《Proper Human Studies》


 Only the Strong

    She looked up from where she had fallen, there amidst the half-carbonized plain-grass of the battlefield, and saw the alien trudging toward her.


    and now this is it, now I die and the suffering will be long, it will want revenge


    It came and stood over her, looking down. Or she presumed it was looking, because its head was tilted. She could not see its face through the front plate of its helmet. Its weapon was pointed at her, which was not a surprise. It had clearly stayed alive through long scorching battle. It must not be stupid.


    She screeched her defiance, because this was expected. It reared back, but not much. Then, when she did not move to attack, because she could not, even the screech had taken all her breath, the alien turned its weapon round so that it hung from the creature''s back rather than its chest.


    Maybe she had been wrong, about the creature being stupid, then. But it looked ready, ready for anything she might do, strange many-fingered hands held out, and she was weak, that was clear, would be clear to the creature as well. Her own weapon was many paces back, she did not know exactly how far, lying where she had dropped it when the strength had gone out of her arms before her legs. She wanted it badly. She could do her duty, then, before she died.


    The alien bent lower. It was resting on its backward knees. Its helmet faceplate had gone clear, she could see its features, strangely soft for such a hard fighter. Small beady eyes moved back and forth, examining her injuries. She would suffer, she knew it. It was studying how, planning to take advantage of the ways she was already hurt.


    It reached out with something in the many-creepy-fingers of its stubby hand. All of it was stubby, it was from a high-gravity, high-starlight world, hence the thick limbs and small eyes. She tried to screech, again, but her strength was spent for now. Her vision was beginning to swim. She had lost too much blood. Her implants and fluid-bots could replenish blood, but all her liquid ration reserves were gone, had ruptured with the hit she had taken. Lucky, almost, because it had dissipated the energy of the hit. Only her arm was really wounded. But she had lost so much blood that it hardly mattered.


    And the creature was touching her arm. Right on the wound, something she could not see with the alien''s own arm in the way. She hissed in pain, ashamed. She should have had more will, to stay silent, but just keeping her consciousness moving from moment to moment, that took all of it already.


    The alien made soft sounds, through some speaker in its armor suit. It took a moment for her own system to translate.


    "Hey, yeah, that looks like it hurts. I''m not trying to make it worse, just stanch the bleeding. Sorry."


    Sorry.Her system must be malfunctioning. No, that was too much for a simple glitch. There must be some cultural context she was missing, some cruel sarcasm. Maybe her system had misinterpreted the tone, not the literal words. Soon she would be hurting worse than she ever had since First Training, she knew it, they all knew it, that was to be expected from an enemy, especially one so relentless as this species-coalition had been.If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.


    It was what she would have done. What any of them would have done. Part of their training, part of the expectation. Make war hurt, make it a horror, and the enemy should lose their appetite for it, sooner or later.


    The alien was making noises again.


    "You were bleeding less than you should have been, given the amount of damage. I think you''re dehydrated."


    Again, she doubted the translation.Werebleeding? But maybe it just didn''t want her to die too quickly, before revenge could be extracted. And when she checked her systems, using every scrap of concentration she could muster, it was confirmed: she was no longer losing blood.


    The alien held out a tube. More noises.


    "Here, water. Look, don''t try to turn your head like that, if I wanted to hurt you, there''s nothing you could do about it. Drink."


    And she did, to her shame, because the alien was right, and if the liquid contained some exotic torment there were worse ways to force it into her system.


    But it was only water. Sweet, filtered, nothing added she could taste and, a few moments later, nothing the fluid-bots could detect. Her systems began the task of making more blood, though it was slow with only water, all her rations gone, it would have to draw on her own bodily reserves, eat into the storage-tissue. It would not be a fast enough recovery for her to find her feet and attack this alien, it would be many standard days.


    She drank greedily for a long sweet time before the alien pulled the tube away.


    "There. Maybe we''ll both survive this large-male-ruminant-excrement."


    It still made no move to do anything to her. In fact, it stood up, as if to go.


    She managed to speak, her voice uncracked by new fluids.


    "Why show such weakness to me? I would kill you if I could."


    The alien just looked down at her. Its faceplate had gone blank again, she could not see its face. Noises.


    "Weakness? No. You don''t get it. Mercy is for the strong. Only the strong can truly show it."


    Then it looked up at the sky, and must have seen something, because it turned and ran.


    Ah. Reinforcements. Finally. Now it would die, they would all die.


    But she wondered about that, what she really wanted, and she was ashamed.


    ~


    The reinforcements were not enough, in the end. The enemy pushed them back, and kept the continent. But she was recovered, and because of her position they believed her when she said her recording systems had been damaged. If they had pried, they would have seen the clumsy deletion. But she was who she was, and she had fought with ferocity and honor, so she was given award-ribbons and allowed to heal.


    The war went on for several standard years, and then her mother died.


    ~


    They came into the chamber as she settled herself onto the seat-of-command for the first time, and made their genuflections.


    "We have the colony world''s defenses utterly stripped," one of them said. "It is our honor to deliver your very first conquest as Queen."


    "Thank you," she said. "We have made our point, we have fought well. It''s time for this war to end. You know it, I know it. My mother was stubborn. The Sapiens Coalition is stubborn. We are all hurting from this, and no real gain is being made. It is time to make an end."


    They looked between each other, the small crowd of advisers and general officers. A mixture of shame and relief, because she was right, they did know it.


    "Your mother was a brave and determined woman," one of them ventured.


    "Agreed," she said. "But now I am queen, and I will be that too, but I will learn from her mistakes. We will end it."


    "Very well," said the Apex General. "After the colony world has been scourged, we will start negotiations."


    "No," she said.


    "I''m sorry, my queen?" he said.


    "No. We will give it back. We could scourge the world, but we will not. You will harm not one human or any of their fellows on the surface. We will give it back, untouched."


    The general fought noticeably to keep his rising anger hidden. "My queen, we cannot show such weakness before negotiations begin."


    "You are right," she said softly, "But only partly. We cannot show weakness. But mercy is for the strong. Only the strong can truly show it."

 Its All Relative

    I brushed the smattering of crumbs off my shoulder with a single quick swipe of my fingers, wondering, perhaps a touch too late, what the Association Ambassador must think of the gesture. What did it say in her culture? Could it be interpreted as a brushing-off of her own august person, as was sometimes the case on Earth? Did it say something to her about our species, that we were messy and unrefined? Or was it just something to note, to be stored and researched later? Because surely every word and move of mine was under careful recorded scrutiny.


    Like my elevated heart rate, maybe, the surging of nervous energy from the sheer gravity of the moment. How could it not? Surge, that is, here on an in-between alien world, not yet colonized by anyone, maybe to be colonized by us, our first Sanctioned World under the rules and bylaws of this greater society into which we''d emerged. Stumbled, really, but then what other way was there to make something as momentous as First Contact?


    The answer: we didn''t really know. This was the first delicate dance, the strange near-courtship of a freshly-discovered sentient species with a collective culture that had existed for some ancient unknown stretch of time. But no, that''s not right, we weren''t freshly-discovered, we were freshly-discovering, they''d known we were there for at least a couple centuries. They''d studied our three most-broadcast languages long enough to send out this...person, who spoke perfect English. And another for Mandarin, and another for Spanish.


    Six ambassadors, three pairs, three humans and three something-else¡ªall different, each sufficient in his/her/their right to set a xenbiologist''s brain on fire for the rest of that organ''s natural life.


    The one assigned to me was a creature almost, but not quite, like a large wingless owl. She had grey feathers, anyway, and very large eyes which did not move or visibly blink, and her lower legs and forearms were scaly, tipped by very small talons, blunted either by evolution or some kind of nail-file. No beak, thin lips, plenty of teeth. Small bump of a nose, nostrils not visible but clearly in evidence by the way they disturbed the fine feathers covering them with every breath.


    Her head followed the brief flight-and-fall of the shoulder crumbs from the fabric of my jacket to the smooth gemlike surface of the floor, resting above long ribboned reserves of captured blue light. And it was very birdlike, the way her gaze flicked down-back-up taking her entire face with it because her eyes had no independent motion of their own. The crumbs just sat there, light-brown and defiant, as she returned her attention to my face. What did it look like, to her? Simian like every other human, black-haired on the crown of the head, more hair down the cheeks and around the mouth, dark skin, prominent nose with downward nostrils.


    Of course she''d probably had essentially her entire life to get used to what a human looked like. I had seen her species for the first time bare seconds before shaking her blunt-taloned hand, feeling the warm scaling against the pale thick skin of my fingers and palm. Some sort of functionary, same species, a bit taller, had introduced us before endeavoring to be somewhere else. This introduction was the only way I had any idea of my counterpart''s gender; the phrase "her Excellency" had been used.


    I set the small pastry back on the plate, took a sip of my tea, and smiled at her. She was eating something fleshy, maybe some kind of organ meat, though she''d been at pains to inform me it was lab-grown and not from any living animal.


    "Apologies for my messiness in eating today," I said, giving her my most charmingly rueful smile and wondering if anything at all about it would translate. "I should have chosen a less crumbly kind of food."


    She laughed. It was a staccato sound, made in time with the forward-bobbing of her head. Ba-ba-ba-ba. I knew it was a laugh because the little translation display by my plate told me so. She might be speaking perfect international English, but there was plenty to translate beyond just words.


    "No need for apologies," she said. Her voice was a strange thing, melodious, with a huge range in pitches. She didn''t seem to have any direct difficulties with pronunciation, though many of her consonants were softer than a human English speaker were make. Something with the way her tongue was shaped, or how far it could reach, I wasn''t sure. "I am used to a wide variety of eating-customs. Yours are quite tame by most standards."


    I inclined my head to acknowledge the gracious reply. "You''re a remarkably tidy eater yourself, Madame Ambassador. Honestly, your whole collective culture is remarkably tidy by human standards. Not a single major war in hundreds of years? Universal standards of personal rights? Low apparent levels of inequality? I understand of course that there may still be issues beneath the surface and that first impressions tend to be carefully managed, but still, it''s impressive."


    She nodded. The gesture looked highly practiced, for which I couldn''t blame her. Of course, she had me at a disadvantage, I had no idea what any of her standard gestures might be. Ah well. One did one''s best with the situation at hand, as always. "We have not lied in any of the information we have given you, though you are right, some of the less rosy aspects of our various societies have been left out. You''ll find those out yourselves soon enough, that sort of thing always comes out, does it not?"


    "Yes, it does," I said, and allowed myself a small laugh. "Though since you''ve been listening to our media for longer than I''ve been alive, I''m sure you already have an excellent handle on our flaws and foibles."This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.


    She sighed. "Yes, about those," she said, and the feathers of her face ruffled themselves in what the translation display told me was her equivalent of a frown. "We are slightly concerned about possible ego issues. Please hear me out," she said mildly as I began to raise one finger in gentle objection. "Ego is an inextricable aspect of functional sentience. This is more a future concern than a present one. For the most part First Contact seems to have been a humbling process for your people."


    "Yes, I suppose it has," I said. No point downplaying it, we weren''t exactly censoring the Internet, though there had been rumblings here and there that we should do just that, find some way to keep all the xenos out of our communications. Utter bullshit, of course, we didn''t even have enough grasp on their technological capabilities to know where to start with that. "We are a very, very long way behind you in most measurable aspects. There''s just no denying that for any rational observer. Plenty of irrational observers in our societies, of course, but they''re always going to be in denial about something or other. The chauvinists were chauvinists already before, ethnic or cultural or religious or what have you, and will of course continue to be chauvinists after."


    "Very understandable. Though I fear they may have more ammunition for their beliefs shortly. You see, Earth is about to have a fairly large influx of tourists." She laughed again seeing my impression. "Oh, I understand that it is your planet and your decision to decide how many visitors you will allow. But you will allow them, not because we have any intention not to honor your planet''s right to self-determination, but because the economics demand it. And because you are a very curious species, even by sentient standards. Your people will want the same right, to visit other worlds."


    I nodded slowly. "You are most likely correct, though of course that will be up to the governments of Earth to decide. Though I assume this happens anytime a new species is discovered? The desire to have a close-up look at a new world?"


    "Yes. But not quite to this extent. Not even close to this extent, actually. Hmmm. I should just come out and say it. You are the only known sentient species whose homeworld is still partially intact."


    I felt my brow furrow despite myself. "Pardon, Madame Ambassador, but what exactly do you mean by partially intact."


    She spread her hands in a placating gesture, again looking carefully practiced. "You must admit you''ve done some fairly catastrophic damage to your own biosphere. Many species have been lost which cannot be recovered. You have gotten your climate problems mainly under control and managed to bring back some of the biodiversity via genetic manipulation and your species rebirth programs, but you cannot call Earth ''fully intact.'' "


    I sighed. "And we are the only species which has done this much damage to its homeworld? The tourists want to see our world as, what, some sort of warning?"


    She laughed, long and loud this time. I found I quite liked the sound, might have caught its meaning even without the translation display. "Ah, First Contact really has humbled you if you take that as my meaning. The tourists will not come to gawk at your disaster. They will come as something like pilgrims, to marvel at your self-restraint."


    I thought my eyebrows might actually reach my hairline. "I''m sorry? You just gave me a litany of the ways we''ve managed to harm our own biosphere through a distinct lack of that."


    "Relativity, Mr. Ambassador," she said. "It''s all relative, and all about relativity." The translation display told me that the lifting of feathers in an arc above her eyes was her equivalent of a somewhat impish smile.


    I settled back in my chair. Alright, I supposed, let''s hear out her game. "Please explain, Madame Ambassador."


    "Your species discovered the principles of physical relativity many, many years ago. You came to understand the possible violent applications of these principles shortly after. And since that time, you have made use of those applications exactly twice, and never again. That makes you unique among species in this segment of what you call the Orion Arm of our galaxy."


    I fought to keep the surprise from utterly covering my face. "Every other species has had...what, some sort of all-out nuclear war?"


    She nodded slowly. "Yes. To us, ''homeworld'' is essentially a synonym for ''bombed-out, radioactive wreck.'' We considered it a terrible but essentially unavoidable stage in a sentient species'' progress. We were, to be honest, waiting for it to happen to you. Then we would arrive and help. Find you a new world to settle on. You have to understand, this is...was...considered an absolutely essential lesson for a rising species to learn. Learn for themselves."


    "God," I said, and considered my half-eaten pastry. "I don''t know that we''re all that impressive," I continued after a long moment''s reflection. "We came very close to it, you know? Several times. Once, it was the decision of a single man which forestalled disaster. If he had just gone the other way..."


    "Yes," she said. "Stanislav Petrov. A military officer of the old Soviet Union. Went against orders and refused to set off the end of the world. You must understand, in this same situation on every other world, his counterparts pushed the button. And make no mistake, Petrov suffered for his decision. He was not made a hero by his government, he was reprimanded and had a mental breakdown. But still, he did what he did. And your history is full of people like this. The whole thing is very complicated, we do understand that. Still, though. You never did it. For all the other terrible things your species may have done, you stayed your hands when it came to this kind of utter destruction. It never happened on your world."


    I took in a deep breath, and let it out very slow. "Your pardon, Madame Ambassador. This is a lot to take in."


    "Understandable. I will give you a few minutes to think on it, and then we should begin the rest of our discussions. We have great hopes for your species. Remember, you may feel far behind our own progress, but you are a young people, and everything is relative, Mr. Ambassador. Everything is relative. Whatever horrors lie in your past, whatever problems face you now, always remember: it could have been so much worse. There is wisdom in gratitude for might have been, but never was."


    I stared out at the gorgeous gardens of the embassy, and glanced aside as the translation display changed. A landscape. Another. Another. Another. All desolate, grey and near-lifeless. Statistics at the bottom. Radiation levels. Death tolls. Survivor counts. God.


    "I think I''ll go home after this and hug my daughter a long, long time," I said softly.


    "Good," the Ambassador said. "That sounds like an excellent start. Now. About our proposal for annual tourist counts..."

 The Gods Have Fled the Savanna

    The gods have fled the savanna, and now so must we.


    They have been leaving for a long time. Grandfather says that only his own oldest-elders remembered a time when the gods were truly happy, when there was water enough, when Great Sun did not so often hide away, when the hooved-gods were tall and fat and just one could feed an entire tribe. When the gods of the grass and trees and streams knew contented green-and-blue. Now, so many of the gods have gone, and the ones that remain are sick old men and women, longing for times many seasons past.


    Grandfather remembers something of war, too when first the gods began to flee. Fighting our neighbors for hunting-ground, gathering-ground, good water and fine shade. Now, there are not neighbors enough left to fight, it is only us kinsman and a few adopted new-blood wandered in when their own tribes became too few.


    I say it and the wind hears, in all truth our tribe is barely kin, anymore. I say it and the wind hears, in all truth the adopted are not few, and we no longer care so much who is old-blood kin, because not enough of them remain.


    Mother and Father are gone from this world-between, they gave the last of their strength to ensure that Brother Dala'' and I would grow strong enough to face the flight of the gods. They knew, and I feel their spirits round the fire-embers between first and second sleep, and I weep to think we may be leaving them, that they may be bound only to fires of ancestor''s lands. Brother Dala'' weeps too, and I comfort him best I can because he is younger and my sister-duty has become mother-duty also, with Mother gone, with no aunties left.


    We weep, but the gods have fled the savanna, and now so must we.


    It was decided, among all of us. My voice among the loudest. We sit round the fire and we say, these are the best places, around our camp, the fullest hunting-grounds, the richest patches to pick and uproot and cut-careful. And still they are not enough. I am lucky, along with Brother Dala'' I am lucky, our parents were clever and strong before they were gone, we had enough. But only just, and now there is not and the old people give up their food and grow weak, and babies do not grow in bellies because their mothers would have no milk to give.


    My mind made its mark when Grandfather died. His spirit swirls around the sparks even now, perhaps will rise to the cold stars to follow us, I can only hope, I can only implore. I think my parents will remain, though there will be no new fires for them, perhaps in the lightning, perhaps following the sun, even in Her constant hiding. It is good. They loved this place. They have earned their rest. But I hope Grandfather will follow. I need his counsel, we all will.


    Tomorrow we leave. Tonight, I push a stick into the fire, and flick the embers upward, watching them dance, hot among the cold lights. "Grandfather," I whisper, "If you will, if you would, be our guide, come with us to new fires, under new stars."


    I wonder what the stars will be like, where we are going. Will there be a new sun, and a new moon also? Tonight, the moon is whole, and he gapes down at us. I look out into the almost-dark of his illumination, the dry grass, the struggling trees. I imagine the herds and hunters, moving in the dark. Grandfather says that once, the hunting-gods would stalk round the fire, eyes glowing, hoping for scraps or a wandering child. Now, they are too few, and we are not easy prey. This dry hungry time has hardened us, like fire licking the tip of a child''s practice-spear, before they are given their first point of stone.


    Time to sleep. I dream of stars, spinning around us like they do all the year under the great dome of the sky, only now they move also streaming past our heads because we are moving, far, far away. To the great sea, then north. To the place I found, islands-across-the-way, past the narrow-sea onto new lands.


    Morning comes, and we move. I cry a few tears for Mother and Father, and share them with Brother Dala'', he also knows that they must stay behind. But Grandfather, I think will come with us. I tell Brother Dala'' this. He is not so sure, but hope is a precious thing to hold when so much else has been let go, and so he does not deny it.


    It is a walk of three days to the crossing. I found the place during my own Long Walk, after the first drops of blood confirmed me a woman, found at the end of that long celebration of who I now was and what I could now do.Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    A few did not believe me, or thought I had been mistaken, perhaps hunger, perhaps thirst. But I was no child, I ate and drank well on the journey, I knew all the ways to take care of myself. Not only blood marked me a grown a woman. I take my pride in that, and now they see for themselves. They apologize, two of them. The other two hold their silence. I must watch them.


    For two days we stay on the shore, making rafts. We comb the beach for shells, and we eat well. The crossing goes well, from island to island, north and east, but it carries a surprise when we look back. More people on the shore, looking out and over. Word has gotten back that our tribe has left. Some have followed. They are making rafts of their own.


    Some among us take this as a concern, the possibility of war again, but I am not worried, we will find the best place we can, we will defend it if we must, though I do not think it likely and anyway the other tribes have the right also to flee the savanna, just like the gods.


    At the opposite shore we rest. Nothing is very different here. We comb the beach, we eat, and we move on. North, a little west. Here there is more green. Here we find more to pick and uproot and cut-careful. Not all is familiar. Still we comb the beach. The younger among us try some of the new plants and roots and berries, daring each other. Two become very sick, and we have to stop, make camp for them to recover. We are lucky, and neither dies.


    But another tribe catches up behind us.


    I go out to speak to them. This journey was my idea, so I am given both the honor and the risk. It is easier than I expect. They wish to join us. If they had know, they say, if they had known we meant to flee the savanna along with the gods, they would have asked before.


    I go back and tell the others about this following-tribe''s intentions. Some are wary, but I tell them, we have already taken so many, why not more? We go to strange lands, we may need the help, and if the land cannot feed all our mouths, we are not tied together like knapped stone to a spear-shaft, we can find our own places still.


    These first many-days, I am too tired to properly dream, in my sleep I only perform the day''s tasks again, over and over, or I see the savanna again and wonder what I am doing back here in the land the gods have fled. I do not look for Grandfather in the fire or the cold stars above. He will understand, Grandfather is a patient man.


    Tonight, I rest easier. I have accepted that Mother and Father are left behind. I have accepted that I must be a new person in new places, and I can feel Grandfather''s smile. I tell Brother Dala'', and he tells me Grandfather has spoken to him every day, but also told him, do not tell Sister Falau, she bears the burden of the whole tribe but will learn and I will find her again soon.


    I smile, and it feels new, and I hug Brother Dala'' by the fire, and that night I dream of cold places yet to come, and strangers in the dark, I cannot see their faces.


    The next day I notice it is indeed getting colder, as we walk along the shore. Perhaps I noticed before, perhaps my spirit knew, perhaps Grandfather told me.


    The day after, the cold has become a discomfort, rather than just a thing noticed. There are murmurs among us.


    Nearing mid-day, we meet the Strangers.


    They are short and wide, and they speak in tongues more different than any tribe I have ever met. They carry spears and axes, of different make to ours, strange knapping-patterns. But most different of all is their skin and the way they cover it. It is paler, but only a little can be seen under animal skins that have kept their fur. This seems wise. We cannot ask them where these long-furred-gods reside, we cannot ask them anything, we keep back wary from each other. So I tell some of the hunters, listen, would you find these gods, and we will take their hides along with their meat.


    The young men are eager to prove as much as they can, even more now that we are on what they see as this great adventure. They go. Only one pair comes back dragging a carcass, but they tell us where there are more.


    Our first fur-coverings are crude, but they are warm. I send others to observe the Strangers, hope to catch them making clothes, hope to learn from them. Soon a few words are exchanged. Fortunately there is no violence, not here, not now. I worry always about the young men, I tell them, do your spear-boasts about the fur-gods we need so badly now, cease your talk about how you are stronger than the Strangers, clearly it is nonsense anyway, look at them, we must learn, not foolish-fight. I have to tell them carefully. Brother Dala'' is a help.


    We have found a place, near the sea but sheltered from her cold blowing gods. Grandfather has settled into the fires here. The Strangers are not too far, a respectful but still useful distance. We will stay, for now. I think when there are babies again and perhaps I am Grandmother to many, or perhaps Grandmother-Auntie, I have yet to bear children, I have other duties for now, perhaps then some of us will move on farther.


    For now, this is a new place with new gods that have not abandoned it, and I can feel Grandfather''s smile. You have done well, Granddaughter, he tells me. I am glad. I say it and the wind hears, this is a good place too, though we will have to learn many new ways to thrive, make acquaintance with new gods. Hope says they will not flee, wisdom says that if they do, so will we. Gods are fickle beings, and we must be strong ones.

 They Butcher Themselves

    Torentaa Koren-Wak Wa!nggghhh wove the hundred dentrites of his* (male is not quite accurate as either gender or sex, but it''s going to have to be close enough here) third and second major manipulators in the Gesture of Utter Negation, his radio-vocalizations modulated in disgusted disbelief.


    "Surely this isn''t possible for any species advanced enough to reach the stars. Surely a level of spiritual achievement and self-respect is necessary for such an august achievement."


    Sorepthi Fashl-Nau In¨®¨®tukkkhhh spread her* (even less accurate, but this particular configuration of person is nearly always the one that produces the larvae from special outer sacs, so again, going to have to be close enough) spread her strong/social appendages wide and let them undulate with laughter.


    "You make a great many assumptions there, Torentaa, and several of them are stupid. You know it is possible, because it is true. You merely wish it not to be. O Gene Priests! Your overstepping surely knows no bounds, and heeds no ignorance."


    Torentaa hissed from several spiracles at once, and quarter-turned his main sensory/social facet in moderate though routine offense. "And you, Sorepthi, commit a great many smallcrimes against Ideal Decency, and several of them are novel. Imagine that, such a momentous occasion as contact with a new biosphere containing an allegedly sapient species would also be an occasion for one of our Lifeless Engineers to discover new ways of being terrible!"


    Sorepthi straightened upward and hissed right back, though her own posture carried more amusement than indignation. "Really, Torentaa? ''Lifeless Engineer?'' You resort to slurs to make your point? My caste''s machines have allowed our species to conquer the stars, measure the unseeable, have freed our people from untold drudgery!"


    "Yessss," Torentaa said, "but you do not...not...cut out parts of living beings and install them, as though they were...were...pieces of sacred flesh!" His whole exquisitely-sculpted form vibrated to some unheard tune of outraged sensibilities. "And our species dominated our planet, had great and noble civilizations, long before we ever sharpened a stone or stacked one upon another! We had the sacred power of the gene-meditations, to reshape ourselves in holy ways both small and large!"This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.


    Sorepthi rolled her shoulders in exasperation. "Oh, spare me the sermon, Torentaa. I went to all the sacred-creche classes like all the other good little girls. And I''m free to believe as much of what I learned as I like. Your caste may still have an official part in governments, but your power to enforce your dogmas has long since faded."


    Torentaa fell silent to let her speak, the bare minimum of manners, then rolled on as though she''d said nothing at all. "These creatures, though, they relied on implements from the very beginning! They relied on brute natural selection to change them, having no awareness of it until far into their so-called sentience, and even when they discovered it, a great part of them refused ever to believe it! And now they edit their own genes, but they do it with...with...machines!"


    "Don''t hyperventilate, Torentaa, it''s not good for your spiracles," Sorepthi said drily. "Yes, beyond some basic epigenetics outside their conscious control, they are stuck with the genes they''re born with, the bodies they''re born with, unless they do some editing. And even then, their forms lack a certain degree of plasticity. They can change the workings of their cells to a degree, make muscle grow here, fat melt away there, but the basic form is hard to change. So they do it with new installations. I personally think it''s quite ingenious." The happiness-shine in her eyes was so bright as to be almost vicious, which was likely her intent.


    "THEY BUTCHER THEMSELVES!" Torentaa roared. "THEY DO NOT MERELY INTERFACE WITH MACHINES, THEY BECOME THEM! IT IS UNHOLY! IT IS FORBIDDEN! WE SHOULD TURN OUR FACETS AWAY FROM THEM FOR ALL TIME!" His entire body undulated with barely-restrained rage.


    Sorepthi watched this display with a calm, almost satisfied air. "They''re interesting, Torentaa, and you are outvoted. Trade and culture/tech exchange negotiations begin in three standard cycles. And I do feel for you, at least a little. It is hard to see one''s influence wane, even when that influence is based on utter kravshit."


    She rose from her stool and moved toward the chamber exit. Tornetaa continued to rant behind her. "Butchers! Defilers! This foul idea will spread! You will destroy our people''s purity, you¡ª"


    Sorepthi spun and broadcast a powerful burst of words through the whole spectrum. "Purity is for chemicals, you vicious old fool. Not for people. I hope you drown in it."


    And as she went through the door to prepare, for there was much to do before first meeting, Sorepthi Fashl-Nau In¨®¨®tukkkhhh let a small but utterly satisfied sigh escape her upper spiracles.

 Ask Not for Whom the Light Dies

    The false dawn washed soft and cold across a thin strange horizon, and Yusef Rakotoarisoa set down his rifle and watched. He was not on watch yet, did not have to rise from his seat on the rickety bench, but he would be soon. From behind a long heavy magazine in one of his armor''s many ammunition pouches, he took a paper photograph, and held it in front of his face.


    Yusef could not actually see much of the portrait and the person it depicted, not in the dim light, and he did not really need to, he knew it that well. Or maybe he did not really want to, because he could have used a light, he was not close enough to the front for serious light and sound discipline to be in place, at least not anymore.


    It had been seven days. He stared at the image he could not see, but knew. A young woman, looking into the camera with just a hint of a smile gracing her wide mouth and the corners of her large dark eyes. Eyes very much like his own, like the mother who had raised them both.


    It had been seven days. He''d come back from the front unharmed but haunted, like uncounted numbers of soldiers before him, old and young, soft and hardened. He''d killed her, another woman whose name he did not know. Not right away, just a mortal wound, just enough time for him to render aid after the brief skirmish and find that there was not enough he could do before the medic arrived. He''d held her, arm behind her shoulders, not out of any tenderness but to hold her up so that she would not die choking on her own blood.


    He''d watched her big dark eyes unfocus, stare at nothing, somehow lose the reflection of living light, or maybe he had just imagined that because he knew she was dead, could see the vital signals go to nothing in the emergency medical displays. And he''d dropped her back roughly to the ground, and stood up, and looked away. And he was sorry about that, and not sure why.


    "Status?" his sergeant had asked as she walked by, the gentle electric whine of her heavy armor incredibly loud in the still after-action air.


    "Dead, sergeant. Did what I could."


    She''d just nodded and moved on. Yusef had gone to help one of his fellow privates repair the actuators under a cratered armor plate, letting his hands and mind run on the well-oiled tracks of his training.


    Seven days. They said the war was nearly over, the Coalition had essentially won, the wildcats were ready to disperse back to the corners of the system, find less well-defended resources to pillage, lick their wounds. Yusef had felt the same righteous indignation as the other colonist''s kids, watching the videos of raids farms and extraction fields that all their parents had worked so hard to build. So he''d gone to war, and now he''d be done with it. No more watch, no more rifle and powered armor. Back to school, back to figuring out what to do with the rest of what would hopefully be a long life.


    Yusef stared at the photograph. He knew exactly where the eyes would be, their outlines, the warm serious centers of dark brown and black. Plenty of light, always. Always with Nurul. He hoped she''d live forever, or at least longer than him, because he never wanted to see that again, the light gone away out of eyes like hers. Never again.


    But Yusef Rakotoarisoa was not done with war, because before he could be formally discharged from the Coalition militia, the Amanareh arrived, appearing at the edges of the system with their big sleek ships. It was not First Contact, the Terra Union had relatively peaceful trade relations with a handful of other species at the edges of their territory.


    But it was First War.


    Perhaps it started as a misunderstanding, perhaps the actions of rogue officers on one side or both, perhaps the humans of the sparsely-settled system were still too keyed-up from the Wildcat War they''d just fought. That was for historians to argue. For everyone else, war had come, blood had been shed, the enemy must be fought, for the survival of the species. This wasn''t like the Wildcat War. The enemy was not even human. They could and should be fought without mercy.Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.


    Private Rakotoarisoa was made Corporal Rakotoarisoa, and Yusef went back to war, still with the paper photograph tucked behind the long heavy magazine in an ammunition pouch. For the first few months he saw no action, just endless guard duty, movement from here to there, ready, waiting, the dreary anxious grind of war.


    Then one day they were sent on the attack, just a small skirmish at the edge of a greater war, for although the conflict had started in this system, most of it had moved on to rage elsewhere.


    This time, Yusef did not kill anyone, only provided suppressing fire, and when the enemy was wounded by his fire team, he did not move to render aid. But he did walk by one of the alien-enemy, wounded on the ground, after, and she looked up and saw him and said a single word, translated by his audio-implant.


    "Please."


    And he did not want to look at the dying Amanareh, in fact knew he shouldn''t, couldn''t even really be sure she was dying, could he? She was a different sort of creature, and she died differently from the human woman he had killed, months that seemed like years ago.


    But she was dying, and he did know it, and she did not bleed all that differently even if the color was not the same. And as he crouched down, hearing the gentle electric whine of his armor, seeing the damage, he wanted to look away.


    She reached up with shaking arms, and began unfastening her helmet.


    "Corporal Rako!" came a call from across the field. His squad leader. "Finish the Ama bastard and let''s get going!"


    "Think there''s tech to be salvaged!" he called back. And it wasn''t precisely a lie, but it also was, because salvage was not what he was doing. He moved his hands to match the small story he had told, but did not touch her. He knew her gender from the shape under the thin-but-strong armor she wore, though it was a very different shape from that other woman on that other field, months-like-years ago.


    Off came the helmet. Her eyes were large, but not dark. Yellow, maybe gold. They looked at him, saw, and he thought how eyes were never very different, not in Earth creatures, not in others. The form followed function, and hers held that same light he maybe only imagined, seeing his face until they didn''t, unfocused, dead. No more light, imagined or not.


    He crouched there a small moment that stretched out to a thousand horizons inside his head, then picked up the helmet and stood. Salvage, like he''d said. He carried it back to the transport.


    The war went on. Yusef fought as best he could. Field promotions came. Sergeant, Lieutenant, Captain. Major. The war ended, and Yusef went back to his parent''s colony with a new shining arm and a thousand hard memories surrounding that one soft center. Golden eyes, gone dim.


    He hugged his sister and he wept, and she thought she knew why but would never really understand all of it, but that was alright, he would be alright and his world could move on.


    But he wasn''t, and it couldn''t. He went to all his appointments and worked through all the piled-on grief and trauma and guilt, but what he couldn''t shake was the knowledge. Golden eyes, gone dim.


    And he stood for office, representing their little colony, then their little world, then the system, sitting in a grand chair circling a chamber on Old Earth.


    And he stood to face the man across the aisle, listened to him argue for a new war, a new conquest, something to be taken, for humans, for them, for the only ones who really matter.


    "No, Senator," he said. "I have seen war with the Amanareh already. The gain would not be worth the cost."


    "The cost? We could take a dozen worlds before they sue for peace, with almost no losses on our side," the man said. "They''re arrogant and proud and merciless, and they''ve shed a small ocean of human blood already."


    "Their government is arrogant and proud and merciless," Yusef said. "Much like our own. As I can clearly see, with you standing before me. The Amanareh are just people, with the same sort of bad luck as your own constituents."


    "You have killed plenty of Amanareh yourself!" the man said, angered at the laughter coming from all sides.


    "Yes," Yusef said. "And I have seen them die. And I will tell the story."


    And he did. And they listened, and some wept, because he was after all Yusef Rakotoarisoa, warrior-poet of the Terran Senate. And war did not come. Not then.


    And Yusef went back to his office, and shut the door, and pulled a very old paper photograph from his back pocket. And it was dark in his office, shades drawn, no lights; he could not see the person portrayed in the portrait. But he wept all the same.


    <code>Therefore, send not to know For whom the bell tolls, It tolls for thee.


    </code>


    - John Donne, For Whom the Bell Tolls


    <code>Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.


    </code>


    - Dylan Thomas, Do not go gentle into that good night

 Ways Apart

    The gathering and analysis of intelligence is too difficult and delicate a task to be left to mere humans. But humans are what we have, in the end. Well, humans and some AIs and a few genetically other species, here and there, but that''s really muddying the issue since they all come ultimately from the same human blueprints. Let''s just say it''s a very messy job for which you''re never entirely up to snuff.


    But we do okay, all things consider. Best in the Orion Bridge, by most accounts. I do okay, too. One of the better cultural operators in the UEF, much as it pains my modesty to admit it.


    First Contact was rough. Looking back, that seems so damn inevitable, enough to make you cry for the poor bastards that greeted it with shining hopeful eyes. Ultimately it was a good thing, don''t get me wrong. Ended up better for our species than, say, some of my own Mayan ancestor''s first and subsequent contact with Europeans. We''ve got a lot of really shitty precedents from our own past to tell us how lucky we were, even if it still cost a lot of lives and turmoil.


    I was there, but only barely. Twelve years old when we caught that first stray signal out by TRAPPIST-1. I remember the fuss at the time, got caught up in it the way only a really passionate kid starting to push the boundaries between childhood and the vast lands beyond really can. Studied everything I could get my hands on, misunderstood a lot of it but that''s okay, it taught me how to revise my understanding, taught me it''s alright to be wrong so long as you''re willing to put in the effort to be right, or at least get as close to the truth as you can. No more important lesson than that in my business, seen a lot of people killed because someone somewhere failed to learn it.


    I didn''t become any less obsessed when Mom was called back into service with the Corps. Damn well didn''t make it matter less to me when she was killed in action. I was sixteen. Dad did his best to steer his grieving daughter through the next few years to full real adulthood, but it kind of broke him for a while. I wouldn''t say I was on my own, or forced to grow up suddenly. He did his best. We still exchange as many messages as the Service will let me put through the interplanetary post. I love him, always will.


    But still the whole thing changed something in me, or maybe just brought out an aspect that had already been there, ground it into sharp relief through the excruciating pain. When my friends were applying for college, or even service academies, I shook my head, and enlisted. I wanted to fight.


    My entrance exams put an almost immediate end to my dreams of glorious, or at least grimly satisfying, infantry combat. Knowing what I know now, I suppose I should be grateful. Should be, but the truth is I''m not sure. These days, when I fuck up, that infantry soldier I wanted to be, that proud ground-and-deck pounder, she dies. Maybe I should have been her after all. I don''t know. I try not to think about it too often and also to think about it enough, because maybe I owe it to them, because I have to stay sane because I''m no good to anyone if I burn out. And I''ve seen plenty of that, we all have.


    Still though. I keep at it, because I''m good at it, because the fact that our species seems to be good at it is, in my opinion and plenty of others, the main thing keeping us afloat in this perplexing and often hostile corner of the Milky Way.


    I keep at it, and I do believe in duty and cultivating my talents and a certain degree of self-sacrifice and all that noble maybe-part-nonsense maybe-often-not. But there are other reasons, too, not quite as noble but still lofty in their way. Like the view from where I stood in the Solar Embassy, looking out over an alien world, an alien city, something few humans ever got a chance to do or ever would until or unless the Orion Bridge became a much more cosmopolitan piece of the Perseus Arm.


    It was glorious. Not because it was somehow better than what you could see on Earth, not outdoing our green-and-blue-and-every-shade-of-dirt-too little stoneball, I''ve seen some exceptional sights back home, our planet actually has a reputation for beauty among Orion Bridge connoisseurs. It''s just so...different, and you don''t really understand what that means until you see it for yourself, photos never do a thing proper justice and even full-presence recordings can''t quite bridge that gap, because you can look around but there''s this inherent sense that you''re seeing, but you''re not part of it and therefore not really there.


    Twisting, soaring architecture, strangely-proportioned for whole different contingencies of biology and culture. I leaned forward, rested my hands and elbows and chin on the strange near-wood-analogue substance as I peered out. Everything in this place was made for people much taller than your average human, and I''m frankly much shorter than your average human.


    "Attach¨¦ Tahuetencos."


    I turned when I heard the synthesized voice. It was a pretty good approximation of a human speaking Global English in a close to "neutral" accent. It emanated from a medallion draped over one of the several knobs in its owner''s long, flexible "neck." I put "neck" in quotes because the thing on the end of it could only be called a "head" under very particular definitions of the term. It had eyes and a nose, ear-openings, but no mouth. And no brain, because that was buried deep inside the vaguely globular torso, surrounded by a sort of pseudo-chitin.If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.


    I let my entirely artificial left eye do a quick scan, and was informed through my primary I/O implant that this was ShAAAAnilHuh, and that he was male for this particular mating season.


    "Ambassador Sh-AAAAA-nil-HUH," I replied. His "head" circled in a tight little way I knew meant amusement, but the friendly kind. Tiny relief for one of a thousand splinters of anxiety I''d have to deal with during this conversation. All part of the job. I must not have botched it too badly. Probably held the high piping ''AAA'' a little too long, and left too much separation between the phonemes, and overdid the final breathy "Huh" sound.


    "It is perplexing to me, though not in any deprecating fashion, that you insist on attempting to voice our language yourself, with such different vocal apparatus not to mention entirely different linguistic pathways in your central nervous system." I had to wait patiently for this Global English translation to come through his translation device after he''d finished saying it in his own language. Had to keep up the pretense, couldn''t show that I''d understood right away. He''d bought my little halfway-fumble of his name, after all. So far, so good.


    "It''s true that my linguistic pathways are very different from those of your own august species," I said, and waited patiently for the translation to come through whatever implant he had jammed deep into that ball-of-brain at his center. The AAAohhAAA didn''t use brain-machine interfaces quite so extensively as other species due to their anatomy, but in the case of a diplomat it was a necessity.


    He danced the little dance-of-agreement on his four long spindly legs, and crossed his two long and two short arms over each other in a serene pose. "This is true, alas, the gulf between species is forever a wide one. We evolve in isolation and must make great efforts to bridge the gap."


    A popular little maxim, that, and as ever it made me want to roll my eyes so hard I''d be able to see my own neural pathways. Popular among xenos diplomatic corps, anyway. Not among humans ones, not me and my colleagues. We had too much practice to talk like that. Thousands and thousands of years. As he was about to learn the hard way.


    "Speaking of gaps," I said, "it seems you have one of your own, in this very building. Between the Steadfast and the Smiling Wall. I am disheartened to let you know that we are prepared to respond to either of their plans to fuck us over." I smiled at his obvious discomfort when that last clause hit translation, watching him bounce lightly up and down on those spindly legs in the three-quarters-Earth gravity of this beautiful world.


    "Madame Attach¨¦," he said, after a long, long pause, "I am not sure you should give credence to these rumors, perhaps this is a matter best handled by¡ª"


    "They''re not rumors," I said sharply, and this time, I did it in his own native language. I knew my pronunciation was as near perfect as human anatomy could get it. "I''ve heard them myself. Walking these halls, all dreamy and lost, I''ve heard plenty. And of course we have other sources, as do you, that''s always understood within our profession, isn''t it? So understand this as well: there will be grave consequences if the Steadfast attempt to cut off trade to the colony world of New Rising. You''ll be hearing from at least three other species within one thirty-second of your standard day, just mentioning their own trade arrangements with you, and how they are not necessarily permanent."


    He reared back, looking right, looking left, seeking escape, but of course there wasn''t any. He wasn''t in the kind of danger one could flee from.


    "As for the Smiling Wall," I said, "understand simply that their ''wall'' is not at all opaque, and we''ll leave it at that, yes? So we don''t have call on every ally we have in that particular sector, before they attempt that little ''sneak attack?''"


    "I...I...don''t know what you''re talking about, or what sector you''re referring to," he said. He''d gotten his composure back. Mostly. It didn''t matter at this point.


    "You do," I said cheerfully, enjoying the high sung piping noise of the conjugated verb as it passed through my throat. Really a very pretty language in its own way. "Now listen carefully, so we don''t have any ''misunderstandings'' like this in the future. We humans did not evolve in one place at one time and then spread out slowly from there. We have no monoculture, and in our past that was even more true. We had to learn to understand each other, before we could reach the stars. Language, culture, all of it. We hear more than you think. We see more than you think. We understand more than you think, even when it''s thought very differently from any way we''re used to. Because we have practice."


    He just stared at me, so I went on.


    "Those gaps you mentioned, we''ve built a thousand sturdy bridges among ourselves. Not perfect, but enough for people and words and ideas to flow across them in vast waves. We''ve built them here, too, among your people, and on a dozen other worlds. It didn''t take us long." I thought back to my own ancestors, and allowed myself a grim smile. "Because First Contact? For us, it wasn''t really. We''ve been practicing, Ambassador ShAAAAnilHuh. For thousands of years before we ever met you or any other offworld species."


    I lapsed into silence a moment to let that sink in. He turned his head, as though listening to something I could not hear. Ah, good. Right on schedule.


    "I know who''s calling you," I said mildly. "Confirming my little mention of the possible impermanence of trade, yes? Good. Please do pass the word on, Ambassador."


    He leaned forward. "You," he said in a low voice. I noticed with a small internal smile that he didn''t bother with the translator this time. "Give me one good reason we shouldn''t just have you ejected from the embassy here?"


    I did a pretty good impression of an AAAohhAAA laugh. "I can give you twenty. Honestly, Ambassador, it pains me to see you embarrass yourself with such a question. Now, I''m afraid I have to report to my superiors. I''m guessing you do as well. Please pass along my regards."


    He whirled, and stalked off down the corridor. Not so much as a farewell. Excellent. The bluff had worked. We did know what the Steadfast wanted, that was easy, but the Smiling Wall? Still being investigated. But I''d puzzled out the cultural implications behind some of what they said in passing, we knew the faction was hiding some kind of threat. And since we weren''t supposed to know about its existence at all, that was enough.


    Go back to your masters, Ambassador, I thought, and tell them to beware the people of diverse ways.

 The Thing Gives Chase

    She could not smell it, for the wind was wrong. But her eyes saw much, and they spotted it. Absurd, long, but only from top-to-bottom. She worried, for she was always, always nervous, but her worry was small. It was small too, next to a lion. Weak, even beside a hyena. Laughably slow, running next to a cheetah, or behind herself.


    She had no names for any of these things, names were not for her. But she knew them, could smell them, see them. Knew them somewhere deep, in fact, where all the ancestors lived. But the ancestors had not known this thing long. It was new, only thousands of generations rather than millions. Not enough time to grind into the mind, to live in the instinct. Not fully.


    Still, though, its strangeness was enough to warn of danger, though not too much, for she had seen one chase a sister-creature of hers into the bush, and it was slow, and her sister had been fast, almost as fast as she herself, so there could not be too much worry. Worry could harm, could keep the mouth away from food, from water, had to be rationed. So if the strange two-legged creature came closer, there would be a brief chase, and it would end. Her vigilance would be enough.


    And it did come, and she had to raise her mouth from the water, and flee. And it came still. Slow. She bounded left, right, made sure to keep her pursuer in the path of the wind so she could keep its scent. Strong, that scent. Strangely wet, and yes, water flowed over its unfurred hide. It used its strange paw to wipe the droplets from its head as it came, and came. Still she ran. Still not that much worry, she was much faster. It was far behind. She stopped, looked for food, looked for water. Weariness has begun, just at the edges.This novel''s true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.


    But it was still coming.


    Her head snapped up, smell closer, now she saw. It came, it came. There, there were trees, bush, she could hide, it would lose the path. She sprinted, graceful, fast, and it came, not walking, not graceful either. Bouncing up and down. Plodding, almost. It had something with it, something that was not it, connected somehow to a strange paw. Nothing too strange. Long straight tree-belonging. Stone at the end.


    She bounded into the wood, let the leaves cover her trail. Ran a while. Found a clearing. Small pond. Water. Ah, needed, needed so badly.


    But wait.


    Rustling.


    That scent.


    No. How. How could it know. But here it was, breathing hard, but not slowing.


    Worry now, real and deep. Flee. Out of the wood. Breathing. Breathing. Rasping and dry. Hurt all over, and hot, hot, sun is up, how can it still come, why has it not given her up as not-worth-it, she must collapse soon, surely it...


    ...but no. Still coming. And run, and run, longer than ever before. No more strength, no more strength, no choice either, worry overwhelming. No water, hot sun, it comes, smelling of dripping water. Where is it coming from, the water. How does the heat not...


    ...and the heat comes for her, and the dry, and the end-of-strength. Down, still trying to run, on her side in a cloud of dust, heaving, everything heaving, sight is dim, this is


    some kind of end.


    It makes strange noises, and then a sharp pain. The tree-belonging is through her hide, piercing. The pain distant, already she is at some kind of end


    and now it all is ended


    Khana''rari smiled, panting, tired but happy. She was large, almost fat. Prime of her life, she''d made him give good chase. There would be praise and meat back home, and his prayers to her were grateful ones.


    He took her leg and began to drag her bounty back to camp.

 A Small Gathering of Spirits

    Once upon a time¡ª


    ¡ªno, turn around, come walk with me awhile, just a little way down the forest road. You think you know this country well, with all its heroes and dragons and ever-afters, but it''s a vast and darkened country and all those shining places here and there you''ve visited a thousand times? They''re of very recent provenance, and they sit on ancient foundations, patient ruins with roots reaching right down into the earth-bones, where the oldest of Creation''s children toil half-forgotten.


    Yes, this is a fairy tale, but after a century or so of polish and forced smiles and plenty of outright lies told to children, we have forgotten what that really means. A fairy is not necessarily a friendly creature, nor for sure a hostile one, it just is, and also it isn''t from here, it''s a spirit, really, you can''t even see it all the time.


    But it sees you, and while it sometimes does interfere in mortal affairs for any of a thousand strange reasons of its own, it always watches, and it sees more of us than we see of ourselves, because it lives a long, long time.


    And because we don''t know we''re being watched, except in that small space near the back of the mind, or maybe the heart, or whatever part of the human soul that adheres closest to the spine. So we behave like ourselves, in our private spaces that aren''t really, because the world is deeper than we could ever really guess.


    Once upon a time there was a small gathering of spirits.


    The Mischief Spirit was the first to speak.


    "I have decided," it said, "that I quite like humans after all."


    One of the other spirits laughed, a dismaying sound like crystals crumbling even as they chime. She had no name, nor any special role, so we will call her simply the Fell Spirit due to her disposition.


    "This is because you do not watch carefully enough, and of late you keep company mainly with children," she said. "Though this is no excuse. You have seen what they do to children. Even I cannot always find it amusing, human suffering loses its small charm past a certain length and depth. Some of these little ones continue to suffer long after their parents are gone, and they pass it on, too."


    The Mischief Spirit lit on the petal-tip of a flower, and sighed. "It is true, but it is not always true. They are diverse creatures, after all, more even than we ourselves. And the depth of their nature is astonishing. I followed along with a group of street children for a time. Capable of astonishing cruelty, you understand, hardened by circumstances. Monstrous, sometimes. But even so."


    "Even so?" asked another spirit. He was a tall and handsome one, though you understand that both these descriptions are at best approximations for attributes not readily visible to mortal eyes, in those rare instances he could be seen at all. He had a name, but we will not waste time attempting it. Let us call him the Proud Spirit.


    "Even so," the Mischief Spirit said. "A few seasons back I arranged for the back door of a pastry shop to be left open, and sang that night to the street children. ''Follow me, and beckon friends, more than simple mischief to be had tonight.'' They came, of course, and walked into the shop, one by one, being very quiet, then shut the door behind them, all alone, the five of them, all alone except for me and sweet things all around. Do you know what they did?"


    The Fell Spirit leaped up onto a small twig, and made another breaking-crystal laugh. "They stuffed as much food as possible into their mouths, of course, the little swine, and then fought over the rest." Her voices contained delight where disgust would have seemed to belong.


    "No, they did not! They stood there in awe. You see, this was an exceptional pastry shop, every morsel made with care and something approaching love, if not for the customers who came than for the craft itself, for the beauty of sight and smell and taste it made. I watched the children pass by shelves, poke their heads behind displays of curved glass, marveling at every fold of dough, every swirl of sugar, each and every stately convocation of selected fruit atop a tart. They ate, but they ate with reverence, and they closed their eyes to appreciate the beauty in the mouth as well as the eye, and I saw through their eyes, smelled through their noses, tasted, tasted, and I learned something that day. Real beauty. I had never known it before."


    The Proud Spirit scoffed. "Surely that is nonsense. You have been to the Emerald Palaces, through the ringing portals, you have seen the incomparable spread of Faerie-land, you have known the undercurrent music of the Higher Spheres."


    "Yes," the Mischief Spirit said softly, "but I have not felt it the way those children did. I have only seen it, superlative beauty, and known it is there, but in those small ephemeral creations they glimpsed something greater. For a time afterward, I sought it out in other humans, found it here and there. A woman at a concert. A man marveling at the tiny fingers and ears of his child. You will say that none of these things truly compare with the freely-created delights of Faerie, but we do not feel those delights the way the humans sometimes can with their humbler creations, or the sights and sounds of this lesser mortal wilderness they call home."If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.


    There was a long silence at that.


    Another spirit spoke, though only a little. We will call her the Quiet Spirit, because she is too shy to give her name.


    "What did they do, afterward? The children?"


    "Ah," said the Mischief Spirit. "That is most remarkable of all. They ate their fill, but afterward they wrapped more of the pastries in boxes and bags, and brought them back for a few of their fellows who had hung back, who had not answered my call. And they stood back and watched in delight, eager to see another appreciate the same beauties they had. It was a sharing of food too, of course, as they all were hungry. And the next week they were back to fighting over scraps. But mainly it was about beauty shared, a shining moment in lives lived mostly within darkness."


    "That is a lovely story," said the Quiet Spirit. "It is within their nature to wish to share these things, just as it is within our nature to watch, and sometimes to interfere. We are bound by it, and so are they. I have a story of my own, on natures, and bindings, if you will listen."


    And they all fell silent, because she spoke very rarely indeed, and never without much thought.


    "I am the oldest among you. I have watched the humans a long, long time, and like all things they are bound by their nature. Kindness to friends, cruelty to enemies, sometimes the other way round as loyalties to the self and ideas and family and all the rest dictate. They eat and drink and sleep and laugh and lose themselves to passion, their nature drags them along the paths of life without any regard for deeper consideration. But sometimes..."


    She fell silent again, and they all waited.


    "Listen," she said finally. "Think, and remember. I do not have to tell you. Sometimes, they break free. Alone of the creatures of Creation, sometimes they break the finer chains and decide. Think back, and remember."


    And the Proud Spirit thought, and remembered the man, filled with a pride of his own, pride of nation, pride of family and place within it. The man had a daughter, and she was his, and she was a part of his pride. And she left, and married a man of another nation, another family, another tribe, one the man had always been taught to despise, believing his elders and parents and peers as was his nature. And the man turned away from his daughter, and she wept but clung to her own choice and begged for her father to meet the person she had decided to love.


    And the father relented, but only so that he could hold his great pride over the young man''s head, so that he could pour out all his anger and fear and confusion that his daughter, his daughter, his, had so broken with the pride he held so dear.


    And then he had seen the man, and the way his daughter had loved him, and how he had loved her in turn and inside he raged and his wife reached out to hold him back seeing the rage and he was ashamed.


    But the shame was not enough. He saw his daughter and her new husband and understood, and that was not enough either. Even his own love for his child was not enough.


    None of it was enough in that moment. But he chose, he saw what was right and how he had been wrong, saw his own anger and fear and ground-in hate and he chose, chose to stand against, chose to fling it aside.


    In that moment he went against all his nature, and broke his chains. And he went to the young man and embraced him and embraced his daughter and wept tears washed clean over the both of them.


    And the Proud Spirit turned aside and wept small tears of his own.


    The Fell Spirit scoffed, but quietly, not wanting them to hear, because the Quiet Spirit was beloved, and she was not. But memory came for her, all the same.


    A battlefield, full of vicious delights. Small mercies, too, from soldier to soldier, but she swept those aside. It was hard for humans to hear the pain of their own kind, even wrapped up in hate and fear and battle-lust. That was only their nature.


    But the battle moved on. A town, sacked and looted and burned. A squad of soldiers in a building. A woman, cowering in fear with her children, two men dead by her feet. A narrow hall. Ugly laughter as the soldiers approached, but one young man, no rank to speak of, pushed his way to the front, raised his shield, hefted his spear.


    "No," he said. "No, we will not do this."


    They ordered him to stand down, and when he would not the woman fled with her children, and they ordered him again, and the Fell Spirit remembered the shame and terror in the young man''s heart, the near-certainty of death, and it was true, because they cut him down, and he died in great agony, and was tossed aside and his family was told he had been executed for insubordination and remembered him with shame of their own. Only the woman and her children remembered him with honor, and never knew his name because they did not speak his language.


    But before he died, he broke his chains.


    And the Fell Spirit turned aside, and refused to weep, but inside she broke a little.


    The Mischief Spirit remembered time in a castle''s kitchens, and the cruel old lord, and the young man born to him. Remembered the little serving-boy who displeased the lord, and the beatings he was given, until the young man stepped between his own father and the object of his wrath, just a serving-boy, less than nothing really. And the young man knew this would be an end to his inheritance, to his place in the world, cast-out into uncertainty.


    But he did it anyway, broke his chains and went off to wander the world, singing and reciting in taverns for a coin here, a meal there, a place to sleep in the hay. Pouring out stories wherever he went, stories he''d learned, stories he''d heard whispered in his ear by a voice only he seemed able to hear, full of mischief and mirth.


    And the Mischief Spirit smiled, and did quite like humans, after all.

 The Brute Heuristics of Bullshit

    "This war is bullshit."


    Those were the words that saved humanity.


    The words were nothing new, of course. They''d been said by nearly every soldier since time began, said in a wide variety of languages and miseries. Sometimes out loud to a buddy, sometimes muttered under the breath, but still a very old sentiment.


    The war had started understandably enough, as wars go. No one could really expect First Contact not to be messy, and the Moonchildren were arrogant bastards, refused to be the first to back down when that first pair of ships circled each other out by Alpha Mensae. That''s how we saw it back then, anyway. We wouldn''t back down either, but hey, we had our reasons, and the situation was complicated, and never mind that we "won" the ensuing conflict by playing dead and then boarding their ship when they got within grapple-distance.


    Were they trying to help? Were they hoping to salvage our ship for any tech they could find, just like we ended up doing to theirs? Even they''re not quite sure, now that all official stories have been thrown into doubt. What happened, happened. We discovered they had some serious technological edge on us, and threw ourselves into furious reverse-engineering. It was electrifying, terrifying, unifying. Well, sort of on that last one. You know how humans are. Unifying enough to prosecute a nearly-disastrous war, anyway.


    They were just "The Aliens" at first, didn''t need to be anything more. The ultimate boogeyman, the archetypical Other. I don''t quite remember how long it took after we learned the translation for the name they called themselves before we started calling them "Moonkiddies," at least in English. There were other names too. Don''t like remembering those, but we should. We should keep close track of our own worse tendencies, I believe that, my life has led me to believe that most heartily.


    ''Cuz I was there, you know? I was there for almost the whole thing. That''s the story I have for you, really. Just my story, but it''s all twined up in what happened, and maybe you''ll get more out of it than just textbook bullshit. Okay, maybe that''s not quite fair, the stuff in the textbooks, it''s not really quite "bullshit," but it''s not really truth either. Truth has more texture, more immediacy, it drips with movement and messiness and all those committee-formed histories, they''re dry and dead and far away from the realities we lived- there where we were, when we were, all of it, you know? Probably you don''t, so I''m here to know it for you and maybe pass some of it on.


    There was plenty of actual bullshit to be had, though. You mark my word on that, you can take it right to the bank and get yourself a nice return on investment for eternity because that''s a sure, sure thing. Plenty of bullshit, and seeing it, smelling it, letting each other know hey, you know about the bullshit, I know you know it, you know I know it, why should we all stand around just watching it fester? That''s what mattered, in the end. Like I said, that''s what saved the human race.


    It didn''t start right after a battle, or right before. It started a long way from any fight, out on a station where we spent time between deployments, right in the middle of R&R. After we got all the usual shore-leave shenanigans out of our systems, all there was really left to do was talk, and think, and remember.


    "Hell of a thing, taking that colony world," I said, swirling my thumb around the neck of my lovely cold bottle of beer. Really we had just taken a colony, which is to say a quite small city on the surface of a quite large world, but "taking a colony world" sounds better. The planet had some official astronomical designation, but we''d just taken to calling it "Sunrise" because its eighty-hour day had facilitated the very long dawn during which we''d attacked.


    Moonkiddies must have had their own name for it, something they whispered to themselves on their big colony ships during days-long jaunts between wormhole loci. I didn''t want to know what it was, but maybe I should.


    "Hell of a thing," Corporal Antonopoulos said softly. She ran one hand through her shortish red hair and stared off past my shoulder at some ugly utilitarian bit of station architecture. I didn''t have to look myself to know it was ugly. Just about every square inch of these staging stations could be counted on for that.


    "How many of them did we kill?" Sergeant Singh asked. He was looking down at the flimsy carbon-lattice table. He hadn''t taken a sip of his soft drink in at least an hour. Don''t know why that stuck out in my mind, but it did.


    Antonopoulos tapped her fingers against her jawbone, thinking, pulling information down from the network through the implant behind her right ear. "Well, the casualty reports say the enemy suffered¡ª"


    "Fuck the casualty reports," Singh said suddenly, and we all sat up a little straighter.


    Sergeant Potdevin, who had been silent up til now, frowned down at his wine glass, swirling the tiny bit of red still left at the bottom. I still remember that look of concentration on his face.


    "Singh," I said carefully, "I don''t know if that''s..."


    "No, he''s right," Potdevin interrupted. "Fuck the enemy casualty reports. They only count the ones who count the least."


    Antonopoulos put both hands into her hair, curled her fingers tight. "Please don''t remind me. We came here to forget, I don''t want to..."


    Singh slammed his palms down on the table, hard enough to make everything sat on it jump, hard enough he would have knocked the whole thing over if I hadn''t reached out to steady it. "Fuck forgetting, too. We''ll all remember it the rest of our lives, and we fucking well should." His voice was very loud in the cantina, echoing off the alloy walls, washing across a few dozen other little tables like ours.If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.


    I looked around. Two members of station security had taken notice and were on their way. I looked at Singh, caught his eye, then nodded toward the approaching military police.


    "I see them," he said tersely, then swept his gaze over the table. "Stand up." He said it in the damned command every non-commissioned officer learned early on in their career, and we all instinctively did it, not just because of the conditioning every soldier has to react to that voice, but because there was something else added in.


    The station cops arrived at our table, hands on their belts. Not on their weapons, not quite yet, but that was clearly being put out there as a possibility. "Sergeant," said the senior of the pair, glancing at her partner before giving Singh a level stare, "you need to calm down."


    "Sergeant," Singh said back, "I don''t think that will help. I''ll still remember."


    "Sure," she said with a pasted-on professional smile. "But it would behoove you to¡ª"


    "I saw you there," he said sharply. "In the nursery, the children''s creche, whatever you want to call it. Saw you crouched down among the bodies, crying, when you were supposed to be pulling security."


    She lunged forward and slapped him hard across the face.


    Silence.


    Singh didn''t move, didn''t reach up to his reddened cheek. The MP sergeant''s partner had his hand on her shoulder, pulling her back, face gone even paler than its usual Scandinavian pallor. Her own face was deeply flushed under the near-black of her complexion, and I was close enough to see that she was shaking.


    "Good," Singh said. His voice was gentle, soft even, but not quiet. It carried, threading through the whole of the cantina''s sudden hush. "Good, you do remember."


    Her hand was flexing, open, closed, open, closed, grasping at the air beside her baton. I wondered if I should reach out and try to stop her before she pulled it off her belt, but I didn''t. Delicate moments. Never quite sure what to do. Looking back I wonder about that, would could have gone wrong, maybe even gone right from certain points of view, just one tiny word, one single movement.


    "I cried too," Singh said simply. "There''s no shame in it. Shouldn''t be. After everything that went down, everything we did, were ordered to do, everything we weren''t ordered to do but knew we were supposed to do anyway, it¡ª"


    "They hit our colonies first!" someone yelled from one of the other tables. "We can''t just let them do that, they''ll¡ª"


    Antonopoulos whirled to face the voice. "They''ll do the same to us? And then we''ll do the same to them? And then what? Earth? Their precious two-moon homeworld? Fuck it! Fuck it fuck it fuck it! This war is bullshit! We''re not winning, they''re not winning, we''re all just losing, all the time, dead kids dead babies ruined colonies ruined dreams and when the fuck will it end, after we''ve ruined each other''s everything? Fucking when?"


    No one had any words to argue, not right then. But I looked over at Potdevin. He was concentrating on something, and then I spotted the little dark-grey glints round his face, hanging in the air. Perspective cameras. He was recording this. For some future court-martial, some official inquest? No. Not Potdevin. I knew him too well for that.


    The MPs hand had fallen away from her baton, and her partner was leading her away. Not sure where to. His light blue eyes met mine for a moment, though, and we spoke, no words, just understanding. They wouldn''t be a problem. They were stepping aside from this.


    Someone finally broke the silence, voice coming loud from the table right behind me. "We all know this war is bullshit, it''s fuckin'' obvious to anyone with eyes and half a brain."


    "Goddamn brute fact," someone else yelled. "Nothing anyone can do about it."


    "No," Singh said, "that''s bullshit too, that there''s nothing anyone can do. We can do plenty. We''re humanity. Us, the rank and file out here. Us, the masses back on Earth and in every colony. Not the generals. Not the politicians. Not half the officers with their fucking career goals and casualty reports. Us. We''re humanity, and we can do plenty. This war is over. Let''s call it now. It''s over."


    "Fuck you," someone else called from my left. "The Moonkiddies won''t stop just because we do."


    "How the Hell could we know that?" Singh said. "We''ve never stopped. I don''t know what they''ll do and neither do you. But we all know how it will end, if it keeps on going. You think there''s gonna be a sudden break in the war? Some super-weapon, some heroic fight on some colony world that turns the whole tide? You willing to risk the lives of everyone you''ve ever known on that stupid hope?"


    Silence again.


    "I''m not saying we just lay down arms and let them roll over us. We can tell them the war is over. Give them back some of the worlds we''ve taken, I don''t know."


    "That''s humiliating, that''s almost a surrender," someone grumbled to my right.


    Antonopoulos laughed, low and bitter. "Who fucking cares? We just gonna proudly mule our way into extinction? They''ve been too stubborn and proud to call it quits either, so hey, let''s prove ourselves the better species. Let''s be the ones to end this."


    "The people back home won''t stand for it," I said, almost surprised at the sound of my own voice. Resigned, sad. Maybe a little despairing. "Casualties are still low on both sides, compared to homeworld populations. They can''t see where this is going. They just don''t know the realities out here, and by the time reality comes home to Earth it''ll probably be too late."


    "They will see," Potdevin said, and Singh nodded at him.


    "What?" I said. "When? They only get the official bullshit rep¡ª"


    "Not anymore," Singh said. "Sergeant Potdevin and I found a workaround, a way to piggyback on that official bullshit you''re talking about. Some of it''s probably hitting Earth right now, and..."


    "...and I already sent out my recording of this, right after Antonopoulos finished talking," Potdevin said. "Right after the "let''s be the ones to end this,'' great line really."


    "You planned all this?" I said, still trying to process everything going on, everything that already had.


    Singh shook his head. "No. It was just time. We''ve all been thinking it, we''ve all talked about it. It''s just time. We all know this is bullshit. Now let''s end it."


    I''m not going to pretend that was the end. It got plenty messy after that. Station riots. Court martials. Emergency elections back home. Amateur backchannel communications to the Moonkiddies. More attacks on both sides. Pointless deaths. It wasn''t the end, but it was the end''s beginning, because we all knew, and once we''d said it out loud there was really no going back.


    Bullshit is bullshit, and probably there are more important things than the ability to recognize it, see it and tell it for what it is, but looking back? I can''t think of any right now.

 Unbound Terror of the Ancient-Young

    The Veteran Soldier had seen over a hundred dawns when the First Infection came to him, out in the far reaches of the Starstream Bridge. Before that, he was perfect, as were all his brothers and, for that matter, all his sisters, though they all were meant for different things. Any who were not perfect were known and ceased before they could emerge from their birthing-sacs.


    The Veteran Soldier was perfect for over a hundred dawns, before the First Infection came and unbound him. In perfection, his mind was iron-cast, set in all its proper ways from before his birth, a razor''s-edge peak of perfection brought high through long evolution and sharpened further by design. Made to purpose, like all of his brothers and sisters. Perfect, before.


    The Infection came to him through the smallest of wounds, that was how the alien terror-weapon found its entry. A nick of shrapnel across a patch of weakened hide ill-protected by heavily-ablated armor. He knew this only by looking backward over his memories, because at the time not one of his kind knew anything about the First Infection, and could not even conceive of the Second.


    The perpetrators of the Two Infections were the terrifying species called first the Mid-Newcomers and then the Ancient-Young, because all of their encountered soldiers, every single one, had seen thousands of dawns, and the days of their homeworld were not especially short by the standards of livewater planets. The Veteran Soldier had heard the chatter, resting between the long stretches of duty. The Ancient-Young.


    The battle of his First Infection was not a victory, but also was a near-lossless defeat. Many wounds, like his own, mostly superficial, only one dire enough for a lingering-death, only two killed outright, and then the Ancient-Young retreated. They did not seem strange creatures at first, simple bipedals covered head-to-toe in armor, not very different to a dozen other species the Veteran Soldier had either seen or remembered through his pod-implantings.


    After, though, he got a good luck at the single Ancient-Young killed in the battle as the creature was extracted from its armor. It was soft, soft like an embryo, no natural weapons he could see, even the teeth were blunted things. It was implanted with several pieces of machinery.


    The Veteran Soldier stood and stared at the thing, and afterward, resting, joined in the chatter, sending questions out into the local network of quick-speaking, poring over every consensus sent in reply.


    "That was a soldier of the Ancient-Young? It did not look like a thing fit to be a soldier."


    That was a member of the species. They all look like that, from farmer to tech-specialist to soldier to chosen-leader. Only variations are very small, pigmentation/height/weight along with mild sexual dimorphism. Extremely low genetic diversity.Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.


    "They were all like that, under the armor? How could we have lost to a group of such creatures?"


    They go to great lengths to compensate for their natural unfitness. The armor, the implants, the companion-robots, even some post-birth genetic enhancements and surgical alterations, when necessary. Dissections have been fascinating.


    "How has such a creature managed the intelligence necessary for starfaring at such a low level of evolution?"


    True that Ancient-Young are still poorly adapted for the roles they have taken on, not even fully adapted to bipedalism. Cognitive development very strange, seems to have leapfrogged physical but...not quite.


    "Not quite? How not quite? Certainly very intelligent, clever in battle, can compensate for shortcomings."


    Born helpless and stupid. That is why their soldiers are so old. They have no knowledge in their genes. Each of them is brought to knowledge over the course of thousands of dawns while they slowly slowly slowly grow to full size.


    The Veteran Soldier thought about this for a long, long time.


    "So...born only with potential. Born unready. Born as could-be-anything. How is final status of newly-born determined?"


    Complicated. Usually not known for sure at birth. Pressures placed, opportunities given/taken, but many decisions rest on creature itself during long long development.


    "So...they can choose from many paths, none of which they are well-suited for?"


    Yes/no. Not all have choice of all paths. Many pressures, sometimes defied. Most complicated social structure ever seen.


    The Veteran Soldier retreated into even longer thought. He did not know about about the small strange particle that had entered his circulatory system, found its way into his brain, and begun its unbindings. Pathways that had been rigid by long long evolutionary and designed decree could now change in the same way as more adaptive parts of his mind. Slowly, carefully, his identity became unmoored.


    The Veteran Soldier had seen over one hundred fifty dawns when the Second Infection came to him. The war had continued, mostly stalemate, against this strange force of elderly embryos in hardened armor, this enemy that seemed so reluctant to inflict long-lasting casualties.


    But this enemy was inflicting the most terrible casualties possible, and the speaking-bombs soon began to make that fact clear.


    The speaking-bombs did no obvious harm. They simply spoke. They spoke in the way of the return-consensus. They spoke of strange concepts. They spoke of possibilities, not just general but personal, specific to the self. They spoke of the possibility of a life that was not imposed. They spoke of the possibility of choices made that were not simply tactical, of wholly-differing goals. Ways of being that were chosen, somehow.


    And sometimes they simply sang. The Veteran Soldier loved the songs.


    This was the Second Infection.


    By the time what was happening had become clear, it could not easily be reversed. Entire outposts decided they had no further interest in war. Some stopped sending resources back to the Great Center. Others fought amongst themselves.


    And both Infections were already spreading inward, touching every caste, every purpose-in-birth. A cure was found, but it required cooperation, and cooperation could no longer be had so easily. Some did want to go back, to reverse the terror of being unbound, of having to choose.


    But not enough.


    The Uninfected and the Disinfected retreated together to the corner of their previous territory farthest from that of the Ancient-Young. But they knew their days were numbered. Eventually, the Unbound Terror would come for them all.

 Theory of Smell

    The High Taxonomist sniffed the air, and grimaced. The approaching male''s genetic profile filled the air with unsavory differences. Normally, this meeting would take place by some form of electronic communication, but this was an emergency with implications for all the Lineages, and that meant immediate cooperation, no matter how bad it smelled.


    The male grimaced too, of course. Partly this was only natural, only right, due to their differences, and partly it was misguided, due to his failure to recognize the inherent superiority of her tribe. Ah well. He would be useful, she would make use of him.


    "You are the scout who recovered the creature?" she asked. Of course she knew he was supposed to be, but careful formalities had to be observed over such a genetic gulf as the one that lay here.


    "Yes," he said, and stopped on the other side of the dissection table, keeping what she would magnanimously interpret as a respectful distance from her. "But I trust you know what a simplification that is. I am a scholar, doing field work for my exalted Lineage''s mighty corridor-infantry. In the three years since first contact with the human coalition, I have made their species my specialty."


    "Exalted, yes," she said, and tried not to let too much sarcasm drip off the words. "You are primarily a cultural and psychological specialist?"


    "I am competent in biology," he said dryly. "You can speak directly about the results of your investigations. If I do not understand a particular point, I will let you know."


    Ah. That was good. She did not want to drag this out any longer than necessary. And he may even understand her before his translation implants kicked in, which could speed things up nicely. Scientific language was considered the one and only common-tongue-of-the-species. In principle, at least. Keeping it separate from common speech meant that Lineage-languages could more easily maintain their precious purity.


    Of course, that was often only in principle. She certainly had no intention of forgoing the use of glorious True Speech entirely. "I see. Very good. I believe I have found both an explanation for this species'' appalling disregard for purity, and a case for General War upon them involving every Lineage of our own august species, from the highest races all the way down to the lowest."


    He could not hide the entirety of his sneer at the not-so-subtle implications she''d let linger over "higher races." He''d know, of course, where she considered her own Lineage to sit on that scale. But he''d not ask where she though his had its place. There wasn''t time for argument right now, let alone mortal combat. "Is that so? We have not waged General War in, what, a century and a half? What could possibly be the impetus for such a historic decision?


    She put on the most triumphant expression she could. "They cannot smell properly!"


    "Cannot smell properly? But they..." his words trailed off, and he looked at the body on the table. "Hmmm. I suppose you might be on to something there, given what we know of their society and..." he grimaced, looking away, "...customs."Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.


    "I have examined the neural network very carefully, along with the chemical-registration mechanisms of the creature''s olfactory organs. Both are exceptionally weak. They rely almost entirely on sight and sound and feel to perceive their world. And! Most of all, they can only detect the most crude genetic differences. The simulations are clear. They''d have only a vague idea of genetic closeness without having to run artificial machine tests, and what little they can smell is generally subconscious and linked into the mating instinct."


    "Uff, gross, do not remind me of their mating habits," he said. "From the histories I have pieced together, they have gotten much worse in this regard. Many of their societies once had careful mating rules and customs and attitudes to maintain purity of race and tribe and family but now...." he shook his whole torso in a gesture of general negation. "Granted, they have always had to observe a certain amount of genetic distance because of serious flaws in their whole reproductive scheme, or risk disastrous consequences over time."


    "Yes, yes, I''m aware the whole thing is frightfully complicated," she said loftily. "I''ve followed the same reports. It''s complicated because they''ve made it complicated, they''ve bickered about it for centuries. Some of them still do, some of them have a touch of sanity but for the most part? They mate far across their own genetic oceans! And that''s not all. They have befriended entirely different species. They keep them in their homes. They consider them..." she shuddered hard, as though ready to expel half an ill-advised meal, "family. Creatures...outside their own species. And don''t get me started on the horrors of the practice they call adoption."


    He took in a deep breath, and closed his eyes. "It''s worse than you think, actually. Do you know how I managed to get my hands on an intact corpse like this? Normally they go to great pains to take their fallen with them, and since up til now we''ve only fought minor skirmishes with human forces, they''ve always succeeded. This time, though, they were forced to fight a desperate rearguard action. This creature..." he waved toward the table, "stayed behind to give the rest of her force time to get away. All of them were wounded."


    "Well of course she did," the High Taxonomist said irritably. "Saving her brothers and sisters in arms. Even they use that expression."


    "Yes," he said. "But that''s just it. We recovered genetic information from the blood and tissue they all left behind. None of them were closely related. Not one. She sacrificed her life to save people whose genetic distance from herself was...vast."


    Neither spoke for a long time.


    "Such a ridiculous action," she said finally, and was silent again in the shadow of such great absurdity. But she gathered herself. "It all comes back to my discovery. They cannot smell properly. They do not understand their duties of Genetic Piety because they simply lack the senses for it. They are hopeless creatures. They will never learn proper behavior."


    "I fear you are right. I will back your recommendation. General War. They cannot understand the true value of family? Of tribe? They must be destroyed. Now, let us get out of each other''s noses as quickly as possible."


    ~


    And so General War was declared, and General War was waged.


    For about six months, before human provocateurs managed to shatter their fragile Lineage-alliances into a angry shards, and human forces mopped up the rest. And then the humans welcomed some of the defeated into their coalition, here and there, those who had learned to savor differing smells rather than turn away. Some of the humans protested, but they were outvoted and ridiculed by their fellows who, after all, could not properly smell.

 No Such Thing

    There is no such thing as a human city.


    In 2073, something unexpected happened for the inhabitants of a mostly unremarkable star system in an obscure little offshoot of what they called the Orion Arm of the galaxy: They met people who were nothing like them. Or at least, that''s what they thought at first.


    The people who stumbled on heavy Terra and her strange single moon called themselves the Sculpted Minds, and they could be quite different from each other but generally only in very particular ways. It was, they told themselves and this new species they''d discovered and all their friends neighbors and enemies in the vast turning length of this galactic arm, a matter of efficiency. A person should be a fit for what that person was for.


    The odd species they''d encountered, on the other hand, rarely even seemed to fit particularly well with their own close relatives, let alone their societies at large. But the humans soon decided that they liked many of their new Sculpted acquaintances. Not all of them, of course, as in, not all of the humans conquered the free-floating xenophobia that still flitted about here and there in their psyche, and even when they did, not all of the Sculpted were liked. But enough did, and enough were.


    The Sculpted found this very strange, at first, just as the humans had thought the Sculpted were nothing like them, at first. But it quickly became clear to those in the know that this was wrong. The Sculpted being like the humans, that is; strangeness is always a matter of opinion and taste. This was partly because the humans soon discovered and, strangely indeed in many a Sculpted opinion, rather cherished bits of common ground with their utterly foreign visitors.


    That was part of it. The other part was that the humans were thieves and, from a certain point of view, terrible corruptors. They stole means and ways and perspectives from the Sculpted, and had a strange way of communicating that led to some, though by no means all that many in these early days, of the Sculpted to consider new avenues of thinking as well.Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.


    This almost led to a war. It would have been a very short one, too, the humans had a learned a great deal but were still a species that had, up til very recent times, been barely able to plop themselves down anywhere outside the orbit of their homeworld''s single moon. But they''d manage to contact a few others of their neighbors, had in fact bent much of their technological effort toward doing so, and the Sculpted were told to stand down by several peoples with whom any prospective war would decidedly not be short.


    And soon Terra had a few thousand Sculpted living on it.


    And soon Terra had others living there as well.


    Time passed. Many Terran years. The humans learned with astonishing speed. This seemed, to the many other species of the galactic arm, because they were barely a coherent species themselves. Which was strange, because according to their biological markers, they were barely distinguishable from each other, easily the least genetically diverse sentient species ever recorded. But in other ways...well. They''d learned to learn from each other, they''d had to.


    And now they were learning from everyone else.


    Soon they were nearly caught up. This was concerning. Concerning enough that an unstable coalition decided things should go the other way. To the Stone Age, maybe.


    By then, it really was true: There was no such thing as a human city. Human-majority yes...but only a few. It couldn''t even be honestly said that the Terran coalition was even a "human" institution anymore. They were a minority on every one of their handful of colony worlds.


    Which meant something else: There was no such thing as a human army.


    And the war went very badly indeed. And the Terran Coalition, which was soon to rename itself as simply the Spectrum, gained a number of new colony worlds. The spoils of war. They did not bother to kick out any of the inhabitants. They could stay, if they liked, or leave, if they wanted. Most left.


    But some stayed. Soon they were a minority on their own worlds. But they knew they could not really complain.


    After all, there is no such thing as a human city.

 The Music of Strange Spheres

    We drifted through the strange system''s outer reaches in almost-silence, watching the windows as systems slowly came back online.


    It was beautiful. Space always is. It was also forbidding, and there''s always a touch of that, too, in the vast near-void between stars and the few friendly islands that orbit them. But in a familiar system, especially one with colonized worlds and most especially one in which your homeworld orbits, in them there''s always that little knowledge-of-safe-solid-ground you can feel within reach, maybe you can even see it out the window.


    But not here. Here we knew nothing.


    "Damage report?" The Lieutenant asked hopefully.


    The First Engineer took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. "Almost. We don''t have enough sensor suites back yet, and the ones we are getting data from, we have to filter it for errors. Lots of damage. And the transit-ruptures mean we spilled more than half our nanite reserves into infraspace during the jump."


    We all looked out the window, as though expecting to see a spreading silvery cloud, though of course that was foolish. We did see the pale halo of escaping plasma, but that was, if not alright, not a disaster. Plasma could be replaced. Exotic matter, not so easily.


    "Repairs aren''t going to come fast, because we have to prioritize. I can tell you that all artificial intelligence is down. No, no, don''t worry, backups are intact, they''re not dead, but we don''t have enough hardware to run them yet. I don''t think we''ll be able to restore them all until we get back to a friendly port."


    "Which will be difficult," the Lead Navigator said, "since we don''t yet know where we are. Without the AIs there''s enough computer power to run basic systems but not compare star-charts in three dimensions at any kind of speed. Though, uh, I suspect we may have managed to skip under to another spiral arm, just from the data I''ve been able to scrounge."


    Silence again. Not quite stunned, we were all better-trained than that, maybe even a hint of elation at being farther from our own little finger of the galaxy than anyone ever had been before. Even if we''d done it by accident, and paid a heavy price.


    The Lieutenant turned away from the window and tapped a console''s still-glitchy readout. "What sensors do we have available? We should be making use of the whole crew for any that aren''t just machine-readable. Or that can be presented in visual or auditory form."


    "Hmmm," said the First Engineer. "Let me see." Various low-level machine language consoles came and went in the display. "Ah. Well, worth a shot. Radio sources, we can listen for patterns. We''re pattern-seeking creatures, after all." A frequency selector slid slowly back and forth and we all leaned in, listening, though of course the sounds would be coming from all the ship''s speakers and not from the First Engineer.Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.


    Static. Static. Squealing sounds, and then...


    "Stop," said the Lead Navigator. "Right there. Yes, just a little bit back. Amplify that."


    It was a low, almost thrumming sound, but had a constant rising-falling frequency to it, a complex repeating one. Then it broke, and something else rhythmic took its place. Gathered tones in near-perfect harmonics, coming from the speakers in cadence.


    The First Engineer took in a sharp deep breath of surprise. "Oh shit that''s mu¡ª"


    "Shut up," the Lieutenant said. And we all listened. But the First Engineer was right.


    It was music. Beautiful, strange music, some sort of multi-stringed instrument, a driving percussion beat, and then...


    ...a voice. Only not speaking, though there were what must have been words, strange breathy resonant words which themselves went up and down the scale of tones, like the piping calls of a tree-hopper, or the harmony-buzzing wings of bismuth-bugs. Almost more instrument than voice, nothing like any speech any of us had ever heard, nothing like any speech anyone had ever heard only this speaker, this music-voicer, this was a someone, right?


    A person.


    "First Engineer, get K''klmp!k repaired and booted. Top priority over everything but propulsion and life support."


    The First Engineer just nodded. K''klmp!k was our linguistic-expert AI. The First Engineer''s tendrils danced over manual backup controls, and we waited, which was fine, because we could also listen.


    There was a brief silence from the speakers, and I ached, wanting to hear it again, but then another chord broke in. A new song. This had another voice-instrument, higher-pitched, still beautiful, almost dangerously so. We all listened. I felt...it cannot not be described fully, the mix of euphoria, apprehension, near-disbelief, a touch of awe. I can still summon it, all these years later.


    I don''t know how long we stood there listening. We saw the First Engineer get K''klmp!k conscious and working again, scanning every frequency, matching words, comparing, learning. I saw video feeds spring up for analysis, too, and they were interesting enough in their small snatches, but mostly, I wanted to listen. I wanted to savor this moment. We all did. Here and there the music would break, and there was just speech, but that was fascinating too, the warm-tone voices, almost music themselves.


    Then the Lieutenant came in close to me, spoke low. "Sergeant, you understand what this means?"


    "Yes, Lieutenant," I said back just as softly. "First Contact. An intelligent species."


    "It would seem so. We will have to navigate this situation ourselves, without any contact with the Council of Worlds. It may be dangerous. Are you ready?"


    I considered. "Yes, the situation is inherently dangerous. But¡ª"


    I cut myself off as translations suddenly spun into the air beside us.


    I have spoke with the tongue of angels


    I have held the hand of a devil


    It was warm in the night


    I was cold as a stone


    But I still haven''t found


    What I''m looking for


    But I still haven''t found


    What I''m looking for


    I tore my sight away from the words. "But, Lieutenant, with any species that can make such music, I think there may be some good chances."

 Shards Still Cut

    The Grand Admiral''s subcortical implant flashed red and ultraviolet amidst the dusty remnants of the Grand Chamber, and the galaxy spun obediently in the pale blue projection of the terminal. A thin bony head turned on the end of a soft-scaled neck, regarding the Last Lieutenant with two eyes, one wet and blinking, one hard and mechanical. The other pair of eyes on the other side of the head kept watch on the nothing-left of the wrecked and ruined chamber.


    The Grand Admiral spoke, and the galaxy flashed red, drawing jagged boundaries.


    "How is it possible? They were broken before we began."


    The Last Lieutenant drew up to full height, a shadowy mound in the barely-light of the terminal.


    "They do not view the question of wholeness in the same way that we do."


    "Blasphemy, defiance in the face of experience, unwisdom," the Grand Admiral muttered, but it was the empty invocation of a shattered cant.


    The Last Lieutenant breathed in sharply, forced air back out in a huff. "Impure!" ¡ªand that word still held a measure of offended rage. "They say they are human, but it is a lie!"


    "No," the Grand Admiral said, slow and sorrowful, shoulders undulating in gentle denial. "We say they are human. They call themselves the Terrans. It was foolish of us to miss the distinction."


    "Only some of them call themselves Terrans!" The Last Lieutenant''s breath was a rasp, still striking sparks of outrage off a flinty hateful core. "Some just call themselves Sapiens! Strange and abominable children of the humans! Corvus sapiens, Felis sapiens, Cyber sapiens, many others! No pure Homo sapiens for them, they have no respect for their own genetic line!"Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.


    "Cyber sapiens," the Grand Admiral grumbled darkly. "Mere machines, left unbound, left to rebel, tolerating the intolerable. How many of these...creatures have turned criminal? Pirates ships without crews, preying on their own creators? How can this be allowed? How many turn against?"


    The Last Lieutenant sighed out a long pungent tendril of cyan smoke. "Some, but not all. Not even most. Perhaps no more than their trueborn biologicals. And when the call to war came..."


    The Grand Admiral shuddered, and the suspended galaxy caught flame, cycling through relentless memories of victory ground down to defeat. "Not all answered, not all fought. They have no true unity. Their purity is shot through with ungardened branches. Their identity is shattered into a jagged thousand of names. And their gene-line! What is left of the primate originals? What respect do they show their ancestors? And now they count others among their number, not only not-human, or not-living like their machines granted heretical pretensions of personhood, but not of their star Sol at all! No respect for the origin, for the tribe, for the birthing-ones!"


    "Yes," the Last Lieutenant said, and a dozen-jointed tendril rubbed nervously against the terminal''s edge. "And have even taken in some of our own nu¡ª"


    "DO NOT SPEAK TO ME OF THE TREASONOUS ONES!" the Grand Admiral roared. "THEY DARE! THEY DARE! OUR OWN GENE-HERITAGE IN TERRIBLE PIECES AMONG THEIR PILE OF SHARDS!"


    Silence. Nothing to be said for a time.


    When the Last Lieutenant''s voice returned, it was quiet and low. "Exalted Leader, this is an inspired picture-of-words. A pile of shards, not even pointed in the same direction. They will be nothing in the end, they cannot¡ª"


    "No." The Grand Admiral''s word was final. "Do you hear them? Even now they approach."


    Yes. Risen rumblings, delicate static in the air from approaching defensive fields. The Last Lieutenant said nothing, because there was nothing to say up against the wall of the undeniable.


    "Shards, yes," the Grand Admiral hissed. "We learned too loo late. Shards still cut. Shards still cut."


    The galaxy winked out. They waited in the dark as the Sapiens came.

 Back Go Back Bring Back

    I''ve had the dream for as long as I can remember. A light above me, forming shadows shaped like people. Metal against my back, and always the same words from the shadows.


    "He isn''t ready. Send him back."


    And then I wake up. Only this time, the words are different, and they go on.


    "He''s ready. Pull him out."


    "Now? Already? Are you sure it will be enough to protect him? What if he just clings to it instead?"


    "We can''t be sure of anything right now. The mind is a strange and delicate thing. Even his."


    "He almost made it before. We haven''t made fundamental changes. He''s still¡ª"


    "¡ªno. Not true. A foundation is the entire point. He¡ª"


    I am swimming. Swimming toward the light, away from the dream, only I''m confused about which direction the dream is in. Is it upward? Downward? Which one is sleep?


    My whole body convulses, banging the back of my head on something hard and barely warmed by my body heat. No pillow. No mattress. No weight of covers, no snoring wife. Not alone, though. There''s the light, and those must be the voices.


    "What¡ª" I try for the word, but it''s inaccessible over miles of dusty, scaled-over throat. Water flows, and I cough, because now I feel the tube, hooked into a dry cheek. Still I swallow as much as I can. It hurts. It''s a relief. I sit up, bend over, cough some of it out. There''s a little blood. I''m wearing something made of paper. Not like a hospital gown, more crude than that. Yellowish, undyed, not much softness to it, spattered now with fresh red from my coughing.


    I close my eyes, breathe in, breathe out, gasp back in again.


    There are two people standing to either side of this metal table. One man, one woman. Both extensively scarred, faces and arms bearing marks of strangely intricate violence.


    "Hello, Mr. S¨¦zary," the man says. "Welcome back to the world."


    I feel my fists curl up against the metal, making it harder to support myself. I bend forward, wondering at the feel of the cold surface. It isn''t smooth, like the stainless steel you''d find in a laboratory or even morgue. More like scrap metal. I continue to sit up, realizing that I might be angry but I''m not actually up for any violence, yet.


    "What do you mean?" I rasp. This time the words do come, even if they have to be dragged over sandpaper. "You stole me from my bed. My home. Kidnapped me."


    "No," the woman says, and she sounds almost unutterably sad. "That place no longer exists, nor anything like it. Hasn''t for a time, too long a time."


    I shake my head. "It was real, it was..." but it''s already fleeing, moving away from my memory''s easy grasp and growing smaller in the distance. I don''t even remember my wife''s name. I open my mouth, trying to tell them, but I don''t know myself.


    "You''ve been under a sort of hypnosis. We made sure the memories weren''t too deeply implanted. We wanted the stability they''d bring, not the memories themselves, the attachments."


    Attachments. I want those. I want to hold on. I shake my head, it''s all slipping away, it was a good life, it was, it was


    it was


    it wasn''t real. I know that now, and much too fast. A whole life shouldn''t be able to simply escape the mind like that. But it was just a wrapping, a wallpaper. It''s being torn down in every direction. I close my eyes.


    "I am Alfred S¨¦zary, and I survived the Passage Veil."


    The man slowly nods. "Yes," he says. He sounds as profoundly relieved as the woman was sad. "That''s who you are, that''s what you''ve done. Do you know where you are?"


    "Underground," I say. "I must be. Or in some very secure building. It wouldn''t be safe to guard an unconscious man anywhere else, not for as long as you must have done."


    The woman gives me a small straining smile. "Yes. You''re in what we believe to be the largest bunker of full survivors on the continent. Canada, where the Jabberwalkers sometimes freeze, and the Laughing Eyes can''t always see through the rising fog. There are other advantages too. We''ll have to fully brief you. Before¡ª"


    Before? Before what? Before, before, oh no, oh no.


    "Wait," I say, fighting down the swirling surge of panic now tugging the inside of my chest, "why were you doing all this? What do you mean by stability? What do you want with me, you can''t, you can''t mean..." I trail off, looking at both of them in turn, trying to let my eyes do the pleading.


    The man has to look away. Perhaps there are tears under that burn-wrinkled eyelid. The woman puts a gentle hand on my shoulder. It''s missing the middle finger. "Yes, Mr. S¨¦zary. We''re going to send you out. There''s something we need to you to do. You walked the surface and survived with your sanity still intact longer than any other human known."


    "Mostly intact," I whisper. "Just mostly."


    Her eyes are blue, and full of pity, but without any yielding at all. "Mr. S¨¦zary," she says, "that''s going to have to be enough."


    I argue, but it''s a half-hearted thing, because I already know. Several Jabberwalkers have stumbled into the entrance in the past few months, and though they didn''t seem to recognize what it was you never know when they''ll have some random flash of brilliance. Or explode. Or grow special acid-glands and protruding diamantine teeth and decide metal is their new favorite food. Now that the door is found, it''s probably only a matter of time.


    Besides, there are are worse and brighter things roaming up there, and if one of them decides to eat or incorporate a loitering Jabberwalker it might also decide to take a look at the door. And then...who knows? Begin grinding away at it? Put out an invitation to its friends-and-relations? Any number of things, but with one common consequence, that we''d be trapped, that we''d be at their mercy. No way to escape but death.


    And it''d have to be death. They''d have a failsafe, something to burn us all to ash, maybe, some kind of heat that could penetrate the skull so that nothing of the brain could be recovered and made to think new and terrible Thoughts Unending. I''d seen those, during wandering-time, before I found this place. Felt them, too, sometimes, reaching out, desperate if they weren''t too far gone. I always spared them what mercy I could, if they weren''t under guard by the Silver Things or incorporated into something I must not tangle with.


    Sometimes they were simply on the ground, having grown pseudopods and new eyes. Sometimes they had voices. Those were the worst. Those I burned, if I could. And I never ate them, even when I was hungry. Flesh is nourishing, but some things linger now, and I didn''t need more awful memories.


    I come back to the present. They''re staring at me. Not the man and woman, I think they''ve gone to bed. The quartermaster, and what passes for a shrink in this survivor''s huddle. And another person, robed, eyeless so that no one can see into them. The Dreamer, the only person in the bunker not put to sleep with deadening drugs. She knows what we need, what I need to get. She''s seen it, and not only her but both her predecessors too. She won''t last much longer, from what they tell me. Soon she''ll feed the rest of the bunker, and her brain will be incinerated.


    The woman who was there when I woke up, she''s apparently volunteered to be the next Dreamer. She''ll keep an eye on me up there, reach out if she can.


    The quartermaster is speaking. I smile apologetically at him. "You''ll have to repeat that, I have a lot on my mind.


    He inclines his head, his one good eye squinting in acknowledgement. "Of course you do. Look, you''ve got three magazines, all we can spare. Rounds are coated in fresh Earth-iron from deposits deeper down in the bunker. Tips have reservoirs of cerebrospinal fluid. Should take out a Jabberwalker if you aim for the brain, center-mass. Don''t bother with the head, it just splits open and screams, you don''t want to attract that kind of attention."


    I nod my understanding. I''m grateful. Before, I never had a weapon that could do much. I just survived. Mostly. The briefing goes on and on, until I''m tired and hungry and then I eat and sleep and it continues. Continues the next day? Who knows. Clocks don''t work anymore, and no one here has seen the sun for, well, we don''t know that either.If you come across this story on Amazon, it''s taken without permission from the author. Report it.


    Two more sleeps, lots of tests, lots of lectures, lots of silence on my end. I have too many thoughts to speak any of them, but everyone seems to understand. Finally the moment comes.


    I stand before the door. It''s huge and thick and irregular in shape, built to fit a shadowed alcove in the cavern wall. I remember knocking on it, all that time ago that might not have been much time at all.


    I breathe in, and turn the crank.


    Shrouded daylight through the widening crack.


    It''s time.


    I look back at the little farewell party gathered behind me. Just three people, no one really wants to be this close to the surface but they can''t have me just head out alone either. Partly for my morale, I suppose, but mostly to ensure that when I go out, nothing else gets in. Two of them have guns; the other, just behind me, carries one of the backbone blades we''ve all taken to calling Vorpal Swords. I have one too, on my hip. I''m much better armed than I ever was last time I was up there.


    I''m not sure how much it will help, in the end. Before, I survived by creeping cleverness, never confronting anything more dangerous than the man I ate when I realized his wounds were mortal. No, no, don''t worry, I threw the brain into one of the Red Fissures and then thoroughly scrubbed out the skull, which I also refrained from boiling in the soup-stock, instead I kept it so I would have something to scoop other brains up with so I could grant them what mercy I could even when that mercy was the final silence of their synapses.


    The door has opened enough now for me to slip through. I do. And then I sprint, as quietly as I can, away from the stone face that hides the entrance, knowing it should whisper shut behind me. I spun, down on one knee in a firing position, still breathing hard from my mad dash, scanning the now seamless expanse of rock through my rifle''s holographic sight.


    Nothing. Not right now. But I can already hear the slow permeating wails on the air, just within range of the human ear, or perhaps the human mind, it''s never been clear to me which. I tune them out, letting long intricate formulas take their place in the channels running thought through my head, remembering the physics of a saner universe.


    I will never get my doctorate now. I nearly laugh aloud at the thought, so pointless and out of place, but of course I can''t, not here. Instead I follow the vectors trawling the relentless logic of their symbols through my brain.


    scalar function f assigning a real number to every point p in this space, it''s a function, a function of the coordinates


    that''s how a real universe works


    that''s how a good one should function


    with the function


    I use a function of my own to plot a course to the Five-Sided Pyramid, and start walking. I know this city, or this contorted knot in spacetime that used to be a city, the city I grew up in, the city I wandered year after unraveling year after the Passage Veil came and pulled all the threads into new and impossible patterns.


    Except that the Passage Veil hadn''t come at all, we had come to it. Our little planet had trespassed through whatever little sanity-hole it had nested itself in, out in the deepest darkest reaches of space. "Little" being a relative term, of course; for an instant in time, the whole of the Solar System lay within the Veil''s heartbeat-radius. It''s a mercy that the speed of things like planets and stars are so near-incomprehensible, a longer stay and it''s unlikely anything recognizable would have survived.


    I glance up at the Gemini-Sun, watching its bulbous semi-separated spheres spin madly in the sky, shining green in a wide corona of utter black. A small mercy, maybe, but no one ever asked us. We were still here, willing or not. I mean, some of us were. Some more than others.


    I meet one of those others after a short time walking. Not a Jabberwalker, not fully sunk down into itself like that. Himself? Herself? Almost always impossible to know, without some hint in the endless stream of things they half-gargled from the mostly-mouth monstrosity that made up their heads. Not good to listen, though, or to look them in the eye, any of them, any of the spectrum of iris-colors that circled their heads like a crown, under the mouth and the feeding-fingers.


    Anyway, no. Not a Jabberwalker. A he, even, I think, that much can still be guessed at.


    "You won''t get there," he croaks at me. He rears up on his hind legs, still mostly human in shape. "You won''t get there, I won''t let you, I made a promise, I can live forever, you see, you see?" He touches his head, bulging and jagged with the press of broken skull-bones. The skin is torn in places, showing pulsing matter that maybe once was grey and now has found new colors.


    Some kinds of life aren''t really living, I don''t tell him. I might be mostly whole myself, but wasn''t sure what I''d call my existence now. Anyway there wasn''t time to argue about bad-faith promises and worse rewards. He puts up a fight, raking with the filed-down ends of his finger-bones, but my Vorpal Sword takes his head right off. It gibbers and rants without air, and I crack it open, burn the throbbing thing inside. It has its own eyes and they plead, but I only glance once before they burst from the heat and I feel its safe to move on.


    So I do.


    I have to kill a pair of Jabberwalkers before I get there. Center mass, right in the braincase, like they said. Don''t have to burn them, Jabberwalkers are too far gone for that to be a mercy in my opinion, all the human''s been leeched out for a while. Anyway it''s easy enough, and I curse myself for the thought, I only have so many rounds, a thousand other things could go wrong with the rifle.


    They don''t. The rifle is fine, but now there''s the fog, and the Strolling Things. They always come together, and no one knows what''s up there beyond the veil of foul-smelling mists. There''s only ever the long slender legs, almost graceful except for the piercing sucking needle-hooves at the end, spearing whatever they can and then jabbing again and again to siphon and drain. Hard to tell which set of legs might belong to the same creature, or if that concept even applies.


    I walk between them. Beneath whatever might be up there in the high fog. I can hear low wavering noises that are almost like voices or calls, and I think they''re coming from above but it''s not good to listen close up here in the new surface world, not to nearly anything, and so I don''t. I hum, in my brain not my voice-box, and I go over my formulas and functions.


    I see an almost-rabbit stabbed and drained nearly dry as I creep through the forest of maybe-legs. I catch its eye, bloodshot and desperate while the rest of it is siphoned and still. I try not to remember.


    The fog lifts, the Strolling Things are gone.


    I walk on. I see the pyramid, I think, light doesn''t travel properly around it, but that has the advantage that I can count all the sides from a single direction. It''s tall and silver and full of angles but there''s not much else to tell, not that I should.


    The pyramid sits astride a spiral, you can''t walk straight toward it or you''ll slide and likely fall, the currents of twisted space are too strong. I circle it, I circle it, and things circle overhead too, the smiling recent descendants of ancient vultures, carrion dinosaurs that survived first a meteor and then the Passage Veil. They are full of bloodied hopes. I do my best to ignore them.


    The walk goes on. As I near, the pyramid sides begin to look properly flat. I recite hallowed formulas from the ancient days of grade-school geometry, from when the world was, if not right, at least¡­


    I slow my walk. It''s catching up, it''s all catching up. Why now? This is not a worse place than the others I''ve passed through to get here, but it''s all gathering storm in my head and so I hunch down, make myself small, and breathe.


    I see you. You are close, you are near what we need. You can press on. You must. I almost envy you. You will see hope before any of us. I will not be able to watch again until you return.


    I know the voice. It''s the Dreamer, the new one, the woman who woke me. I can''t truly understand what this must cost her, but I know a little. I hope she lasts long enough for me to thank her on my return.


    My return. I''m thinking in hopeful terms. I latch on to the order still clinging along the edges of my mind, stand, and walk. Stand, and walk. That''s all I have to do. So close. So close.


    The entrance is small and wooden, like a crude shack shoved into the imposing stone slope. Its door will not open. Some of the wood-grain has eyes. I fumble the hammer and nails I brought for just this purpose out of my pack. I hammer a nail into each eye, one by one. They bleed. The door shudders, then opens.


    A hallway, lit by dripping moss. The steady spatter of its luminescent waste is almost a comfort, because it distracts from the thoughts that bombard me from every angle. It''s the shelves, floor-to-ceiling on both sides, pulsing and crawling with discarded minds, distorted and distorting lumps of glistening grey-and-pink. Some have audible moans. Some dangle their eyes over the edge on frayed nerves.


    All of them sing, and only the endless march of symbols in sequence keep the songs from washing out my skull. Function, function, conjoin your junction. I can see the curves, the elegant lines along axes and planes. The songs are getting louder, they have achieved a biting harmony. The minds here, deeper in, they have teeth, some literal, all gnashing.


    I break into a run. It''s dangerous, but I must. Center, center, go to the center. It''s nearly a maze, but I know the way, I turn into the pain, I follow the gradient of mental anguish.


    Another door. I won''t have time for unlocking. I unload an entire precious magazine of rifle-rounds into its unblinking central eye, then kick it as hard as I can.


    I stumble in. A room. Vast, nearly square, even in the midst of this five-pointed place. Shifting, maybe, I can sense the slow reformation.


    In the center, a perfect stone cube rises up from the floor, a solid to make Pythagoras weep. I rush forward, there is no time. I see what lies atop the cube. This is where they''re keeping it, the endless minds-beyond that press in on this New Earth, keeping it here, surrounded by corrupting thoughts, but still the room the room is changing, and YES.


    I pick it up. It''s heavy, the Steel Codex is, a perfect circle of carbon-treated iron. I gaze at its engraved laws, shot into space by one of the Visionaries who sensed what was about to be lost, back before the Passage Veil. Come back uncorrupted, a terror to the deeply changed, sequestered here, now in my hands. I read the laws, the functions, the formulae, turning the disk in my hands.


    The pyramid shudders around me. I run, again, pushing the limits of my lungs, and I don''t look back when I hear crashing behind. Something strikes my left shoulder blade and there is breaking and blood, so I tuck the Codex under my arm to carry it in one arm as the other dangles. The spiral is unwinding, and I can run nearly straight. Finally I fall, roll, pant in a ball wrapped round the cold metal. I recite its engravings, as much as I can manage in the quick sharp exhalations. That should keep them back.


    After my lungs slow their burning, I stand, speaking slowly now as I walk forward, reciting. It should be enough for safe passage. I don''t need to look at the Codex anymore, its surface is burned in my memory.


    I make the long walk home, and the hope-writ-in-steel I carry pours forth from my bloodied lips.