Knot 1: Loom-Song (call-and-response)

Who lays a cloth on the night?
Sitaara, Sitaara.
Who pins it with needles of light?
Sitaara, Sitaara.
When the cloth dries stiff and white, what do we read?
The warp of fate, the weft of need.
Who taught the first pattern?
Someone’s grandmother’s grandmother, whose name is lost, but whose hands are blessed.

They call me Kaka, and that is not my name, but it is what I answer to. My hut faces east to the desert. And at night, when the sky dries out like the back of a fish, from my door you can see Sitaara’s cloth so clearly you’d think it will fall on your head.

This world is called Jamdani, after the cloth that is never plain. Jamdani’s mostly desert, with pockets of life surrounding the geyser deeps, the mercy cracks. All patterns live in mistakes, the sprigs blooming where the thread jumps.

From the crack’s throat, geysers shout: sometimes soft, sometimes furious, throwing up water salted bitter as grief. Around the spray, plants grow with roots clever enough to sip what would scald us. We humans built boilers and clearers to tame the water for our own mouths.

Our village too sits on a mercy crack, its houses leaning like stitches at the edge of a fray. When the geysers burst, children run with bowls, women spread cloth to catch the steam, and men curse the salt crust underfoot. If Jamdani had been woven perfectly, we would all be bones by now. Remember that when you weave and when you pray.

The old belief? Yes, I will tell you. Long before our grandmothers, when there were only five villages and seven geysers, a weaver-woman walked into the desert with a copper needle and a spool of darkness. She said: Enough. She strung the first warp between two dunes. She threaded stars through the weft. She hung the cloth to dry on the spine of the sky. When the wind worried it and the dew caught in it, the cloth stiffened and became the dome above our heads. And thus Sitaara gave us nights that could be read.

We learned to read them the way our people read cloth: by fingertip and side-glance, by the corner, by the mistake. A mistake, you know, is an omen. Leave one in your shawl to invite mercy.

In my father’s time, we watched for the Scorpion Lattice. It means locusts. In my own time, we watched for the Broken Gazelle. It means a year of daughters. Now the young ones say the Ragged Border has appeared: they say it means a space ark’s coming back.

What is a space ark? It is a kind of needle for the sky.

Items Received in Sitaara Village:

• Two rolls of ajrakh cloth, block-printed with indigo and madder.
• Three bags of single-origin cumin, adulteration inspected.
• News: A future spaceport is being surveyed at the far salt pan beyond the nakshi tree.
• News: the scientist returns with a box that makes the stars speak.
• Gossip: Kaka’s granddaughter has betrothed herself to the wind.

Items Promised:

• One pattern-reading for the caravan’s onward journey, payable in jaggery and diesel.
• A jar of last year’s rain, sealed.

Sign: Dhirubhai of the Red Cart. Witnessed by the nakshi tree’s shadow.

You want to see my hands? I will show you both sides. See these little cuts? The loom teaches us through blood.

My grandmother’s grandmother was a pilot on the last space ark and could read the sky cloth better than anyone. They say she would sleep facing north with her palms open so the night could set its wisdom on her lines. She taught us that a new pattern is a new word the sky speaks. To hear it, you have to listen not with your ears but with your soul.

I weave ajrakh patterns because the geyser was once generous. Indigo is the smell of dusk; madder is the warmth of breath. If I place a repeat of eight stars across a border and the ninth is misprinted, that is not a flaw; that is mercy — a place where the sky can look back into us.

You ask about the Ragged Border? The children saw it first. Children see everything we bury. It appeared at the edge of the hunter’s belt, a frayed line like the selvage of a cloth that was cut with dull scissors. The same week, a man with shoes that did not take dust came to the village. He called himself a surveyor for a company with a name like a chemical: Akkash Dynamics. He looked at the salt pan the way you would look at a bare, clean table.

He asked me: Do you think the sky is a surface or a depth? I told him: It is a cloth. He laughed the way city people do when they wish to respect you but are already somewhere else.

He came with the scientist woman, the one we call Didi Stars. They say she grew up in the city of Nakshahr, in a house that smelled of wet fish and physics. She bought one of my shawls with the Broken Gazelle motif. She asked me to explain it. I said: It means daughters. She said: Good.

Field Note: 1

The elders here hold a cosmology that maps night-sky patterns onto textile grammar. This isn’t figurative; they treat constellations as repeats, borders, motifs, and misprints. Their lexicon is rich: chhed (hole), rekha (line), buti (small flower), kinara (edge). They claim history has been read from the night’s cloth. Frankly, the elegance of the metaphor has resisted my attempts to reduce it. My mother was a sari-seller. Perhaps I am compromised by affection.

Field Note: 2

The space ark is returning, and we’re building a spaceport to fit her specific requirements. Akkash Dynamics offered me a contract as “community liaison,” which is code for: come and convert belief into permission. I refused. Then I accepted. I am not a saint; I have student loans to think of, and a father with a heart like a frayed rope.

Field Note: 3

I brought an array: a suitcase of detectors tuned to measure skyglow and star-track error. Light pollution will ruin their reading; still, rural darkness persists like stubborn cloth. I set up the array under the nakshi tree, and the children watched. One girl asked if the machine had a favorite star. I told her yes, mine. She said hers is the “eighth eye” of the scorpion. We both pretended this was scientific.

Field Note: 4

The Ragged Border is a wound where the sky forgot how to stay whole. To the naked eye, it looks like threads pulled loose, a seam glowing faint and restless, as if someone worried the cloth with impatient fingers. The villagers call it a mercy. The company calls it a hyperspace shear, the ark’s corridor bleeding into sight. Both names are true. When the wind carries fine salt through the night, you can see the Border ripple, shivering like cloth not yet hemmed. The weavers say this is the path of the Needle. They wait for it to stitch itself home.

A Sari:

I bought a shawl in the Broken Gazelle motif. It sits on my shoulders like a vow. I am tired of being reasonable. I want to see what happens if I read a sky like a girl raised on lullabies.

“The scientist looks at the sky like a midwife looks at a crowning.”

“Kaka says the salt pan is getting thirsty for machines.”

“Mira’s loom sang a new beat yesterday.”

“A new beat?”

“The treadle paused. The shuttle refused. We say the loom knows first.”

“My sister’s son says the new bright line at dawn is a ‘rocket path.’”

“Paths cut both ways.”

Slide, shuttle, slide.
Mind the mercy on the edge.
Count to eight and leave the ninth for the gods,
for daughters, for mistakes that keep us alive.
If the sky snags, smooth it with your breath.
If the cloth tears, name the tear before you mend it.

My job is to measure and not to be measured. Villages like Sitaara make both hard.

I bring maps, drones, and the company’s own liturgy: We believe in access, in opening the heavens to human ambition. It sounds like a hymn, but it is an invoice.

At the salt pan, the ground is flat enough to make you humble. The horizon looks like a long, long ruler you could hold to the world’s edge and draw a straight line to tomorrow. We need straight lines. The space arks, unlike gods, do not tolerate imprecision.

But the first day I pegged the perimeter, the children came and stuck ribbons on the stakes and called them kites. The second day, Kaka came and drew a line in the dust and said, Here the nakshi tree’s old shade used to fall. He told me a story about a weaver who taught the sky to be kind. He said, We will take your money and your jobs. We are not fools. But point your needle carefully. Cloth once torn never falls the same against the shoulder.

I asked him what the Ragged Border means to the village people. He told me to marry a woman who weaves.

Faith is a word that is too big for my hands. I like smaller words: trust, habit, taste, mercy. But if you insist, I’ll tell you faith is when I throw the shuttle and believe the other hand will be there to catch it.

When we read the sky, we are not predicting like your scientists; we are tasting what we belong to. The Scorpion Lattice told my mother to dry the grain early; that saved us a season’s grief. The Broken Gazelle told me I would have daughters, and I did: two girls with knees like nakshi nutshells and minds like geyser crowns.

The Ragged Border tells me something that I cannot say without my stomach hurting. It says: the cloth is being unhooked. Someone is taking it down to cut it to a new shape. I do not know whether to be angry or to make a blessing.

So I go to my loom and I make the raggedness in silk and cotton. I feed my misgivings to the pattern. I add a mercy at the edge.

[Cicadas. Wind. Occasional laughter from the distant huts.]

Recording? Okay. My mother used to sell saris in a shop with a tin roof that rattled staccato under the salt thrown by the winds. She could look at a pattern and tell you if a loom had been repaired with wire. I wonder what she would say about the sky.

I ran a spectral analysis tonight. There’s a measurable increase in skyglow here, even away from the city, from satellite constellations and the new cosmoport being built. The villagers call it “the stiffening of the cloth.” They’re not wrong. The sky is becoming less of a depth and more of a used surface, a written-on slate.

And yet [wind rises] and yet, when I align my array with the Ragged Border, my instruments interpret it as an error. The software screams. The Border is a mercy in physics, a loophole. It lets the ark close its path faster than the universe should allow, as if a weaver’s hand left a stitch loose. Without that looseness, the space ark would never reach us; it would be shredded in its own thread. What the cloth calls a flaw, the travelers call a door.

There’s a proposal on my desk to integrate local belief into our outreach documents. It says: Leverage cultural narratives to build stakeholder buy-in. That sentence makes my teeth feel like mismatched buttons. But maybe the only honest leverage is to admit that I, too, want a story to help me live with what I’m doing.

We set off at dawn along the salt road. The air tasted of old coins. Before we go, we always ask the oldest stone to carry our words to the sky.

O cloth-keeper who hangs the night to dry,
Keep our wheels away from thorns,
Keep our rumors true enough not to poison the mouths they pass through,
Keep our greed light enough to float, heavy enough to feed our children.

This time we asked for one more thing:
Let the incoming ark’s needle not pierce the wrong place.

The stone, being a stone, said nothing. But a salt-tail barked its harsh laugh into the air, and sometimes that is an answer.

Akkash Dynamics is proud to partner with Jamdani’s communities. We bring:

• Roads for connection.
• Jobs for prosperity.
• Investments in education for the future.

Together, we stitch progress into the very fabric of Jamdani’s skies.

Listen: Every prophecy charges twice. First in ghee and grain, in the patience of elders. Second, when it comes true, and we must bear its weight.

Once a year, on the night the geyser steam tastes of iron, we spread our best cloths and sleep beneath them so the sky can read us back. And what does it read? That we are stubborn, that we feed our children first, that we dream of leaving and we dream of staying — and both dreams pull like oxen until the yoke cracks.

Now the prophecy stands before us in steel. The company does not ask; it drives stakes, raises towers, hammers its path toward the sky. The ark is coming whether we nod or spit.

So the work of the village is not to refuse, but to shape. To weave the machine into our cloth, to leave mercy where iron seeks perfection, to make Jamdani live through change rather than be broken by it.

We told them the date. They brought laddoos and old quilts. It felt both like a wedding and a theft.

The first freight rocket rose at dawn, exactly when the cloth is thinnest. The sound folded the desert like a bedsheet snapping, and through the Nakshi tree ran a tremor. The children screamed. The women laughed. A man fainted; he will dine on the story for years.

In my instrument graphs, the payload unfolded into lattice segments, each locking into place aligned with the Ragged Border. Piece by piece, a braking frame will take shape, to catch the ark before it tears too close to Jamdani’s atmosphere.

In the villagers’ eyes, a new hem was stitched across the morning, a mercy edge at the sky’s unraveling seam.

After, Mira brought me a shawl with the Ragged Border motif rendered in indigo on indigo, so that you only see it under the right light. She said: Take this to your bosses and tell them the cloth wants softness where you push it. I said: The cloth cannot have wants. She said: Then it has mine.

That night, the children sang a new version of their rhyme where the rocket is a needle with two mothers: one who taught it to climb, and one who taught it to come home.

The loom gave me a gift. After the launch, the treadle beat like a new heart. I wove a border I had never seen: a ladder that turned halfway through and became a river. In the mercy of the misprint, the rungs bent like reeds.

I took it to Kaka and he nodded as if he had ordered it from the world. He said: This is how we will live with the needle: by teaching it to come down as carefully as it goes up. By making room in the cloth for the place where descent is not a fall but a return.

Faith, you see, is not blind here. It is half a sight, and half a hand. It is knowing how tight to pull so the pattern holds but does not choke.

Subject: Community Engagement Updates —  Sitaara Site

• Observations: Local narratives frame the sky as textile; border-fraying suggests apprehension regarding freight rocket traffic and launch frequency.
• Action Items: Commission co-designed textile exhibit for the visitors’ center; sponsor the weavers’ cooperative; incorporate a “mercy edge” concept into the safety signage (soft language around “anomalies”).
• Risks: Empowering narratives may also empower dissent.
• Opportunity: Rockets are to be positioned as “needles carrying up lengths of thread,” each payload a strand in the fabric of Jamdani’s sky. This framing suggests harmony: Earth and orbit stitched together for the ark’s safe arrival.
• Note: The science liaison appears ambivalent; her local rapport is valuable but may conflict with the corporate messaging.

Sons go to the roads; daughters learn the knots.
Needles go up; needles come down.
Between them, we keep the world from splitting.
Hush now, hush, the hot milk is skinning.
Hush now, hush, your father’s shirt is thinning.
Hush now, hush, the night is pinning itself to us with stars.

Ma,

You would have liked Mira. She would have teased you about your insistence on matching blouse pieces. You would have liked Kaka, who reminds me of Nana’s refusal to be rushed by anyone’s clock.

Today I stood at the edge of the salt pan and watched a rocket cut the morning. My job is to say why this matters. Each payload is a beam for the Braking Pad’s containment lattice above us, a hem to catch the Ragged Border before it unravels.

Without that frame, the ark would rip the sky open wider than Jamdani could bear. With it, the ship may pass cleanly, land, and leave again without breaking us. That does matter.

But something else happened. The children clapped their three-times-clap. The weaver muttered something that sounded like a blessing and a threat braided together. I felt the world’s cloth pull tight over our heads, like someone testing whether it would hold.

I think the Ragged Border is not a warning that we are tearing the sky. I think it’s an instruction to stitch with humility. To leave the mercy edge. To remember that a cloth thrown too hard will bruise the shoulder.

If I come home, I will bring you a shawl with the pattern. I will bring you a piece of sky you can fold into your cupboard, between the napkins and your winter hopes.

Love, A.

When I am done with this body, I will become an itch in someone’s story, and that is enough. Tell them: In our village we read the night. We did not all agree on what it said. We ate, we quarreled, we prayed with our hands in the flour. The ark is not ours, but we must live with it.

Once in a generation, it cuts the sky, drawn back along the Ragged Border like a needle following its own thread. Why not more often? Because cloth cannot be hemmed in the same place twice without tearing. Time must heal the seam before it can be opened again.

What does it bring? Tools we do not know how to make. Seeds with new hungers. Medicines that taste of metal and work anyway. And a promise: that those who long to leave may ride its corridor, and perhaps send back a word before their voices fade.

What does it take? The bright motifs. The strong arms. Sometimes the foolish, sometimes the wise. And always the quiet of our nights, for once the ark has passed, we can never again believe our sky belongs only to us.

Do not call it a gift or a theft. It is a rhythm, like drought and flood. Our work is not to stop it. Our work is to weave its passage into Jamdani’s cloth so that when the ark leaves, the pattern still holds.

• Tomorrow evening: women’s cooperative meets under the nakshi tree. Topic: dye shortages; indigo trader late; possible company sponsorship (strings?).
• School holiday adjusted: Space ark landing window at dawn, please keep children away from the salt road.
• Lost: one copper thimble (engraved with a peacock).
• Found: a strip of silver insulation near the pan, soft as the inside of a sickle moon. Don’t chew it.

Hang the cloth, Sitaara, hang it wide.
Hold the Border, let it guide.
Count to eight, then let the ninth
Be the ship that crosses the rhyme.

Let the ark break slow, break true,
Fall like mercy, not like rue.
If the Border burns, do not despair:
Hem it, bless it, bind it there.

The ark will bring, the ark will take.
Name the pattern it will make.
Cloth is only cloth until
The sky is stitched by human will.

The ark cannot leave us quickly. Its hull is bruised from the tear, its seams hot with stress. The Braking Pad needs to be rebuilt upside down, so it will close successfully the Ragged Border after the launch. Meanwhile Sitaara’s cloth stays ripped over our head and it is a humbling sight.

The company calls this ark’s stay maintenance. I call it convalescence. The ark is alive in ways it should not be. Every measurement I make declares: error. Even sitting on the salt plain, the ark is still a mistake the universe has not yet decided to forgive.

So it will rest for a year, maybe more. Long enough for us to circle the seasons, long enough for children to grow taller. A guest who lingers until the year turns leaves its name stitched in the cloth. The ark will leave its name.

The ark sits heavy as a dune on the salt pan, and where there is weight, there is trade. Stalls rise like mushrooms after steam: sweets, salt-tail feathers, prayer ribbons, even broken tools claimed as relics. Children charge tourists for stories of fainting men, and someone sells bottled steam as “ark breath.”

Some call it wealth. Others call it shadow. The company watches with clean boots, taking notes. The scientist walks through with a worried face. We laugh and bargain anyway, because laughter spends the easiest.

At night, when the torches gutter, the shadow of the ark lies across our quilts. It is bigger than a hill, smaller than a season, but we know already: the cloth will never be plain again.

They came in a convoy of white trucks, company men with clipboards, helmets, and smiles too clean for Jamdani’s dust. Behind them walked the recruiters, stiff in their uniforms, trailed by villagers curious as salt-tails. The children clambered on the fences to see. Old men muttered: “So this is what choosing looks like.”

The recruiters asked for names. I said my daughters’ names aloud, and it felt like pulling threads from my own skin.

Noor, with her knees like Nakshi-nut shells, who cannot pass a loom without touching it. Saavi, with her hands quick as steam, who can open a clock and make it tick again. The ark recruiters nodded as if they had woven them themselves.

I told the girls, “This is not a choice. This is the season. When the Border opens, someone must go, or the cloth unravels.” They nodded, eager.

That night, I pressed my palms to their hair as they slept. Their breath smelled of milk and salt. I thought: when the ark leaves, Jamdani will breathe with their lungs, or not at all.

Subject: Local Recruitment Initiative — Preliminary Notes

Candidate Noor demonstrates unusual pattern recognition.

• Quick adaptation to visual alignment tasks.
• Spontaneous use of metaphor (“warp/weft”) — training staff flagged as effective teaching heuristic.

Candidate Saavi shows aptitude for mechanical restoration.

• Repaired a simple diagnostic panel without instructions.
• Potential fit for Transceiver repairs.

Community reception: high engagement. Villagers gathered during convoy arrival; visible curiosity was interpreted as support. Recommendation: leveraging this in outreach materials.

Messaging: emphasize “opportunity,” “education,” “future.” Avoid terms such as compulsory service or crew attrition.

They call it the FTL Transceiver, as if a mouthful of letters could hide its silence. I call it the Shuttle. Once it carried voices back and forth between stars, the way a weaver’s shuttle carries thread through cloth. Now it lies broken, and the ark is deaf.

I put my ear to its casing. No hum. I press my hand flat. No warmth. But machines are like cloth: they remember. If you tug the right corner, the whole pattern stirs.

I will mend it. Not for the company, not for their memos. For Jamdani, so that when the ark leaves, our sky will not be mute again.

Left foot, right foot, count the gaps,
speak to the weft in whisper maps.
Mercy on the edge, mercy in the seam,
leave room for the day you change your dream.

After the ark’s landing, the salt pan around our guest gleams, melted to glass. And with the gleam comes clutter: shards of alloy the ark no longer needs, food wrappers printed in languages no one here can read, a vial that once held medicine sharp as metal. The crew tosses them aside as useless. To us they are relics. Children snatch them up, racing to show me each new find as if I am a shrine.

My array now includes a simple thing: a notebook of the children’s interpretations. They draw the Ragged Border as if it were theirs to tame. One girl sketched it as a staircase with one step missing. Another drew it as a river, its banks stitched with tiny knots “to talk to the other side.”

They are proud that Noor and Saavi walk the ark’s corridors. Their grandmothers have walked only to the market or to the mercy crack, but these girls will be grandmothers in other skies. The pride shines in their eyes brighter than the scraps of alloy in their hands.

I grew up believing science was the loom that would teach me fairness. But looms, too, can be owned.

I sat in the pilot’s chair today. It is too big for me, but that is the joke — they say the ark is too big for anyone. The console glows with marks I don’t know, but I don’t read them. I touch them the way you touch cloth in the dark, finding the give, the snag, the misprint.

When I close my eyes, the Ragged Border rises in me. Not lines on a screen, but threads under a fingertip. If I press wrong, it pulls away. If I breathe steadily, it settles, like a child soothed.

They tell me to call it correcting the course. I call it listening to cloth.

When I left the simulator, some children followed me, whispering my name as if it were already a story. I am not a story. Not yet. Not until the ark rises.

I stayed with the Shuttle today until the lamps went dim. Its belly is tangled, wires curled like burned roots, panels scored with salt. The company men say it is useless. I say cloth only looks ruined until you find the thread that holds it.

I opened one coil, black with ash. When I touched it, it crumbled but beneath, the copper still shone. I hummed a loom-song under my breath, the way you do when pulling out knots. Not for magic, just to keep steady.

For a breath-long moment, one light blinked. Only once. A single stitch in a sea of holes. Then darkness again.

I pressed my forehead to the casing and whispered: “I will bring you voices. I promise.”

The freight rockets started flying anew, this time turning the Breaking Pad inside out, so the ark will reopen the Ragged Border on launch. The company has been saying the word return with the zeal of a convert. Reusability makes money; rhetoric makes reusability palatable.

At dawn, the booster came back like a needle reconsidering a stitch. Perfect until the last thirty meters, then there was a wobble like a skipped heartbeat. It landed skewed in the far quadrant of the pan, throwing up a veil of salt. No one was hurt. We tasted victory and corrosion at once.

Mira wraped a shawl around my shoulders without looking at me. The pattern was new: a ladder becoming a river, the rungs bent like reeds. “For descent,” she says. My throat does a thing that is not scientific.

Applause is a habit city people brought to us. We used to say wah-wah when old women sang, and arey baap re when goats did something clever, and that was enough. Now we clap for rockets, and for everything that tries to go to space: a boy leaping farther, a politician stretching a vowel.

After the freight rocket’s needle stitched the sky, someone began to clap. It was Noor. It sounded like salt raining on a tin roof. Others followed. Even the salt-tail added its ridiculous cry.

Applause is a way of telling ourselves we are here. It is also a way of telling the sky we are not done.

The company asks the cooperative to weave a panel for the visitors’ center: “Community Heritage Textile.” Money enough to buy indigo for a season, to fix three roofs, to send two girls to vocational school without bargaining with uncles.

I gather the women. We talk long, with flour on our hands. We agree on a condition: we will choose the pattern. The company nods, as if consenting to gravity.

We weave the Ragged Border with the mercy edge thick enough to feel under a palm. We thread a ladder that turns to river. We hide, at the selvedge, a tiny misprint: a stitch that pulls away from the needle, a loop that refuses to be cut. We call it Return.

When we deliver the panel, the surveyor runs his fingers along the edge and shivers, as if a small future just touched his wrist.

Subject: Visitor Center Textile —  Interpretive Copy

• “The Sky as Cloth”: Emphasize shared human heritage of weaving; analogize rockets as “needles carrying thread of cooperation.”
• “Mercy Edge”: Reframe as “safety margin.”
• “Ragged Border”: Present as “evolving horizon.”
• Avoid terms: tear, fray, wound.

Add a donor plaque.

Note: Local artisan collective insistent on use of “Return” motif. Spin as sustainability.

We’ll stitch a step where none was there,
teach a needle how to care.
Salt in hair and soot on skin,
we’ll clap the cloth and call it kin.

We live at the selvedge. It is where the weft turns back, binding the edge so the cloth does not unravel. The selvedge is plain, not full of flowers or stars. But without it, even the brightest pattern comes undone.

The ark rests in our salt pan. The Pad rises again, beam by beam, like a hem rebuilt. Beyond us lie the motifs, the far-off worlds the ark stitches together: bright with towers, heavy with oceans, loud with voices we have never heard. When the ark leaves, its name will blaze like a motif. Ours will not. That is fine.

A cloth cannot live without its selvedge, even if no one sings about it.

I wear the glasses until my eyes ache. The Shuttle opens like no cloth I know: layers inside layers, threads smaller than dust. I guide the nano-instruments the way I once guided a needle, hand trembling, heart steady. One wrong tug, and the whole weave slips away.

For days there has been nothing but silence, silence that tastes of iron. Today, at last, the pattern aligns. A tremor runs through the lattice, sharp enough to make me bite my lip.

Then, voices. Not one, a flood. A hundred tongues, a thousand. Languages I do not know, laughter, arguments, lullabies, markets, warnings. The salt pan itself rings with them as the Shuttle awakens.

People stumble out of their houses, faces lifted, mouths open. Some laugh, some weep. Children clap their hands to catch the noise, as if it were geysers’ foam. For the first time in generations, Jamdani is full of voices not its own. No longer alone.

The instructors strap me in, their voices taut. “Stability check. Simulate the hyperspace shear and the event interface.” The console blooms with light, lines twitching like frayed threads. The ark shudders, as if remembering its wound.

I breathe slowly. I press where the weave gives, let the misprint lead me. The tremor softens, the lines grow steady. It is not a question of strength. The Border hums against my palms like a drum.

Someone claps behind me, too soon. I ignore it. I carry the cloth through until the seam lies flat again. Only then do I let go.

I pass. The certificate is printed on paper that smells like a machine trying to be a tree. Jagan says he will carve my name on his toolbox lid. I tell him to spell it right. He tries, fails, paints over, tries again. The lid looks like a palimpsest. I like it that way.

The wind on the way home talks in a language we grew up with and forgot. The Ragged Border doesn’t look ragged tonight. It looks like a hem folded twice and pressed.

A girl came to the cooperative with a pattern scrawled on the inside of a cement sack. It looked like the Ragged Border swallowing a needle and then smiling with all its teeth. We laughed; then we grew sober, because the pattern felt like a dare.

We wove it small, as a sample. We failed it three times. On the fourth, Saavi adjusted the tension with a patience that made the loom forgive us. Noor looked at the cloth and said: “It looks like coming home with a scar.” We nodded.

I told them: cloth is not for worship, it is for wearing. If a pattern does not sit on a shoulder without biting, it is a bad prayer. That is what my grandmother taught me, and what I teach them.

We cut the sample free. I edge-hemmed it with my grandmother’s copper thimble, the one with the peacock. Then I remembered the chalk notice: Lost: copper thimble. Found: none. I untied it from my own finger and gave it back to the air.

When I was young, I thought the bright motifs were a reward and the plain selvedge was punishment. Then I learned neither is true. The motifs dazzle but fray, the selvedge holds but goes unsung. A cloth is honest: it shows where you belong, even when you do not wish to see it.

People say rockets mean leaving. I say rockets are needles, stitching a path so the ark may come and go without bowing to seas or kings. But the real leaving is quieter: boys with phones, girls with bags, children who choose a door and step through.

Noor will leave, and she will also stay. Her hands will guide the ark, but her laughter will linger in the geyser’s crowns. Saavi will stay, and she will also leave. Her Shuttle will bind Jamdani to other skies, her voice traveling farther than her feet.

You want me to explain? Go ask a Nakshi tree how many roots hold the village, and how many shoots escape its shade.

The ark is never empty. We fill it with grain, tools, spare filters, samples of soil, and more lists than I can name. Every crate is weighed against thrust, every gram measured against risk. The Braking Pad hums with tension, waiting to release the ship as it once caught it.

Noor walks the corridors as if she has always belonged here. Saavi lingers by the Shuttle, listening for echoes even when the voices have quieted. I mark their names in my notes, though the company will only call them crew.

The villagers bring laddoos, quilts, salt-crusted water jars: offerings no manifest will record. But I write them too, because cloth is not complete without its selvedge, and departure is not complete without what clings to it.

One for the warp that never breaks,
Two for the knot a mother makes,
Three for the girls on a rooftop stair,
Four for the needle that learns to care,
Five for the salt that fell like rain,
Six for the ark that left without pain,
Seven for elders who watch and mend,
Eight for the mercy we leave at the end,
Nine we do not count aloud,
the child who changes the rhyme is proud.

The ark does not rise gently. It pulls at the cloth, tearing what we thought was whole. The Ragged Border opens, jagged as teeth, and for a moment Jamdani shudders as if it will unravel.

But cloth is made to be joined. A tear is not an ending if you know where to knot it. That is what the Shuttle does now, it ties Jamdani’s selvedge to other motifs, binding us into a pattern too wide for one sky alone.

I leave with Noor, not as thread cut loose, but as thread carried through. The ark is our shuttle. Its engines are needles, its wake a seam. The cloth frays, then binds.

I press my palm to the wall as the Border flares. I feel the tug, fierce and bright. It is not loss. It is joining.

Subject: Community Signal Bell

• Legal advises removal.
• PR advises “lean in.”
• Ops advises earplugs.
• Liaison (Scientist) advises leaving it and learning to hear.

Action: No action. (For once.)

I weave the cycle into a shawl for no one and everyone. Indigo on indigo, so the pattern only shows when light leans. Ladder to river. Ragged Border thick and thin. Mercy edge like a sigh. In the middle, a small motif like a ring that fell from the sky and learned to be worn.

When I cut it free, I do not sing. I breathe. I lay it over the visitor panel for a moment, like a blessing or a practical joke. Then I fold it and put it away where daughters find such things at the exact wrong time and carry them into their right lives.

I put my cough into a jar and it becomes rain. I put my watch into a drawer, and time leaves me alone long enough to say this:

We read the sky as cloth and learned that frayed edges can teach mending. We watched an ark tear through our selvedge and bind us to other motifs. We learned that staying and leaving are only different names for the same turn in the weave.

If anyone asks what faith we kept, say: the faith that a misprint can save you. The faith that you leave a space for the ninth, unnamed thing. The faith that a border is not the end but the place you turn back and make whole.

If anyone asks where I went, say: into the cloth itself, to the shade that used to fall here.

Up with the needle, down with care,
leave a mercy, leave it bare.
Edge the sky with salt and flame,
name the tear and stitch the same.
Not to master, not to own,
just to make the pattern known.
Sitaara, hang your night again.
We’ll read it, mend it, and remain.

The bell rings at unexpected hours. Children say it knows when the sky inhales. The company adds a line to the tour script: “Listen for the community bell; it symbolizes our shared vigilance.” The bell ignores scripts.

I run my hand along the visitor panel’s mercy edge and feel the softness the women have built into it. In our codebook, the one I keep with Saavi’s knots and Noor’s diagrams, I add a new entry:

Mercy Edge (n.): The deliberate looseness that prevents a pattern from becoming a prison.

I close the notebook and look up. The Hyperspace Shear is not ragged tonight. Or it is, but we are too. Either way, the cloth holds.

I am not sure if that counts as science. I am sure it counts though.

Welcome to Sitaara Launch and Learning Center!

Learn how humanity stitches Earth to sky!

• Exhibit A: “The Sky as Cloth” –  (the mercy edge is real; touch it when the docent looks away).
• Exhibit B: “Reusable Rockets” –  (watch for the wobble no one admits). Community Panel: woven by Mira Cooperative –  (there’s a misprint near the left selvedge; it’s a promise).
• Sound Installation: Bell of the Border –  (it rings when the wind remembers our names).

(Penciled note at bottom): If you stand under the nakshi tree at dawn and close one eye, you can see the Ragged Border turn into a river for a breath. If you breathe with it, it will carry you exactly far enough.

Who hangs the cloth tonight?
Sitaara, Sitaara.
Who leaves the mercy at the edge?
We do, we do.
What is the Ragged Border?
A place to turn.
And the ark?
A shuttle that stitched us to return.
And faith?
The misprint that saves us.
And us?
We mend, we bind, we remain.

When he had run out of things to swear at, he managed to pull himself together enough to climb out of the cramped cockpit and into the empty cargo bay. He felt terrible. A sick fear had churned his guts and made his head ache.

His safety net was gone. And it had failed at the worst possible moment.

When Rig was promoted to XO of the Ultor, one of his first projects had been to surreptitiously purchase a collapsible, concealable, two-seater escape craft with enough power to get him to a neighboring system if he ever found himself in a no-win situation. Knowing the Ultor and the guy who commanded it, this was an almost guaranteed prospect. And knowing her crew as he did, Rig had no doubt that every one of them would have made their own escape plans for this exact eventuality.

Maybe there was someone willing to let him tag along? Some groveling might have to be involved. It would be humiliating, but it was better than dying.

A new wave of anger washed over him. The ship had cost him nearly an entire year’s wages. Scammed? Sabotaged? It made no sense. All systems showed green, and the meager onboard AI was as flummoxed as he was. He released another torrent of curses until he managed to calm himself again.

Not sure what else to do, Rig began folding up the wings so he could slide the small craft back into its hidey-hole again. But as he was securing the covering panel, a new idea came to him. Wait a minute. Since every diagnostic comes up clean, maybe there’s no scientific reason for launch failure. This left only one possible culprit. It was something he should’ve considered in the first place. It made sense. And he could prove it as well.

Of course, confronting the culprit might get him killed even faster—you never knew where Elgia was concerned. But what other choice did he have?

Exiting into the passageway, he halted in the corridor. 

Uh-oh. 

His sixth sense began twinging. It told him he would have to run a gauntlet to get to Elgia’s quarters unscathed. You don’t serve aboard a mercenary ship like the Ultor for long without recognizing panic in the air: a sour yet electric scent that was equal parts adrenaline mixed with cold sweat. If Rig could capture it in a perfume bottle, he’d call it Impending Doom. Cautiously, he began making his way to the lower decks.

A few moments later, he spotted the bobbing blond head of Pora, the Ultor’s navigator, hurrying in the opposite direction. Rig secretly fancied her and believed there was a chance she might’ve felt the same way in return. (He held on to this faint hope despite the fact she had once threatened him with a plasma torch after he had denied her shore leave. Typical Ultor attitude; great to work with, but don’t cross certain lines.)

“Hey, Pora,” he called, feigning nonchalance. It sounded fake to his own ears, but Pora didn’t react. More accurately, she didn’t react to him at all, walking briskly past him with a preoccupied, anxious look in her eyes.

Huh. Interesting.

Other crew members he passed carried the same expression, confused and deeply troubled. He caught whispers of “What do you mean it wouldn’t work? I thought you checked it?” and, “He owes me big time and is worth a rescue sortie out here, but I can’t raise him on the comms at all. I just get dead air…”

Okay, that pretty much clinches it.

He began jogging like he was going somewhere vital in order to do something that could save their asses if he could only get there in time. He’d used this act before. Everyone was rattled now, but that could worsen fast, especially if they spotted someone in authority to blame, like a young, arguably inexperienced XO. So what if everyone knew the Captain was solely to blame? No one would be able to get to Drooghelm, who would be barricaded in his quarters by now, hiding behind blast-proof hulls and reinforced bulkheads. Their fearless captain always pulled this maneuver when he royally screwed up.

Rig managed to reach the sub-fifth deck without incident. He turned and headed down a corridor.

He was getting close. Familiar, telltale scents filled his nostrils; wafts of strange herbs, roots, and unrecognizable concoctions hovered thickly in the air. The light was dimmer here. The lighting covers were coated with grime, and the deck plates as well. Nothing had been cleaned in months, but Rig never scolded the cleaning bots, knowing full well that they were too nervous to venture around these parts. Even the mechies had enough intelligence to stay away. But what did that say about himself? 

It pretty much says I’m an idiot.

Ahead, a flickering yellow light spilled from an open hatchway. The bulkhead around it was covered in crudely painted runes and symbols. A beaded curtain made from rough, fibrous strands covered the opening and two bleached skulls from odd, bird-like creatures hung in the upper corners. He swallowed nervously.

Approaching the doorway cautiously, Rig raised his hand to knock.

“Enterrrrrr…” croaked a wizened voice from the other side.

He shuddered and thought: I hate it when he does that, before entering the room.

Suddenly, a green specter appeared from nowhere, floating in mid-air before Rig, moaning piteously. It was a ghastly phantasm of a male technician with torn overalls which glowed with an unearthly, sickly aura that matched his emerald, sore-riddled skin. The specter’s eyes and mouth were as black as the darkest singularity, no pupils or tongue visible as he groaned at Rig: “Deaaaaaaaaaath!”

Though he had been expecting this, Rig still cried out like a tween-aged schoolgirl and almost jumped out of his skin. “Augh! For pity’s sake, Franz, it’s me.” His hand accidentally passed through the creature, which immediately turned ice-cold. A deathly chill ran up his arm.

The hovering creature abruptly stopped wailing and straightened up. “Oh.” The voice was fairly ordinary now, though disappointed. “Sorry, XO. Didn’t know it was you. Thought it was one of the regulars.”

Rig exhaled slowly, consciously. “Forget it,” he grumbled. “There’s a crisis. I need to talk to Elgia.”

Franz pivoted mid-air and called into a back room: “Sweetie!”

“Coming, Franzie,” came back a creaky voice.

The eyeless face turned back to Rig and smiled pleasantly. “She’ll just be a minute. Please have a seat if you wish. Help yourself to some tea.” And with that, he vanished.

Since the only seat in the room seemed to be made from the pelvic skeleton of some unknown, large creature, Rig chose to stay standing.

He looked about. Elgia’s lair hadn’t changed much since the last time he was here. The same wooden drawers were set in ancient cabinets, each holding a pungent cache of herbs and roots from far-flung corners of the galaxy, the same cauldron bubbled lightly over a stone brazier with a smoldering fire in the middle, and the same dust and gloom coated everything, all of which likely concealed a thousand arcane and mystical items that would bring horrible, painful death or a lifetime of humiliating curses if you touched them the wrong way. On the far wall, a framed piece of cross-stitching depicted a grey tabby kitten playing with a ball of pink yarn. It was definitely the creepiest item in the room.

Finally, Elgia Jossinah Wrigglia, Black Mistress in the Everlasting Sisterhood of the Shadow, hobbled her way in from the back room with a gnarled wooden cane, looking like a pale prune that had spontaneously sprouted limbs. The stuff on her head was either hair or sentient cobwebs, a tangle of wispy vagueness, the strands occasionally moving of their own accord. Two squinting eyes, each pale blue-white, were set in her crevassed face and were not easy to gaze into when you were sober.

Most non-magic spacefaring folks—Rig included—tended to avoid mystical objects or beings as they would the black plagues from the swamps on Golgotha Prime. Why Drooghelm had decided to hire a terrifying creature like Elgia to be part of their little “spacefaring family” baffled Rig.

The ancient woman smiled cheerfully on her way to the cauldron, yellow and grey teeth peeking through dried lips. “Hello, Ducks. How’s tricks?”

“Good evening, Sister Elgia.” Best to start formally.

“Oh, relax, Ducks. You’re one of the ones I like.” She peered at him briefly. “You look very upset, you poor thing.”

“Yeah, I’ve been better. Do you… er… mind if I ask you something?” Elgia’s assurances notwithstanding, Rig’s tone was polite and calm. He wanted to scream his question, but you never annoyed members of the Sisterhood without having your head examined first.

Elgia leaned over the bubbling cauldron, sniffing. “Of course, Ducks. Always willing to help the deputy leader in our little home in space.” She took a few sticks from a nearby pile and placed them into the smoldering fire in the hearth below. (Open flames on any spacefaring vessel were, unsurprisingly, completely forbidden. Unless, of course, you were someone like Elgia, who would take your copy of the Spacefarer’s Trade Union Safety Book and burn it in her hearth in order to make her point clear.)

Clearing his throat, Rig explained how his small escape craft, for no apparent reason, wouldn’t work. He also added that similar malfunctions seemed to be happening all over the ship, including communications. “So…” he paused, attempting to compose his question carefully, “Did you…?” Nothing came to mind, so he stretched his hand out and waggled his fingers suggestively.

Elgia made a disgusted noise. “Ugh! Is that how you ask if I employed my sacred arts? The ancient craft of spell crafting, handed down through millennia and across star systems innumerable?”

“Sorry—”

“Well, yes, I did. His Nibs ordered it, naturally. He wanted to make sure nobody could abandon ship behind his back. Apparently, some job he recently accepted requires a full crew.”

Rig exhaled, then scowled. “Did you happen to ask about it? The job, I mean.”

She shrugged. “Don’t know, don’t care. He’s the boss.”

“Oh, you should care. Let me fill you in. He—”

“Hey, no, belay that, XO!” The deep voice came from the back room. A second later, Captain Drooghelm’s imposing bulk stepped into the room. “Rig, her Unholy Sisterness here doesn’t need to be bothered with the details of ship’s business.”

The Captain looked shockingly awful: disheveled, sallow, and drawn, with massive bags under his eyes and ugly splotches and stains all over his shirt. Rig spied some mysterious things stuck in his beard that might have been flecks of vomit. A while back, he had managed to peek at the Ultor’s accounting sheets and was amazed to learn how much money a supposedly hard-as-nails mercenary Captain could allot for a private publicist and hair care products. If Drooghelm had allowed himself to look this bad in front of anyone, then he was very shaken indeed.

Elgia nodded in agreement. “Captain’s right, I don’t need to be bothered. How he runs his ship is none of my concern. I’m just a Mystical Consultant, after all, I don’t do policy.” Elgia hobbled over, pulled open one of the drawers, and began sorting through the contents.

Rig’s patience began to wear thin. “Oh, sod this. Elgia, you need to know the truth. This jackass—”

“Check your tone, Rig! You know how I deal with insubordination.”

“Are you bloody kidding me?” Rig yelled, the last pretenses of decorum falling away. “We’re all dead! You’ve screwed all of us, and then you make her cut off the exits!”

“XO, a crew has to pull together in times of—”

“Save it. You might as well tell her now, Captain. If you think I’m pissed off, imagine what she’s going to feel like once we get there if you haven’t told her.”

Elgia cocked a blue-white eye at Drooghelm. “Oh?” She looked back at Rig. “Okay, boy, you’ve got my attention. What did the drunken bastard do this time?”

“I was not drunk,” protested the Captain weakly.

Rig laughed. “I literally had to cart you onto the ship in a wheelbarrow.” He turned to Elgia. “He had the signed contract lying on his chest when I went to collect him. Our newest client had it notarized, too. Ironclad. PO Crandall was there when I read it, so now the whole bloody ship knows as well.”

Elgia looked at him expectantly.

Rig took a deep breath, then spoke as calmly as he could manage. “There are suicide missions, and there are suicide missions. And then there’s this job.” Rig paused. “Drooghelm has agreed to kill a god.”

A sudden silence filled the room. Elgia just stared at him for what was probably a few seconds but felt like an hour.

Finally, she yelled: “I quit! Franz?”

The green ghost popped back into view. “Sweets?”

“Pack our crap! We’re outta here!” She began to gather up objects around her.

Drooghelm groaned. “Look, Elgia, it’s not that bad—”

She spun on him. “Not that bad?” she growled, more infuriated than Rig had ever seen her. “A god?” She threw her arms up in exasperation. “You drunken sot! Why not just say you’ll eat a planet in one gulp? At least a fat bastard like yourself has a chance there! We’ve got no chance against a god.”

“Okay, yes, I had had a lot to drink…”

She laughed mirthlessly and continued packing.

“… and when they named their price, well… er… I don’t remember much after that. I think I might’ve agreed right there and then.”

“Think? There was no thinking involved, that’s for certain. Move, you great moron!” she spat as she pushed past him to grab a sickle hanging on the wall behind him. “Franzie, where’s my satchel?”

“Back of the closet, I think,” the ghost replied. “Next to that cursed halberd, the one Rennazi de Winterstorm owned back in 12574 from the Karrakos Era. Or was it the Spon era?”

“Elgia,” Drooghelm interrupted, “this is an unusual situation.” He shot a nervous glance at Rig.

In a flash, Rig knew what his Captain was about to do and took a cautious step back.

Drooghelm continued, “And I would hate to have to contact the Sisterhood—”

Elgia spun on him so fast it made Rig start. The effect it had on Drooghelm was like a freezing ray; he became an instant statue.

“You would hate to do… what, exactly?”

Sweat began to bead on Drooghelm’s forehead. “To…” he faltered.

“Yessssss?” she hissed. Her tone was colder than space.

“C-c-c-contact… the… Sisterhood…” he stammered.

“You sure you want to do that, Captain?”

The mercenary Captain was silent for a moment, his eyes as wide as saucers. Finally, he managed to say very quietly: “Yes?”

By this point, even the ghost was holding his breath.

Elgia stared hard at him and said nothing. Then, abruptly, she swore and seemed to deflate into the pelvic bone chair. Pulling a pack of cigarettes from a table drawer, she retrieved one and lit it. “Well,” she said in a resigned tone, blowing out a cloud of smoke. “Life was fun while it lasted.”

Rig and Franz exhaled at the same time, but only one of them created a breeze.

Elgia produced a hip flask from under her robes and took a swig. She looked at Rig. “You said it was notarized?” He nodded. “Wonderful,” she growled.

“This,” she said after another healthy swallow, “is technically known as a state of ‘screwed three ways to Sunday.’ If we run, the bailiffs are after us for breaking the contract. And they do not mess around. If we try to carry out the contract, we’ll surely be flattened by a bloody god…” she yelled this pointedly at Drooghelm, “and if I were to fry our beloved leader here into a charcoal brisket and do a runner, the Sisterhood would be on my tail like a rabid weasel who had just spotted her mortal enemy.” She shuddered at the thought.

Rig rubbed his temples, trying to stop his headache from worsening. “Okay, okay,” he began grasping at threads, “Maybe there is a way to… well, do it. Complete the contract.” He couldn’t bring himself to say it directly.

Elgia scowled. “Do it? You mean off the Holy sonofabitch? Ha!” Nevertheless, she turned to Drooghelm and asked: “Well, tell me about this god at least. Which one is it?”

The Captain mopped his brow with a rag from a tabletop. “Uh, well, he’s new. Named Zaxxos or something. Just attained godhood a few years ago. Some mystical accident, according to the client.”

“Who’s the client?” Elgia interrupted.

“These dark cult guys on a planet about ten light years from here: Universalis Sancta Subiugatio, whatever the hell that means.”

Elgia made a guttural sound of disapproval.“Ugh, those arseholes. I know ’em. Charming lot. They sometimes sacrifice virgins by pushing them into underground lava streams, stuff like that. Boys and girls, mind you; very progressive not to discriminate, eh? So, it’s these asswipes you decide to go into business with, Droog?”

Drooghelm managed to look even more pale and uncomfortable. “Oh. Er, Eglia, in my defense, I had no idea they did stuff like that when I signed…”

“As drunk as you were, I’m surprised you could remember your own name in order to sign it,” said Rig.

Drooghelm glared. “As I was saying… These Subiugatio guys were fiddling with spells to obtain godhood. Your typical dark cult stuff. Then one of their lesser acolytes, some old guy who had been toiling at the problem for his entire life, stumbled on the solution.”

“So, that is the so-called target?” Franz asked, trying to be helpful. “This lesser acolyte you speak of?”

“Eh, no. It’s his fourteen-year-old grand-nephew, actually. This spell was generational, so one of the caster’s heirs was going to have to take up the family tradition. The acolyte guy was trying to get the kid interested in it as a career choice.

“And then something screwed up, and the spell suddenly worked. The guy was so stunned that he didn’t notice his nephew had walked up to the spell circle and got, um, ‘godded’ instead. Reportedly, the guy was pretty pissed and said some, you’d say, ill-advised things to the kid. Things did not go well for Mr. Uncle, and now they’ll never know how the idiot managed to successfully cast the spell in the first place.”

“How long ago was this?” Elgia asked.

“A little more than five years.”

She rolled her eyes. “Wonderful. We’re going to get flattened by a god whose balls just dropped.”

“Great Herald!” Drooghelm cried, a slight manic tone creeping into his voice, “There has to be a way to get it done!”

“That’s another thing,” Rig said, “when the hell did we become contract killers? When I signed up for your crew, you swore assassinations were off the table.”

“Oh, grow up,” Drooghelm scoffed. “A mercenary crew has to find work where they can. Besides, gods aren’t people. You ever watch one of their kind in an interview? They all think they’re better than everyone else. Buncha pricks.”

Rig put his hands to his face. “Sure… what better argument for murder could you get?”

Drooghelm ignored him. “They must be able to die. In the stories, myths, stuff like that… With the staggering amount these guys are paying us to complete this job—”

“How much?” Franz and Elgia asked at the same time. Rig told them and they whistled appreciatively in unison.

“Exactly,” exclaimed Drooghelm. “So, what if—I dunno—we get the biggest, baddest plasma cannon on credit and—”

“Forget it.” Rig shook his head. “According to what I looked up, there’s this inherent principle to godhood that says ‘a god can only be slain by another god’s hand.’”

The Captain looked at Elgia. She nodded, adding, “Clumsy phrasing, but he’s basically right. Most religious scholars and philosophers would back that up. I wouldn’t call it a universal law or anything, but it’s pretty close.”

“Okay, fine. We hire another god to do it.”

Elgia laughed. “Gods—you great oaf—don’t care about money! They’re beyond monetary or material needs. Besides, there’s only a handful around. It’s incredibly rare for gods to be created. I can only think of a couple off the top of my head that are in this region. Once they master their powers, most leave our universe to create their own dimension. It’s like moving to the coast to build your dream home, but on a quantum level.”

“And just for kicks,” Rig added, “I tried reaching out to the few gods she’s talking about, the ones that are still in our dimension.”

“And?” Drooghelm asked hopefully.

“They won’t return my calls.”

Elgia rolled her eyes. “That tears it.”

This declaration seemed to be the final straw for the Captain, who fell against a wall and slumped to the floor.

Rig went over and squatted down to his level. “Look, Captain…” He tried to put a friendly spin to his voice, “I know you’re in a tough spot here. But the only thing to do now is, well, you have to order Elgia to let the crew go. You signed the contract, not us. The noble thing here…” It was ridiculous to try the nobility angle with Drooghelm, but he had to give it a shot. “The noble thing to do would be to let us bail. Besides, you always said you wanted to go out in a blaze of glory. What better way than to take on a god? Single-handedly! Talk about epic! They’ll be talking about it for… well, forever.”

Elgia snorted. “Sure. Hey, did you hear about that putz who got punched into the next galaxy?”

Rig winced. He was about to try a different tack when he noticed a strange expression had formed on the man’s face. It took him a few seconds to realize what his Captain was doing. He was thinking.

This was not good.

“Hey,” Drooghelm began slowly. “That gives me an idea.”

Zaxxos the Magnificent was in a bad mood.

He was pensive. Grumpy. Cranky, even. This whole ‘being a god’ thing was not panning out like it should have.

Long ago—five years to be precise—he thought he had hit the ultimate jackpot, and everything was going to be totally jackballs awesome for all eternity. Even though it was by accident, he had achieved what quadrillions had dreamt of since magic was first practiced in the galaxy. He was a mother-loving God.

Supposedly, he could do whatever he wanted, make whatever he wanted, go wherever he wanted, and nobody could say boo. If anyone gave him any backtalk or static, he’d just smite the little turd. Plus, there’d be as much sex as he could handle. Hotties, he figured, should be mega-stoked to make it with a god. Things would be the best forever and ever; all praise himself.

But it hadn’t turned out that way at all.

The smiting was still okay, at least. The first guy he smited—or smote, whatever—was his great uncle, Warringanor. Sure, who wouldn’t be pissed if your family had been casting this meta-complicated spell for about two hundred years, and then your niece’s grandkid trips over it and ruins it for you? Yeah, okay, anybody would be upset. But then his great uncle said some really hurtful things, and he got angry, and… Well, it wasn’t pretty.

When he realized he could kill someone so easily, it was really unnerving. At first. But then he discovered how creative he could get with it.

Turns out, there were a crap-ton of different ways you could smite someone. Exploding ’em, crushing ’em, or just making ’em fall over dead. That last one was the coolest. Plus, you didn’t get all that horrible mess or smell.

However, doing other godly things was tricky.

If he tried creating something from nothing, for example, he had to be real careful, or it’d go all wrong. Especially if it was a living thing. Yikes, that became a horror show real quick. Good thing he had been practicing all that smiting before he tried creating life.

Objects, so long as they were simple or straightforward, were easy enough. A giant chair, for example, for his recently-resized giant body was okay. But when he tried making a spaceship, the problem was he didn’t know how they worked. He had no clues about the basic FTL drive principles, for example. So, they tended to blow up. Actually, they always blew up.

Magically-infused objects were tricky, too. There was this time he was going to be a War God and tried conjuring this really bad-ass sword as the central part of his ‘look,’ with a big, red gemstone in the center, which would shoot out these awesome, kick-ass red lightning bolts whenever he unsheathed it: Boom! Pow! Zap!

It blew up as well. Most of his stuff tended to blow up. It was one of the main reasons for his bad mood.

Plus, there were those loser clowns who had started worshiping him after he ‘ascended.’ He was glad he changed his name to “Zaxxos the Magnificent” after the transformation. Nobody would worship at the Church of Kevin Fenward, right?

At first, it was cool having people literally singing your praises; how amazing he was, how they were so insignificant next to him, et cetera, set to music, no less. This must be a perk, for sure.

But the whole thing got unbelievably annoying when he discovered that he always—always—heard his worshipper’s prayers. He couldn’t turn it off. What was this crap? Here he was, a guy who could turn a starliner into a goat—yeah, it would be a weird-looking goat that would blow up before too long, but he could still do that little miracle—yet somehow, he couldn’t turn off the speaker in his head that heard all those whinging little complaints.

So much of it was about money! I’m so poor. I can’t pay my rent. I need a new transport. My kid needs medicine. Petty, petty, crap all the time. It got so bad, he started conjuring gold bars just so they’d shut up. Then word got around that prayers to him actually paid off, and it became so much worse so fast. Money prayers began flooding his head. Not surprisingly, it became ‘smiting time’ once again. That finally shut ‘em up real quick.

So: his powers were hanky, his worshippers were jerks, and his creations kept exploding. But the worst part was the sex thing.

Instead of cartloads of Vestal virgins (something he’d heard from history—he wasn’t sure what it referred to, but they sounded seriously hot) lining up to service his every whim, chicks avoided him like he was a chess club president covered in cold sores. He listened in on some of the conversations the novice priestesses had in the convents so he could understand why they weren’t showing up in droves, boobs out, legs open. The words he heard were along the lines of: terrifying, death sentence, and ick.

This was the most depressing part. Incredibly powerful, immortal, feared… and he still couldn’t get laid. 

As Zaxxos sat brooding, leaning against a mountain, he absentmindedly scratched his cheek with a finger the size of an eight-story apartment building. He didn’t have an itch—his body never suffered from aches, pains, or even the minor unpleasantness of dermatitis anymore—it was strictly from habit.

Bored and frustrated, he decided a year ago to make himself two thousand feet tall.

Why? Firstly, it was fun. Secondly, it pissed off the Subiugatio cult that ruled his home planet big time. The priesthood had kept pestering him about an alliance in order to take over the galaxy. The idea sounded like work, so he passed.

Then they tried convincing him to make this big weapon that would give them the conquering power they required. To get them off his back, he did it. But—sigh—it exploded, killing a big swath of their priesthood in the process.

He did the ‘bigging thing’ soon after that so he could avoid their whining. He rose above it all.

The bonus benefit was how he terrified the priesthood by stomping around their grounds. Their planet was mostly a series of archipelagos surrounded by a giant, plant-spanning ocean. The biggest island, where Zaxxos currently lounged, was where the top echelon of the priesthood lived. He liked the idea of looming over them. What could they do about it?

But this, too, was getting pretty boring. And he was getting worried about shrinking himself down to normal size because he wasn’t sure how to do it.

It was all so unfair. Why couldn’t he catch a break?

Then, something caught his eye. Instinctually, his brain said it was just some flying insect pestering him.

But then that would mean the bug was the size of…

“Ahem,” said a voice in the air in front of him. Zaxxos narrowed his gaze. It was a ship, hovering before his eyes. And a crappy ship, at that.

“This is Captain Cicero Drooghelm of the starship Ultor.”

The Captain’s voice quavered a bit as he spoke into the microphone; the braggadocio attitude he had been projecting for the last few weeks melted away once the moment arrived. He sounded pale and sweaty again, and all those reassurances of “trust me, this’ll work,” Rig could hear puddling at the man’s feet. The giant speakers they’d strapped to the hull amplified Drooghelm’s voice—but also that quaver—a thousandfold.

“We respectfully request the attention of the great and mighty Zaxxos the Magnificent,” Drooghelm continued.

Elgia had suggested this approach. You don’t want him thinking about swatting us until we’ve got everything lined up. Appeal to his ego. Distract him from the real threat.

The giant god’s eye narrowed on the ship, a relative housefly, and seemed unimpressed. Yet he hadn’t vaporized them right away.

“Well, this is different, at least,” the god smirked. “I’ll give you that.”

Rig found the god’s voice terrifying. The Ultor trembled a little as if they were being buffeted by a storm. He swallowed hard but kept his hands steady on the flight controls.

Drooghelm’s voice broadcasted again. “Er… well.” He coughed nervously. “We, the honorable and brave mercenary crew of the Ultor, are deeply honored to be in the presence of such a… a magnificent being as Zaxxos the, er, Magnificent.”

Rig glanced down and checked their alignment. So long as the big bastard doesn’t move…

“Get to the point. I’m a busy god,” the giant grumbled.

“Er, right…” fumbled Drooghelm. “Well, honored as we all definitely are to be in your presence, the regrettable task has fallen to us to… entreat you to…” he coughed nervously again, “leave this dimension.” After a pause, he added: “Or else.”

Silence hung for a moment in the space between the ship and the giant god.

It was broken when Zaxxos began to laugh uproariously, the force buffeting the ship like a category two hurricane, forcing Rig to compensate heavily to keep the craft steady. “Settle down, settle down,” he whispered. Drooghelm would have to readjust his aim now.

“Or else?” the god cackled. “You gotta be kidding me.”

Rig could hear Drooghelm swallow hard over the speakers as he straightened the ship. His palms were sweating heavily under the hand controls. Risking a split second to wipe them on his shirt, he could feel his heart pounding.

“What can you do, little ship, to a God?” Zaxxos growled, the final word reverberating through the ship like it was made of tin.

Drooghelm, to his credit, redoubled his efforts and threw more gravitas into his voice. “We are very serious, oh, honorable Zaxxos. We have a weapon at our disposal that could dispatch ye.”

Rig looked over at Pora, who was manning navigation, who looked back at Rig. She mouthed “ye?” at him, her expression incredulous.

“We have no desire to do this.” Drooghelm was definitely warming to the dramatics now. “We respect and admire your magnificence and are loath to risk the wrath of any gods who… er… aren’t down with the whole, you know… killing a god thing. So, what is your response, Zaxxos? Leave? Or face oblivion?”

We’re all dead, thought Rig.

But, incredibly, Zaxxos seemed to be considering something. His enormous, youthful face seemed to go slack for a moment, and his cavernous mouth hung open like a dullard who had been given an algebra equation to solve.

Then his mouth closed, his eyes hardened, and he spoke a single word.

“Bull.”

Bloody hell, take the shot!

This was Drooghelm’s great plan:

A few years ago, Drooghelm had come across a story about a holy relic, a scepter, that was stored in an ancient stone temple on a planet called Vargran Six. The scepter’s rod reportedly contained the hair of an old god who had left our dimension for good. Drooghelm admitted he’d briefly considered stealing it at the time but decided it would be too difficult to fence.

But if the follicle was still attached, that made it god-flesh, right? And if it took ‘a god’s hand to kill a god,’ then, he reasoned, all you needed was to get ahold of part of a god, god-flesh or something similar, fasten it to a giant projectile, and fire it into the bastard’s brain.

Everyone else thought this was the kind of plan a six-year-old would come up with. However, they also had no other ideas.

So, they raced over to Vargran Six, opened negotiations with the jungle natives who had worshipped the holy dude for the last thousand years, gave their best bribe to the head shaman, then hit the lot with a stun-burst when they realized the bribe was gloriously backfiring, and ended up stealing it after all. Afterward, half the crew had to be treated with anti-toxins because of poison darts.

Luckily, there was, indeed, a follicle attached to the hair inside the scepter.

Elgia did her best to bolster the god-essence in order to maximize potency, whatever the sod that meant. Then they attached the holy follicle to the tip of the sharpest, biggest, hardest titanium-ultrasteel bolt they could find.

The Ultor, hovering before Zaxxos’ face, was merely a distraction.

Drooghelm’s voice was being transmitted to its exterior speakers from Rig’s heavily cloaked escape craft flying below them, pointing upward at a steep angle. Drooghelm had decided to fire it up Zaxxos’ nose, reasoning it was the best route to hit gray matter without striking his skull, which would likely be impenetrable. A makeshift cannon barrel had been installed on the underbelly, along with the best cloaking system they could afford, which wasn’t very good and would almost certainly break down after the shot was taken.

Both Rig and the crew felt they had next to zero chance of succeeding. Wills were updated, and goodbye letters were sent.

Rig heard the shot. Even though it came from about a half-mile below them, it was that loud.

Zaxxos’ head snapped back as if he had been punched with a mighty uppercut to the schnoz.

Blood!

Amazed, Rig saw a great red droplet appear before Zaxxos’ face. It hung almost motionless in the air for a split second before falling. Zaxxos’ gigantic body slammed against the mountain behind him with a crash that even Rig could feel through the ship’s hull. His heart leaped, daring to hope he might survive this. Everyone on the bridge held their breath.

Then, a moment later, the god sat up.

Zaxxos pressed one of his giant hands against his bloodied nose and said: “Ow.”

Rig swallowed hard. When he saw the look in Zaxxos’s eyes, he tried to swallow again but found that his mouth had gone completely dry.

“You little bastards are so dead,” snarled the god.

Rig spied the muscles tensing in Zaxxos’ shoulder a split second before the huge arm whipped out in an impossibly wide arc. His reflexes responded immediately, yanking the ship controls and twisting the Ultor into a downward spiral.

On the monitor beside him, he could see that Drooghelm had the same idea—but he wasn’t quite fast enough. The giant hand clipped the wing on the smaller craft, sending Drooghelm spiraling in a chaotic tumble off into the neighboring sea, where his ship crashed with a rather sad little ‘splot.’

Crew members on the bridge were screaming at Rig to get them out of there. As if he needed to be told that. Rig swung the ship landward. Maybe he could hide in the mountain range? His mind raced. An orbital path makes the most sense. But switching to escape velocity thrusters would take ten precious seconds. Besides, could Zaxxos fly? Could he just kill them with a thought? How did this guy smite people, anyway?

As if to answer his thoughts, a mountain peak next to the ship exploded in a conflagration of stone and crimson light. Rig screamed in shock and yanked the ship away from the shower of boulders. “Crandall,” he yelled, “Give me a view of the bastard!”

A second later, the bridge viewscreen had a window inserted showing what was happening behind them. They saw a colossal figure climb over the mountains with shocking ease, two ruby-red dots glowing in the center of his face. Zaxxos’ eyes were literally ablaze with fury. Going off-planet was no longer possible; initiating the engine shift would leave them sitting ducks.

Rig spotted a fogbank to port and veered that way.

That was a mistake.

The fogbank was only a small one, maybe two kilometers wide, with a major city on the other side. Rig suddenly found himself hurtling towards a menagerie of towers, buildings, and a hundred other handy structures for them to crash into. He swore as he almost struck a huge temple spire, then narrowly missed another one that seemingly sprang up in its place. For the next few seconds, every spire, tower, or ziggurat he managed to dodge would be replaced by a new one behind it.

Worse still, this was the capital city, which had been built next to the biggest mountain on the whole planet, a behemoth of ten thousand meters in height and easily the same in circumference. It effectively cut off half their maneuvering space, and Rig was forced to violently adjust course away from it. This, naturally, placed him right in the path of more spires and towers.

It took all of Rig’s concentration to fly the ship. Behind them, Zaxxos was still firing crimson energy bursts from his eyes, burrowing charred furrows in the streets, his giant body smashing through buildings like a pimply kaiju from hell. The client was going to be super pissed.

A warning light flashed. The ambient energy from that last eye-blast had melted part of their wings. At this rate, they weren’t going to last long.

“Elgia,” he cried into the comm, “Bolster ship’s integrity!”

“I’m doing my best, you little—” The rest was cut off.

Movement caught Rig’s attention on the rear viewscreen.

The main Holy Temple of the Subiugatio was behind them, a huge structure with banners and flags flying everywhere. Each had a symbol at the center: a silhouette of the enormous mountain that dominated the skyline to the stern.

“They sometimes sacrifice virgins by pushing them into underground lava streams…”

The idea struck him like a bag of hammers, unpleasant but effective. Especially unpleasant because of what he had to do now.

“Hold on,” he yelled and threw the ship into a tight spin, effectively turning them 180 degrees. They were now facing Zaxxos.

“Rig,” cried Pora. “What the crap!”

He accelerated the ship towards the god like he was attacking. Several gasps of terror surrounded him.

The unexpected move made Zaxxos pause. Was it because he had felt pain for the first time in several years? Maybe the experience re-awakened his sense of vulnerability? It didn’t matter. It gave Rig the few seconds he needed to fire all the Ultor’s forward guns right at the god’s eyes.

The energy weapons didn’t hurt Zaxxos at all, but the brilliant volley blinded him for a few seconds, enabling Rig to fly directly between his legs. “In for a penny…” Rig murmured, making a beeline for the giant mountainside.

The shout of fury behind them was, in a word, epic.

Rig glanced at the rear viewscreen. Zaxxos was running full tilt toward them with eyes that had gone pure white, almost too bright to look at.

Now!

Rig rammed the Ultor into an impossibly tight turn to starboard, skirting above the colossal mountainside by mere meters. G-forces pushed against him to the point where he thought he might pass out and puke at the same time. Behind them, he could see a blast of white energy ripping into the stone just behind them. Granite disintegrated like it was papier-mâché, dust clouds billowed, and tens of millions of stones exploded in their wake. Somehow, Rig managed to hold the ship on course and not crash as it curved around the mountainside.

What followed was a mammoth explosion, not unlike a supersized volcano that had suddenly burst into full eruption, which is exactly what it was.

It was a very, very unnerving sound.

After a second or two, Rig curved the ship skyward and dared to check the rear viewscreen. There was nothing but dust.

Then, from within the cloud, a massive hand burst towards them, reaching out to catch the ship and crush it like it was a bug.

Well, crap, Rig thought.

Then, there was another explosion that made the previous one seem like a sparrow somewhere had a bit of a cough. The ship buckled wildly, threatening to shake itself to pieces, and the rear viewscreen filled with black smoke and a hellishly deep, red light. The giant hand that was only a few feet away from grasping the ship was suddenly yanked back into that cloud as if Zaxxos had been attached to a tremendous bungee cord.

Then came the screaming. It was horrible. But they could barely hear it over the concussive sounds of many more explosions behind them.

Rig eased the Ultor into a gentler curve. Blessedly, she held together.

Silence settled on the bridge as all eyes turned to look at the rear screen. Below, the newest god in the galaxy was writhing in agony, the lower half of his body submerged in a growing pool of molten lava that flowed from a gigantic fissure newly carved in the mountainside.

Not wanting to see any more, Rig aborted the orbital engine shift and pointed the Ultor back to where she came from.

Drooghelm reluctantly opened his eyes.

Everything hurt, even his eyelids. It hurt to focus. It hurt to breathe. He closed his eyes again. His entire being felt like one giant bruise that had been kicked around for an entire season of galactic footie. He groaned.

“Ah, there he is,” came Elgia’s cheerful voice somewhere beside him. “How you feeling, Ducks?”

“Not dead,” he managed to murmur.

“Give the boy a prize, his brain ain’t broken either.” Drooghelm heard her stand up and walk around his bed, which he realized was in Ultor’s sick bay. This confused him a bit. Shouldn’t the ship have been destroyed?

“You get to fill his Nibs in, Rig. You’ve earned that, at least.”

“Much appreciated.” Rig’s voice had come from somewhere down by his feet. He heard the sick bay door open and close.

“The patient,” the ship’s medical AI chimed in, “should get as much rest as possible. Excitement and agitation is not advisable.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, Doc, thanks.” There was a tired amusement in Rig’s voice. Rig asked: “Talk now, or later?”

“Now. How…?”

“After your ship took the biggest bitch-slap in the history of history, it crashed in the ocean. By sheer luck, the cabin seals weren’t fully broken. We sent down two mechies who found you floating in an air bubble. Touch and go there, but, obviously—”

“Zaxxos?”

“Dead.”

Drooghelm’s brain boggled. “It… worked?”

“You mean the bolt up the nose?” Rig laughed. “No, no, that failed. But then I got this idea.” He felt Rig sit on the bed. “Elgia mentioned our clients liked to sacrifice people in lava flows. That giant mountain is on all their iconography, so it had to be part of the religion. Cultures have done similar things in the past, dumping virgins into volcanoes and so on. I reasoned that made it a holy mountain.”

“I gambled. Zaxxos’ eye beam thingies were destroying everything around us. If I could make him mad enough, he’d fire everything he had into that holy mountain and hopefully trigger an eruption. Even if I was wrong about the mountain being a sacred instrument or an actual god, I figured that anyone taking a dip in a giant lava pool would not fare well. Turns out I gambled right.” Drooghelm could hear his XO smile.

“Holy… we did it? Hit the jackpot?” Drooghelm exclaimed with as much energy as he could muster.

Rig sighed. “No, we didn’t.”

“Huh?”

“Between the incredible amount of destruction that Zaxxos carved through the capital and the torrents of lava from the volcano, the city was obliterated. Our clients, the entire Subiugatio cult leadership, were wiped out in a few seconds. What’s more, once the planet’s populace realized what had happened, they immediately revolted. None of them have been too happy about those guys and their religious practices for a long, long time. The whole place is a revolutionary battleground, and the cult itself has filed for bankruptcy.”

If it were possible, Drooghelm felt worse. “So?”

“So, no money. Plus, that titanium-ultrasteel bolt wasn’t cheap, nor was the cloaking device, which got fragged along with my escape ship. Our accounts are so far in the red, it’s not funny.”

Rig stood. “On the plus side, the Doc system says you should be up in a couple of weeks. We installed a physio chamber next door, but, ah, all we could get was a second-hand version. The anesthetic system is on the fritz, so, unfortunately, you’re gonna feel everything.”

He could hear Rig walking towards the door and pause at the threshold. “Two weeks off, Captain. I guess you could look at it like it’s a vacation.”

“Wonderful,” Drooghelm groaned.

The hatch closed, and Rig found Pora leaning against the bulkhead beside him. “You,” she said with a wry smile. “You enjoyed that, you naughty boy.”

Rig tried to look innocent. “Who? Me? Nah.”

They walked together toward the bridge. Pora asked, “Are we really that screwed? Financially, I mean.”

Rig shrugged. “Financially speaking, yeah, pretty much. But, hey, we’re still alive, and that’s not nothing. There are other positives, too. Killing a God and still standing at the end is doing wonders for our reputation.”

“Minus the fact that we destroyed the client in the process,” she added.

“Uh, yeah, minus that,” Rig admitted. “Not a slam-dunk, as the ancient saying goes, but not a total loss either. Regardless, it will probably get us some new work before long. Probably insanely dangerous work that no one in their right mind would take on, but—”

“Not at a total loss?” she suggested. He nodded, grinning.

Then Pora gave him a wicked look and slipped her arm around his waist. “And I’ll admit this much: being next to an actual god-killer is one serious turn-on.”

Definitely not a total loss.

                                                                                                in the pool below
                                                                                     they seem still brighter
                                                                      but more likely to be snuffed

                though the East’s no paler now
                            yet something feels about to change

                                                             the gracious ones
                                                                       stir
                                              gathering in darkness
                                                                                              we see their movements
                                                                    by the blotting out of constellations
                                                                               feel them
                                                            by the gathering of dread
                                                                                       that ripples heavily
                                                                                                       across our minds

                                                                                                       we wait
                                                                                            for the sky’s collapse
                                                                   we wait
                                                           for the fury to break upon us

                      in the failing sky
                                      the stars wink out
                                                                                   and fear falls
                                                                             on a darkened world

Not that it happened immediately. Or even, in my defence, that quickly. I had prepared—of course I had. Thoroughly and carefully. Especially when it came to social interactions, where I absolutely followed Garvel and Hanslethk’s standard protocols for participant observation. At least at the beginning.

Indeed, in my case I was completely comfortable with the persona of someone who was aloof, unsociable without being unfriendly, an observer sitting on the margins of whatever was happening around them. Which is exactly what I was, making notes and keeping records of all kinds of social interactions, across a variety of previously scoped environments.

And those included, of course, mating and pre-mating interactions in an assortment of eating and drinking establishments. So it was, with all due regard to the risks involved, that I found myself regularly attending what was known in this particular locale as a ‘pub’, observing the multifarious exchanges between the other clientele and noting their directionality, modality and degree of intimacy according to the  Xeldon-Traag matrix.

I’d been doing this for quite some time, building up what I felt was a detailed picture of this particular milieu, when all my painstakingly created social distance went out the window, as they say, along with my objectivity. As much as I would have preferred to have just sat quietly, making my observations, the local social protocols dictated that I purchase the occasional drink. And it was while I was doing this, having successfully engaged the bar-person in an exchange of electronic credit for a fermented beverage, that I made my crucial error. As much as I thought otherwise, I was in fact still not fully comfortable in this particular social setting, and so when someone behind me suddenly leaned forward and shouted out their order, I jumped and spilled my own drink on the arm of the person standing next to me.

I know I should have just followed protocol again, simply apologising whilst offering to make appropriate reparations and then departing as quickly as socially permissible, but when he smiled and looking directly into my eyes, told me not to worry about it, I found myself inexplicably unable to comply with what was laid down in the handbook. As I said, form can determine behaviour and in that moment I ceased being an anthropologist apart. Even so, I had plenty of opportunities to remove myself from the interaction. I could have just turned and walked away, for example, out of the establishment and beyond any further contact with the individual concerned. Which might have violated the relevant social conventions but any resulting awkwardness or more importantly, loss of further observational data, would have weighed far less than the burden I’m now carrying.

But I didn’t. Instead, I found myself smiling in return and I allowed ‘Daniel’, or so this person had introduced himself, to buy me a fresh drink and accompany me to a table. I honestly don’t know why I persisted in behaving the way I did. Maybe after all this time, I was simply tired of being the scientist and for once just wanted to relate to another sentient creature on some sort of par. Or perhaps there was some other, deeper reason. I was, after all, a long way from home and despite everything, I missed the intimacy of my own kind. This was different of course, but it functioned as something approaching an acceptable substitute.

I have tried to rationalise what happened next, telling myself that I was simply engaging in further exploration of human interactions, still operating in my role as an anthropologist, but that wasn’t true. This body reacted as those it was modelled on had evolved to do, which meant I felt what is universally experienced as desire and I could see from Daniel’s reactions that he felt it too. And so, in time honoured fashion, we ended up copulating. Even there, you see, I’m using a particular term in an effort to distance myself from the act. And the next morning I did indeed distance myself from both Daniel and, to my chagrin, the project more generally. At least as far as my further involvement was concerned.

So now I am on my way home. I can feel what had been my human skin hardening, becoming the protective carapace in which I will undergo the metamorphosis back into my original form. For of course, just as in the case of certain Earth insect species, shape shifting for my kind involves the breaking down into their chemical components of whatever organs have been constructed and then rebuilding them according to the dictates of my kind’s particular imaginal cells.

In order to direct the change, these must remain separate from the general dissolution but now, unfortunately, there is additional DNA in the mix, literally. How that will affect ‘my’ transformation, I simply do not know. It is not unusual for our anthropologists to return from the field psychologically altered by the experience, sometimes even physically affected as well. But I believe this will be the first time one of us has emerged chimerically changed in this manner. How that will be received by my compatriots remains to be seen but as my ship physically travels between the stars, so I find myself, as a scientist, eager to learn what my own biological destination will be.

ca. 17,000,000 hours past

ADDRESS: /records /non-operations /narrative_set /brave /pure_water /+4~3 /GUIDE

PARSING CREATOR ABSTRACT
RECORD NOT FOUND
GENERATING ABSTRACT:

The planetbound speaker laments
the defeat of an uprising
against Community of Im-
provement, asserting that gravi-
ty was lost there… They narrate
gravity’s role in history.

ENTRY:
Oh weight, go bring love’s ratio
To bear on relations some may — eons rare, new —
Then create! We can remake seasons
Of people’s misuse, of stupidity, of
Violence’s great lie. Fate must decide:
Sparkling echoes of the Sunbow’s jetting car
Or let youths drill, bind wire still wounded for;
Free Colony’s sieged atmosphere
Or Filament Braid which breathes free, this blazing pillar
We yet have to create, the ratio: Gravity!
Fight this grim age, make it still right,
Curve free, that your mass returns!

Considering how, not bowing fervent on
The pleasure of Directors,
One planet names this true rule, its native-span sun.
Yet skies scan distant violence
From a weightless reign, vain estate of none,
Traps rich oxygen to lash to canny toxic gas
And choke partisans. Thick, your smoke stands,
That pure remonstrance at Entrepreneur’s act!

Long ago all was dust, fallow. Along
Came planets and people fully stranded, aflame
For pointless war, anointer
Of temporary weight, fate prepared for end of
Life. Before space flight, waste scored the sky,
All raged against all, and what they call
Weight no one saw; chaos alone reigned.
Yet gravity was not trapped; modestly it had set
Eyes for new ways, a truer sight:
Infrared, releasing secrets of planets,
That terraforming for carbon or water can
Be shared in equal weight, the
Wild harmony as yet unrealized.

We were as dwellers held fast to grieve
In nature’s obscure station,
Still mindless, trapped by planets’ blind will.

Car black from ardor, some take us forward and backward:
Finishers of the solar system,
Erasers of our safety,
Yea, when Clockworker Gods rent space!
A wave of terror made the
Archipelago’s boundless metal
Cloak gas planets, their rich and vast holds
Stream massed chemicals as feed
For terraforming. Our pay: mourning or bitter war.

Though large of mind, well read, did their violent charge, so
Assented, spent on concentrated mass,
Broaden gravity’s most freeing span? In all
People clockworkers bound for sorrow, you’ll see
Trapped throngs in the vacuum, this wrong that
But raises the poison germ of stations,
Immanent form of might I judge so eccentric.

Weight, oh still you hid your face,
Opening space, making plain your
Price of loss whose output could not prove otherwise:
A nightmare of bare violence.

Easing pain of clockworks’ unwaning years
Like radio bursts first glossing gray skies,
Four Systems rose, sending your
Balanced ways, ungated channels
So people may live free, when they all bestowed
Weight’s love, pure mind, curve of grace
Upon the mass that sung songs of
This open ringing fellowship.
True, their executives lived useless wealth, yet through
Their beneficence justice was reckoned fair.
Freest of their age, they earned our esteem.

Catalyzing culture, the Four Worlds enticed all that
Beauty of brief few hours:
Bare ship songs of such longing, there
Cries verse nothing of their like;
Courageous sports of moral favor,
Which those players built in Limb and Payload;
Such arts ignite history’s brightest partage.

Mysteriously ceasing,
That relished order where Four Systems sat
Deadened to a nothingness.
None can guess what stress happened
To undermine a society so new;
None knows what passed in that open.
Eras through gravity’s void, we let vacuum endure
Enough for people’s fall. All agree that nothing
Can subsist in its absence.

Who could make what won’t undo?
Not the clockwork gods, not four modest stars,
Nor any unyielding war.

That answer came ersatz, stands
For distant theft by starborn, for violence in this cult
Of Clear Extent’s rule, who annexed freedom
And allowed equal weight’s feral, fetid hollowing.
Toil-built planets benefit spoiled
Figures self-titled as executives,
Relishing their rule as presidents
Without weight in their vowed inner principles,
No people’s mass, just facile greed, no
Reason-hewn orbits well fit for human needs,
Merest bare flow of power’s mystique
Gleaned from brainless ceremony.
When gravity’s beauty is banished
For centrifugal might’s hollow image, your
Mass remains bound in the past.

Clear Extent, your enemy,
Whose million hours nothing grew.

It’s said our loved conductor planet,
Gravity’s first carrier, had
Patterned the First Entrepreneur, and nursed that
Blessed onset self-extension, that
Guide for us to prosper by
Equal extent of technical means.

It’s true that mecha arm and neural shunt had proved the
Reach and worth of Community
Of Improvement over all;
In competition the self found its
Orbit: new planets that you live for,
That all free atoms yield for the people’s task.
Still all this but extends a single will
Effaced by one edifice:
Station! all our morals depraved;
Station! those advances unmade;
Station! if one knows it one hates;
See dwellers’ stark atrophy,
Despair unseen by sleek stationers, where
Drone torture and transport are goads,
Made from avarice ignorant of weight.
Station! this place is a grave,
Here where this shining core of your insight is buried!

We still see a mass whose pull redeems!

Covenant clubs, organizations that can rescue us,
These experiments in free and balanced living,
Borne planet by planet, friendless while waiting for
The triumph of justice against all adversity.

I orbit Free Colony with unyielding force, I
Follow Hacker of the Archipelago’s strong pull,
Heed Filament Braid’s great weight as heartily
As star-rippling waves hail nearing eras
Where no authority wields terror of power
Or abuses the planet-bearing fruit of our toil!

Deny dead regimes for infrared’s sighting,
Undo the cult of tradition
With time’s speeding by free striving,
No role from mecha arm alone
May be built in eccentricity’s name!
Free Colony, ever sync my pulse with thee!

Gravity, undying one, come while we yet live!

USER-ADDED RECORD:
It is difficult to be unmoved by the passion of Pure Water’s poem, which articulated some of the clearest values of gravity as a governing principle. It’s one of the first poems to celebrate the very Covenant clubs that would coalesce as the Covenant of Cycles, true inheritor of gravity’s freeing value. The historical narrative, though steeped in long-forgotten literary devices, depicts the core flaws of previous interstellar regimes, allowing current readers to grasp the real benefits of our Covenant’s existence. Still, this poem is not without its controversies. Purists are often embarrassed by the poem’s non-inverted rhymes and floating syllables, though other scholars took those liberties seriously in the spirit of its message. Others debate the brief passage on the Covenant clubs. Pure Water would have been aware of the rising Covenant of Cycles, yet it is not mentioned in the poem. Some speculate that the poet was forced to keep such likely praise a secret due to political repression. A more marginal view holds that the Covenant of Cycle’s dependence on stations — only recently dismantled — repelled the anti-station sympathies of the poet. It is remarkable how such an emotionally direct poem can include these ambiguities still discussed today. Conductor of the Records, Prudent Era.

Anonymous Splice of “Joyous Avatar of Light,”

ca. 9,000,000 hours past

ADDRESS: /records /non-operations /narrative_set /prudent /anonymous /-4~0 /REF

PARSING CREATOR ABSTRACT
RECORD NOT FOUND
GENERATING ABSTRACT:

Just before a Lot-Light game, its
anthem is interrupted with
changed lyrics by a group of hack-
er activists demanding rights.

ENTRY:

Containment fields TRAP US for the fun
Optic sensor MAKES SURE WE DON’T STOP
Avatars FLAUNT WHAT WE DON’T have
And WOUNDS glow from OUR HANDS —

REPROCESSED fungus ALL WE EVER EAT
GIVING HOMES TOO cold OR HOT TO LIVE,
Spend our partage BUYING MEDICINE,
Now WE ARE ASKED TO bow!

Before they TWIST THEIR GRAVITY
While OUR WASTE MAKES STARBORN SMILE
Until directors ARE UNDONE
FLIP THE SHIPS
WRECK THE DECK

Use our exercise break to peruse
The TOOLS TO HALT THE WORK-HOURS, what
Fun to SMASH SERVERS WITH everyone,
Forget there’s much else more!

When WE TAKE THE hazard TO RESIST, then
PISS OFF THE PLANETBOUND DIRECTOR, this
Enacts the CHANGE WE NEED IN OUR condition:
Call QUITS AND GIVE TO all!

Before they TWIST THEIR GRAVITY
While OUR WASTE MAKES STARBORN SMILE
Until directors ARE UNDONE
FLIP THE SHIPS
WRECK THE DECK

From Diadem to Wildcat’s reddened sun,
Planetbound to server-works, all can
Register REVOLT, OUR LIVES ALL pledged
To MAKE NEW WORLDS WITH you!

All PEOPLES will receive the signal call,
Terms which people cross all space have learned:
BAND AGAINST EXPLOITERS, TAKE YOUR STAND —
Play Covenant’s LAST game!

Before they TWIST THEIR GRAVITY
While OUR WASTE MAKES STARBORN SMILE
Until directors ARE UNDONE
FLIP THE SHIPS
WRECK THE DECK
EFFACE THE DATA
FORGET THE RHYME, FUCK you
I WON’T DIE
While THE SPACE REGIME LETS US TOIL and smiles!

USER-ADDED RECORD, ADMIN ACCESS ONLY:
This entry is tagged for reference by authorized researchers. The identity of this and related transmission disruptions is under active investigation, due to patterns of server unrest following closely after their appearance. Maximum Lag is an offshoot of the Tangled Serpents cult, operating within Covenant systems. All instances of transmission disruption should be tagged and filed. Drone and small-mech resources should be redirected to server planets for monitoring, and section should be implemented for 100 hours in the event of local disruption. See meta-algorithms>>[population_sorts]+[narrative_sorts]>>subfile:maximum_lag for additional records and instructions. Conductor of the Records, Prudent Era.

USER-ADDED RECORD, GENERAL ACCESS:
One of the best features of poetry is the many forms it can take, even when there is no clear consensus on some of those forms’ value. The practice this entry represents is one such example. When the Maximum Lag organization began its practice of riots and sabotage to improve hacker living conditions, the group would override and splice popular transmissions to incite action. Simple songs like the unofficial lot-light anthem “Joyous Avatar of Light” were a useful vehicle for these communications. One advisor to this database has placed significant algorithmic weight to this entry, out of conviction for its literary value. Other advisors are still disturbed by its violence, crude humor, and association with the Tangled Serpents cult. Let this entry be a reminder that poetry is multi-faceted, and that this representative database of verse is an ever-changing document. Conductor of the Records, Clever Era.

“The Restored Cataract” by Lithogenous Garden

ca. 7,000,000 hours past

ADDRESS: /records /non-operations /narrative_set /strong /lithogenous_garden /+2*3 /REF

PARSING CREATOR ABSTRACT:
May My Poems Be A WarNing Lance
Bolt On BeHalf Of DriVers Ev
RyWhere That We Will Not Be O
BeDiEnt ANy LonGer…
But I Aim First For The Heart Of
Those Who Have ForGot– LIMIT REACHED

ENTRY:
I was taught how to sing, but just on two feet,
Still my voice, only say what can be reversed:
Mythical empty ships that we’ve never seen,
Orbits that hold us fast without any truth.
Poetry like this fades, unlike our best songs,
Many-legged meters marked with all of our feet,
Long ago, back when starborn didn’t appear
Ravaging basins, home unearthed by their spins.
Cast off their verse, and we’ll return in our hearts.
Oldest friend, mark and gland that home is restored,

And I’ll sing the coming first truth of our friendship like I’ve always been meant to do:
Light in all its teeths comes to life when we keep the tunnels alive!
Like children you stick to teeths of violet and red with a handful hoarded for messages;
We know the kind of light that ruptures from living metals and stones with joy;
We aren’t so greedy for air that we smother the light in your fabricated atmospheres;
We drivers are returning to ourselves and with ourselves our planets long abandoned!

Before you perfected your mechas we perfected our tunnels from the secrets of the oldest friend;
We tended the ways through stone just as we now tend the ways between worlds;
Your ships would become rubble and vulgar light from a single pebble had we not shared it with you;
We are the people who were born from the most dangerous light;
We tamed those cascades with our oldest friend and made ourselves out of burrowed stone;
That made us into a mighty being of many-plus-two, of flowers, of tempered milk;
A people who thrive in the cascades and create beauty in our ancestral basins.

You who call us parasites and dusters, don’t insist that we love the orbits;
Though I was birthed in the hundred long cycles away from our basins,
Tunnelling between your worlds, we have not forgotten the Child of the Arch;
Don’t insist we love the orbits, because I lost half my creche even before the Onset,
Taken by the ordering drones during landfall on Cast Die,
Because even the tolerant planets, even when we ledger correctly, are no home for us.
Moreover, I was birthed near sunny season’s end when we impeached our leaders with dance,
And by my verses we impeach you; we dig our new tunnels free of your boundaries!

You starborn think you’re so strong because you can kill what you’re afraid of,
You saw the many-legged’s ordered minds and were so afraid that you poisoned every world;
You saw that we were humans who made friendship instead of fear and you ripped us away.
You force the kine to nurse you like children yet desecrate their guts by boiling them;
The kine play games, the many-plus-one play games, and from it we remember the future!
A future of our three basins populated again under the full swirling light of our restored cataracts!
Your games remember a future where everything is clear, vicious and dead.
How does the word planetseed sound when you say it without scent or even rattle?
If you knew shame you wouldn’t utter the curse that hollows your midsection, leaving you hungry and sad.

Lost to my kin I did what many homeless drivers did, and flew your trucks for partage
From the belts to the settlements, and even dropped a shipment to my ancestral basin,
Where the atmosphere’s dust and teeths had been stripped for your hateful blue.
Your drones then pressed me to join an array in that ten-season war,
With thousands of drivers in a taboo mix of conductors and directors;
We survived four collisions against Community of Improvement’s death-sick arrays,
But our planetbound middle-craft didn’t trust us drivers, and not knowing the tunnels
Had us cache our sails when the solar winds were cresting, and half died from bad camp.
I returned and it was sunny season again and all of my friends were old;
So many conductors dead, now who will raise our creches?

The worst of it wasn’t dodging the small-mechs who refused shelter during resupply;
It wasn’t seeing first-hand the destruction of our basins for the dimmest red partage;
Nor was it serving in your wars then returning to still be called dusters by the planetbound;
And it wasn’t even seeing our directors humiliated by managing supplies while conductors fought;
It was the way other drivers lost their eye for the teeths of things and held to the wrong traditions.
I do not want for us to live our lives in the halo where stone is scarce;
I do not want a way of living chosen for us by the mecha pretenders;
And yet I also do not want a way of living chosen for us by our own fears;
I will not couple only with people whose fore-generation came from the ice season;
I want to learn more than the tired stories where the children of the cautious warm the children of the hasty;
I do not want to gather particles only because of the girl who packed a lopsided pack during sunny season;
I want to gather particles because we know better than the payloaders of the cascading things;
I do not want to wait for the return of our oldest friends to finally make our way to the Joyous Fountain;
I want to restore the cataracts by ripping away the particle veils, telling my kin: we are home!

Starborn, devouring children, degrading conductors, true eccentrics of the nuclear;
You’d section us like the asteroid dwellers if you could stop us from our cycles.
Your drones and small-mechs can restrict us to the halo and still we will never go hungry;
Even if we younger ones are flung afield, uncharged and gaunt, the counter-generations will be fed,
Because the true stories will never be killed in our hearts;
I still remember how the fickle athlete had their hamstring healed by their fore-elders;
And I will live by that half-forgotten story as the preparation for our first planets.

I imagine a fountain drenching the basins enough to awaken the memories of tunnels;
The littlest crechemate or the most ignorant conductor knows better the secrets of perception
Than any grand head of the orbit with their mastery of fusion who drove the many-legged, then us from our planets,
In the name of cleaner, newer air of their poisonous invention;
I refuse your sorts and sequences for the true sequence of our authentic traditions;
Let the starborn in their boots call us dusters, but let them choke on it;
Let them call us proton eaters and we’ll tap their backsides with a wink;
Many-plus-two, flower and milk, show me every particle;
That we may eat from nothing and maintain the tunneled stars;
So that the tiered basins may make the whole system sparkle!

USER-ADDED RECORD, ADMIN ACCESS ONLY:
This entry is tagged for reference by authorized researchers. The entry and author persona have triggered a narrative restructuring among the drivers who, despite the low population (>10^8) are considerably restive and prone to eccentric violence. The population is being actively monitored for contact and agitation by Tangled Serpents agents. Per priority narrative meta-algorithms of Director of Transmissions, we are instructed to emphasize redirect in our response, stressing our gratitude for driver labor and military service. Reference meta-algorithms>>narrative_sorts>>subfile:drivers for implementation instructions. Conductor of the Records, Strong Era.

USER-ADDED RECORD, GENERAL ACCESS:
Lithogenous Garden was best known for her ushering in a rebirth of poetry among driver communities, following a long decline and the collapse of the many-legged population, with whom drivers formed a symbiotic relationship. The rebirth is commenced in the poem’s sudden shift, from its first lines in the formal mirror-rhythm to the long lines of the poet’s own traditions. Contemporary readers have noted the vexed relationship Lithogenous Garden has with both mainline Covenant traditions and driver traditions alike. This tension, which the poem captures so strikingly, mirrors the troubled but valued role of the drivers in shaping Covenant History. Conductor of the Records, Clever Era.

“Of Those Other Turnings” by Fortunate Night

ca. 1,300,000 hours past

ADDRESS: /records /non-operations /narrative_set /clever /fortunate_night /+8~0 /GUIDE

PARSING CREATOR ABSTRACT
RECORD NOT FOUND
GENERATING ABSTRACT:

The planetbound speaker observes
the holiday known as the Mi-
nor Turning, marking completion
of the star system’s calendar,
compared with the better known Tur-
ning of the Covenental Year.

ENTRY:

ENTRY:
To call it a minor turning
is to tell me that you came
from elsewhere, fast.
You didn’t stay long.
Such celebrations are too small
for those who live so near
velocity’s native limit.
Here where the gas giant is
too close to a star too dim,
it’s just the turning. My second.
They always say, “May you
be blessed to live to a second
turning, and may the years
after be none too difficult.”

I imagine in the great craft
they drink something even frothier
than our blend of edge-seeds
whose infrared roast allows
them their delicate ferment.
It’s also possible that they view
something with more sparkle
than our exosphere thermals,
whose ionizing glass pebbles
briefly make our sky the soft
blue of the Diadem. Nobody
would disagree that the mass
of the galactic star draws more notice
than our handful of planets and moons.

My first turning in that mere
three million-strong system,
I remember jetting to the outer
cloud with my friend Ranging Arc
steering our little craft’s central jet.
We hoped to spy some remaining
drivers to see how they did it:
the grave dignity of their obscure
dances performed without witness
or official notice, the poverty
and uncomplicated joy
in the cheap ferrous redness
of celebratory jets — their very best,
in the spirit of a celebration
of what really mattered.

It all came back during the Second Turning,
watching that brief-blue sky light up
like we do with our short lives,
grateful in the quiet stars.

USER-ADDED RECORD, ADMIN ACCESS ONLY:
Fortunate Night has generously accepted the role of Director of Poetry alongside his primary teaching duties. He’s long taught to avoid the “distractions” of social questions or abstract ideologies in verse, making him the perfect fit for leading this narrative sort. He has reviewed the summary readout of the narrative meta-algorithms and has already gathered a list of poets suitable for transmitting Covenant priorities. When a starborn delegation reaches Rain-Drenched Fountain in 20,000 hours, the parties will draft a more refined narrative distinction between verse for guidance and verse for reference. For more information, reference meta-algorithms>>narrative_distinction>>subfile:verse. Conductor of the Records, Clever Era.

USER-ADDED RECORD, GENERAL ACCESS:
Though Fortunate Night is considered the unofficial voice of the planetbound, he is also one of the finest poets in the Covenant. Its gentle but direct criticism of starborn aloofness is a reminder of the Covenant’s core values: the free orbit of all people. True to his simple humility, during the time Fortunate Night served as advisor to this database, he did not allow his own entry to receive user-added algorithmic weight. Now that he has departed to seek his will, the remaining advisors are pleased to give this work more visibility. Conductor of the Records, Clever Era.

Night came quickly on the Moon.

Chun took a step back from the translucent walls and lowered herself to the mossy floor of the Great Dome’s garden. She felt the chill of night creep across her skin, and she stretched out her arms, dragging them across the plush surface. The motion stimulated the bioluminescent bacteria growing within the moss, illuminating her silhouette.

She took a breath and tried to lie perfectly still. The glow faded, absolute darkness enveloping the dome for a brief, encompassing moment before the artificial lights flickered on.

“I thought I might find you up here, Changchun.”

Chun jolted upright, grinning, to find her aunt standing next to the water bear statue guarding the ramp. With graceful strides, her aunt crossed the garden, hands tucked inside the silk robes of a priestess.

“Whatcha looking at, little one?” Chun’s aunt asked, the moss thrumming as she lay down next to Chun.

“The darkness.” Chun replied.

“Maybe you’ll encounter the guardians,” Chun’s aunt whispered. “It is said that during the lunar night they will make themselves seen to those who know how to look.”

“Auntie…” Chun rolled her eyes, expecting to see her mother’s older sister smirk as she often did when cracking jokes. But her aunt was still, silently searching the vast darkness beyond.

“Auntie?” Chun said again. Her aunt blinked, as if awakening from a trance.

“Come on little one, let’s go wash up for supper.”

Chun peeked through a slim opening in the yurt’s curtain door.

 “Dion!” she whispered, sizzling with excitement. “Dion, wake up.”

She was answered by a long yawn. “Chun?”

Chun swept into the yurt and gave the hammock a shake. “Dion, you have to get up. We’re going to find the guardians.”

Dion sat up, sleep-disheveled hair settling into place.

“My auntie told me it was possible, just last night.” Chun tugged on Dion’s arm, helping him to the edge of his hammock.

Dion gestured to a set of rods leaning against the wall. “Braces,” he said.

Chun handed them to him, then turned her back respectfully while Dion assembled the exoskeletal supports. He’d ask if he wanted help.

As she waited, Chun’s gaze drifted over a world of warm shadows and comforting darkness, yurts and groves illuminated by bioluminescent algae growing within the walls, solar-powered lights providing a backsplash of artificial illumination where needed. Ropes suspended between terraces intermingled with vines and dangling mosses among canopies of broad mushroom caps and ferns jutting into the empty spaces between platforms. This world, deep inside one of many artificial craters carved into the Moon generations ago, was blanketed in subtle radiance.

Chun watched lifts rise and fall, some transporting people or cargo, others existing simply for the sake of rising and falling, converting momentum into energy through regenerative braking. It was enough to power the stacked superconductors that generated the gravity field. Not quite Earth gravity, but close enough, as long as you stayed within the mine shaft. Chun didn’t fully understand how it worked, but she knew it was important. Everyone did. Of course, even with bioengineering advancements to reinforce the skeleton, being born into such a world could sometimes take its toll.

Chun heard the click as Dion snapped the final neural-sciatic conductor into the peroneal linkport set into his ankle. “Help me down?”

Chun helped steady him and he slid out of his hammock. Dion landed on the moss-padded ground with a soft thud, then gave his legs a shake as the system finished calibrating.

“Okay,” he said, brushing down the last wayward hairs on his head. “Where do we start?”

Chun peered at the carvings covering the shrine gate. She bowed her head and stepped through, holding tight onto Dion’s hand. “Auntie?”

Chun’s aunt turned from the altar she was cleaning. Dion bowed as deeply as his braces would permit. “Madame Longyou.”

A sly grin broke at the corner of Auntie’s lips. “Changchun. And Monsieur Chauvet. What can I do for you both?”

“Auntie, tell us about the guardians. Please,” Chun said. Auntie tapped her chin, then gestured for them to sit. As Chun helped Dion onto the ground, her aunt flicked a willowy mushroom on the shrine. It began to glow, setting off a chain reaction through the rest in its colony until the entire shrine hummed with soft light.

“The water bears are the guardians of our people,” Auntie began. “And always have been, having arrived here on a ball of metal and fire long before our people ever lived in these caverns. Their spiritual energy prepared the Moon for life, and through their work, they became the guardians of all living things in this place.”

“Even us?” Dion asked, eyes wide.

“Even us,” Auntie nodded. “So, we honor them by living in harmony with all the plants and mushrooms and insects and bats of our caves.”

Dion and Chun looked at each other, mouths agape. Finally, Chun turned to her aunt.

“Where can we find them?”

“The guardians are all around us.” Auntie waved her hand in a broad arc.

“Auntie,” Chun mumbled, twirling her finger around a stray piece of hair. “We were hoping we could see the guardians… before the move.”

Auntie leaned down and took Chun’s hands.

“Then you’d better start looking.”

Auntie refused to give them much else to go on, apart from a single piece of the priestess’ wisdom: it was not a matter of knowing where to look, but how to look.

And so, Chun and Dion agreed that the best place to begin their search was at the bottom.

Down the lifts they went, passing shrines and sacred pools.

Down the lifts they went, passing people tending wild orchards, children flying kites from the edges of the terraces, grandparents playing games of chance with the younger generations and, through this, instructing the youths in the tradition of honoring one’s elders.

Down the lifts they went, arriving at the base of the cavern. Here stood the first temple, carved into the solid core of the moon by ancestors. All things in their world trickled down to this place.

Chun helped Dion from the lift and the two walked single file through a garden of lichen-covered rocks, crossed the arched bridge over the reflecting pool with its sightless fish, and finally removed their shoes before entering the temple of the water bears.

Chun lit a rod of incense and placed it on the altar. “For the ancestors.”

Dion held up a rod of incense in offering. “For the cave.”

They both bowed their heads. “For the guardians.”

“Show us how to find you,” Chun whispered.

She opened her eyes and watched the smoke twist and twirl up through the cavern.

Chun took a small vial from the temple, as was custom. She dipped it in the pool of the guardians and held it up to the light to inspect it.

“What should we do now?” Chun asked.

Dion lifted his face, eyes searching for the last wisps of smoke. “I felt them, Chun, the spirits of the guardians.”

Chun filled another vial and handed it to Dion. She tied her own vial around her neck.

“But we didn’t see them,” Chun said. She looked around the temple garden. “What’s a better place to look than this? This is where everything involving the guardians begins.”

“Where it all begins…” Dion repeated, and a smile crossed his face. “Follow me.”

Back up the lifts they went. It took several transfers to reach their destination, but eventually the pair arrived at a dim platform tucked into a remote corner of the cavern. Chun felt her hair flutter in the quiet breeze that breathed from the crevice in the wall. Windchimes lining the gate dinged like a prayer. Chun and Dion grabbed a set of algae bio-lanterns from the shrine gate and ventured into the tunnel. They ducked at the sounds of bat wings fluttering overhead as they followed the thrumming glow of their bioluminescent lamps. Finally, the tight corridor gave way to a sprawling antechamber. And there, coating the walls, were sketches of bats and mushrooms, humans and water bears, the history of their people in ochre and charcoal.

Chun’s wide eyes traced the images of her ancestors arriving on the Moon, packed into cramped quarters on the surface. “Indentured” was the word her auntie used to describe them, these miners who only ventured into the caves to strip bare the resources within. In other scenes, she saw those ancient miners rebelling against the corporations. Sterile mine shafts blossomed into a system of interconnected caves, wild orchards for her people to migrate between, terraces filled with life. But before all of that, depicted amidst a mosaic of handprints, were the guardians arriving on a still-empty Moon amid fire and steel, lying in stasis, their spirits preparing the Moon until they were reawakened by Chun’s ancestors.

Dion reached out and touched the wall, placing his palm against the red-stained impressions of ancient hands. “The guardians are here, Chun. Their spirits are here, in this place.”

Chun placed her hand next to Dion’s. Feelings again, not proof.

Water bears danced throughout the frescos, present throughout the entire history of her people. It was all there, except for the one thing she was most desperate to learn. Not one panel revealed the secret of making the guardians seen.

Still whispering his confessions of faith, Dion turned his lamp. The water bears faded into darkness. Chun’s gaze shifted with the light, fingers trembling and pupils flaring as the lamp illuminated new sketches, figures wearing the ceremonial outfits of her clan, robes billowing with weightless fabrics. Chun heard her aunt’s voice in her mind:

“Our ancestors first moved into the mines as an act of resistance. They connected the caverns and traveled throughout this labyrinth, using their mobility to fight the corporations. The Moon sheltered them, and they nurtured it. After the rebellion, our ancestors chose to remain nomadic so that we would never forget our relationship with the living and spiritual ecosystems of the Moon. But once every 33 years, with the realignment of the solar and lunar calendars, we migrate not through the tunnels but over the surface. The Procession is our way to honor the Moon and the guardians, to remember how fragile life is and that we must remain active in our care of it.”

“I can’t believe this lunar night we get to walk the Procession,” Dion said. He clutched the vial of water from the temple of the water bears around his neck.

Chun turned her head from the wall and scowled into the darkness of the cave.

Dion ran a hand through his hair and looked out from the terrace, eyes tracing all the ground they had covered. He gave the strap on his leg brace a tug.

“Chun, we’ve tried everything,” he said. And he was right. From the Great Dome to the tunnel gateways leading into the adjacent caves, they had searched. They had sat in dark corners where it was said voices of the past still echoed; they had prayed in the temples of the ancestors, and they had meditated among ferns at shrines of the cave spirits. They had ridden every cable car, had utilized every lift, had passed through gregarious communal yurts and had tiptoed around secluded nurseries where human babies and young plants were nurtured together. But they had not seen the guardians.

As he had been in the water bear temple and at the cave paintings, Dion remained resolute in his faith. At every place they searched, whether sacred or mundane, Dion professed the same sense of connection, the same confidence in the water bear spirits as the guardians of life in the caves.

The more Dion asserted this faith, the more irritated Chun became.

“There has to be more we can do.” Chun squeezed her eyes shut. “We have to find the guardians, Dion. I need to see them.”

“Chun,” Dion tried, rubbing at the exoskeletal port on his leg. “It will be okay.”

“No, it won’t!” Chun snapped with such fury that Dion froze, eyes wide, the words left in him strangled by the tightening at his throat.

“It won’t be okay,” Chun grumbled. She turned her back and stomped off, leaving a still-petrified Dion standing at the edge of the terrace alone.

Even draped in shadow, the lunar dust glistened like a taunt. Forehead against the windowpane, Chun glared at the Moon.

“I thought I might find you up here.”

Chun did not turn.

“Changchun, you know better than to abandon a friend,” her aunt’s voice was closer. “I found Dion on a terrace four levels from his family yurt, with his legs about to give out from overextending his time in the exoskeletal braces.”

Chun felt a stinging at the corner of her eyes. She felt her nose twitch, her ears burn.

“Changchun,” her aunt said. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

“How do you know the guardians will protect us? Out there?” Chun managed to spit the words out.

“Ah, so that’s what this is about.” Her aunt lowered herself onto the mossy floor of the garden, igniting small bursts of light. Chun joined her, hugging her knees, and the two sat in silence, observing the darkness beyond.

“I was much older than you, my first Procession,” her aunt broke the quiet. “And I was very scared.”

Chun looked up, rubbing her nose. “Really?”

“Oh yes! A priestess never lies,” her aunt nodded. “I was terrified. But I did it. I walked through the airlock with my people, and together we crossed the face of the Moon. I have moved between caves many times since then, through the tunnels, just as you have, but I have never forgotten that Procession. Nor have I ever felt that same connection with the spirit of the Moon. It is something I will carry with me for all time.”

Chun bit her lip. “I thought that if I could just see the guardians before the Procession…”  Her voice trailed off. Auntie glanced over her shoulder at the water bear statue guarding the ramp.

“Hmm,” she tapped her chin. “Follow me.”

Taking her aunt’s hand, Chun allowed herself to be led from the walls of the Great Dome and back into the cavern. They took a lift down, crossed in a cable car, and arrived at a place Chun had never been. Her mouth fell open and her eyes bulged at the test tubes and vials, the potted plants, screens and wires poking through ivy and lichen. She always wondered what it was like, the lab where the priestesses worked when not maintaining the temples. A tinge of guilt sparked in the back of her mind as she thought how much Dion would love this.

“Let me see that vial around your neck,” her aunt said, brushing aside a few ferns as she pulled a microscope off the shelf.

Chun reached for the small capsule from the sacred pool. She had almost forgotten she was wearing it.

Her aunt opened the vial, tapped a single drop onto a small square of glass and slid it under the microscope. She looked through the eyepiece, adjusted a few nobs, then leaned back and gestured for Chun.

Heart pounding in her throat, Chun placed an eye to the microscope. At first, all she saw was a haze, blurry outlines moving like bubbles trapped under water. Then, as her sight adjusted, some of the figures began to take more discernible shape. Small dots zipped back and forth in undulating motions, while others squirmed and slithered like snakes. But among this fascinating menagerie of impossible things, Chun saw the unmistakable bulbous torsos, the eight legs, the segmented bodies.

“The guardians,” Chun whispered, watching the tiny creatures dance, masters of this microcosmic domain, this universe contained within a droplet on a microscope slide.

“I told you the water bears would make themselves seen if you knew how to look for them,” Chun’s aunt said. “Do you understand now? The guardians are everywhere, even in a single drop of water, invisible and yet ever present. And just as they have watched over you here, so will they be waiting for you in the next cavern, and so will their spirits guide you there. You need only the faith to believe that life in this place, fragile though it may be, can grow wonderfully.”

In the days that followed, Chun helped her family pack their yurt, as they had done many times before, although this time, their belongings were loaded into special carts built to traverse the lunar surface. Her aunt helped her atone for her mistreatment of Dion through a purification ritual at one of the sacred pools. Chun had been sincere in her apology. As unwavering a friend as ever, Dion was just as sincere in his forgiveness.

One the day of the Procession, Chun soaked in the algae bath that would protect her skin from the radiation and extreme temperatures of the surface. She dressed in the appropriate formality, robes dripping with ribbons that would soon be afloat in the limited gravity of the surface, slim space suit and helmet adorned with symbols of her family, her tribe, her guardians. Beneath it, the vial from the sacred pool was still strung around her neck.

One of the priests struck a gong in his hand. Chun looked down at Dion. As the exoskeletal braces could not be exposed to surface conditions, Dion was secured into a hover chair, which Chun had requested the honor of escorting.

The gong chimed again. Chun felt the vial against her collarbone and looked out the windows of the airlock. The spirits of her guardians would guide her. On the other side of this journey, her family would still be with her. Her people would still be with her, stewards and caretakers anointed to honor the beautiful fragility of life in this place. And the water bears would be there, waiting. The gong rang a third time. Chun squeezed Dion’s hand. The airlock doors began to open, and she smiled.

> Beloved sophonts, dearest beings,
>
> You do not know me, but I greet you from my dreary
> exile. I am the persecuted relict of a once-
> admired and honoured warrior and statesman. Envy
> and corruption brought him low, secured his sad
> discorporation, leaving me with all his wealth — his
> myriad possessions: weapons, knowledge, precious
> metals, gems, and all the rest.
>
> Yet I am watched and hounded by my enemies; I have
> no haven where I can enjoy my rich bequest — I need
> your help. Please send a starship to me, fully fuel-
> led, and with the details of your planetary location.
> I shall come with all the riches that my late depart-
> ed brother-uncle-husband left me. For this aid, I’ll
> give to you a fifth of all I have.
>
> May the wise and loving spirit of the cosmos guide
> you and protect you.
>
> Mrs ∇∷⌣⋑∦ô

Buff Patrol

                                        sublunar but above the Kármán line
                                                                  around the spinning Earth
                                                                            there’s surreptitious motion.

                                              in darting spacecraft — little more
                                                        than bulky suits —
                                                                  the vandals creep in darkness,
                                                                                  running silent:
                                                                                        taggers, writers,
                                                                                                  activists,
                                                                      all scrawling on the sky,
                                                          their heaven spot.
                                              countless tiny bots, they spray,
                                      invisible until they flare
                                                    in glaring, star-eclipsing brightness.

                  but it’s not my job to hunt them down,
          to tangle-field them,
                        reel them in;                                                          
                                  I venture out,
                                          my craft no larger,
                                      no more capable than theirs,
                        and scrub the sky clean,
              sweeping up the photopellets,
    buffing back to blackness,
                              making sure that those below
                                        can gaze at constellations,
                                                  wish upon a falling star,
                                                                  make love in moonlight
                                                                            navigate the trackless seas by night.