Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 83

by Vandana Singh

  I told myself to stop being foolish. How could one million people have only two fixed genders?

  But the only other person like me in all the asteroids was Aagot, who I couldn’t find.

  Fields

  It was not quite the last time I would approach my family’s asteroid: that pitted, dark peppercorn-shape, orbited by a moon only three kilometers in diameter, that landscape at the heart of my personal stories. Home. No, it was not quite the last time I would approach it, but I hurt enough to believe it was.

  “Big Cousin!” my youngest cousin’s voice came in over the comm. “We’re opening the smaller landing bay for you. Bring everyone in!”

  A hole slowly opened in the asteroid’s side.

  I wordlessly landed my craft, waited for the bay doors to close and the air to return, waited for the signal to unlock my craft’s door. Unloading began. My family emerged from the corridors to help: to organize the storage of possessions, to lead people to places they could sleep and spend time until the Cai Nu people arrived.

  I slipped away to the fields.

  They filled four vast rooms: stacked shelves holding soil and spice-plants. I drifted above them, perpendicular to their ends, looking along each shelf at sage bushes, carefully stunted cinnamon trees, red-fruited chilies, long fennel stalks fronded with white flowers, clusters of bay and berry-heavy juniper and green-leafed plants hung with the star-seeds of anise. So many smells: green and sharp and sweet. Home-smells.

  Many plants had been recently harvested: leaves thinned out—taken for drying—and seeds picked. Others soon would be. Our last harvest.

  I went to a cluster of star anise plants.

  The light gravity generator in the shelf pulled me to the soil. Clods between my toes. Glossy leaves against my legs. The weight of my body startled me, pulled me to my knees. I steadied myself. It was always uncomfortable, returning to the fields after a long journey. Soon—no. I sat. I placed an unripe seed—green, eight-pointed—on my tongue, I dug my fingers into the soil. My skin already smelled of the fields: green, earthy. Home.

  Would I ever work in a field on Cai Nu? Would I ever adjust to that much gravity?

  I wanted to think of nothing but star anise against my tongue, against my skin.

  Younger Mother’s voice cut through the air. “Oldest Child? Is that you?”

  “Yes.”

  Boots clanged on metal: she climbed down from far above me, shelf to shelf, until she appeared at the end of mine and swung herself onto the soil with an ease I lacked. A bag of cinnamon hung from her shoulder. She walked towards me with bark-stained fingers and bare feet—and the way she walked, straight-backed and sturdy, reminded me suddenly of the pictures of the Cai Nu people.

  “I didn’t hear you working,” I said.

  “I was thinking about, well, a lot of things.” She crouched at my side, smiling. “Why are you in here?”

  “I wanted to sit in the fields, as we’ll be abandoning them soon.”

  My voice was as brittle as a dried cardamom pod.

  Younger Mother’s smile faded.

  I looked away, at the soil, at the star anise, as my mother quietly said, “It will be better. For everyone. Just—just imagine the fields there! Real fields, laid flat across the ground not stacked like this, like shelves because we don’t have to room to do it any other way—and sunshine!”

  “I see the sun regularly,” I murmured.

  Above our heads, the underside of the next shelf held UV lights that replicated the sun for the plants: a constellation of hundreds across the fields.

  “I’ve read about rain and snow in a thousand poems,” Younger Mother said, “but to see them! To feel them on my skin!”

  We—I—wouldn’t. I had grown up in the fields, gravity on my bones, but I had spent so much of the past ten years among the asteroids. I loved it: the cumin or clove or galangal on my tongue, the spice cabinet doors sliding open, the happiness I brought, the stories shared. But I doubted my body was much healthier than those of the people I traded with.

  Would my field-working family adapt quickly? Would they work in real fields?

  “And they will have new spices there,” Younger Mother said, running her fingers over the star anise’s leaves. “New flavors. New—so much.”

  New spices.

  “It will be better.”

  “And difficult,” I said. “No one seems to want to talk about that.”

  “What else can we do? You know this, you see the other asteroids and everything that’s broken and old in them.”

  I remembered the star anise asteroid, broken open like a seed casing, all its contents—its people, who I had once known—spilled out.

  “I need to get back to harvesting,” Younger Mother said. “I know there won’t be much need for all this on Cai Nu, but it would be a shame for it to go to waste.”

  “I’ll eat it.”

  She smiled, then left me among the star anise plants, their seeds hanging around me like the view from an asteroid’s surface. I couldn’t imagine any other view.

  I returned to my craft, to my journey—not a trade journey, any more.

  Cinnamon, Turmeric, Rosemary, Cloves, Galangal, Sage

  I started to forget to place spices on my tongue as I arrived at each asteroid, collecting its people—bringing them closer to the Cai Nu people’s arrival. I started—slowly, reluctantly—to think of the ways life on Cai Nu would be better for them, for me.

  Found

  Everyone gathered. Everyone. Who had ever imagined such a sight? So many people holding onto the walls or drifting carefully, so many bags and boxes tethered with them, so many voices all at once—people who had never seen each other, only spoken over the comms, suddenly able to talk unending, to shyly smile and embrace and unhesitatingly kiss. A wonder. A hundred people, another hundred, another. A community, not stretched out like sparse flowers on an ill chili plant but here, together, one. Everyone.

  I couldn’t deny my excitement. I couldn’t subdue my fear.

  I looked and looked for Aagot.

  Older Mother had set up comm units throughout the large loading bay, so that her voice could be heard everywhere in that vast space, among so many people. Periodically she said, “The Cai Nu craft is now two hours away!” and, “The Cai Nu craft is continuing its steady course, only an hour away!” until, suddenly, too soon, “The Cai Nu craft will enter the landing bay in ten minutes.” I drifted through the loading bay. Around me, people drew in breath together, a long silence before new conversations streamed out like air into space.

  Then—so soon—we heard the grinding as the landing bay doors opened for the first time in over a hundred years. We heard nothing, nothing, noise lost in vacuum—then a gentle set of metal-on-metal sounds. The Cai Nu craft landing. I drifted, unseeing. I only knew sounds. Arrival. The landing bay doors closing again. The first set of airlock doors between the two bays opening. I didn’t breathe, I didn’t speak—no one did. I reached a wall. I held.

  The second set of airlock doors opened.

  The people—five of them—wore dark blue suits and helmets with clear visors, but I was too far away to see their faces. Into our silence they slowly entered, using the handrails that spread across the wall like roots. They removed their helmets. They looked at us with cautious smiles. One said in Mandarin, “I am Team Leader Hu Leyi. It is a pleasure to finally be here and meeting you all.”

  Older Mother drifted forward, saying, “I am Lo Minyu. On behalf of everyone: welcome. You are very welcome here.”

  The other four Cai Nu people looked around the loading bay, as if trying to match faces to the voices they had heard over the comms.

  “Are you all here?” Hu Leyi asked.

  What did they think of us? What did they—

  I saw, then, a long, thin braid of hair with a circular metal ornament fixed to its end.

  I remembered: etched with a person crouched inside the shape of a bear.

  “Aagot!” Then fear reache
d my tongue and I couldn’t talk. Was this Aagot? Was this some other person, who did not know me, did not want to talk to me—

  The person turned.

  “Aagot,” I managed.

  A slight frown. “Ecralali, now.”

  Now. A name-change—a reason I hadn’t been able to find Aagot Fossen, who no longer existed.

  “Did we meet when I was younger?” Ecralali asked.

  “Yes. Yes. I am Lo Yiying.”

  Quietly, Ecralali said, “I know you.”

  “Years ago, we talked about—” One or two people were interested in our conversation. I wanted privacy. I wanted no one to judge our words unimportant, irrelevant. Most of all, I wanted Ecralali to remember me. “We talked about Thyme and gender and—” I might as well have bared my skin in the space between the asteroids. “It was the most important conversation I’ve ever had.”

  Ecralali’s face changed: astonishment and delight. Unless I interpreted wrongly, unless I imagined—

  “I remember,” Ecralali said, “I remember telling you about un-gendered Houyi—”

  “I’d only ever known Houyi as a woman before then,” I said, as full of wonder as if I was hearing the tale of Chang E and Houyi for the first time. “That’s how my mothers always tell the story.”

  “—and the story of the stars, whose lives are not measured in gender.”

  “Thyme,” I said, fennel-foliage soft, “who is like me.”

  “Yes.”

  Hu Leyi and her colleagues were still talking: moving among us, taking names, inventorying possessions, dividing us into groups.

  “I know more stories now,” Ecralali said.

  “I—I would like to hear them.”

  “I know about Cai Nu—the founder, not the moon—I’ve read everything in our records, listened to every story. A lot of them tell that Cai Nu was fluidly gendered.”

  “The founder was . . . ”

  Ecralali’s smile was as rich as a whole cabinet of spices.

  I half-heard announcements. We would have a room for each family on the Cai Nu people’s spacecraft, as well as several communal spaces, connected by a long corridor. I thought of stems. I thought of floating above the spices still growing on the shelves of my family’s fields. They would shrivel and die and I would never again be Lo Yiying the spice trader. I would be far from my home. Then we would reach Cai Nu. Gleaming. Strange. Skied.

  Storied.

  “I want to know what stories are told there,” Ecralali said.

  “I would listen to every one.”

  It hadn’t occurred to me—

  I had needed to explain myself to my family, to people among the asteroids. Before that—to myself. That had taken almost twenty years. I had only found myself in the stories that fell from Ecralali’s—once-Aagot’s—mouth like star anise. To even imagine that I might be found in other stories—

  I hadn’t.

  “My favorite stories,” Ecralali said, “are those that say ‘Cai Nu’ is a chosen name.”

  One of Hu Leyi’s colleagues reached us. As Ecralali said, “Ecralali Fos,” and pointed to just one small bag, I thought of my own name: a gift from my mothers. Could I—No. I still wanted it. It had clung to me, all these years, like a grain of soil under a fingernail: a welcome reminder of my family on the long journeys between the asteroids. It fit me.

  Below us, the first group passed through the airlock doors to the spacecraft.

  “Lo Yiying,” I said, and my voice was almost steady. “My possessions are with my family—Lo Minyu and Xu Weina are my mothers.” I didn’t think I needed to list the rest of my family—brother, cousins, aunts, uncles, a single grandfather. They all waited together, with the spice cabinet—full of the final harvest—between them.

  The man made a note on the translucent screen that hovered in front of him, then moved on.

  “I should go to my family,” I said, though I couldn’t imagine moving, couldn’t imagine any of what would happen next.

  “We have months of journeying ahead of us,” Ecralali said. “Plenty of time for telling stories.”

  Thyme

  The fourth story Ecralali gave me, with thyme on our tongues, was of Cai Nu: working on a team of scientists identifying planets and moons suitable for human settlement, finding the moon that would eventually bear their name, spending decades preparing the team for the long journey and the tireless tasks at the other end—then, being invited to join the team despite their advanced age.

  Cai Nu lived a year on the moon before finally dying. They are remembered forever: their vision of people living on this moon, their hard work making it more than a story.

  Their name, chosen in the same year that they first saw a promising moon in their data.

  I pressed the thyme to the roof of my mouth.

  I was not alone.

  About the Author

  Alex Dally MacFarlane lives in London, where she is pursuing an MA in Ancient History. When not researching narrative transmission in the Alexander Romance traditions, she writes stories, found in The Other Half of the Sky, Heiresses of Russ 2013: The Year’s Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer and Zombies: Shambling Through the Ages. Poetry can be found in Stone Telling, The Moment of Change and Here, We Cross. She is the editor of Aliens: Recent Encounters (2013) and The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (forthcoming in late 2014).

  The Lovers

  Eleanor Arnason

  There was a woman of the Ahara. She came of a good line within the lineage1 and grew up to be tall and broad with thick, glossy fur. Her eyes were pale gray, an unusual color in that part of the world. From childhood on, her nickname was Eyes-of-crystal. If she had a fault, it lay in her personality. She was a bit too fierce and solitary.

  Her home was in the town of Ahara Tsal, which stood on top of the Tsal River bluffs. To the west and south lay the farms and pastures of her lineage: a flat, rich land. To the north and east was the river valley, wide and marshy and full of animals. Eyes-of-crystal liked to go down there into the wilderness and ride and hunt. Her mother warned her this was dangerous.

  “You’ll get strange ideas and possibly meet things and people you don’t want to meet.”

  But Eyes-of-crystal refused to listen.

  Don’t think this is a story about how she met ghosts or bandits or some horrible great animal like an ulkuwa and learned that her mother was right and she ought to have stayed at home. That’s another story entirely and maybe a good one. But the pain that Eyes-of-crystal encountered did not come from disobedience, and it not come to her when she was away from home.

  As mentioned before, she grew up to be large and strong. When she was twenty-five, her relatives decided to breed her.

  At this time, the Ahara were the second most powerful lineage in the world, and this young woman came from a line that produced really fine children. The Ahara wanted to breed her with someone important. They looked around, and who did they see? Eh Manhata, who was the greatest warrior of the age. His lineage, the Eh, stood in front of everyone else. They had no equals. Only the Ahara came close.

  So the young woman’s relatives entered into negotiations with the senior women of Eh.

  Eyes-of-crystal knew about this, but paid as little attention as possible. She had never wanted to be a mother, but she had always known that she had no choice. At times, she wished that she had come from a less excellent line. If only there had been something wrong or unhealthy about her immediate family! Maybe then she would have been left alone.

  But her brothers and male first cousins were sturdy fighters. Her sisters and female first cousins were producing babies like furry butterballs. Every relative was co-operative, moral, intelligent and well-put-together.

  What a curse, thought Eyes-of-crystal and went back down to the river to hunt. There, in the dark forest of the flood plain, she found a kind of peace. Often, she found animals as well and brought them home, dead and bloody, across the back of her well-trained tsi
n. Imagine her as a kind of Diana, a gray-furred virgin huntress, about to lose everything she valued.

  After a while, her mother called her in for a conference. One of her uncles was there as well, her mother’s full brother, a soldier of middle age with a great scar across his face and one eye missing.

  “You know that we have been speaking with the Eh,” her mother said. “We wanted Eh Manhata as the father of your child.”

  “Yes,” said Eyes-of-crystal. “I know this.”

  “He is not available,” her mother said. “According to the Eh, they can’t afford to take him out of the current war and send him here.”

  “There may be more going on than we can see,” her uncle added. “I have never heard of Eh Manhata fathering any children, even in those periods when the war has slowed down.”

  Her mother’s head tilted in the gesture that can mean either agreement or consideration. “There are men, even great men, who are not able to father children for one reason or another.”

  Eyes-of-crystal knew the reasons, of course. The People do not enjoy thinking about the unpleasant aspects of life, any more than humans do. But if a thing is unavoidable, then it must be looked at, and they have never misled their children about what was involved in producing the next generation.

  Some men were infertile, and others were impotent. These were physical problems and comparatively rare. The most common problem was one that humans would call psychological, and the People would say was moral or spiritual. There were men who simply could not overcome their natural aversion to sex with women. They were fine with other men, but put them in breeding situation and nothing happened.2

  “They have offered us Manhata’s full brother,” her mother said. “He has fathered a number of children, and most of them look good. Your uncle has met him, which is why I asked him to be present in this conference.”