Machine Learning: New and Collected Stories

The Walk up Nameless Ridge

It was difficult to sleep at night, wishing good men dead. This was but one of the hurtful things I felt in my bones and wished I could ignore. It was an ugly truth waving its arms that I turned my gaze from, that I didn’t like to admit even to myself. But while my bag warmed me with the last of its power and my breath spilled out in white plumes toward the roof of our tent, while the flicker of a whisper stove melted snow for midnight tea, I lay in that dead zone above sixty thousand feet and hoped not just for the failure of those above me, but that no man summit and live to tell the tale. Not before I had my chance.

It was a shameful admission, one I nearly raised with Hanson, my tent mate, to see in the wrinkles of his snow-beat face whether this was a guilt shared. I suspected it was. In the mess tents and around the yellow craters we dubbed latrines, the look among us was that only one would be remembered. The rest would die alone in the snow or live a long life forgotten—and not one of us would’ve been able to explain to a child the difference. Frozen to death by altitude or by time was all the same. The truth was this: History remembers the first, and only the first. These are the creeping and eternal glaciers, the names etched across all time like scars in granite cliffs. Those who came after were the inch or two of snowdrift that would melt in due time. They would trickle, forgotten, into the pores of the earth, be swallowed, and melt snow at the feet of other forgotten men.

It was a quarter past Eno’s midnight and time to get up. If Shubert and Humphries were to make it to the top, they likely would’ve by now. If any of their gear still worked, they would be radioing in their victory, taking the first pictures of starlit peaks wrinkling far past the limits of sight. By now, they would know how many fingers and toes it cost them, how much oxygen was left in their tanks, whether or not they would live to speak of the mountain’s conquest.

The faint odor of tea penetrated my dark thoughts. It must’ve been a potent brew to smell it at all. We had already scaled beyond the heights where taste and scent fade to oblivion. One had to remind himself to eat and drink, for the stomach is one of those organs that knows when to quit. It is the first, in fact, to go. The mind of the climber is the last.

Hanson brought me tea. I wormed a single arm out into the cold, though my heating bag had become a feeble thing. I did not want to lose what little it held. I coughed into my fist, that persistent cough of the dead zone, and accepted the steaming mug.

There were no words spoken as we forced ourselves to drink. Every twitch was an effort at those altitudes. We were sleeping higher than all the fabled peaks of Cirrus VII. Our fourth camp along the Slopeson Ridge, at 42,880 feet, was higher than any speck of dirt on Hanson’s home planet. And when we arrived on this wasteland of a frozen ball, out here in a corner of the galaxy where men go either to not be found or to be remembered for all time, we set up a base camp very near to the highest peak of the place I grew up: Earth. Where men were first born and first began to scale to deadly heights.

I sipped my tea, burning my numb lips, and told myself it would be an Earth-born who scaled Mount Mallory first. This was a distasteful idea that I and many others were willing to share. The secret I kept to myself was that others could die if they dared climb her before me.

Two other private teams were making a go of it that season. Government expeditions and collectives of alpine clubs had given up decades ago. They now watched as men such as I took leave of our day jobs and, with borrowed funds and the best of gear and medicine at hand, set out to prove what was possible.

The window of opportunity for a summit was but a bare sliver of a crack. Half a day at most when the fearful winds of that dizzy world slowed to a manageable gale and before the monsoons buried the rock under drifts a hundred meters deep. The problem, of course, was in not knowing when that half-day would fall. Every climber across thirteen worlds studied the weather charts like day traders. As the season neared, predictions were logged on the net, men in their warm homes with their appetites intact and the feeling still in their fingers and toes would make guesses, watch reports from the satellites left behind by those government expeditions, and make bold claims.

I had been one of those prognosticators until recently. But now, after spending a night at camp 7 beneath the Khimer Ridge, I felt as though I had graduated to one who could sneer at the antics of those at lesser heights. By dint of my travel between the stars and my arduous climb thus far, I was now an expert. It lent Hanson and me the illusion that our guess was far more refined than the others.

Or perhaps it was the lack of oxygen that made us crazy this way. In the middle of that terrible night, rather than spend my last morning thinking of my wife and kids or dwelling further on the debts incurred to travel to frontier stars and hike up a murderous peak, I thought of all my fellow climbers who were safely ensconced in their homes as they followed our every move.

Right now, they likely followed Shubert and Humphries, two strong climbers who had knocked out all else the galaxy had to offer. They would also be keeping an eye on Hanson and me. And then there was the pairing of Ziba and Cardhil, who were also making a bid that year.

Ziba was an enigma of a climber, a small woman who looked far too frail in her heat suit and mask. When first I saw her navigating the Lower Collum Ice Falls above base camp, I mistook her oxygen tanks for double-aughts in size, as they dwarfed her frame. The consensus was that there was little to fear in her attempt that year. I had done some digging before my uplink succumbed to the cold and read that Ziba had knocked out the peaks of her home planet, none of which top thirty thousand feet, but she had at least done them in style. No oxygen and swiftly, one of those modern climbers. It had been a private joy to watch her give in to the true mountaineering methods necessary on Mallory’s great face. The methodical lift of crampons, the bulging tanks of air, the fogging and frosted masks. These were the ways of the true climber. Mallory is an instructor to all, and Ziba did not seem too full of herself to submit, learn, and adapt.

Cardhil, I figured, was the great unknown. Ziba had chosen an odd tent mate in the android. And if it were a manchine that was the first to summit great Mallory, the consensus across the alpine forums was that nothing would have occurred at all. There would not even be an accomplishment to asterisk. And anyway, I had sent notes a week ago to an old climbing buddy, telling him not to worry. The cold was worse on the manchine’s joints than our own. Hanson and I had left camp 6 while Ziba was chipping away at Cardhil’s frozen ankles. And please don’t tell me that a man’s memories counted for the man himself, that the android lived because he remembered living. I have had many a conversation with Cardhil around base camp and watched him with the Sherpas. He is no different than the droid who cleans my pool or walks my dog. A clever approximation, but with movements too precise, too clean, to pass for human. The other day, Hanson nudged me in time to turn and catch Cardhil taking a great spill on the east face. The way he did even this was unnatural. Supremely calm and without a whimper, the manchine had slid several hundred feet on his ass, working his climbing ax into the deep snow, with all the false grace of an automaton.

Nobody feared this duo as long as they were behind and below us. There, off our ropes and out of our way, they had only themselves to kill.

Hanson and I left our flapping tent in utter darkness. The driven snow blocked out all but a few of the twinkling stars. Near the tent, a pile of spent oxygen bottles gathered a drift. They glowed bright in Hanson’s headlamp. Debris such as this would be left for all time. They were an addition to the landscape. The local Ha-Jing, whose lands included half of great Mallory, made good money selling permits to aspiring climbers, and this litter came with the riches. The south face of Mallory, which some climbers posited would make for an easier ascent, was governed by the irascible Hiti. Great climbers by all accounts but miserable at governing. The only assaults on that face have been clandestine affairs. There had been some arrests over the years, but like many who come to Eno hoping to etch their name in the history books, most simply disappeared.

Hanson broke snow for the first hour, his head down in a stiff breeze. We had radios in our parkas but rarely used them. Good tent mates had little need for words. Roped in to one another, the union becomes symbiotic. You match paces, one staring at a flash-lit patch of bright snow, the other staring at a man’s back, illuminating a spot in a sea of darkness. Boots fell into the rapidly filling holes of the climber ahead, each lifting of a crampon some new torture, even with the springs of the powered climbing pants taking most of the strain.

I’d lost count of the number of peaks we’d climbed together. It was in the dozens across a handful of planets, most of those climbs coming over the past five years. Climbers tend to orbit one another long before they share tents. The first time I met Hanson was back on Earth on a new route of Nanga Parbat, a small mountain but notorious for gobbling souls. Climbers called her “Man Eater,” usually with knowing and nervous smiles. Tourists from other planets came to exercise on its west slope or to make an attempt on its south face while preparing for harsher climbs. Some took the tram to Everest to hike up to the top and join the legions who made that yearly pilgrimage only to walk away wondering what the fuss was about.

I tended to bite my tongue during such diminishing talks of my planet’s highest peak. My twenty-year partnership with Saul, my previous tent mate, had ended on a harmless run up Everest. There was a saying among the Hiti Sherpas: “Ropes slip through relaxed grips.” The nearest I ever came to death was while climbing indoors, of all things. It wasn’t something I told anyone. Those few who had been there and the doctors who tended to me knew. When anyone noticed my limp, I told them it happened during my spill on Kurshunga. I couldn’t say that I’d failed to double back my harness and took a forty-foot spill on a climb whose holds had been color-coded for kids.

Saul had also fallen prey to a relaxed grip. He had died while taking a leak on Everest’s South Col. It was hard to stomach, losing a good man and great friend like that. Hanson, who trudged ahead of me, had lost his former tent mate in more glorious fashion the same year Saul died. And so mountains brought couples together like retirement homes. You look around, and what you have left is what you bed down with. Ours, then, was a marriage of attrition, but it worked. Our bond was our individual losses and our mutual anger at the peaks that had taken so much from us.

As Hanson paused, exhausted, and I rounded him to break snow, I patted the old man on the back, the gesture silent with thick gloves and howling wind, but he bobbed his head in acknowledgment to let me know he was okay. I coughed a raspy rattle into my mask. We were all okay. And above us, the white plumes and airborne glitter of driven ice and snow hid the way to glory. But it was easy to find. Up. Always up. One more foot toward land that no man had ever seen and lived to tell about.

At sixty thousand feet—the height of two Everests stacked one on top of the other—man and machine alike tended to break down. We were at the limit of my regimen of steroids. The gears in my hiking pants could be heard grinding against one another, even over all that wind. And the grease smeared over the parts of my face not sheltered by the oxygen mask had hardened until it felt like plaster, like blistered and unfeeling skin, but to touch it and investigate it was to invite exposure and far worse.

Batteries meant to last for days would perish in hours up there. The cold was death for them. And so our suits gave up as we moved from the death zone to a land that begged for a name far more sinister. The power left in struggling batteries went to the pistons and gears, routed away from the heaters. Fingers and toes went first. They would grow numb; the blood would stop flowing through them; the flesh would become necrotic and die right there on the bone.

The Sherpas of Changli had a saying: “A man can count on two hands all the climbs he conquers, and that man conquers nothing.” I always took this to mean the more we summit, the more we lose. Climbers were notorious for staring down bars in base camp at lifted mugs, silently counting digits gone missing, making a measure of a man’s worth by how far they’d pushed themselves. Saul had a different take on the Changli saying. To the people who lived in the shadows of mountains, these were not things to conquer. To climb them was foolish, and who would think to do so? As much as I had loved Saul, he was always too politically correct for my tastes.

Breaking snow up that unnamed ridge, my mind turning to mush as supplemental oxygen and doped blood could only do so much, I felt the first pangs of doubt. My cough rattled inside my mask; my limbs felt like solid lead. Two days prior, at camp 5, I had pushed myself beyond my abilities. Eating and drinking moved from inconvenient chores to something I dreaded. My weight was down. I hadn’t been out of my clothes to see what I’d wasted away, just comforted myself instead on how much less I now had to lug to the top.

The radio in my parka clicked on with the sound of Hanson breathing. I waited a moment between arduous steps and listened for what he had to say. When the radio clicked off, I turned to check on him, my headlamp pointed at his chest so as not to blind him. Hanson was a strong climber, one of the strongest I’d ever seen. He had fallen back to the end of the rope that joined us, his breath clouding his mask. Lifting a hand a few inches from his thigh was all the wave he could muster.

“Take your time,” I told him, clicking the large switch on my belt. What I wanted to say was what the hell we thought we were doing. There, five thousand feet below us and eight light years away, was the tallest peak ever climbed. We were moving into the thin air above the highest of heads. We would have been in outer space on some small planets, in orbit around others. And still, we wanted to conquer more.

The rope between us drooped as Hanson took a few laborious steps. I turned and broke snow, resigning myself to an extra hour at the head, an extra shift to give him more rest. It was hard to know what drove you once you passed the thresholds of all pain. Maybe it was the thought of Shubert and Humphries somewhere above us, either in glory or buried in snow. Maybe it was the fear that Ziba had gotten Cardhil’s ankle sorted and that they would begin their push later that morning. Or maybe it was the promise I’d made to myself after telling my wife and kids that I would be safe. I had told them that I wouldn’t take chances. But I had already promised myself something different: I would come home with that final ridge named after me, or I wouldn’t come home at all.

My altimeter died at 62,000 feet, even though the manufacturer sold these with a guarantee of 100,000. Such guarantees were bullshit gestures with no real-world testing. As I climbed, I composed the post I would make on the forums complaining of its failure. And had my remaining fingers been any kind of functional, I would’ve removed the strap from my arm to save the weight. Instead, I carried one more dead thing up with me. From then on, I had to guess how high I was by the hour. It was still dark and we were probably at 63,100 feet when I stumbled across Humphries.

He wore an orange suit, the kind that men with low confidence and a care for their mortal coil wore. It made them more easily found and more likely to be found, two very different things. I pointed out the snow-dusted form so Hanson wouldn’t trip on him, but I didn’t slow. Humphries had died facing the summit, which meant he hadn’t made it. I felt a mix of relief and guilt for the awful thoughts I’d held in my sleeping bag all night. Shubert, of course, was still out there. We could meet him stomping down in the dark, his eyes as bright as the handful of twinkling stars above, and whatever was driving Hanson and me upward would likely leak out our pores. Whatever glory I had hoped to win would be spent in future days recounting my time on the same slopes as this other man. I would detail my ordeal up Shubert Ridge, a horrible name if ever there was one. I would write of his glory and bask in whatever shadows fell my way. These were my mad ruminations as I left his dead tent mate behind and crunched through that terrible snow a thousand feet beneath the peak.

A tug at my harness gave me pause. Hanson was flagging again, at the end of his rope and ours. I questioned what I was running on for Hanson to give out before me. I wondered if the doctors hadn’t worked some kind of special magic between the doping and the careful regimen of drugs. Perhaps the coils in my pants were holding up better than his. Hanson had skimped on his gears and had invested in more heat. I may be freezing to death, but I was still climbing. I saw the look on his face, beyond the glare of my headlamp and the frost of his desperate breathing, and that look told me that this was as high as he would go. It was a look I’d only seen from him once before, but enough times from others to not need the radio.

After a coughing fit, I jerked my thumb toward the summit. Hanson lifted his hand from his thigh and waved. As I pulled the quick release that held our rope to my harness, I wondered if I would be stepping over both him and Humphries on my way back down. God, I hoped not. I watched him turn and trudge into the dark maw of night and white fang of snow before looking again to my goal. The summit was several more hours away. I would be the first or the second to stand there. Those were adjacent numbers and yet light years apart in my esteem. They were neighboring peaks with a precipitous valley between. Being second was death to me, so I lifted a boot, gears squealing, toes numb, and remembered with sadness the lies I had spoken to my family. There was nothing about this that was safe. If I loved them as much as I loved myself, I would’ve turned around long before Hanson had.

The highlanders of Eno have a saying about climbing alone: “The winds seek out the solitary.” And sure enough, with Hanson dropping back to camp—hopefully dropping back to camp—the winds came for me and shoved my chest for being so bold. With my oxygen running low, the mask became an impediment to breathing, something to catch my coughs. Adjusting the top of the mask against my goggles, fingers frozen stiff, I let the wind howl through a crack, invigorating me with the cold. The gap sang like the sound a puff makes across the mouth of a bottle. This whirring howl was a sort of musical accompaniment. It made me feel less alone. The dwindling oxygen made me feel crazy.

When I came across Shubert, I thought he was already dead. The snow was covering him, and the ridge here was perilously narrow. Solid rock stayed dusted with snow and ice; otherwise it felt the ridge itself should be blowing away.

Shubert stirred as I made my slow and agonizing way around him. He was faintly swimming toward the summit, clawing through the ice, throwing his ax forward. I stopped and knelt by the young and powerful climber. His suit made no noise. It must’ve given out on him, leaving him alone and under his own power. My thoughts were as wild as the wind, disturbed by my air-starved mind. I thought of Cardhil and how something so reliant on its mechanical bits held any hope for rising above camp 7. I rested a hand on Shubert’s back to let him know he wasn’t alone. I don’t know that he ever knew I was there. He was still crawling, inch by inch, toward the summit, as I trudged along, head down, mask singing a sad lament. If I made the top and got home, I decided I would name that ridge after him. I was already dreaming not just of being a legend, but the awesome humility I would display even so. It was delusion beyond delusion. I was dying, but like Shubert, I cared only about the next inch.

The oxygen ran dry as the sun broke. My headlamp had grown feeble anyway, frosted with ice and with its battery crippled by the freezing temperatures. This was my last sunrise, I was fairly sure. Cutting through the shark’s teeth of peaks that ran the breadth of this alien continent, the dull red glow was empowering with its illusion of warmth. Once that large foreign star lifted its chin above the most distant of snowcapped crowns, it seemed to rise with a vengeance. It made a mockery of my own agonizing ascent.

It occurred to me in the wan light of dawn that I was the highest man in the universe. Coughing into my mask, I couldn’t feel my legs, but I could at least balance on them. The handful—not quite—of fingers and toes I had left would be gone. But that was optimistic. I could see the summit up the ridgeline. There was no more technical climbing, no ice to work up, no faces or craggy steps, just a long walk on unfeeling stumps. A walk to a grave that stood far over all mortal heads.

I found myself on my knees without remembering falling. The snow was thin here. It blew off sideways and was just as soon replaced. There would be no flags ahead, no weather stations, no books to scribble in, no webcams showing a high sunrise to millions of net surfers. It was just a lonely and quiet peak. Not a footstep. Not ever. Untrammeled earth, a thing that had grown exceedingly rare.

The people of Eno had their own name for Mallory. Locals always did. It translated to Unconquerable, but of course nothing was. It was always a matter of time, of the right gear, the right support teams, all the ladders and lines and camps and bottles put in by hardworking Sherpas.

I was on my hands and knees, mask howling, lightheaded and half-sane, crawling toward my destiny. And I missed Hanson. I wanted him there. I missed him more than my wife and kids, whom I would never see again. There was my grave up ahead, a bare patch of rock where snow danced across like smoke, like running water, like angels in lace dresses.

I wondered if my body would lie there forever or if the wind would eventually shove me off. I wondered this as I reached the summit, dragging myself along, my suit giving up the last of its juice. Collapsing there, lying on my belly, I watched the sun rise through my mask. And when it frosted over, and my coughing grew so severe, I worried those were flecks of purple lung spotting my vision, I accepted my death by pulling the mask free to watch this last sunrise, this highest and most magnificent sunrise, with my very own eyes.

The tallest climbs, often, are the easiest. All the great alpinists know this. Tell someone you’ve summited Mokush on Delphi, and the mountaineer will widen his eyes in appreciation while the layman squints in geographical confusion. The steep rock approaches of Mokush more than make up for the lack of elevation. And of the several hundred who have reached the top—Hanson and I among them—thousands have perished. Few peaks have so bold a body count and so brief a list of conquerors.

On the other hand, list the highest peaks of the eight old worlds, and most will whistle in appreciation. Everyone knows the great climber Darjel Burq, the first to top the tallest mountain on each of the civilized worlds. But other climbers know that Darjel was hoisted up many of those by Sherpas, and that he never once assaulted the great Man Killers who stand along the shoulder of those more famous giants and claim the more daring of men.

This was a peak for climbers like Darjel, I thought, lying on the top of the universe and dying. Here was a peak for the tourists. One day—as I coughed up more of my lung, pink spittle melting the frosting of snow on my mitts—the wealthy would pay for a jaunt to the top of Mallory. The drugs and heat suits and blood doping would improve. In another five years, I would have made this climb and lived to tell the tale. But not today. And anyway: in five years, it would not have mattered. I wouldn’t have been the first.

The sun traveled through its reds and pinks until the frozen skin of Eno was everywhere golden. It was a good place to die. And when my body was found, they would know I’d made it. Unless it was many years hence and the wind and blizzards had carried me off to a secret grave. Such had been Mallory’s fate, the great and ancient climber whose name graced this peak. I was of those who never believed Mallory had made it to the top of Earth’s highest summit. But no longer. The madness of my oxygen-deprived brain, the sad glory of my one-way victory, and suddenly I knew in that very moment that Mallory had climbed to the top of my homeworld. He had simply never planned for the climb back down.

Sleep came amid the noisy and blustery cold. It was a peaceful sleep. My breathing was shallow and raspy, but at least the cough had gone away. I woke occasionally and looked an alien sun in the face, whispered a few words to that orange ball of fire, and allowed the ice to hold fast my lids once more.

I dreamed of my wife. My kids. I went back to the party my office had thrown, all the confetti and balloons, the little gifts that were well-meant but that I would leave behind as useless. Coffee and dried meals, boot warmers that were suited for lesser hikes, the kind of gifts that show how little these revelers and kin know of where they are wishing me off to with their gay ribbons and joyous cards.

The mementos, likewise, had been left behind. The picture of my nephew that my sister dearly wanted me to carry to the roof of all the worlds. A dozen of these that seemed so small and light to each giver but added up to difficult choices and considerable weight, and so none of them even made it to base camp.

I longed for all of them in that moment. Not that I could have dug them out with my dead fingers, but just to have them on my body. In case my preserved form was ever discovered and picked through by future explorers. Just so they would see that these things were there. That I wasn’t so alone.

I woke once more and spoke to the sun, and he called me a fool. His climb was rapid and impressive. And who was I? I was a mortal pretending to do godly things. I had wax for wings. I was already dead, my body frozen, but all the effort of my being, my slowing and cooling blood, the best drugs doctors could pump into me, kept my thoughts whirring. Slowly whirring like gears with their dying batteries. Just one more turn. Another thought.

I woke and spoke to an angel. So small. The world was outsized for her. An angel in a mask, breath fogging it with ice, no tanks on for that final and swift climb of hers.

I passed out again, but I felt the world shudder beneath me. The mountain was rising. They did this, you know. Confounding last year’s climbers by lifting up a fraction more for the next season. Always this: our accomplishments subsiding to time and acclimation. That fear that our former feats were yesterday’s glory. Every year, the mountains moved just a hair higher. And I was likewise now rising and falling, numb everywhere except in my mind. Only in my head, by the jounce of my neck, could I feel the world move.

Ziba was there, a face behind a mask, an angel with no oxygen, laboring down that nameless ridge having summited after me.

And Cardhil, whose ankle had seized, whose gears whirred, whose mind was said to be that of the great climber of the same name, but it was not something I ever believed. Until that moment. And I would never doubt again. It was Cardhil who carried me. And the perfect grace that had seemed inhuman at base camp felt like a real man to me on that summit. Cardhil staggered and limped along. He cradled me in his mighty and trembling arms.

At camp 7, Hanson tended to me, though he was in no shape to do so. He said my hands were gone. My feet as well. I believed him.

At 6, we notified base camp. We informed Humphries and Shubert’s team that they had perished nobly. The controversy was not in my mind at camp 6. I was weeping frozen tears. I was still dead on that peak, blabbering to alien stars. I had not yet been carried anywhere.

There was no memory of camp 5. I’m not even certain we stopped there. At camp 4, a doctor removed my lips and my nose. It required no instruments. My Sherpas were there to congratulate me. The horror of what I’d done was far worse than the horror of what I’d become. I could look at myself in the mirror with no revulsion. To think on myself, though, was to invite black thoughts.

Ziba and Cardhil made it down the mountain ahead of me. I asked Hanson to work the radio, and I tried to form the words with my new face. But it wasn’t my lips that caused problems. It wasn’t my tongue.

At base camp, at this approximation of civilization, I was provided a glimpse of what awaited me across the worlds. And it did not matter who I told or how often. I wrote in every forum, had letters crafted by those who could form them, who could understand my muted, lipless words, but Ziba, I was told, was already off to explore new worlds. And my exhortations that she be remembered fell on deaf ears. Ridgelines had already been named. And when my wife kissed my new face weeks later, the tears I wept were not for seeing her again but for the misery, the pain, of not having been left there where I deserved to lie, where I could be forgotten, frozen in the vastness of time, spinning lazily with broken wings beneath that great orange and alien star. Beneath that star who alone would ever know the awful truth of my most hollow glory.

I doubt I’ll ever write a story as effortlessly as I wrote this one. “The Walk up Nameless Ridge” spilled out of me in a single writing session. It was a story I needed to write for myself, and I immediately thought of it as one of my finest. Which is a bit ironic, because the story is about how unworthy I am as a writer. It was a rejection of what little fame my novel Wool was bringing me. An attempt to step back and hide from the world.

At the time, Wool seemed to be everywhere. It was on the New York Times Best Sellers list, and the five individual parts were clogging up the top of Amazon’s science fiction Best Sellers lists. It was a bizarre feeling, a mix of exhilaration and embarrassment. I was sure I didn’t deserve any of this. The feeling was crippling at times.

Around the same time, I read Kevin Kelly’s excellent book What Technology Wants. Kevin helps dispel the illusion of singular creators, discoverers, and inventors. What is true of the sciences I believe is also true of art. Success in art lies as much in the changing tastes of the crowd as in the offerings. There is a varied froth of material being generated at all times, much of it along narrow themes, and when the need from the audience becomes great enough, one stream of that art is rewarded.

I’ve seen many parallels to Wool in other forms of popular culture. There were a lot of artists thinking about the same issues, wrestling with the same ideas, because artists are part of the general population, and we were all wrestling with the same forces all around us. It’s not coincidence; it’s shared experience.

With “The Walk up Nameless Ridge,” I wanted to write about the possibility that our true explorers will never be known. Maybe we should give less credit to those we think broke new ground. And maybe we should look harder and appreciate more those who came before us.

Second Suicide

I wonder, sometimes, if this is not me. Holding a tentacle up in front of the mirror, turning my eyestalk and studying these webbed ears, these bright green eyes with their space-black slits, I become convinced they belong to some other. It is a morning contemplation that, much like the gas from breakfast, eventually passes by mid-afternoon. But when I rise, I feel it is in another’s body. My brain is discombobulated from sleep, and I sense some deep gap between my soul and my form. I think on this while on the toilet, until my bunkmate, Kur, slaps the bathroom door with his tentacle.

“Always in a rush to shit,” I shout through the door, “but never in a hurry to be first from bed.”

Kur pauses in his protestations, possibly to consider this contradiction. “It is your smelly ass that wakes me,” he finally explains.

I flush and pop the door. Somewhere, our spaceship home will turn my waste into a meal. I like to pretend it will all go to Kur. Outside, we jostle in the tight confines of our bunkroom as he takes my place in the crapper.

“What day is it?” he asks, farting. Most of our conversations are through this door. Once our shifts begin, we don’t see each other. Kur works in Gunnery, and I moved up to Intelligence ages ago, after the conquest of the Dupliene Empire. The new job came with a superiority complex, but, alas, not a larger bunk.

“It’s Second Monday,” I tell him. We are practicing our Native. Kur and I are both assigned to Sector 2 landfall. He will be shooting at the very crowds I have studied, and on this planet they have seven days to a cycle instead of twelve. Such confusions are likely why I awake feeling like some other. You settle in the skin of an alien race, and by the time you feel at home there, they are no more.

Kur flushes. “Not day of the week. What day till planetfall?”

I hear the sink run as he washes his tentacle. Kur’s personal hygiene makes up for much else.

“It’s eight days to planetfall,” I tell him. “Near enough that you should know.”

He cracks the door. His bottoms are still undone. “I dreamed today was the day,” he says. “Very confusing. I was mowing down the pink cunts when your foul emanations stirred me.” He screws his eyestalks together, suppressing a laugh or a bout of gas. “Explains the cannon fire in my dreams,” he says.

He laughs and farts and laughs some more.

I am reminded of my own nightmares. They usually come right after a conquest. In these dreams, it is suddenly the day of the next planetfall, and I don’t know my assignments. I don’t know the language or my targets or the geography. I haven’t had these dreams in a long time, though. I feel prepared. I know this planet Earth twice as well as I have any other. I am as ready for this invasion as I have ever been.

While Kur finishes dressing himself, I tap the grimy terminal on the wall. A light in the top corner is flashing, twice long and one short: a message for me.

“Fuck me,” I say.

“Seriously?” Kur asks. He flashes his fangs and points to his bottoms. “I just got the last button done.”

“I’ve been reassigned.”

Kur’s joke hits my brainstump a moment later, too late for a retort. He shoulders me aside to study the terminal for himself.

“A new bunkmate,” he says. “A girl. Maybe this one will sex me.”

“I will miss you, too,” I say. It is a half-truth. But my feelings are raw that Kur seems not sad at all. Part of me expects him to grieve.

“I wonder if she’s cute,” Kur says. He is making his bunk before breakfast, a feat I have never witnessed. He says her name aloud: “Mil.” Almost as if he is tasting the sound of it. Tasting her.

“I think she must be deranged is what,” I say. “Two suicides in a cycle. How much do suicides cost these days?”

“Two thousand credits,” Kur says. “Squad mate of mine had to pay recently. Cut his neck shaving with a butcher’s knife. Swears up and down it was an accident.” He turns and shrugs his tentacle as if to say: No damn way it was an accident.

“Well, glad I’m not getting this roommate,” I say. “She’ll probably kill herself in the crapper while you sleep.”

Kur laughs. “You’re jealous. And I’m not the one with eight days to learn a sector.”

This only now occurs to me. Sector 1. That’s the continent known as Asia in Native. A large landmass, heavily populated. I pray the languages there are mere dialects of Sector 2’s. Hate to waste my vocab.

I also mull the four thousand credits this Mil from Telecoms now owes for the two suicides. That’s a lot of cred. All of that in a lump sum would be nice. It takes five thousand credits to buy a settlement slot these days. I could own a small plot of land on one of these worlds we conquer. Watch the fleet sail on without me.

Such are my thoughts as I pile my belongings onto my bed and knot the corners of the sheets. Everything I own can be lifted with two tentacles. Kur describes in lurid detail a girl he has yet to meet while I double-check that my locker is empty and I have everything. I find myself imagining this Mil dangling by her own tentacle from the overhead vent—and then I see Kur sexing her like this, and I need out of that room. Maybe he is right about me being jealous.

Opening the door and setting my sack in the hall, I turn to my mate of the last three invasions. Who knows when I’ll see him again?

Kur has a tentacle out. He is looking at me awkwardly and plaintively, as if this goodbye has come just as suddenly for him. I am overwhelmed by this unexpected display of affection, this need to touch before I leave the ship, this first and final embrace.

“Hey,” he says, his eyestalks moist. “About that fifty you owe me…”

The transfer shuttle is waiting for me. The pilot seems impatient and undocks before I get to my seat. As he pulls away from my home of a dozen lifetimes, I peer through the porthole and gaze longingly at the great hull of the ship, searching for familiar black streaks and pockmarks from our shared journey through space. This far from our target star, the hull is nearly as dark as the cosmos, her battle wounds impossible to find. My face is to the glass, and it is as though an old friend refuses to look back. Suddenly, it is not the shuttle peeling away from my ship. It is my ship withdrawing from me.

I remember when she was built. It was in orbit above Odeon, thousands of years ago during a resupply lull. It was the last time I was transferred. Those thousands of years now feel like hundreds. I try to remember a time before this ship, but those days are dulled by the vast expanse of time. It often seems as though we were born together—like the ship is my womb but the two of us share the same mother.

I brush the glass with a tentacle as I gaze at her, and I hunt for the marks of wear upon my own flesh. I search for reminders from my years as a gunner—but those scars must be on another tentacle. It was so long ago. Or maybe I am remembering old scars that are gone now, washed clean when last I died. It is a shame to lose them. With them go my memories of how they occurred. Those reminders should be a part of me, just as I was part of that ship. But now its steel plates fall away and lose detail, until my old home is just a wedge of pale gray among hundreds of such wedges.

I turn in my seat. Past the pilot I can see my new home, a similar craft, practically identical. And beyond that, a disk of illumination brighter than the neighboring stars—the planet that all the fleet has its pointy bits aimed at.

The pilot docks, lazily and with loud, jarring clangs. I thank him as I enter the airlock. Onboard the new ship—with some struggle and crappy directions—I find my bunk. My mate is not there. On shift, no doubt. I leave my things on the stained and bare mattress of the upper bunk, wondering idly if this is where the girl of the second suicide slept, or if perhaps my new bunkmate has been waiting for this day to claim the lower. The suicide girl probably passed me in another shuttle, is at this very moment surveying my empty bed. Or lying in it. Or she is dangling by a tentacle from my old air vent.

I can’t stop thinking on the suicides. As I wend my way down foreign corridors, placing a tentacle here and there on the unfamiliar pipes and plates that squeeze in around me, I wonder what madness in some strange woman brought me here. Not that I haven’t killed myself, but that was a very long while ago, after my second or third invasion. I remember waking up in the same body the next morning—same but newer and still smelling of the vats—and realizing the futility of it all. My supervisor at the time—Yim, I believe—sat me down and explained that bodies weren’t cheap and to cut that shit out. I soon realized that taking a blaster to my own head was no different than falling in battle, just more expensive. It took centuries to work off that debt, what with the interest. It only takes once to know the headache is not worth it, that the numbness is not worth it. Going to sleep at night is a more useful and less costly way to not exist for some short while.

Unless… maybe this girl in my old bunk is so far in debt that more of it is hardly felt. Maybe she enjoys the waking. Maybe she loves learning to use her tentacles again. I remember that, the deadness in my suckers after reviving. Like I’d slept on them wrong. That is not a feeling I crave enough to kill myself for. But there are those much crazier than I.

Eight days to planetfall, and here I am lost on another’s ship and thinking on nonsense. This will be one of those invasions where I am useless, standing on the sidelines and watching, no time to adequately prepare. I’m comfortable with that. No one can blame me. The late transfer is not my fault.

I pass a woman in the corridor and notice the way her stalks follow mine. Hey, maybe a new ship will be good for me. Maybe my bunkmate is lousy at gambling. I can get used to this life, as I have so many others. This is what I tell myself, that I can be happy in this skin of mine. For what other choice is there?

I find Supervisor Bix in the Sector 1 command hall, near the front of the ship. A terminal tech points him out through the glass. There are three men and two women bent over a table that glows with a land map. Stretching my stalk, I can see Sector 1 and part of Sector 2. I watch these supervisors argue, can hear their muffled annoyance through the glass, and I see that things operate similarly here as everywhere else—with very little grease and a lot of grind.

The more I watch, though, the more I note the added stress among Bix’s superiors, those men and women wearing emblems of High Command. I don’t know these commanders personally (nor anyone of their rank—I report to those who report to them), but I can clearly see the tension in their tentacles, in the twitch of their stalks, and I do not envy them their jobs.

The display screen is centered on the fat land of my new sector. I see great swaths of blue, and then the coast of my old sector at the very edge of the map. The men and women inside the room seem nervous. Tentacles are waving, and I can hear shouts through the thick glass. Eight days to planetfall, and this must be the stress of ultimate responsibility. Why any ship jockeys to lead these incursions is beyond me. Surely it is best to be number two.

Cycles ago, after selecting Earth as a target and assigning sectors, there was a pissing match between my ship and this one over who had final rank. This happens when you study a planet long enough. You see its history through the lens of your sector, and you feel rightly that your target is the most crucial. With Sector 2, I would have landed on a long continent pinched in the middle like a woman sucking in her gut. Sparsely populated, but my supervisor liked to point out that the wealth per life form was high and that their military spending outpaced all other sectors. But invasions are about bodies in the end, and no one can compete with Sector 1.

Heh. Funny how quickly I adopt the other side’s arguments now that I’m here. Part of me always thought they had it right. Or so I tell myself. The homesickness is draining away as I wait for Supervisor Bix to finish his meeting. I imagine that he requested me personally. He must have studied my files. My chest inflates with the sudden pride of a new home, a new position, new people to know and impress. It is like a new body, but I get to keep the scars.

I make eyestalks with one of the receptionists in the waiting room. She smiles, and I can see her neck splotch in embarrassment. “Here to see Supervisor Bix,” I say, tucking a tentacle into my waistband. “I work in Intelligence.”

The receptionist opens her mouth to reply when Bix comes out, trailing his superiors. I introduce myself and offer a tentacle, which Bix declines. He seems confused. And then his eyestalks straighten with awareness. “From Sector Two,” he says.

“That’s right.” I puff out my gut. “Liaison Hyk. Intelligence, Sector Two.”

Bix waves a tentacle. “No, no. You’ve been moved to Gunnery. Go see Yut for your assignment. I’m busy.”

The air is out of me. I look to the receptionist, who diverts her stalk. “Ship’s gunner?” I ask with all the hope I can muster.

“Ground gunner,” Bix says. “See Yut.”

“But I’m a man of learning,” I complain.

Someone snickers, and I see that I’m a walking cliché.

“I haven’t been a gunner in lifetimes,” I add. “I’ll last five minutes down there.”

“Then you’ll wake up here and be sent right back in,” Bix says. “I suggest you die heroically, so the body doesn’t cost you.”

“But why was I transferred?” I ask. “Was there something in my files—?”

Bix swivels his eyestalks toward me. “You’re on this ship to get someone else off it,” he says. “Nothing more. You can show us what you’re made of”—I catch him looking at another officer with something like worry—“the next go-around.”

With this, Bix and these other men and women of high station lumber off on their tentacles. The receptionist looks at me with pity for the barest of moments, and then turns back to her work, leaving me to show myself out.

Gunnery is in the rear of the ship, where all the other little ships are kept. It’s far enough to take a shuttle, which allows me to sit in sullen silence. I watch the stars go by. I pick out my old ship among the fleet. At least, I think it’s mine. I wonder if my bodies are still on that ship. If the shuttle loses pressure and I die right now, where will I wake up? And what would be the last thing I remembered? It’s been a while since I saved my thoughts. I’ll have to do that soon.

The constellations are strange from this point in space, but I can pick out a few stars we’ve visited. I have small souvenirs from a few. There are others that exist only in the history books. Like Celiad, where we learned the secret of the vats. Or ancient Osh, where our ancestors learned how to store the memories of man into machine.

Our current gun tech came from Aye-Stad, which I visited countless cycles ago. Our ships are from Rael. And thanks to the K’Bk, we no longer have disease, but I remember how such things as plagues used to work. The races I study still employ their immune systems, and the parallels between those systems and us as a race are striking. For we have become what Earthlings would call white blood cells. We remove foreign bodies from the cosmos. And every one leaves an imprint, a bauble of tech or a new idea, all of which we neatly coil into our lives, into our molecular structure. We are an immune system, and we are immune to death. This last, alas, is our curse.

As the shuttle takes us aft, I gaze through the cockpit past the pilot, and I imagine Second Fleet off in the distance, those ships out there identical to our own. Second Fleet trails us dutifully in case something awful happens. A backup full of backups. With my sudden demotion, I wonder what it would be like to wake up there, in the wake of my former home, with true mortality within tentacle’s reach.

Thinking of tentacles makes me realize mine have slimed up with thoughts of Gunnery. It has been a long time since I landed on a planet with the first wave. Surely this is temporary, this demotion. Didn’t Bix say so? It is simply because of the short time until planetfall. It is because of that silly woman with her second suicide. She is being punished, and so they punish us both. It should have been Kur sent here, a true gunner.

When was the last time I fought with a first wave? Memories of bright and colorful worlds swirl together. The one thing in common is the brown mud on my boots. Slogging through battlefields. Noticing details like how the insides of sentient things have much in common: the same blood that colors red in the air, the sacs for breathing, the sacs for pumping blood through tubes, the tendrils for turning thoughts into things.

The dead and these worlds, they blur together like all colors into a dull brown. All I remember in the end is that I did my job, shooting so I would not be shot. All I remember in the beginning is the fear of death.

This is something you get over. You live with the fear until you die for the first time, and then you realize death isn’t the end. Not when you have another body waiting in a vat with a backup of your recent recollections. It is painful, though, both the death and the rebirth. Painful and expensive. Both are deterrents meant to keep us on our guard. That’s my theory, anyway. That they add the rebirth pain on purpose so you avoid dying the way a tentacle avoids a fire.

I no longer fear death, but still I try not to draw her attention. I like this me, however imperfectly it fits. I like my small scars, even if I can’t recall where I got them. I search my tentacle for an old wound as the shuttle banks around the ass of my new ship, but some scars are memories that have faded, and some memories go with scars that no longer exist.

A glimmer of stars beyond my porthole distracts me from these sentimental thoughts. I think I can see Second Fleet, those little pinpricks among pinpricks, back there where true immortality lies. Though I fear a return to Gunnery, I know I will go into battle invulnerable. Our fleet is invincible when planetfall comes. We march through civilizations the way a child splashes through puddles, for in the distance lies our safety valve. One day, of course, we will face a surprisingly resilient foe. Or we will drop our guard because a thousand conquered worlds have left us bored with victory. Someone will vanquish us, but we will awaken in bright new ships, and we will show this foe that we do not die so easily.

Bah. Listen to me. An hour back in Gunnery, and I am giving speeches meant to clench loins and rush boys into battle. Already pretending to be brave. When what I really need is a strong drink and to meet those among my new bunkmates who gamble recklessly.

It is six days to planetfall, and instead of working on my aim with the new and improved double-barreled GAW13s, here I am in the smelly hall of records digging through files. I am looking for a girl who I’m not even sexing on behalf of a former bunkmate who little loves me. My mother would say the suckers on my tentacles have grown soft, and she would be right. Look at how little a fight I put up with the demotion to Gunnery. I would think myself spineless were it not for the invasion of Hemput III, where I got a damn fine look at my backbones before the lights went fully out.

I find the suicide girl’s records by looking up her bunk. Easy to do since I sleep in the thing. Mil. I do like that name. And so of course I imagine Kur sexing her. My brain loves torturing the rest of me.

I start a ship-to-ship file transfer to Kur’s terminal so he can pry on his own. Aware that Mil might be the one checking the terminal, I come up with an innocuous header for the message: Hey, Fart-Sac—The report you wanted. While the computer does its job, I scan the file for myself. I remember my transfer orders saying Mil was in Telecoms. Now I read that she was a terminal technician in the radio wing. Gad, I would kill myself too! But now our suicide girl has brains, and Kur is sexing her even more. I resolve to get out tonight and meet someone. Why was Kur not transferred instead of me?

Speaking of transfer, the ship-to-ship is taking forever. Less than an Earth cycle to planetfall, and the networks are as packed as a mess hall on garbum night. I decide to send myself a copy on the intership network, just in case. Besides, I have nothing to read. Sector 1’s written language is nothing like Sector 2’s. If you planted a bomb in Sector 2’s language and scattered the remains on a terminal screen, you would have Sector 1’s language. It’s no wonder this planet is always at war. My language instructor once said: No two people have ever battled that read each other’s poetry, and I believe that. It’s why we in Intelligence are told to avoid poetry at all costs. Learn, but do not empathize.

That should apply here as well, as I read up on Mil. I tell myself I’m doing a bunkmate a favor, but the truth is that I’m in love with a woman I have never met. A woman my former friend is most likely sexing at this very moment. A woman who seems to hate her life as much as I hate mine.

Second Squad, Gunner Troop 5, Sector 1, plays cards with some fucked-up rules. Quks are wild, but only if you have a five-tentacled Kik in your hand. And in a run, you can skip a number if all the cards on both sides are the same gender. They call this the “missing buck” play. What I’m missing is thirty-five credits, and it isn’t because of any difference in skill. It’s because I can’t keep these blasted rules straight.

“Two pair,” Urj says. He’s bluffing, and I wait for the player to his left to call him on it, but a card is drawn instead. This squad will have me broke before they get me killed.

“Urj says you were a liaison officer.”

It takes me a moment to realize I’m being spoken to. I’m trying to determine if my Quk is wild or not.

“Yes,” I tell the brawny woman across from me. Rov is her name. Hard to keep all the new eyestalks straight. “I worked in Intelligence on Warship Two.”

“Warship Two,” someone says with something like sympathy.

I take a sip of my bitter drink.

“Lot of transfers all of a sudden,” Urj, our squad leader, says. He aims a tentacle at Rov. “You were in Accounting, right?”

Rov waves in the affirmative.

“And I was in Water Reclamation until two weeks ago,” Bek says. We’re all waiting on him to play, but he doesn’t seem to be in a hurry. He has one tentacle curled protectively around an enviable pile of credits.

“I thought you all had been together a long time,” I say. I feel less like the new guy. It makes being down thirty-five creds even harder to bear. Unless these are ship-wide rules.

“Nah, they’re throwing everyone to Gunnery for this one,” Urj says. “Heard it from Sergeant Tul. Said it’s ‘All-Tentacles’ this go-around.”

I think back to the argument Bix and his superiors were having when I reported for duty. Seemed tense, but I figure the pressure is always greater on Warship 1. Taking the lead into battle is a heavy responsibility. Performances are judged against prior conquests, and there is a lot of open space between worlds in which to measure one another.

“So what’s this world like?” Rov asks. “If you were a liaison officer, you must’ve done a lot of reading up on the natives. You fluent?”

“Not for our landing sector,” I admit.

Rov looks disappointed.

“But I know quite a bit about the planet in general. From studying Sector Two.”

Urj squares his cards and rests them by his remaining credits. A chair squeaks as the player to my right settles back. All eyestalks are looking at me, and I realize these gunners aren’t curious so much as worried. We’ve had a few All-Tentacle raids in the past. Last time, Warship 5 was lost in orbit, taking all the vats onboard with it. A replacement ship had to be called up from the trailing fleet. Until everyone could be sorted and new bodies grown, there were men and women walking around on their last sets of lives.

“They write about us a lot,” I tell my squad mates. I can see their tentacles stiffen. Except for Bek, who ties three of his limbs into knots of worry. “I don’t mean us, exactly. I mean… their culture is full of doomsday musings. Raids from space are a particularly popular trope.”

“All races are full of doomsday musings,” Bek says. He looks to the others, is trying to comfort them more than himself. “We have our own stories of all this coming to an end. It’s fear of final death.”

“This is worse than most,” I say. “I can only really speak for Sector Two, but they think on little else. They spend more of their money on warfare than any other thing. We submitted a report to the Command Committee about this a while back—”

“Must be your report that has me back in Gunnery,” Rov says, her accusation flying across the table.

“And him too, don’t forget,” Bek points out, waving a tentacle at me.

“Hey, what’s wrong with being a gunner?” asks Urj, who has obviously never been anything but.

“Pipe down,” someone shouts from a bunkroom down the hall. Sounds like the sergeant. A hush settles, and eyestalks swivel guiltily toward the door. Someone makes a move at a pile of credits, but a tentacle slaps the thievery away.

“Tul heard from High Command that the warships are to be kept in low atmo,” Urj says quietly. He is squad commander and to report out of chain is a great sin. Somehow, the hush deepens. The game is forgotten, even the thirty-five that I’m in the hole.

“Reboot and reload?” Gha, a gunner, asks.

Urj nods.

“What’s that mean?” Bek asks, and I am thankful. I grow tiresome of admitting my ignorance on these things.

“It means there are more of us in the vats, and those bodies may be needed as well.”

“Fast as they can grow us,” Gha says, “they’ll send us down.”

Everyone looks at me like I’m responsible for this mess. But what do I know? It’s been ages since I took a life or gave one up. There have been occasional worlds that we passed by because they were deemed too dangerous to take on. There have been worlds we conquered with a single warship. Then there are worlds like these that worry the stalks of those much higher in rank than I’ll ever be. So many types of worlds, and I’ve studied them all.

Instead of spending my free time greasing the outdated gear I’ve been assigned or going over the tactics in my squad manual, I sit in my bunk in the days before planetfall reading about Mil, my absent bunkmate. This is what I call her: my absent bunkmate. We share our bunks, hers and mine, just not at the same time. She is sexed where I used to sleep, while I suffer the dreadful slobbering snores of her old roommate, Lum. I wonder at times, woken at night by the awful noise of Lum sleeping, if the mystery of Mil’s suicides is not right there, one bunk below me.

Mil’s files are full of a vague strangeness, but nothing I can put my sucker on, either for myself or for Kur. Lots of messages are gone—the original ordering is intact, but some numbers are skipped. Reminds me of the “missing buck” play my squad inanely ascribes to.

Quite a few messages are to and from a secretary at High Command, saying that Mil’s reports are being passed along. The actual reports are not among her files, however. There is one partial report quoted, describing a missing signal of some sort. I wonder if one of our advanced scout ships has been taken out. It is from these ships that all my intel came. Does Earth have warning of our arrival? Wouldn’t be the first time. And it would explain the All-Tentacles and the consternation among the higher-ups.

I think of the long-range scans of Earth I used to study. It was evident that fighting had taken place recently and might still be going on. Not unusual on planets we raid, and this planet’s inhabitants are an especially warlike people. If they stopped that fighting and trained their guns toward us, that would be very much not good. The problem with hitting an aggressive race isn’t just their honed skills, but their state of readiness.

Maybe I’m reading too much into Mil’s records, but with so many bodies being thrown into Gunnery, it is time to consider that we are being lowered like a skink into boiling water. Maybe Mil was suggesting we bypass this planet entirely, and High Command is having none of such talk from a terminal tech. Perhaps they deleted her suggestions in case she turns out to be right.

But why the suicides? It’s not just that suicides are expensive—it’s that the chances of offing oneself twice in a single cycle are low. Whatever is ailing someone is not likely to be present when they are brought back.

When my new bunkmate, Lum, returns from her station duties, I set the terminal aside and broach the touchy subject.

“Hey, Lum,” I say.

My bunkmate is eating a gurd. With her mouth full, she raises her stalks questioningly.

“Did you… notice anything strange about Mil before she… well, before either of her suicides?”

“Mmm,” Lum says. She swallows and starts taking off her work clothes. I haven’t been able to tell if she is coming on to me, but I knot my tentacles that she isn’t.

“Yeah,” she says. “She was very different the days before. Both times.”

“How so?” I ask.

Lum throws her clothes into the chute and steps into the crapper to run the shower. “She got real calm,” she says. Steam starts rising in the crapper. I’ve scalded myself twice showering after Lum’s lava blasts.

“You mean, she wasn’t usually calm?”

“Her normal state was to raise hell,” Lum says. She sticks her head out of the crapper, but I notice a tentacle wrapping around the edge of the door. She is dying to shut the conversation off and get in the shower. “The reason Mil offed herself was because of her demotions. She was in High Command a few raids ago. Got bumped down, and she’s been getting bumped down ever since. Causes too much trouble.” Lum screws up her eyestalks. “Speaks her mind,” she says, as if this is a great sin.

“Seems weird,” I say. “Two suicides in a cycle. Taking on that much debt.”

Lum eyes the shower. The steam is, blessedly, cloaking her lower half.

“You ever done it?” I ask. “Ever… you know.”

“No,” she says, smiling. She looks down at herself. “I’m all original. And I’m wasting water. You wanna come in? I can tell you about my crazy ex-bunkmate, and you can scrub the barnacles off my back.”

“I’m good,” I say. “Just curious is all.”

Lum seems, if anything, relieved. I can’t get a bead on her. “Suit yourself.” She starts to pull the door shut, then sticks her head out one last time. Considers something. I’m waiting.

“You were in Intelligence,” she says.

“Still am,” I say. “Gunner is just this one time.”

“And other races, they do it too? Off themselves?”

“A lot,” I say.

“But it’s final death for them,” Lum says.

“Yeah. That’s the point,” I say. “They do it when they get depressed.” Here, I’m drawing more from my own experiences than any of my studies. I remember feeling like I wanted to sleep for a long time. Forever, if I could.

The steam is filling our bunkroom. I feel sweat gathering on my back. Lum studies me for a painfully long while.

“I don’t think Mil was depressed,” she finally says. “I think she was… satisfied. Content, maybe. Or resigned. Or maybe…”

“Maybe what?”

“Or maybe she was scared out of her senses, and she couldn’t get anyone to pay attention. So she finally gave up.”

The next morning, I find what may be a clue. It is discovered by my sensitive back: a lump in my mattress or a spring bent out of shape. This is two mornings in a row with an ache in my spines (my mother would, again, call me soft of tentacle). I tear the sheets off my mattress in search of the answer.

All the springs are in fine shape, but running a tentacle across the mattress, I feel a lump. A very hard lump with sharp corners. It turns out to be a small data drive sewn into the fabric of the mattress. This is most curious. I wouldn’t think my beloved Mil would be into sexing vids, which is all I have ever used these for. The drive is locked. I try to access it with the wall terminal, but it refuses my tentacle. Coded to Mil’s secretions, unless it belongs to someone else.

One mystery is solved, and that’s the second suicide. Even with Mil’s memories restored to some prior, stable state, she would have found the drive and accessed some reminder. She had left a note to herself before the first deed, and upon discovering it, gave a repeat performance. Maybe her superiors knew she had left some memory behind, and so they sent her to another ship. To my bunk. Where she is being sexed by Kur.

The only problem with my brilliant theory is that Kur says she’s still trying to hang herself. But that could be explained by the sexing! I chuckle to myself. I will have to tell Kur that one. I bring up my messages on the terminal to pass this joke along and to tell him about the data drive, when I see a message waiting in my inbox from him, saying that he has thwarted another attempt on her life.

Why does my heart go out to her? Why am I not disturbed? And what if she kills herself yet again and they are out of bodies for her in the vats here? They might bring her back as a man, and now it is too late and I already love her.

Listen to me. A cycle ago, I was dreaming of saving enough for a plot of land and a settlement pass, of making a permanent home on some ball of mud. Now I am worried over a woman with a career of demotions and a pile of debt.

I study the locked drive, this lone token of hers. It was sewn into the top of the mattress, almost as if designed to gouge a spine and annoy the resting. Like it was meant to be found. Maybe it wasn’t planted for her at all—but for me.

Two days to planetfall, and a terminal tech’s madness consumes me. I should be worried about my own skin. A bad death means more debt I can ill afford. But it’s difficult to stop being a liaison officer. I am trained to dig and to study and to know a soul before we destroy them. Now I find myself curious about a soul intent on destroying herself.

It is download day, one day before planetfall. After mess, we file by rank down to the vats and hold our tentacles very still in the tight confines of the scanner. Annual copies were taken in my old line of work, but they were treated casually—few people fall over dead at their research terminals. This time, I don’t move a muscle. I try not to think any stray thoughts. I have a very good feeling that this copy will be needed.

Will I wake up with my current sense of dread intact? Will my first thought be, upon my rebirth, Please don’t let me die tomorrow? What a strange life. It is only strange to me because I have studied so many races who only know final death. Their one life is all, and this causes some among them to guard it until it cannot breathe. Others flail and spend it recklessly. And what do we do? We grow bored of it.

Before I joined the fleet, I remember thinking that we were conquerors of worlds. But we are conquerors of death. How many copies of ourselves have we left behind? How many will be enough? The scanner clicks and whirs around my head, recording these disjointed musings of mine, the hollow in the pit of my soul, and what is really eating at me becomes clear:

I do not dread dying tomorrow as much as I loathe the thought of taking lives with my own tentacles. I have studied for too long, read too much poetry, perhaps. I am used to making planetfall with the last of the landing parties, the crafts full of advisors and record-keepers and relic-takers. I land once the bloated bodies of all a world’s poets have already been turned beneath the soil.

So this I dread. And what else? The repetition. The waking up to do it all over again. Death becomes no more than sleep. And even if I put a bullet to this brain, and the next, and the next, swift enough to test the staying power of the vats, there will always be another of me in Second Fleet, and finally I will tire of this as well.

The scanner records these worst of my thoughts. And then the whirring and grinding falls still. Ah, how I wish I could fall still as well. Into some meditative, or more permanent, silent state.

And with this, the mystery of Mil’s second suicide is solved. It is so obvious, I feel like slapping myself with my own tentacles. I squirm from the scanner. As the next gunner takes my place, I badger the scanner technician to look something up for me on his terminal. He is annoyed, but I have all the charm of a liaison officer. All I need is a date. I need to know when Mil performed her last routine backup. I tell him it is a matter of life and death. Of life and debt. And he relents.

The date is near enough that I know that I am right, but I rush back to my bunkroom and pull up Mil’s records to be sure. And yes, her backup was soon after the missing messages but just before her first attempt. Whatever she knows, it doesn’t look bad to a technician on her scans. It is not a black fog of depression, no bright colors of mental imbalance. Just a piece of knowledge, cleverly hidden away.

I fish the locked data drive out of my pocket and study this mystery. If only I had another day or two, I would get to the bottom of this. As it is, the why of it all will have to wait until after Earth. I just hope when I die in the morning that I’ll be able to piece these more recent epiphanies together again.

It is planetfall, and as our attack craft soars down through the atmosphere toward this green and blue and white target of ours, my thoughts drift to a heat tech I met once. I don’t remember his name, it was so long ago. He came to the bunkroom Kur and I shared when the thermostat was out. It was so cold in our room that our piss froze and crinkled before it hit the toilet. While he was working to fix the unit, the heat tech complained that he was always cold, which I had never thought of before. Strange to think of a person who fixes heaters never being warm. But of course. He only works where the heat is broken. He must be cold all the time.

I am thinking this on the day of planetfall, because lately I have only seen our conquests in ruin. The planets are already smoking from the orbital bombardment and the armies of gunners by the time we liaisons ever get mud on our boots. The power grids are out; satellites blown to bolts; fires raging. Others stay behind and build an empire; they will see the place whole. But not me. I am like the heat tech, forever cold. I am the conqueror who never glimpses what he has won. I only see these worlds in their cultural writings from deep space, and then I see them battered and broken.

These are my thoughts as the shuttle touches down and sways on its struts. The gunners around me loosen their harnesses as the rear hatch lowers. There is gunfire from a squad that got here first. There is the scream of something heavy plummeting through thick atmosphere. Sergeant Tul yells for us to “move, move,” and we do.

I am third off the ship, and my tentacles are moist with fear. My GAW13 kicks as I fire. Tanks rumble and drones and fighter craft swirl overhead, a maelstrom of missiles exploding, fountains of dirt erupting, my first glimpse of real-life humans taking shelter, taking aim.

I have studied them so long that they feel intimate and familiar. I know them. I launch a volley into a small squad, and one of the humans is ripped in two. Our shuttle is taking fire and screams as it pulls away, lifting up to gather more bodies as they spill from orbiting vats. The resistance is stiffer than we were promised. A grenade takes out Urj, and one of his dismembered tentacles tangles around my ankle. Sergeant Tul is yelling at us to take cover. There is a mound of metal nearby, some kind of bunker half-covered with dirt that a few gunners huddle behind. Bullets pepper its side. I fire into the humans until my gun overheats and then dive into the bunker. The last thing I see overhead is the flash of a new sun, a blinding ball of light, as one of our warships and all of its vats wink out of existence.

There is much yelling. Radios bark back and forth. I check my gun and my tentacles, make sure all is in place, and then I see what I am hiding inside of, this makeshift bunker. It is familiar. It is the ruin of one of our ships, a troop shuttle, but something is not right—

Bullets ping off the hull, and I can hear the natives of Sector 1 yelling and coordinating. A gunner from another squad has taken shelter with us. Her radio barks, and she yells at Tul, “War Two is down!”

I think of Kur. Our home. Our bunkroom. Now that ship is a hailstorm of bolts plummeting through the high clouds and scattering across this ball of mud.

Inside the busted troop shuttle where we’ve taken shelter, tall grasses are swaying, waving at me, trying to signal some warning. Rov stands by the gaping hole in the shuttle’s skin, scanning the sky, her armored bulk blotting out my view of the carnage beyond. I am going to die a cowardly, expensive death, I realize.

“War One has taken a hit!” Rov shouts.

Flashes of light stab in around her, another brightening of the sky. A moment later, there is a deep grumble that I feel in my bones, a noise like the belly growl of a hungry god.

Closer by, a bomb explodes, a sharp crack followed by the howls of my kin. I hear alien craft buzzing overhead, filling the sky with the piercing shrieks of their passing, and with the whistle of loosed munitions.

All is background noise. I am watching the tall grasses wave and wave. Their feathery blades are growing up through the destroyed hull of one of our ships. There is rust here and there, cables chewed by local varmints, all the signs of that universal destroyer: Time. The scars he leaves are everywhere I look.

I hold a tentacle in front of my visor and study it. Where are my scars? Where are the physical artifacts of wounds I remember suffering? Has it really been so long? I search for an old injury that I have been hunting for and have been unable to find for a cycle now. The last thing I remember is waking in my bunk, feeling like someone else. I remember a last glimpse of my ship, dimmed and showing no pockmark, no wear of war.

Another bomb erupts in the distance. More of my people dying. And I think of the stress I witnessed among High Command on my warship. I think of the way things have been falling apart—so many people thrown to Gunnery. There is a girl who will not stop killing herself, a girl who knows something, a fragment of a report about a missing signal from another ship.

There is a helmet by my feet, half-buried in the dirt of planet Earth. Tul is yelling for us to fight, and I am trying to remember a poem I once knew. The words are not with me. All around us are the signs of an invasion that did not succeed. And I know a sudden truth with all the fierceness of a hot blast—I know this as bullets zing by my helmet and bombs rage closer and closer:

“Second Suicide” came about while daydreaming about the alien invasion trope from the point of view of the aliens. This story has been told so many times. What’s interesting to me is that humans are always the underdogs. Makes sense—if aliens could arrive here in force, they’d be leagues ahead of us in all sorts of warfare-making gizmos. But what if we are more indomitable than we realize? What if we’re not so fragile after all? There are colonies of ants that most humans are wise enough to steer around.

The tension in most good stories comes from the underdog perspective, the hero’s journey. Perhaps alien invasion stories put us at a disadvantage for narrative purposes as much as some primal fear. With “Second Suicide,” I wanted to flip that around. The opening scene hopefully makes the reader care for who is normally the bad guy. And then I tell a story of humans kicking ass, and somehow it becomes a sad tale. The people we normally root for are winning, and even while writing the story, I didn’t know how to feel about this.

It’s difficult to remember that every conflict has two sides. The other side feels just as secure in their position as we do in ours. There’s something to be gained by taking the opposing side as our own, really trying to empathize, imagine the bad guys are the good guys. With their motivations in mind, it becomes more difficult to dehumanize them and easier to understand them. It’s not something that comes easily—but I’m trying.

Nothing Goes to Waste

“Nothing goes to waste.”

I could hear my father’s voice echoing in my mind, always pestering me to do this, not do that, to do it all differently.

Pleasing him may forever prove impossible, but I couldn’t help myself from trying.

He wanted a boy. It was a fact, not something I guessed about or suppressed in my psyche. No, he told me all the time. Usually right after correcting me or pointing out some flaw.

Born small, I stayed that way. Doctor said it was a problem with one of my glands. My dad thought it was gender-related. My theory? Self-preservation. My body had figured out early on that it was a target and best to make itself hard to hit. Stupid theory, I know, but it helps to think it.

You get picked on for being small long enough, you eventually figure there’s no benefit to be had. Tall kids play galaxy ball, some of them going off to make millions. Fat kids push each other across gravity mats, winning accolades from their countries. When I was growing up, small kids had their money taken away from them. And they got plenty of shouts, but not the good kind.

I was fourteen before I discovered the one thing small people were good for. Riding Theryls. The fastest quadrupeds on twelve planets. Of course, Theryl racing wasn’t that lucrative for the jockey, even as the owner made piles of credits and the studs sold for piles more. And outside the secretive gambling rings where a year’s wage might be put on the line for a single race, nobody could name a single Theryl jockey.

But it paid a wage. And it was something I could be good at. As good as the boys. Maybe good enough for my dad.

I quit school and got a job in the stables, working my way up. A trainer named Juinco took me under his wing, let me cool a few Theryls down after their workout, get comfortable in the saddle. I did a few amateur circuits first, then some smaller shows, finding more ladders to work my way up. Only now, the rungs weren’t a stretch because of my height, but thanks to my gender.

Still, I worked hard, my father’s voice always in my ear, urging me along. Eventually, owners saw that I didn’t drink or do the drugs other jockeys got into. I didn’t gamble away my meager pay. I finally got my shot.

“You sure you wanna go pro?” Juinco asked me. “It ain’t easy going back.”

Juinco knew—he was a retired jockey, like most trainers. He’d made the sacrifices you have to in order to compete. Every ounce mattered. I could do the calculations in my head, each tenth of an ounce meant three-fourths of a second. That might be the difference between first and fifth.

I’d grown used to the hunger, starving myself for days before a race. The trick was to have enough energy to not pass out, but no more. If the blackness pushed in around your vision while you jounced down the track, you’d hit it perfect. I could do that. My dad had taught me to be perfect.

My new pro sponsor paid for the legal procedures, like the removal of most of my thigh muscles. You didn’t need them on a Theryl—it was almost all in the hamstrings and ass. My arms I already had down to mere sticks, using them as little as possible, starving myself enough to have my body absorb its own bone marrow. Every ounce meant almost three and a half seconds. There were so many parts of me I could let go of.

You can tell a lot about a Theryl jockey just by shaking their hand. If you feel a full set of fingers wrap around the side of your hand, you’re dealing with an amateur. Someone on one of the smaller circuits. A lightweight, but not light enough.

Unfortunately, even though the facts were well-known, the procedure couldn’t be performed “officially.” I suspected the race committee wasn’t solely to blame; the jockeys treated it like a rite of passage. Something each rider needed to do themselves.

Thumb and forefinger, that was all I needed to stay in the saddle. Even if I fell off once or twice a year, I would win twice that many extra races by shaving the superfluous weight. I hardly needed to do the math.

It was Juinco’s final lesson before I moved on to the pro ranks. He told me a hot plate was better than a welding iron, the flat surface cauterizing the wound quicker and cleaner. I bit down on a strap of leather, just like he’d said, and aligned the clippers around the base of my pinkie. One of the long handles went across my shoulder; the other was gripped in my other hand, one of its last acts as a fully formed appendage.

I made sure the cooking plate was all the way up before closing my eyes and pulling the handles together. It made a loud pop as it went through the bone, and the pain was more of a dull throb than the bite of a sharp cut. My brain wanted to pass out, but I had mastered the art of taming that sensation. I pushed my bleeding nub against the hot plate, filling the room with a sizzle and the smell of cooked meat.

It reminded me of the step I’d forgotten. Juinco’s insistence returning to me at the odor of my burning flesh.

“Eat something before you start,” he’d said. I didn’t think it was important, but all of a sudden understood why. I salivated uncontrollably and glanced at the missing piece of me sitting on the table.

When was the last time I’d eaten? I couldn’t remember.

I could hear my dad’s voice, clear as the popping of hot juice on the hot plate.

“Nothing goes to waste.”

This may be the most gruesome story I’ve ever written. The idea that a jockey would so value their diminished weight that they would discard what they see as extraneous digits and limbs. But this is where science fiction and satire help reveal absurdities in real life. We harm ourselves all the time in pursuit of strange ideals.

I’ve wrestled with an eating disorder my whole life. There must be some genetic component, because my father has it as well. I don’t have it as bad as many do, but I’ve always felt overweight, even when I can see my ribs. I skip meals and control my portions in order to feel skinny enough. I have studied enough about the human brain to know that this is a problem, and to fight against it and try to maintain a healthy weight, but the issue is still there.

When I was in college, my best friend was in the local ballet company. Most of my friends were dancers, and I saw the horrific pressures placed on the female dancers to maintain a certain weight and size. There was also the abuse of their feet. The injuries in the name of grace and balance were absurd. The audience wept for all the wrong reasons.

I think “Nothing Goes to Waste” was written thinking of my friends Scott, Shannon, and Sarah. The irony is in the title. Plenty goes to waste. All for sport and art and shame.

Deep Blood Kettle

They say the sky will fill with dust in a bad way if we don’t do something soon. My teacher Mrs. Sandy says that if the meteor hits, it’ll put up enough dirt to block the sun, and everything will turn cold for a long, long while. When I came home and told Pa about this, he got angry. He called Mrs. Sandy a bad word, said she was teaching us nonsense. I told him the dinosaurs died because of dust in the sky. Pa said there weren’t no such thing as dinosaurs.

“You boys watch,” he told me and my brother. “That rock’ll burn up. It’ll be no more than a flash of light. I’ve seen a million shooting stars if I’ve seen a dozen.” Pa stopped rubbing his rifle and traced a big arc in the air with his oil-stained rag. “She’ll hit the sky and light up like fireworks, and the worst she’ll do is leave a crater like that one down in Arizona. Then we’ll show them suckers how we watch over our land.”

Only Pa don’t use the word “suckers.” Pa uses worse words for the invaders than he ever did for Mrs. Sandy. He never calls them aliens. Sometimes he says it’s the Russians or the Chinese or the Koreans. He believes in aliens about as much as dinosaurs.

Pa spat in the dirt and asked if I was taking a break or something. I told him, “No sir,” and went back to oiling my gun. He and my brother did the same.

Pa says our land is fertile because of the killin’ we soak it in. That’s why things grow as tall as they do. The little critters are killed dead and give their life to the soil.

I seen it every year when we plow it under for the new crops. When I was a boy, before Pa let me drive the John Deere, I’d play in the loose soil his plowing left behind. Acres and acres for a sandbox. The dust he kicked up would blot the sky and dry my mouth, but I’d kick through the furrows and dig for arrowheads until my fingernails were chipped or packed full of dirt.

Where he hadn’t yet plowed, you could see the dead stalks from the last harvest. The soil there was packed tight from the rains and the dry spells. Pa used to laugh at the newfangled ways of planting that kept the ground like that by driving the seeds straight through. It weren’t the way the Samuels tended their land, he told us. We Samuels dragged great steel plows across the hard pack and the old stalks, and we killed everything in the ground. That was what made the land ready again.

When I was younger, I found half a worm floppin’ on top of the ground after a plow. It moved like the tail on a happy dog, but it was already dead. Took a while for it to realize, was all. I pinched it between my fingers and watched it wind down like the grandfather clock in the great room. When it was still, the worm went into a furrow, and I kicked some dirt over it. That was the whole point. The little things would feed the corn, and the corn would feed us, and we would all get taller because of it. Pa, meanwhile, drove that tractor in great circles that took him nearly out of sight; the dust he kicked up could blot out the whole Montana sky, and my boots would fill up with gravel as I kicked through the loose furrows he left behind.

Pa only believes in things he can see. He didn’t believe in the meteor until it became brighter than any star in the sky. Before long, you could see it in the daytime if you knew where to look and squinted just right. The people on the TV talked to scientists who said it was coming straight for us. They had a date and time and everything. One of them said you could know where it would land, but that nobody wanted a panic. It just meant people panicked everywhere. And then it leaked that the rock would hit somewhere between Russia and China, and Pa reckoned those people were panicking a little worse.

He called it a rock, not a meteor. Like a bunch of people, Pa don’t think it’ll amount to much. Folks been predicting doom since his grandpa was a boy, and the world outside still looked pretty much the same.

This was before we got “First Contact.” That’s what they called it even though the rock hadn’t set down yet. It was nothing but a phone call from what I could tell. On the TV they said it was coming from the other side of the rock. That’s when even the scientists and all the smart people started acting a little crazy.

First Contact happened back when Mrs. Sandy was still our teacher. We listened to the news at school, and I talked to her, and I didn’t tell Pa any of what I learned. It made him angry hearing about the demands, but Mrs. Sandy said it was the best thing that ever happened to our planet, them deciding to come here. She told me a lot before she left and the substitute took her place. She was going to be one of them that welcomed the invaders, even sold her house and bought a pickup with a camper back. I eventually reckoned Pa was right to call her some of those bad things.

But I did sort out a bunch between the TV and what Mrs. Sandy said. The rock weren’t no accident like the scientists used to suppose. It was aimed. Like the stones I chucked after a plowing, trying to hit one rock with another. The invaders, they was right behind the big rock.

Mrs. Sandy liked to say that our governments would make the right choice. And all of a sudden, the same channels on TV that I watched for news showed new people. They wore headphones and spoke funny and argued over what to do. My brother wouldn’t stop asking about the little flags in front of each of them, and I had to tell him to shut up so I could hear.

The invaders were giving us a choice, it sounded like. All they wanted was half our land and for us to get rid of all of our weapons, and they would leave most of us alone. They gave a date. It was the same one the scientists had already figured. The rock could be moved, they said. It didn’t have to hit. It could go into orbit, and then we could have it for our own.

On a different channel, men with suits and ties argued real loud over how much the rock was worth. They used words I’d never heard of before, something more than “trillion.” I knew what gold and some of the other valuable things were, but some were called rare and sounded like they were from Earth. I couldn’t sort out how something that could kill us one day could be worth so much the next, but the invaders said the rock only needed a nudge.

When I turned thirteen, Pa said I was finally old enough to drive. He taught me in the old pickup with the missing tailgate and the tires that were always starving for air. It was a shifter, which seemed a hard way to start driving, but Pa believed in learning the worst to begin with. I had to yank up on the steering wheel to push the old clutch all the way in. Damn thing made it so my arms would be as sore at night as my legs. Pa cursed every time the gears growled, and it was hot in the truck even with the windows down. But I got to where he would send me to fetch the mail. And once I’d mastered the old pickup, he taught me on the John Deere, and I learned to plow. Pa was right that it made driving the tractor easier. But it was still scary as hell.

The first time you drive something so big, you wonder if one man ought to be able. There was a red lever that went from rabbit to turtle, and Pa would stand in the cabin with me and yell for me to nudge it up. But we were already bouncing around something fierce. The noise was terrible. And looking back, I couldn’t see the house through the haze I was stirring. It weren’t even like we were moving so much as the great big tires of the tractor were spinning the earth beneath their knobby treads. Pa would bend over the seat and knock the red lever up, and the bucking would grow worse. The steering wheel jittered side to side, and I had to clutch it just to stay in my seat.

But like the truck, my fear of the tractor didn’t keep. Before long, Pa hitched the great plow to the back, twenty-four feet wide, and I learned how to kill the soil to make it ready for planting. The seat would bounce me along like I was in a saddle, and the radio would blare in the little cabin that smelled like my dad when he was sweaty. I did circles like I was mowing grass but twenty-four feet at a time. The mesa behind our house would disappear behind the dust, and it got so I couldn’t see the cliffs along the back of the homestead. But I could see the soil in front packed hard and tight, and I could see out the side where I’d already been. Plowing was a lot like mowing—I just had to overlap where I’d been before.

“Not too much overlap,” Pa would tell me. The price of gas had gone way up since First Contact, and too much overlap meant an extra run for no good reason. And so I bounced along and put death in the soil. I cut the worms in half and made things ready for planting. Now and then, a deer would startle across the loose furrows, legs having a hard time of it, and white rabbits would dash from the thrush. The rabbits were the dumbest little things. They would dart back and forth in front of the tractor—they could see me coming, but they couldn’t make up their minds. I would yell and yell at them, but they would just jitter back and forth until the tractor went over them and then the plow. Turning in my seat, I always expected a tuft of white to spit out somewhere, but the soil that kicked up would just turn a little red.

“That’s where the corn would grow the tallest,” Pa would say when I told him how dumb the rabbits were. The blood in the soil was a good thing. That’s when you knew it was ready.

The cliffs behind our house were a source of constant play, and they had a funny name. Too Close for Comfort they were called. I reckoned kids made up that name, but it was a real thing. Scientists called it that. Men who were supposedly smart had come up with it.

When I was a boy too young to drive—before I turned thirteen—they came from the university and dug in the dirt at the base of the cliffs that rise up behind our land. They found so many bones beneath the dirt that they couldn’t take them all. Steve Harkin and I plotted to sneak in one night and nab a skull or two, but the men in the shiny city trucks with no 4×4 put a stop to that by giving us a skull each. It weren’t as fun without the danger and flashlights, but we got our skulls.

I remember cradling that great hunk of bone as heavy as stone and asking one of the university men why they were digging there.

“This here was a buffalo jump,” the man told me. He reminded me of Mrs. Sandy, and he had this clipboard with all kinds of little squares full of numbers and was the smartest man I ever spoke to ’cept for my pa.

“The buffalo used to come over this cliff and smash into the rocks down here,” he told me and Steve Harkin. “That’s where these bones came from.”

Steve thought that was pretty cool. We gazed up at the cliffs that I had known all my life, the ones that delayed the sunrise in the morning, and I saw them different for the first time. I asked this man from the university why buffalo were so dumb.

“Oh, buffalo aren’t dumb,” he claimed. I was about to argue with him, but then he explained. “Indians used to chase the buffalo to the edge of the cliff in great herds,” he said. “They tumbled off hundreds at a time and smashed their legs so they couldn’t walk. While they squealed and snorted and tried to pick themselves up on busted bones, the Indians would run in with spears and jab ’em in the neck.”

Steve whistled. I asked the man if that was real.

“Very real,” he said. “The people who used to live here long before us called it ‘pishkun.’”

“‘Pushkin,’” Steve Harkin said. “What does that mean?”

“It means ‘deep blood kettle,’” the man told us. He pointed to where the men and women were digging in these funny squares with ropes and stakes marking everything off. “You can still see the blood in the soil.”

I didn’t know if that man from the university was playing with us or not, but I told him we needed to go. That skull he’d given me was getting heavier and heavier the longer he talked.

The people on TV with the little flags and the headphones reminded me of white rabbits in the plow season. You could watch ’em go back and forth on the screen. Everyone wanted the gold and the trillions and trillions and trillions and all the rare Earth stuff. But nobody wanted to give up their land. And the invaders insisted on half. They wanted half or they would take it all.

People on the TV argued about why the aliens would do something like this, why they would let the rock hit us and kick up the dirt and make things cold, but I knew. I reckon I knew better than most. Just the year before, I’d watched a movie about invaders coming down. They’d made a different kind of contact. There were fights with lasers and explosions, and our side found a way at the end to lick them for good.

It was a good movie, but those invaders were dumb. I tried to picture us Samuels taming our plot of land something like that. Pa and Riley and me would take to the soil with guns and shoot the worms one by one. And the worms would fight back with the rabbits, the deer, the turtles, and the foxes. And I could imagine them swarming us and licking us good. They were dumb, but there was an awful lot of them.

Which was why we used the plow. It was why we throw the dirt up into the air. We make all things die in the soil so when we put in our own seed, that’s all the life there is. And where the ground is reddest, that deep blood kettle, the corn reaches up so high, you think it might leave us behind. And that’s what the rock will do, plow us under. It weren’t going to be like that movie at all.

Mrs. Sandy used to say before she left town that the dust would kick up and blot out the sky if the rock fell, but she didn’t think we would let that happen. Mrs. Sandy always thought the best of people. She even liked my pa, no matter what he called her. Me, I wished she would come back from wherever she went. I’d like to have her sit in the John Deere with me and feel it buck and buck and chase down those rabbits too dumb to move. I’d take Mrs. Sandy by the hand and lead her to the cliffs on the edge of our land and show her the piles of bones and see what the Indians had done.

But Mrs. Sandy was gone, and nobody went to school no more. And outside, the spot of light in the sky had grown so bright that it was like a star in the daytime. The people on the TV moved like rabbits. They were chased like buffalo. And you didn’t need to know where to look no more to see that something bad was coming.

I woke up in my father’s house just before Thanksgiving expecting to work on my current novel. But the impending government shutdown of 2013 was occupying my mind, the absolute lunacy that Congress could watch disaster slowly unfold without taking action.

Sometimes, plot ideas present themselves almost fully formed. This was one of those occasions. It was a story about a meteor hurtling toward Earth, the whole world watching, while politicians bickered. Instead of making progress on my novel, I wrote the entirety of “Deep Blood Kettle,” made an editing pass, and fired it off to John Joseph Adams to see if he wanted it for Lightspeed Magazine. To this day, it remains one of my favorite pieces.

There are two ideas explored in the piece, one that I’d been thinking about for most of my life. I never understood how alien invasions were presented in popular science fiction. To begin with, there has to be enough wet balls of oxygen-rich mud out there, covered in pre-industrial or non-sentient life, to not need to come here. Beyond that, I would expect most spacefaring organisms to be more curious and benign than outright hostile. But even if you get past these two barriers, why zoom down and risk waging a ground war that the original inhabitants might win?

The easiest way to vanquish us and settle on Earth would be to arrive a few decades (or centuries) behind some guided meteors. Or unleash a devastating virus. Instead, aliens manage to traverse the cosmos and then are usually portrayed as naked, slobbering fools. They are more ghost story than science fiction.

But stories need tension, so I went with aliens who are powerful but somewhat peaceful. Make room for them, and they’ll allow us to remain here as well. Make some drastic cuts, and things can balance out. A tough decision, but the alternative seems too dire to contemplate. And yet there we were that November…

The name “Deep Blood Kettle” comes from an actual kill site. It’s translated from the Blackfoot word pis’kun, which literally translates to “deep kettle of blood.” The idea that Native Americans lived in harmony with nature and used every ounce of the things they killed is a myth. Entire herds were driven to their deaths, and the choicest meats taken while the rest of the animals suffered and the buzzards ate what they could. There is a wastefulness to humankind that we ignore when we assume it’s a contemporary and temporary problem. Instead of worshipping a past that never happened, we should look to a future that we might avoid.