All These Shiny Worlds

by Jefferson Smith

  Within a month he had the first structure, built from stone and timber. He transferred equipment from the landing craft, then went back up for more. Gene sequencers crafted fish eggs for him to place gently into the tide pools on the beach. First small fish, to eat the algae, then bigger fish to eat the small fish. He set the machines to keep producing pre-fertilized eggs, and every few days took the buckets to the shore.

  Meanwhile he was mapping the land with seismic probes. Inside a year he had located veins of iron and copper. He set up automated mines and built more robots.

  He sent Sari pictures and video files of the construction. He brought a small fusion reactor down from his ship and used its power to construct and start a large one—one big enough to power a city. He cleared large sections of forest and made fields, seeded them with a grass that would grow and rot and enrich the soil. His own patch of garden was tiny in comparison, but it replaced the synthetics that he had eaten since he left Earth.

  He sent Sari a video of the first meal he cooked from Avalonian crops, and another of the first bread he baked.

  He built stone walls around the fallow croplands. It was time to introduce vertebrates to the land.

  Birds, he thought. Let’s start with birds.

  Gulls and sandpipers to begin, then robins and sparrows and swallows and doves. He raised the birds in cages, feeding them with native vegetation and insects until they could fly, then let them go.

  Sari sent him a raft of massive files that turned out to be edited movies. She’d taken films from the Camelot’s library and edited herself into them, reacting to the events on-screen as if she were watching the movie with him. It was a thoughtful, touching gift. Nearly the whole library was represented.

  She must have spent years on the project.

  During the day he bred and raised animals—squirrels and hedgehogs, foxes and feral cats. At night he watched movies with Sari’s digitized reflection, and sent his own comments back.

  By the time that this body began to ache and reject food, there were herds of sheep and horses running free across the green hills of Davidson’s interior.

  Camelot was two hundred and seventy years away. Tomas began making plans for their arrival.

  He put cameras on some of the robots and set them up to broadcast the feeds to the ship for collection and rebroadcast to Camelot. He wanted Sari to be able to see her destination.

  When it was time to die he walked slowly into the forest, lay down at the base of a tree, and took his pills. He made note of landmarks, so that he could find these bones and bury them later. A hundred and fifty years later, he had decided. Davidson could get by without him that long.

  His last memory was the sun through the trees, and the wind on his face.

  His first memory was looking out a window, trying to find his gravesite from orbit. The control room felt like a steel coffin in the heart of a cage above the world. It was nearly nine hundred years since he had first been born, on a city back on Earth. Sometimes he wondered if that city existed anymore.

  He had been alive on Earth for thirty-eight years. He had lived a hundred and twenty years above and on Avalon.

  And now he was a newborn again, but he felt very old. As old as the world.

  He checked for messages from Sari first. While the computer was sorting through them he checked the ship. It was going to need some work.

  The feeds from the robots were all still active, as were the images from orbit. The herds of sheep had grown too large and overgrazed a section of the interior back into desert. He hadn’t wanted to introduce any large predators, but he might have to. He told the computer to begin a simulation of how a pack of wolves would impact Davidson.

  Life was spreading to the other continents as well, seeds drifting on the ocean tides and winds, or carried by gulls. That was good, and to be expected.

  None of the transmissions from the Camelot were marked urgent, so he began to play them in order. Sari had been alive for forty of the hundred and fifty years that Tomas had been dead. He would have plenty of material to occupy him.

  He fired reseeding packages into the desert region and hoped for the best. Then he went down to work his mines.

  Adjusting to the gravity was easier this time. Camelot, he knew, created its own gravity by spinning on its long axis, and Sari had adjusted the spin to match Avalon’s gravity. She would be able to walk as soon as she touched down.

  Tomas wanted to walk with her, under the trees that he had grown in this alien soil.

  Tomas narrated his own work to send back to her.

  He spent five years slagging rocks and separating the molten stone into ingots of pure elements. Sari kept him company, talking about her troubles with the Camelot. The enormous vessel had its own ecology, organic components to produce food and air for her, and on the long voyage they had mutated. It hadn’t been a thousand years ship time—time dilatation had helped. Although the acceleration was low, Camelot had spent much of the voyage close to the speed of light.

  Still, it had been a very long time—millions of bacterial generations. Sterilizing and regrowing the organics to keep her alive had become an ongoing job.

  Nor was the machinery immune to the ravages of time. Everything had to be rebuilt, or re-manufactured, using only the raw materials inside the ship’s skin. She had kept busy, but her tone was cheerful. It was a challenge. No one had ever done anything like this before.

  The buildings that he had constructed were mostly intact, although they were overgrown. He hadn’t wanted to program the robots to cut down plants. He did that himself, shaping paths through the compound and cutting back the brush. The machinery he had mothballed before his last death was still in good repair.

  The wolves, he had decided, were necessary. Without them the sheep would breed faster than the pastures could grow. He put off introducing them for as long as he could. First he cleared space for the city, assuming a thousand inhabitants who would want to begin raising families right away, and built a wall around the cleared ground. It was made from stone blocks cut from the ground with a laser, twelve feet high and pierced regularly by steel gates. He never found the bones from his last body. He assumed that the growing tree had buried them and grown fat on their minerals.

  He raised three breeding pairs of wolves to young adulthood, then set them free. He couldn’t really teach them to hunt, but then, the sheep didn’t know how to be hunted, either. Predator and prey could learn together.

  The years passed comfortably.

  He set up a water treatment plant and a pumping station, laid out networks of pipes for water and sewage, and buried cables for electricity. He set up towers for data transmission. He set down roads and named them after characters from the movies that he and Sari enjoyed. He taught the robots to build simple houses out of stone.

  He documented it all for Sari, telling a robot to follow and record him on long rambling walks through the city grounds while he talked about what he’d done, and what he had left to do.

  When he felt his body growing old he welcomed it. He told the computer not to bring him back to life until the Camelot entered the Avalon system.

  His last memory was lying on damp grass and looking up at the stars.

  His first memory was watching a blue-white star that wasn’t a star through the window of his ship.

  Camelot was ten light-hours away and decelerating, its drive spraying a fan of high energy ions before it like a headlamp.

  Sari’s recordings were rushed. She was waking up the passengers, a delicate procedure. They took time to convalesce, the newly arisen frozen sleepers. She would have to nursemaid the first dozen until they were well enough to awaken and care for the others.

  Tomas was a thousand years old. Tomas was two hundred years old.

  Tomas was a teenager, and there was company coming.

  He checked the ship only long enough to ensure that no critical systems were in danger of failing, and then he headed for Davidson City. He started ins
tructing his robots on the trip down.

  The mild Davidson winter was just ending, and the fields were wet with the last of the melting snow. Tomas started the gene sequencers making seeds. Corn and wheat and vegetables. Despite the wolves the sheep still thrived, covering the hills. Rabbits and squirrels had become a problem, though. Hawks, Tomas thought, I should have introduced hawks before now.

  Suddenly there were a million things to do.

  In the months left before Camelot’s arrival he worked himself into a happy exhaustion every day. Sari’s updates grew more frequent, and the time lag shrunk until they could converse. She had her hands full with the ship and the passengers, who had been silent and still for so long but now suddenly needed managing.

  He had his hands full with the land, bringing in the harvest and building silos to store it through the winter.

  Still, they had time to talk in the evenings, if only a few words.

  “I can’t wait to see you.”

  “Me, too. Soon.”

  Camelot became the brightest star in the night sky.

  And then, quite suddenly, it was there.

  One morning Tomas awoke to the knowledge that Camelot was breaking for orbit around Avalon, geosynchronous above Davidson City. Sari’s last message was, “I’m bringing the first boat down now.”

  The boat, like Tomas’s landing craft, came to rest in the harbor. It dwarfed the ship that had brought him here from Earth. Once it sat floating gently in the glass-smooth sea it launched its own boats: water boats, inflated bladders of polycarbonate fibers with whining outboard motors.

  Sari was piloting the first one to land.

  She stepped unsteadily onto the beach and looked around, breathing in the cool, rich air, so ripe with life after so long inside steel corridors. The passengers behind her waited, subdued and still.

  Tomas stood. Smiled. Spread his arms to indicate the shore, the continent, the entire world, green and growing all around them.

  “Welcome home,” he said.

  ***

  On a world called Avalon, in a place called Founder’s Park, at the center of Davidson City, there are two statues. The park is a long quadrangle, with a reflecting pool down the center, and trees arching over it on both sides. The statues are of a man and a woman, one at each end of the park, looking towards each other. The man holds a plow in his hands, of a kind that only historians would recognize. The woman grasps an equally ancient brass spyglass.

  There are plaques giving their names at the base of each of the statues, but they are old and worn, in a dialect not read much anymore. Residents just call the statues the captain and the plowman.

  No one is quite sure why they were placed so far apart.

  About The Author

  Misha Burnett draws his stylistic inspiration from the New Wave Science Fiction of the 1960s and 1970s—writers like Phillip Dick, Samuel Delany, and George Alec Effinger. He navigates the internal landscape of his characters, believing that the strangest new worlds are those behind our eyes.

  For more information, visit https://mishaburnett.wordpress.com/.

  Three Demon Gambit

  J.S. Morin

  Editor’s Note: The “deal with the devil” story has a rich tradition in both fantasy and science fiction. Rich enough that tvtropes.com has an entire page devoted to its usual forms. So imagine my delight at finding a story that puts a new (and humorous) twist on that crowded tradition.

  Jaraim’s knife bit into ancient wood, following the chalky lines of the glyph. Sweat beaded on his forehead, and as he finished each cut, he gasped from having held his breath as he carved. It had taken him three days of surreptitious work, stealing hours when Faulyr was absent from their shared room. It was nearly finished.

  From the top post of the bunk beds, a crow squawked. Jaraim jumped, the knife dropping from his fingers. He aimed a glare at the creature, staring into the black pits of its eyes. “Shut up, Kalab. This is going to work. I can’t trust chalked warding circles anymore.”

  Jaraim regarded himself from Kalab’s perspective, through the mental bond shared between master and familiar. He looked haggard, pale, with dark circles beneath bloodshot eyes. Kalab was worried about his health. “I’ll be fine. I’ll sleep better once I settle this business. Just…don’t scare me like that when he gets here.”

  Jaraim finished his carving, then wiped away the remnants of chalk with a rag. The circle was perfect, and safe from smudges, sneezes, and other hazards of chalk-drawn circles. Waving away the cloud of dust he had added to an already dusty room, Jaraim dug through desk drawers until he found a tallow candle. It was octagonal and violet, with glyphs stamped into each of its sides. As far as Jaraim knew, the glyphs were merely decorative, something to lure more coins from ignorant students. Jaraim was not one of those; he knew he was paying for the appearance of the arcane. Sometimes things needed to appear as they ought to be, and not what they really were.

  Setting the candle at the center of the circle of glyphs, Jaraim steadied himself with a deep breath, and with a spark of elemental fire, lit the wick. The tallow gave off a foul odor, some additive in the color burning sour and sulfurous. Jaraim waved away the smoke before beginning his chant.

  Dossic was an elder tongue, little used in modern magic except by those who dabbled in demonology. Jaraim had learned it in secret—just enough to practice the summoners’ arts. The words were heavy, guttural, each carrying a taint of vulgarity. As he droned on, a pale blue glow formed in the glyphs, growing brighter with each repetition.

  Jaraim lost track of time, eyes focused on the candle flame. When the wick flared and the flame burst like a squeezed grape, his guest arrived. The creature in the middle of the circle was no taller than one of Jaraim’s shoes measured toe to heel. Its skin was the color of lava and glistened with oil. From its head sprouted a pair of tiny horns, and from its fingers even tinier claws, all ending in needlelike points. Its body was cherubic, with short, pudgy limbs and no defined muscle. Its name was Alkax, and it was a telik—a lesser magma demon.

  “Greetings, Apprentice Jaraim,” said Alkax in a reedy voice that lilted with sarcasm. The demon took in its surroundings, focusing on the circle of glyphs carved into Jaraim’s writing desk. Alkax gave a lazy kick in Jaraim’s direction and a flash of arcane energy repelled him at the circle’s border. “I’m moving up in the world. It’s almost as if you’re afraid of me. You haven’t got a reason to be afraid of me, have you, Apprentice Jaraim?”

  Despite the barrier protecting him, hearing Alkax speak his name always caused a shiver in Jaraim’s soul. Names held power, and the demon had wheedled Jaraim’s given name from him when he was still too reckless and inexperienced to know better. Alkax had been the first demon he had ever summoned. He would also be the last, Jaraim had sworn—but not today.

  “I require your assistance,” said Jaraim. He forced himself to meet the demon’s gaze, looking into the black depths that were not so different from Kalab’s, now that he thought of it.

  Alkax smiled, showing off a mouthful of serrated fangs, lit from within by a furnace glow. “Since when don’t you? If you spent half the time studying that you spend pestering me, you’d be the top of your class on your own. I already gave you all the answers you’ll need for your final test.”

  “I’ve discovered that there will be secret questions at the end, to see who among the students has studied best on their own. It will set the rankings in the event of multiple perfect scores. I stole the questions; I just need the answers from you.”

  Alkax cackled. “I like you, human. Never satisfied. Never shy about doing what needs doing. Never…afraid to bargain.” The demon’s smile grew impossibly wide for its face.

  “What’s it going to cost me?” Jaraim asked. He kept the fear from his voice. It made no difference what the demon asked; he would agree.

  “Well, since you already owe me a year of servitude, let’s just add a month. Thirteen is a nice number.”

  “Deal. My ser
vice still starts after I earn my medallion,” said Jaraim. What that service would entail, Jaraim tried not to contemplate. Possession? Enslavement in the nether realm? His imagination had provided nightmares of every description.

  Jaraim relaxed as he read the questions from a scribbled list that he kept out of the demon’s field of vision. They were a ruse, as was the added portion of the testing. The only answer he wanted was to the last question: “How does one bind a narvish?”

  “Oh, now that one ought to separate the censer sniffers from the scholars,” said Alkax with a giggle. “Nice boy like you shouldn’t know such naughty words. I think I’ll save you from yourself.”

  Jaraim knew better than to think the demon had his best interests in mind. It was valuable knowledge, and Alkax would not part with it readily. “So then, our contract is void. And since this was an extension of our original deal, and not a separate one, I am free of obligation to you.” Jaraim sat back and crossed his arms, letting a smirk settle across his lips.

  Alkax lunged for him. Blue radiance flared at the tip of each of the demon’s claws as Alkax tried to scratch his way through the barrier to no avail. “Trickster! You can’t worm your way out of a bargain so easily. You belong to me.” The demon spoke three words; Jaraim felt sullied by hearing them, but forced himself to echo the chant. “There. Our bargain is complete. I will return in three days’ time to collect you, whether you summon me or not.”

  Jaraim barked a righteous word and forced Alkax back to his own world. The tiny magma demon vanished in a twist of sooty smoke, and the glow faded from the glyphs that bound him to the mortal world. An eerie quiet remained in the room, with Jaraim slumping back in his chair, exhausted. Three days, and it would all be over.

  Kalab squawked. There were footsteps in the hall outside.

  Jaraim scrambled to clutter his desk, covering the circle of glyphs in books and notes, draping his traveling cloak over the chalk and knife; there was no time to put things away. By the time Faulyr entered, it looked as if Jaraim had been hard at study.