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  I nodded, silently, a siren of panic rising inside. “You really care about this guy, don’t you?”

  He looked at me. My son’s eyes were whole, intact, defiant, adult. Thede nodded.

  He’s been getting bullied, his mother had told me. He’s in love.

  I turned away from him, before he could see the knowledge blossom in my eyes.

  The shirt hadn’t been stolen. He’d given it away. To the boy he loved. I saw them holding hands, saw them tug at each other’s clothing in the same fumbling adolescent puppy-love moments I had shared with his mother, moments that were my only happy memories from being his age. And I saw his fear, of how his backward father might react—a refugee from a fallen hate-filled people—if he knew what kind of man he was. I gagged on the unfairness of his assumptions about me, but how could he have known differently? What had I ever done, to show him the truth of how I felt about him? And hadn’t I proved him right? Hadn’t I acted exactly like the monster he believed me to be? I had never succeeded in proving to him what I was, or how I felt.

  I had battered and broken his beloved. There was nothing I could say. A smarter man would have asked for the present back, taken it away and locked it up. Burned it, maybe. But I couldn’t. I had spent his whole life trying to give him something worthy of how I felt about him, and here was the perfect gift at last.

  “I love you, Thede,” I said, and hugged him.

  “Daaaaad . . .” he said, eventually.

  But I didn’t let go. Because when I did, he would leave. He would walk home through the cramped and frigid alleys of his home city, to the gift of knowing what his father truly was.

  Seth Dickinson is the author of The Traitor Baru Cormorant and a lot of short stories. He studied racial bias in police shootings, wrote much of the lore for Bungie Studios’ Destiny, and helped develop the open-source space opera Blue Planet. He teaches at the Alpha Workshop for Young Writers.

  THREE BODIES AT MITANNI

  Seth Dickinson

  We were prepared to end the worlds we found. We were prepared to hurt each other to do it.

  I thought Jotunheim would be the nadir, the worst of all possible worlds, the closest we ever came to giving the kill order. I thought that Anyahera’s plea, and her silent solitary pain when we voted against her, two to one, would be the closest we ever came to losing her—a zero-sum choice between her conviction and the rules of our mission:

  Locate the seedship colonies, the frozen progeny scattered by a younger and more desperate Earth. Study these new humanities. And in the most extreme situations: remove existential threats to mankind.

  Jotunheim was a horror written in silicon and plasmid, a doomed atrocity. But it would never survive to be an existential threat to humanity. I’m sorry, I told Anyahera. It would be a mercy. I know. I want to end it too. But it is not our place—

  She turned away from me, and I remember thinking: it will never be worse than this. We will never come closer.

  And then we found Mitanni.

  Lachesis woke us from stable storage as we fell toward periapsis. The ship had a mind of her own, architecturally human but synthetic in derivation, wise and compassionate and beautiful but, in the end, limited to merely operational thoughts.

  She had not come so far (five worlds, five separate stars) so very fast (four hundred years of flight) by wasting mass on the organic. We left our flesh at home and rode Lachesis’s doped metallic hydrogen mainframe starward. She dreamed the three of us, Anyahera and Thienne and I, nested in the ranges of her mind. And in containing us, I think she knew us, as much as her architecture permitted.

  When she pulled me up from storage, I thought she was Anyahera, a wraith of motion and appetite, flame and butter, and I reached for her, thinking she had asked to rouse me, as conciliation.

  “We’re here, Shinobu,” Lachesis said, taking my hand. “The last seedship colony. Mitanni.”

  The pang of hurt and disappointment I felt was not an omen. “The ship?” I asked, by ritual. If we had a captain, it was me. “Any trouble during the flight?”

  “I’m fine,” Lachesis said. She filled the empty metaphor around me with bamboo panels and rice paper, the whispered suggestion of warm spring rain. Reached down to help me out of my hammock. “But something’s wrong with this one.”

  I found my slippers. “Wrong how?”

  “Not like Jotunheim. Not like anything we’ve seen on the previous colonies.” She offered me a robe, bowing fractionally. “The other two are waiting.”

  We gathered in a common space to review what we knew. Thienne smiled up from her couch, her skin and face and build all dark and precise as I remembered them from Lagos and the flesh. No volatility to Thienne; no care for the wild or theatrical. Just careful, purposeful action, like the machines and technologies she specialized in.

  And a glint of something in her smile, in the speed with which she looked back to her work. She’d found some new gristle to work at, some enigma that rewarded obsession.

  She’d voted against Anyahera’s kill request back at Jotunheim, but of course Anyahera had forgiven her. They had always been opposites, always known and loved the certainty of the space between them. It kept them safe from each other, gave room to retreat and advance.

  In the vote at Jotunheim, I’d been the contested ground between them. I’d voted with Thienne: no kill.

  “Welcome back, Shinobu,” Anyahera said. She wore a severely cut suit, double-breasted, fit for cold and business. It might have been something from her mother’s Moscow wardrobe. Her mother had hated me.

  Subjectively, I’d seen her less than an hour ago, but the power of her presence struck me with the charge of decades. I lifted a hand, suddenly unsure what to say. I’d known and loved her for years. At Jotunheim I had seen parts of her I had never loved or known at all.

  She considered me, eyes distant, icy. Her father was Maori, her mother Russian. She was only herself, but she had her mother’s eyes and her mother’s way of using them in anger. “You look . . . indecisive.”

  I wondered if she meant my robe or my body, as severe and androgynous as the cut of her suit. It was an angry thing to say, an ugly thing, beneath her. It carried the suggestion that I was unfinished. She knew how much that hurt.

  I’d wounded her at Jotunheim. Now she reached for the weapons she had left.

  “I’ve decided on this,”I said, meaning my body, hoping to disengage. But the pain of it made me offer something, conciliatory:”Would you like me some other way?”

  “Whatever you prefer. Take your time about it.” She made a notation on some invisible piece of work, a violent slash. “Wouldn’t want to do anything hasty.”

  I almost lashed out.

  Thienne glanced at me, then back to her work: an instant of apology, or warning, or reproach. “Let’s start,” she said. “We have a lot to cover.”

  I took my couch, the third point of the triangle. Anyahera looked up again. Her eyes didn’t go to Thienne, and so I knew, even before she spoke, that this was something they had already argued over.

  “The colony on Mitanni is a Duong-Watts malignant,” she said. “We have to destroy it.”

  I knew what a Duong-Watts malignant was because “Duong-Watts malignant” was a punch line, a joke, a class of human civilization that we had all gamed out in training. An edge case so theoretically improbable it might as well be irrelevant. Duong Phireak’s predictions of a universe overrun by his namesake had not, so far, panned out.

  Jotunheim was not far enough behind us, and I was not strong enough a person, to do anything but push back. “I don’t think you can know that yet,” I said. “I don’t think we have enough—”

  “Ship,” Anyahera said. “Show them.”

  Lachesis told me everything she knew, all she’d gleaned from her decades-long fall toward Mitanni, eavesdropping on the telemetry of the seedship that had brought humanity here, the radio buzz of the growing civilization, the reports of the probes she’d fired ahead.r />
  I saw the seedship’s arrival on what should have been a garden world, a nursery for the progeny of her vat wombs. I saw catastrophe: a barren, radioactive hell, climate erratic, oceans poisoned, atmosphere boiling into space. I watched the ship struggle and fail to make a safe place for its children, until, in the end, it gambled on an act of cruel, desperate hope: fertilizing its crew, raising them to adolescence, releasing them on the world to build something out of its own cannibalized body.

  I saw them succeed.

  Habitation domes blistering the weathered volcanic flats. Webs of tidal power stations. Thermal boreholes like suppurating wounds in the crust. Thousands of fission reactors, beating hearts of uranium and molten salt—

  Too well. Too fast. In seven hundred years of struggle on a hostile, barren world, their womb-bred population exploded up toward the billions. Their civilization webbed the globe.

  It was a boom unmatched in human history, unmatched on the other seed-ship colonies we had discovered. No Eden world had grown so fast.

  “Interesting,” I said, watching Mitanni’s projected population, industrial output, estimated technological self-catalysis, all exploding toward some undreamt-of ceiling. “I agree that this could be suggestive of a Duong-Watts scenario.”

  It wasn’t enough, of course. Duong-Watts malignancy was a disease of civilizations, but the statistics could offer only symptoms. That was the terror of it: the depth of the cause. The simplicity.

  “Look at what Lachesis has found.” Anyahera rose, took an insistent step forward. “Look at the way they live.”

  I spoke more wearily than I should have. “This is going to be another Jotunheim, isn’t it?”

  Her face hardened. “No. It isn’t.”

  I didn’t let her see that I understood, that the words Duong-Watts malignancy had already made me think of the relativistic weapons Lachesis carried, and the vote we would need to use them. I didn’t want her to know how angry it made me that we had to go through this again.

  One more time before we could go home. One more hard decision.

  Thienne kept her personal space too cold for me: frosted glass and carbon composite, glazed constellations of data and analysis, a transparent wall opened onto false-color nebulae and barred galactic jets. At the low end of hearing, distant voices whispered in clipped aerospace phrasing. She had come from Haiti and from New Delhi, but no trace of that twin childhood, so rich with history, had survived her journey here.

  It took me years to understand that she didn’t mean it as insulation. The cold distances were the things that moved her, clenched her throat, pimpled her skin with awe. Anyahera teased her for it, because Anyahera was a historian and a master of the human, and what awed Thienne was to glimpse her own human insignificance.

  “Is it a Duong-Watts malignant?” I asked her. “Do you think Anyahera’s right?”

  “Forget that,” she said, shaking her head. “No prejudgment. Just look at what they’ve built.”

  She walked me through what had happened to humanity on Mitanni.

  At Lagos U, before the launch, we’d gamed out scenarios for what we called socially impoverished worlds—places where a resource crisis had limited the physical and mental capital available for art and culture. Thienne had expected demand for culture to collapse along with supply as people focused on the necessities of existence. Anyahera had argued for an inelastic model, a fundamental need embedded in human consciousness.

  There was no culture on Mitanni. No art. No social behavior beyond functional interaction in the service of industry or science.

  It was an incredible divergence. Every seedship had carried Earth’s cultural norms—the consensus ideology of a liberal democratic state. Mitanni’s colonists should have inherited those norms.

  Mitanni’s colonists expressed no interest in those norms. There was no oppression. No sign of unrest or discontent. No government or judicial system at all, no corporations or markets. Just an array of specialized functions to which workers assigned themselves, their numbers fed by batteries of synthetic wombs.

  There was no entertainment, no play, no sex. No social performance of gender. No family units. Biological sex had been flattened into a population of sterile females, slender and lightly muscled. “No sense wasting calories on physical strength with exoskeletons available,” Thienne explained. “It’s a resource conservation strategy.”

  “You can’t build a society like this using ordinary humans,” I said. “It wouldn’t be stable. Free riders would play havoc.”

  Thienne nodded. “They’ve been rewired. I think it started with the first generation out of the seedship. They made themselves selfless so that they could survive.”

  It struck me that when the civilization on Mitanni built their own seed-ships they would be able to do this again. If they could endure Mitanni, they could endure anything.

  They could have the galaxy.

  I was not someone who rushed to judgment. They’d told me that, during the final round of crew selection. Deliberative. Centered. Disconnected from internal affect. High emotional latency. Suited for tiebreaker role. . . .

  I swept the imagery shut between my hands, compressing it into a point of light. Looked up at Thienne with a face that must have signaled loathing or revulsion, because she lifted her chin in warning. “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t leap to conclusions.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You’re thinking about ant hives. I can see it.”

  “Is that a bad analogy?”

  “Yes!” Passion, surfacing and subsiding. “Ant hives only function because each individual derives a fitness benefit, even if they sacrifice themselves. It’s kin-selective eusociality. This is—”

  “Total, selfless devotion to the state?”

  “To survival.” She lifted a mosaic of images from the air: a smiling woman driving a needle into her thigh. A gang of laborers running into a fire, heedless of their own safety, to rescue vital equipment. “They’re born. They learn. They specialize, they work, sleep, eat, and eventually they volunteer to die. It’s the opposite of an insect hive. They don’t cooperate for their own individual benefit—they don’t seem to care about themselves at all. It’s pure altruism. Cognitive, not instinctive. They’re brilliant, and they all come to the same conclusion: cooperation and sacrifice.”

  The image of the smiling woman with the needle did not leave me when the shifting mosaic carried her away. “Do you admire that?”

  “It’s a society that could never evolve on its own. It has to be designed.” She stared into the passing images with an intensity I’d rarely seen outside of deep study or moments of love, a ferocious need to master some vexing, elusive truth. “I want to know how they did it. How do they disable social behavior without losing theory of mind? How can they remove all culture and sex and still motivate?”

  “We saw plenty of ways to motivate on Jotunheim,” I said.

  Maybe I was thinking of Anyahera, taking her stance by some guilty reflex, because there was nothing about my tone disconnected from internal affect.

  I expected anger. Thienne surprised me. She swept the air clear of her work, came to the couch and sat beside me. Her eyes were gentle.

  “I’m sorry we have to do this again,” she said. “Anyahera will forgive you.”

  “Twice in a row? She thought Jotunheim was the greatest atrocity in human history. ‘A crime beyond forgiveness or repair,’ remember? And I let it stand. I walked away.”

  I took Thienne’s shoulder, gripped the swell of her deltoid, the strength that had caught Anyahera’s eye two decades ago. Two decades for us—on Earth, centuries now.

  Thienne stroked my cheek. “You only had two options. Walk away, or burn it all. You knew you weren’t qualified to judge an entire world.”

  “But that’s why we’re here. To judge. To find out whether the price of survival ever became too high—whether what survived wasn’t human.”

  She leaned in and kissed me softly. “M
ankind changes,” she said. “This— what you are—” Her hands touched my face, my chest. “People used to think this was wrong. There were men and women, and nothing else, nothing more or different.”

  I caught her wrists. “That’s not the same, Thienne.”

  “I’m just saying: technology changes things. We change ourselves. If everyone had judged what you are as harshly as Anyahera judged Jotunheim—”

  I tightened my grip. She took a breath, perhaps reading my anger as play, and that made it worse. “Jotunheim’s people are slaves,” I said. “I can be what I want. It’s not the same at all.”

  “No. Of course not.” She lowered her eyes. “You’re right. That was an awful example. I’m sorry.”

  “Why would you say that?” I pressed. Thienne closed herself, keeping her pains and fears within. Sometimes it took a knife to get them out. “Technology doesn’t always enable the right things. If some people had their way I would be impossible. They would have found everything but man and woman and wiped it out.”

  She looked past me, to the window and the virtual starscape beyond. “We’ve come so far out,” she said. I felt her shoulders tense, bracing an invisible weight. “And there’s nothing out here. Nobody to meet us except our own seedship children. We thought we’d find someone else—at least some machine or memorial, some sign of other life. But after all this time the galaxy is still a desert. If we screw up, if we die out . . . what if there’s no one else to try?

  “If whatever happened on Mitanni is what it takes to survive in the long run, isn’t that better than a dead cosmos?”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. It made me feel suddenly and terribly alone. The way Anyahera might have felt, when we voted against her.

  I kissed her. She took the distraction, answered it, turned us both away from the window and down onto the couch. “Tell me what to be,” I said, wanting to offer her something, to make a part of the Universe warm for her. This was my choice: to choose.

  “Just you—” she began.

  But I silenced her. “Tell me. I want to.”