by Neil Clarke
It was rare for humans to enter the Avenue of Tools, and it was unprecedented for one of the Ship’s captains to walk among the residents. But this was a unique captain. Competence, seamless and steady competence, had carried Aasleen from being a very successful engineer into the highest ranks of the administration. This was a human who understood the nature and beauty of machines, and she made no secret about relishing the company of machines over her own species. It was even said that the lady’s husbands were robots and she had secret children who were cyborgs. That’s why some of the tools, seeing her so close, began to hope that maybe she was looking for a new mate, and maybe this would be their best day ever.
But no, Aasleen was seeking one very particular tool, one using a string of names.
A locally famous tool, as it happened.
The captain found what she wanted soon enough. And the ancient tool wasn’t entirely surprised by its visitor. Yet ignorance was a good starting point in any relationship, and that’s why the tool said, “I’ve done nothing illegal.”
“Have I accused you of crimes?” Aasleen asked.
“My business remains within the letter of the law,” the tool added.
Aasleen laughed at the game. Then her human hands unfolded the crudest possible note: permanent ink on a piece of human skin. The skin was supple and pale and mostly depleted of its genetic markers. But not entirely, and what remained held hints of a known criminal who had been chased by nobody for many aeons now. What mattered were the words on the parchment. “‘Madam captain, you’re planning to fly us close to a black hole,’” she read aloud. “‘The rendezvous is a few years off, but maybe you should think a little harder about your methods. And that’s why you should chat with a genuine expert in hyperfiber.’”
She stopped reading. “At this point, your various names are listed.”
The tool stood in the center of the artery, flanked by hundreds of motionless, intensely interested neighbors.
“Do you ever speak to humans?” Aasleen asked.
“I have, yes.”
“Recently?”
“None recently,” the tool said.
“Do you know any humans at all?”
She said, “I did. One man. But he died several decades ago.”
“A man?”
“I worked with him, yes.”
“He hired you for a job, did he?”
“For many jobs. We formed a partnership and thrived as a team. For nearly eighty years, yes. His last will gave me the business and all of its contracts, which is why I am the richest citizen in the Avenue today.”
“How did this man die?”
“Tragically and without any corpse to honor,” the tool said.
Aasleen let that topic drop. Instead, she shifted the parchment in her fingers, reading the rest of the odd note.
“‘Ask the lady about the great ship that she built. Which may or may not have been real. But that isn’t the point. You’ll know that, Aasleen. The point is that maybe we don’t want to be too precise in our aim. Or everything turns to shit on us. And you don’t want that, my friend.’”
“You don’t want that,” the tool agreed.
Aasleen said nothing.
With a hopeful voice, the tool asked, “Is there more to the message?”
“‘And this beauty,’ he writes. ‘This beauty before you has a thousand other wonderful stories to tell.’”
The tool moved her limbs, drawing spheres in the air.
“I don’t know the author to this note of yours,” she claimed. “But he is right in one regard, madam. Yes, I am a beauty.”
Suzanne Palmer is a writer and artist who lives in western Massachusetts. A Linux systems and database administrator for a bunch of really awesome scientists by day, she writes into the late night, having given up on any pretense at sleep. Her short story “Tuesdays” won the Asimov’s Reader’s Choice Award in 2016, and she was a second-place finalist for the Sturgeon Memorial Award the previous year. Her work appears regularly in Asimov’s and Interzone, and has also appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Analog, and Black Static.
TEN POEMS FOR THE MOSSUMS
ONE FOR THE MAN
Suzanne Palmer
1.
Sky egg blue, a nest
of walls,
a floor of fissioning stone
cottage made for close company
lonely of but one.
Not that he really understands how the house floor works, given the odd impositions of the world surrounding him. It works, though; radiating warmth up through his feet as he paces, casting furtive glances back at the replica of an ancient machine where it sits upon a replica of an ancient desk, through which he has been trying to pull—tap tap—new words.
It’s the first poem he hasn’t crumpled up and tossed into the fireplace at the end of the vaulted room. The novelty of paper, of fire relentlessly marching from crisp edge to blackened ash, has consumed several salvageable scraps of work, but he’s not here for scraps, for minute victories; he has come to be the flame, set his long-slumbering and cold imagination alight, and perhaps also to bury the embers of something else that never was meant to be.
The exhausting act of having crafted something that might not suck propels him past the desk, the textured matte black bulk of the Underwood, the thin flag of paper still standing his tiny effort up into the air. He needs to walk before he can judge: keep as is, keep going, fall into the limbo of tinkering, or smother now before he gets too attached.
The Project has thoughtfully provided him with boots and a walking stick propped by the door. He slips his feet into the boots and glances up at the large thermometer mounted on a turquoise porch post just outside the door. Turning, he checks the mechanical clock over the fireplace, then picks up the old-fashioned inkpen where it dangles on its string from the logbook by the door.
Day 7. 11:43. 12C, he writes on the next empty line. Sunny. 1070 hPa. The task is not as onerous a condition of his residency as he’d feared.
He slips on his coat, notebook in pocket, and steps out the door. Pausing there, he marvels at the pure existential joy of going for a stroll on an alien world, and one that he has, effectively, entirely to himself. For someone who had lived much of his adult life in the cramped and crowded towers of Old New York, the rolling hills and wide skies of Ekye are a dream. As a poet floundering, rendered wordless by the stale dregs of his own substanceless life, it is an offer of resurrection, reincarnation.
The hills that nestle around the cottage are a deep green, covered in a thick tangled carpet of a grasslike creeper named popim-weed. A forest of blue and green umbah-trees lines the ridge, and a lazy river winds its way down below through a field of green, fuzzy boulders called mossums.
Be cautious outdoors above 20C, they’d said.
That had worried him, but they assured him he was in no direct danger. The landscape gets more active on warmer days, they’d explained. Keep your walking stick and watch your footing, and you’ll be fine. Remember you’re on an alien planet.
Oh, and if it gets above 30C, don’t linger below a mossum field.
A thick stone wall curves along the hillside behind the cottage, and above that, mossums are scattered in the bright midday sun like enormous green pebbles tossed from the riverbed.
2.
I walk with my eyes half-open,
the familiar and the unfamiliar
side by side, long-lost brothers
yes—
—the landscape of memory
tree and root and stone
succumb, uncomfortable,
to pattern recognition
but hold fast, immovable,
to lost particulars,
like and unlike.
The cottage has stockpiles of both paper and notebooks, the latter for recording observations, but he doesn’t think it improper if he carries one for moments of his own inspiration. They know he is a writer, that he wanted the long solitude of the post, was willing (eager
!) to live under the low-tech strictures of Ekye. Loneliness is less terrible to bear when alone.
During orientation, the Project had explained about the swarming creatures—nochers—attracted by strong electromagnetic fields, much as moths were to flame; it was why the main heat source for the house was embedded inside a two-meter-thick block of hardened polymer, why he had a typewriter instead of a voice-text composer, why he made tea in a pot swung on a hook into the fire on his hearth.
He had spent nearly the entire first twenty-two-hour day obsessively tapping at the Underwood’s space bar, eyes closed, listening to the keys as if he was hearing the hidden music of a thousand writers long dead. Then, in a burst of enthusiastic excess, he’d jammed them all up in a pile and slunk away out onto the porch in the spring rain. He is embarrassed by how much time he spent trying to figure out how to reboot the typewriter before he gave up and gently pressed the keys back into their proper places with his fingers.
The sun is warm after several cloudy days, so he goes to the cottage’s shed, opens the door, and contemplates the bicycle. He’s been told it requires practice, has seen vid of people riding them, but not how they got on or off. After staring at its thin, silver frame for some time, standing beside it in different ways to see if some method of getting safely aboard might become apparent, he decides he’ll walk.
He climbs up the rolling hills that surround his cottage and sits in the sun with his back against a mossum, then pulls out the notebook and doodles a sketch of the view. He was never more than a passable artist, but it is sufficient skill for his own satisfaction.
The cottage is not far from the coast. A herd of creatures is moving across a meadow between him and the bright blue line on the horizon. Like inch-worms the size of horses, hairy and horned and bright hues of blue, together they move like their own undulating wave of strangeness. The Project told him their name, but he cannot recall it, and, letting his gaze unfocus while he tries to remember, he slips into a light doze.
It is the name—feffalons, as if everything here has been named by a fanciful child—and the sense of weight pressing against his back that rouse him. The day has grown warmer.
He stands, stretches, repockets his notebook, and can’t find his pen. He pokes through the ground cover, looking for it.
The popim-weed is a strange texture. Ferny, almost feathery, the whorls of green spray in a spiral helix up the stem to a point, where a small round bulb grows. Flower buds? he wonders. The end of his pen protrudes from a dense patch of the weed, just at the edge of the mossum he was leaning on. He grabs the tip, pulls, and discovers it is stuck beneath the mossum.
Reaching out, he touches it. It is as he expects: a solid boulder with a thick coating of moss-like fuzz, warm where the sun has fallen on it, chilly where it has not. He presses harder and it yields slightly. He is able to pull his pen free, and hastily pockets it.
There is a flattened patch of weed uphill from the mossum.
He is unnerved that the mossum may have moved. He’s a poet, after all, not a geologist or mossologist or xenobiowhateverist. Next time he will sit beside an umbah-tree or on the upslope side of the mossums, and if the day is warm enough, he will watch.
3.
Not all rolling stones
gather,but are gathered by
impossible moss.
No, he doesn’t like that. Trite, stupid. Writing haiku always makes him deeply self-conscious, as if failure has been predetermined before he even starts. He turns the little knob that advances the paper in satisfyingly analog increments until the offending bit of doggerel hangs over the back of the Underwood, out of sight.
4.
There once was a poet named Davin,
Who’d found his own private heaven,
but the rocks, they rolled
as the feffalons strolled
—second thoughts, should he be a’havin’?
At least no one is looking over his shoulder, no one nearer than geostationary orbit to pass silent judgment. He yanks the paper free of the machine, crumples it up, and tucks it beneath the dead ashes of the morning’s fire as a solemn promise for later.
One wall of the main room has bookshelves, and although the vast majority are a seemingly random assortment of static biography—Hypatia, Aaron Swartz, Mel Blanc (a desperate proxy crowd for some previous, lonely occupant?)—there are a few fiction books and a lone, hand-bound collection of watercolors. He can feel the texture of the paper, the way the paint buckled it slightly in places. It feels more real a presence than a dozen volumes of the stories of dead people.
The paintings are all dated within a few months of each other from the previous year. His predecessor, then. He wonders why she did not stay longer.
The second painting has been done from the cottage’s front porch, the posts neatly framing the path down to the river, the small bridge that crosses it, and the low hillside beyond. He carries the book to the door and stands there, glancing down at the wash of vibrant color, up at the sunset-soaked landscape. The nearer stand of umbah-trees is taller now but accurately rendered, as is the flow and ebb of the land around it. The mossums on the hills, though, are mostly absent from the paper, and his own unhindered river instead shown choked with them.
Rocks rolling down . . . that he could process, if not find reason in. But up? Some unseen hand at work?
He closes the book and sets it on a small table by the door. The rest of his evening is spent idly thumbing through an impenetrably distant biography of Mary Anning, trying to dispel a quiet disorientation and the suspicion that he may be the unwitting target of a hoax.
In the end, only as he is drifting off to sleep in his bed, do the sheer logistical and financial impracticalities of his various paranoias convince him that whatever is happening, however opaque to reason, is unlikely to be anything to do with him.
5.
The stone shifts in its coat of moss
in the wakening sun,
considers and discards
millennia of geologic
and poetic common sense,
and goes for a roll.
The hill, for its part, is unsure
what the bold stone portends,
if it should protest
measured or stridenbtkjs
The keys are jammed again.
He hasn’t yet adapted to the notion that he must compose tethered to the machine’s needs, that creation is no longer the performance of a conductor to a rising orchestra of his own vision, but the precise and small monotonies of a technical transcriptionist. Frustrated, he sets down his half-drunk tea, leaving the chair and the broken, dangling disaster of a poem to go check on his other project.
He has found a roll of flexible sticky-tape and used it to hang a single sheet of paper beside each window that overlooks the mossum fields. On each, in a burst of morning diligence not usually his style, he has made a reference drawing of the locations of what should be fixed elements. Umbah-trees, hills and valleys, mossums of assorted sizes, and so forth. The drawings are a mockery of the fine watercolors that gave him the idea, but a solid reference. He has also used his pen to mark a tiny x on the floor about a meter and a half from the glass, which takes him several minutes to find. He hopes they’ll escape the scrutiny of the Project, should they be looking for any petty (if well-intentioned) vandalisms during his stay.
Standing on the x, he studies his drawing, the scene out the window, then his drawing again. The thermometer at the door reads 15C. He is not certain, but it seems that the mossums have all shifted slightly further down the hill since his morning drawings, now several hours old.
He resolves to check again later. In the meantime, today is report day.
There is a logbook. He has already copied over into it each day’s weather observations for the past four weeks, and adds the day’s readings. The barometer has dropped, which he is learning means there could be rain. He has a window near the typewriter open, and a breeze is rifling through the corners of
his poems, slowly sliding one toward the desk edge.
That reminds him that there is a mechanical device tucked up among the ceiling beams, a pen on a stick scribbling away tiny lines as the small windmill on the roof turns and spins in the wind. He drags a stool beneath its niche. Swapping out the paper is not as straightforward as the Project made it seem, but once he sees how it fits it is easily done.
Later, he turns to the survey the Project has provided him. Although ostensibly he is here as an exchange of needs—they need a reliable, intelligent observer who can function for extended periods in an isolated, low-tech environment and carry out occasional sampling and testing tasks, while he desires that self-same environment to try to reconnect with his creative self—part of the overhead of keeping him alive is making sure he isn’t, to put it poetically, completely losing his marbles.
The survey is a series of mostly unobtrusive health questions, followed by a self-assessment of his mental well-being. Is he lonely? No more so here than where he came from. Is there anything he misses? Music. There is a space for questions/concerns about bodily matters, of which he has none, a supply checklist, and another blank space for items he would like. Binoculars, he writes in. He is fairly sure those can be made without electronics. More of this, he adds, and puts a small piece of the sticky-tape on the paper, drawing a line to it.
He picks up the weather log, wind-machine scribbles, and his survey, and then fetches a small, red metal tube from a cupboard. Opening a few more windows to let out the last lingering odors of bread he let burn in his distraction, he goes outside and walks up the steep hill behind the cottage.
There are a few clouds moving in, high pencil-line wisps that seem a precursor to most weather here. He hurries, feeling the pull in the backs of his calves and thighs, still unused to the exercise.