by Larry Niven
What else would you have me do?
I would have him find another island to love, far away. I would have him talk some sense into Mother. I would have him tell the storm to stay away from my brother.
The blood in my veins feels as cold as seawater. It isn’t love that is changing me—it is desire. I cannot change the sea without also changing myself.
“I’ve come to say goodbye.”
I whirl to find Shuramin behind me. Gray and blue shift beneath his skin. His eyes crackle like lightning.
“No.”
He only smiles at my denial. “It is my choice. Let me be as I am.”
I seize him, hold him in my arms, intending never to let go. A large wave crashes behind me, and the water eats away the ground beneath my feet. “I’ve done everything wrong.”
“You have still saved the village, Tahrie.”
And then my arms are empty, the damp smell of rain lingering in my nostrils.
* * *
I wake in the middle of the night, knowing that something is wrong. Water touches the back of my neck and caresses my fingertips. I sit up as my eyes adjust to the darkness. My brother’s bed, on the other side of the room, floats, knocking into the wall with each swell. The sea has come home.
I have waited long enough, Tahrie.
My blankets are wet, and I have to drag myself from beneath them. “Mother!” I call out. “Father!”
When I wade out of the room, I find my mother in her wicker chair in the corner. She weaves a basket, holding it close to her face so she can see the reeds in the moonlight. She doesn’t seem to notice the water covering her lap or the table floating over where the fire pit used to be.
“We have to go.” I fight against the waves and grab her wrist.
She wrenches away from me. “This is my home. I’m not leaving.”
Father emerges from the shadows and places his hands on her shoulders. “Go, Tahrie,” he says.
“Make her come with us,” I beg him.
He blinks, his eyelids thick and languorous. “I love her,” he says. “I cannot ask her to change.”
Even as he says it, Mother’s hands slow and turn gray. Her mouth becomes a fissure. The rough texture of stone creeps up her neck. “You can stop this, Tahrie. You can marry the sea.”
I touch my palms to the water’s surface. The sea forms hands, pressing wet palms to mine. There’s a subtle pressure, a tugging. Would it be so terrible—to fall into the sea? I imagine sinking into the water, my hair becoming the foam, my body melting away. Leaving Tahrie behind. A sudden dread fills my chest, and I jerk away.
“I am not like Shuramin or Grandmother. I cannot love the sea.”
A wordless roar sounds in my mind. I’ve spoken aloud, with the water nearly to my waist, tugging at my skin and my clothes like hands.
The sea surges and I flee.
* * *
The night is filled with the crash of waves, with the creak and groan of wood as the houses fall apart. I swim toward land, choking on salt, blinking against the water in my eyes. It always seems so far away. By the time I reach it, I can only crawl out of the sea, my arms and legs trembling.
Tahrie, he says. Tahrie, Tahrie, Tahrie …
I keep going through the trees, the roots scraping my knees and palms.
By the time the sun rises, I can no longer hear him. My mother is gone. My father, gone. Shuramin is out of my reach. I am still Tahrie, but I am changed.
* * *
I lay three bundles of flowers on the beach, near the trees. I dare not go any closer to the sea. In the year since the sea returned home, all trace of the village has faded away. Any wood that washed ashore was immediately put to use in building new houses, further inland.
I found a man to love. He doesn’t mind that my hair is white as sea foam. He says he loves me as I am, but I find the edges of my tongue have softened.
The waves inhale and exhale, swell and release. I feel their pattern in my blood, in my breathing.
One day you will come to me, the sea whispers.
“Perhaps,” I say. I cannot say it is impossible; I have lived through too many impossible things. I hesitate before taking out another bundle of flowers and laying it on the sand. “I am sorry for your loneliness.”
And I, for yours.
He is silent, and I can sense that he is waiting—for me to ask to see Grandmother, or Mother, or Father. For me to ask him to push them ashore.
But I turn and leave without another word. The sea is fickle and demanding, but in many ways, he is not unlike a stone.
I would not ask him to change.
Published in Galaxy’s Edge Issue 5
Copyright © 2013 by Andrea G. Stewart. All rights reserved.
Author Biographies
James Aquilone is an editor and writer, for fun and for profit. His fiction has appeared in Flash Fiction Online, Weird Tales Magazine, DarkFuse’s Horror d’oeuvres, and Third Flatiron, among other publications. His nonfiction has appeared in SF Signal, Den of Geek, Shock Totem, and Hellnotes. He has never owned a cellphone and hopes radio dramas make a comeback. He lives in Staten Island, New York, with his wife and small dog. Visit his website at jamesaquilone.com.
Lou J. Berger lives in Denver with three kids, three Sheltie dogs and a kink-tailed cat with nefarious intent. He’s an active member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, has been professionally published in short form, and is writing his first novel, a non-genre YA book set in 1978’s North Carolina. His website can be found at www.LouJBerger.com.
Steve Cameron is a Scottish/Australian writer who currently resides in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. When not writing, he teaches English at a local secondary college. Steve maintains a website at www.stevecameron.com.au.
Gio Clairval is an Italian-born writer and a translator who has lived most of her life in Paris and now commutes between Scotland and her hometown on Lake Como, followed by her pet, a giant pike. She has sold stories to magazines such as Weird Tales, Fantasy Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, and Postscripts, among others, as well as numerous anthologies, including The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities (HarperCollins) and Caledonia Dreamin’ (Eibonvale Press). Her translations (from French, Italian, Spanish and German) have appeared in the Ann and Jeff Vandermeer anthology The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, and elsewhere. A former international Strategic Management Consultant, she holds four master’s degrees in various fields of Psychology and in Organizational Studies, and is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing. You can find her at Kosmochlor:.www.gioclairval.blogspot.com/ and on Twitter: @gioclair.
Eric Cline was born in Independence, Missouri. It was in a thrift store in that city that his mother purchased some children’s science fiction books by “Paul French” (a pseudonym of Isaac Asimov). Eric went on to devour all the books he could find by Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, Heinlein, Del Rey, and L. Ron Hubbard, among other Golden Age authors. Eric holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English. He now works in an office and has been writing evenings and weekends since 2007. His stories have appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Stupefying Stories, and Writers of the Future anthologies.
Eric Leif Davin is a science fiction historian and the author of Pioneers of Wonder: Conversations with the Founders of Science Fiction (Prometheus Books), and Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction, 1926-1965 (Lexington Books). In the future, however, he intends to write more fiction. His debut novel, The Desperate and the Dead, was released by Damnation Books in September 2014. A work of historical horror, it features pirates and zombies against the demons of Hell.
Nick DiChario’s short stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies. He has been nominated for the Hugo and World Fantasy awards, and his first two novels, A Small and Remarkable Life (2006) and Valley of Day-Glo (2008), both received nominations for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Scienc
e Fiction Novel of the Year.
Kary English grew up in the snowy Midwest where she avoided siblings and frostbite by reading book after book in a warm corner behind a recliner chair. She blames her one and only high school detention on Douglas Adams, whose Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy made her laugh out loud while reading it behind her geometry textbook. Today, Kary still spends most of her time with her head in the clouds and her nose in a book. To the great relief of her parents, she seems to be making a living at it. Her fiction includes several short stories, a planetary fantasy series available in 2015, and a fantasy saga about a little girl and an orange kitten. A student of New York Times bestsellers David Farland and Tracy Hickman, Kary aspires to make her own work detention-worthy. Kary is a Writers of the Future winner whose fiction has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, the Grantville Gazette’s Universe Annex and Galaxy’s Edge.
Tom Gerencer is a 45-year-old writer of science fiction and fantasy stories who grew up in Maine and moved to West Virginia for the whitewater. He attended the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s Workshop in 1999, then sold several short stories, including “Primordial Chili” and “Demo Mode” to Science Fiction Age, “A Taste of Damsel” to Realms of Fantasy, and a dozen or so others to magazines and anthologies around the country. He took time off from writing fiction to build a small business, and is now polishing up his first novel. He and his wife Kathy are awaiting the birth of their first child.
Tina Gower earned a master’s degree in school psychology, raised guide dogs, and eventually decided to train her own two children. She worked as a psychologist for several schools before turning to writing as a profession. Tina has sold stories to Galaxy’s Edge, Writers of the Future, Chicken Soup for the Soul, and a few others that are forthcoming. She is also collaborating with Mike Resnick on a forthcoming Stellar Guild team-up, to be published by Phoenix Pick. She won the Writers of the Future Gold Award as well as the Daphne du Maurier Award, the latter for Excellence in Mystery, Suspense, and Romance for the Futuristic, Fantasy, Paranormal category, for her unpublished novel.
Robert T. Jeschonek is an award-winning writer whose fiction, comics, essays, and podcasts have been published around the world. He won the grand prize in Pocket Books’ nationwide Strange New Worlds contest, and was nominated for the British Fantasy Award. His young adult slipstream novel, My Favorite Band Does Not Exist, won the Forward National Literature Award and was named one of Booklist’s Top Ten First Novels for Youth. His science fiction thriller, Day 9, is a 2013 International Book Award winner. He also won the 2013 Scribe Award for Best Original Novel for his alternate history, Tannhäuser: Rising Sun, Falling Shadows. He is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Visit him online at www.thefictioneer.com. You can also find him on Facebook and follow him as @TheFictioneer on Twitter.
Nancy Kress is the author of thirty-three books, including twenty-six novels, four collections of short stories, and three books on writing. Her work has won five Nebulas, two Hugos, a Sturgeon, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. She has also lost over a dozen of these awards. Most recent works are After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall (Tachyon, 2012), a novel of apocalypse, and Yesterday’s Kin, about genetic inheritance (Tachyon, 2014). In addition to writing, Kress often teaches at various venues around the country and abroad; in 2008 she was the Picador visiting lecturer at the University of Leipzig. Kress lives in Seattle with her husband, writer Jack Skillingstead, and Cosette, the world’s most spoiled toy poodle.
Mercedes Lackey was born in Chicago, Illinois, on June 24, 1950. The very next day, the Korean War was declared. It is hoped that there is no connection between the two events. In 1985 her first book was published. In 1990 she met artist Larry Dixon at a small science fiction convention in Meridian, Mississippi, on a television interview organized by the convention. They moved to their current home, the “second weirdest house in Oklahoma,” in 1992. She has many pet parrots and “the house is never quiet.” She has over eighty books in print, with four being published in 2014 alone, and some of her foreign editions can be found in Russian, German, Czech, Polish, French, Italian, Turkish, and Japanese. From a collaboration with Dennis Lee, Cody Martin and Veronica Giguere came the Secret World Chronicle (www.secretworldchronicle) a five-book series of which the first four—Invasion, World Divided, Revolution and Collision—are available from Baen.
Leena Likitalo hails from Finland, the land of thousands of lakes and at least as many untold tales. Leena breaks computer games for a living. (Really!) When she’s not working, she writes obsessively. And when she’s not writing, she can be found at the stables riding horses or at the pool playing underwater rugby. She’s a Writers of the Future 2014 winner and Clarion San Diego 2014 graduate. Her fiction has appeared in Weird Tales, Galaxy’s Edge, and various semi-pro zines. You can visit her online at www.leenalikitalo.com.
Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Clarkesworld Magazine, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts. Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, the first in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, will be published by Saga Press, Simon & Schuster’s new genre fiction imprint, in April 2015. Saga will also publish a collection of his short stories later in the year.
Marina J. Lostetter’s short original fiction has appeared in venues such as Lightspeed, Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show, and Writers of the Future anthologies. She has also written tie-in work for the Star Citizen and Sargasso Legacy universes. Recently, she has taken over the Artist Spotlight interview column in Nightmare Magazine, and is enjoying the opportunity to learn more about visual artists and their processes. Originally from Oregon, Marina now lives in Arkansas with her husband, Alex. She tweets as @MarinaLostetter. Please visit her homepage at www.lostetter.net.
Catherine L. Moore was one of the true giants of science fiction. She broke into print in 1933 with the classic “Shambleau,” and created the still-popular Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry series, all for Weird Tales. She then moved to the science fiction magazines, where she wrote the immortal “Vintage Season,” plus “The Bright Illusion,” “Fruit of Knowledge,” and literally dozens of books and stories in collaboration with her husband, Henry Kuttner. She was Guest of Honor at the 1981 Worldcon. “Happily Ever After” was Moore’s very first published story, an amateur piece submitted to her college magazine, and unavailable for 83 years until its first professional publication in Galaxy’s Edge.
Larry Niven has written fiction at every length, and speculative articles, speeches for high schools and colleges and conventions, television scripts, political action in support of the conquest of space, graphic novels, and a couple of comic book universes. He’s also collaborated with a wide variety of writers. His interests include science fiction conventions; role-playing games, live and computer; American Association for the Advancement of Science meetings and other gatherings of people at the cutting edges of science; comics; filk singing; yoga and other approaches to longevity; hiking; and racquetball. His awards include Hugos for “Neutron Star,” 1966; Ringworld, 1970; “Inconstant Moon,” 1971; “The Hole Man,” 1974; and “The Borderland of Sol,” 1975. He won the Nebula for Best Novel with Ringworld in 1970, Australia’s Ditmar for Ringworld in 1972 and Protector in 1974; Japanese awards for Ringworld and “Inconstant Moon,” both in 1979; and the San Diego Comic Convention’s Inkpot Award in 1979. He was the Worldcon Guest of Honor in 1993.
K. C. Norton’s work has appeared in Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show, Writers of the Future anthologies, and Lightspeed’s “Women Destroy Science Fiction!” special issue. She has studied Mesopotamian economics, Greek history, Viking mythology, Bronze Age shipping networks, und
erwater archaeology, and writing for children. When she’s not chronicling the struggles of vegetable people, she moonlights as a dog groomer-slash-bartender-slash-librarian. Norton lives in Pennsylvania with a dog who looks like a cow. She has never enslaved produce of any kind.
After college, Ralph Roberts served in the army, becoming a decorated Vietnam veteran. Then came his dream job, working with NASA during the last part of the Apollo moon-landing program—he’d still be there but … NASA—in one of their several budgetary constraints—laid off the smart guys. He came back home to the family farm. Looking for a way to make a few bucks, he started writing. In the mid-70s—when personal computers came only as kits—he built his first one. By 1978, Ralph was writing about and on computers, one of the pioneers in word processing. He has sold over twenty million words as a professional writer, including more than 100 books and hundreds of articles and short stories. He also builds amateur radio stuff (his call is W5VE), has a rack of servers, tons of computers, and all sorts of gadgets, like that amazing credit-card-sized computer, the Raspberry Pi. He’s currently writing the book Advanced Raspberry Pi for Everyone. Ralph still lives on the family farm in the mountains of Western North Carolina with his wife Pat and two horses.
Andrea G. Stewart lives in Northern California and gardens year-round in her tiny backyard, an activity that allows for copious daydreams of distant lands and planets. Her fiction has appeared in Writers of the Future Volume 29, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Daily Science Fiction, and of course Galaxy’s Edge. When she’s not writing, working her day job, or chasing chickens out of her vegetables, she hangs around the house with her trusty dog, her loud cat, and her endlessly patient husband.
Sabina Theo was born in Haskovo, Bulgaria, and began reading and writing at the age of three. She is fluent in Bulgarian, English, Greek, and Russian. Her first horror story, “The Substitute,” was published when she was seventeen. The review in Haskovski vesti immediately defined her as “original and talented.” She followed that up with her first vampire story, Running Away from the Light, which ran over six subsequent issues. Since then she has published thousands of articles on culture, medicine, and social issues, and a number of short stories and poems—in eleven countries altogether, including the USA, Germany, Denmark, Greece, Canada, France, Sweden, Russia, and Argentina. Her novels The Summer of the Vampires, Sons of Shadows, and Following the Dusk are currently scheduled for publication. She also won a prize for Best Short Prose (“The Lover”) in the 2005 Bulgarian national contest. Sabina has also translated the work of Harry Houdini, Louisa May Alcott, and many others into Bulgarian.
