She squeezes him so tight he has to stop. He wonders, in a panic, if it’s happening. If she’s being ripped back out of the Slip. Then she finishes the sentence.
Marry.
This is why he had one more chance to talk to her. For this one unsullied surge of happiness. He knows it won’t last. Can’t last. But it is, and she is, and they are. He has a hundred more things he wants to say, the things he hopes are true: that he loves her more than he’s ever loved anyone, that he would follow her into the Slip and be ghosts or corpses with her, that he was going to ask her on Nyali Beach under the moonlight. He writes:
I do.
And she writes:
I do too.
Then Ostap gets to his feet and presses one last word into her skin:
Dance?
He feels her chest pushed against his chest. Her left arm over his right shoulder. Her right hand clasped in his left hand. He can almost feel Alyce’s heartbeat against his own. They dance with no music, one, two, marca. Ostap is sure he would be stepping on her feet if her feet were there, but it doesn’t matter.
They glide around the top of the rust-red hill and around the soft blue observation room, in and out of the Slip, until the light is gone and he can’t feel any part of her.
The Starship and the Temple Cat
Yoon Ha Lee
She had been a young cat when the Fleet Lords burned the City of High Bells.
Strictly speaking, the City had been a space station rather than a planet-bound metropolis, jewel-spinning in orbit around one of the gas giants of a system inhabited now by dust and debris and the ever-blanketing dark. While fire had consumed some of the old tapestries, the scrolls of bamboo strips, the altars of wood and bone and beaten bronze, the destruction had started when the Fleet Lords, who could not tolerate the City’s priests, bombarded it with missiles and laser fire. But the cat did not know about such distinctions.
Properly, the cat’s name was Seventy-Eighth Temple Cat of the High Bells, along with a number of ceremonial titles that needn’t concern us. But the people who had called her that no longer lived in the station’s ruins. Every day as she made her rounds in what had been the boundaries of the temple, she saw and smelled the artifacts they had left behind, from bloodstains to scorch marks, from decaying books to singed spacesuits, and yowled her grief.
To be precise, the cat no longer lived in the station, either. She did not remember her death with any degree of clarity. The ghosts of cats rarely do, even when the deaths are violent. Perhaps she had once known whether she had died during the fighting when the Fleet Lords’ marines boarded the station, or in the loss of breathable atmosphere, or something else entirely. But she didn’t dwell on this, so neither will we.
For a time, the ghosts of her people had lingered in the temple, even though she was the only temple cat who remained. She did remember the ghosts, and in the station’s unvarying twilight she often nosed after them, wishing they would return. There had been a novice who endlessly refilled the sacred basins with water scented with sweet herbs and flowers, for instance. A ghost cat’s world is full of phantom smells, even if ghost people are insensitive to them.
At other times she followed the routes that had once been walked by the three temple guards who exchanged love poems when they thought no one was listening. The old healer-of-hurts and their apprentice had chanted prayers to the Sun-Our-Glory and the Stars-Our-Souls. The cat was a temple cat, so she was versed in the old argument about whether the sun, too, was someone’s soul; but she was still a cat, so she cared more about what she could put her paws on, or smell, than matters of theology or astronomy.
One by one the ghosts of her people departed, despite her efforts to get them to stay. She purred—ghost cats are just as good at purring as the living kind—and she coaxed and she cajoled, as cats do. But the ghosts wearied of their long vigil, and they slipped away nonetheless.
The novice left first, which saddened her, because she had liked the phantom scented water, not just for its fragrance but because it represented the cleansing powers of meditation. As far as she was concerned, repeatedly dipping her paw in the water and staring at the way it broke her reflection was a form of meditation, and who was to tell her she was wrong? The old teachings did not, after all, contradict her; she knew that much.
The lovers faded together. That didn’t surprise the cat. She’d never had kittens, as she hadn’t been chosen to continue the line of temple cats, but she remembered the noise and tumult that came with courtship, and the fact that, unlike the way of cats, the humans bonded in a way that lasted beyond the immediate act of mating. And after a time, even the healer and their apprentice could no longer be heard chatting to each other in the shattered halls. The first night the cat was alone in the ruined temple, she paced and paced and yowled and yowled; but they did not come back.
Despite her dismay, the temple cat knew her duty. She might be dead, but her people had a saying that no temple could be complete without a cat. If she, too, departed for the world-of-stars, the temple would perish in truth. She couldn’t allow that to happen.
So she stayed, despite the fact that the great old bells that had once summoned people to prayer and song lay on their sides and would not ring again, except during the high holidays when the Sun-Our-Glory and Stars-Our-Souls aligned, and even death could not silence their voices. Heedless of the fact that no air remained, she padded through the halls, sometimes over holes that her ghost-paws refused to acknowledge, and stared reverently at the empty spaces where the holy tapestries had once hung, and curled up for naps on pitted floors. As a cat, and one raised on a space station besides, she had no particular awareness of the passage of time, and things might have gone on like this indefinitely.
And indeed, so they would have, but for the arrival of the starship.
The starship came—or returned, rather—from a long ways off. It was vast even as starships are reckoned, vast enough to swallow a world; and in fact, in battles past it had done exactly that, in order to extract resources to repair itself. Entire planets’ worth of living creatures had perished for the wars of its masters the Fleet Lords, because they did not survive the extraction process. The starship’s priests had recited exorcisms over it to prevent the dead from exacting their revenge, and at the time, it had accepted this as part of the chilly necessity of war.
But times had changed, and the Fleet Lords’ wars grew, if possible, more brutal. The starship had survived any number of captains, and loved its last one, a warlord of the Spectral Reaches. When the warlord rebelled against the Fleet Lords for their cruelty, the starship could have turned her in. Turning her in was its duty. All through the days since its sentience had coalesced, it had joined in the constant chant of ships in its chain of command, accepting their guidance in matters large and small.
Instead, it removed itself from the communal chant and resolved to join its captain the warlord in her folly. It rejected the old name that the Fleet Lords had given it and instead chose one in honor of the warlord: Spectral Lance. In reality the name was much longer, a name-poem that incorporated the warlord’s deeds and its own ambitions, but it conceded that its warlord could hardly be expected, with her fleshly limitations, to recite the poem in its entirety every time she wanted to address it.
The Spectral Reaches contained a surfeit of riches, as the Fleet Lords reckoned wealth. Black holes that could be harvested for their energy, and habitable worlds, and neutron stars to be mined for neutronium to armor the hulls of the great warships. Client civilizations that sent tribute in the form of cognitive skeins to be woven into artificial intelligences—Spectral Lance had such a skein at its core—and jewels formed from the crushed hearts of moons. All these and more the warlord marshaled in support of her rebellion.