by Ken Liu
The silence behind him was broken by a dispassionate, “Huh.” He glanced at Bouchard, who hadn’t moved, then slowly backed up into the ship.
The being followed him, maintaining its distance. As soon as it was clear of the door, one of the soldiers slammed it shut. The alien didn’t react. It twisted its upper portion, presumably to look around, though if it had eyes Avery couldn’t identify them, paying no more or less time assessing the crew than the ship.
Avery flashed back to Mrs. Okeke’s grade four music class. He leaned forward and tapped out a ta-ta-ti-ti-ta on a nearby container. The alien extended its handless arm and repeated his knock, before it knocked a more complex pattern for Avery.
Before long, Avery was knocking out the intros to his favourite songs. The alien never missed a beat, but exercise was bringing them no closer to learning where they were or what had attacked them. Avery knocked back a final pattern, tapping his chest. “Avery,” he said. He pointed to the alien and waited.
It seemed to sag in disappointment but made no sound.
Avery crossed to the door and tapped a two handed rhythm against it. The alien rallied and joined him, growing a second arm to repeat the pattern.
He opened the door slowly. “Bouchard, watch my back,” he said as he went outside, keeping an eye on the sky and waiting to see if the alien would follow. The sky was empty, but as he rounded the ship he saw three stray burrs, buzzing erratically like lazy bumble bees. They darted at him, before suddenly veering away. From a distance they hissed like startled cats. Avery glanced back, to see the alien close behind him. It seemed he wasn’t the only one with bad memories of jello salad.
He gestured to Bouchard. “We need one of them alive.”
Ekki watched the children clumsily try to capture an Aloika. She decided to do it for them before they hurt themselves. Though she was still tired from her previous exertions, she called a puff of wind to propel her adversaries within range. She snatched one of them out of the air and handed it to the Bold One. He put it in a small rectangular box with a locking clasp and carried it back inside the conveyance. Ekki followed close behind but hesitated at the craft’s entrance, where some of them were constructing something.
She wanted to stay and watch, but was wary of losing the rapport she was building. Back inside the vessel, Ekki played more tapping games with the children, marvelling at their behaviour. They appeared to make no effort to mask their pheromones, but their responses to one another’s emotional needs were inconsistent. She wondered if these discrepancies were the result of some of the newcomers being more advanced than others. The other options were chance, which was unordered, or bias, which was unnerving.
The imprisoned Aloika whined softly until it died. Its death appeared to go unnoticed by its captors. She tried again to mindspeak with the Bold One, but only succeeded in raising his stress levels. When he began to rub at his head she stopped.
One of the others brought forward a large flat strip of cambium covered in intricately patterned markings. The newcomers discussed it at length before making more markings with a small stick. Ekki grabbed the stick impulsively and examined it. It left marks on her flesh and she quivered in excitement. Blank cambium sheets were brought to her and she experimented with marking them. Her efforts were clumsy but she was hopeful.
Her first picture depicted her dancing through the stars with Hetchi under the jealous gaze of the Conductor. The second showed the Conductor’s scorned advances being mocked by those in the chorus. Lastly, she drew the Conductor’s terrible wrath, as he trapped Ekki and her lover on separate cosmic bodies and banished the Aloikan chorus to burn in the sun.
Finished, she held the stick out to the Bold One hoping he would understand.
Avery watched the alien draw. With each panel its proficiency grew, but he had no idea what he was looking at. It was like a comic without captions and he had no frame of reference. When the marker was returned to him he hesitated. How was he supposed to tell the story of his entire species in a handful of pictograms?
“What am I supposed to draw?” he asked no one in particular. The suggestions were few. The Milky Way. Earth. Gliese.
The Milk Way seemed the most useful of the three so he started with that. His drawing sucked, it wasn’t to scale, and frustration was giving him a headache. He tried for an image of their intended mission. The armada of ships was bigger than the planet they left from and, without context, the Gliese system was just a collection of circles and dots. Damn. If Edwards were alive, she’d likely have found a way to discuss philosophy by now.
A crackle of static came over the radio, eliciting cheers from the crew and distracting the alien from his artistic failures. The boys at the panel fiddled some knobs and intercepted a message.
“—ort their positions and situation on this emergency frequency for orders. This is Admiral Pardos of the Gantry, to all ships in the fleet. All ships are to report their positions—”
Callaghan snatched the receiver before Avery could reach it. “This is acting Captain Stephen Callaghan of the Terrestrial and Marine Animal Resear—”
Avery grabbed the receiver out of Callaghan’s hand and pushed him away. “This is Lieutenant Commander John Avery, sir. “Tamara suffered thirty percent losses to the crew from equipment failures in transit. Lander One’s hull was damaged upon impact and parasitizing life forms claimed a further nine souls before we took them out. Power is at minimum and communication is spotty. We’ve had no contact with anyone else in the fleet. We’ll organize a search for the rest of the landers in the morning.”
“There’s another alien!” Callaghan shouted.
“Commander, are you currently under attack?” barked Pardos.
“No, sir,” Avery said, as he motioned to Bouchard to take Callaghan elsewhere. “Some of the civilians are just a little excitable.”
“Get them in hand. This is a military mission now,” Pardos said. “What is the status of the library?”
“Undetermined. We’ve had our hands full, sir.”
“Resolve that, Commander. The library is your highest priority.”
Avery looked around at a room of people who’d just discovered their value. “Securing it now sir.”
Avery watched the green slime toss aside his awkward drawings in favour of taking a marker to Callaghan’s satellite images. If the military found out about it they’d lock it away and dissect it before they even learned to communicate. He needed more time to decide what to do.
Ekki was delighted by the image of her planet the children had brought with them. She lovingly added details of her garden to the map and drew a simple icon of the Bold One on the point where his vessel had landed. Surreptitiously, she watched as he spoke into a lifeless flattened sphere. Somehow it spoke back. There was a long exchange between the Bold One and the disembodied voice. She longed to take it apart and examine it more carefully.
A few of the children came to stand by her. They pointed and exclaimed over the marks she’d made and new emotions flavoured the air. She calculated their landing points of the other vessels she’d seen and marked their general locations as well. The children’s excitement grew. It was infectious enough that soon they were gathered around her communicating animatedly. Ekki felt a sense of place and purpose.
She began to think that their anxiety had been caused by the disembodied voice and not any actions of hers. This was good, but she wished again that she understood their words. She wished for larger pieces of cambium to complete the picture but had no way to make the request. She would have to exercise patience.
The tension rose again before the Bold One finished his strange conversation. He beckoned her to follow and headed deeper inside the conveyance. Hoping to learn more about the children, she followed.
They walked alone. Ekki began to worry that she was being led away so the others could hide from her, and that she would be alone once again.
They travelled through a tunnel with many rooms leading off it. Together
they entered one such room, and the Bold One sealed them in. Briefly he slumped against the door. The air around him became heavy with grief and Ekki longed to comfort him. Before she could try, he opened a second door to reveal a room within the room. Ekki’s unease grew as a deep winter cold escaped the interior chamber and thin white frost covered all of its inner surfaces.
The Bold One entered but did not beckon her; indeed he seemed to have forgotten all about her. Ekki hesitated on the threshold. The room contradicted nature and felt like a trap, but curiosity won out.
She followed him inside.
Avery stood at the door to the library with a sense of urgency but no clear plan. The room was twenty feet deep and twelve across, and dark—no power. Frost covered industrial shelving filled the room and acrylic holders of test tubes filled the shelves, but it wouldn’t last. The shelf labels were covered in a thin frost that made them illegible and Avery didn’t have time to read the individual tubes. Without a map, he had no way of knowing which vials were most important.
He grabbed a portable freezer unit from the rack outside and filled it from the first shelf he encountered. He’d cleared less than a quarter of it before the unit was full. He closed the lid and switched on the battery power. If they didn’t get some solar cells working in a day or two he’d have another problem. For now, he had to deal with the fact that he couldn’t save even one percent of what they’d brought with them.
Trying to hedge his bets, Avery moved through the room grabbing vials randomly. He felt like he was picking lottery numbers. When the last portable unit was full, he headed for the door, only to find it blocked—by the alien.
It had one of the tubes in its strange hands and appeared to be studying it. Avery wondered what it might be seeing. Heat from its body had melted the frost of the label. He twisted his head to read it. Muscovy. He was pretty sure it was some kind of duck.
Avery scratched a simple sketch into the softening frost on the wall. The alien studied it for many minutes before making refinements, adding feathers to the body and webbing to the feet. He figured it was definitely smarter than he was—until it ate the tube.
Ekki studied the dead pattern with a burgeoning understanding. Somehow these creatures had come into possession of a great wealth of patterns, frozen and preserved, but they didn’t know how to create them. No other explanation explained the Bold One’s grief.
He was deeply distressed, but now she knew how to sooth him. Ekki thinned her membranes until she was able to ingest the pattern sample she held. She kept her membrane translucent, so the Bold One could watch as she borrowed basic ingredients from within herself and began to weave a primary pattern.
He exclaimed repeatedly and his anxiety levels rose and fell, but he did not try to stop her.
Manipulating the primary pattern to match that of the dead sample was a slow and tedious process. In the outer room, overwhelmed by the stresses of the day, the Bold One slept. Quietly Ekki opened the door and retraced her steps until she found herself in the main room of this strange burrow. None of the children kept watch, and she was grateful the Aloika had so exhausted themselves that another attack was likely many days away.
In the soft moonlight, she sang quietly while she continued her work. As her lover took ascendancy in the night sky, she called out to him as she brought forth this new child, laying it amongst the flowers that had grown in spite of her attempts to limit them.
“Hetchi, my love, see this new pattern. I will fill my garden with them as a testament of my love.”
Through the holes left in her shield by the arrival of the children’s ship, a weak voice answered. “I have missed you Ekki. Your garden is beautiful, but to see it and not hear you tears at my soul. Must you repair the whole shield? Can you not leave one opening for me?” Hetchi’s emotions flooded her mind. He was so desperately lonely. Without her, he had not even flowers to talk to.
She soothed him with a dance as she looked out over the land at all that she had created, all that the Conductor’s cursed Aloika strove to take from her. She was conflicted. Ekki closed her eyes as Hetchi’s distant dreams caressed her mind, reminding her of how happy they had been while twinned. She continued to dance for him, craving the touch of his thoughts. She could not lose him again, but how could she protect her garden if she kept a window open?
A gasp from behind alerted her to the Bold One, awake and watchful. He had followed her from the vessel, and stood staring at the still wet pattern Ekki had brought to life. Behind him, half a dozen sleepy children looked at her in wonder. Protectively they crowded around the child she created and cooed softly as it waved its upper limbs and struggled to stand.
The newcomers were fragile but tenacious. She would study their pattern box until she found a way to make them stronger, so she and Hetchi could dance and sing.
A Theft of Flowers
Stephen Palmer
Stephen Palmer lives and works in Shropshire, England, and is a proud vegetarian, which he considers the simplest and most effective way to combat environmental destruction. He also has nine SFF novels to his name, many of them with either a literal or figurative take on subject of ecology, as well as numerous short stories. Perhaps his fiction is what he eats.
True to form, his story here takes a sideways approach to the natural, recognisable world. Competition is fierce in the virtual marketplace, and flaring tempers and underhand tactics are commonplace online. The question to ask before you begin is, Do you know what you want?
Or even whose side you are on...
In that mirror-bright morning on the edge of steel and chrome, Djeneba faced disaster. During the night her entire stock of flowers had been burned in the brazier that stood outside her stall.
She stood motionless as people milled around her, dark eyes invisible behind dark shades. The breeze ruffled her replacement aluminium hair as the silver fronds falling from the backs of her arms and legs sparkled in the sun.
A nearby stallholder, noticing her shock, called for Asséta.
Such a thing had not happened at Ouagadougou Market for three decades. The intricate web of relationships—of give and take, and of responsibility to the market—prohibited all forms of struggle, especially vendettas. The Old Council had been set up to provide justice and leadership, to symbolise the ethics of the market.
Of course, the Green Wall was a sector apart—real people—but there was no sign of their work at Djeneba’s flower stall.
Djeneba saw little of events around her. All she could see were tiny puffs of smoke emerging from holes in the brazier lid. Eventually Asséta arrived, then led her away, whereupon Djeneba recovered enough composure to speak.
Asséta said, “Do you know who did this?”
“No.”
“Do you have enemies?”
“None!”
Asséta hesitated, glancing down at the silver grass. “In truth,” she said, “there is little I can do. The Old Council holds no stock of money. Those of us who run stalls are independents, solitary or paired, who succeed or fail according to the whim of the market.”
Djeneba nodded, still too shocked to cry. She sat down, taking off her shades.
“It is possible that friends will rally round to provide you with food and drink,” Asséta continued. “And you do still have your tent.”
Djeneba nodded again.
“Or you may have to leave Ouagadougou Market. You cannot hope to collect enough stock from the machines around us before we leave for Timbuktu. Buying stock from people in Ouagadougou or from your friends would cost too much.”
Djeneba sat motionless.
Bending down to place a hand on Djeneba’s arm, Asséta said, “As leader of the Old Council I must be impartial. I am sorry. It would pain me to lose so vibrant a member of the market. But life in Ouagadougou is not at all like life in a real town, or even a village. Because we are so close to the Green Wall of Africa we live and die by our luck.”
Djeneba glanced up, then replied, “An
d by our software.”
Silence.
Asséta stood upright and said, “Ouagadougou Market contains proprietary software—I will not deny it. But that software works only for itself. None of these machine dumps, these random collections… none of those are ours. Ouagadougou Market is its own entity, owing little or nothing to forces outside, governed by the detritus of failed nation states.
"Djeneba, you have been with us for some years. Whatever you decide to do, I wish you luck.”
Asséta walked away. Djeneba glanced at her, then dropped her gaze to study the ground.
People looked aside as they passed her, as if ashamed.
Asséta presented a calm face as she moved on.
Although she suspected that a full attack on Ouagadougou Market could not succeed, she was far from certain. Strife between stallholders, when it happened, took the form of mercantile competition or shouting matches; there were few previous incidents that she could use to gauge what danger the market might now be in.
However, everyone who worked in Ouagadougou Market was aware of the existence of those darker folk who came from inside the Green Wall. The attention of that criminal fraternity was usually turned away from the market, which existed as a cyber-shield against verdancy, but sometimes Green Wall eyes looked in their direction. Asséta knew that if Djeneba’s life was in danger the threat would like as not come from that ancient place.
That was, if Djeneba spoke the truth. Life in the market was harsh. Soon they would be on their way to Timbuktu, and that meant passing through the Green Wall. Real people, real green, real animals and insects. She shuddered. There was no way over or under.
That evening Djeneba began to see what she would have to do.