War & Space: Recent Combat

by Ken MacLeod

  Wolves. They started creeping along the fringes of inhabited space soon after the other spacefarers were stumbled upon.

  It was on the fine edges between cognita and incognita that the wolves began conducting war, although this too was something of a misnomer made a nomer by necessity. Like shepherds, wolves required no spaceships to travel vast distances across both herespace and wherespace. Like shepherds, they took diaphanous forms. Some speculated that they were fallen shepherds, similar to what happened in Christian legend to some of the angels. The main difference was that the wolves could take corporeal form, shapeshift and speechshift, to whatever they desired. It was unclear, exactly, what they desired, but when they descended on the Thane Moon Triage—their first invasion—the lights on those satellites turned blue and extinguished. The wolves dropped from the sky, released their tenebrae, forced settlers into the structures of their own myths and tragedies (in this instance, a combination of Bluebeard and Great Flood motifs), and started devouring whatever transpired. Wolves bent reality to shapes of storybooks, what transpired beneath the covers of half-buried iconographies.

  Warily, spacefarers roused and girded themselves for the sparring, having no idea what they were getting into.

  You ducked. A clot of muck caught in your mouth. The smoky breath of the wolves, like ghosts propelled from a cannon, shot towards your crew. Realms of potential harm were thrust upon you. Arborfeint’s talons snatched away the tenebrae arcing towards your face like an octopus tentacle. The smoke shriveled. Pasiphae fell sideways, gripping her arm, which had turned into a heron, which in turn was very confused and frightened regarding the graft, and started stabbing Pasiphae’s neck with its beak. Kyrie sliced at a tendril and ran to her sister.

  You heard the retort of the captain’s gun crystallize and then shatter the air. For an instant, you could see what was underneath the world you knew—gray dull rock, no wolves, smooth silver guns instead of muskets. But that passed. Covering your ears, still in your crouch, you saw her shrug off a dying tenebrae that tried to necklace around her. She started running towards the encampment.

  No, you shouted, but she didn’t hear you. Has your chance to change, to warn her, passed? Arborfeint fended off the remaining wisps, but the twins were lost, draping each other, their bodies a menagerie of birds and snails. Canary chicks burst from Kyrie’s eyes. You tried to hold back vomit, and didn’t do a very good job at it. Retching, you stumbled to their corpses, which bubbled over with small baronies from the animal kingdom, animals that you remembered from stories. You slid a knife from each of the twins’ holsters. One blade was jade and the other turquoise. You saw a dual reflection of your face from the weapons’ faces.

  Arborfeint landed on your shoulder for a bare instant, and in that moment of contact it told you that the captain was ten seconds from ambush. It was quiet. Arbor alighted. You began running, churning your legs through the fog that wanted to wall you.

  The ground tilted on a wild axis and you plunged into the encampment. A gun boomed and pitched. A strand of a lullaby could be heard above the din.

  There were more than three hundred spacefaring species. Each species had hundreds of cultures, which meant that there were hundreds of thousands of myths and tales that the wolves fed upon. They were relentless predators upon the once upon a time. They made tactile the golden idylls of fireside, the half-drowsed words sinking into children’s ears. They attacked childhoods as much as children, altering topographies into allegories. Once, a pack of wolves transmuted the polar icecaps of Mirabai: the frost into frosting and the ice into gingerbread and it all fell down.

  What surprised humans most was that every species had stories, and fought fiercely to keep their stories unrazed. Except for the shepherds, of course, none were immune, not even the species that appeared most austere. The urge for stories was a requirement for sentience. Those tales might have been expressed in magnetic resonances of spheres rearranged on a sea-plain; or books in the form of gourds, droplets of heavy water, or cairns of plankton floating in a methane sea. But the forms mattered less than the tellings told over and over.

  After decades of defeat, and hundreds of planets turned into wreckages of folklore eaten from the inside out, it was stumbled upon that the only way to defeat the wolves was to tell more stories, not less. Never less.

  Your hearing returned as you saw her fall. The owl was a snake now. A giant garter. A few bodies—gray, almost indistinguishable from a nimbus—skittered around her. They had to have been wolves. One of the wolves was on the ground next to the captain. The wolf looked like it was burning from a gun-hole. The gun was whispering a story. The encampment was topsy turvy. One of the wolves was eating a metal axe in the shadow of a spruce, blade first. It was hard to get a good look at them, all of them at once, and maybe that was fortunate. Maybe they look like the trappers they killed, only with more of a blur.

  It was gray and dark around you, like you were wading inside fur. But you didn’t care. You shouted and your knives rose in the aquamarine eighth of a rainbow. All of the remaining wolves were crouching around the captain, and saying something backwards. One, with a pockmarked face that seemed to be collapsing in on itself, grabbed her palm and licked it. This seemed like appropriate behavior for a wolf. The captain’s skin shriveled. Silver writing—no, strings of numbers—appeared on the palm. That was the one you cut first, slicing its ear, a gray apricot dropping to the ground.

  As the other wolves started toward you, voices raising in volume—the gun was dying, its voice was fading—Arborfeint, who you had forgotten about for a few seconds, entwined around the wolf closest to you. The left knee. For some reason Arbor, in snake form, knew exactly where to apply pressure. It was a tender place. Your jade knife slashed upwards into its belly. Silver coins spilled out. The remaining wolf straggled away, at a zigzag, hauling its companion—the one the captain felled—by the shoulder. They could give themselves strong shoulders if they wanted them.

  You stabbed and stabbed the wolf that you and Arbor had swarmed upon. Its eyes turned to bits of glass, smooth children’s marbles. Its neck was a pillow stitched with a tiny unicorn. You hit and hit the wolf until it expired. Arbor sidewinded away.

  The captain, whom you had thought dead, coughed and put a hand on your shoulder.

  The fog, itching for territory, closed back again.

  Then, in the cloudcover, the feinting wolves closed back again. You heard them when it was too late.

  Slowly, folklorists and anthropologists took to the front lines. They analyzed what the wolves had transformed. They developed applications of technology that would counter the warping of space time according to the morphologies of folktales. They would be sheep in wolves’ clothing, becoming participants in whatever fantasies the wolves would devise, and then stealthily alter them for tactical advantages. If the wolves mutated a pod settlement into a pastoral scene replete with carillon castles and fair damsels, Parameter shocktroops might become knights, or even trolls. Small groups roaming the symbolic terrain were better. Surprisingly, the shepherds took an active role in these panoplies, plunging themselves into roles of “magical” agents. Sometimes other spacefaring species would integrate themselves onto a planet, in order to confuse the wolves, who are not always adept at interspecies archetypes.

  The tide turned. And yes, it is still turning. Nothing is certain, however. The Parameter and its allies are not sure that it is enough. We tell people on the front lines, when they face impending doom at the hands—or other culturally appropriate appendages—of a wolf, there is one thing that might save them, sometimes. Only sometimes: recite or sing the earliest story you remember. Even if you don’t know all of the words, it may help. But wolves are aware of these tricks, and more pour in from wherespace every year. More flesh and blood beings step into fables, armed with raconteur guns that shoot encoded, everchanging narratives, encased in super-light. It is one of the few things the wolves cannot stand: being shown, by a superior story, that their imagi
nations aren’t really that interesting.

  You don’t remember which one put its clammy lips around your neck, with a suddenness that took your breath away. Perhaps all of them did. The marrow of your life began sucking out of you, replaced with a nonsense scramble that was on the verge of disconnecting you. You started humming a ward to counter their jabber: ba ba black sheep have you any wool, yes sir yes sir three bags full, one for my master, and one for my dame, and one for the little boy who lives down the lane. The captain had no way of knowing what grandmother or aunt taught you that.

  As you died, your hair became black as night, and curly, and taut. As you died, you heard Arborfeint shrieking. It was a wolf now, Arbor was an animal, something from a rift of myth. A wolf pouncing on wolves. The captain tried to drag herself away. You didn’t have a neck anymore. You mumbled the word wool over and over until you fell, each of the sky’s stars puncturing the cloudcover like a cookie cutter.

  Stories are not just stories. To use a metaphor—as if there is any other way to tell this—if tales are streams coursing down a mountain, then there is always the fish churning upstream against the current, back to the wellspring. There is always the bit of black inside the white, the flaw in the perfect carpet—even the ones that rise from the ground and coast to the crescent moon. There are always knots and tangles in what seems to be the plainest string.

  For example, the common nursery rhyme about black sheep was actually a cruel little ditty about taxation, about shepherds having to divvy up what they thought was theirs alone. There were always codes. It was better to sing it sweetly and openly in a meadow, and teach it to children, rather than muttering about the kings-of-things in the alehouse.

  The wolves—and I don’t know whether they can be called malicious, even after everything they have done—understand this, even when they kill. They enclose us with open arms. They have big teeth that encompass solar systems. They have every capacity to eat us. But there’s no celestial axeman to bail us out. We can only save ourselves by the stories we tell, by the pitch and heft of words, how they cleave us. Each of us has the capacity to mend or destroy, speak or shut up. Clever stories will make us more clever. Each of us has enough wool, more than enough to save us.

  Captains come and go, but this one lived. She lived and didn’t necessarily know whether she deserved it. Arborfeint left; the guardian had no more interest in Queen’s Gambit Declined. The captain never blamed it and never saw it again. The crew was restless but glad to see the captain alive. She was unable to tell her story to anybody for a long time.

  Queen’s Gambit Declined, under her steady hand, still hunted wolves, analyzed their stories and forged counterstrikes accordingly. Even in the midst of awful violence, she liked the woods, the seawater, the fog. But the altered landscapes lacked some of their old luster; it became more and more of a simulacrum for her. There was one contingency, however, that kept her going, kept her countermanding the wolves’ stories.

  You might not have died. She consoled herself with that. It was hard to know whether anyone actually died from wolves, or just moved to a different place, to a kingdom where stories were told over and over again and people never had to wither and expire. But it was hard to know, for you, whether dying itself was only a matter of moving to another place. She didn’t think so, but had no way of knowing. There never was a way of knowing. Perhaps on the edge of islands, the ultima thule, with bone white palm trees and palms, she will come across you again, calling to the waves. Maybe you will have a few black lambs for company, for sweaters.

  Until then, she will tell the story of how you were lost. She will tell her crew, and to anyone else who would listen, of your courage. “You killed your first wolf when you were fifteen,” the captain would begin, staring off into space, navigating the ship. “You were a cabiner aboard the Queen’s Gambit Declined, a cutter that wended among the islets of Li Po,” she would continue, chartering her descent into war-ravaged ports, to hear if there have been stories, rumors even, of your return.

  Carthago Delenda Est

  Genevieve Valentine

  Wren Hex-Yemenni woke early. They had to teach her everything from scratch, and there wasn’t time for her to learn anything new before she hit fifty and had to be expired.

  “Watch it,” the other techs told me when I was starting out. “You don’t want a Hex on your hands.”

  By then we were monitoring Wren Hepta-Yemenni. She fell into bed with Dorado ambassador 214, though I don’t know what he did to deserve it and she didn’t even seem sad when he expired. When they torched him she went over with the rest of the delegates, and they bowed or closed their eyes or pressed their tentacles to the floors of their glass cases, and afterwards they toasted him with champagne or liquid nitrogen.

  Before we expired Hepta, later that year, she smiled at me. “Make sure Octa’s not ugly, okay? Just in case—for 215.”

  Wren Octa-Yemenni hates him, so it’s not like it matters.

  It’s worse early on. Octa and Dorado 215 stop short of declaring war—no warring country is allowed to meet the being from Carthage when it arrives, those are the rules—but it comes close. Every time she goes over to the Dorado ship she comes back madder. Once she got him halfway into an airlock before security arrived.

  We reported it as a chem malfunction; I took the blame for improper embryonic processes (a lie—they were perfect), and the Dorado accepted the apology, no questions. Dorado 208 killed himself, way back; they know how mistakes can happen.

  Octa spends nights in the tech room, scanning through footage of Hepta-Yemmeni and Dorado 214 like she’s looking for something, like she’s trying to remember what Hepta felt.

  I don’t know why she tries. She can’t; none of them can. They don’t hold on to anything. That’s the whole point.

  The astronomers at the Institute named the planet Carthage when they discovered it floating in the Oort cloud like a wheel of garbage. They thought it was already dead.

  But the message came from there. It’s how they knew to look in the cloud to begin with; there was a message there, in every language, singing along the light like a phone call from home.

  It was a message of peace, they say. It’s confidential; most people never get to hear it. I wouldn’t even believe it’s real except that all the planets heard it, and agreed—every last one of them threw a ship into the sky to meet the ship from Carthage when it came.

  Every year they show us the video of Wren Alpha-Yemenni—the human, the original—taking the oath. Stretched out behind her are the ten thousand civilians who signed up to go into space and not come back, to cultivate a meeting they’d never see.

  “I, Wren Alpha-Yemenni, delegate of Earth, do solemnly swear to speak wisely, feel deeply, and uphold the highest values of the human race as Earth greets the ambassador of Carthage.” At the end she smiles, and her eyes go bright with tears.

  The speech goes on, but I just watch her face.

  There’s something about Alpha that’s . . . more alive than the copies. They designated her with a letter just to keep track, but it suits her anyway—the Alpha, the leader, the strong first. Octa has a little of that, sometimes, but she’ll probably be expired by the time Carthage comes, and who knows if it will ever manifest again.

  Octa would never be Alpha, anyway. There’s something in Alpha’s eyes that’s never been repeated—something bright and determined; excited; happy.

  It makes sense, I guess. She’s the only one of the Yemennis who chose to go.

  Everybody sent ships. Everybody. We’d never heard of half the planets that showed up. You wonder how amazing the message must be, to get them all up off their asses.

  Dorado was in place right away (that whole planet is kiss-asses), which is why they were already on iteration 200 when we got there. Doradoan machines have to pop out a new one every twenty years. (My ancestors did better work on our machines; they generate a perfect Yemenni every fifty years on the dot—except for poor Hex. There’s always o
ne dud.) Dorado spends their time trying to scrounge up faster tech or better blueprints, and we give our information away, because those were the rules in the message, but they just take—they haven’t given us anything since their dictionary.

  WX-16 from Sextans-A sent their royal house: an expendable younger son and his wife and a collection of nobles, to keep the bloodline active until the messenger arrived. We don’t deal with them—they think it’s coarse to clone.

  NGC 2808 (we can’t pronounce it, and sometimes it’s better not to try) came out of Canis Major and surprised everyone, since we didn’t even think there was life out there. They’ve only been around a few years; Hepta never met them. Their delegate is in stasis. Whenever that poor sucker wakes up he’s going to have some unimpressed ambassadors waiting to meet him. They should never have come with only one.

  Xpelhi, who booked it all the way from Cygnus, keep to themselves; their atmosphere is too heavy for people with spines. They look like jellyfish, no mouths, and it took us a hundred and ten years to figure out their language; the dictionary they sent us was just an anatomical sketch. Hepta cracked it because of something Tetra-Yemenni had recorded about the webs of their veins shifting when they were upset. The Xpelhi think we’re a bunch of idiots for taking so long. Which is fine; I think they’re a bunch of mouthless creeps. It evens out.

  Neptune sent a think-tank themselves, like they were a real planet and not an Earth colony. They’ve never said how they keep things going on that tiny ship, if it’s cloning or bio-reproduction or what; every generation they elect someone for the job, and I guess whenever Carthage shows up they’ll put forward the elected person and hope for the best. Brave bunch, Neptune. Better them than us.

  Centauri was the smartest planet. They sent an AI. You know the AI isn’t sitting up nights worrying itself into early expiration. It’s not bothered by a damn thing.