“Doesn’t it sound like the sea?” her mother asks, and Ttisa, not yet five years old, shakes her head and sets the conch back down on the white, white sand of the natatorium’s fabricated beach.

  The six umbilical cords begin to wrap themselves tightly about her, each one attaching to a critical, predetermined site on Ttisa’s body by means of razor-sharp beaks composed primarily of chitin and complex cross-linked proteins. One for her throat (entering by way of her mouth), another through her sex, her belly, her rectum and the base of her spine, and yet another penetrating the medulla oblongata via the foramen magnum.

  I am not drowning, she thinks. I could never drown. I am held fast. Embraced, as I have never been embraced before, and I will not fall again.

  “Has it started?”

  “Yes,” whispers a voice that is not a voice. “It has started. Rest now. You will need it, farther along.”

  Theo puts down his tab and squeezes his eyes shut. He rubs at his temples, as though his head aches. “It sounds like rape to me,” he says. “No, it sounds much worse than rape.”

  “I wish I could make you understand,” she tells him. “I would, if I could.”

  And around Ttisa, all the wide world has shrunken to this golden lagoon of kindly, flesh-filtered light and transmuting fluids and the gentle, voiceless reassurances in a tongue she understands without having learned.

  And, for the first time in her life, she is sure that she not falling.

  6.

  Though she didn’t go down to the departure bay in time to say goodbye to Theo (and, for that matter, he didn’t come to say goodbye to her), Ttisa did watch him leave. She stood alone on the observation deck, and, with an index finger pressed to the wall, traced the steady, silent path of the ungainly, multi-hulled sleeper as it exited the station and moved away towards the pulsing scarlet ring of the starboard ftl portal. She looked away before the embarkation flash, and when she looked back, the ship that would ferry him home was gone. He was gone. And she knew that she’d never see him again.

  She knew that she should feel remorse.

  And she knew, too, that there should be a profound emptiness inside her, an ache that she would carry for a long time to come. But there was nothing of the sort, and it seemed very silly to counterfeit, or to worry over the absence of emotions that would have only caused her pain.

  They’ve changed me this much already, she thought, still watching the ftl portal as the lateral vector array stopped flashing while the entire circuit powered down. The plasma stream had dissipated, and there was nothing visible through the portal now but stars. She picked out the yellow speck of Arcturus, then pulled her hand back from the wall and stared at her fingertip, instead.

  That’s it, then. He’s away. It is for the best, really. He was so unhappy.

  “Sleep tight, my love,” she said aloud. “Sleep tight and dream.” Then, wondering if this was possibly only another part of the experiment, and, if so, how she’d scored, Ttisa turned and left the observation deck.

  7.

  This far along in the process, three Sol days and counting, there is no longer any meaningful distinction between her memory and that of the surrogate. “It” clearly recalls kneeling on a white beach and holding a plastic conch to its ear, listening for a phantom sea. “She” remembers, with equal clarity, the towering, crystalline spires buried miles deep, beneath the shhakizsas’ sprawling polar megalopolis, the quartz lattice of temples erected to long-forgotten gods and demons. “It” recalls a day at the beach, and “she” relives a pilgrimage to an archeological wonder. The rapidly mutating body that was Ttisa Fitzgerald drifts, not falling, safe within the sanctuary that has grown around it, the amniotic cyst that cradles what it has become and what it is still becoming.

  The confluence, this new, compounded consciousness thinks again. The meeting of the waters. Encontro das Águas.

  Milk in coffee.

  The cold swirl of stars in near vacuum.

  All but one of the surrogate’s umbilici has withdrawn, completely resorbed into the host’s endometrium. The one that remains is there for no other reason than the carnal pleasure of contact. It has swollen to completely fill the thorny, cilia-lined slit that can longer be described as a human vagina. The enormous body of the surrogate and the far smaller body of the reborn shiver is unison.

  We are whole, it thinks, as the latest in a seemingly ceaseless series of orgasms fades. This is our gift, the gift we have given to ourself. This wholeness, unfettered by the jail of individuality. Our minds are laid bare, and there can be no mental isolation here, and no secrets.

  Being alone is unbearable, it thinks.

  We will never be alone again, it replies. Even when the cyst ruptures and we divide, we will remain as one.

  Is she still here, watching from somewhere within us? The one who was named Ttisa Fitzgerald? but it knows the answer even before the question has been fully articulated. Nothing has been lost, save the abyss between one consciousness and another.

  Hold it up to your ear and listen. Tell me what you hear.

  You might have asked me to stay.

  And I’ll say, “She was a woman, once. She was the most beautiful woman I ever saw, and I loved her.” I’ll say, “You might find that hard to believe, but she was a woman, once.”

  And, if not woman, and if not shhakizsa, what are we now? it asks itself. What is this beast we have become?

  There are many words available with which to answer that question, but they all, each and every one, signify unification. It pauses in the flow of questioning and revelry to examine what has been fashioned from the willing offering of Ttisa Fitzgerald—the reborn child, the holy feast, the marriage consummated. In combined lifetimes, it has beheld precious few things so singular in their loveliness, so unlikely in their realization. That impatient daughter tugs roughly at the remaining umbilicus, snared between her legs. And, pleased at the unprecedented fruits of so painful and perilous a labor—a labor that failed six times previously—the amalgam resumes its ministrations.

  7.

  It is not from space that I must seek my dignity, but from the government of my thought. I shall have no more if I possess worlds. By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world.

  Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), Pensées

  The Beekeeper

  Jamie Barras

  I was born in freefall on a boneship of the Stro. My parents named me Elena, after my mother’s mother, but to the Hila I am Andalian, orphan of the storm and keeper of Kimonayev’s bees.

  We made planetfall one hundred kilometres east of the candidate garden. My father had timed our arrival to coincide with local dusk, and we spent the rest of the night unloading our equipment. By daybreak, we were finally ready to break camp and start for the garden. But we had one last thing to do before we could set off: we had to kill the boneship. Antonov drew the short straw. We all said our goodbyes to the ship and then Antonov fired the safety charges. With a crick-crack of splintering bulkheads and the hiss of released respiratory gases, the ship shuddered and died. We watched the outer shell began to warp and bubble as the accelerated processes of decay began. By the time that they finished, all that would be left of the ship would be a quarter-tonne of cellulose and a few hundred grammes of long-chain hydrocarbons, alcohols and esters. Even the most iterated of Melzemi hunters would be unable to distinguish the remains from the indigenous flora. It was a sad end to an old friend, but it was something that we had to do just to survive.

  We turned away at last and climbed the valley side to watch the sunrise. We were none of us planetborn—this was the first real sunrise for us all. We stood in silence with our faces to the sun and drank in the heat, the light, the depth and breadth of it all. Kimonayev’s bees buzzed lazily about our heads seemingly just as mesmerised.

  “We’re here,” Antonov said at length. “We’re finally here.”

  Sylvain laughed derisively. “We’re stuck here, you mean.” She gestured back down towards the valley floor. “We just blew the brains out our ride.”

  My mother hugged me close and shook her head. “Have a heart, Marie.”

  Sylvain ignored her.

  “We can express our reserve ship once we get to the garden,” Kimonayev said. Every search team carried a spare copy of the boneship expression licensed from the Stro.

  “If we can make the garden bloom,” Sylvain said, rounding on Kimonayev—she didn’t need reminding what we could or couldn’t do. “And what chance of that? A Class D, on the edge of Melzemi territory? The last time that I was awake, the Veche would never have wasted a search team on a prospect as poor as this.”

  Sylvain appeared young in years—not more than forty. In fact she was the second oldest on the team in terms of time spent. Thanks to the vagaries of Acheron’s coldsleep lottery the last time that she had been awake had been over two hundred fixed years earlier. Back then, the Veche—Acheron’s governing committee—had not been even a third of the way through the list of abandoned gardens that they had bought from the Stro. These were different days: only a quarter of the list remained, and Acheron’s search teams had still not found so much as a single uncorrupted copy of the faster-than-light expression. These days, the Veche sent teams to anywhere within range.

  “We’ll make do,” Kimonayev insisted. He looked at least thirty years older than Sylvain, but he was far younger in terms of time spent, with only a single, two-decade-long spell in coldsleep behind him. The things that he knew about how things currently stood with Acheron made him much more stoical.

  Sylvain started to respond but my father cut her off. “We’re wasting daylight.”

  Sylvain cursed.

  My father looked to her. “Are you done?” After a long moment, Sylvain nodded her head. “Good.” My father looked to Kimonayev. “How are your little pets doing, Alexandr Simonovitch—they ready to travel?” Kimonayev’s bees were only a couple of hours out of coldsleep, but they were typed for quick recovery and rapid orientation. Kimonayev watched them sketch patterns in the air for a few moments then turned to my father. “Yes, Grigori Pietrovitch.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  Early on the first day of our march, we cut the trail of some local animal life. My mother and Antonov broke out a couple of dumb guns and set off to follow the trail. They returned half an hour later carrying the carcase of a small, grey-haired quadruped: binocular, binaural, warm-blooded. Sylvain ran its DNA: it was indigenous—not a child of the garden. She extracted and then strained its stomach contents. The juices went into one of her vats. To survive on this world we would need to eat what the local animal life ate. The contents of the dead quadruped’s stomach would provide the source code for the retyping of our own intestinal flora and fauna. At dusk, Sylvain dosed us with a cocktail of laxatives and oral antibiotics followed a couple of hours later by helpings from the contents of the vat. By dawn the next day, we were ready for our first breakfast of locally grown food: fruits and legumes chased down with unfiltered local water.

  We were adapting, getting ready for the physical challenges ahead. By the third day, even I was finding the going easier. The first two days, I had struggled. My mother had taught me to swim in the boneship’s bladder, developing my muscles by making me push and pull myself through the water, but, even so, supporting my own weight had not come easily to me after an infancy spent in freefall. And yet by that third day, I was able to walk unassisted—and even run for short distances. It felt good.

  We reached the lower slopes of the garden’s outer rim on the afternoon of the fourth day. A short reconnoitre showed that we were less than three kilometres south of the spot that the survey from orbit had fixed as our point of entry into the garden. This was a broken line of ridges streaked with waterfalls, and stacked one above and behind the other like a crumbling staircase. Although it was impossible to tell from the ground—clouds shrouded the rim’s upper reaches—the survey from orbit had revealed that this staircase led all the way up and over the top. But the top was a full kilometre above the level of the surrounding forestland—even taking it in stages, it wouldn’t be an easy ascent, especially with all the gear that we had with us.

  “If things go smoothly, we should make it to the top in two days,” Antonov said confidently. Like Sylvain, he was of athletic build and a young physiological age. He sounded as if he was looking forward to the challenge.

  Kimonayev shook his head and laughed. “What I wouldn’t give for a floater right now. Or even just a pallet or two.”

  There couldn’t be any of those things, not this close to Melzemi territory. This was by necessity a largely technology-free expedition. My mother, my father and the other adults would have to carry the team’s gear up on their backs.

  “We’ll rest up for what’s left of today,” my father said. “And start our ascent bright and early tomorrow. Alexandr Simonovitch: you better start packing up your little pets. It’s going to be windy up there.”

  We made camp.

  The next morning, while we were still at breakfast, the beyonders appeared.

  They were three-metre tall bipeds, bimanous, binocular, binaural, furry-backed, bare-bellied—unmistakably children of the garden. There were six of them, all dressed in the simple animal-skin garments of temperate pre-trade peoples, and carrying rudimentary throwing weapons.

  My father went forward to greet them, his hands empty and his face dressed in a smile. They started to close on him, slowly, but surely. I hid behind my mother’s legs.

  “Worker-type three eighty-seven,” Kimonayev said, keeping his own lips fixed in a smile, but speaking loudly enough for my father to hear. “Low mil. capability, minimal aggression—and zero exchange value.”

  “What’s their trigger?” my father asked.

  There was a pause while Kimonayev searched for the answer amongst the masses of information that the boneship’s smart engine had fed into his brain during the long journey to the target world. At length he said, “Asbal Command Language—any tone.”

  The garden-builders had typed their children for obedience—and language comprehension.

  My father took another step forward. The beyonders kept coming on. “Stop where you are,” my father said, in pitch-perfect ACL—more smart-engine-delivered knowledge. The beyonders came to an immediate halt. “We are no threat to you. Ground your weapons.” The beyonders rested the butts of their spears on the ground. My father fixed his gaze on the closest of the beyonders—a redback with a paint-daubed face. “Tell the rest of your group to join us.”

  There were shadows moving through the trees beyond the clearing’s edge—more beyonders; the redback and its five companions were scouts sent to assess the situation. The garden-builders might not have typed the 387s for combat or tactics, but the 387s were smart enough to know not to take any chances.

  Nothing happened for a long moment. “Could they be functionally mute?” Sylvain said, speaking Ruslac.

  With no master to bring them on, many children of abandoned gardens failed to develop normally, no matter what skills the garden-builders had hardwired into them. There was no reason to suppose that these 387s would express their language skills in the absence of anyone ever having talked to them. But for all that, after a few moments, the redback threw back its head and called out, “Rest your arms, and come here!”

  It pitched its voice high—the sound didn’t seem to fit with its massive frame. “That was Child Common,” Kimonayev said. He laughed. “Actual Child Common. From the mouth of a child.”

  The boneship’s smart engine had fed us all the sound of children’s voices many times across the boneship’s three-year fall towards the target world. But that had been on microdat—and mostly simulated speech. This was live—sounds generated within organic voice boxes, given their timbre by a planetary atmosphere.

  The redback looked to my father when it had finished. “They are coming, speaker-of-commands,” it said.

  My father shook his head. “My name is ‘Rahmatov.’ This replaces ‘speaker-of-commands.’ And these are—” he went around the rest of the team “—Seremnova, Kimonayev, Sylvain, and Antonov—and the little one there is Elena.” He looked again to the beyonder. “Do you have a name?”

  Another long pause. Then: “I am the 83rd to be called ‘Beyonder Who Starts At The Tall Rock Then Goes Towards The Sun Three Days Before Turning North And Moving . . . ’ ”

  It carried on in that vein for half a minute or more, describing what sounded like a search pattern through the forest that surrounded the garden. Eventually, it reached the end—back at the “Tall Rock” where it had started.

  “I think we’ll go with ‘83’,” my father said, looking to the rest of us for agreement.

  More beyonders started appearing from the trees. Within a few minutes, almost twenty had crowded into the small clearing. The shortest was perhaps two-metres twenty, the tallest three-metres ten; fur colours ranged from golden-brown through russet-red to black, and skin tones showed a similar degree of variation. One of the newcomers had lost its arm below the elbow, something that excited some comment and speculation from my mother, Sylvain and Kimonayev—the team’s organics specialists. Ofttimes, societies established by the children of abandoned gardens were intolerant of physical impairment. The garden-builders had been interested in only the best produce; they had equipped many child types with an inbuilt drive to attack the weak and the damaged.

  “Rahmatov,” the redback—83—said. “Every member of this party of beyonders is now here.” Task completed. Awaiting further commands.

  “We going to let them haul our gear for us?” Antonov asked.

  “First things first,” my father said. He looked to 83 and then pointed to the garden rim. “We need to get to the other side of that. Can the . . . the ‘beyonders’ take us there?”

  As one, the beyonders all turned towards the garden rim. Then they just stood there looking up at it. Seconds ticked by.