to Devan. “She, uh - she wants to know why, if we have no power, the grav is still on.”
“Because we’re cheap and generated it rotationally instead of having an actual generator,” Devan answered. It was one of the easiest ways to cut costs on vessels - artificial gravity generators were a pretty penny and a half, and for any ships that weren’t amphibious or triphibious, and especially ships that went extrasolar, like long haulers, it didn’t matter where up or down actually were, or if they were constantly changing in absolute position, only in relative. “And a good thing too,” he said, flicking his flashlight beam over the hulk of metal and cable and corrugated tube that was the main heart of the engine assemblage. The power source itself was tucked out the posterior end of the ship, heavily shielded so as not to give them all cancer and suck up the company’s money having to hire new haulers, but this was the part that converted it all from death into usable electricity - the important part. “Because I would not fancy trying to fix that thing in zero.”
Two hours later, Devan was willing to kick even 0.8 grav into the mud if he thought it would help. He shoved a wisp of hair out of his face with a grease-slicked hand.
Daniel hauled on a panel with a terrible creaking sound. “Détache, vierge de truc!”
Kyuten had dragged up a section of mesh flooring and was crawling around halfway in the space, her reflected lantern-light bizarrely underlighting Soo-jeung and E-something-or-other
Like nerve fibres running off from a ganglion, or an aorta carrying blood away from her heart.
“All right,” Jasmine said imperiously. “Call everyone for a crew meeting. Rec space. ASAP.”
But -“Um, how, exactly?” Devan asked. “The intercom’s going to be useless too -“
“So find everybody and tell them!” she snapped. “This ain’t that big a ship!”
“Do we have a sense of what is and what is not out of commission at the moment?”
“Everything,” Devan said. “This thing blew the main line, which is why the aux isn’t feeding either. Doesn’t matter how much power we do or do not have, none of it can get where it needs to go. So everything that does not have its own self-contained power source as of this moment is offline.”
Kaja lifted a hand. “So, uh… are we gonna freeze or are we gonna boil? Just want to know.”
“Neither, actually,” Daniel responded. “When we said everything, we meant everything. Water reclamation’s shot too, so we’re going to run out of potable water far sooner than we can radiate. And even faster since now the only pressure in the system is head pressure.” So as they used it, that pressure would drop, inhibiting ttheir access to the remainder that was in the system. And when it hit net cabin pressure - which happened once approximately three-quarters of max volume was used up, thanks to the fixed volume of their system - that would be it. No more water for any of them.
He could probably get a little more out of the cistern manually, but - damn. That was not going to be a safe endeavour in the slightest.
“Is tehre anything at all we can do?” asked Samarra.
Jasmine sighed. “I’ve got out the emergency transceiver,” she said. “We’re going to send out a distress call, see if anyone is near enough to answer. Beyond that -“ She gestured at Devan and Daniel. “
“How much -“ started Sidney, and then broke off. Daniel gave him a curious look, and he continued: “How much time do we have?”
Devan wasn’t sure whether he had been hoping for somebody to ask that or not. That was the thing about pain - it could be dealt with or it could be ignored, but choosing either option, like the cat in the box, cut off the other pathway.
Daniel seesawed his hand. “Give or take - maybe a week.”
The emergency transceiver was about the size of a smallish suitcase, but much heavier. When Jasmine had said she had taken it out, she had been being very literal: it was sitting askew on the floor three inches in front of its locker, but no further. Devan and Kaja carefully manipulated it closer to the center of the bridge, where it could have the required two-meter clear radius, and examined the casing while Jasmine held the flashlight for them.
Handles. Rubber corner bumpers - excellent, that meant it wasn’t going anywhere else without two of them either, the friction on that stuff was incredible. Fibreglass casing, ridged for grip, and a series of screws lining the upper and lateral edges.
Devan unhooked his impact driver and unscrewed them as gently as he possibly could. The panels unfolded, Kaja and Jasmine clutching them to slowly lower them down. Revealed inside was a fairly standard transceiver setup, with dials for amplitude, frequency, and spectrum. It ate the lowest power it possibly could, and transmitted only a highly attenuated signal at regular intervals: name of ship, nature of distress, last known coordinates and velocity, and a time stamp, so that anyone picking up the signal days or weeks or years from now in the vacuum of space would know whether there was still any use trying to save the crew.
It was a formality, really. Outside of planetary orbit the chances of anyone being within range to reach a stranded ship were dozens of orders of magnitude to one. The best he’d ever heard was of a couple allowing closure, several years later when ships had been reported missing until their signals were picked up detailing fuel ruptures that had flung them off course, leaks that had poisoned the entire crew, and allowed final reports to be made to their grieving families.
Jasmine pressed the power for a few seconds, and weak light came on
The worst thing to hear on a spaceship wasn’t. Because they were never quiet - there were always cooling fans, piping, alarms and notifications, other crewmates being noisy at shift changes or as they tried to get a little bit of fun out there in the void of space when they thought they wouldn’t be noticed. And the bulkheads carried it like a xylophone everywhere.
So when one stopped hearing anything - found perfect, pure silence - it meant something was very, deeply wrong.
And I already goddamn know that, Devan thought to his brain. I was the one who diagnosed it, for crying out loud. So, uh, can we stop trying to panic and get some sleep?
It seemed doomed not to be. Eventually, he slid back the panel of his berth and rolled out, fumbling for his flashlight - heaven help him if he lost that thing now among the sheets or it fell under a locker or disappeared some other way. As quietly as he could, he unlatched the handle to his own locker and reached inside, slipping fingers into the pocket of the clothes and drawing out what he knew was in there. He closed the locker door again and sat down atop the bank, pulling the small bag of tiny pellets nad the flashlight into his lap.
Jasmine would kill him if she knew he had this on him. And then she would throw every punishment she could legally give to his corpse, and then she would fire him and dump him unceremoniously off at the next station to try and beg some way back to civilization.
And, at this point, no punishment was really going to matter, since they were never going to reach the station anyway.
Give or take a week. A week before they all dehydrated.
Would it be… better? He pinched the bag, feeling shed powder crunch between his fingerpads. Not to wait to suffer through that, realize that no-one could have saved them? Leave more water for the rest of them, to give them that one-in-a-million greater chance? He did have enough
Devan was unsure how or why they had all come to the conclusion to gather in the bridge. Possibly because it would conserve
Olufemi running his thumb over his dry lips over and over.
Daniel was slouched in the corner against the bulkhead, head bowed over his knees and folded hands pressed against his face, muttering: into them: a prayer to the goddess he had previously cursed. “- pliene de grâce; le Seigneur est avec vous. Vous -“
“- le fruit de vos entrailles, est béni. Saint Marie, Mère -“
“ - amen. Je vous salue -“
“- que ton nom soit sanctifié, que ton règne -“
“- à la tentation, mais délibre-nous du mal -“
“- vous salue, Marie, pliene de grâce; le Seigneur -“
“- maintenant et à l’heure de notre -“
A loud crack split the air, and everbody jumped. It dissolved into a crackle, and Devan managed to pinpoint the sound. The transceiver. “-hailing the Mirezza, we have received your distress signal and have visual on your ship, do you copy? This is the Carrier Stella Australis hailing the Mirezza, we have received your dis -“
“Yes!” Jasmine lunged to the transceiver, hauled at the dial. “Shit! Yes! This is the Mirezza, we copy!”
Another crackle. “Glad to hear it, Mirezza,” and this time there was a smile in the voice. “We have visual on your proximal port and expect to be able to dock at it. Do we have permission to board your vessel? Over.”
“Yes, you have it!” Jasmine cried. “Over!”
“Please hold for alignment and docking. Are any of your crew in need of emergency medical attention? Over.”
Jasmine looked back at all of them, and especially Soo-jeung. She and Daniel both shook their heads. “No,” she answered the transceiver. “No, we’re all right. Over.”
“Please hold for alignment and docking.”
Nobody spoke; it seemed as though nobody dared, like even a single word could shatter this unlooked-for fortune, could rattle the ship and make the Australis’ port clip off, thrusting them chaotically apart rather than drawing them together. Like everyone was afraid to hope again.
“Devan,” Jasmine said suddenly. He looked up. “We still have command over the interior locking, don’t we?”
“Yeah.” External airlock doors could be opened by the outer interface, but inner doors were wired into the ship and the ship only and could not be externally overridden, for security purposes. Someone was going to need to use the manual release and actually open the lock for the Australis. “I’m on it.”
“Ah, Dieu, oh, mon Dieu.” Daniel squeezed his eyes shut, pressed his prayer beads against his lips.
The river parts around my fingers and rejoins in a standing wave - glittering-clear
They are not to be trusted, my mothers and aunts and sisters have all told me, time and again. Do not cross over the none-land, do not wish upon the sun, do not touch a coppiced tree, for all of these will allow the humans to capture you and take you away.
It is said that when they speak, their words may represent no reality at all - that if you should try to unpick the true meaning underneath them, you can find yourself clinging to nothing, a rope without an end. That they make the lights they use to try and keep their dwellings apart from the purity of the night from the transmuted flesh of animals, and that they can wipe clean the minds of living ones and force them, empty shells, to do their will.
They have so many names, and change them all the time; no-one knows, yet, if they have any that are true or if they are deep-down nameless.
“What are you doing?”
And I whirl around, and come face-to-face with the human. He must only have been feigning sleep, for he stands now before me, head cocked to the side like a bird as it sizes up a worm it intends to eat. And the worm in this situation is me.
I cannot run. They have barbed claws that fly far beyond the reach of their own arms - I would be snared, before I had gotten more than a dozen paces.
So I stay very still instead, like my mothers have told me I should do should I ever startle a bear, a wolf, an usage. Predators like movement, she had said, because it means there is something there that recognizes it should flee. Things that do not move are less likely to catch their eye, and they may pass them by.
But I had never had much confidence that would work, even against the natural predators. And against a human? No chance. His gaze has not yet been removed from me.
Just finish it, I think. If you’re going to drag me back to your prisons, wipe clean my mind, if you’re going to kill me just in your alien sport, do it, but don’t play with me like this! For he has not yet drawn any one of their strange heavy weapons, for all that I can see two hanging unconcealed from his belt.
Rather, he makes a different assault. “What is your name?”
Never give it, my mothers had told me, and their hands had bit into my shoulders so tightly they clenched them and their eyes had gone black, black, black as the void that separates the stars in their intensity. Die first. You will prefer it, to the things that will be done to you if anyone manages to acquire your name.
“Why do you do that?” I venture to ask.
He opens his eyes. “Why do I do what?”
I point at his chest. He looks awkwardly down at it, and then back up at me with a confused expression. “You’re going to have to be a bit more specific.”
“The… thing,” I say, pumping my own hand in and out of my chest to try and mimic it. “Where you keep moving it.”
A small line appears between his eyebrows. It is, in an alien way, intriguing. “You mean breathing?”
Is that what they call it? I try out the word, feeling how it slithers snakelike around in my mouth. “Breathing.”
He laughs and lets his head drop back
What I feel is not love.
So I go out into human lands.
No-one sees me slip out into the bushes, hurry ducked along game-paths to the edge of the none-land.
I feel the strange urge to stand, to bow my head and fold my arms around me just like we do at the rituals of the solstice - this is something, I know with all of myself, that was never meant for hulder eyes to see.
Ugh. Devan dug his knuckles into his temple
He stood up. The world greyed out; he clutched
He… he really didn’t feel good at all.
“Devan!” For a second, he legitimately thought he had been stabbed in the head; that was hor much the sound hurt. “Can you hear me?”
So could a deaf man, he tried to say, but his body refused to cooperate. It came out as a vague moan, and that worried him enough that he managed to pry his eyes open.
“Samarra.” Of all the things she might have expected to interrupt her while sorting shipping manifests in the third shift curled in the squashy armchair in the rec space, a pyjama-clad mechanic was not one of them. She jumped when the door opened, papers slipping off her knee onto the floor. “I need your help.”
“Why?” She stood, more papers sliding out of her piles. “What’s wrong?”
He made a gesture that indicated that, since Devan was flesh and blood rather than metal and plastic, she shouldn’t expect him to be able to diagnose anything. After all, she was the one with all the physiology knowledge.
“Don’ tell Jasmine,” he begged.
“Don’t tell her what?” Samarra asked. It wasn’t like they didn’t all know about the still - it wasn’t as though they didn’t all borrow from the still. If he was just drunk he’d be chewed out for skimping on work, sure, but Jasmine had been turning a blind eye to the not-so-secret still since before Samarra had signed on with this crew, or so she’d been told: she had implicitly given her permission by that. And if he was actually ill then Jasmine couldn’t punish him for love nor money, because that then became an issue of fundamental human rights and all -
Daniel had paused, halfway through the survey, near his right knee. His back hid most of Devan from her,
Something was held up in front of her face. Samarra’s brain processed it in chunks: Daniel’s fingers. In the fingers, small clear zip-top bag. In the bag, series of white oblongs no bigger than her littlest nail.
That complicated things. That complicated things very much. Her gut twisted up cold.
“Devan.” She snatched it from Daniel and leaned forwards, tapping him on the cheek. He shifted, struggling to focus on her. She held up the bag in front of his face. “Devan. What is this?”
He turned his head away. “Don’t - she -“
“Forget about Jasmine.” She shook the bag. “I need to know what’s in this.”
“Dex - dexa -“
Good enough.
She sighed. And he was running completely on empty too? Oh, there were so many things she wanted to say right now, so few of which were not profane.
Devan whimpered. Samarra couldn’t say she had much sympathy.
Nothing would stay still. The floor heaved and rolled like mercury. “I think there’s something wrong with the grav -“ he mumbled.
“Nah,” Daniel said next to his ear, “you’re just high as a kite.”
“It hurts…”
“Yeah, I’ll bet.” He couldn’t think, he couldn’t breathe, someone was driving spikes one by one into his chest and it was going to split from the pressure, it hurt it hurt it hurt - he doubled over and gagged uselessly.
Cold hand on his forehead. Someone scrubbed something across his mouth. Daniel and Samarra saying something about water
A whispered conversation:
“We have to tell Jasmine.”
“Legally? Yes, we do.”
“… but you don’t think we ought to.”
Daniel sighed. Devan imagined him running a hand over his face. “Look, Samarra,” he said, “if we tell Jasmine, then… she has to fire him.” It was in all their contracts - haulers were bound to obey local law, both of their destination and their home station, on pain of termination. “And more than that, she has to put him off at our very next berthing.” Right. That part was in the contracts too - immediate termination. Stupid legalese. “Do you really think unemployed Devan - do you really think unemployed Devon on Sourien - would be better off than current Devan?”
There was a pause. He could feel them both looking at him. Yes, Samarra was going to say, yes I really do think that, and she was going to get him fired, and he kind of wished he could make himself care about that.
She hissed out a breath. “No. No, I suppose not. But I don’t like it.”
“Can’t say I do either. But it’s better to keep the things you don’t like where you can at least see them.”
Samarra made a noncommittal noise. “So what explanation are we going to give?”
“How long?” he managed.
“Until I say so, that’s how long!” Samarra snapped. “You are in no position to be complaining about anything right now!” She softened. “He’s got a point, though,” she continued to Daniel. “Every time I even suggest somebody go out on binny I’m intensely aware that all their work is going to have to be handed over to someone else. And this is going to take - well, he’ll be crashed out useless for two days at absolute minimum
“I’ll cover it,” Daniel said. “I mean, for right now - my next shift is about to start up in a couple hours anyway. I’ll go finish up whatever he was doing and then just keep working until it’s time to hand off to Soo-jeung and Khuyen.”
A thought finally managed to worm its way through the fog in his head. “But tha’s twenty hours,” he slurred. On his feet, too. Devan wouldn't wish a shift like that on his worst enemy, let alone his closest coworker. “How’re you gonna -“ stay awake himself. He had drugs, but Daniel had nothing. Because he was the one who was reliable, and honourable, and all the other words ending in -able.
“Spite,” Daniel said. Samarra snorted.
“What about your paperwork?”
“Yeah, like Jasmine’s going to check. There’s a reason she asks me to do it, you know.”
An amused huff from Daniel. “Seriously, though,” he said. “He’s going to be all right?”
“Yeah.” He felt her pet his hair, like he was a dog. It felt… really kind of nice, actually. Not even so much the contact itself but… the reminder that she cared enough to do it. That they both did. It was… too easy, out in the void of space, to make oneself an island - after all, everything else out there was, moons, planets, asteroids, stations, and ships all self-sufficient and separated by tracts of vacuum too far for human minds to fully comprehend.
He faintly hears Samarra telling Daniel to put on a shirt