President Gram came forward off her third leg and began to pace forward, moving in her strange, fast, hobbling way. “I can present it to the council this way, yes,” she said. “There is hope here.” She stopped her movement, peering up at Drill with her ears pricked forward. “Is it possible that you could allow me to present this to the council as my own idea?” she asked. “It may meet with less suspicion that way.”

  “Whatever way is best,” said Drill. President Gram gazed into the darkened recesses of the room.

  “This smells good,” she said. Drill succeeded in suppressing his smile.

  “It’s nice to see you again.”

  “I am Drill.”

  “It’s nice to see you again, Drill.”

  “I think we can make the peace work.”

  “Everything will be all right, Drill. Drill, I’m sure everything will be all right.”

  “I’m so glad I had this chance. This is the chance of a lifetime.”

  “Drill, it’s nice to see you again.”

  The next day President Gram called and asked to present a new plan. Drill said he would be pleased to hear it. He met the party at the airlock, having already dimmed the lights. He was very rigid in his attempts not to smile.

  They sat in the dimmed room while President Gram presented the plan. Drill pretended to think it over, then acceded. Details were worked out. First the location of one human planet would be given and verified—this planet, the Shar capital, would count as the first revealed Shar planet. After verification, each side would reveal the location of two planets, verify those, then reveal four, and so on. Even counting the months it would take to verify the location of planets, the treaty should be completed within less than five years.

  That night the Shars went mad. At President Gram’s urging, they built fires, danced, screamed, sang. Drill watched on his Ship’s video walls. Their rhythms beat at his head.

  He smiled. For hours.

  The Ship obligingly grew a communicator and coupled it to one of Drill’s spare Memories. The two were put aboard a Shar ship and sent in the direction of Drill’s home. Drill remained in his ship, watching entertainment videos Ship received from the Shars’ channels. He didn’t understand the dramas very well, but the comedies were delightful. The Shars could do the most intricate, clever things with their flexible bodies and odd tripod legs—it was delightful to watch them.

  Maybe I could take some home with me, he thought. They can be very entertaining.

  The thousands of Shars waiting outside Ship began to drift away. Within a month only a few hundred were left. Their singing was quiet, triumphant, assured. Sometimes Drill had it piped into his sleeping chamber. It helped him relax.

  President Gram visited informally every ten days or so. Drill showed her around Ship, showing her the pilot Memory, the Frog quarters, the giant stardrive engines with their human subspecies’ implanted connections, Surrogate in its shadowed, pleasant room. The sight of Surrogate seemed to agitate the President.

  “You do not use sex for procreation?” she asked. “As an expression of affection?”

  “Indeed we do. I have scads of offspring. There are never enough diplomats, so we have a great many couplings among our subspecies. As for affection…I think I can say that I have enjoyed the company of each of my partners.”

  She looked up at him with solemn eyes. “You travel to the stars, Drill,” she said. “Your species expands randomly in all directions, encountering other species, sometimes annihilating them. Do you have a reason for any of this?”

  “A reason?” Drill mused. “It is natural to us. Natural to all intelligent species, so far as we know.”

  “I meant a conscious reason. Is it anything other than what you do in an automatic way?”

  “I can’t think of why we would need any such reasons.”

  “So you have no philosophy of constant expansion? No ideology?”

  “I do not know what those words mean,” Drill said.

  Gram closed her eyes and lowered her head. “I am sorry,” she said.

  “No need. We have no conflicts in our ideas about ourselves, about our lives. We are happy with what we are.”

  “Yes. You couldn’t be unhappy if you tried, could you?”

  “No,” Drill said cheerfully. “I see that you understand.”

  “Yes,” Gram said. “I scent that I do.”

  “In a few million years,” Drill said, “these things will become clear to you.”

  The first Shar ship returned from Drill’s home, reporting a transfer of the Memory. The field around Ship filled again with thousands of Shars, crying their happiness to the skies. Other Memories were now taking instructions to all terraforming bases. The locations of two new planets were released. Ships carrying spare Memories leaped into the skies.

  It’s working, Drill told Memory.

  Long, Memory said. Very long.

  But Memory could not lower Drill’s joy. This was what he had lived his life for, and he knew he was good at it. Memories of the future would take this solution as a model for negotiations with other species. Things were working out.

  One night the Shars outside Ship altered their behavior. Their singing became once again a moaning, mixed with cries. Drill was disturbed.

  A communication came from the President. “Cup is dead,” she said.

  “I understand,” Drill said. “Who is his replacement?”

  Drill could not read Gram’s expression. “That is not yet known. Cup was a strong person, and did not like other strong people around him. Already the successors are fighting for the leadership, but they may not be able to hold his faction together.” Her ears flickered. “I may be weakened by this.”

  “I regret things tend that way.”

  “Yes,” she said. “So do I.”

  * * *

  The second set of ships returned. More Memories embarked on their journeys. The treaty was holding.

  There was a meeting aboard Ship to formalize the agreement. Cup’s successor was Brook, a tall, elderly Shar whose golden fur was darkened by age. A compromise candidate, President Gram said, his election determined after weeks of fighting for the successorship. He was not respected. Already pieces of Cup’s old faction were breaking away.

  “I wonder, your Excellency,” Brook said, after the formal business was over, “if you could arrange for our people to learn your language. You must have powerful translation modules aboard your ship in order to learn our language so quickly. You were broadcasting your message of peace within a few hours of entering real space.”

  “I have no such equipment aboard Ship,” Drill said. “Our knowledge of your language was acquired from Shar prisoners.”

  “Prisoners?” Shar ears pricked forward. “We were not aware of this,” Brook said.

  “After our base Memories recognized discrepancies,” Drill said, “we sent some Ships out searching for you. We seized one of your ships and took it to my home world. The prisoners were asked about their language and the location of your capital planet. Otherwise it would have taken me months to find your world here, and learn to communicate with you.”

  “May we ask to arrange for the return of the prisoners?”

  “Oh.” Drill said. “That won’t be possible. After we learned what we needed to know, we terminated their lives. They were being kept in an area reserved for a garden. The landscapers wanted to get to work.” Drill bobbed his head reassuringly. “I am pleased to inform you that they proved excellent fertilizer for the gardens. The result was quite lovely.”

  “I think,” said President Gram carefully, “that it would be best that this information not go beyond those of us in this room. I think it would disturb the process.”

  Minister-General Vang’s ears went back. So did others’. But they acceded.

  “I think we should take our leave,” said President Gram.

  “Have a pleasant afternoon,” said Drill.

  “It’s important.” It was not yet dawn. Ship had awakened Drill for a call from the President. “One of your ships has attacked another of our planets.”

  Alarm drove the sleep from Drill’s brain. “Please come to the airlock,” he said.

  “The information will reach the population within the hour.”

  “Come quickly,” said Drill.

  The President arrived with a pair of assistants, who stayed inside the airlock. They carried staves. “My people will be upset,” Gram said. “Things may not be entirely safe.”

  “Which planet was it?” Drill asked.

  Gram rubbed her ears. “It was one of those whose location went out on the last peace shuttle.”

  “The new Memory must not have arrived in time.”

  “That is what we will tell the people. That it couldn’t have been prevented. I will try to speed up the process by which the planets receive new Memories. Double the quota.”

  “That is a good idea.”

  “I will have to dismiss Brook. Opposite Minister-General Vang will have to take his job. If I can give Vang more power, he may remain in the coalition and not cause a split.”

  “As you think best.”

  President Gram looked up at Drill, her head rising reluctantly, as if held back by a great weight. “My son,” she said. “He was on the planet when it happened.”

  “You have other offspring,” Drill said.

  Gram looked at him, the pain burning deep in her eyes. “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

  The fields around Ship filled once again. Cries and howls rent the air, and dirges pulsed against Ship’s uncaring walls. The Shar broadcasts in the next weeks seemed confused to Drill. Coalitions split and fragmented. Vang spoke frequently of readiness. President Gram succeeded in doubling the quota of planets. The decision was a near one.

  Then, days later, another message. “One of our commanders,” said President Gram, “was based on the vicinity of the attacked planet. He is one of Vang’s creatures. On his own initiative he ordered our military forces to engage. Your terraforming Ship was attacked.”

  “Was it destroyed?” Drill asked. His tone was urgent. There is still hope, he reminded himself.

  “Don’t be anxious for your fellow humans,” Gram said. “The Ship was damaged, but escaped.”

  “The loss of a few hundred billion unconscious organisms is no cause for anxiety,” Drill said. “An escaped terraforming Ship is. The Ship will alert our military forces. It will be a real war.”

  President Gram licked her lips. “What does that mean?”

  “You know of our Shrikes and so on. Our military people are worse. They are fully conscious and highly specialized in different modes of warfare. They are destructive, carnivorous, capable of taking enormous damage without impairing function. Their minds concentrate only on tactics, on destruction. Normally they are kept on planetoids away from the rest of humanity. Even other humans find their proximity too…disturbing.” Drill put all the urgency in his speech that he could. “Honorable President, you must give me the locations of the remaining planets. If I can get Memories to each of them with news of the peace, we may yet save them.”

  “I will try. But the coalition…” She turned away from the transmitter. “Vang will claim a victory.”

  “It is the worst possible catastrophe,” Drill said.

  Gram’s tone was grave. “I believe you,” she said.

  Drill listened to the broadcasts with growing anxiety. The Shars who spoke on the broadcasts were making angry comments about the execution of prisoners, about flower gardens and values Drill didn’t understand. Someone had let the secret loose. President Gram went from group to group outside Ship, talking of the necessity of her plan. The Shars’ responses were muted. Drill sensed they were waiting. It was announced that Vang had left the coalition. A chorus of triumphant yips rose from scattered members of the crowd. Others only moaned.

  Vang, now simply General Vang, arrived at the field. His followers danced intoxicated circles around him as he spoke, howling their responses to his words. “Triumph! United will!” they cried. “The humans can be beaten! Treachery avenged! Dictate the peace from a position of strength! We smell the location of their planets!”

  The Shars’ weird cackling laughter followed him from point to point. The laughing and crying went on well into the night. In the morning the announcement came that the coalition had fallen. Vang was now President-General.

  In his sleeping chamber, surrounded by his video walls, Drill began to weep.

  * * *

  “I have been asked to bear Vang’s message to you,” Gram said. She seemed smaller than before, standing unsteadily even on her tripod legs. “It is his…humor.”

  “What is the message?” Drill said. His whole body seemed in pain. Even Lowbrain was silent, wrapped in misery.

  “I had hoped,” Gram said, “that he was using this simply as an issue on which to gain power. That once he had the Presidency, he would continue the diplomatic effort. It appears he really means what he’s been saying. Perhaps he’s no longer in control of his own people.”

  “It is war,” Drill said.

  “Yes.”

  You have failed, said Memory. Drill winced in pain.

  “You will lose,” he said.

  “Vang says we are cleverer than you are.”

  “That may be the case. But cleverness cannot compete with experience. Humans have fought hundreds of these little wars, and never failed to wipe out the enemy. Our Memories of these conflicts are intact. Your people can’t fight millions of years of specialized evolution.”

  “Vang’s message doesn’t end there. You have till nightfall to remove your Ship from the planet. Six days to get out of real space.”

  “I am to be allowed to live?” Drill was surprised.

  “Yes. It is our…our custom.”

  Drill scratched himself. “I regret our efforts did not succeed.”

  “No more than I.” She was silent for a while. “Is there any way we can stop this?”

  “If Vang attacks any human planets after the Memories of the peace arrangement have arrived,” Drill said, “the military will be unleashed to wipe you out. There is no stopping them after that point.”

  “How long,” she asked, “do you think we have?”

  “A few years. Ten at the most.”

  “Our species will be dead.”

  “Yes. Our military are very good at their jobs.”

  “You will have killed us,” Gram said, “destroyed the culture that we have built for thousands of years, and you won’t even give it any thought. Your species doesn’t think about what it does any more. It just acts, like a single-celled animal, engulfing everything it can reach. You say that you are a conscious species, but that isn’t true. Your every action is…instinct. Or reflex.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Drill.

  Gram’s body trembled. “That is the tragedy of it,” she said.

  An hour later Ship rose from the field. Shars laughed their defiance from below, dancing in crazed abandon.

  I have failed, Drill told Memory.

  You knew the odds were long, Memory said. You knew that in negotiations with species this backward there have only been a handful of successes, and hundreds of failures.

  Yes, Drill acknowledged. It’s a shame, though. To have spent all these months away from home.

  Eat! Eat! said Lowbrain.

  Far away, in their forty-mile-long Ships, the human soldiers were already on their way.

  Introduction to “Face Value”

  by Karen Joy Fowler

  Fish-out-of-water stories are a staple of Hollywood. Sometimes they can lead to charming fables like Splash, and sometimes to formulaic extravaganzas like Beverly Hills Cop III. But, while Hollywood finds humor in thrusting characters from one milieu into another, it’s worth remembering that when fish are too long out of the water, they die. (They also begin to stink, which is an aspect that Hollywood has not neglected.)

  This is a waterless story, dusty as its desert setting, as its mothy aliens; but reading it is not a dry experience. It is liquid with life, hot with the suffering of a character who wavers between being un- and too-adaptable.

  Karen Joy Fowler came to maturity as a writer via the academic route of literature and writing classes. Often this is where would-be sf writers are lost to our field, because the pressure against writing science fiction can be intense. But Fowler doesn’t respond to pressure by complying; instead she combusts, and the result has been a series of unforgettable short stories that owe more to Faulkner than to Heinlein and yet are definitely science fiction—arguably could not exist except as science fiction.

  Fowler is also a perceptive teacher of writing. It is not true that writing cannot be taught; the aphorism is widely believed because most writing teachers are incompetent. Just because someone knows how to write well, or even edit well, does not mean that she knows how to teach writing. It is a separate knack, and Fowler has it. So if you are ambitious to join the ranks of practitioners of this arcane magic, and you hear of her leading a writing workshop or teaching one of the weeks at Clarion, I assure you that she will actually help you toward your goal.

  FACE VALUE

  Karen Joy Fowler

  It was almost like being alone. Taki, who had been alone one way or another most of his life, recognized this and thought he could deal with it. What choice did he have? It was only that he had allowed himself to hope for something different. A second star, small and dim, joined the sun in the sky, making its appearance over the rope bridge which spanned the empty river. Taki crossed the bridge in a hurry to get inside before the hottest part of the day began.

  Something flashed briefly in the dust at his feet and he stooped to pick it up. It was one of Hesper’s poems, half finished, left out all night. Taki had stopped reading Hesper’s poetry. It reflected nothing, not a whisper of her life here with him, but was filled with longing for things and people behind her. Taki pocketed the poem on his way to the house, stood outside the door, and removed what dust he could with the stiff brush which hung at the entrance. He keyed his admittance; the door made a slight sucking sound as it resealed behind him.