by Neil Clarke
Then she takes the clock and presses it to the wall. It adheres, becoming a part of the ship, and something of the ship flows into it.
The Librarian gasps. “No!” She runs to the clock and tries to wrestle it from the wall. As she yanks on it she wails, “No! No! No!” But she does allow Amelia to gently move her aside.
“Look,” says Amelia.
The Librarian has changed to Pele, Pele of the mobile face, the warm, beautiful brown eyes.
“Thank you,” she says.
Sometimes Pele prepares for the invasion.
Invisibly, in particles, they scout the terrain of Terra Nova, Planet X. It breaks down in this way:
1.It is empty, ready for us, with no life, but able to accept life, or with life that will not interfere with ours, or
2.They are ready for us, or something like us. The branches:
1.Annihilation
2.Rejection
3.Acceptance/modification
4.Surrender
Of these four, Pele fancies most number three. Except: what are they save identity?
Yet identity undergoes constant modification.
This is a special kind of hell. She decides to enjoy a thousand amazing sunsets to refresh herself.
Pele wonders how to say what is happening. “Time passes?” “Spacetime moves?” “We flash, and flash again, in long instants, out of darkness, and into light?”
They play, and play again, in endless iterations.
The running of the ship, the thought-ship? Inflections wash through it each moment, Earth-based inflections of thought wrought from the hard thrash of human dreams, human longing. So they are all dancing-ship stories. That’s all they are: stories. Pele’s unique slice of older-time gives her wry perspective. She can be outside the story. She stubbornly refuses to surrender. It-is-not-real, she thinks, seeing them all at play, leaping from bloody mayhem to the estranging magic of Through Fairy Halls, and, often, lying spent and weeping on a riverbank after being swept up in the billions of dark stories that comprise their heritage.
It takes all her strength and more, drawn from a rich stew of inspiring works, to pull them back from self-annihilation. For what choice is there, they collectively feel, after being soaked in the deep evil that humans do, but to remove themselves from the picture?
Whether or not they are right, she hurls tales of goodness, blazing thunderbolts, into their minds. They wake bright-faced, with a jolt, ready for the new day. She doesn’t exactly dust her hands in self-satisfaction, but she does try not to wonder too hard if she’s done the right thing. Who is she to shield them from grief; from sorrow, from deep reflection, or from growth?
She just tries to keep them from hurting one another, and from hurting them or herself. What else can she do?
She tries to be older and wiser. She absorbs old movies; re-views Casablanca as a lesson about how one bestows grace through artful lies concocted on the run, new tales to make things go right. These are lessons she missed while on Earth. She spoke from stalwart truth, never mind what pain it caused. How can one make these calculations, though, when in the midst of chaos, which is where she lives, in a constantly re-invented throng of young entities who cannot understand literatures truly until they have gained in wisdom? And who cannot gain wisdom except through sorrow, which she does not wish to thrust upon them? Sorrow generally bestows cynicism, and she is back in the same old revolution, lifted up and down until they die except
They cannot die.
We are scattered into particles. We are a speeding cloud, intent.
It is a word at last, the word that’s been there all along, our Kansas home:
Courage! With a Brooklyn accent.
Whatever, wherever, that is.
“Courage,” we shout. Our brave chests expand, our heads a single thought, shooting for we know not what, re-organized by new information every instant, but shooting forward, now, at last, to Planet.
We will find ways to infuse any matter we find. We will organize and blend, we will crush and release.
For we are the mighty, the awful, the terrifying power of life itself. We are infinitely tiny, infinitely large.
Our words describe the states that we create; the states create us, and a bond sings through it all.
Courage!
We crash onto every wave-hushed shore, every cold rocky outpost, every object that will hold us, with equal, eager, organizing force, programs of life, and flower, for a brief instant of stability, everywhere at once, a wide delight of life itself. We pass the instant of death, the deep drag of dread and sadness, the roiling, drowning crush of force upon force. We rush up the beaches, we drift to the high peaks, we burrow, nest, burst, and sing.
And leave ourselves, that dream of us, behind, and continue.
An instant from far here to far there, like the instant dividing life from death, but skipping that, as it must be skipped.
This is the story of how a bunch of kids kidnapped a physicist who was also a librarian so that they could get to a new planet, one far outside of our solar system. It sounds like a fairy tale because it might be. It is really very simple.
We cross a roaring creek on a rickety bridge, fishing pole on our shoulder, in a deep mountain chasm, heading home in an evening of cold, settling mist, alone.
Yet heading somewhere.
A tentative confidence sparkles, a stand of tiny pink Galax that Pele does not pick. She hikes upward through an early spring forest of re-awakened earth, its moist smell of leaf-loam and the rush of the new-born creek fed by high snowmelt a cool, moist blessing, as is the fact of day, where trees hide most of the sky and those tempting, empty stars. She comes across it again and again in her solitary hikes, and each time kneels and contemplates it with renewed, deep, solitary wonder: it and her. A different life, with a different story, but a story nonetheless.
Life, in all that lifelessness.
After a thousand such flash-lives filled with wonder, bursting into time, she returns to here, knows it to be real, and for the first time, Pele does not recoil.
Why did she do it? Why did she let them go?
Was it hubris—wanting to see if her science project would really work?
Was it a heroic act, a Noah for the arc?
Blind, rushing ignorance?
This is our house.
This is our bed.
These are our chairs.
“We have left Oz in a magic balloon,” says Targa, lying on his back with his hands laced behind his neck. “We made the fire, like the professor. So who is the Wicked Witch of the West who will punish us for trying to get to our new home?”
“Pele,” yells Oscar.
“No!” several chorus. Ki says, “Pele is Glinda!”
“Pele is the sleeping princess,”
“She’s awake.” “Not really.”
“And so are we all munchkins?” asks Juno indignantly. “Or flying monkeys?”
“I’m a flying monkey,” says Targa, flipping over and pushing off, soaring with arms extended.
“And do we have hearts?”
“I am working on mine,” says Bean, splaying two long-fingered hands across her chest. “I am working very, very hard.”
Pele, hunched near-fetal in her berth, hears voices. She always does, but these wake her, for some reason. She opens one eye and sees that they have furnished her with a crystal ball with which to watch the proceedings. She allows herself a brief, tiny smile, uncurls, stretches, and leans forward on her elbows. “Wicked witch,” she votes aloud, her long-unused vocal chords pushing it out as a rusty whisper.
They all look at the monitor, wave and cheer. “Pele! Pele! Pele!”
She tests the most important word: “Courage!”
“Courage,” they yell back. “Courage!”
How long can longing last? Is English really so sparse?
Pele finds the German word sehnsucht. Sounds like a sneeze. And that C.S. Lewis said it is “That unnamable something, desire for which pierces us like a rap
ier at the smell of bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of “Kubla Khan,” the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves, carrying the freight of longing’s complexity, modified by underlying stratum of utopias particular to each individual.”
But English has its strengths, for longing indeed is … long. Endless, in fact. Until what she imagines will be that eyeblink, sudden as their previous transition to the inescapable longing of perpetual now.
Presently, that is Pele’s name for this planet.
Sehnsucht. “Zeenzucht,” Pele says, and saying it changes her brain. Or something. Maybe.
Despite all we know and all we have learned about Shining Leaf, as Ta’a’aeva insists we call this planet, there is much that remains unknown.
Shining Leaf is just a blip. Another flash, a nanosecond opening that, taking, we risk all.
We have seeded other planets with our clones. As far as we know, they all died. We all died. But here we are. Still.
We are, at last, restless. In fact, we are able to realize that we are mad.
That we are ready to choose.
Pele never votes. “I voted once,” she says, and we say, “Yes, and we are glad that you did.”
She makes us promise something. And, at last, we do.
We cannot even talk about the painful changes that swept through us when we disengaged the drive. How it looked, felt. The precise analytics, biological and physical. How long it took in mundane time. The unspinning. Realizing the door of us, each unique. Moku could tell that story, and those in the future will want to know.
Having lived it is enough for us.
Moku was our home. It sustained us in our search, kept us alive, taught us much, but kept us in a state of fear and hesitation. We wanted to grow up badly enough to die if it did not work. Like Pinocchio, we wanted to be real.
We saw our main chance, and we took it.
And so became human again.
How can you tell the choice between good and evil when that choice is hard upon you? How do you recognize it? Is there a way to measure the road not taken? Why would that matter?
We have learned much about taking risk. We could not help moving into this.
From the Giant’s abode in the sky, Jack stole the harp that plays by itself. The ship is that: we stole it.
From the Giant’s abode in the sky, Jack stole the goose that lays the golden egg.
Perhaps that is us.
Will we live happily ever after?
Time will tell.
When a horse wins a race, she is heaped with flowers. She snorts and prances and feels proud.
Our horse, on which we placed all bets, won.
So many suns, so many planets that did not suit. You know that tale. Some, seeded by us with life, might now be flourishing, but we will never know.
It is not luck that brought us here, to this perfect planet, with its perfect star. It was courage.
Beneath this glorious, intense blue-violet sky, buffeted by sea-wind, I know, ineluctably, that I am here, on this loud coast. Crashing waves suck rattling, tumbling stones back into the shorebreak, nicking my bare feet and calves with delicious sharp pings. Sunset-tinged clouds billow like great swans on the horizon. I pull in breaths of sweet salt air, keeping an eye on my great-granddaughter, playing tag with rushing foam.
Shining Leaf is no game, no illusion, no manufactured reality, and it is no fairy tale. I spin round and see the gully-ridden cliff behind me rise, thick with massive virgin trees, relatives of red alder, bigleaf maple, Sitka spruce—trees that relish deep morning fog. They ascend in tiers of wind-tossed greens to the long grasslands above.
The pampas stretch for fifty miles to snow-peaked mountains, where just below the tree line buffeting winds twist and gnarl the bristlecone pines. Across the plains gallop herds of savannah animals, for our biosystems found homes here as well, and have flourished. And when I ride my real horse there, she actually moves, and we do reach the plane trees.
Sometimes, after opening my bedroll and making tea, a human speck amid a sea of high, sweet-smelling grasses where the sound of the rushing wind combing and flattening the grass is equally sweet, I gaze at the stars among which I lived for I do not know how long and am infused, suddenly, by a sense of deep and utter strangeness, illuminated by that … flash we all felt—or were—on Moku.
It seems just a second, but I cannot be sure how long it lasts, that flash during which I am transformed; illuminated. It could be eons. It could be Planck time, the tiniest bit of time we can measure. But when I am there, and perhaps always, I am like a pebble of pure consciousness, tossed into the most lucid medium imaginable, where my ripples intersect with and are changed by other patterns, and this goes on forever.
It is then that I know that I am not as I was, and it is then that I long to be back among the stars, and to never touch land again.
But here, I invent new languages to map the house of thought I build. My thoughts were useful once; they may be useful again. Or not.
I could tell you how our chimerists, biophysicists, engineers, artists, and mathematicians generated experimental interim environments to test and refine our interaction with this new planet as we explored it virtually, hungering to land and climb its towering young mountains and sail its vast seas. We studied its weather patterns, developed plans for symbiosis, testing and re-testing, accelerating path after path, answering question after question, for we had time, and we had to be satisfied. But that is all in our library; you can experience it there. We grew, changed, exploded into larger life, real life, using Moku‘s vast genetic library and modeling algorithms to make decisions about populating Shining Leaf with ourselves and other fauna, learning from stories of failures on Earth, merging with what was here. The very last step, the most serious, was deciding where best to settle, and how.
We chose well. We changed, very slightly, to adapt to Shining Leaf, to its particular chemistries, its atmosphere, and its wilder seas, which Ta’a’aeva’s tribe explores with zest, though Moku mapped its every fractal coast, her motto being “the map is not the territory.” We grew defenses against that which would have killed us, larger and different lungs to inhale and use a slightly different atmosphere. Alcubierre gave us time to do that.
We live in towns and villages scattered around the planet, and have plans for golden cities, both far and near, which now assemble. We have new sciences, new technologies, communications networks that run on new symbioses, and the sure knowledge that we are still changing, because life is change, and because change is life.
I have young Bean’s heart and mind, yet my grown mind is different, a human/spacetime hybrid, and my hard-grown soul my own.
Is a soul courage? Is it philosophical depth? Is it simple immortality? Is it the being that runs through us, animates us, the foundation of all love and hope and deep satisfaction in the art of living, in community, in life itself?
Here, we and our children chart their own courses; they are pioneers, seekers, builders, dreamers. One son is an artist: one daughter, an engineer. My many descendants flourish.
The wind, evening-strong, blows back my hair. I lean down and pluck up a cool, gleaming golden stone from the tumble, hold its water-honed, near-translucent thinness up to our new star and think of all the time this one stone holds and might reveal, from when it exploded into being until now, after being crushed and washed and tumbled and honed into this beauty that I, also a part of the same story, can see, hold, taste, and smell.
I give it to my great-granddaughter, who is four, to play with and she flips it in the air and laughs. Her eyes are hazel, like my father’s.
I think of the librarian, who died long, long ago, and know for a certainty, which has not always been the case, that she was real, and that this is not a fairy tale, but something we have done.
We named our star for her: Pele.
She helped me grow a soul.
; And that makes everything worth it.
Here’s a heigh and a ho! for the purpose strong,
And the bold stout hearts that roam,
And sail the Seven Seas of Life
To bring such treasures home!
—Olive Beaupré Miller, The Treasure Chest
—With everlasting thanks to Irma Gwendolyn Knott
Poems herein by Olive Beaupré Miller, My Bookhouse,
The Bookhouse for Children Publishers, Chicago, Illinois, 1920
Yoon Ha Lee’s debut Ninefox Gambit won the Locus Award for Best First Novel and was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Clarke Awards. His short fiction has appeared in Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other venues. He lives in Louisiana with his family and cat, and has not yet been eaten by gators.
EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES
Yoon Ha Lee
W hen Shuos Jedao walked into his temporary quarters on Station Muru 5 and spotted the box, he assumed someone was attempting to assassinate him. It had happened before. Considering his first career, there was even a certain justice to it.
He ducked back around the doorway, although even with his reflexes, he would have been too late if it’d been a proper bomb. The air currents in the room would have wafted his biochemical signature to the box and caused it to trigger. Or someone could have set up the bomb to go off as soon as the door opened, regardless of who stepped in. Or something even less sophisticated.
Jedao retreated back down the hallway and waited one minute. Two. Nothing.
It could just be a package, he thought—paperwork that he had forgotten?— but old habits died hard.
He entered again and approached the desk, light-footed. The box, made of eye-searing green plastic, stood out against the bland earth tones of the walls and desk. It measured approximately half a meter in all directions. Its nearest face prominently displayed the gold seal that indicated that station security had cleared it. He didn’t trust it for a moment. Spoofing a seal wasn’t that difficult. He’d done it himself.
He inspected the box’s other visible sides without touching it, then spotted a letter pouch affixed to one side and froze. He recognized the handwriting. The address was written in spidery high language, while the name of the recipient—one Garach Jedao Shkan—was written both in the high language and his birth tongue, Shparoi, for good measure.
