A Psalm for the Wild-Built

by Becky Chambers

  “Do robots hold hands?” Dex asked. “Is that … a thing, for you?”

  “It’s not,” Mosscap said. “But I’d very much like to try.”

  Dex offered an open palm, and Mosscap took it. The robot’s hand was so much bigger, but the two fit together all the same. Dex exhaled and squeezed the metal digits tightly, and as they did so, the lights on Mosscap’s fingertips made their skin glow red.

  “Oh, my!” Mosscap cried. “Is that—” It pulled Dex’s hand up, and pressed one of its fingertips to theirs, bringing out the red more intensely. “Is that your blood?” Mosscap looked enthralled. “I’ve never thought to do this with an animal before! I mean, I can’t imagine one would let me get close enough to—” Its eyes flickered; its face fell. “This isn’t the point of holding hands, is it?” it said, embarrassed, already knowing the answer.

  “No,” Dex said with a kind laugh. “But it’s cool. Go ahead.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Dex held up their palm, fingers spread wide. “Yeah,” they said, and let the robot study them.

  8

  THE SUMMER BEAR

  The rain stopped during the night, though Dex had been unaware of it doing so. They were likewise unsure of when they’d properly fallen asleep. There had been many attempts failed by the cold or the rocks or rustling behind the rainfall. What scraps of rest had occurred between these unkind wakings had been shallow and skittering. But apparently, at some point, their brain had shut down—for a few short hours, anyway. They awoke not to discomfort or potential danger but to sunlight and birdsong, and to finding themself curled in a ball on the cave floor, their head resting on Mosscap’s leg.

  “Oh,” Dex said groggily, sitting up fast. “Sorry.”

  Mosscap cocked its head. “Why?”

  “Just, uh…” Dex tried to shake off the fog of sleep. They cleared their throat and smacked their lips. The inside of their mouth felt disgusting, and the rest of their body wasn’t faring much better. They looked around for their backpack and, upon finding it, retrieved their water bottle and drank deeply. There wasn’t much water left. They’d worry about that later.

  “Does your hair always do that when you wake up?” Mosscap asked.

  Dex raised a hand to their head and assessed the gravity-defying swoop sticking up like a clump of spun sugar. “Ish,” they said. They combed the mess with their fingers as best they could.

  The robot leaned forward with interest. “Did you dream?”

  Dex took another sip of water, more sparingly this time. “Yeah,” they said.

  “What of?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “I don’t understand. How do you know that you dreamed if you don’t remember it?”

  “It’s … hard to explain.” Dex dug around in their pack, found two protein bars, tossed one to Mosscap, and tore ravenously into their own. “Dreams are there while you’re sleeping but gone as soon as the rest of your brain kicks in.”

  “Always?” Mosscap asked, holding the unwrapped protein bar idly.

  “Not always. But most of the time.”

  “Hmm,” Mosscap said. It pondered this, and gave a wistful shrug. “I wish I could understand experiences I’m incapable of having.”

  “Me too.” Dex got to their feet, muscles grumbling, blisters making their existence known. Something in their neck had folded in a way it wasn’t meant to, and their palms were chafed from climbing.

  They staggered to the cave entrance, and the sight beyond rendered them silent. They didn’t know where they were, but the world outside was magnificent. The yellow morning sky was smudged with the shadows of last night’s clouds, and toward the horizon, thick grey curtains revealed where the rain had gone. Motan was setting, the faint stripes of its mighty storms sinking below the horizon for another day. Below, the Kesken Forest spread without seeming end. Dex could not see the broken road, nor the villages, nor anything that hinted of a world other than this. They could not remember ever before feeling quite so small.

  Mosscap appeared behind, and gazed outward with them. “It should only take us a few hours from here,” it said. “Do you still wish to finish this?”

  “Yeah,” Dex said. “I do.” The feeling behind their words was no longer a furious need, driven by neither rhyme nor reason, but simply an inevitability. A surrender. They had come this far. They would see this through.

  * * *

  A sign rose out of the undergrowth. Its letters were long gone, its message lost to time. But the existence of a human-made object sparked an alertness in Dex. They knew there were no people there, no assistance if needed. That didn’t matter. There was a sign in the ground, where someone had placed it. People had been there, once, and some raw impulse within Dex latched on to that fact. Though they knew it unwise, they couldn’t help but feel just a little less lost in the woods.

  There was a path, too—not a road but a stone ramp winding up and up. After a day and a half of trekking through the anarchy of untouched forest, Dex’s feet met the orderly walkway with profound gratitude. It was still a climb but a far simplified one. Dex found it dangerously easy to understand why their ancestors had wanted to pave the world over.

  The top of the ramp came more quickly than expected. Dex had known where they were going, yet the sight that popped into view stunned them into stillness all the same.

  “Oh, my,” Mosscap said.

  The Hart’s Brow Hermitage had been beautiful, once. Dex could see it if they pushed their eyes past the weathered decay. It was a single-story building with a large dome at the center, orbited by attached rooms that clustered and spread, flowerlike. These were roofed with concentric rings that alternated between abandoned turf planters and antiquated solar panels. Dex imagined how the roofs had looked in their day—glossy blue contrasted with buzzing green, an attractive striped mosaic made of things that drew life from light. The stone walls below had been sparkling white, free of the peppered lichen that now lay upon it like a burial shroud. The wooden accents framing it all were silvered, but Dex could picture them in warm, embracing red. A courtyard spread out before the building, artfully filled with trellises and planters. The garden was overgrown now, the fountains within it long run dry.

  Dex couldn’t easily define what they felt as they looked at the place. On the one hand, sustainable dwellings like this were the progenitors of the buildings people lived in now, and it was important to remember that such places had existed pre-Transition. Not everything in the Factory Age burned oil. There had been those who had seen the writing on the wall, who had made places such as this to serve as example of what could be. But these were merely islands in a toxic sea. The good intentions of a few individuals had not been enough, could never have been enough to upend a paradigm entirely. What the world had needed, in the end, was to change everything. They had narrowly averted disaster, thanks to a catalyst no one could have predicted.

  Splendid Speckled Mosscap wandered through the human-made courtyard, its human-made feet clanking on the paving, its heirloom eyes surveying the building’s central dome. “Oh, Sibling Dex, this is wonderful,” the robot said reverently. “I’ve never seen a place like this.”

  Dex wandered, running their fingers across overgrown benches, feeling present and history blur once more. “Does it scare you?” Dex asked. “Like the factory?”

  “No,” Mosscap said. “Not at all.”

  Both of their meanderings led them, in time, to the building. The walls were worn with weather, cracked with root and vine, but within them were windows of stained glass, largely intact. Dex reached a trembling finger out to touch the panes. Even faded, Dex could make out the shapes and stories. There was Panga, orbiting Motan in a burst of sunlight. There were the gods, their circle unbroken. There were the people, trying to understand.

  Mosscap stood contemplating the rotting wooden doors that separated out from in. “Perhaps I should go first,” it said. “There’s no telling what’s in there.”

 
; Dex nodded in agreement, despite their irrational surety that nothing in there could possibly be wrong, that this place was good, so intrinsically Good, that it housed nothing but love and safety even in its ruin.

  The robot pushed the doors open gently; their hinges cried out but held steady. Beyond the threshold lay an entry chamber, curved like a horseshoe to either side, with a staircase on each end. An open archway stood in the middle of this, and Dex and Mosscap went through to the inner sanctum. A fire pit was sunk in the center, blanketed with arboreal debris. This was surrounded by stone benches, and from these branched nesting channels in which water had once flowed. Three footbridges overlaid the waterways, leading in turn to three distinct doors. Above each of these was carved a symbol: a sun jay to their right, a sugar bee to the left, and a summer bear straight ahead.

  Dex let out a shaky breath.

  Mosscap took note of the doorways, then stood musing. “Is this typical?” it asked.

  “Is what typical?”

  Mosscap nodded at the carvings. “A tremendous amount of effort went into building in such a remote spot, yet it’s a shrine for only half of the pantheon. Would a twin building for the other three have existed elsewhere?”

  Dex’s brow furrowed with confusion. “This … is the whole pantheon.”

  The robot was confused. It pointed to each door, as if Dex were missing something obvious. “Samafar, Chal, Allalae. Where are the Parent Gods?”

  Dex gestured at the room they stood in. “Right here.” They pointed at the dry moats, filled with decrepit filters and pumps. “These are for Bosh. They would’ve been aquaponic ponds, back in the day. Fish to eat, plants to filter the greywater. And see—” They moved their finger through the air, tracing the perfect curves the waterways formed.

  The robot lightly smacked its forehead. “Circles for the God of the Cycle. Yes, of course. And, oh—” It pointed at the walls, where water had once poured from three-sided spouts. “Triangles for Grylom. Yes, yes, because the Cycle and the Inanimate are so closely intertwined.” Mosscap looked around the room with its hands on its hips. “But where is the third?”

  No blatant symbol of Trikilli had jumped out at Dex, so they gazed around the room, lips pursed. “Oh,” Dex said, with an appreciative laugh. “Oh, neat.” They pointed at the fire pit, a containment area for that most famous display of molecular interaction, then drew their hand up toward the circular flue in the ceiling above. “Imagine the smoke,” they said. Mosscap wasn’t getting it, so Dex stretched their fingers flat, tilted their hand to the side, and drew a line from the pit to the sky—a vertical line.

  Mosscap’s irises grew wide, and it laughed. “That’s clever.” The robot nearly bounced with excitement. “Let’s see the rest!”

  One by one, Mosscap opened the doors, and one by one, Dex followed.

  For Chal, there was a rusting workshop. Tool racks and workbenches lay dormant beneath a metal ceiling pierced by dozens of sun tubes. The shafts of light cascading through them fell like fingers through the dusty air.

  For Samafar, there was an all-purpose library, filled with art supplies and laboratory equipment in equal measure. Paper books moldered heartbreakingly on shelves. A grimy telescope pointed up toward the retractable roof.

  Then came the final door, and at this, Dex felt their heart quicken. Mosscap went in, to ensure there was no danger. After an interminable few minutes, the robot stuck its head back out. “I believe you’ll like this,” it said with a smile.

  Dex hurried inside and found—what else?—a cozy living space. There was a kitchen with spacious counters, a bathroom with an enormous, shareable tub, and beds, their plush linens eaten away. There were objects on the floor, too, knocked around by time and creatures long gone. Incense burners, eating utensils, a scratched pantry box whose contents had been wrestled forth by something with persistent claws.

  One of the objects called to Dex out of the corner of their eye, and they bent down to pick it up. It was a tea mug—entirely out of date in both style and material but recognizable all the same. They cradled the relic in their palms, holding it close to their chest.

  They remained that way for a few minutes until Mosscap walked up beside them and placed a hand on their shoulder. “Are you all right?”

  Dex wiped their eyes with their shirt collar. “Just stuck in a memory.”

  “A good one?”

  Dex exhaled at length, and sat on the dirty floor. “This one time—I was ten years old, and I—I don’t remember what was wrong, but I was having a day. Probably something to do with school. I wasn’t good at school. Or maybe my sisters were being jerks, or—” They shook their head. “It doesn’t matter. All I remember is standing in the kitchen, yelling at my dad. Just shouting the walls down. And my dad, he’s looking at me—I have such a clear picture of this, he’s standing there with a half-eaten muffin, staring at me, like, what is even happening—and I yell and I yell and I’m not even making sense anymore—if I ever had been to start with—and eventually I skate right from yelling into crying. Bawling snot. He puts the muffin aside, and he kneels down, and he holds me. And this is the funny part, because I felt so embarrassed over being treated like a little kid. I was ten. I was very much a little kid. I absolutely wanted to be held. But when you’re ten, the last thing you want to do is act like a baby. So, I tell him that. I say, ‘I’m not a baby!’ and I push him away. As I’m sobbing, right? So, he lets me go, and he looks at me, and he says, ‘You’re right; you’re not.’ He told me to go clean myself up, because he was going to take me to somewhere cool. Already, this was awesome. It was a school day. He messaged his work crew and said he wouldn’t be in the fields that day. We weren’t taking my mom or my sisters. Just me and him, just like that. He put me on the back of his ox-bike, and we rode into Saltrock—one of the satellites, down near the river.”

  “And what was in Saltrock?” Mosscap asked.

  A nostalgic smile made Dex’s mouth shift. “A monastery of Allalae,” they said. “I’d been to our local All-Six lots of times, and a disciple of Samafar did the rounds with his science wagon every few weeks. But I’d never been to a dedicated shrine before. It was probably really small—Saltrock is only about five hundred people—but I remember it as the most incredible place. There were wind chimes, and prisms hanging from the rafters, and big smooshy cushions, and carved idols everywhere, and so many plants. It smelled like … I don’t even know. It smelled like everything. They had house slippers for us to use after we took off our shoes, and I remember looking up at this giant shelf of them in all different colors. I got purple ones with yellow stars.” Dex shook their head. They were getting sidetracked. “We found a spot in the corner, and the monk who came over to us—she was so cool. She had icons tattooed all over her arms, and she was wearing plants—like little sprouts and moss balls set in brooches and earrings and things, and tiny strands of solar lights woven though her hair. She sat down with us, and I don’t remember what she asked me. I don’t remember what we said. What I do remember is her treating me like an adult. Like a whole person, I guess. She asked me what I was feeling, and I rambled, and she listened. I wasn’t some awkward kid to her—I mean, I was an awkward kid, but she didn’t make me feel that way. She talked to me about what flavors I liked, and she busted out all the pots and jars and spice bottles, like we do, and gods, it was magic. I sat there, with my suddenly cool dad, in this perfect place, with this fancy cup of tea made just for me, and I never wanted to leave. My dad looks over at me, and he says, ‘Now that you know the way here, you can come anytime.’ He tells me it’s cool for me to bike around the satellites on my own, so long as I’m home before dark. So, I started going to that shrine all the time. I learned from the monks that I didn’t have to have an excuse to be there. It didn’t have to be a bad day. I could just be a little tired, or a little cranky, or in a perfectly good mood. Didn’t matter. That place was there for me whenever I wanted it. I could go play in the garden or soak in the bathhouse, just beca
use. And as I headed into my teens, I started paying close attention to the other people there. Farmers and doctors and artists and plumbers and whatever. Monks of other gods. Old people, young people. Everybody needed a cup of tea sometimes. Just an hour or two to sit and do something nice, and then they could get back to whatever it was.”

  “‘Find the strength to do both,’” Mosscap said, quoting the phrase painted on the wagon.

  “Exactly,” Dex said.

  “But what’s both?”

  Dex recited: “‘Without constructs, you will unravel few mysteries. Without knowledge of the mysteries, your constructs will fail. These pursuits are what make us, but without comfort, you will lack the strength to sustain either.’”

  “Is that from your Insights?” Mosscap asked.

  “Yeah,” Dex said. “But the thing is, the Child Gods aren’t actively involved in our lives. They’re … not like that. They can’t break the Parent Gods’ laws. They provide inspiration, not intervention. If we want change, or good fortune, or solace, we have to create it for ourselves. And that’s what I learned in that shrine. I thought, wow, y’know, a cup of tea may not be the most important thing in the world—or a steam bath, or a pretty garden. They’re so superfluous in the grand scheme of things. But the people who did actually important work—building, feeding, teaching, healing—they all came to the shrine. It was the little nudge that helped important things get done. And I—” They gestured at their pendant, their brown-and-red clothing. “I wanted to do that.” They folded their hands around the mug, placed their forehead against the rim, shut their eyes. “And now it’s the only thing I know how to do.”

  Mosscap cocked its head. “And that bothers you.”

  Dex nodded. “I care about the work my order does, I really do. Every person I talk to, I care. It’s not bullshit. I may say the same things over and over again, but that’s only because there are only so many words that exist. If I offer to hug somebody, it’s because I want to hug them. If I cry with them, it’s real. It’s not an act. And I know it matters to them, because I feel their hugs and tears, too. I believe the things they say to me. It means so much, in the moment. But then I go back to my wagon, and I stay full for a little while, and then…” They shook their head with frustration. “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Why isn’t it enough?” Dex looked at the robot. “What am I supposed to do, if not this? What am I, if not this?”