Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World

by Caroline M. Yoachim

  The delicate orange bird at the base of Achron’s throne began to sing. The language was simple, as the languages of organic sentient beings tend to be, but the notes of the song carried an emotion that was strong and sad. Eggs lost to some unknown disease, chicks threatened by new predators that came from the west. The small concerns of a mother bird, transformed into a prayer to the sky god, Achron. Take me, the bird sang, and save my children.

  This was the moment of Achron’s ending. Not an abrupt ending, but first a shrinking, a shift. Achron became the mother Apodid, forming a new bubble of existence, a rattle on the tail of a snake outside of time. Through the eyes of the bird, Achron saw the towering statue of the sky god, a cross section of time, a human form that was not stretched. It was an empty shell, a shed skin, a relic of past existence.

  Achron-as-bird hopped closer and examined the bivalve shell the mother bird had offered. It was a brilliant and shimmering blue. Existence in this body was a single drop in the ocean of Achron’s existence, and yet it was these moments that were the most vivid and salient. The smell of the sea, the coolness of the wind, the love of a mother for her children.

  Achron would and did save those children. The Apodids were and would be, for Achron, as humans were for Prime. They would appear together on the great pyramid and usher in the new age of the universe.

  The Great Pyramid of Gliese 221

  Prime was tired. She felt only the most tenuous of connections to the woman she had once been, to the dream of humans on another world. She had been to all the colony worlds, and nowhere had she found anything that matched her antiquated dreams. Humans had moved on from their bodies and left behind the many worlds of the galaxy for other species to inherit.

  It was time for her to move on, but she wasn’t ready. She had searched for her dream without success, so this time she would do better. She would create her dream, here on Gliese prime. She built a great pyramid and filled it with all the history of humanity. She terraformed the surrounding planet into a replica of ancient Earth.

  She called for Achron.

  “Are you ready for the humans?” Achron asked.

  “Almost.”

  Together they decorated the pyramid with statues of humans and, at Achron’s insistence, the sentient orange birds of 51 Pegasi b. On a whim, she sent Achron to retrieve the sentient trees from the hanging gardens. It was not Earth, but it was good. The work was peaceful, and Prime was comforted to know that Achron would always exist, even after she had moved on.

  “I think it is time.” Prime said. Time for the new humans. A new beginning as she approached her end. “What was it like, to reach your end?”

  “I am outside of time.” Achron said. “I know my beginning and all my winding middles and my ending simultaneously, and always have. I cannot say what it will be like, for you. We are always together in the times that you are, and that will not change for me.”

  “Bring the humans.”

  Achron took ten thousand humans from the Mausoleum at HD 40307 g. Stole them all at once, but brought them to Gliese in smaller groups. The oldest ones Prime raised, for though the bodies were grown the minds were not. After the first thousand, she let the generations raise each other to adulthood of the mind. The humans began to have true infants, biological babies, carried in their mothers’ wombs and delivered with pain.

  Achron brought the Apodids from 51 Pegasi b. They lived among the trees of Beta Hydri, their bright orange plumage lovely against the dark green banyan leaves. Prime taught the humans and the birds to live together in peace. She did not need to teach the trees. Peace was in their nature.

  There was one final surprise.

  “I have something for you, inside the pyramid,” Achron said.

  It was a stasis pod, and inside was Mei. The body was exactly as it was when she had left it, nearly four billion years ago, on the icy moon of Europa. Achron had brought it through time, stolen it away like the bodies from the Mausoleum. No. The body on Europa had been contaminated with radiation, and this one was not. “You reversed the radiation?”

  “I didn’t take the body from Europa. I took tiny pieces from different times, starting in your childhood and ending the day before you went up to the observation tower. A few cells here, a few cells there—sometimes as much as half a discarded organ, when you went in to have something replaced. The body comes from many different times, but it is all Mei.”

  “It is a nice gesture, but I am too vast to fit in such a tiny vessel.”

  “No more vast than I was, when I entered an Apodid,” Achron said. “Take what you can into the body, and leave the rest. It was always your plan to have your ending here.”

  Prime sorted herself ruthlessly, setting aside all that she would not need, carefully choosing the memories she wanted, the skills that she could not do without. She left that tiny fragment behind and transcended beyond time and space.

  Mei opened her eyes and looked out upon a new Earth, a world shared with minds unlike any Earth had ever known. What would they build together, these distant relations of humankind? She watched the sun set behind the mountain of the Great Pyramid and contemplated a sky full of unfamiliar constellations.

  Prime had left her enough knowledge of the night sky to pick out Earth’s sun. It was bright and orange, a red giant now. Earth was likely gone, engulfed within the wider radius of the sun. The icy oceans of Europa would melt, and the lighthouse would sink into the newly warmed sea. Entropy claimed all things, in the end, and existence was a never-ending procession of change.

  It was only a matter of time before the inhabitants of Gliese returned to the stars. Mei stood on the soil of her new planet and studied the constellations. Already, she dreamed of other Earths.

  AUTHOR NOTES

  Part 1: Our World

  Five Stages of Grief After the Alien Invasion

  I’ve written several flash stories for Daily Science Fiction, and a few years ago they invited me to write a series of flash for them. I got the idea to write one flash story for each of the five stages of grief, with a different point of view character for each story. I wanted all the stories to fit together and reveal more and more about the post-alien-invasion world. But once I’d written all five stages, I couldn’t bear to break them up. Despite starting as a series of flash, the piece had definitely become a single story.

  The strategy of combining several interrelated flashes into a single short story has worked well for me, and several of the stories in this collection were written using what I’ve started calling the ‘flashmash’ technique.

  Betty and the Squelchy Saurus

  This story originally appeared in Fireside Magazine, with amazing art by Galen Dara. In the first draft, the girls lived in a modern-day boarding school, but the setting wasn’t coming together properly. Then I stumbled across some descriptions of 1950s orphanages, and I was really drawn to all the details—the chores the girls did, the institutional buildings, and the bathrooms with pink tile floors.

  Rock, Paper, Scissors, Love, Death

  For the last several years, I’ve done a writing challenge called Weekend Warrior. It happens on Codex, an online writing group, and the basic idea is that participants write a flash fiction story every weekend for five straight weekends. It’s a great way to generate a lot of stories in a short amount of time. Over the years I’ve written around 35 stories for Weekend Warrior, including several of the stories in this collection.

  Most of the time, I write flash stories with the intention of keeping them at flash fiction length, but for this story I wanted to write something that (1) worked at flash length, and (2) was also the start of a longer story. The flash fiction version is the first section (ROCK). I think the story works both ways, although I definitely prefer the longer version.

  The Philosophy of Ships

  This story was inspired by a famous thought experiment called ‘the ship of Theseus,’ which asks whether a ship remains the same ship if all of the individual boards have been
replaced. I find this question really fascinating in the context of human identity. If you replace every cell in someone’s body, are they still the same person? What if you replace the cells with something different than what they started with—metal instead of organic?

  I was doing a lot of skiing around the time when I wrote this story. Being (at best) an intermediate skier, the idea of skis with safeties programmed into them was pretty appealing, although obviously in the story they turn out not to work so well after all.

  This story originally appeared in Interzone, and was included in The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2013, edited by Rich Horton.

  Temporary Friends

  I often find myself with half an idea. In this case, I knew I wanted to write something about a society where humans had a vastly longer lifespan. I had a world in my head where people could get all kinds of replacement parts, but I didn’t have a story to go with the world. Then I watched Finding Nemo with my kids. The movie got me thinking about how we try to expose our kids to some experiences and shield them from others, which became the seed for the story.

  Interlude: Flash Fiction Worlds

  A Million Oysters for Chiyoko

  This story was inspired by an article on the increasing acidity of our oceans, and the effect that has on shellfish. I thought it would be interesting to take an element that is traditionally fantasy (mermaids) and make it into science fiction. Tina Connolly did a lovely reading of this story for the 150th episode of her podcast, Toasted Cake.

  I mentioned earlier that “Five Stages of Grief After the Alien Invasion” was a failed attempt to write a series of flash for Daily Science Fiction. This story is part of the series that I eventually did write—a “Tasting Menu” of five food-related flash stories.

  Carla at the Off-Planet Tax Return Helpline

  Unidentified Funny Objects is a series of humorous speculative fiction anthologies edited by Alex Shvartsman. I hadn’t written much humor before this story, but I thought it’d be fun to give it a try.

  Do Not Count the Withered Ones

  A big thank-you to Vylar Kaftan, who has provided me with many story prompts over the years. In this case, the prompt was the title of the story. It got me wondering why we shouldn’t count the withered ones, and from there I came up with the idea of heartplants.

  Pieces of My Body

  I did this story for a writing challenge called Bellderdash where the goal was to fool the other participants into believing that your story was written by Helena Bell. I didn’t win, but I did trick a couple people. Interestingly, this story ran on Daily Science Fiction the day before a story actually written by Helena Bell. That might have been coincidence, but maybe the editors saw the similarities in style and thought the stories worked well together.

  Everyone’s a Clown

  When Unlikely Story put out a call for clown-related flash fiction for their Coulrophobia issue, I was surprised to realize that I had already written a couple of stories about carnivals and clowns. So I decided, why not write yet another clown story?

  Harmonies of Time

  This story was inspired by a video I watched of a baby who got a cochlear implant and was able to hear his mother’s voice for the first time. It got me thinking about what it would be like to interpret a new type of sensory information, and whether learning a new sense might be useful for communicating with aliens.

  Part 2: Fantasy Worlds

  Stone Wall Truth

  In 2006, I attended the Clarion West Writers Workshop. Clarion West is a very intense experience—the students live together for six weeks and focus on writing. Each week there is a different instructor. I learned a lot, and it was a wonderful experience, but afterwards I had a period of time where it was hard to write.

  This story was part of my effort to break out of that slump. It started as a writing challenge issued by Tinatsu Wallace and Tina Connolly, two of my Clarion West classmates. They each gave me a prompt: “humiliation” and “stone wall.” The challenge was to write a flash story that combined the two prompts. I’m usually pretty good at sticking to the length I set out to write, but this story definitely needed more space to breathe.

  “Stone Wall Truth” was a finalist for the 2010 Nebula Award.

  The Little Mermaid of Innsmouth

  Every year, The Drabblecast commissions three stories for their H.P. Lovecraft Tribute Month. When I got the invitation to participate, I was conflicted—it was my first invitation to write a commissioned story, but the racism in Lovecraft’s work makes writing a ‘tribute’ story problematic for me. I decided to accept the commission, but address the racism head on. The result is this story—a Little Mermaid/Shadow Over Innsmouth mashup told from the perspective of a Japanese fish-frog girl.

  After I wrote the story, I got the idea to write a parody of “Part of Your World,” a song from the Disney version of The Little Mermaid. I came up with a complete set of Lovecraftian lyrics, and—since The Drabblecast is an audio magazine—I recorded the song to play along with the podcast of my story. If you’re interested in hearing the song, you can find it on the Drabblecast website.

  On the Pages of a Sketchbook Universe

  I wanted to include a couple of original stories in this collection, as a thank you to my readers. This story started when I discovered watercolor pencils. I really love the concept of them. Watercolor paint is pretty, but I’ve never really had a knack for painting. So paint in pencil form really appealed to me. I started thinking about pencil people and paint people and how a watercolor pencil person would fall somewhere between the two. It was originally going to be a relatively straightforward secondary world fantasy.

  Then I got it in my head that I wanted it to be a secondary world fantasy with aliens. As a general rule, aliens are firmly in the science fiction genre, but the difference between fantasy creatures and science fictional aliens is largely one of origin. Did it come from another planet? If so, it’s an alien. So I introduced other planets to my secondary fantasy world so that I could have aliens.

  Seasons Set in Skin

  The inspiration for this story is a Japanese technique for doing tattoos by hand, called tebori. I watched a few videos of tebori tattoo artists to get a feel for the technique (and also because it is really cool to watch a skilled artist at work). The hardest thing for me was finding a video where I could really hear the sound the needles made—many of the videos had music covering the sound. I’d seen it described in several places as a shakki sound, with a rhythm to it, but I wanted to hear it for myself.

  The Carnival Was Eaten, All Except the Clown

  This story was originally flash fiction, written for the Codex Weekend Warrior contest. I later expanded it to have additional cycles of the sugar clown being melted and reborn.

  Interlude: Flash Fiction Worlds

  Paperclips and Memories and Things That Won’t Be Missed

  I often write from prompts, and the one that sparked this story was to chose any three words from a list of twenty and write a story that included those words. I selected ghost, peanut, and invoice, but the list of words also got me thinking about odd collections of things. I liked the idea of ghosts collecting little things from the world of the living. At the time I wrote the story, my youngest daughter was about three months old, so the other bit of inspiration for the story was her fondness for warm bath water and white noise.

  Please Approve the Dissertation Research of Angtor

  “Carla at the Off-Planet Tax Return Helpline” made it into Unidentified Funny Objects 3, so when Alex Shvartsman put out a call for submissions of dark humor for Unidentified Funny Objects 4, I decided to try my hand at humor again. I was particularly pleased to land a story in UFO4, because I get to share a table of contents with George R.R. Martin and Neil Gaiman.

  Grass Girl

  The seed for this story was the Shakespeare quote: “God has given you one face, and you make yourself another.” It got me thinking about someone building their own face, and
their own body. Then I wondered what might happen if we had the ability, as teens, to change ourselves to fit in with the other kids. This story has been selected to appear in Year’s Best Young Adult Speculative Fiction 2015, edited by Alisa Krasnostein and Julia Rios.

  One Last Night at the Carnival, Before the Stars Go Out

  I like experimenting with point of view, and I like carnivals. This story combines those two things.

  Honeybee

  This story was interesting because I wrote it almost entirely in my head, while driving from Seattle to Portland. I composed it in bits and pieces, repeating everything in my head so that I would remember it, and then typed the story up when I arrived in Portland. I think a 750 word flash is about the most I could possibly hope to hold in my head this way.

  Elizabeth’s Pirate Army

  This is another story written from a prompt. In this case the prompt was: “If you got one whole day of invulnerability, what would you do with it?” I took the “you” in the prompt quite literally, and thought about what I would have done as a kid if I was invulnerable for a day. The original title of the story was “Caroline’s Pirate Army,” but I decided it was kind of weird to have a character named after myself, so I later changed it to Elizabeth.