Clarkesworld: Year Seven

by Neil Clarke

  “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 those 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, anymore.

  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.”

&
nbsp; “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 months 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.

  Mar Pacifico

  Greg Mellor

  A pale dawn spread across the Pacific as my dead mother emerged from the waves.

  The bloom of algeron must have crept closer to shore during the night, and now it shimmered in the sickly morning light all the way out to the horizon. The thing that had once loved me rose out of the bloom, slowly at first, like a column of black mercury. Then features emerged: a head, limbs and torso with skirts of algeron hanging like seaweed down to the foamy water at its feet. Finally the body shape that I knew so well came into being—a nightmarish simulacrum, but taller than her in real life, struggling one step at a time until it found land.

  Its confidence seemed to grow when it saw Kelly with her back turned, playing with pieces of driftwood on the sand. It staggered up the beach and reached out awkwardly with impossibly long arms.

  “Kelly!”

  I had only turned away for a few seconds—like all the mothers down the ages—but now I was sprinting towards her, sand flicking up behind me.

  Ripples spread for kilometers across the bloom and whispers lingered in the drafts of briny air—voices from something cavernous and deep. They rose in pitch and tone, unifying into a bleak chorus that threatened to overwhelm the sound of the ocean.

  Kelly smiled as I approached, and smiled at the simulacrum. I reached out to Kelly, keeping my distance from the thing now watching my every move. “Time to go, honey.”

  I could see Kelly was more curious than shocked as this wasn’t the first time we had seen forms flow out of the algeron. She confronted me with inevitable, innocent logic. “But it’s Grandma.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to look into its eyes for fear I might see what Kelly saw. “I know, but we have to go. The bloom is getting bigger and I told you not to go out today.”

  “But she called me.” Kelly stretched out her hand to the simulacrum. “They’re all calling me.”

  “Stop.” I grabbed Kelly by the elbow. “Time to go, young lady.”

  The chorus intensified—a susurrus of lost souls. A crude smile began to form on the simulacrum’s lips. Platelets of algeron shifted across its skin, turning its face into a pin-cushion mask of concentration. Its mouth moved, forming a single word: “Erin.”

  I gritted my teeth and finally looked into its . . . into Mum’s eyes. The dark orbs reflected sky and sand, Kelly and I standing there, rag-tag and anorexic. Details became visible in the black juncture of its wrist, the tendons on the back of its hand, the long fingers ending in delicate nails—a mother’s hand that had once been caring yet firm.

  We look for things in others we value most in ourselves. It was Mum, in a forgotten time when the world had color and nuance.

  “I miss you, Mum,” I said, now feeling compelled to reach out to her. But as I did I realized there were details missing: the edges of her hands were crude and sharp so that the fingers looked like talons.

  I shivered.

  The talons came closer.

  I snatched up a long piece of driftwood and clubbed the simulacrum on the jaw.

  It froze; an obsidian statue with surprise etched on its imprecise face. The algeron’s chorus grew quiet against the ever present sound of the Pacific. Cracks spread across its face and then its features melted until it was a blank column collapsing under its own weight and slithering back into the bloom.

  Kelly sobbed then swung wildly at me until I scooped her up and hugged her close.

  “It’s okay, Kelly. We’ll be okay.”

  More lies to sustain us.

  Kelly whimpered in the crook of my neck as I carried her back to the ruins on the promontory. She craned her neck to look back over my should
er, seemingly mesmerized by the sight of the bloom receding out to sea.

  The skies were leaden the next morning.

  Kelly sat on the dead grass in front of the building—once someone’s home, now an empty brick ruin like all the others on the Tathra headland. She was playing with her shell collection. She had been a skinny child anyway, but now I fretted as her bones and ribs protruded. I must have looked the same to her, for there were nights when we huddled in the ruins and her hands would trace my sunken cheeks and worry would fill her eyes. Soon to be replaced by innocent resilience and hushed words of reassurance that should never have come from a six-year-old, but I would accept them anyway and the strength they provided to face another day.

  By mid-morning, bands of sunlight forced their way through the cloud, turning the Pacific into a patchwork of reflections that filled my heart with sadness. Once families had played along Tathra beach, sun-browned surfers had tried their skills on the modest waves, and a warm breeze had tugged my blouse and whisked sand around my feet. It felt like the blink of an eye against the history of an ocean that contained much of the world’s mystery. Ferdinand Magellan, on confronting the vast expanse of water for the first time, had named it mar pacifico—peaceful sea.

  There were some days I still believed it, but today wasn’t one of them. I looked out to the horizon. The black line of algeron was still there, waiting. It had left a stain on the sand that ran the entire length of the bay. A small circular blotch marked the spot where the simulacrum had stood.

  I wondered how long it would take for her to return.

  I knelt down and picked up a fan-shaped shell from Kelly’s collection as she hummed to herself. It was covered in ridges and striations—the discarded home of some tiny creature, washed up over centuries—one and a billion others like it eroded by endless cycles of water and sun.

  Then I caught a glimpse of something black in Kelly’s hand.

  “What’s that?”

  Kelly clamped her fingers around the object.

  “Kelly. We don’t keep secrets.”

  “It’s mine.”

  I held out my hand. “Give it here.”