Fergus nodded. I hate having to say goodbye, he thought. It’s always so much easier to sneak away. “Well, I’m going,” he said. “If I don’t see you again, please thank everyone for me one more time.”
“Sure.”
He closed and sealed his face shield, then turned and cycled through the airlock and out onto the platform.
There was a lone flystick waiting for him in the center of the platform, covered in purple, glittery starbursts. He started laughing and couldn’t stop until his suit’s monitoring systems started registering alarm. Taking hold of the ’stick, he fired it up, and the air around him filled with holographic, rainbow-colored ballroaches. Strapping his cane over his back, he launched into the stars in a cloud of smiling and waving cartoon bugs.
“Fergus?” Mari’s voice came over his comm.
“Yes, Mari?”
“Thanks.”
“For what?”
“I spent my whole life thinking I didn’t count as a real person, that everything I am is a lie, and that maybe—just a little—Gilger and Graf were right to hate us. It wasn’t until I left Cernee that I realized being a person had nothing to do with being human. Maybe someday Arelyn will see that too.”
“I think she’s already starting to,” he said. “Give her time.”
“Yeah,” Mari said. “You too, Fergus. Whatever happens, remember you’re still you, not someone else’s idea of you.”
“Right,” he said. “That’s good, because a lot of people think I’m an asshole.”
Mari laughed. “Not everyone, but give them time.”
“I’ll do my best,” he said.
There was silence on the line for a while, and then she spoke up again. “Those two guys I shot . . .”
“It was war, Mari.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I’ve been at war my whole life. I don’t want to be anymore. How do you do that?”
“One day at a time,” Fergus said. “And if that’s too much, one hour at a time. Trust your instincts, your friends, and definitely any strange little old grandmothers you meet on cable cars. They never stop looking out for you, even when they’re not around.”
“You think so?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“And what about you?”
Fergus laughed. “I think I’m learning that I’ve always been running away from the wrong things, and it’s time I went back and fixed some stuff. Might take me a while to get it all sorted, though.”
“Yeah, well, if you do . . .”
“If I do?”
“Next time I am definitely gonna stab you with the pitchfork and keep your socks. You were way too much trouble.”
He laughed. “I’ll miss you too,” he said.
She disconnected.
Turning as soon as he was clear of the Wheels, he headed out to where Venetia’s Sword waited patiently for him. A single Asiig ship remained, dark and ominous and unmoving above the ship it dwarfed. This is crazy, he thought, but then, when had his life ever not been?
He slowed, tense for the slightest sign of movement, but the ship just sat there as if sleeping as he flew beneath it and up to Venetia’s Sword itself. A faint, almost iridescent sheen surrounded it, like it had been caught in a soap bubble and frozen there. He coasted closer, constantly glancing up and around him for signs of movement, until he could reach out and touch the bubble with one gloved hand. It felt springy, yielding slightly to his touch, but it did not pop and vanish as he’d hoped.
If they wanted me to get in, he thought, they should have given me a key.
Maybe they had.
He reached out again, put the palm of his glove against the strange field, and let electricity seep through, increasing the strength until in an instant the bubble that had been there was suddenly not. The suit blinked at him and rebooted.
When it came back up—four seconds, an impressive recovery speed—he kicked the ’stick forward, reached Venetia’s Sword’s airlock, and with a last look around him at the still-unmoving ship, pressed the external comm. “Control, voice command, acknowledge,” he said.
“Restate authentication,” Venetia’s Sword responded.
He gave the code again, and the outer door slid smoothly open. Pulling himself and the ’stick in, he closed it, waited for the lock to fill with atmo, and exited into the interior of the ship.
It all seemed exactly as he’d left it. Garbage was still strewn in the hallways from the ship’s misuse by Gilger’s crew, dispersed more widely by several gravity shifts that had been his own doing. The remnants of the ties that had held him prisoner still dangled from the arms of a chair lying on its side at the back of the bridge, patches of dried blood on the floor and console beside it. He walked around that chair to the pilot’s station instead, glad to have that harsh reminder of his last visit out of sight behind him.
“You returned,” Venetia’s Sword spoke. He could see the flicker on the console of the ship’s higher mindsystem waking up and trying desperately to stabilize itself.
“I did,” Fergus said. “Are you ready to go home?”
“Yes.”
After a few more flickers, the light went out.
“Gravity to thirty-eight percent, Mars standard,” he said. He felt the weight drain off him.
In front of him, the viewer was on, and he could see the point of the Asiig ship directly above. He wondered where the others had gone. Would they follow him when he left, follow him the rest of his life? It hadn’t occurred to him until that moment that they might. How would the Shipmakers feel if he brought back aliens with their ship?
They better be happy they’re getting it back at all, he thought, or I’m going to punch somebody.
He took the pilot seat, reattached and clipped himself onto the safety tether, and reached to power up the panel when he froze. Sitting there on the top of the helm controls was a motorcycle key.
Startled, he spun his chair around and stood up.
A man stood in the bridge doorway, about his own height, arms folded across his chest as he leaned against one of the blast doors. His suit was thin and strange, and there was something odd about his face that Fergus couldn’t quite pin down. “Well,” the man said, his accent equally unfamiliar. “You came back.”
“I did,” Fergus said. He picked up the key and slipped it into a pocket, instantly comforted to have it there. “You’re human.”
“Oh, don’t start this conversation off like that,” the man said. “I haven’t been human in a very long time. How about you?”
“More human now, I think,” Fergus said.
The man chuckled. “Whatever helps you sleep,” he said.
“How did you get on board?”
The man sighed. “Not in a way you’d understand even if I tried to explain it very slowly,” he said. He stepped forward and to one side, and something moved behind him.
Fergus lost his balance and nearly fell.
The alien was as tall as the doorway, walking on six legs that seemed too skinny, too jointed, to hold up the thick plated shell above it. Like someone crossed an armadillo with a daddy longlegs, Fergus thought, except a hell of a lot scarier.
Below the shell, a rounded body hung on multiple stalks, its front dominated by a cluster of what Fergus could only assume were eyes, all different sizes and shapes and all, like the body, a gleaming black. It made a sound like crickets, and the man straightened. “It says you have damaged your leg,” the man said.
“Yeah. It’ll heal. Were they really watching Mother Vahn all this time?”
More crickets, and the man said, “They watch.”
“Not a very clear answer.”
“You don’t think?” the man said.
The Asiig spoke again, and the man chittered back at it for a moment before sighing. “This is an imperfect translation, but just answer
as best you can. What word is now in your heart?”
Fergus blinked. Without thinking, he said, “Gratitude. I—”
“No, don’t explain, you’ll only ruin it,” the man said.
“Fine,” Fergus said. “So tell me this: why me?”
“Your proximity to the Primary Vahn when we lost her and your unlikely survival that returned you to them in her place were too fortuitous events to ignore. The Asiig listen intently to the signs of the Universe, always.”
“Why?”
“Why? To understand it,” the man said. “You are a piece of the dialogue the Asiig are having with the Universe, whether you hear it or not, whether you understand it or not. Whether you want to be or not.”
Fergus stared at them, trying to make sense of that information. The Asiig stared back, its eyes blinking like camera lenses, closing from all sides at once down to a point. Then it turned, moving smoothly despite its bulk, and began to leave.
“Wait!” Fergus shouted. “What, that’s it?”
“That’s what it wanted,” the man said.
“Is this all a joke?”
The alien stopped, was silent for a moment, then chirped briefly at the man. “It says that’s a somewhat profound question,” the man translated. “It will consider it.”
“But . . . what about me? Will you fix me?”
“We could only fix you if we’d broken you,” the man said. “I don’t think we see that the same way you do.”
“Then what am I now? What am I supposed to do?”
The Asiig chirped again, then left the bridge.
Fergus stared at the man, desperation making him tremble. “What did it say?”
“Ah,” the man said. “Sometimes they’re hard to understand, you know. Shades of syntax and all that.”
“Tell me,” Fergus said, almost begging.
“It said, ‘Be interesting.’ Now, is that a command? Or a prediction? I can’t tell you.” The man shrugged. “Not really my problem. Don’t know yet if we’ll meet again. Good luck.”
He turned and followed the alien out.
Fergus stood there, wanting to cry, wanting to laugh. All he’d been through, and that was the answer he got?
Venetia’s Sword’s helm beeped at him, and he turned to see the black triangle looming above slide forward and vanish back into the dark.
Fergus stared at the empty space for a very long time. It was his aching leg that brought him back to himself, and he sat, taking several deep breaths, before reaching for the helm again. “All systems check?” he asked. His voice trembled.
“All systems functioning,” Venetia’s Sword answered.
“How big is the universe?”
“Calculating a current estimation will take me—”
“Never mind; big enough. Set a course for Crossroads, and run a full integrity check on the jump engines as we get underway.”
“Commencing,” the ship said.
Fergus leaned back in his chair. A few jumps, a few days, and he’d have the ship back to its makers, who could fix it and make it right again. This job would, at long last, be done. He will have met his last obligation.
Still not quite the last, he realized. I have a motorcycle to get out of storage and take back to its owner, if I can. He’d have to avoid Mars for a while, probably; the MCA had a long memory when it came to people who’d gotten away from them, and if they were peeved enough, they might even have passed on a fugitive description to the Alliance. The Alliance, for its part, couldn’t care less about Marsie problems unless he got right in their faces. Which he’d have to try to avoid if he was going to get back to Earth.
Earth.
He was starting to get the glimmer of an idea for how to get through EarthPort security without raising any flags, but beyond the cold logistics, the thought of actually being there—his feet standing on Earth with its oceans and mountains and memories—left him lost. He didn’t even know where to start, much less if he was ready. Was he just one more long-lost broken thing, coming home?
And what after?
He could take another finding job. He could go back to the Shipyard, see Venetia’s Sword made right again, hang out with Theo and the others until they kicked his useless ass out. He could go back to Coralla and live on the beach, maybe study with a Tea Master. He could help Cernee rebuild, work for Harcourt, or maybe open Cernee’s first curry shop. Bugrot hadn’t seemed bad. Or he could do something else entirely, something that he hadn’t even thought of yet, something different and new.
Whatever he did, he was certain things weren’t over with the Asiig.
Be interesting, he thought, and he tapped the helm sequence to go.
Acknowledgments
Over the years I’ve become that sort of person that often reads acknowledgements in books, but I’ve never had the opportunity to write them before, so naturally this is an occasion for much AAAAAAAH PANIC FLAIL. (This is something that authors do a lot of, and never let them tell you otherwise.) I wouldn’t have the chance to write this if it hadn’t been for the incredible support, patience, wisdom, and occasional justified dope-slap from a lot of people, all of whom I am extraordinarily grateful for in ways this brief acknowledgement can’t come close to adequately expressing.
My agent, Joshua Bilmes, has been a steadfast guide from our earliest conversations, and this book would not be here without his patient efforts. Thanks also go to Katie Hoffman, my editor at DAW, for her enthusiasm and for loving my book enough to bring it the rest of the way into the light of day, and to all the other wonderful folks at DAW who have worked on it and helped this anxious n00b through the process without strangling me.
I wouldn’t have gotten this far without my first writing group, the Rosleyians, nor the instructors, staff, and my fellow alumni of the Viable Paradise Writer’s Workshop. Special thanks need to go to Laura Mixon-Gould, without whose support and timely words of wisdom I would have thrown in the towel entirely, and to Macallister Stone and my many friends at AbsoluteWrite who made me feel like I belonged somewhere again. Much of my writing gets done in the evenings while I’m logged into the AbsoluteWrite IRC chat channel, and while it would be going too far to say they’ve kept me sane, certainly they’ve kept me excellent company. A shout-out is also due to those editors (Sheila, Neil, Trevor, and Andy, among others) who believed in my short fiction work and whose encouragement still keeps me reaching to do better. Taking up writing has introduced me to an entire, diverse community of thinkers and creators and amazingly talented, weird, funny, clever, good-hearted people, all over the world and right here in my tiny happy valley in western Massachusetts, that I cannot imagine life without. There are no riches in this world more shiny than friendship.
And I wouldn’t be on this writing journey at all if not for my early teachers who got me hooked on reading Science Fiction and Fantasy, my friend Kelly Fenlason who dragged me off to my first real SF convention (Boskone, the year with the orange t-shirt . . . ) as a teenager, and all my friends from the UMass Science Fiction Society, many of whom are still hanging out with me all these years later. Particular thanks are owed to Jonathan Turner and Robin Holly, who provided invaluable feedback when I sorely needed it, and the rest of the weekend gaming crew.
Likewise, none of this would be possible without the support of friends near and far (*waves to the September Moms*) and the understanding and forbearance of my family, including my children who no longer blink when I wander around the house muttering about blowing up shit in space, my big floofy dog who gets dragged on long walks whenever I get stuck (and loves it like it’s a brand new adventure every single time), and most of all my extraordinarily talented oldest daughter Tarian who knows just when to bring me tea and does her best to make me eat more vegetables, though she is never gonna sell me on kale. Love you all, every day. Sorry I forgot to do the laundry again.
And
last, but so not and never least, all my thanks and love to my best friend Laurie Vadeboncoeur, who dared me to write something all those years ago, and forgot to tell me I could stop. For her sins, she gets to beta-read all my work, and she hasn’t changed her phone number yet so I must still be doing okay.
Thank you for reading. Peace (-:
—Suzanne
NOVEMBER, 2018
About the Author
Suzanne Palmer is an award-winning and acclaimed writer of science fiction. In 2018, she won a Hugo Award for Best Novelette for “The Secret Life of Bots”. Her short fiction has won readers’ awards for Asimov’s, Analog, and Interzone magazines, and has been included in the Locus Recommended Reading List. Her work has also been features in numerous anthologies, and she has twice been a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and once for the Eugie M. Foster Memorial Award. Palmer has a Fine Arts degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where as a student she was president and head librarian of the UMass Science Fiction Society. She currently lives in western Massachusetts and is a Linux and database system administrator at Smith College. You can find her online at zanzjan.net and on Twitter at @zanzjan.
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