Time to read: about 45 minutes
It was said the revolution did not rise from the galactic hub, where the voices of anger and rebellion roiled bold and loud. It crept in from a nondescript world on the fringe of civilization, as a mounting whisper that would not cease.
—
The tall man, dressed in graying rags, shuffled with the mass of slaves along the hard salt earth. In the crook of his elbow an infant squirmed, but the man’s eyes stared, unfocused, at the white ground and dragging feet before him. A loaf of bread hung low from his fingers. An aging woman ahead fell to one knee, retching air. He stepped clumsily around her like the rest of the mass.
The man’s name was Baedo. The child had no name.
On all sides, the salt flats of a long-dead sea stretched to an undulating horizon, unbroken but for the great arc of barracks, manor houses, and the mining sheds where the man, like everyone else, spent the entirety of his life. The child twisted against his arm and bubbled a sound. He lolled his head slightly to see her.
His steps slowed and stopped.
Baedo stared as his two-month-old daughter squinted against the sharp sunlight. Her tiny, open mouth widened into an infant smile as she reached curling fingers upward, the thin shadows brushing her face. His brow wrinkled. He stood unmoving, his feet burning against the white earth as he blinked at her. Behind the cracked, dry smile, her tongue worked as if for words. Small hands stroked the sun, and a feeling rose in him from a time when his memory was young and unripe.
The siren.
He had been a boy the day the siren had screamed out of the forever-dead afternoon. It was a sound such as he’d never known, piercing his skull and dropping him to his knees. The scream sent most of the slaves running, some crouching, all with hands hard to ears. Most had never heard it before, and none had heard it since. He grasped at the leggings of adults that ran past, but they tore away, rushing for the barracks.
The machines rose then. Rusting insects thick as a man lifted from behind the steel manor fence, clear wings humming loud beneath the siren’s wail. A dozen drifted in the shrill blue sky for a moment before tilting and spreading out in all directions.
He ran, stumbling, the siren stabbing into his skull as he scrambled to his feet. He was kicked by another as she ran past. The shadow of a drone swept over him and sped out over the salt flats beyond the barracks. He reached his own barrack but found the door held closed from within, so he pushed himself against a shaded wall and held his ears while the confusion poured itself out in unfamiliar tears.
After many long minutes, the siren stopped. Young Baedo, still holding his ears against the painful silence, watched as the governor-magistrate and a half dozen gentlemen walked out of the manor gate into the wide salt yard. They stood silently, as if waiting, the governor tapping a baton against his calf. The hum of the flying drones swelled from the distant flats behind Baedo and he pushed hard against the barrack wall. He could hear the scratching of people inside trying to peer through cracks. Ten of the machines converged as smoothly as they had departed and sunk out of sight inside the manor compound. The remaining two dragged a woman into the empty yard from the flats. Dark red lines from her raw, scraped feet stretched out into the unbroken emptiness beyond the barracks. Blood seeped where the tapered hooks of the machine legs were sunken into her shoulders. She hung before the governor for a moment before their claws snapped open and she dropped as a pile of white rags at his feet. The governor looked at his baton quickly from one angle, then another, and with a full-body motion, brought it down onto the woman’s arm.
Baedo jerked as the sound hit him. A rising wail followed as the woman pulled herself up on her other arm and tried to push away.
“You should be grateful that we even let you people live,” the governor spoke, too loud for just the woman. Loud enough for the thousand ears crouching in the barracks. “You are nothing. Do you understand that—what that means? You are almost useless. All but nothing.” He swung again and Baedo blinked hard against the sickening sound and the gagging sobs that followed. The woman writhed, facedown, arms protruding from her body at abrupt angles. Her toes clawed at the white dirt.
“You are good for one thing, and only one thing.” He was looking around at the barracks now, still circling the woman. “Machines break down, but you can heal.” He laughed something at the woman. “Machines are expensive to replace, but with a little bread and water, you people provide generations of use. It’s a good return on investment.” He smiled at the gentlemen, who smiled back. One brushed at a scuff of white on his black trousers. Another picked at his teeth. “You have only one talent of use. Only one ability.” He was speaking clearly toward the long row of barracks. “You endure!” His voice rose sharply. “You have value because you endure. And the moment you can no longer endure it, you are worthless!” He spun around, and with all the force in his body, drove the baton into the back of the woman’s head. The salt beneath her face turned greedily red.
They staked her there, literally, a few minutes later. She regained consciousness, and the inhuman shrieks she made as the wooden rod was pounded through her ribs and into the red earth resounded throughout the barracks until well after the sun set.
She was never removed. In less than a day, she was as good as unnoticed as the slaves shuffled to and from the salt mines. She had decayed there as the unseen desert creatures reduced her to nothingness. Eventually, even the stake had rotted away.
Baedo had seen the woman long before her attempted escape. In the dark, sticky air a half-mile down in the mines, she had put down her pick and gingerly lifted a small salt rock from the rubble piling at her feet. She had seen him watching and held out the rock. In the arc lights had lain an impression in the muddied salt—an array of organic lines spiraling in on themselves. She had pulled it close again, just barely brushing the ridges, eyes fixed on the unusual shapes embedded in the rock, mouth curved in a childlike smile.
Baedo, as a grown man, stood alone, staring at his daughter in the crook of his arm. Her open, curving mouth, her eyes wide… And he suddenly saw that same gaze, that—fascination—staring back up at him.
He looked up at the empty yard, the bread house, and the barracks. Blinked at them as if coming awake. He looked back to his daughter.
“Not for you,” he whispered, and fear heaved up from his belly. He pulled her in close, as if in the surge he might drop her.
“This is not for you.”
—
The colony was circular, barely six miles across, and set in the middle of a dried salt sea. A thousand steel and wooden barracks surrounded the mines and the half dozen manor houses. The manors were walled by steel, and the barracks by endless salt. Several times a year, ships floated down from the sky beneath glimmering hydrogen balloons to take the unique crustacean-laden salt and leave a new cadre of gentlemen. The gentlemen rarely appeared outside the gates of the manor houses, but occasionally they would make their way in groups to the mouth of one of the mines and talk loudly of “capital,” “delicacy,” and “investment.”
Most of the slaves shared beds with shift-mates, as the mines were dredged continuously. Only the nursing barracks held any privacy. Their occupants were assigned. Assigned matings would yield a child, and the infant would be weaned at five months and sent elsewhere in the colony. The man and the woman would be rehoused in regular barracks. Family connections would evaporate.
It was in one such barrack that the man named Baedo lay.
“Tayado?” he asked, quietly. The small room was dark, the ragged hole of a doorway glowing slightly with starlight. Between his sleeping mat and hers lay the child box. Soft sounds of breaths inside.
“Tayado?” he asked again, no louder. A hair’s breadth of rusting metal separated their partition from the other thirty in the nursing barrack. He heard her turn on her mat.
“What is it?”
“What if you did not have to go to the mines tomorrow?”
The wind blew gently in the door, over his feet. Somewhere in the barracks, a baby bleated once.
“I would probably work in the bread house.”
“No, I…” In the dark, his eyes seemed to scrutinize the corrugated ceiling. “I mean… do you ever think about going away?”
“I’m tired.”
The wind blew again, and his lips fought to make words.
“Do you ever think about the child when it is grown? Do you ever think about it—she—not being like us?”
“I won’t know it when it’s grown. Sleep.”
“I don’t want her to be like me. I don’t think… What if she wasn’t like any of us?”
“It’s not for you to say.”
“I think I want it to be.”
Her mat rustled again, and her voice muffled against the wall. “In three months it will be weaned. Do whatever you like then. Don’t bother me more.”
Again, he tried to make words of the swell in his throat, but he knew Tayado would not listen. His brow twitched in the darkness, and his eyes stayed wide. He turned to look at the child box between them, where the soft snores still eased. He guessed where the baby’s head might be and reached out to brush the back of a finger against her. Before he found her, a tiny palm closed quickly around his finger, and held him there.
The fear rose within him again; that unknown, confusing mix of dread and joy. He moved closer on his mat to the box. The warm breeze blew in again, and he blinked wide into the darkness.
When he spoke, it was so quiet even he could barely hear.
“Somehow,” he breathed. “I will.”
The fingers twitched.
He began to shake.
The dry breeze ebbed, the horizon wavered in the wake of the day’s heat, and a tall man on a nondescript planet lay awake a night holding his daughter’s hand.
—
The next four days blurred together for Baedo. As he drove his pick into the deep salt, he watched the other helots, bent to their mining, hacking endlessly at their stark shadows on the walls. He thought of his daughter, grown, hitting this same spot with the same pick and ache and confusion resounded in his chest with every strike. After shifts, on his way to the bread house before sleeping, he would find himself glancing at rusted utensils that might be made sharp, or gauging if the empty space behind a barrack’s steps might fit a man and a baby.
And always, at the edge of his vision, the horizon shimmered. Once so ignored that it might have been a wall, it now caught his every glance. But every time he let his eyes rest on the indistinct meeting of white earth and blue sky, he remembered the long, bloody streaks of a dragged woman’s feet twisting their way out into the distance.
“You’re a fool,” Tayado scolded him when he thought aloud in their room.
“I feel like a fool.” He poked a finger gently into the child’s ribs. Her smile responded. The heady mix of fear and joy had not waned since that night.
“I will not hide you. No one will hide you. And you can’t run away. You have nothing.” She scraped a spoon loudly at a pot that was far older than either of them.
“I know.”
“If you do something, I will yell it through the gates of the governor. I won’t be beaten for you.”
The scraping of the pot grated inside their metal room.
“You can’t hide. At roll call they’ll know you’re gone, and they’ll find you. And you can’t run. I’ve heard the flying machines can fly faster than any man.”
“I’ve seen them. They fly much, much faster.”
The pot, long since clean, resounded under her spoon.
“You’re a fool.”
Their daughter, lying on her stomach, watched the approach of his hand and broke into a round smile before the finger reached her ribs.
“She has taken your color of eye,” he said.
The scraping stopped dead. In the sharp silence, he resisted looking around to Tayado. The baby jerked when the pot slammed the metal table.
—
Well before the sun rose the next morning, he sat sideways in the doorway, looking at the sleeping figures of Tayado and their child. Outside, the manor house in the distance glowed with a warmer, gentler light than the sharp white glare that hung over the distant mines.
“I have nothing,” he whispered into the night. Tayado had said it. The governor had said it. Everyone knew it. There was no advantage to be had. They were smarter. Their machines were faster.
“You are nothing,” he whispered again. The governor standing over the broken woman in the yard. His baton swinging eagerly in his hand. No worth. No abilities. No value. Baedo squinted in the dark. Except…
“You have one value,” he said, lips contorting around the unusual word. “You endure.”
In the small doorway, Baedo felt the fear refilling him, both sickening and welcome. He leaned out, looking between the huts to where the darkened horizon undulated, as if the distance itself were beckoning him.
His mouth moved several times before the word came.
“Run,” he said.
He heard Tayado move abruptly on her mat. He looked in to her, and saw her sitting up, a livid steam in her stare.
“What?”
“I will run.”
“Fool of a man. Fool. You’ll be dead. She’ll be dead,” she gestured with a sharp glance at the child box. “I’ll be beaten.”
Baedo shook his head. “I have been thinking.”
“Mated to a fool,” she mumbled on, sitting upright and pulling an arm out of a sleeve to expose a breast. Small hands and feet rose quickly from the box to greet her large grasp. She set the child to nursing with a sharp efficiency.
“I think there is a way.” His voice was hushed. The morning sun edged over the horizon, casting the white dust on their floor into sharp relief. “If a man were to start running from here,” he dabbed a finger into the dust and left a dot, “and ran all night before roll call,” he dragged the dot into a line. “Then when they noticed him gone, they would send out the machines to find him.” Through her jaw, her muscles ground together. Her brows were sharp and wrinkled. Her eyes bored hard into his face, ignoring his finger. She rocked in a quick, perfunctory motion.
“They would guess how far a man could run since sundown. ‘Perhaps he ran for ten hours,’ they might say.” He stopped the line. “But as long as they didn’t know what direction he ran in, they would have to search a large area all the way around the camp.” He drew a wide circle around the initial dot. “Even with their great speed, it would take much time for the machines to search so much space. Many, many miles.”
“It would not take them long,” she said, almost in a spit. “You would be found.”
“But if I ran farther than they thought I could in ten hours…” He continued the straight line beyond the circle. “While they search within this first circle, I would be running still. When they come to know I am not in this circle, they will know I have run farther,” he drew a new, much larger circle around the first. “They will have to search everywhere between these two circles.” He pointed toward the dust, gesturing, waiting for her to understand. She continued to ignore the drawing. The sun, already waxing into its cruel white, shone hot on her face. He gestured again. “It is much more space to search,” he said. “Every moment I get farther away and they don’t know where I’ve gone, it will take them longer and longer to search. The longer I am uncaught, the more I will not be caught.”
The child kicked, and Tayado’s glare was interrupted as she switched the baby to her other breast. “It’s as simple as running as fast as you can for twenty hours, then?” Her chin jutted out. “Carrying a child?”
He looked down at the circles, already eroding under the constant drift of dust.
“I think they would give up after a day.”
“And if they don’t?”
“I guess…” he darkened the straight line with a finger. “I guess I would have to keep running.”
Tayado stood quickly, shrugged her sleeve back on and pushed past him in the doorway. With the baby tucked in one arm, she walked hurriedly toward a group of slaves forming a line in the yard. A brief whistle blew, and people stepped briskly from all the barrack doors, scurrying into a line that would stretch a half a mile. The censors strolled from the direction of the manor house, metal pads in hand. Baedo brushed away the drawings and trotted out to join the line.
—
That evening, after the sun had set and the child finally lay quiet in her box, Tayado lay down to sleep, and Baedo stole into the darkness to test his limbs.
He returned ten minutes later, breathing heavily. He tripped up the single step before the door and crawled on hands and knees to his sleeping mat. Tayado hissed at him to quiet his grunts.
He lay still, chest heaving, blinking absently at the metal ceiling, blood throbbing in his throat.
“I am—” he breathed hard. Small lights seemed to wink in the darkness. “I am not—not such a good runner.”
Though it was hard to hear anything beyond the wheezing in his head, he was able to hear Tayado snort.
—
The next time darkness fell on that side of the planet, he ran again. When no one was watching, he ran out several hundred yards beyond the perimeter of the barracks. Lightheaded instantly by the simple thrill of being beyond the undenoted boundary, he turned and ran parallel to the barrack backs like a boy half his age. The motion, the lightness, the sound of bare feet hissing on the starlit salt, drove him onward with a kind of lust. He practiced holding his arms as if his daughter were there, holding her with her face out forward to feel the rush of wind, or back toward his chest so the joy that overflowed him could spill out onto her.
But within a few short minutes, his arms would seek their natural pumping motion, his chest would trade joy for air, and his boy-like legs would churn heavy as wet bread. He kept the pace for a few minutes more, but slowed and turned back, walking briskly as the distance between himself and the barracks seemed suddenly unnerving.
In the following days, the pain set into his legs.
He fell, not once but twice, while carrying a heavy sack in the mines. His leg scraped and bled, but he, like everyone, was more worried about the small boxes in the walls that spied on them for the manor gentlemen. Weak, sick people were removed from duty, and thereafter removed from memory. Though his legs shook, he made sure to step carefully, and pretended each sack was a baby he would protect without fail.
And at night, he ran again.
The fifth night, there was no joy when he slipped out beyond the barracks. No excitement as he turned to run along behind them. Every tendon from his hips to his heels felt hot with pain. He had been able to run no more than about thirty barracks’ lengths since the first night. He had always thought himself strong, able to lift more than most others. Always with a larger appetite and more endurance. But he began to understand that the strength of his arms had little to do with the strength in his lungs. He pushed himself into a stride, moving quickly but far from the first night’s graceful abandon. In minutes, his throat felt sharp and his thighs dull with pain. He held his arms around his invisible daughter, twisting his body back and forth to throw some momentum into each stride, but soon the strides became clumsy and the hissing steps began to scrape. With each step, his worn legs wobbled, and well before thirty barracks, his left leg gave way and he sprawled face-first into the salt.
He forced himself up slowly, wiping the white dust from his chest where his daughter’s presence lay. He took a step, knotted pain springing up his shin. He took another to the protest of his other shin. He leaned forward, breath hissing loudly through his nose, and drove stride after stride forward. His arms swung at his sides, his daughter’s form forgotten. A yellow manor light shone a moment between two barracks, and the words of the governor so long ago rushed through him. Worthless! Nothing!
His leg collapsed again and he fell, catching himself on hands and knees. Tears ran down his face, though he didn’t feel as if he were crying. His breath heaved at the white ground. Endure! He had come only some twenty barracks.
Water continued to run down his cheeks as he stood and hobbled back toward the nursing barracks.
In the darkness, he limped around the edge of the barrack, found his doorway, and stepped sluggishly up inside. He wiped angrily at his eyes and nose and shuffled toward his mat.
He knelt, and as his eyes adjusted to the blackness of the room, he saw Tayado lying at an odd angle. He wiped hard at his eyes. She was pressed up against the child box, an arm uncomfortably bent over the rim, one finger held tightly in the sleeping baby’s hand.
He lay down close to the box as well. His heart pounded in his ears and the desert air ebbed across his still-shaking feet.
The next night, he ran again.
—
For the next month, every time this side of the small planet turned away from its sun, a man stepped cautiously out of his barrack door and lit out into the flats.
He ran along the edge of the colony, always strong at first, his mind wandering as he passed thirty, forty, fifty barracks. He would come back to himself when his throat began to rasp and his calves flagged. He no longer counted barracks but watched for landmarks—a newer metal barrack, a skewed mining light. He carried his water-soaked shirt for thirst, learned how to lengthen his stride and strike the salt soundlessly.
The child changed. One morning he was startled to awaken to her wide blue eyes staring down at him over the rim of the box. He reached out, but she fell back into the box with an odd gurgling laugh, and two small feet popped into the air.
Baedo changed.
“You look ill,” Tayado said over a mouthful of bread one evening.
“How?”
“You look thin and dying.”
He nodded, looking down at his dark body.
“The women say you look like an old man.”
“I’ve seen it,” he said, poking at the hard ridges in his torso. “But I do eat. I eat more now than ever.”
“Four loaves every night, I know. But you are becoming ugly. You can see,” she waved toward him with the back of a hand, “all your ugly muscles are pressed up to your skin.”
He chewed, looking at the solid curve of his thigh.
“The women laugh that I’m mated to an ugly, sick man with the stomach of a boy.” She smiled. “I tell them I steal your bread and make you sleep in the child box.”
Baedo smiled a rare, toothy smile. Tayado picked up a loaf soaking in the pot on the floor beside her and tossed it to him. “Eat! Ugly sick man!” In its arc, it dripped on the child propped up between them. She turned her clumsy head from one to the other before falling backward, disoriented, into her box. Baedo chewed the softened loaf with a wide grin, patting his stomach. Tayado grunted, plucking a bite of bread from her mouth and nudging it into the baby’s.
That night, his strides were lighter, and he discovered a feeling of calm as he passed his previous landmark. The calm seemed to encompass and lift him, and after more than an hour, he felt no more tired than after half an hour. His arms and legs seemed to roll him swiftly and silently across the hard ground. He had become so lost inside the feeling that he hadn’t looked for landmarks as the barrack-backs moved past him in the dark; and then he saw it, and in the moonless night his jaw dropped and his eyes were wide.
Tayado woke as he stumbled noisily into their doorway. The sun was rising, casting its earliest red-hue reach behind him. He saw in her face traces of the previous evening’s laughter, but it faded as she looked at him. He slumped down against the wall, chest heaving. The baby twitched in her sleep. Tayado’s leathery forehead wrinkled hard as she looked at him and then out to the brightening sky.
“You ran all night?”
He nodded, breath coming hard. She stared quietly, brow knitting more tightly.
“How far did you go?”
He twirled a finger, letting his head drop back against the wall.
“All the way,” he whispered hard.
“You ran all the way around the colony?”
Smiling wide through an open, panting mouth, he nodded. He held up two fingers.
“Twice.”
With breath still coming in grunts, he looked at his outstretched legs, watched the silver-slick muscles writhe, looked at the veins swaying in his forearms as he curled his fingers.
Tayado stared at him, mouth slightly open, eyes unfocused. She looked at the sleeping child. Back to him, and back to the child, eyes seeming to search for something. Lips still parted. Baedo leaned his head back on the wall and breathed at the ceiling.
Tayado said nothing the rest of the morning, though he noticed she was more attentive than usual. When roll call came, he carried his daughter out to the line, and Tayado followed slowly and quietly.
—
“A man died next to me in the mines a few days ago,” said Tayado as they sat in their doorway, watching the sun redden on the horizon beyond the empty yard.
“Did you get anything?”
She nodded. “His shirt. Others got his leggings.”
“That’s good. Good to have an extra shirt.”
She didn’t respond but stared at the sun, the baby asleep in her lap. The last month had passed. At roll call the next morning, the child would be five months old and would be relocated to a group barrack elsewhere in the colony. After their shifts, they would also be separately reassigned.
Baedo had run every few nights, all night. He slept hard on the other nights, and his work in the mines suffered. He spoke little to Tayado, and his only moments that did not involve digging in the mines or running in secret were the few silent minutes before he would fall asleep, when he searched out his daughter’s fingers in the darkness.
“I will leave tonight,” he whispered.
Tayado moved her fingertips across the child’s eyebrows but stayed silent. Long minutes passed. The sky darkened.
“When I was a very young girl, a woman tried to escape. The drone machines dragged her back. I saw the governor break her apart.”
“I saw that, too.”
She looked up at him, and their eyes met for a moment. She dropped her gaze back to the moist hair in her lap. “I cried that night until an elder kept slapping me to stop.” Hair blew gently against her face. “I don’t know why I cried.”
Baedo watched her coarse fingers stroke the tiny cheekbone. “I won’t let them have her.”
She nodded. “I won’t tell them anything. Nothing.” She glanced out to the yard, and he caught a flicker of fear in her face. She swallowed. “I won’t.”
The last of the sun disappeared in a ripple of heat. Overhead, stars were already visible.
She turned in the doorway, reaching under her mat, keeping the baby asleep. She handed him a lump of soiled cloth. “I tore off parts of the shirt. I tied some of it together at the bottom.”
He uncrumpled the fabric, finding it full of knots and tears.
“You tie the sleeves around your neck,” she said. “She can lie in a pouch. On your back.”
He held it up in the light breeze. A better shirt than either of theirs. The knots and tears were intricate and precise. Tayado stood quietly and walked back into their room.
Inside, he pressed several loaves flat and slid them into his waistband. The sunset was fading quickly in the dry air, and sharp white lights flickered on far away above the mines. He slid the pouch over his head, and Tayado slid the still-sleeping girl inside. He faced Tayado, and her fingers dragged along the lump of fabric as he turned. She looked up at him in the closing dark, faint lights reflecting in her eyes.
“I wish,” he stammered. Thought for words. “I wish I could take you with us.”
Her voice was quiet in the stillness. “You are.”
They faced each other for moments more before he leaned over and pressed his cheek against hers. In his belly, the fear surged hard and new.
On the darkening side of a quiet planet, a man ran; a single, dim point against the endless stretches of a nameless salt sea.
—
It was not as he expected. He had envisioned this moment a thousand times in the last three months, and always it had filled him with excitement. When his limbs had flagged, he imagined himself running with his back to the lights of the colony and the thrill would propel him for another few minutes.
But from the moment he had turned from Tayado in their doorway, he was nothing but terrified.
The child had awakened when he’d started running, but she did not cry out. He leaned forward against the pouch and ran. The barracks fell away beside and behind him, and with them went not the feeling of confinement, but safety. The emptiness around him opened up and engulfed him, and suddenly everything seemed wrong. He hadn’t thought it through. Had no idea where he was going. Didn’t know if he was even running in a straight line. The slaps of his feet sounded like the snapping of arm bones under a baton. A muffled cry sounded from the pouch. His legs churned, much faster than normal, and though he needed to mete his strength, he could not slow himself.
Nostrils and eyes flared. He hurtled into the blackness.
An hour passed, and he hadn’t slowed. He watched the stars to keep his course straight. A bread had fallen but he held it, not able to stop himself to press it back into his waistband. His breathing, through a wide mouth, was now louder than his feet. It filled his ears with a tiny whine that whispered of panic. I’m not enough.
He envisioned the drones, hovering with a slight wobble, metallic eyes swaying beneath, the speed at which they hummed over the desert. Not enough.
He ran in a moment repeated second after second. Left right left right. Left right left right. His hands a pumping blur under the starlight.
A hum reached his ears. His breath caught, but it was not a mechanical hum. It pulsed with the rhythm of his stride. Behind him, tight and hot against his back, his daughter was humming. Entertained simply by the jarring rhythm.
He saw that the first star he’d been following had almost touched the horizon. The night was half over. He was five hours out. He wanted to look back for any sign of light from the colony, but was afraid he wouldn’t see it.
“We’re—we’re too far now,” he mouthed to her around gasps. She hummed. They would never make roll call. No going back. And he understood then that his daughter now belonged nowhere and had nowhere to go. Had nothing.
She continued to hum as he ran into the night.
—
By the time the sky brightened again, his lungs began to demand he slow. He ran in a jog, the harness twisted around so he held his daughter tight to his chest. His back ached, the soak-shirt was all but dry, and the knots of the harness cut into his collarbones. As the stars disappeared, he reoriented to the impending sun. His daughter had hummed herself back to sleep.
He looked around the ruddying landscape, but the dark sky still met the colorless earth in an unbroken undulation of heat. Nothing broke the white monotony. Something brushed his leg and he looked down in sudden alarm. Thin eyes looked up. She continued to wet through the pouch and down his legs with a faint smile of relief.
He broke off a piece of bread with one hand, chewed it, and took a softened piece from his mouth and pressed it, clumsily with his running, to her lips. She took it quickly, chewed, and began to cry.
“I know—I know. I’m thirsty—too. Couldn’t real—really bring the pot.”
She continued to cry, squirming now in discomfort. He tried to fist a last drop from the shirt.
“It’s okay. It’s okay.” His words came out as rushed whispers. He looked around to the empty horizons. The sun was just starting to crest. “Today would have—been a special day—for you.” She cried more, bucking her entire body and sending him stumbling to keep his stride. “It’s okay. Shhh. Today—they would have—have named you.” He smiled, even as she screwed up her face in exaggerated infant pain. “Guess I must.” She stopped crying for a moment, swaying forcefully in his arms as he ran. He broke off more bread, chewed it and gave it to her. Her tongue played with it behind her teeth while she bobbed, watching him.
Suddenly, from across the desert, leeching in without direction, the siren screamed.
Baedo stumbled, caught himself and, for the first time, broke his stride to turn around. Sharp and demanding, even so far away, it radiated across the flats. The colony was gone in the mounting heat of the morning. All around him were the same, indistinct distances and the rising mound of sun.
He spun around and launched himself. With a single motion, he swung the girl onto his back, put the sun on his left, and ran.
The tearing, nasal sound seemed to permeate everything, even as it did so long ago. The salt resonated with it, vibrating inside his head. He looked fast over his shoulder, expecting a flock of hunter-drones to swarm out of the horizon. The baby shouted and kicked. Somewhere, far behind him, someone was demanding answers from Tayado. The image came to him of her trying to run away. Of being struck down. Of others scrambling beneath the siren, hands over their ears, ignoring her as a few gentlemen held her for the governor. Or would she have run into the desert, too? Did she follow? He looked again over his shoulder. His daughter refilled her lungs and cried a long, choking sob. I’ve killed all of us.
Dehydration robbed his lips and throat, but the siren pushed him on like a searing wind. He hissed through his teeth, matching a breath to every fourth stride. Within minutes his limbs and lungs protested, but he envisioned the circle in circles, the long straight line that led away. The longer I am uncaught, the more I will not be caught.
“I have just—one thing!” he yelled through his teeth.
Endure.
The hours passed.
His footsteps became a mantra in his head.
The child quieted, and his hands and feet grew numb.
He could no longer tell if the siren still wailed across the endless flats or if the blood drumming in his ears was taking on a tone.
The sun rose, and with its height went his sense of direction. When it hovered directly overhead, he ran toward mirages in the distance. In every direction the earth was flat and white, the sky flat and blue, and their meeting a wavering mix. He realized that every time he turned his head to look for the machines, he veered slightly. He had also stopped sweating.
A small cry sounded from the pouch.
“I know,” he meant to say, but his dry throat allowed no words. “We’ll be all right,” he whispered, and it took him several moments to regain rhythm to his breathing. Another small, sad sound from her lips.
“A little—little longer. They’ll stop. We’ll be—all right.”
A shadow appeared on the horizon.
A little off to his left. It undulated in and out of the white. She cried out again.
“You’ll be—all right. Everything’s—all right.”
The shadow grew more solid as he ran. He searched the sky above it. Nothing. Another single cry.
“You like—my voice? I’ll talk. I’ll talk.” The shadow stayed fixed. “Tayado—would be—is—very proud.” He realized he was unconsciously angling toward it. “You’re a—a good baby. A good girl.”
It was a plant.
He eyed the horizons. “I think we—found a—a thing here.”
It was the width of a man. Broad, fat, gray-green leaves spread out in haphazard fashion from the center. Other smaller plants and grasses grew nearby. The earth seemed softer and cool.
He slowed, and the sudden lack of rhythm and momentum felt so foreign that he had to throw his arms out for balance. Before he could bring himself to a stop, his utterly disconnected, numb feet dragged, his knees buckled, and he dropped backward, twisting on his side. The thin cry sounded again, continued.
Propping on one elbow, he swung the pouch around and pulled her out. His skin rasped against her. He nodded to her as if she’d understand.
“We’re all right.”
Holding her against his chest, he crawled to the plant and laid her down in the shadow of one of its leaves. Her face was contorted as if ready to cry, but she was silent, and watching him. He bent a leaf until it snapped. Red juice sprayed them both. The leaf, thick as his fist, was red, pulpy and dripping inside. He sunk his fingers in, tore out a piece, and pushed it into his mouth. For a long moment, he chewed, eyes unfocused. It had little taste, but was very wet. She watched his mouth. He shrugged and scooped out more, placing it gently with finger and thumb between her dry lips. Her jaw moved as her eyes watched him. He smiled and she grinned back with small teeth, still chewing.
“Not so bad, yes?” He was still breathing hard. “Good thing,” he muttered over another ravenous mouthful. “Good thing. I did not tell you before, but I cannot make bread.” She grinned again and opened as he broke off another piece for her. “Good thing.”
He placed the pouch on the back of his head over his burning skin. His collarbones were raw. She lifted her legs until her feet were above her head, twisted her face as if in anger again, and released a single, brown excrement onto the salt.
“Oh! Another good thing! Oh, yes.” She burst out with a gurgling laughter. Her legs jiggled in the air. He wiped quickly at her bottom with a thumb, then rolled the feces in dust and threw it under the plant. “A very good thing. That must have been two pounds. You’ve made my load lighter.” She laughed again, watching him closely through squinted eyes. He wiped his hand against his leggings and scooped more fruit. “I knew I brought you for a reason.” Her gurgling laughs continued, each breath a pause as she read his eyes. Her heels kicked against the salt in delight.
They ate their fill. Baedo broke the end of a few smaller leaves, tucked them into his waistband, and squeezed juice into his shirt. When he tried to stand again, his legs wouldn’t respond. From hands and knees, he lifted himself, stood uneasily, but managed to walk. He closed his eyes, blew hard into his hands, and looked at her beneath the leaf. She was holding onto her toes above her head, watching him for an excuse to laugh again.
“You wouldn’t have an extra pair of legs up there?” She squealed and kicked again.
Moving again seemed easier than standing. He could not push himself past a jog, and within minutes his feet were numbing again, but at least the air did not scrape its way down his throat. She was angry about the pouch.
“You see?” he shot over his shoulder, already feeling as if the rest had never happened. “See what—see what two—two pounds—can do?”
Over his shoulder, breaking out of the curtain of mirage, came the drone.
“Hoh!” he shot in a meaningless burst of breath. “Oh, no-no-no!”
It was a speck; a ruddy brown point in the undulating sky that he would never have seen were it not for the broad beam of piercing blue light that radiated from its belly, splaying a long line across the white ground beneath. The line, plowing toward them, was miles wide.
He instinctively turned and ran directly away, but then switched back and ran forward again.
Its sound reached him. The scanning light reflected so hard off the salt earth that the air above it glowed. He could not get out of its way.
He stopped, almost stumbling, looked behind him to the plant nearly lost in the heat, looked at the onrushing sweep of blue, and ran.
Nothing in him was prepared to run this fast. His hands pumped into his vision. His feet struck the salt with hard slaps. Already he was blowing spit. The baby cried loud with anger. The buzz sounded over the rush of wind in his ears. The numbness fired new bolts of pain up his bones. Sharp blue appeared in the corner of his eye. He was grunting with each heaving breath, wishing she would stop screaming. Quiet! A quick look to the side and up, and the thing was looming over them, clawed legs folding and unfolding in eager ripples.
He half dove, half fell under the broadest leaf. She screamed. He scrambled to get the pouch off. Spun it around and pulled her out. She inhaled and shrieked again. The line rushed up, the buzzing seeming to shake in his lungs. He tried to muffle her mouth but she choked, fought, inhaled and screamed blindly. Again he tried to stifle her and then grabbed her head and wrapped his whole mouth around her nose and mouth. The plant shook. Searing blue stabbed down through the leaves. She was screaming into his mouth. Gagging on her lack of air. He tried to breathe into her, but his own lungs were heaving. The leaves vibrated. The light blinded him. He breathed in through his nose to match her. She bucked and kicked, choking. He pressed her down with his weight and she twisted under him. The light rushed past. She screamed, short, animal screams into his throat. He tried to force air into her, but her back arched hard against him. He waited for those metallic claws to sink into them and drag them back across every step he had fought for. Be quiet! he almost screamed into her. He crushed himself against her, trying to match her breathing as she bucked at him and clawed tiny fingers against his chest. Just one more minute! Just stop! He angled her head back more, shut his eyes hard and forced air down. It descended with a vomitous gurgle into her and returned as another scream into him. He held her for another moment until the sound was gone into the far horizon, then he shoved himself away. They both gasped for air.
“Just one minute!” He shot out, not necessarily at her. She was lying on her back beneath the leaf, crying so hard she was silent. “You only had to be quiet for one minute!” He spat. “Why do you think I’m doing this?”
She inhaled hard and yelled with a wide mouth.
“I just—” he was on his hands and knees. “Just help me out once!” He sat back onto his heels. “I just need…” he spat again. Pink vomit soaked into the salt.
He ducked down and looked under the leaf. Her mouth was thick with vomit. While crying, she squirmed to roll over, closer to him. On her stomach, head up, she stared at him, open mouth letting out long sobs.
He looked out to the now-empty horizon, and back to her blue, wet eyes. She pulled herself toward him, and he leaned in, rolling her over and lying gently on top of her. “I’m sorry,” he whispered directly into her ear. She continued to cry in deep sobs, grabbing the skin of his neck and cheek in small fists. “I am sorry.” He stroked her thin hair, rubbing his lips over her ear and cheek, whispering “I’m sorry” over and over again until it became like a song. He lay there with her until her crying stopped and fed her more plant juice and bread. She grew drowsy and didn’t fight the pouch.
When he got to his feet again, the sun had moved enough that he could tell direction. He leaned forward and his body responded with a first step. In what seemed like an hour, he was at pace again, the pouch in front so he could see her fists balled up to cheeks. He felt heavier, or weaker. Circles in circles. If they were spiraling this far out already… He thought of Tayado; you’re going to run twenty hours without stopping? If he was not even past that first circle when he was seventeen hours out…
“Then I’m not even halfway,” he whispered.
His heels shot pain through his knees.
—
The sun dropped on his right, and the night rotated above. His feet scraped loudly. The pouch in his arm curved his back.
One day. Twenty hours.
From a limbo of thought, he blinked back to awareness. Watching the white grit move toward his feet. He blinked again, looked up, checked to his left, over his shoulder and off to his right.
One day.
The red sky was fading. One sunset ago, the child was sitting in her mother’s lap, having her hair stroked after a meal. Now her lips were cracked and scabbed, and she seemed often only half-awake.
And Tayado was likely no more.
If he had left them alone, Tayado would be alive, settling into her new cot somewhere. The child would be fed and sleeping in a cot of her own. With a designated name. And he would be in his new barrack, readying for another shift.
And wondering every night where my daughter was.
Selfish, petty man. You’ve killed us all so you’d not cry away your nights. Fool!
In the dimming light, he kept thinking he saw another of the broad-leafed plants, always just ahead. But when he neared, he seemed to lose sight of them. The leaves he’d plucked were eaten. The bread was gone.
He blinked hard, picked up his head. Looked left, behind, right, and scanned ahead for guideline stars. He found them off to one side and corrected his course slightly.
“Hey…” His head bobbed side-to-side with clumsy steps. She slept quietly, mouth slightly open. “I’m—sorry. I—thought—would be—different. I didn’t—”
He realized again that he had been staring at the ground for some time. No idea how much time had passed. Checked the guide stars. Corrected. Swung his head left, eyes sliding to follow; checked over his shoulder; to his right. Saw a distant, vivid blue. Rolled his head down again, letting it bob with each step.
Somewhere, he was thinking of the blue. That it was important. That he should look again. Lolled to the right. Sharp, piercing, vivid blue.
A shudder of awareness rippled through him. He blinked, rolled his eyes under drying lids. His footsteps fell more quietly.
It was coming. Off on the horizon, out of the dying red sky, it came. They came.
“Wh…”
He began to straighten.
Why would they send more than one to the same place?
He looked to her sleeping face for a long moment before swinging the pouch around to his back. The glowing, vibrating light steadied as they drew out of the shimmering heat. They figured something out. They knew I found water. They narrowed it from there.
His body was already responding to his quickened pace. Numbed feet stepping askew, chest fighting for desiccated air.
Four. Four!
Adrenaline seeped into his blood.
Four machines, barely visible above the brilliant blue lines, rushed across the desert. His equilibrium faltered as he tried to run with his head turned, so he dropped his gaze back to the current of salt flowing under his feet. Blue-etched shadows began to blur with his steps.
He concentrated on moving his legs, of lifting them for slightly longer steps, and for pushing slightly harder. They did not respond as he’d hoped.
Another glance and they were already covering half the horizon, the ends of their scanning beams overlapping. They grew visibly larger even as he watched. Their hum started to echo in his ears.
He refocused forward. Nothing to hide under. No way to outrun them. His body screamed at him to stop.
I have only one thing. Only one thing.
He pounded his feet into the salt. Cracks and ripples in the ground shot into sharp relief as the drones came on like a wave of light. His daughter bounced against his back. Breath gushed between his teeth again.
To his right, one drone was closing more directly than the others. It would be the one. Less than half a mile away—even if he could somehow evade it, he would merely be in the sweep of the next.
And even as this realization struck him, he would not let himself stop. They flew staggered, not a perfect formation, each drone staggered slightly ahead or behind the others. His eyes widened. The sweeps overlapped as a line, but some were ahead of others. If there was enough room after one passed…
He pressed himself faster. The quadruple hum echoed in his chest. He knew he wasn’t running as he once had. The edge of the nearest oncoming blue sweep was rushing across the desert flats toward him, drawing a sharp, quivering line of brilliance in the darkness. A front-to-back gap, a mere hundred feet before the next line’s advance, lay behind it. Lips pulled back, head kicking forward at each step, he ran in a delirium of anguish. One thing! with every step. One thing!
The line rose up as he took the last lengthened strides, and its edge rushed behind him in a torrent of hum. He skidded, reversed direction, fell, scrambled upright on flailing feet, and ran again. The second scan was an onrushing wall of blue. One thing! One thing!
Towering walls of light flanked him, one hurtling away, one bearing down. The pounding hum seeming to emanate from the salt itself. She bounced against his back. The edge of the second sweep flickered over the ground, closing the distance as if accelerating. Its end came within a hundred paces—thirty—ten—he veered as it surged at to him, and he leaped.
He threw himself, arms out, kicking his legs up behind him. The very tip of the sweep ripped beneath his airborne body, and he struck the salt beyond on his chin and chest. He crumpled, fought to keep his weight off his back, screamed as salt filled his mouth, and stopped. He knew before he even struggled to stand what he had done.
The hum changed, and the lines suddenly swerved in multiple directions as the drones broke formation. He clutched at his mouth with both hands. He tried to stand, still holding his mouth as if to take back the scream. The farthest drone was curving back, dropping lower and moving toward him. The other drones were moving as well, two moving slightly farther onward, and two swooping around to the back. Below them, seeming to crackle the air, the brilliant lines started closing around him in a vast box.
He got to his feet and collapsed backward almost immediately. He recovered, stance wide, blinding blue quivering toward him. The scans came on as ripples over the ground, two sides already formed and the third and forth coming wide from the outside. His eyes stung but nothing watered them. He wanted to shout into the vibrating air, wanted to scream. He swayed and his daughter bumped against his back, pressing. His face contorted on its own until his eyes nearly shut and his mouth gaped open. He turned around and pushed into a step.
He ran in a daze. The weight on his back pressed him, and with moments of clarity he gained spasms of adrenaline. He was dimly aware of the sweeps moving behind him, of running headlong through a maze of blue. Even in his delirium, he knew he could not outrun the drones coming from behind. He had one chance. The far corner would be the last to close. It meant getting there before the last drone caught up. It was at least two miles.
One thing.
He thought of Tayado, standing at roll call, of the censor walking down the line, checking each person against pictures of their faces that appeared on the metal pad in his hands. He would check her off, then pause as he looked at the next person, frowning because their face was not Baedo’s. He would notice the baby also absent. Maybe his pad would tell him it was the baby’s weaning day and he would suddenly understand. He would shout into his wrist, throw Tayado to the ground, and within seconds, the drones would beat the air with—
A scan line swept into his vision on the left. The machine was invisible high above, beyond the outpouring of blinding blue against the black sky. Even from several hundred feet up, it flattened his hair. It won’t be long.
Water touched his lips. Nose bleeding from the fall. The child bounced lightly on his back.
If I give in—would they spare you?
A vision, a delusion, of her tiny blue eyes watching a raising baton, and his sight cleared. The hum disappeared. The hard rasping in his throat and the single points of stars faded. He heard wind in his ears and the slap of feet. He saw blue break into the edge of his vision on the right.
That was everything he knew.
It was a silence more complete than the empty nights in the desert. The wind. His feet. The line. The wind. His feet. The line. He knew, far back in his mind, that his arms, legs, heart, lungs, throat, and bones were telling him to stop, that there was nothing left. But he ran; not willing each step as much as refusing not to take it. The left line was visibly arcing toward him and he began curving away from it. He couldn’t outrun it. Instinct was taking him away from the danger, even when intellect knew the straight run was shorter. He knew all this, and yet couldn’t think beyond the echoless sound of his feet and the close sound of his body rushing the wind. He felt nothing anymore. Even as he saw the lines hurtling up from both sides, he felt that perhaps his vision would simply tunnel slowly and quietly, and he would fade out in a blur of motion on the salt flats.
The lines were gone. His awareness broke back upon him in sudden confusion. The familiar pain rose again in a wave. He looked over his shoulder once, twice. The last line had arced—arced around backward—had cut behind him. It closed in on the other three and shut an empty box. He saw how close behind him the first two drones had been, closing down the box even as the last two moved to complete it. They rushed toward one another, crossed in a flurry of beams, and without hesitation, each curved back toward the original formation.
Their hums again beating in unison, they resumed their path.
He clumsily slowed and turned to watch them advance on the far horizon. Even though his stance wavered, he knew better than to let himself sit or kneel. The four walls of light crackled as they receded into the distance.
I have one thing.
“Is that all?” he tried to yell after them, but his swollen throat was utterly dry and only a tattered hiss passed his lips. He pulled the pouch around to the front and peeked in to where his daughter still slept. His wide stance wobbled. “Thank you,” he hissed with a crooked smile. “Thank you,”—several breaths—“for being quiet.”
His chest had been scraped raw, and he wiped blood from his nose and chin. The light from the drones was all but gone. Along his own path, right under his guide star, the horizon was unusually rigid. He blinked his dried eyes, trying to see more in the darkness. Along much of the horizon before him, it looked as if the land darkened and rose up. He’d never seen anything like it, but it made his bloodied lips smile wide.
“I think we made it,” he whispered to the bundle in his arms. Ignoring the pain again, he pushed his body into its rhythm.
“I think we made it.”
—
The third day dawned.
He reached the mountains.
The child would not wake.
When the sun had broken into the yellowing sky, Baedo was already several hundred feet up the side of the mountain’s gentle slope. He had laughed, a quiet rasp, at the unfamiliar plants and dirt. His toes sunk in at times and he’d reveled in the feeling. A gray, broad-leaf plant had greeted him part way up, and he’d laughed again. When he set down the pouch and lifted his daughter, he knew something was wrong.
He knew even before he’d stroked her face to rouse her. Before he’d squeezed the plant juice onto her cracked lips. Before he pressed a numb ear to her chest and heard no sound. She was thin, sunken, impossibly limp.
“You must come with me.” A broken whisper. He smoothed her hair to her head. “You must…”
He sat on his knees, his daughter pressed against his chest, trying to shout into the warming air. No sounds came from his wide mouth. Nothing flowed from his eyes. He rocked. Wheezing gasps faded across the empty mountainside as his body jerked.
He stayed there as the sun climbed quietly higher, until his body had no strength left to grieve.
And then he stood, holding his daughter tight in one arm, and pushed aimless strides up the face of the mountain.
He stumbled and ran, weight as often on his free hand as on his feet. He slipped and fell constantly up the rocky slope. His knees and shins bled in long, flat lines, but he cradled her small body with care. The air thinned, and he choked on it. At last, his leg slipped on a boulder, and he fell flat against the stony ground.
He wheezed into the dirt, his mouth pressed to her ashen skull. He lay face down for several minutes before lifting his head again.
And he heard the mechanical hum.
A few miles away, lifting over a ridge of the mountainside, four drones flew in formation toward him. The scan lines beneath them stretched from the salt flats to the mountain well above him. They moved smoothly, unhurried. Resolute.
He screamed at them, but merely hissed. He screamed again and dropped his face into the dirt where his screams barely moved the dust.
“I can’t…” he rasped, holding her face close to his. “I can’t do this. I can’t do this anymore.” He wanted tears to come, to somehow sanctify their last moments. “I can’t… I have nothing. I am nothing!”
He pulled her close to his face, laying her beside him. Over her tiny head, he could see them coming; bobbing and bunching slightly in the thin air, but coming. Just a few more minutes. He looked back to his daughter’s face and found her thin blue eyes staring back.
He jerked, eyes and mouth wide. She squeezed the skin of his neck and let out a single monotone syllable.
With both hands he grasped her head, quick whining rasps from his throat. She smiled slightly and he swooped her into his arms, pressing their cheeks together.
He struggled to his feet, holding her so tightly to his neck he had difficulty breathing against her. The drones were coming, and he stumbled and skidded downward. He didn’t know if he could reach the salt flats so far down, out of the drones’ path, but in a way, he barely cared. She was humming again to the rhythm of his feet. He looked again at her face, saw her eyes following the oncoming drones—saw them looking farther down than he thought—
Stones rattled as he stopped and turned. They were still coming, but they were crowding each other, going around the swell of the mountain’s edge instead of over it.
In the thinning air, they could fly no higher.
With one look, he gauged their path. He looked back at his daughter, who seemed to smile slightly before dropping her head onto his shoulder. He spun around and drove up the mountainside.
I have worth not because I endure, you fool of a governor.
He smiled wide as his daughter held him. Needed him.
I endure because I have worth.
They were more than a hundred feet clear when the drones swept by below. They rested only long enough to catch their breath before searching for plants to eat.
The next sunrise found them descending the other side of the mountain into a valley of lush and humid green.
—
Fifteen years had passed since a man named Baedo and his unnamed child disappeared into the salt flats of a small planet on the edge of civilization. They died out there, the governor said. Everyone believed him and forgot the man and his child altogether.
But Tayado did not.
She had thrown herself at the roll call censor, had torn the communicator from his wrist before being clubbed unconscious. She had been questioned for six days and never said a word. Neither shoulder had healed correctly, but she managed still to work.
As an aged woman of nearly thirty-six, Tayado’s days left were few and she had almost forgotten; but not quite. When word spread to her that a baby, nearly weaned, had disappeared from the colony overnight, she remembered. When months dragged on and a second, third, and fourth child disappeared, the rumors spread, and she knew. Twigs of lush greenery were left in the children’s boxes—things never seen before. The governor and the gentlemen were more visible than usual and always agitated. The drones were sent out three times in a month and a few of the gentlemen took to walking the complex at night. But the children kept disappearing. Some people spoke of guardian spirits taking the children to a paradise of green, and the idea of someone beyond the control of the governor was born.
It was a night like any other that she woke in her barrack cot, wrapped herself in her broken clothing and waded through the other sleepers to the door.
She stood in the doorway, skewed with age, staring out into the empty flats. Movement caught her eye and, with a sharp intake of breath, she saw a figure dash outside the edge of the barracks and come to a sudden stop. Her eyes adjusted, and her ears caught the sound of quick breathing.
A young woman stood dark against the starlit flats. She was looking at Tayado. Her skin was glistening in the dim light, streaks of sweat rippling over muscles that Tayado had seen only once before. Their eyes met. Tayado’s mouth smiled. Her eyes saddened. The young woman smiled broadly back.
They held the exchange for a long moment before the young woman gave a slight nod, hooked her thumbs into straps on her shoulders and spun about. On her back, in an old pouch made of a dead man’s shirt, showed a baby’s sleeping head.
With silent footfalls in the vast emptiness, the woman streaked into the night.
—
Generations passed. Long after anyone who ever knew of a man named Baedo, a woman named Tayado, or their daughter, had passed on, communications from the backwater world suddenly stopped. When a ship was sent to investigate, it did not return. When an armored detachment touched down, they found the colony deserted. They did not find the first ship.
A new breed of humanity was let upon the stars. And the empire would not endure it.
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