by Neil Clarke
“But that doesn’t answer the big questions.” I pause. “Why do we keep going? Is life worth living? Et cetera. It just postpones them. Defers them to someone else.”
“Perhaps,” Margarita says. “But life doesn’t care about your questions. It only cares about going on.”
I wonder if the harvesters care about the big questions. We made them sentient because we thought it was cute, and we pretended it was because it would make them better at their job. Margarita, too, and others like her. For a while, it did. Not for long. Eventually, it made them miserable. We should have known that, should have seen it coming: making things smart enough to ask questions about life, but unable to find any answers. A perfect trap of existential agony. We’re not engineers. We’re tragedians.
“I need a favor,” Margarita says as I’m applying skin around her calves.
“Yes?”
“There’s something that needs fixing in the woods. A wind turbine. It takes two and none of the robots have the required dexterity to help me.” She pauses, looking at me. “They understand what needs to be done, but they lack the skill to do it.”
“Of course,” I say. “I’ll help.”
I finish my work in silence.
The robots find it hard to let go of Margarita the next morning, trapping her backpack between pincers and holding onto her hand with a gentleness that machines of this size and strength shouldn’t be capable of. Margarita reassures them with whispered words and soft but sure pats on their bulky metal bodies.
We set off on foot into the dawn haze that still lingers over the plane, dew dampening the legs of our trousers. It’s an hour’s walk to the edge of the woods, then another hour or so before we start our climb in earnest. The wind turbine is at the top of the mountain—a rocky path lined with pine trees. We should be at the site by sunset, camp for the night, start the repair in the morning. Margarita has already moved the crane to the top—how she got it up there, I have no idea. On the third day, we’ll head back down.
We walk in silence, Margarita in front, me in tow. Our skins are a match now, two women in their sixties, fit for their age. But her body is robust as no human woman’s, her gait too regular, her posture too sure. I can already feel the fatigue setting in mine, but she shows no sign of it. Does she ever get tired?
What does it feel like, to be indestructible?
She’s not, though. She wouldn’t need me, if she were.
“Nobody from the village could help you with this?” I ask as we walk, if only to fill the silence.
“They don’t come out here anymore. They don’t like them.” She pauses. “Us. Stealing their jobs. Being better at them than they are.”
“Right. Of course.” Living in the city, sometimes I forget what things are like in the countryside. People see things differently here. Nature, humanity, the sky.
The forest thickens around us. I stop walking for a moment, close my eyes, breathe in the resiny smell of the trees. Catch my breath. The air is cool on my eyelids. Could I live here, under this empty sky?
I can hear water flowing nearby.
Margarita stops walking, turns. “Are you all right?” she asks, her voice morphed around concern so genuine-sounding I can’t tell if it’s real or programmed. Then again, is there a difference?
I start walking. “Fine.”
We carry on.
We reach the top at dusk. The wind turbine’s tower rises and rises, a colossus under the colossal sky. The rotor lies on the ground like a dismembered pinwheel. A giant’s toy.
“Here we are,” Margarita says. She unlocks a container that’s placed next to the rotor and unpacks our tent. I’m thankful we didn’t need to carry any supplies with us—my knees are complaining loudly, and they didn’t need to haul anything but my body up the mountain. “Tomorrow, you’ll help me get the rotor up and set it on. I’ll be the eyes, you’ll be the fingers on the ground.”
When I open my mouth to protest, she raises her hands. “Don’t worry. The crane’s controls are completely intuitive. It will be very easy for you.”
She says it in an almost accusatory way that strips me clean of any will to protest. “OK,” I say.
She points at the container. “There are energy bars in there. Help yourself.” Then, she starts setting up our tent. She doesn’t need it, because she needs no sleep. This is entirely for my benefit.
When she’s done, we sit at the tent’s threshold together. She’s gazing up at the sky while I chew on my sustenance. It tastes artificially sweet and herby.
“The robots are worried about you, you know,” Margarita says into the night. Her eyes are still fixed on the same spot in the sky, whatever it is she’s looking at. I look up instinctively, can see nothing. Only a dark expanse, shrouded with clouds.
“Me? Why?” When did they tell you? I almost ask. Do they talk to you behind my back? It’s an irrational thought.
“They believe your thought machine is broken.”
My thought machine. “Do you think so?”
Margarita lets a few moments pass before speaking. “No,” she says finally. “Not your thought machine.” Then she turns toward me and places her hand on my chest. “This machine, yes.” A silly, sentimental metaphor. We both know it.
Lena.
That night, I dream myself transparent. I stand on the top of a mountain and look down at my see-through chest. Inside, my heart is a train engine, huffing smoke and dripping oil all over my lungs.
What a mess.
Watching the giant pinwheel hover above me is an unnerving experience, but the job itself is as easy as Margarita promised. Margarita gives me instructions through the comms and I guide the crane through tiny maneuvers that translate into a delicate dance in the air. It’s glacial and beautiful.
We’re in the middle of the job when I hear a beep and then Margarita says, “No. Oh no.”
Panic sears through me. “What did I do?”
A slight pause, then: “Nothing. Nothing. It’s not you, Dora.” Another pause. The sun is setting in the distance. “Let’s finish up here.”
As soon as the attachment of the rotor is complete, Margarita makes her way back to the ground. It’s dark around us now, but her eyes are shiny.
I reach out and touch her hand. Her skin is burning up. If she could sweat, she would be drenched. “What happened?” I ask.
“An accident. One of the harvesters miscalculated, struck a tree. It collapsed on top of it.”
“Is it going to be all right?” Then: “Can I fix it?”
Margarita stares at me a moment too long, as if I just said something outlandish. As if I suggested raising the dead. “No,” she says. “It’s gone.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. For your loss.
She looks around, then at the sky.
“Do you want to go back tonight?” I ask.
“No. It’s too dangerous for you,” she says. My soft flesh, a hindrance. “We’ll go at first light.”
The other robots are gathered in a circle around the harvester when we get there. They’re standing still, but something in their stance suggests living things in mourning. A vigil.
Margarita approaches, stiff-backed. I linger a few paces away, like a distant relative who happened upon a family tragedy. The robots turn toward her then, all together. They reach for her hands, for her clothes, for her hair. She touches them back, head bowed.
We hold a funeral, later. There’s no other way to call it, no other word for it. They carry their fallen friend to the barn, then stand around it in silence.
Margarita’s skin is freezing next to mine. “It was the last of its model, you know,” she says.
We watch the robots break down the harvester and each one takes a part—a pincer, a metal plate, a receptor—and solders it onto their body with a soldering iron that they pass around the circle. They’ve done this before, I realize. I see the odd bits and pieces that cover their bodies, now, remnants of worlds and lives gone for good.
Wh
at have we done? I want to ask.
I think of rhinos. I think of leopards and polar bears.
Why do we lament the extinction of species? And does that extend to the ones we create?
I stay silent.
When almost nothing remains from the harvester, the robots disperse and we go back into the house. Margarita continues to freeze through the night, until finally I invite her to join me in my bed. I wrap her into a blanket burrito and cuddle her, pouring as much of my own body heat as I can into her. Slowly, slowly, she warms up.
“Do you miss Lena?” she asks me, her eyes looking away from me in the dark.
“Of course I do.”
I can see Lena now, lying in bed facing me, sleeping. I can hear her voice, reading me something from her book. I see her back as she stands staring out our kitchen window, the tap running.
I used to get angry about that. Lately, I’ve been doing it, too, my mind on what it was that got her so distracted. I asked her, once, and all she gave me in response was this wide motion toward the city, the sky, everything. Everything, all the time, at once.
I study Margarita now, her eyes, her lips. Present. Grounding. Can I feel what they felt together?
I lean close, lips parted, but Margarita stops me with a hand to the chest, freed from the blankets. “I can’t give you what you’re looking for,” she says.
She’s right, of course. Maybe my thought machine is broken, after all.
“Tell me a story,” I say. “Tell me the one about the star again.”
Margarita nods. “There was a star, once upon a time,” she recites softly, “that set at twilight in a land of reeds.” She tells the story of its barefoot walking through the mud, the wondering at every little thing. Its loneliness and its sadness. The villager who tried to make of it something it wasn’t. The waiting.
“It was one of a kind,” I say when Margarita finishes the story.
“Yes,” she replies. She wraps her arms around herself under the blanket. “Aren’t we all?”
As I drift off, I think: am I one of a kind?
Were Lena and I a species? Are we going extinct?
I sink into a cold, damp sleep, without dreams.
The next day, I depart.
I tell Margarita I’m heading back to the city. I doubt she’s fooled though—she can see so much farther and clearer than a human, after all. And yet, I leave them behind: Margarita, the harvesters, the questions they bear for us all.
As soon as I reach the main road, I turn away from the city and toward the woods instead. I follow the direction we took when we made our way to the turbine, until I hear the running water again. Then, I follow the sound.
It’s a river. Narrower than I imagined, but the water is crystal clear. It looks deep. Long stalks line the bank.
I shed my shoes and let my toes sink into the cool mud.
I raise my eyes to the sky and, in this land of reeds, I wait.
About the Author
Natalia Theodoridou is a media & cultural studies scholar, the winner of the 2018 World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction, and a Clarion West graduate (class of 2018). Natalia’s stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Uncanny, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, F&SF, Fireside, and elsewhere. Rent-a-Vice, a cyberpunk interactive noir published by Choice of Games, was a 2018 Nebula Award Finalist. For details, follow @natalia_theodor on Twitter.
Wandering Rocks
Gregory Feeley
Naiad and Thalassa danced as no pair of water deities ever had, racing about Neptune in an endless courtship never to be consummated. If Naiad sped with purposeful regularity even as Thalassa fell slowly behind its inner companion, the sea-goddess tilted its orbital plane so that the smaller nymph would pass above and below it, as though yearning to glimpse its beloved from different angles. The sinuous beauty of such resonance called out to be immortalized in song, and Huong gave his composition a 69/73 time signature, an unearthly (in every sense) feat that no human before or after would ever replicate.
Racing about Neptune more quickly than the planet itself rotated, the two moons were undergoing tidal deceleration and would someday, doomed lovers, spiral down into its raging depths.
“Together?” Koishi asked.
“They will never be together.” Like Castor and Pollux, who crossed the solar system as one but, spinning about the great stone that hid each from the other, never met. Held rigidly apart by the outflung arms of the Centaur, the life modules had sheltered its children in Earthlike gravity for a generation.
“Or they will break up into rings.” Whether this would happen was still an open question, to be settled only when the two moons’ composition was studied in greater detail. This was not a priority for Outreach, which was concentrating on exploring Triton and mining Proteus.
“Perhaps only Naiad will, leaving Thalassa bereft.” Raina, contriving a story from a story (as apparently one did), smiled at this.
Koishi inclined his head respectfully, though his thoughts were elsewhere.
“In any event, Naiad is not your concern. Is it even nearby right now?”
“No, ma’am. By the time I reach Thalassa, it will be forty degrees ahead and pulling away. I am unlikely to remain long enough to see it come ’round again.”
“So your return is not scheduled for maximum fuel efficiency? No, you will have ample reaction mass, won’t you? Kick off from the moon on a spray of its own substance.” She nodded wisely, as though this was something that every kid didn’t know.
“Still, departure hour is definitely fixed.” Koishi glanced at her office’s old-fashioned wall display, though he was in no danger of losing track of the time.
“A voyage of ninety thousand kilometers,” she mused. “By local standards, not too far from home.”
“The distance will triple if I wait long enough.”
“Indeed, unlike in my parents’ day. The distance between Qingdao and Guangzhou never changed.” Koishi smiled politely. The adults joked about how kids hated being told about the way things were back on Earth, but they never stopped doing it.
“You have never been more than nine hundred meters from this spot,” she continued. “This will be a big experience for you.”
Koishi forbore to point out that he had in fact traveled almost three billion kilometers in his life. “The solitude will be a change,” he agreed.
“That’s right; you have spent your entire life here.”
Again Koishi smiled. Here was a private office that Raina need share with no one else, at least for six hours a day. It was small, but Koishi had shared a smaller space with two other boys for most of his childhood.
“Last chance to savor the gravity,” he said, lifting his legs to sink a bit farther into the chair. He had spent his life regarding low gravity as a treat, for the kids were rarely permitted into the ship’s inner levels. If there was anything he worried about, it was loneliness.
He set his feet down with a thump and stood, as though savoring the effort involved. “I should go,” he said. There was no need to rush, but the thought that Raina would make a point of sending him on his way compelled him to act first. Gravely, he thanked her and accepted her words of leave-taking, which contained nothing new.
It was four levels down the shaft, just enough for Koishi to feel himself pressed slightly to the side. When he was a child, class trips to the Hull ended with a thrilling descent back to Castor, as fast as they could persuade the Onboard to go, with the kids pressed squealing against the wall by Coriolis’ invisible hand. None of that where you’re going, he told himself.
The launch deck was busy, but nobody was working on Koishi’s departure. If any of his classmates were embarking on their own missions today, he did not see them.
He walked over to the blister and stood looking at it. Beneath the bulge lay a pore in the Hull wall leading to the surface, blocked only by his tiny craft. Once installed, he would fall into the void.
It was peculiar to reflect that he had never actually seen
the ship, except from the inside and in ghostly rotating images. Designed for a crew of one, it was smaller than any of the craft that had nestled beneath the Centaur’s surface during its years-long voyage. Built as part of the fleet to replace those lost in the Break, it had, like most of them, never flown. EV-32 it was designated, lovely in its unbroken curves, but bare of human use.
“Give it a name,” they told him, so he called it River Stone, because he had once held a reproduction of one and was struck by its rounded beauty.
No flowery speeches. Koishi spoke the words that caused the blister’s skin to peel back and stared down into the opening below. He had crawled down it several times before in recent weeks, though only to emerge an hour or two later.
This time for real, he thought, and lowered himself through the access tube. The cabin was the smallest space he had ever occupied, and he was glad of the time he had taken to acclimate himself.
Eight minutes, time enough to adjust the couch for acceleration, check (needlessly) on the power and subsistence supply, and close his eyes to meditate. Carefully, he donned and sealed his helmet, a needless regulation for so routine a launch, and let the suit run its systems check.
Koishi had never communicated with anyone in Earthspace, so he had never experienced the disconcerting delays imposed by light speed constraints. It would become discernible as Thalassa and the Centaur’s orbits grew farther apart. Of course, if he completed this assignment successfully, and won advancement enough to someday find himself working in the distant moons, even a simple conversation with the Centaur would be almost impossible.
Assignments, rather. Koishi had a big one, of course, a set of academic hurdles to surmount before he could commence the trek toward such a promotion. But it was the other one that he found himself not thinking about.
Twelve seconds. With a warning chime, the couch slid backward and up, so that he was hanging from its straps, staring at the screen as down a pit. Two seconds, one.
Had the craft simply been released from its constraints, it would have slid gently down the launch tube and into space by the force of the Centaur’s spin. Koishi knew this wouldn’t happen, and the sudden kick as the magnetic pulse drove him deep into the couch.