by Rich Horton
Reactions had fallen from my craft’s comm panel: loud, tearful, questioning, accepting.
And there were other conversations, a mass of them like a drawer of star anise and fennel seeds.
Team Leader Hu Leyi had asked, before their decision about our futures: Our records indicate that an experiment in agricultural production was established in the asteroid XI-258. Is that experiment on-going?
To that, Jidarat Chanprasert—the family head of one asteroid, where I placed a sliver of galangal on my tongue—had replied: The Lo family inhabit an asteroid where spices are grown.
How interesting! Several people here are very excited to hear this and would very much like to know more about what species have proved successful. Later, Team Leader Hu Leyi had talked of samples to be brought to Cai Nu.
Jidarat had replied: Perhaps one of the Lo family would like to talk to Team Leader Hu Leyi about this.
Later, I had heard Older Mother’s voice take over, giving Team Leader Hu Leyi the full history of our fields, our production methods, our trade with the other asteroids. I imagined Older Mother walking among the fields inside our asteroid with Younger Mother at her side, talking as they worked.
Sometimes individuals—not heads of an asteroid’s family, not important, knowledgeable people—got onto one of the comm units. One child asked: How many classes are there at your schools?
Team Leader Hu Leyi—or one of her colleagues—replied to every question. There are many classes: mathematics, science, agriculture, history, literature, music, many different types of engineering, many languages.
A day later, the girl said: I want to make plants!
A colleague replied: We have a great interest in bioengineering at the moment, as we progress with the terraforming of the still-unnamed third planet in the system. It is a very exciting field.
Can I do that?
Of course! We will provide an education for all of the children and any adults who want it. We want you to do work that fulfills you, whether it is in bioengineering or finance or poetic composition.
The Cai Nu person sounded delighted by the girl’s interest, but the conversation did not turn to our adaptation. Perhaps it would be easier for children. Perhaps the Cai Nu people didn’t know how much could be achieved with their technology.
In my comm’s chiming I had heard excitement. I had heard joy: to listen to stories of millions of people, stories of great temples and mosques, stories of New Year celebrations that filled thousands of streets with food and color and people, and religious festivities and Landing, the anniversary of arriving on Cai Nu from a different star system, and birthdays in families of over a hundred relations—to listen to this was to marvel, to disbelieve, to hope.
Two days before my arrival at the cumin asteroid, Team Leader Hu Leyi had finally admitted what I had feared: It will be very difficult for you. Your bodies have adapted to the absence of gravity. You will not be able to step from the landing craft onto the surface of our world, but we are building you a zero-gravity habitat, we are already researching the possibilities of technologically-assisted adaptation. However you are able to live here, we will strive to ensure comfort. You will never hunger, never lack medicine, never lack people to talk to. And your children will have every possibility laid out before them.
I had replayed this message until I knew it as well as Aagot’s story.
Thyme
I feared many things, but this was what stuck in me like a blockage in an air supply pipe, like a star anise’s point in a throat: what if people didn’t understand me. I imagined people like Thyme being so rare that they laughed. I imagined the people whose languages used gendered pronouns insisting that I choose male or female. I imagined every one of these one million people needing to be told that I was un-gendered, a different gender—if I didn’t even know what to call myself, how could I expect to be taken seriously?—the way I had needed to tell everyone I knew in the asteroids when I was younger. I imagined giving up.
I told myself to stop being foolish. How could one million people have only two fixed genders?
But the only other person like me in all the asteroids was Aagot, who I couldn’t find.
Fields
It was not quite the last time I would approach my family’s asteroid: that pitted, dark peppercorn-shape, orbited by a moon only three kilometers in diameter, that landscape at the heart of my personal stories. Home. No, it was not quite the last time I would approach it, but I hurt enough to believe it was.
“Big Cousin!” my youngest cousin’s voice came in over the comm. “We’re opening the smaller landing bay for you. Bring everyone in!”
A hole slowly opened in the asteroid’s side.
I wordlessly landed my craft, waited for the bay doors to close and the air to return, waited for the signal to unlock my craft’s door. Unloading began. My family emerged from the corridors to help: to organize the storage of possessions, to lead people to places they could sleep and spend time until the Cai Nu people arrived.
I slipped away to the fields.
They filled four vast rooms: stacked shelves holding soil and spice-plants. I drifted above them, perpendicular to their ends, looking along each shelf at sage bushes, carefully stunted cinnamon trees, red-fruited chilies, long fennel stalks fronded with white flowers, clusters of bay and berry-heavy juniper and green-leafed plants hung with the star-seeds of anise. So many smells: green and sharp and sweet. Home-smells.
Many plants had been recently harvested: leaves thinned out—taken for drying—and seeds picked. Others soon would be. Our last harvest.
I went to a cluster of star anise plants.
The light gravity generator in the shelf pulled me to the soil. Clods between my toes. Glossy leaves against my legs. The weight of my body startled me, pulled me to my knees. I steadied myself. It was always uncomfortable, returning to the fields after a long journey. Soon—no. I sat. I placed an unripe seed—green, eight-pointed—on my tongue, I dug my fingers into the soil. My skin already smelled of the fields: green, earthy. Home.
Would I ever work in a field on Cai Nu? Would I ever adjust to that much gravity?
I wanted to think of nothing but star anise against my tongue, against my skin.
Younger Mother’s voice cut through the air. “Oldest Child? Is that you?”
“Yes.”
Boots clanged on metal: she climbed down from far above me, shelf to shelf, until she appeared at the end of mine and swung herself onto the soil with an ease I lacked. A bag of cinnamon hung from her shoulder. She walked towards me with bark-stained fingers and bare feet—and the way she walked, straight-backed and sturdy, reminded me suddenly of the pictures of the Cai Nu people.
“I didn’t hear you working,” I said.
“I was thinking about, well, a lot of things.” She crouched at my side, smiling. “Why are you in here?”
“I wanted to sit in the fields, as we’ll be abandoning them soon.”
My voice was as brittle as a dried cardamom pod.
Younger Mother’s smile faded.
I looked away, at the soil, at the star anise, as my mother quietly said, “It will be better. For everyone. Just—just imagine the fields there! Real fields, laid flat across the ground not stacked like this, like shelves because we don’t have to room to do it any other way—and sunshine!”
“I see the sun regularly,” I murmured.
Above our heads, the underside of the next shelf held UV lights that replicated the sun for the plants: a constellation of hundreds across the fields.
“I’ve read about rain and snow in a thousand poems,” Younger Mother said, “but to see them! To feel them on my skin!”
We—I—wouldn’t. I had grown up in the fields, gravity on my bones, but I had spent so much of the past ten years among the asteroids. I loved it: the cumin or clove or galangal on my tongue, the spice cabinet doors sliding open, the happiness I brought, the stories shared. But I doubted my body was much healthier than tho
se of the people I traded with.
Would my field-working family adapt quickly? Would they work in real fields?
“And they will have new spices there,” Younger Mother said, running her fingers over the star anise’s leaves. “New flavors. New—so much.”
New spices.
“It will be better.”
“And difficult,” I said. “No one seems to want to talk about that.”
“What else can we do? You know this, you see the other asteroids and everything that’s broken and old in them.”
I remembered the star anise asteroid, broken open like a seed casing, all its contents—its people, who I had once known—spilled out.
“I need to get back to harvesting,” Younger Mother said. “I know there won’t be much need for all this on Cai Nu, but it would be a shame for it to go to waste.”
“I’ll eat it.”
She smiled, then left me among the star anise plants, their seeds hanging around me like the view from an asteroid’s surface. I couldn’t imagine any other view.
I returned to my craft, to my journey—not a trade journey, any more.
Cinnamon, Turmeric, Rosemary, Cloves, Galangal, Sage
I started to forget to place spices on my tongue as I arrived at each asteroid, collecting its people—bringing them closer to the Cai Nu people’s arrival. I started—slowly, reluctantly—to think of the ways life on Cai Nu would be better for them, for me.
Found
Everyone gathered. Everyone. Who had ever imagined such a sight? So many people holding onto the walls or drifting carefully, so many bags and boxes tethered with them, so many voices all at once—people who had never seen each other, only spoken over the comms, suddenly able to talk unending, to shyly smile and embrace and unhesitatingly kiss. A wonder. A hundred people, another hundred, another. A community, not stretched out like sparse flowers on an ill chili plant but here, together, one. Everyone.
I couldn’t deny my excitement. I couldn’t subdue my fear.
I looked and looked for Aagot.
Older Mother had set up comm units throughout the large loading bay, so that her voice could be heard everywhere in that vast space, among so many people. Periodically she said, “The Cai Nu craft is now two hours away!” and, “The Cai Nu craft is continuing its steady course, only an hour away!” until, suddenly, too soon, “The Cai Nu craft will enter the landing bay in ten minutes.” I drifted through the loading bay. Around me, people drew in breath together, a long silence before new conversations streamed out like air into space.
Then—so soon—we heard the grinding as the landing bay doors opened for the first time in over a hundred years. We heard nothing, nothing, noise lost in vacuum—then a gentle set of metal-on-metal sounds. The Cai Nu craft landing. I drifted, unseeing. I only knew sounds. Arrival. The landing bay doors closing again. The first set of airlock doors between the two bays opening. I didn’t breathe, I didn’t speak—no one did. I reached a wall. I held.
The second set of airlock doors opened.
The people—five of them—wore dark blue suits and helmets with clear visors, but I was too far away to see their faces. Into our silence they slowly entered, using the handrails that spread across the wall like roots. They removed their helmets. They looked at us with cautious smiles. One said in Mandarin, “I am Team Leader Hu Leyi. It is a pleasure to finally be here and meeting you all.”
Older Mother drifted forward, saying, “I am Lo Minyu. On behalf of everyone: welcome. You are very welcome here.”
The other four Cai Nu people looked around the loading bay, as if trying to match faces to the voices they had heard over the comms.
“Are you all here?” Hu Leyi asked.
What did they think of us? What did they—
I saw, then, a long, thin braid of hair with a circular metal ornament fixed to its end.
I remembered: etched with a person crouched inside the shape of a bear.
“Aagot!” Then fear reached my tongue and I couldn’t talk. Was this Aagot? Was this some other person, who did not know me, did not want to talk to me—
The person turned.
“Aagot,” I managed.
A slight frown. “Ecralali, now.”
Now. A name-change—a reason I hadn’t been able to find Aagot Fossen, who no longer existed.
“Did we meet when I was younger?” Ecralali asked.
“Yes. Yes. I am Lo Yiying.”
Quietly, Ecralali said, “I know you.”
“Years ago, we talked about—” One or two people were interested in our conversation. I wanted privacy. I wanted no one to judge our words unimportant, irrelevant. Most of all, I wanted Ecralali to remember me. “We talked about Thyme and gender and—” I might as well have bared my skin in the space between the asteroids. “It was the most important conversation I’ve ever had.”
Ecralali’s face changed: astonishment and delight. Unless I interpreted wrongly, unless I imagined—
“I remember,” Ecralali said, “I remember telling you about un-gendered Houyi—”
“I’d only ever known Houyi as a woman before then,” I said, as full of wonder as if I was hearing the tale of Chang E and Houyi for the first time. “That’s how my mothers always tell the story.”
“—and the story of the stars, whose lives are not measured in gender.”
“Thyme,” I said, fennel-foliage soft, “who is like me.”
“Yes.”
Hu Leyi and her colleagues were still talking: moving among us, taking names, inventorying possessions, dividing us into groups.
“I know more stories now,” Ecralali said.
“I—I would like to hear them.”
“I know about Cai Nu—the founder, not the moon—I’ve read everything in our records, listened to every story. A lot of them tell that Cai Nu was fluidly gendered.”
“The founder was . . . ”
Ecralali’s smile was as rich as a whole cabinet of spices.
I half-heard announcements. We would have a room for each family on the Cai Nu people’s spacecraft, as well as several communal spaces, connected by a long corridor. I thought of stems. I thought of floating above the spices still growing on the shelves of my family’s fields. They would shrivel and die and I would never again be Lo Yiying the spice trader. I would be far from my home. Then we would reach Cai Nu. Gleaming. Strange. Skied.
Storied.
“I want to know what stories are told there,” Ecralali said.
“I would listen to every one.”
It hadn’t occurred to me—
I had needed to explain myself to my family, to people among the asteroids. Before that—to myself. That had taken almost twenty years. I had only found myself in the stories that fell from Ecralali’s—once-Aagot’s—mouth like star anise. To even imagine that I might be found in other stories—
I hadn’t.
“My favorite stories,” Ecralali said, “are those that say ‘Cai Nu’ is a chosen name.”
One of Hu Leyi’s colleagues reached us. As Ecralali said, “Ecralali Fos,” and pointed to just one small bag, I thought of my own name: a gift from my mothers. Could I—No. I still wanted it. It had clung to me, all these years, like a grain of soil under a fingernail: a welcome reminder of my family on the long journeys between the asteroids. It fit me.
Below us, the first group passed through the airlock doors to the spacecraft.
“Lo Yiying,” I said, and my voice was almost steady. “My possessions are with my family—Lo Minyu and Xu Weina are my mothers.” I didn’t think I needed to list the rest of my family—brother, cousins, aunts, uncles, a single grandfather. They all waited together, with the spice cabinet—full of the final harvest—between them.
The man made a note on the translucent screen that hovered in front of him, then moved on.
“I should go to my family,” I said, though I couldn’t imagine moving, couldn’t imagine any of what would happen next.
“We have m
onths of journeying ahead of us,” Ecralali said. “Plenty of time for telling stories.”
Thyme
The fourth story Ecralali gave me, with thyme on our tongues, was of Cai Nu: working on a team of scientists identifying planets and moons suitable for human settlement, finding the moon that would eventually bear their name, spending decades preparing the team for the long journey and the tireless tasks at the other end—then, being invited to join the team despite their advanced age.
Cai Nu lived a year on the moon before finally dying. They are remembered forever: their vision of people living on this moon, their hard work making it more than a story.
Their name, chosen in the same year that they first saw a promising moon in their data.
I pressed the thyme to the roof of my mouth.
I was not alone.
A Brief History of the Trans-Pacific Tunnel
Ken Liu
At the noodle shop, I wave the other waitress away, waiting for the American woman: skin pale and freckled as the Moon, swelling breasts that fill the bodice of her dress, long chestnut curls spilling past her shoulders, held back with a flowery bandanna. Her eyes, green like fresh tea leaves, radiate a bold and fearless smile that is rarely seen among Asians. And I like the wrinkles around them, fitting for a woman in her thirties.
“Hai.” She finally stops at my table, her lips pursed impatiently. “Hoka no okyakusan ga imasu yo. Nani wo chuumon shimasu ka?” Her Japanese is quite good, the pronunciation maybe even better than mine—though she is not using the honorific. It is still rare to see Americans here in the Japanese half of Midpoint City, but things are changing now, in the thirty-sixth year of the Shôwa Era (she, being an American, would think of it as 1961).
“A large bowl of tonkotsu ramen,” I say, mostly in English. Then I realize how loud and rude I sound. Old Diggers like me always forget that not everyone is practically deaf. “Please,” I add, a whisper.
Her eyes widen as she finally recognizes me. I’ve cut my hair and put on a clean shirt, and that’s not how I looked the past few times I’ve come here. I haven’t paid much attention to my appearance in a decade. There hasn’t been any need to. Almost all my time is spent alone and at home. But the sight of her has quickened my pulse in a way I haven’t felt in years, and I wanted to make an effort.