Forever Magazine Issue 60 by David Gerrold & Marissa Lingen & Rich Larson

Author:David Gerrold & Marissa Lingen & Rich Larson [Gerrold, David & Lingen, Marissa & Larson, Rich]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: novella, science fiction, science fiction magazine, short fiction, short stories
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2020-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September-October 2016.

Innumerable Glimmering Lights

Rich Larson

####At the roof of the world, the Drill churned and churned. Four Warm Currents watched with eyes and mouth, overlaying the engine’s silhouette with quicksilver sketches of sonar. Long, twisting shards of ice bloomed from the metal bit to float back along the carved tunnel. Workers with skin glowing acid yellow, hazard visibility, jetted out to meet the debris and clear it safely to the sides. Others monitored the mesh of machinery that turned the bit, smoothing contact points, spinning cogs. The whole thing was beautiful, efficient, and made Four Warm Currents secrete anticipation in a flavored cloud.

A sudden needle of sonar, pitched high enough to sting, but not so high that it couldn’t be passed off as accidental. Four Warm Currents knew it was Nine Brittle Spines before even tasting the name in the water.

“Does it move faster with you staring at it?” Nine Brittle Spines signed, tentacles languid with humor-not-humor.

“No faster, no slower,” Four Warm Currents replied, forcing two tentacles into a curled smile. “The Drill is as inexorable as our dedication to its task.”

“Dedication is admirable, as said the ocean’s vast cold to one volcano’s spewing heat.” Nine Brittle Spines’s pebbly skin illustrated, flashing red for a brief instant before regaining a dark cobalt hue.

“You are still skeptical.” Four Warm Currents clenched tight to keep distaste from inking the space between them. Nine Brittle Spines was a council member, and not one to risk offending. “But the ice’s composition is changing, as I reported. The bit shears easier with every turn. We’re approaching the other side.”

“So it thins, and so it will thicken again.” Nine Brittle Spines wriggled dismissal. “The other side is a deep dream, Four Warm Currents. Your machine is approaching more ice.”

“The calculations,” Four Warm Currents protested. “The sounding. If you would read the theorems—”

Nine Brittle Spines hooked an interrupting tentacle through the thicket of movement. “No need for your indignation. I have no quarrel with the Drill. It’s a useful sideshow, after all. It keeps the eyes and mouths of the colony fixated while the council slides its decisions past unhindered.”

“If you have no quarrel, then why do you come here?” Four Warm Currents couldn’t suck back the words, or the single droplet of ichor that suddenly wobbled into the water between them. It blossomed there into a ghostly black wreath. Four Warm Currents raked a hasty tentacle through to disperse it, but the councillor was already tasting the chemical, slowly, pensively.

“I have no quarrel, Four Warm Currents, but others do.” Nine Brittle Spines swirled the bitter emission around one tentacle tip, as if it were a pheromone poem or something else to be savored. Four Warm Currents, mortified, could do nothing but turn an apologetic mottled blue, almost too distracted to process what the councillor signed next.

“While the general opinion is that you have gone mad, and your project is a hilariously inept allocation of time and resources based only on your former contributions, theories do run the full gamut.

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