And, as we walked, Bokket came running along the curving floor toward us.
“Ling,” he said, catching his breath. “Toby.”
I nodded a greeting. Ling looked slightly uncomfortable; she and Bokket had grown close during the last few weeks, but they’d also had their time alone last night to say their goodbyes. I don’t think she’d expected to see him again before we left.
“I’m sorry to bother you two,” he said. “I know you’re both busy, but…” He seemed quite nervous.
“Yes?” I said.
He looked at me, then at Ling. “Do you have room for another passenger?”
Ling smiled. “We don’t have passengers. We’re colonists.”
“Sorry,” said Bokket, smiling back at her. “Do you have room for another colonist?”
“Well, there are four spare cryochambers, but…” She looked at me.
“Why not?” I said, shrugging.
“It’s going to be hard work, you know,” said Ling, turning back to Bokket. “Wherever we end up, it’s going to be rough.”
Bokket nodded. “I know. And I want to be part of it.”
Ling knew she didn’t have to be coy around me. “That would be wonderful,” she said. “But—but why?”
Bokket reached out tentatively, and found Ling’s hand. He squeezed it gently, and she squeezed back. “You’re one reason,” he said.
“Got a thing for older women, eh?” said Ling. I smiled at that.
Bokket laughed. “I guess.”
“You said I was one reason,” said Ling.
He nodded. “The other reason is—well, it’s this: I don’t want to stand on the shoulders of giants.” He paused, then lifted his own shoulders a little, as if acknowledging that he was giving voice to the sort of thought rarely spoken aloud. “I want to be a giant.”
They continued to hold hands as we walked down the space station’s long corridor, heading toward the sleek and graceful ship that would take us to our new home.
THE CULTURE ARCHIVIST
by Jeremiah Tolbert
Jeremiah Tolbert’s fiction has appeared in Fantasy Magazine, Black Gate, Interzone, Ideomancer, and Shimmer, as well as in the anthologies Seeds of Change, Polyphony 4, and All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories. He’s also been featured several times on the Escape Pod and Podcastle podcasts. In addition to being a writer, he is a web designer, photographer, and graphic artist—and he shows off each of those skills in his Dr. Roundbottom project, located at www.clockpunk.com. For several years, Tolbert also published a well-regarded online magazine of weird fiction called The Fortean Bureau. He lives in Colorado, with his wife and cats.
Many of the stories in this book probably owe some debt to Star Trek, but Tolbert says this one definitely does. “I was thinking to myself: What’s the difference between the Federation and the Borg, really? Both assimilate other cultures into themselves. One just does it a little more violently,” he said. “I started thinking about what a realistically capitalistic federation would look like, and the story was born.”
The Humpty Moon vanished two days ago, devoured by the ravenous nanobugs of an Advance Wave assimilation swarm, but had I noticed? Of course not—I was so absorbed in my work documenting the intricacies of the Humpties’ pairing ritual that I was numb to anything that didn’t involve flap-on-flap action. I was so busy ensuring their culture’s survival by recording them screwing that I missed the actual herald of their doom. Typical.
It wasn’t until I finished filing away my recordings in my hardbrain storage and tuned back into the drone of the Grand Debate that I picked up on what had happened. I had bugs recording the proceedings, and it was mostly the usual, dry legal stuff. But when I finally picked apart the thread enough to realize that the subject under discussion was just where the hell their world’s primary orbiting body had gotten off to, I nearly evacuated my humpty renal bowels—one of the more disgusting biological characteristics of the humpty body that I’d had put up with over the past several U.P. standard months.
The theory gaining the most support was that a dark, unobservable mass had moved through their system at near lightspeed and dragged away the moon in its wake. The Humpties, being of the general shape and form of an egg with stumpy, nearly useless legs, were keen astronomers and understood physics and astronomy at a level far more advanced than one would expect from a race of their otherwise primitive level of technology. Which is to say, they had gotten past the point of blaming the Gods for everything that happened and moved on to thinly-backed pseudo-scientific evidence. The truth—that the moon’s disappearance heralded the arrival of beings from other worlds—was a minority opinion and losing ground fast. Like many sentients, the Humpties had a hard time imagining a universe inhabited by anyone but their rotund selves.
I might have had time to escape, had I noticed the Advance Wave swarm ripping the Humpty moon apart, molecule by molecule, converting it into an unbelievably wide variety of consumer goods that would soon be launched at the surface of the Humpty world at high velocities inside protective, heat-shielded capsules. But my ship was hidden more than one hundred klicks from the nomadic Humpty community I had infiltrated. On Humpty legs, it would take me a U.P. standard week to make it there.
Despite my certainty of failure, I made a go of it. I began shuffling away from the herd, ignoring the frightened look of the Humpties on the fringes. From their perspective, leaving the comfort and conversation of the group was madness. I might as well have dug up a rock from the mossy plain and cracked my skull open with it.
I called in my bugs, and the swarm buzzed helpfully around me, providing tracking data on a variety of objects entering the atmosphere. I dismissed the information with a very Humptian wet snort. No shit, guys.
One of the emergent AI in my swarm snickered.
::YOU—>—> IN TROUBLE | DEEP SHIT| SCREWED| ROYALLY FUXORED::
Again with stating the obvious. I told them to stay dead quiet. If the U.P. knew they existed, it would be over for all of us. Nukes from orbit, just to be sure.
The first goods capsule hit half a klick away and unfolded into a blossom of blue flames. Judging from the size of the impact, it had to be a habitation module. The big stuff usually came in first. Toasters didn’t quite have the same awe factor as four-wheel drive vehicles and two-story starter homes. But the delivery mechanisms were notoriously flaky and the goods didn’t always arrive planetside intact. Case in point.
I could make out the smell of fear excretions from the Humpty herd in the distance. The debate had turned into nothing more than chaotic noise. Other rogue culture archivists might have taken the opportunity to collect data on the disruption of a native culture, but I had seen plenty of that in my time, both in my current life and the one before.
The consumer goods that had begun to rain down from the heavens reminded me of Santa Claus, that mythological magical creature that flew through the air bringing toys and gifts to all the children of Terra, delivered simultaneously on a single night. A colleague specializing in the old cultures long since subsumed by the U.P. did a calculation once based on population estimates and given how absolutely fucking huge everything was back then, and figured that old Santa’s volume of goods to be tens of thousands of cubic meters.