Diamonds in the Sky

by Mike Brotherton, Ed.

  But we were well into summer before my account hit the magical 75 NOD.

  My hands started shaking and sweat greased them so I could hardly hold anything. It took three tries to remember where I’d saved that old ad. I called it up and fired a message off to the breeder, suddenly sure the address was no good, or he’d stopped selling them or the price had risen or any number of things.

  Fellow didn’t write to me until the next day. Another one of those neo-Luddites that limited their online time. His message was terse, as most of them are.

  “Eggs available. Sex not guaranteed. Send delivery address with payment.” And then his bank number for the deposit.

  I almost squeed myself, filling all that in and counting the days before the egg would get here.

  * * *

  I was out tidying the nesting house when Dad bellowed my name — my whole name too — so I knew I’d done something wrong. I ran to the house but stopped before I was all the way in the door.

  Sitting on the small wood coffee table was a white parcel. Even from the door, I could see my name on it.

  I’d never seen my dad angry before. Irritated, maybe. Disappointed, yes. But not angry. Not furious. His face was red and blotchy. There was a vein in the middle of his forehead I’d never seen before. It was a little purple snake of rage living under his skin.

  “Jaiden. What is this?”

  I wasn’t even all the way in the house but I stopped moving. I opened my mouth but no sound came out. Trying again, my voice squeaked into being. “It’s my teddy egg.”

  Dad pointed at the box. “Didn’t your mother and I say you couldn’t have a teddy bear spider?”

  “You said we couldn’t afford to buy one. I bought it on my own.”

  Dad’s jaw tightened. “Did you? And how exactly could you afford that?”

  “I’ve been saving all year. I worked odd jobs being a Mechanical Turk. I did web design for neo-Luddites. I worked in the field.” As I said that, it was like strength came back into my body. “I earned it.”

  Dad worked his jaw for a moment and that vein in his forehead died away. He hung his head, then picked the box up. “Okay. Let’s tell your mother.”

  * * *

  How Dad explained it to Mom, I’ll never know.

  It seemed as if, once the egg arrived my folks joined me in the anticipation of its hatching. I’d sit in the nesting house, my school work in my lap during the last weeks, and Mom would sit with me, knitting. I don’t know if she was there to make sure I did my homework, or because she found the bower of woven branches peaceful.

  “Jaiden?” Her voice was almost reverent.

  When I looked up, she was staring at my egg. A sound I had taken for a branch scratching the side of our house came again. At the same time, the egg rocked slightly.

  I dumped my work without any care and scrambled across the dirt floor on my knees, scarcely daring to breath.

  What’s the longest you’ve ever wanted something for? It felt like every day I had ever wanted that teddy bear spider all piled in my body at once, ready to split my skin down all the seams. I couldn’t breathe for the pressure of my wish finally coming true.

  Oh, how I wanted to help it out of the egg, but I knew it had to come out on its own. I wouldn’t have a role until it was free and then — then I wasn’t ready. I didn’t have the fruit paste its mother would have given it or the towel to help wipe the moisture from its limbs so it would imprint on me.

  I must have made some sound of despair because Mom said, “What is it?”

  I told her what I’d forgotten and then, bless her, she said, “You stay. I’ll get them.”

  I stayed. Oh, how I stayed. I don’t remember Mom coming back but I know she did because I had the towel and fruit paste when I needed it. But everything else, I remember as if I were still living it. Each tiny rock of the egg. The barely audible scritching from inside.

  The moment when the first triangular piece of egg broke away from the end, a strange, almost acrid smell came from the interior. I strained to see in that opening for the first glimpse of my teddy, but it was still too soon to touch the egg.

  The process of hatching took most of an hour. When my teddy pushed its head out of the egg, damp, with the fur matted against its head, it seemed almost entirely helpless. It chirruped, like a cricket, and tumbled free.

  Using the towel, I wiped its face, the way its mother would lick it dry and the teddy pushed against my hand.

  I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a newly hatched teddy bear spider. When they first come out, they look like nothing so much as a drowned house cat. By the time they are dry, their downy baby fur has sprung out to give them the plumpness you associate with them. Their ears are outsized to their heads yet and their eyes are closed for the first several hours after hatching. The combination makes them seem adorable and helpless.

  “Well,” Mom said, “is it a boy or a girl?”

  I pulled the towel away to look for ovipositors and noticed — I don’t understand how I didn’t notice until then — but I finally noticed my teddy was missing a leg.

  “Jaiden?”

  I remembered to look for the ovipositors. “A girl.”

  Then I counted again, touching each long leg. My teddy squirmed with pleasure as I fondled her toes. She cooed. Oh, my heart melted even as I was dying inside. All I could think about was that I had somehow caused the leg to be missing. That I had mishandled the egg or the nesting house hadn’t been the right temperature.

  “What are you going to call her?” Mom knelt beside me to look into the bundle.

  “Kallisto. Kali for short.” I’d thought that was terribly clever. Two goddesses from ancient religions, referenced with a single name. Except my poor teddy didn’t have eight arms like Kali the destroyer, she only had seven.

  “What’s the matter?” Mom stroked my head.

  I pulled the towel back to show her the place on Kali’s side where her eighth leg should have been. It was one of her hind limbs, designed for weaving. Mom didn’t say anything. She kissed me on the forehead and went inside.

  I leaned against the wall of the nesting house and rocked my baby teddy. They really do look like teddy bears, you know. Especially when they are young and about the right size. The illusion vanishes when they open their mouths, of course, and the three lobes of flesh part, right along the lines of the threads of a stuffed bear’s mouth. But even that was a source of utter fascination to me. Her long coiled tongue looked like a pink seashell or party favor and it quested out of her mouth for the fruit paste as if it were an extra arm. If only she had come with a spare.

  * * *

  Mom and Dad came out later and crowded into the nesting house with us. I had spent the intervening time memorizing the features of my teddy. Kali was asleep in my arms, and her whole body pulsed with her breath. I was imagining it, of course, but it seemed as if she were already bigger than when she had come out of the egg. Teddies grow at a monstrous rate, nearly reaching their full size in their first year. I wouldn’t try to ride her until she was two, of course, but she’d be nearly large enough for me to by next Top Day.

  Dad cleared his throat. “Jaiden, we need to talk to you about the teddy.”

  Without even looking at him, I knew something bad was coming, the way his voice was careful and neutral.

  “I earned her.” At the time, the only thing I could figure was they were going to complain again about having the teddy at all. “I earned money to buy her egg and I’ll earn money to pay for her keep.”

  Dad tried again. “Your mother said the teddy is deformed.”

  I didn’t say anything to that. Sure she was missing a leg, but one look at her perfect face would tell you that deformed was the wrong word to use.

  Into my silence, Mom said, “We spoke to the man who sold the egg to you. He said he’d replace the egg.”

  Now two thoughts went through my head at the same time. One was that they couldn’t have spoken to him, because he w
as a neo-Luddite and didn’t give out his number. The second and more pressing thing was that Mom had said, “replace.”

  “She’s mine.” I clutched her tighter. I’d fallen in love, you see? It didn’t matter one whit that she was missing a leg. She had seven more and wasn’t she the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen? If you look at a picture of her face, I’d defy you to find a teddy bear spider with a more perfect set of features.

  Mom and Dad looked at each other like they were trying to double their strength. “She needs to be put down.”

  I don’t remember which of them said that. It might as well have been both of them.

  “No!”

  Dad held out his hands. “I’ll take care of it honey. She won’t feel a thing. The man will send you another.”

  “No. Kali is mine and I love her.” Now you might argue about what a thirteen-year-old could know about love or whether it was possible to learn to love something in the span of time I’d held Kali, but what you can’t argue about is how deeply I felt it. I’d loved Kali since before I saw her, since the first moment I held that egg in my hands. She represented all of my hopes and efforts for the last year, and she might be flawed, but no other egg would be as thoroughly mine.

  Mom opened her mouth to try again but I cut her off. “I earned her and I can choose what to do with her, can’t I?”

  “But she’ll never weave and won’t be able to carry you up the cliffs. What good is she?” Dad gestured at the leftover fruit paste. “She’s going to be a burden. An expensive pet.”

  “She’s mine.” I glared at them.

  To my amazement, Mom put her hand on Dad’s arm. “Ken, let her keep it.”

  You’ve never met my parents but all my experience with them told me that Dad was the softie and Mom was the rule maker. Later I asked her why she let me keep Kali. She said, “You were looking at her like she was your firstborn. I knew you’d never forgive us if we took her away.”

  And she would have been right.

  * * *

  The funny thing was, Kali had no idea she was missing a leg. She scrambled up hills as if she were meant to be seven-legged. When she got old enough, I’d ride her and we’d ramble through the mountains for hours, exploring all the places I wanted to go but couldn’t on my own. She loved nothing better than to climb to the top of the mountain and look out at everything around us. I’d lean between her legs and she’d rest her head on my shoulder, chirruping with contentment.

  She even helped around the farm. We spent one summer helping Dad string irrigation lines between the terraces of the farm. It would have been tricky work with the jetpack, or just climbing by human power, but Kali could cling to the cliffs like they were level ground.

  And then, when she was three, and the sun entered the ring heading toward winter, Kali started to weave, as they do. I guess the weaving is something that’s genetically encoded in them, because all teddies follow the same pattern and I don’t know how else they’d learn it.

  Kali’s now, Kali’s was different. The missing leg, you see? It’s the first time I think she knew something was wrong with her, because she had that pattern in her head, but she didn’t have the equipment to make it go right. My beautiful girl tore out three weaves and snapped at me when I tried to help. I wished we spoke a common language, but there was no way I could explain to her that she was deformed. In fact, it was the first time I’d thought it since she hatched. My heart broke all over again, watching her try to weave and fail.

  * * *

  On Bottom Day, I went outside before my parents were up, to take Kali her present. She met me at the front door the way she did every morning, her whole body vibrating and dancing with delight. If I’d had my way, she would have slept inside with me, but even I had to admit a full-grown teddy bear spider was just too big for a house.

  She had this funny little hop she’d do when she was excited where she’d bounce about a foot off the ground. I had wanted to get out to her nesting house with the gift before she woke, but that was clearly a vain hope. I gave her the honeyed fruitroll and let her wrap her long tongue around it.

  Chirruping, she took it and bounded toward her nesting house. Evidently I didn’t follow fast enough because Kali came back and nudged me from behind.

  “Hey!” I laughed. “Cut it out. I haven’t got any more.”

  She pushed me again and I started to get the sense she had something to show me. Now, you’ve probably already guessed it, but I’ll tell you I hadn’t an inkling.

  Kali had figured out how to weave.

  The sun hadn’t risen high enough to get into the nesting house, but the weaving seemed to make its own light. Normally, a teddy will just make one per season, but it was like Kali had gotten so excited to finally sort out how, she had made two. Each of them had the thousands of dense strands of golden silk you think about when you think about a teddy’s weaving, but instead of being in the traditional pattern, Kali had made a spiral galaxy of her own invention. The arms rotated out in a pinwheel with thinner, gossamer sections in between. She’d incorporated bits of the landscape into the weavings, like they always do, but one of them took my breath away so fast I had to sit.

  Embroidered into the fabric was a weathered strand of red wool. She’d found that old hat Mom had made me, out in the fuzzywyrm’s tree, and built it into her weaving. I started to cry, until I realized Kali didn’t understand how happy she’d made me. Jumping up, I rubbed her soft ears and told her over and over what a good girl she was, until she shimmered with happiness.

  We sold one of the weavings online at auction for a ridiculous sum on account of it being unique.

  The other one? The one with my hat woven in.

  That one’s got my past and my future woven in it. I’d sooner stop breathing than sell either.

  Afterword:

  In the summer of 2008 I was fortunate enough to attend the Launchpad Writer’s workshop, run by Mike Brotherton. While there, Jerry Oltion gave us a tour of the solar system and I learned that besides Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune also have rings. It’s quite possible that Pluto has them as well. I innocently asked the question, “Could a habitable planet have rings, too?” The answer was “yes” and this story was born. One of the things that you notice when looking at pictures of Saturn is the strong shadow cast by the rings across the planet’s surface. What would it be like to live on a world where that was part of your daily life? So many of our holidays and rituals are based on the stars or the moon that it seems likely that having an arch in the sky would have an enormous impact on the culture of a ringed planet. You might miss the solstice if you aren’t paying attention, but there’s no way you could fail to notice Bottom Day.

  © Mary Robinette Kowal

  How I Saved the World

  by Valentin D. Ivanov

  Saving the world is expensive and time-consuming. To say nothing of the sweat and toil. The troubles began with the doctors who drained a few liters of your blood every day, not to mention the other types of body fluids. God forbid you showed the faintest sign of weakness or illness. Sneezing in front of the wrong people would reduce your chances to fly by orders of magnitude.

  Then, you had to undergo the weightlessness training — just a fancy name for the vomit comet flights. They put you on a jet transport, and mind you, this was a Russian banger long past its retirement age. I wouldn’t be surprised if Gagarin himself trained on the same aircraft. This thing chattered more than my wife and her sister over the phone on a Sunday afternoon. Oh, just forget it. So, one morning they loaded you and the other wannabe supermen, and took off. It was scary, I know. The worst came after the plane started diving to the ground. Even then the pilots had to squeeze every last horse power from the engines because the air resistance slowed the bird down. Your free fall exercise was nothing but free.

  All the trainees rolled to the front end after every dive when the pilots leveled the machine — thanks God the bowels of the cargo bay were covered with thick layers of r
ubber and plastic. You could swear that the wings were falling off. We all could. This was when the real fear hit. Each session lasted for an hour, and there were way too many of them. After the first climb I asked myself why I was doing this. Three flights later I was having fun, actually.

  You are about to save the world, remember? And on your own nickel too, so I hope you enjoyed the weightlessness training, because the afternoons after the flights were much worse. And I mean, much worse. The Russians locked you up in a classroom to study the matchast, or the material part, as they call the equipment. You listened to tedious lectures about the ship systems, sitting at a wooden desk covered with carvings: names, dates and cartoons worthy of a certain well-known gentleman’s magazine. Who said Russian art was dead?