Shapers of Worlds

by Edward Willett

  “Nothing else out here for thousands of kilometres,” Dad said. “But I didn’t receive any transmission. I didn’t even detect one.”

  “It wasn’t in one of our standard frequencies,” the PlanSec man said. “We only caught a small part of the transmission, but the data looked like Sphere-code.”

  “Izzy plays in the Sphere.” Dad’s voice sounded tense. “So does Bear. That’s Barak, my son. I believe he knows two words. Are you saying my kids are communicating with the Galactic Main? My wife and I attend an Ecumene service, from time to time . . . does that mean we might be receiving messages?”

  Dad’s hand shifted perceptibly closer to his pistol.

  “I’m saying we want to ask,” the PlanSec man said.

  He, too, moved his hand to his belt, not far from his weapon.

  “I’ll talk to them.” Izzy nodded at the PlanSec man. “I’ll talk to you.”

  The Shepherd knelt, bobbing up and down slightly in her view as the two vehicles moved on waves not quite in sync. His safety harness pulled his tunic as he did so, exposing soft brown belly. “I know you saw someone surprising in the Sphere.”

  “Your dead friend,” the PlanSec man added.

  Izzy felt the skin at the back of her neck prickle. “Is that what this is about?”

  “Maybe,” the PlanSec man said. “Did you talk to your dead friend?”

  Izzy nodded slowly. “He talked about breathable air. And he said it was cold where he was, and he wanted to know if I had food.”

  “Food?” PlanSec asked.

  Izzy nodded again. “I think maybe he was hungry.”

  “Anything else?” PlanSec asked. “Any talk of rescue? Discussion of planetary stabilization? Coordinates for other habitable planets? Any mention of the Governor, or Planetary Security, or the Ecumene?”

  Izzy shook her head to all the questions.

  “I don’t think Eli knows anything about those things,” she said. “Eli liked griefing and dirty jokes.”

  Dad snorted.

  The PlanSec man took a deep breath, exhaled, and shook his head. Izzy kept her eyes on his pistol until he had disappeared into the vehicle, and then stared at the vehicle until it had crossed the horizon.

  She didn’t stop trembling for three hours.

  Viv sent her ethernotes: Come join us at the Sphere. Mount Mountain feels empty without you. Ahmad is a terrible griefer, he wants to fill up his inventory instead of just smashing stuff. Come baaaaaack!

  Ahmad ethered her, too: Hey, where are you? I like Eli Hill, good job with the new bird species! Why does Viv like breaking everything to bits, when we can take it and use it ourselves?

  Izzy didn’t answer.

  She didn’t get any ethernotes from Eli.

  The waves got bigger and more frequent. Dad stopped sleeping. Mom lit more candles.

  “Juice!” Bear said.

  It was the middle of the night and he woke Izzy up. She rubbed her eyes and stared through the transparent ceiling of her sleeping pod. A brilliant crimson band crept overhead, punctuated by distant stars here and there.

  “Juice!” Bear said again. Then he added, “Eli!”

  “Go to bed,” she told him. “It’s late.”

  Bear reached under her light coverlet and grabbed Izzy by one foot. “Eli!” he said again.

  The name brought Izzy fully awake. She’d never heard Bear say Eli’s name before.

  Where would he have heard it? At Eli’s funeral? But that had been in the Community Hall, and Bear imitated all the low-res noise he heard in the Sphere as “burp.” From Izzy’s own lips, in some casual discussion of what she did in the Sphere? From Mom or Dad?

  It didn’t matter. “Go to sleep.”

  She rolled over and tried to find sleepiness again.

  “Burp!” Bear said, and then she heard his feet padding away across the station.

  Izzy was just beginning to drift off when it occurred to her that Bear had left her dormitory and walked away from his own sleeping pod.

  “Bear?” She leaped from her bed.

  She ran down the hall. Dad lay crumpled against a control console, snoring erratically. Beside him, on the console, stood an open bottle of kelp-liquor, half empty, and his pistol. She wanted to stop, to hide the gun and the bottle, but she was afraid Bear might be headed for the outside.

  The door to her parents’ sleeping pod was shut. All over the station, lights were off, and the celestial glow shone down through the transparent ceiling, lighting her path.

  The one light that was on shone in the ladderway leading down to Roo’s port. Izzy stuck to the balls of her feet but ran faster.

  “Coordinates acknowledged,” she heard Roo say.

  What coordinates could Bear give Roo? Burp-juice-burp-Eli? Izzy threw herself down the shaft of the ladderway, sliding down the ladder’s rails rather than climbing down its rungs. She landed heavily and off-balance, just in time to see Roo’s pocket begin to close.

  Izzy lurched to her feet and threw herself down the dock, falling down the short stairs and into the pocket just as the transparent shell of the pocket shut.

  Bear sat in the pilot’s seat, his hands on the steering controls.

  “Bear, what are you doing?” Izzy smiled at her little brother, trying to make light of the moment. “Roo, open the pocket.”

  “Please fasten all safety restraints,” Roo said. “Launching in ten seconds.”

  “Roo, override!” Izzy said. “Roo, stop!”

  “Nine,” Roo answer, “eight . . .”

  Izzy quickly shoved Bear into the pocket’s second seat and buckled him in, and had just enough time to dive into the pilot’s chair and fasten her own harness before Roo left the dock.

  Roo’s acceleration to maximum speed was so gradual that Izzy scarcely noticed it. But by the time she gave up trying to find a manual override or activate the comms, which absolutely refused to cooperate, the utility craft was skimming above the water at 300 kilometres per hour.

  The waves were enormous. Looking over her shoulder, she saw the station heaving up and down so violently it seemed about to flip upside-down.

  “Roo, go back!” she said to the vehicle.

  “Where are we going?” she asked it.

  “I’m going to tell my dad!”

  Roo ignored her.

  Bear promptly fell asleep.

  In less than an hour—travelling always due west, Izzy could tell by watching the moving crimson band overhead—lights appeared ahead, just above the water. She had studied the charts, and she knew that there was no station here. What, then? Some craft in transit, or some bioluminescent sea dweller, come up to the surface for air?

  But the lights were stationary, and the colour was a deep red, not the blue or white she usually saw in eels and crustaceans. And as Roo drew closer, she saw that the red lights were embedded in the underside of a long black cylinder. It was enormous, ten times longer than the station was across, and smooth and black, and it hovered above the water without any visible means.

  Izzy felt as if her heart had stopped beating.

  Encircled by red lights, on the underside of the cylinder, was an opening. Roo decelerated, positioned itself beneath the opening, and then rose vertically into the cylinder. Within the cylinder was darkness.

  “Initiate docking procedure,” Roo said.

  “Where is this?” Izzy asked.

  “This is Eli’s house.”

  The pocket’s transparent shell opened, and there was a black staircase, leading up.

  Should she leave Bear, or bring him with her? Neither seemed safe, but she picked Bear up and slung him over her shoulder. It seemed like a way to honour his part in bringing her here.

  At the top of the stairs, she found herself in a room.

  The only thing in the room other than herself and Bear was a console.

  Bear woke up, and she set him down. “Juice,” he observed.

  “Juice,” Izzy agreed.

  An opening appeared in
the wall, and a being came out. It slid forward slowly, moving by rolling a hedge of muscular tentacles beneath itself, and came to stand on the other side of the console.

  Izzy had been here before.

  “Eli,” she said. “This is Eli’s house.”

  The being was slightly shorter than Dad, and broader, and covered with wrinkled yellow skin. It had a skirt of tentacles ringing its upper body as well as the mass of tentacles beneath it, and something that looked like a face in between. Its eyes were large and unblinking, and its mouth was a birdlike beak.

  The being stood still for a few moments, then reached forward and touched the console. A synthesized voice poured out, low-resolution and deep, but understandable.

  “Izzy. I have peaceful intentions toward you. I have peaceful intentions toward your family. I have peaceful intentions toward your whole people. I am like you. I live in isolation. You farm kelp. I mine cosmic dust. I watched you. Your planet is dying. You are cut off from your other planets. I tried to reach your people’s communications. I failed. Then I connected with your simulation. I have capacity in my vessel to hold the entire human population of this planet. I am here to help.”

  “Burp!” Bear hollered.

  Izzy’s heart beat so fast she could barely breathe. “What’s your name?”

  The being touched its console repeatedly, with both upper and lower tentacles. The motions reminded Izzy of typing.

  “My name is hard to say,” the voice said. “Please call me Eli.”

  “Eli.” Bear nodded, and hugged Izzy’s leg.

  Somehow, Izzy managed not to cry.

  Eli-the-Dust-Miner touched the console again. “And this is my family.”

  Another opening appeared in the wall. From it emerged three beings that resembled Eli-the-Dust-Miner. One was his size, and faintly green. The other two were smaller, closer to Bear’s height, and bright-pink.

  Bear rushed three steps forward, stopped, then shook a fist in the air. “Juice!” he said. “Burp! Eli!”

  One of the pink creatures clung to its green parent, but the other came to meet Bear halfway, upper tentacles trembling with excitement. It made a noise that sounded like squealing.

  “May I use the comms in Roo?” Izzy asked. “In my vessel? I want to contact my parents.”

  “Yes,” Eli-the-Dust-Miner’s synthesized voice said. “Tell them we are coming.”

  Izzy nodded. “I’ll tell them there is hope.”

  A Thing of Beauty

  By Dr. Charles E. Gannon

  “The children have become an unacceptably dangerous liability. Don’t you agree, Director Simovic?”

  “Perhaps, Ms. Hoon. But how would you propose to resolve the problem?”

  “Director, it is generally company policy to . . . liquidate assets whose valuations are subpar and declining.”

  Elnessa Clare managed not to fumble the wet, sloppy clay she was adding to the frieze, despite being triply stunned by the calm exchange between her corporate patrons. The first of the three shocks was her immediate reaction to the topic: Liquidate the children? My children? Well, they’re not mine—not anymore—but just last year they would have been mine, when I was still the transitional foster parent for company orphans. How could anyone—even these bloodless suits—talk about “liquidating the children?”

  The second shock was that these two bloodless suits were discussing this while Elnessa was in the room, and only twenty feet away, at that. But then again, why be surprised? Their company, the Indi Group, was simply an extension of the megacorporate giant CoDevCo and evinced all its parent’s tendencies toward callousness and exploitation. It also possessed the same canny ability to generate profits, often by ruthlessly factoring human losses into their spreadsheets just like any other actuarial number.

  The third shock was that Elnessa could hear Simovic and Hoon at all, let alone make out the words. Because of the xenovirus which had hit her shortly after arriving on Kitts—officially, Epsilon Indi 2 K—Elnessa had suffered losses in mobility and sensory acuity. But every once in a while, she experienced an equally troublesome inversion of these handicaps: unprecedented (albeit transient) sensory amplification. Six months ago, she had had to endure a hyperactive set of taste buds. All but the blandest of foods had made her retch. And now, over the past four days, her steady hearing loss had abruptly reversed, particularly in the higher ranges. Elnessa had acquired a new-found empathy for dogs, and could now pick out conversations from uncommonly far off, whereas only a week ago, she had been trying to learn lip-reading.

  She realized she had stopped working; had, in fact, frozen motionless. And Simovic and Hoon had fallen silent, were possibly watching her, wondering if she had—impossibly—heard them. Elnessa raised her hand haltingly, then paused again, hefting the clay. Then she shook her head, plopped it back, and began rolling it to work the water out. Meanwhile, she continued to listen carefully, hoping they had believed her depiction of “distracted aesthetic uncertainty.”

  Simovic’s voice resumed a beat later. “So, Ms. Hoon, do you have any suggestions for the most profitable method of divesting ourselves of these young—er, high-risk commodities?”

  “Director, at some point, the attempt to find a profitable method of divestiture can itself become a prime example of the law of diminishing returns. Sometimes a commodity becomes so valueless that the simplest and least costly method of liquidating it is best.”

  Elnessa reminded herself to keep breathing. The good news was that Simovic and Hoon had believed her performance as “the Oblivious Artist,” contemplating the frieze before her. The bad news was that the discussion at hand had already moved from, “Should we get rid of the children?” to “How do we go about doing so?”

  Simovic carried the inquiry further. “So we just abandon the asset in place?”

  “Director, I would suggest junking the asset at a considerable distance from the main colony, and even the outlying settlements. I suggest using an infrequently visited part of the planet. No reason we should risk being seen and reported for disposing of unwanted material off-site.”

  Elnessa was now acclimated enough to the horrific conversation that she could actually work and listen at the same time. She straightened, began layering in thin strips of micro-fibre pseudoclay that would hold and provide a reflective receptacle for the backlit acrylic inserts with which she would finish the high-relief centre panels of the mixed-media frieze. With one eye on Simovic’s and Hoon’s reflections in the inert monitor of her combination laser-level and grid-plotter, Elnessa smoothed and sculpted the materials while straining her ears after every word.

  Simovic chuckled: the sound was more patronizing than mirthful. “Ms. Hoon, sometimes the direct approach to seemingly low-value divestiture is not the best alternative—particularly if one has had the opportunity to plan in advance.”

  Hoon’s shoulders squared defiantly. “What advanced planning are you referring to, sir?”

  “Well, in fairness, it’s nothing that you could have been aware of. Suffice it to say that with the appearance of this—ah, unregistered vessel—in main orbit, the asset in question may not be wholly valueless.”

  Hoon sounded skeptical. “And just why would a bunch of Grey World orphans be of interest to—to whoever it is that’s hovering just outside Kitts’s own orbital track?”

  Elnessa watched Simovic lean far back in his absurdly over-sized chair and steeple his fingers. His smile had mutated from smug through shrewd and into predatory. “Come now, Ms. Hoon; surely you can think of at least a dozen reasons why unrecorded corporate wards would be items of interest to any number of parties.”

  Hoon’s defiant frown slowly evolved into a smile—at about the same pace that Elnessa felt her blood turn into ice. People, particularly kids, who were “unrecorded”—who lacked birth certificates and national identicodes—were rare, and therefore inherently valuable, black-market commodities. And there wasn’t a single use for such commodities that was anything less than hi
deously illegal and immoral.

  “And why,” Hoon asked in what sounded like a purr, “are you so sure that our mysterious visitors will be interested in such a trade good?”

  “That,” Simovic answered with a self-satisfied sigh, as expansive and deep as had he just finished a very filling meal, “will become obvious within the next twenty-four hours.”

  Elnessa blinked and doubled the speed at which she was putting the finishing touches on the clay components surrounding the central space she had left open for what she had silently labelled The Brazen City. She had to complete the frieze soon, and in particular, she had to finish on time today, because she needed to make an early visit to her dead-drop site.

  She had to make sure that her contact, Reuben, came to debrief her. As early as possible.

  Sitting on the spongy, close-mowed kitturf that seemed half-lichen, half crabgrass, Elnessa surveyed the small patch of ground that served as the colony’s park, promenade, and grey market. She watched as Reuben led the newest batch of fresh-faced PDPs—Parentless Displaced Persons—to the sparsely appointed playground at the other end of the public square. Although the orange-yellow disk of Epsilon Indi had almost dipped behind the horizon, the amber-white gas-giant Lee was in gibbous domination of the darkling sky. If one looked closely, the resulting double illumination created faint secondary shadows, with the stronger ones (generated by the system’s primary) rapidly losing ground to those created by the weak but steadily reflected light of Kitt’s parent-world.

  Elnessa smiled as several of the younger children lagged behind, mesmerized by the ghostly effect. Reuben cycled back to the end of the group, gently urged the stragglers to keep up, evidently throwing down the claim that he could reach the playground first. Cries of glee provided the soundtrack for the impromptu footrace to a dilapidated jungle-gym.

  Nice kids, thought Elnessa. And they almost always were, despite the hellholes that invariably spat them out. Usually, their parents or parent had died on a Grey World, still indebted to the company store or transit office, and—presto—the kids became the wards of the corporation. Which grudgingly fed them and clothed them as generically as the parents it had killed—unintentionally, of course. But once wearing a megacorporate yoke that shackled them to the company store, a great many desperate employees discovered that they had to work in increasingly risky and brutal jobs to defray the debts that accumulated faster than the pay.