This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Otherwise, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2023 by Ann Leckie

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

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ISBN-13: 9781662515675 (digital)

Cover design by Caroline Teagle Johnson

Cover image: ©mikroman6 / Getty

Who put you in charge?

Someone has to make the plans. Someone has to tell people what to do. Why shouldn’t that be me?

It makes sense. I’m the biggest. Look at you, little thing, quivering, the tentacles by your mouth trembling. Even the eggs tucked into the bases of the radioles tufted here and there on your body are shivering. You’re afraid of me.

And you should be.

I’m bigger than anybody else I’ve ever met. Well, except the humans, but, I mean, humans. They’re not exactly people, right? I don’t know what they are. But they mostly don’t get involved in that everyday stuff, like digging burrows or fetching water.

Which really isn’t fair, when you think about it. Humans are just about made for carrying things and digging; they’re all stiff and they only bend at corners. They have cold, stiff containers for carrying all sorts of things with their stiff, cornered not-tentacles. People have to hold a stick or a right-shaped stone in a couple of tentacles and scrape at the dirt, and if it’s too dry, you take a plant membrane to the river and get a little bit of water and go back and forth and back and forth. You don’t get very far if you’re working by yourself, and some of the time a monster comes up out of the river and tries to eat you.

If someone planned it, though . . . if someone planned a big thing and then made people do parts of it, everyone working all at once, you could get a lot done. Like, if you had two or three people to dig at the same time, and another half dozen to carry water, and more to shove the babies out of the way, you could dig a channel from the river and make a nice, wide muddy space that would always be wet, with no monsters.

And after that you’d still need someone to be in charge. Someone to tell some people to keep the babies from getting underfoot, and someone to drag old sick people away from the colony before they cause trouble or die somewhere inconvenient.

And I’m the biggest. It should be me.

I did it! We have a nice wet place now, with no monsters. We have a special place for growing algae and people to make sure it grows well, and to distribute it. We have people who watch out for the babies so they don’t get eaten as much.

And it used to be you couldn’t go a day without some crazy old person waving their stiffening tentacles in your face, threatening you incoherently, or crying out as though their entire bodies hurt them. And they would curl up and die right where they were, and there would be dead bodies everywhere. But now I have them dragged off, away from our nice muddy place, as soon as they start wandering and raving.

“It’s very impressive,” said Leeyay, the human, when I showed them. They had folded themselves down to the ground so they didn’t tower so high over me. It’s the only thing I don’t like about humans, the way they’re so much bigger than I am. “A lot of people have thought of this, and even tried to make it happen, but I haven’t seen anyone get quite this far.”

I was disappointed not to be the first, the only. But I had still done more than anyone, ever! I couldn’t resist a flourish of tentacles, a happy shiver that made my radioles flutter as if caught by a breeze. “I will go farther still,” I declared. “I will go over the hills and kill the monsters that keep us from getting the rocks and plants that you like. And then we will bring you oh, so many, and you will give us all sorts of things. Boxes and bricks and tools.” Maybe even the secret to making those boxes and bricks and tools for ourselves, but I didn’t say that.

“That would be nice,” said Leeyay. And for a while we watched people coming and going, the harvesters harvesting, the baby minders herding the infants out of the way of the agents who made sure the people did the things they were supposed to do.

At length, Leeyay said, “It looks like you’ve thought of nearly everything. Tell me, Narr, what are your plans for making sure this continues after you’re gone?”

“After I’m gone?” The question puzzled me extremely. “I’m not going anywhere, Leeyay. Even if I go over the hills, it won’t be for that long; I can just leave my agents in charge until I come back.”

It was difficult for me to read the reactions of humans, but Leeyay seemed taken aback. Or amused. Or sad. “Narr,” they said, “I have been here for . . .” They paused, as if thinking. “For more than ten years.” Ten years! That was a long, long time. “Only one person of all those I met, when I first came, is still alive. How old are you?”

How old was I? Why would I even know such a thing?

But Leeyay didn’t wait for me to reply. “You’re not quite a year old. You will live maybe another year. At the most.”

“How can you know?” I asked. Indignant. “Maybe I’ll live ten years. Maybe I’ll live twenty!”

“You won’t,” said Leeyay. “Sometime in the next few months, eggs will sprout among your radioles. You’ll live to see them hatched, but likely not long after.”

“Then I won’t hatch any eggs,” I said. “I’ll have my agents remove them when they sprout.”

“It won’t change anything,” said Leeyay. “Believe me. Your species is just very short lived. But you should be proud of what you’ve accomplished. And you should think about how to make sure that accomplishment doesn’t disappear after you’re gone.”

Does everyone die? Will I die?

“Humans live a very long time,” I said to Nk. They sat beside me on the mound I’d built that let me see all over the colony. The smooth, slick infants—green and blue and gray—squirmed under the eyes of their watchers. Diggers held tools in their tentacles, bodies rippling and radioles waving as they moved soil. Sunlight shifted and sparkled over the wet ground as the breeze moved plant membranes overhead.

“Humans aren’t from here,” said Nk. “I remember when I was a baby, crazy old what’s their name said humans came out of the sky, a long time ago.” Nk pondered a moment. “But they were old and crazy, so maybe it wasn’t true.”

Nk was my best friend. Almost, but not quite, as big as me. They helped me make sure that what I said would happen happened. “Leeyay told me something like that. They said that the stars are suns, and that those suns all have their own earths. That humans come from an earth that belongs to one of those suns.”

“Pfft. That would mean the sun there”—Nk gestured to the sky with a tentacle—“is a star.”

“Leeyay said it was.”

“Pfft,” said Nk again, more forcefully. “The stars are tiny, and there are swarms of them all over the sky. The sun is big and alone and warms the earth. The human is lying. Or crazy. It’s old, you said, and old people are crazy.”

“Who’s the oldest person you know?” I asked. “And how old are they?”

Nk thought about that for a while, tentacles oddly still. Below, one of the algae cultivators broke away from the others and came slowly toward the center of the colony, a wide, flat space where people could assemble to receive instructions. They moved as though their body pained them, their tentacles held stiffly in front of them.

“I guess I don’t know how old anyone is,” Nk said. “Why would it matter?”

Below, the algae cultivator began to shiver and keen, in a way that gave me a strange unpleasant sensation in my denticles.

“Weak!” cried Nk, suddenly irritable. Their still-stiffly held tentacles twitched, an odd, disturbing movement that made me think of the old people I’d seen dying. Of the cultivator keening in the square below. “Weak! Weak!” They opened and closed their mouth, as though trying to speak.

“Nk,” I exclaimed, alarmed. Terrified, as though my friend had threatened me, directly. “Nk, are you all right?”

Slowly the fit, whatever it was, seemed to subside. “Never,” said Nk. “Not me. Never. I won’t. Won’t be weak.” Nk flexed one tentacle, carefully. “I won’t die.”

I went and found Leeyay. They were sitting outside their house by the river. “Hello, Narr,” they said when they saw me.

I said, “Why do people die?”

Their face did an odd thing. “That’s a big question for a little mousy slug.”

“What?”

“Never mind. Look, your question has any number of answers, some more complicated than others, and none of which would satisfy you. People die. That’s all.”

I thought about that. “Some people die because they’ve been too badly injured to heal. Some people die because monsters eat them. Some people just . . . get crazy and mean and have trouble talking and moving, and eventually they just curl up and scream for a long time and then they die.” Nk, shouting Weak! Weak! Tentacles stiff and shaking. Unable to say anything more complicated, anything more sane, until the fit had passed.

Leeyay made a whooshing, breathy sound that I thought meant they were either frustrated or sad. “Yes,” they agreed.

“So how do you not die?” I asked.

“Everyone dies,” said Leeyay.

“No, that’s not true. It can’t be true. You said you’ve been alive ten years.” Ten years was a long, long time.

“More than that,” said Leeyay. “Actually.”

“And you said you knew a person who had lived a long time. Who has been alive since you came here.”

“Why are you asking me about this now?”

I thought I didn’t know, thought I wouldn’t have an answer, but I said, as though my speech-organs had a mind of their own, “Nk is sick. But they can’t be sick! They can’t be dying! They’re big, almost as big as me, and they’re stronger than I am. How can a person be so big and strong and just suddenly . . . just suddenly die? They can’t die. They won’t die. They can’t.” I felt the tremor of my emotion ripple through my body.

“I’m sorry, Narr,” said Leeyay, gently. “I’m sorry to hear that your friend is dying.”

“They’re not!” I cried. “They can’t be dying! They can’t die!”

But after days—after weeks!—of raving, of wandering erratically, of moaning and screaming in pain, Nk died.

What do you think you’re doing?

Well, I was trying to get into the container the humans use to go up into the sky. I almost managed it too. I found a crack and got a tentacle in pretty far and then hit an obstruction. It seemed kind of squishy, just the littlest bit, and I thought maybe I could chew through it, so I pulled my mouth in there too. It was a very tight space, but I did manage to get my denticles onto the slightly squishy stuff and started rasping. I mean, once you decide to find out why people die and how to stop it—really truly seriously decide—you can’t let little things like some pain stop you. Otherwise you might just as well have stayed home and died.

I hurt that tentacle pretty badly, I think. At least, I can’t see out of it anymore. And I can’t get the taste of the slightly squishy stuff out of my mouth. I think some of it is stuck in my denticles. And the humans who found me closed me in a room where everything was hard and dry and they didn’t give me any water at all. None of them seemed to be able to talk like people, and I asked them and asked them to bring Leeyay so I could tell them to give me some water, but they didn’t understand. And even if they did, it had taken me days and days to get here. By the time they got a message to Leeyay and Leeyay traveled here, I would be dead.

Except I wasn’t. Leeyay got here after hardly any time at all. They brought a stiff container of water and poured it out so I could roll my dried-out self in it; wet had never felt so good.

And Leeyay was very angry with me. “Why didn’t you just ask?”

“I don’t ask,” I retorted, shivering with the relief and pleasure of being wet again. “I make things happen.”

Leeyay’s face did some kind of twitching thing. “In your colony, I know you do. But not here. And definitely not up there.” In the sky, they must have meant.

“If I’d asked, would you have said yes?”

“Possibly.” They paused, made a face that I thought meant sad or maybe amused. “Probably not.”

“Humans don’t die,” I said. “I need to find out how to make it so that people don’t die.”

Leeyay put the ends of their not-tentacles over their flat face, covering their mouth and eye-spots. They made that whooshing sound. “I told you, Narr. Humans die. You just haven’t ever seen it.”

“You said you’ve been alive for ten years.”

“I’ve been alive for a lot longer than that. Humans live longer than your people. But we still die. All of us, no matter how long we live. Everyone dies, in the end.”

“But why? How come no one has done anything about that?”

Leeyay said nothing.

“Ten years!” I said, after some thought. “That’s a long time. It might as well be forever.” Leeyay made a noise I knew meant they thought something was amusing, though it was shorter and sharper than usual. Then I remembered that other conversation we had had. “You said there was one person who was still alive, from when you first came here. To earth. Why are they still alive and no one else?”

“I can’t really answer in your language,” they said. “I don’t completely understand it myself, just the basics of it. It’s not really my work assignment to understand it.”

That was a curious thought, that Leeyay had a work assignment. Usually they just walked around or sat outside their big stiff house by the river. “What’s your work assignment?”

“I’m a Leeyay,” said Leeyay. “I’m here to look out for your interests. All of you.” They waved a not-tentacle. “The people here.”

“It’s in our interest not to die,” I pointed out.

“Look, Narr.” Leeyay lowered themselves to sit on the smooth, hard, now-wet ground beside me. “I’m supposed to protect you from . . . from exploitation. But . . .” They made that windy, blowing sound again. “We got here, found you. And we found, not just life, but intelligent life. Not that the company cared about that—or even the government. But word got back to earth that not only was there intelligent life here, but it was squishy knee-high creatures in pretty colors that ate plants, and so it became a question of publicity.”

Publicity. I puzzled over that. “A question of telling people things?”

“I’m here to make it look like the company cares what happens to you. All of you, not just you in particular. But the company doesn’t really care.”

“What’s the company?”

“It’s too much for me to explain,” said Leeyay. “But what it means, in the end, is that I can really only do small things for you. The company might know how to make you all live longer. It probably does. But it won’t do anything to help you make that happen unless it gets something out of it. And there’s nothing the company would get out of it that it isn’t already getting from you.”

I didn’t understand any of that. “The person who’s still alive. I want to meet them. To ask them how they did it.”

A long silence. Then: “I can probably do that much, but it won’t do you any good. And if I send you there, you’ll never come back here. Or even if you do, everyone you know will be dead. No one will know who you are. Go back to your colony. Build your algae pools, forage with your friends, and play with the infants. That’s what you’ve got; that’s all anyone gets in the end. Don’t give that up for nothing. Because I promise you that’s all you’d get out of it.”

“I want to go,” I insisted. Nk was dead. Who else mattered? And if I could come back with the knowledge of how to live so long, people would be happy to see me, whether they knew me or not.

“Well, you’ll have to wait at least a week,” said Leeyay. “You damaged the seal on the airlock, and they have to bring replacement parts.”

A week was a long time. But I could wait.

Where am I?

I don’t even remember getting into the container that goes up into the sky. I don’t remember being in the sky at all. One moment I was on the earth talking to Leeyay and the next I was in the dark in a stiff container, one with edges and corners.

It was dry in the container, and everything was shaking. I could hear humans talking, but I didn’t understand what they were saying. I wanted to call out, to tell them I was too dry, that my skin hurt, that I needed water. But I didn’t like the sound of their voices. Only Leeyay had ever been able to talk to me, of all the humans I’d met, and only Leeyay had ever seemed to care how I was. I’m here to make it look like the company cares what happens to you, they had said. And they had seemed to care what happened to me. Maybe other humans just didn’t. And if I was far away, up in the sky, and Leeyay was nowhere near, I was going to have to look out for myself.

The container I was in had cracks, like the sky box. I waited until the shaking stopped and there was quiet; then I tested a crack. Slowly, carefully, but it wasn’t as tight as the sky container airlock, so I was able to get all the way out.

I had to cross a long, cold stretch of dry, gritty stone and squeeze through more cracks—practically holes, really—and finally I found myself looking up at the stars. Or a few stars, anyway. There weren’t many, hardly any at all; glowing globs of light here and there overhead—not high enough to be stars—cast pools of luminescence over the scratchy stone. Up with the too-few stars was a big gray-and-white circle shining down at me, and the sky had never, ever looked like that at home on earth. And so that was how I knew that I’d really reached the place humans came from.

I made my way across the scratchy stone—it tasted bad, and it hurt my skin—until eventually I found actual dirt. The dirt tasted funny, too, but it wasn’t as bad as the taste of the stone that had scraped the bottom of my body raw, and there was some wetness there. There was even some very tiny algae, but it made me sick when I ate it.

The plants were strange—huge stretches of long, thin membranes sticking straight up. Other membranes were broader but strangely notched and serrated, sometimes surrounding a single stem holding up a bunch of bright-yellow growths that reminded me of radioles, though these were flatter.

And monsters. So many things with six or even eight legs scuttled around me, brandished stiff mouth parts at me, made noises I didn’t understand. Some ran from me. One tried to bite me and I fled, the horrible thing chasing me until I fell, by great good luck, into a stream. The water tasted strange, and the monster wouldn’t step into it.

I looked up. The plants here were enormous, and their membranes shivered and trembled with the breeze, but also with things moving around. Monsters chittered and screamed, and I didn’t know what any of them were. Which ones would run from me and which ones would try to bite me? What lived in the water here? I didn’t think it was deep enough for monsters, but this wasn’t home, wasn’t a place where anything made any sense at all.

Where was I going? What had I hoped to do here?

There was nothing to do, now, but continue. To walk and walk until I found something. Someone who could speak language. Someplace even a little safe.

The monster that had chased me to the stream lost interest and wandered away. I didn’t see anything else that obviously wanted to eat me, so I climbed out of the stream on the other side and kept going.

I crawled for days. I went slowly, moving as much as I could in the shade of the weird plant membranes, watching for monsters that were doing the same. I didn’t eat any more of the horrible algae that had made me sick when I had first tasted it. There were other plants that seemed like they might have been good to eat—thick and green, growing shaded close to the moist ground—but I was wary now. At least the dirt was moist, and my skin, abraded by the gritty stone plateau I’d first crawled across, was beginning to heal.

Then all cover fell away, and there was only that thin, straight plant, packed close, but shorter, looking as though the tops had all been sliced off at the exact same height. And sitting among these membranes, to my immense, exhausted relief, was a person.

But they were a very strange person. Half my size—that wasn’t unusual, really. But they were absolutely motionless, their tentacles too thick and too stiff, the eye-spots at their ends too bulbous and completely black and surrounded by a long, black fringe that made me think suddenly of the fringe that surrounded Leeyay’s eye-spots. The oddly stiff person’s skin was bright pink all over, and their radioles seemed more like the strange yellow plant growths I’d seen than like actual radioles, and they glittered in the sunlight. “Hello,” I said. “I need help.” But there was no answer, not a single twitch of movement in response.

And then a monster fell on me out of the sky, shrieking and squeaking and stabbing me with its hard, pointed mouth, grabbing and scratching me with its hard, pointed feet. I screamed and fought as it tore at my radioles. It shrieked louder as I wrapped one tentacle around its leg and tried to pull it off, to throw it away from me so I could flee. I was sure I was about to die, sure I would be eaten by this brown-and-orange flying monster, and the moment I realized that I was about to die, I thought, very clearly, I hope I make it sick.

But there were suddenly humans with me. One, the size of Leeyay, flapped its not-tentacles at the monster, which seemed to frighten it. It let go of me and flew away. The other, smaller than I’d ever seen any human, spoke incomprehensibly to me in a high voice and petted and petted me with its not-tentacles. Then it picked up the very strange, still person and shoved it into my side, and I realized that it was not a person at all but an assemblage of membranes and stones made to look like a person. It was too much. I wanted it away from me, but the small human seemed to think it was absolutely necessary that I hold it in my tentacles, and when I did that, the human stopped shoving it into me.

The larger human walked back and forth, making noises in a way I would have thought expressed distress and frustration if it had been Leeyay. And then, stopping suddenly, it stooped and put its not-tentacles around me—tentatively, carefully—and lifted me gently off the ground.

How did you live so long?

“I know the answer,” said the other person—the first person I’d seen in this strange, monster-filled place. “But it’s going to be complicated to explain to you.”

“You think I can’t understand?” I asked. “Because I’m not stupid. I figured out how to make people build a place that would always be wet and free of monsters. I figured out how to grow algae on purpose in one place.” Well, I hadn’t exactly figured any of that out, but I had made it happen.

The humans seemed to always be in boxes. We were in a box now, with smooth, dry floors and smooth, hard containers for things. There was a shallow container of water on the floor, and the very old person sat in it. “I’m not saying you’re stupid. You’ve hardly been alive a year, though. There are a lot of things you don’t know yet.”

“You don’t seem like anything special yourself,” I said, still stung. “You’re so small, and you hardly have any radioles at all. Small and ugly. How does someone small and ugly get to live ten years?”

“Closer to twenty,” they said. “And will you become even more angry if I tell you that smaller people are more likely to live longer?”

“That’s ridiculous. Smaller people aren’t as strong as bigger ones. You”—I poked a tentacle at them—“are smaller than anyone I’ve ever seen. I could kill you right now.”

“Probably,” they said equably. “But if you did, you’d never get your answer.”

I paced around the room awhile. I wanted to leave, to go outside, but the thought of another sharp-mouthed monster made me uneasy. Not afraid, you understand. But I had been days recovering from that attack, and I didn’t want to do it again. Entirely practical.

“Tell me,” I said finally. “Tell me why you’re still alive. Tell me why people die. Tell me how I can make it so I don’t die.”

“Everyone dies eventually. Humans live to be a hundred, a hundred and fifty years, but they all die in the end. Everything alive dies. Everything changes.” I didn’t know what to say to that, and the other person continued, “I’m called Nish. I was tiny even when I came out of the egg. I’m lucky I lived long enough to become an adult, because I might easily have been eaten or even just crushed by someone careless.

“All the people I’d hatched with grew patches of radioles all over, and those grew eggs, and those eggs hatched. I, you may have noticed, have a single small circle of radioles. Every now and then, while I was on earth, an egg would grow in them, and hatch, maybe once every couple of years or so, but the infants were always much bigger than I had been. Anyway, after a while all the people who were infants when I was, they got sick and died. But I never got sick.

“Then the humans came. It was a while before our Field Liaison noticed how different I was from everyone else. The Liaison we had mostly ignored us unless they wanted something from us.”

“What?” I interjected. “Leeyay doesn’t ignore us.”

“Field Liaison is a thing someone does, not a person’s name. Your Leeyay isn’t the Liaison I dealt with.”

I didn’t understand that and would have to think about it. In the meantime, Nish continued, “Once they realized, the humans very much wanted to know how I lived so long when the rest of our people died so much younger. One day our Liaison just picked me up and put me in a box, and the next thing I knew, here I was.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “How does that answer my question?”

“I told you the answer would be long and complicated,” Nish replied. “I’m not done with my answer yet. Now, since you are so very smart and have figured out so many important things, perhaps you have asked yourself why the humans came to earth, and why they stay there?”

I had never asked that question. The humans were there, that was all. They had come from the sky, everyone knew that, but what else was there to know?

“They are there on earth,” Nish continued when I said nothing, “because there are things there that they want. Rocks. Plants. A place to build and control to suit themselves. They thought, the humans who came to earth, that they had found such a place, that they could do anything they wanted there, take anything they wanted, and no one here on the humans’ world would care. But word reached here that there were people on our earth. At first no humans really cared, but it turns out, they think we’re . . . I don’t know how to say it. I know the human word for it, but not how to say it to you. They make models of us for their infants, and those infants clutch those models and carry them around and pretend they talk and do things.”

I thought of the strange, sparkly not-person I’d seen, just before the sharp-mouthed monster had attacked me. The way the small human had pressed it on me. “What, was that an infant I met?”

“Did you meet one?”

I told Nish about my harrowing journey. About the weird plants and the strange, stiff pink not-person. The sharp-mouthed monster.

“A bird,” said Nish. “You’re lucky you didn’t run into a dog. Even if the humans had come to help you, you might have died if a dog had gotten a hold of you. And, yes, that was an infant. So you’ll maybe understand when I tell you that a lot of humans who never will meet an actual person would be sad if a lot of us died, back on earth. The humans on earth don’t want that to happen, because it would make things difficult for them. So they made the Field Liaisons, and whenever any human here asks how we’re being treated, back on earth, they can say, Oh, we have appointed dozens of Field Liaisons whose whole job is to look out for the interests of the people there and help us communicate with them. The Liaisons don’t even have to actually do anything, except make sure the humans get what they want out of us in a way that won’t make humans here sad.”

“What?” I couldn’t get any of that to make sense in my mind. There weren’t dozens of Leeyays; there was only one. “What do the humans want out of us?”

“Information. Among other things. And here’s where things will get strange, for you.”

“It’s been pretty strange already!”

“Not this strange,” said Nish. “Settle into the pool here, and listen. This will take a while.”

Nish told me that everything alive, everything that made infants, that made copies of itself, contained instructions. Instructions for growing whatever thing it was. People contained instructions for growing people.

The eggs that grew among people’s radioles? Grew there because everyone’s radioles gave off a sort of dust that got caught in other people’s radioles. That dust carried the instructions of the person it had come from, and it mixed together with the instructions of the other people whose dust had caught in the radioles, and the person the dust had landed on. And that made a new set of instructions for growing a new person.

Humans had known of these instructions before they ever came to earth and had looked at our instructions as soon as they had found us. And they had found something curious.

“We didn’t always make infants this way. A long, long time ago a person used to only get instructions from two people, who had to be touching each other to exchange dust, and then they might each grow one or two eggs, and this might happen every year or so. But somewhere there was a change in the instructions, and the people with the change could make dozens of eggs in a year, and those eggs could have instructions from any number of people, not just two. Those people had lots more babies, and so eventually they outnumbered the people who made eggs the old way. But that change came along with another consequence—people who had that set of instructions would all die horribly, very young. Somehow the two things are connected, in our instructions, in a way that humans don’t know how to separate. Or, to be honest, it might be that they could figure out how to separate those things, but they mostly don’t care.”

“So . . .” I stopped. I had to think about this. So much of it didn’t make any sense to me at all. “So can’t the humans just . . . just change my instructions? I don’t really care about eggs. I just don’t want to die.”

“Maybe,” said Nish. “I think they probably can. But the humans will only give you something like that if you give them something in return.”

What are you going to do now?

“I don’t know what to do,” I said to Nish. “I don’t want to die; I want to live as long as I can. But I don’t like the humans telling me what to do. I’m the one who tells people what to do!”

It didn’t help that I felt helpless here, spending whole days with only Nish to talk to and the occasional human. The human who had talked to me the most—the chief of all the Field Liaisons, they had claimed—had spoken to me as though I were stupid. I didn’t like that either. Nish had suggested that it was only that this Field Liaison couldn’t speak people’s language very well, and maybe that was the case, but I still had come away from every meeting feeling insulted.

“And besides,” I continued, “I don’t like that the humans think we’re cute.” I had talked with enough humans now to sort of understand that word. “You said that humans here would be sad if anything happened to us, but they don’t think we’re people. They think we’re things to play with. The humans on earth could kill all of us and the humans here might hardly even notice; they’d still have their sparkly, fringe-eyed, stiff not-people to give their infants.”

“Ah,” replied Nish. “So you’re not just a big bully. You actually think about things.” I was angry at that, but before I could say anything, Nish asked, “Why do people do what you tell them?”

That was a ridiculous question. “Because I’m bigger. Because I have other big people to help me make them do what I tell them.” But as I said that, Nish’s you’re not just a big bully echoed in my mind uncomfortably.

Nish said, “But they could all just leave. I’m sure some people do. Or if enough people got together and decided they didn’t like you bossing them around, they could stop you. They may not like being told what to do, but they’re getting a steady supply of food and a safe place for the infants. In the end, they’re doing what you tell them because they think they’re getting something they want out of it.”

“Well, of course they are,” I retorted. “Why do you think I bother to begin with? I make things better for everyone in the colony.”

“Well, not everyone,” Nish said. “Not for the people who won’t do what you tell them. Not for the people who have a different idea of what’s good. And certainly not for the people who you decide have to work harder or go hungry or even die just to make things”—Nish waved a tentacle sarcastically—“better for everyone. But let’s not argue about those details. You’re facing a choice. Live longer—twenty years, thirty, maybe even forty—and serve the humans so that things can be better for everyone, which will really be better for the humans and only incidentally better for people. Or you can die here, painfully, in a few months.”

I said nothing. I still could find no way through this. Or, more honestly, I could only see one way through it, knew I would take it, but hated the bargain I knew I would have to make.

“When you’re small,” said Nish, after a moment’s silence, “you survive by being patient, and clever. You can’t make big things happen all at once, so you do what little things you can. It’s not unlike seeing you want a pond and thinking of all the little steps you need to build that pond, and then taking those steps, one by one. Of course, the more steps, the harder it is to accomplish big things like this, when you don’t live long.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

“The humans have a thing they call the long game. Most humans, just like people, are usually just thinking of today. What can they eat today? How can they stay safe today? But then sometimes they’re thinking way ahead, thinking of things too big for them to do here and now. It’s how they’ve done things like go into the sky or read the instructions of life.”

“That’s easy when you live a hundred years!”

“Not so easy,” said Nish. “And some human long games go much longer than a hundred years. They can communicate with humans not hatched yet, and humans now can understand the thoughts and intentions of humans long dead, because of passing on stories. And writing.”

“You mean like tally marks,” I said, after some consideration. “And day counting.”

“Like that, yes, but more complicated.”

I had to think about that for a long time. Then I asked, “What if I found out how to change the instructions? What if I could find out how to make it so people could live twenty years? Then we wouldn’t have to wait for humans to give that to us. We wouldn’t have to do what they say to get it.” What if the humans had to deal with us as people and not as toys? That would take careful thought and planning. I might not be able to do it all by myself. I might have to do some of it and leave the rest to some other person, years from now. “What if I did a long game?”

“Those are good questions,” said Nish approvingly.

How did you talk them into letting you come back here?

It took some work. I talked and talked. I told the Chief Field Liaison all about how much easier it would be for the humans if I could have time to really build things up, make it so we didn’t have to work quite so hard just to live. People would be so grateful to the humans for making life better. People could spend more time fetching rocks and plants. And it would be so much easier for the humans to have someone like me—grateful to them, eager to set their plans in motion, good at making sure people did what the humans wanted—in charge, back home on earth. Easier if I lived a long time so they wouldn’t have to worry about whoever new might come up with their own ideas, their own plans, and even if the next person was happy to do what the humans wanted, that would only be for a little while, and then they would die and the humans would have to start over.

But if they helped me live longer. If they sent me home. Yes. I would be so grateful. I would do what the humans wanted. I would make things so easy for the humans, on earth.

Eventually they listened. And here I am, back home, strong and healthy, though I should have died months ago. I’ll live as long as Nish has. If I’m careful, if I don’t let something else kill me.

“Look at all the things I built,” I said to Leeyay. They seemed a little sad. Having spent more time with humans now, I could make several guesses as to why, and I knew now that they were a better Field Liaison than most—but in the end I couldn’t trust them, not really. I knew that the list of something else that might kill me included humans, if they thought I wasn’t doing what they wanted me to do. “I was gone for so long, everyone who knew me is dead, just like you said would happen. But the algae fields and the pond are still here; people still keep things going the way I set them up.”

“That’s true,” said Leeyay.

“Now that I have help from the humans,” I said, “I’m going to make the pond bigger and grow more algae. And we’ll find those plants you like and grow those too. That will make you happy, won’t it?”

“Yes,” said Leeyay sadly.

I didn’t tell them about the school I was planning. I would make sure the infants learned tally marks, and we would begin to make more complicated marks, like the humans used, but ours. And I would begin to teach the infants about the instructions we all grew by. As long as I will live—maybe forty years!—I will never see the outcome of this plan. Maybe it won’t happen exactly the way I want it to. But I can start it now, and the people who come after me can build more.

“Narr,” said Leeyay, “I haven’t told anyone this yet, but I’ve decided I’m going back home. I don’t think I’m cut out for this job. It’s . . . I just can’t do this.”

“Don’t be sad, Leeyay,” I said. “Look at the channel from the river! Look at our wonderful pond! Our field of algae! All the work we did and how long it’s lasted!”

Someone has to make the plans. Someone has to tell people what to do. Why shouldn’t that be me?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo © 2013 missionphoto.org

Ann Leckie is the New York Times bestselling author of the Imperial Radch series, Provenance, and The Raven Tower. The recipient of the Hugo, Nebula, Arthur C. Clarke, and Locus Awards, among others, Ann has also published stories in Strange Horizons, Subterranean Magazine, and Realms of Fantasy.

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“There are few who write science fiction like Ann Leckie can. There are few who ever could.”

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