I was checking out Kanella’s garden, sniffing this and that, trying to see if the globe in one of her many lined pots was anything like an Earth orange. If they had colors, that might offer a clue, but unfortunately, everything here was only shades of green. I was sniffing something that looked like a strawberry when Kanella came out holding a basket. Her back looked less arched than usual. The green light of the sun shone on her eyes. It seemed like she was in pain since she was squinting.
“Kanella, are you okay? You look hurt,” I said.
“Oh, no. This is just a recurring hip pain. Don’t worry about me. When you get to my age . . .”
“How old are you anyway?”
“In Raskillion years or human?”
“Um, human?”
“Well, let’s see.” She touched her fingers, going back and forth. “There are too many exponents upon exponents. Let’s just say, I’m old.”
“I see.”
Kanella bent down to tend to what looked like a violet, maybe, given the shape. She leaned over and I heard an oof.
I walked over to help, but she held up a thin green hand. “No, no, I’m fine.”
“Kanella, I wanted to ask you something. What kinds of vegetables can I eat here?”
“Vegetables?”
“Yes, the things you grow from the ground. Like sweet potatoes.”
“Oh, yes. Well, we give you all the things you need. What are you looking for?”
“The potluck. I wanted to contribute. Make something. You know. I thought it might be fun. And interesting. Like a science project.”
“Oh, the potluck,” said Kanella, dismissively with a wave. “That was cancelled due to the collision. We had a lot to catch up on since you’ve been asleep. So our schools thought to move up the schedule a bit. You’ll see your friends in the gathering next month.”
I couldn’t explain it, but I felt a seething anger creep up . “But I want to see my friends!”
“Oh, no worries. Next month will come so fast you won’t even . . .”
Kanella was now holding her back, wincing. A tear fell from her face. It was red—not simply red but the exact color of a certain fleshy being I knew. The inside of a certain fleshy being, to be exact. A red that was accompanied by smells of sewer and old livestock. Vishwajeet.
I backed away quick. I grabbed something, anything. It was only a pot of what looked like daisies. I held it up.
“What are you doing, Azalea? Put that down. You shouldn’t be running about like this.”
Her voice sounded calm, but Kanella was doubled over in pain, clutching her stomach. I saw something strangely tan-colored push out from her waist. It was a twig . . . no, it was something rounder but with a sharp edge. A chopstick . . . no, a nail.
It was a fingernail, poking through. A tan one.
“Ranna,” yelled Kanella. “Ranna, are you okay?”
Ranna had been beside the door watching. As she approached, her otherwise graceful gait gave way, cracked to a halt. She stumbled on her hands and knees. Her green skin was shedding. No, it wasn’t falling off, just splitting open, like an egg giving way to a chicken.
I couldn’t shake that image. What would the chicken be like? I almost imagined a yellow feathery bird crawl out.
But my attention moved back to Kanella, who was making eerie calls into the night in high octaves way above human range. I was still holding up the pot, but I wasn’t sure what to do with it. Kanella was being opened from the inside. Something reached out from within. The familiar hand with a gold ring. Ravi’s hand. And tentacles. I saw one flick about. I moved backward.
I looked to my left, ten feet away, where Ranna was crawling. Ranna opened her mouth to scream, but no sound emanated. Her mother’s own high-pitched, eerie calls had trailed off into a whimper. Instead, a kind of hum, low and steady filled the room. The sound seemed to come from within Kanella, a deep echo from an abyss.
The tentacles were transforming, changing. They were lengthening and thinning. They were pouring out of Ranna’s and Kanella’s bodies like spilled noodles. Giant arms reached out from in there, too. Wet, slimy, pockmarked arms.
My eyes glazed over with pink floaters. No, no, I thought.
Something scratched my throat. My eyes swam in the pink confetti. I remembered the strength of those tentacles. PTSD—I could feel my body being squeezed already.
But then the pink floaters began to clear. The muscles in my throat relaxed. I could see around me a kind of metamorphosis taking place. Gruesome but not altogether displeasing. From the hand that had Ravi’s ring, an arm was growing definition. The pockmarked, slimy arms faded into his skinny arms.
“Ravi?” I wasn’t sure if I was imagining him.
Finally, his head came into being, morphing from the tentacle arms. A procession of luminous bubbles followed him. They were taut and resilient.
“It’s Vishwajeet,” his shaky tenor said. “She’s found the fumigation controls.”
“What?” I asked. I didn’t understand. The green gave way to all kinds of colors. The colors spilled from the disappearing remains of the Raskillion skins, floating outward like a box of spilled crayons.
“Vishwajeet,” he said. “She’s found the cure. She was sick, but she’s recovering.”
Ravi came close enough for me to see his arm. It looked intact. I grabbed his hand. It did not fall off. It felt strong and sturdy, and I felt his gold ring in my fingers when I interlocked my five human digits with his.
Vishwajeet, Conqueror of the Universe, I thought.
“Come, Azalea. We need to get ready,” he said. “We’ll soon be breaching our host family’s atmosphere.”
D.A. Xiaolin Spires stares at skies and wonders what there is to eat out there in the cosmos. Spires aspires to be a 3D printing gourmand but will happily concede with producing and consuming quixotic fiction and poetry. Trips to East and Southeast Asia continue to influence her writing and leave her craving durian, fermented foods, and copious amounts of wonder that fuel her body, spirit, and imagination. Her works appear or are forthcoming in publications such as Clarkesworld, Analog, Retro Future, LONTAR, and the anthology Sharp & Sugar Tooth. Find her on Twitter @spireswriter or at her website: daxiaolinspires.wordpress.com.
The Multiplication
Tom Dullemond
Illustrated by Yves Tourigny
Turned out the engine was dead-dead, not dead-but-dreaming dead. And of course when the engineering cult realized, they all killed themselves.
“So you came to see me to organize last meals for the crew?” Arnovic—culinary specialist Arnovic—tried his best to pretend that he didn’t know why Ensign Sammins had come all the way up to his kitchen to tell him the news: after two days adrift with engine trouble, everything had just gotten worse. She was fully suited up for vacuum, just to add some mystery.
Avoiding the streaks on the stainless steel bench, he refilled his shot glass and watched how the whiskey sloshed slowly to and fro in the reduced gravity. A brief moment of contemplation, and he drank the amber liquid down in one hit. The warmth in his throat pushed back the far colder reality of their being stranded half a light-year out from home station with no propulsion.
“I’m here about your . . . pre-flight report,” Sammins said. “The recommendation that we don’t launch? That we wait a week for the engine anomalies to settle?”
He stopped halfway through refilling the shot glass. Pretty much as he’d expected.
She continued. “It looks like an engineering report, all the right jargon. When I asked pre-launch, no one in the engineering cult remembered writing it.”
Arnovic resumed pouring and Sammins eventually said, “We’ve been out here a while, Cookie. We know everyone’s gossip, and we discovered you’re kind of famous on our homeworlds. I’m originally from Tarseminon? One of the oldest Persistian Colony starlets?”
By “kind of famous” she meant infamous. An engineering dropout. “God-traitor,” by her people’s standards; “oddball
who came to his senses” by his. He didn’t correct her absurd use of homeworld since she was being so gracious. Besides, the Persistians were great allies despite a certain . . . pioneering prudishness.
He sighed, made a vague face-grabbing motion with his hand. “I paid a lot, so I don’t look like me anymore. Some of the engineers might’ve recognized me, and I just didn’t want that life.”
It was as though Sammins had been given her at-ease. She moved in, a little awkward in her suit and the reduced gravity. She grabbed the edge of the steel benchtop, so she was inches from his face.
“So the Hyrna is your ship? You trained with our engineering cult?” There was a world of hope in her voice.
“When I was an engineer, my engine was Hyrnadostorlechanima. And yes, when they put her into a hull six years later, it was this hull.” He recalled the moment well, floating in the civilian station observation bubble in low orbit with his new face, looking away and out while the forty-foot sphere of iron containing the engine drifted slowly into place inside the giant tangled ball of her starship, like a black pearl floating into a wire tumbleweed; the pressured corridors, hair-thin at this distance, moving to enclose her, to seal her away from the sight of the universe; that tearing, yawning sensation opening in his chest; hoping he’d made the right decision.
“And yet you’re here cooking our meals.” Sammins’s voice snapped him back to the present.
“And yet I’m coincidentally here.” He chewed his bottom lip, his fingers fumbling at the shot glass.
“Is there another reason you’re here?”
“Is there a reason you’re wearing that spacesuit?” he replied curtly.
“As you like.” She took the shot glass from him and slammed the whiskey down as quickly as inexperience and sub-one-quarter-gee would allow.
They stared at each other.
“So . . .” Arnovic ventured, tapping the bottle. “We left dock rather suddenly despite the ongoing engine problems. We’re two days out so . . . about half a light-year-ish. We stopped for a few days . . . wherever we are . . . for some classified reason, I suppose . . . and now the engine is . . . dead?”
Sammins shrugged. “The captain was assured by engineering before departure that the engine was fine. Just a little temperamental. Maybe a minor infection? Some star alignment messing with her mood? And the mission was urgent.”
She didn’t elaborate on that, so he pre-empted the awkwardness.
“Who’s the extra mouth?”
Silence.
Arnovic laughed. “You know I feed everyone on the ship, right? It’s actually about the only thing I do. So when we fly half a light-year out, stop, and I start getting an extra order at dinnertime . . .” He stretched lazily. “I don’t know, my mind wanders sometimes, and I come up with crazy notions like . . . there’s an extra passenger on board?”
Sammins nodded eventually. She glanced at the whiskey bottle. A solid drink was something her people would indulge in very infrequently.
“Defector,” she admitted finally. “Mathemagician from the United Republics, looking for asylum, has valuable war intel, etc., etc. He’d been floating out here in an escape pod. Tightcast an emergency radio signal at home station when he ejected, so six months later, it finally reached us, and four days later”—she spread her hands open wide as if the streaky stainless steel with its empty shot glass was all that remained to her—“here we are, proper stuck. Enemy ships looking for us. It’ll be a week before anyone comes to see where we went. So we’re screwed.” She pulled her nose up as though that kind of language had a bad smell. “And all we have is half an engineer. You.”
“Half a light-year is an insurmountable distance, it’s true,” he said. “You forget how big interstellar space is when you’re not being dragged through it by an extradimensional horror.” He expected a frown of disapproval at his blasphemy, but Sammins seemed too tired to care.
“At least, we still have gravity . . . ?” Arnovic prompted.
“I assume some kind of emergency system?”
“Because we’ve suddenly mastered artificial gravity?”
“I . . . don’t understand,” Sammins said.
“All your people live on Dyson spheres around ancient god-balls and not a single engineer among you, hey?” That was a low blow: the Persistian colonies were in awe of the creatures they built their homes around but refused to study them out of respect. By extension, engineering was a hallowed art but no Persistian was worthy of joining such a cult. So there were plenty of Persistian starship crews, but not a single one of them could explain the nature of the starships they crewed.
“The means by which our engines fly around between the stars is the same fundamental principle that gives us ship-gravity.”
“Something about folding spacetime, yes?” she said.
“Essentially. Plication—the folding you mentioned—is how an engine shrinks spacetime on one side, stretches it on the other, and lets you roam around by kind of . . . surfing a wave. They use basically the same mechanism to feed.” He pulled the whiskey bottle toward himself.
“You mentioned you’re from Tarseminon,” he said eventually. “Old, old godle—” He caught himself. “Old starlet. Definitely DBD, dead-but-dreaming—dormant. And that’s what you want if you’re trying to establish a colony: steady, fake gravity, no motion, just a nice orbit around wherever it went to sleep.”
Sammins nodded hesitantly.
“Well, you don’t have that luxury with engines. An engine is awake. And if she’s awake, she’s hungry. You’ve seen the old gravity rubber sheet examples: grab some mass, put it in spacetime, it deforms the hypothetical rubber sheet, and there’s your gravity well?
“Engines work the same way. They create gravity wells to feed by plicating spacetime at their edges, to suck in as much mass as they can. The effect is the same as dropping something massy on that old hypothetical rubber sheet, but instead of pushing deep down into it, it scrunches that sheet tighter and tighter. The gridlines deform the same way; as far as the universe is concerned, there’s a moon or planet or star there stretching it out, but it’s not; it’s just the engine, folding and folding spacetime. And mass just spirals down into that gravity well . . . and gets eaten.”
Sammins stared at him, but he refused to pour her another glass.
“There’s an unofficial saying in the engineering corps: The engine plicates spacetime, we placate the engine. It’s funnier when you see it written down. But the point is that engineers keep the engine sated. If she were hungry, that nice faux-gravity we’re feeling right now would spike whenever she tries to catch biomass.”
Sammins’s eyes widened. “That’s the recurring engineering problem we’ve been having. Fluctuations in gravity!”
“If it was that simple, we’d all be dead. The engineers keep the engine placated with ritual and sacrifice and worship, that’s why it’s such a dedicated task. When we get a 10% spike in gravity, that’s difficult, sure, but not deadly. She’s not feeding. Something else is . . . was . . . wrong.”
A pause.
“It’s not a coincidence that you’re the ship’s cook, is it?” Sammins asked.
Arnovic fixed his eyes on the label on the whiskey bottle. A curved grey-pink cephalopod stared back, surrounded by script, but he couldn’t read the language. The percentage alcohol per volume was all he really cared about at the moment, though, and it was high.
“I may have wanted to keep an eye on Hyrnadostorlechanima. In . . . in my spare time. I don’t think we should’ve undocked while she was . . . ill.”
A low tone began sounding from Sammins’s wrist. “High alert,” she said and tapped her wrist. She blinked at some retinal display, and her mouth tightened. “First ping on an incoming ship. Standard reconnaissance spiral at full speed—peek-in, pop-out.”
Arnovic raised the bottle and Sammins nodded. As he poured their last glass, he asked, “How much time does that give us?”
“Half an hour before we hav
e to surrender. Unless . . .”
“Unless, I can convince whatever is plicating space in the engine room to get us out of here?”
“Indeed,” Sammins said, tapping the suit helmet at her waist. “You’re going down into the engine with me. Suit up, Cookie.”
* * *
His emergency pressure suit hadn’t been pulled out of the locker in months. Several sharp creases marred the plain silver fabric. Arnovic quietly tagged them as weak points while Sammins watched, her expression set in polite patience as he unfolded and unzipped and awkwardly climbed in. The suit was rated for about thirty minutes of emergency vacuum exposure and probably half that of hard radiation. He hooked the emergency oxygen tank to his belt and plugged in the nozzle.
They maneuvered carefully down the corridors to the nearest elevator shaft and held tightly to the support bars as the small elevator shuttled them deeper down toward the core of the ship at a speed that, in the reduced gravity, lifted them slightly off their feet. Arnovic, his suit helmet still in his hand, tried not to think about what was coming. Eventually, he looked at Sammins and said, “Did anyone get a look in engineering after it happened?”
“I have the video feed of when the security detail descended into the main engineering space,” she said. “But, well . . . it’s unpleasant. And we haven’t gone deeper because, frankly, we don’t know what we’re doing. There’s no visual on the interior though—all the ports are coated with viscera. So I guess, she . . . exploded?”
He swallowed, and Sammins asked directly, “Why do they kill themselves? The engineers. Is it a pact?”
Arnovic waved a hand. “It’s simpler than that: it’s straight-up religious love. A good engineer loves their twisted thing more than life itself.
“I only studied engineering for a year, back home.” He couldn’t see out of the corner of his eye whether Sammins reacted to that. “Dropped out. Couldn’t muster the devotion, you know? You need to believe; you need to be ready to fall in love when they catch a new engine and start incorporating it into a hull. I could never love one of those things, and what is worship without love? You can’t—you shouldn’t—tend an engine you don’t love with all your heart.” He hoped that sounded convincing.
Ride the Star Wind: Cthulhu, Space Opera, and the Cosmic Weird Page 20