New Decameron Four: Max Gladstone (Patreon)

Stop Motion

By Max Gladstone

Zhaoying woke before dawn on Beacon Day to stillness, and walked barefoot over moss from her pod to the seashore.

The air tasted of brine. Two moons set and a reddish sun rose. Walkers rambled through the surf: eight-legged human-sized machines overgrown with green save for their lower legs. The moss here hated salt water.

She didn't often see walkers in the ocean, and waded out to join them. The surf was warm as a bath back home, and the sand gave as sand should beneath her toes. She stroked the walker's covering of moss. The walker did not seem to care. She pushed it, playfully, and it steadied itself, kicking up clouds of silt.

The whole world was quiet by agreement. What sounds there were gave one another room: her breath. The waves. The servos in the walkers' joints.

On a human world, on a station even, she'd be boxed in noise by now.

Perhaps the walkers strained the surf for precious metals. Perhaps they liked the feel of waves. Perhaps they came for sunrise, and the unbroken purple-blue of sea horizon.

Zhaoying took samples of the walkers' moss and walked back through the perfect day, humming a childhood tune for which she'd forgotten the words.

Smoke rose from camp. Trace liked fires in the morning; the moss, torn up and sun-dried, made good fuel. Zhaoying found her seated cross-legged by the fire, munching recomb and drinking coffee. Trace had brought sleeves of instant with her personal effects, and parceled them out, one every week for a year.

"Catch anything?" Trace called, but didn't wait for an answer. "Have some coffee. Time to celebrate. We're bound off this rock. One slim bonus for you and me, and better luck next mission."

"You set the beacon."

"You're surprised?" She gnawed off another piece of recomb, chewed, and swallowed. "No distinctive bioforms. Minerals used up. No land fauna. Just moss and more moss over everything, including those damn walkers. We're lucky there's a default bonus for this job."

"We still don't know where the walkers came from."

"Nobody cares. I've taken a hundred of the damn things apart. Every part in there we, or some xenos we know, have had for centuries. They're Markov-chain dumb. I get it, they look goddamn wise until you clean that moss off, but once you do they're just thousand year old junk, barely bright enough to walk in a straight line. Someone will bother with them when there's time, or not. Meanwhile, soon as the Sicily slides in I'm for a hot shower, something to eat that isn't recomb, an ocean of sex, and an assignment hopefully richer than this one." She drank. "Have some coffee, Zhaoying. We're going home."

"The hurricanes finally cleared down south. I'd like to give the shallows another flyby. "

"Sicily slides in at dawn tomorrow," Trace said, "and I plan to meet her. I'm getting little enough bonus off this dirtball without delay-of-transit penalties. Sure you don't want that coffee?"

She did not.

An hour later, Zhaoying's pod coasted over the southern archipelago. She would miss this place as she'd never missed home.

Paint a world in dots of green amid the purple-blue of shallow seas and you'd have Meadow-A320, named for a woman who built a telescope a hundred years back.

Desolation, Trace called it, and at the beginning Zhaoying agreed. The oceans thronged with dumb life, and moss ruled land—moss covered mountains, moss curtains dripped down cliffs, moss nested in the ports and joints of the walkers that crossed and recrossed the land.

She'd grown to think it beautiful. Yes, there was nothing useful. Some old civ had cleaned out the surface metals millennia ago, and the heavy elements, petrochem, wrung the world like a towel and left only walkers behind. The universe was full of planets with more promise.

But none quite so beautifully still.

Trace was expedition lead. Beaconing Sicily had been her call, and she was right. To stay here any longer than the contract year would be a waste of company pods, ships, the recomb machines that kept them fed.

But Sicily meant tiny cabins, and shipping either in to a swollen world or out somewhere new, with carnivorous plants this time maybe, or a hellhole like the broken cityworld she'd found two sojourns back which stank like rotten eggs for her three years' tenure. Nothing so still as this.

She visited each island in the southern archipelago. She'd been here only once: a standard year lasted three quarters of the local season cycle, and soon after they landed on Meadow A320 the hurricanes came.

New sandbar trails were the only sign of the great storms' passing, and moss already colonized those sandbars to the waterline.  Zhaoying tested the new moss, but its indicators all blinked green—same stuff as everywhere else.  

She ate a picnic on the sandbar's point, moss fed through the recomb. Delicious broken down and rebuilt proteins.

One island had a walker ten stories high, trailing moss curtains that glittered purple. Nice, but nothing new.

She flew one last mournful pass above the archipelago, scanning full bandwidth, just before sunset. And she saw a glint of metal underwater.

"You have to see it," she said when she got back to camp. Her heart beat so hard she felt sick. 

Trace was burning moss off the lander. "I will be so happy to be rid of this stuff. It grows on zippers, for Christ's sake."

"There's a ship down in the ocean. We have to tell Central."

She cut the flamethrower. "Let's not be hasty. We knew someone came before us. So you found a crash. That confirms it. No sense bothering anyone."

"You'd hide a discovery from Central?"

"Odds are it's another piece like the walkers—known tech from some backwater empire that juiced this place, flew off, and collapsed without anyone noticing. If we report it Central will stick us here another year to make sure, dock our already meager bonus for diverting Sicily to a bogus pickup, and give us the same shitty thank you for your time payment when we finally do dust off. Why stick ourselves here another year? There are galaxies out there." She pointed up with the flamethrower nozzle.

"But if it's something new—"

"It's not. It never is. You want to make something up to justify the waste of our last year, fine, but, shit, I'm not going to let it keep me down. I have places to go."

"I'll give you half my bonus," she said, "if you come look."

The flames stopped roaring. She turned. The pilot light's reflection glinted in her eyes. "Half."

"Half."

"Guess I didn't need to sleep tonight anyway."

By night the water seemed more alive than the land. Flying by double moonlight and instrument Zhaoying found the crash with ease. Trace threw down a field, and the two of them descended. Water rose twenty meters tall outside the force field. Toothed fishlike things writhed beyond, ghoulish in the field's blue glow.  

The ship was bent and broken, three times their lander's length from end to end, ribbed and modular, ringed at points with tiny holes. The alloy hull gleamed in moonlight.

"No marks," she said as Trace walked around the wreck, scanning. The other woman's eyes ghosted green as implants woke and paired with her tools. "Unless they've been washed away."

"No crew compartment, either," Trace said.

"What?"

"There's a lattice inside, hydroponic maybe. Here." Trace tossed her a slate with the image. "And the ship's not just a ship, turns out. The hull's modular. Each of these—" she patted a rib—"unfolds into a walker. Some small, some big. Aside from that, we've got a Laukkanen-effect drive which would have been fancy news to xenosci three centuries back, a bare-bones field generator, and that's it." Trace snapped off her slate, and let her eyes go blue again. "It's a dummy. Slides from system to system until it finds a place to land and unfold walkers. Drops off some seed for slow terraforming, or whateverforming. Looks like the folks who sent your walkers hoped to make a garden world. Either they messed up, or they really like moss. Or the moss took over after they juiced the place and ruined the land biome. Either way, it's nothing we couldn't have guessed without the craft. Looks like you wasted half your bonus. Not that I'm complaining."

"You won't agree to extend our shift."

An almost-eel the size of the broken ship slammed into Trace's field. The whole thing flashed. "I get it—you want to hang out and gum this little mystery another year. But there's a whole universe up there. You can't just put down roots. Someone else will come here in a century or two and figure out what's up with those robots. Or no one will, and what will the world lose?"

 Zhaoying ran her hand over the broken ship. A thousand years in water and it still felt smooth, as if grown.

"Okay," she said. "You're right. Let's go."

"Don't feel so bad," Trace said when the field closed behind them and water rushed in to fill the open space. "I might even give you your bonus back."

They returned to base exhausted, but they still broke camp. Trace had done most of the work already while Zhaoying scouted the archipelago. They slept in the pods. Trace slept, that is. Zhaoying could not sleep. She turned and turned in her hammock, missing the wind and the soft light of the double moons.

They'd roll on come the morning, roll from world to world like an unceasing wave, meeting only what they thought to find.

She knew how Trace would respond. What other choice do we have? We keep going because we use worlds up, one after the other. What would staying look like? Lingering until our own shit choked us? If that's what you wanted, you would have stayed home. What would life look like without movement? What would a civilization look like, still?

Outside her window, the moon laid its light on moss. 

The launch countdown woke her. Her pod's panel lights blinked on, slaved to Trace's controls. Comms buzzed between the lander and Sicily. Gravity held her close, pressed her down into the hammock.

They rose together from the world. Trace, in her pod, guided the lander through ascent along its calculated path. They gained altitude. Below, Meadow-A320 spread. Moss-covered desolation. And Trace flew them above it, moving on.

No pilot in that downed ship, she thought—no crew compartment at all. Just a hydroponic lattice. A seed-bearing missile, sent from world to world. That ship, or others like it, split to form the walkers. But the walkers themselves were dumb—they look goddamn wise, until you clean off that moss.  

What if there had been a pilot after all? What if she, if it, died when the ship crashed in the salt sea where moss couldn't grow?

What would a civilization look like, still?

Sicily waited up there in the black, with the rest of her life.

Acceleration pressed Zhaoying into her hammock. She forced herself against it, and gripped the d-ring that would release her pod from the lander. Exhaled. Pulled.

The pod's engines cut in to break her fall. Sirens squealed altitude warnings. Comm speakers crackled. "Zhaoying, what the hell are you doing?"

"Go back," she said. "Go on. I'm not done here."

"I can't let you stay."

"You don't have a choice. Sicily's waiting. Tell them I'm dead, if you like." She killed the comm, and fell.

She landed near the beach, and stepped barefoot from her cooling pod onto the sand. Above, the lander carved a bright orange wound in the sky, and then Trace was just another light, retreating.  

Metal feet approached. The walkers scuttled toward her from up and down the beach. Curtains of purple moss swayed from their bodies.

"I hoped you'd come," she said.

One offered her a limb. She did not know what to do. She'd met nothing like this before. She tore a piece of the limb's moss free, and placed it on her tongue. It fizzed like sugar, and tasted tinny sweet. She swallowed.

The world opened. The world was still. It had been still for a million years and more. It had been still when it landed here, and still when it guided its machines to take the metals and heavy earths of Meadow-A320 and build more walker-ships with lattices inside where it could rest and grow and wait to touch more worlds and be still there as well. It was still and silent across this galaxy, and many others.

It was still, and so was she.

Hello, they said.

************************************************************************

"Oh I like that! That wasn't creepy at all!" Maya bounces in her chair. "Imagine that, a world of still alien moss, all those walkers and only one person. She'd be so safe."

He looks at her, not smiling, his head a little on one side. She can't read his face. "It was a great story," he says.

"I want to read all his books now," Maya says. She makes a gesture towards the bookshelves, and notices that the sun has moved away from her chair.

"You don't want to eat some delicious moss?" he asks.

"I do," she says, unhesitating, and puts out her hand. He passes her some, green and vibrant and dripping from his hand. She tastes it tentatively, then stuffs it all in, her cheeks bulge as she chews it all. "Pretty good," she says. "But salty. Let's get some water."

He picks up the cat from his lap and settles him onto the chair. The cat looks at him disdainfully and jumps down and walks away into the stacks, his tail a question mark above his back.

The humans walk together in the other direction, towards the bathrooms. They separate into the gender-marked rooms. She uses the toilet and washes her hands, singing again, but this time the echoes seem warmer, closer. She drinks water and comes out. For a moment she can't see him anywhere and she wonders if he has vanished back into the book when she wasn't with him. Then she catches sight of him looking out of the window. Down below is the cloister, with grass growing in the centre, but he is looking up, above the library walls, to where the dome of the cathedral is looming against the cloud spattered sky. "It always looks closer than it is," he says. "From everywhere. As if Brunelleschi, who designed it and who invented perspective, cheated on perspective to make it bigger than it should be."

Maya laughs. "Did he really invent perspective?"

"Yes, though Alberti was the first to write about it. We could probably find a book about him somewhere around."

"Boring. I want stories. Maybe we could read more in your book."

He shakes his head.

"You really don't want to?"

"Do you want to know what's in your future?"

"Yes. I mean no. I mean --"

"Better to find out as it happens. Come on. Let's go and read something else. Not my book. Another book." They wander back to the table, where Maya picks up the next book. "Oh you'll like that," he says, craning to read the title. "All is Silence. Heather Rose Jones wrote the Alpenia series, which are kind of Ruritanian romance, but that one's Arthurian."

"Knights?" Maya asks. "Interesting title."

They settle down in their chairs again, and read.