Blog Post

by Nessie Sturm

A certain kind of person chooses to make their living on the interplanetary trucking routes: loners, control freaks, alien-obsessives too poor to do it the tourist way. Some would say I belonged to all three, but they would not be entirely correct. I did it for Ileel: my loner, my control freak, my alien-obsessive. Her one dream of experiencing the worlds that enchanted her so was forbidden by the make of her skin—altered by a rare alien bug so it gobbled up sunlight and synthesized it into poison. It's a hard enough condition to survive on earth, even with the best medicine and accommodations, but, in space, UV rays are an acceptable risk. It was a risk that my skin was either blessed or cursed with enduring. My skin and my innate patience for flying through nothing for months allowed me to turn my fate into a vehicle for Ileel's vicarious life. A cruel part of me sometimes wondered whether her eyes sparkled for me or for the baubles of knowledge I brought back to her. I tried to not feed it and focused on the wonderful, little life we had built for ourselves. A life with a time limit, and one day time was up.

After a few weeks sleeping alone in our bed, I broke the lease and left aboard Delilah, my old girl, a cargo space cruiser. A shipment, and as much of what remained of my life with Ileel, weighed down her aging spaceship body. I sequestered myself to the cockpit, where I wouldn't have to confront the mess I'd made of the living deck—a stratum of grief built from layers of clothes, furniture, cookware, and boxes of memories that burned like hot tar. I ignored it, I ignored everything, and we idly carried the cargo to its recipients. Throughout the lengthy journey through the gates and expanse of nothing between them—between bouts of staring silently into that nothing or any nothing that wasn't the everything I had left to my name—I read through the provided materials about my destination.

Myrmecar is a tiny world, a moon, whose finite spins around its ammonia-dyed parent planet were large enough that evolution could work its strange magic, bestowing the capacity of civilization craft to its dominant species. It was a magic that had caught Ileel's obsessions, consequently inspiring me to accept the first job there that came with planet time. It had been the books for months, waiting unaware of the tragedy it would tread upon. To not go felt more poisonous than just drinking it in. So, there Delilah and I were, watching for months as the star that warmed our destination grew from a hole in space, to a puncture, to a pearl, to a marble, to a monster whose size defied all reason.

The haunted mess called to me after I put us in orbit around Myrmecar's gaseous giant and heralded my arrival. With a deep breath, I began searching through piles of clothing for my thigh-high gravity correction boots. Crackling, percussive barks filled the comms, interrupting the search and the tears that had accumulated in my ducts after brushing against one of Ileel's dresses. Cursing, I flipped on my translator and hailed, "Apologies comrade, repeat."

"Welcome, Inspector Cor. Reception net is ready to catch." The translator approximated the alien's voice, convolving human language with their rumbling vocal cords. I could turn off the filter if I wanted, but it made real life sound like a badly dubbed alien film. I left it on and felt my way through the context when the blend of alien and human became incoherent.

"Copy." My voice tightened as the boots automatically constricted to my legs, starting at my toes, and then bit by bit to my thighs, occasionally readjusting to prevent clots.

I skipped towards the control panel, hopping between the spots where the floor peaked through, the heavy thuds of my boots articulating my return, and accepted the Myrmer's coordinates. Delilah finished her rotation around the piss-colored giant and headed to the rendezvous. Shelved engineering pet projects and souvenirs for nobody rattled as we broke through the dense atmosphere of a world drenched in the yellow light of its god. I turned my attention to finding my oxygen stabilizer, jumpsuit, and sun hat before heading below to the cargo hold. Delilah rattled and I slipped down the last few steps.

"Old girl, you can't die on me, you know I have no one left." I patted the titanium coated walls of her belly. Delilah didn't respond. She was a spaceship.

The ghosts that haunted the living deck paled in comparison to those that lurked below. Atmoformers—towering, inscrutable black boxes, manufactured far larger than was necessary, containing fusion powered climate terraforming technology—took up the whole of Delilah's capacity. Their artificially inflated size sought to hide a terrible truth: these were not nearly enough to correct Myrmecar's runaway climate issues. Regulation required that any shipment of climate technology titrate up, pending a detailed report and yearly review—a rule born from a civilization who wasn't ready for the responsibility and consequently boiled its ecosystem. It wasn't my habit to feel guilt for my manifests, but I was not simply a trucker this trip. On Myrmercar, I would play the role of inspector—a role that I was not permitted to hold. Decades of dabbling didn't make up for the poverty life prescribed to me, forcing me to choose between Ileel's medical debt and the tuition required for becoming a certified Climatology Guild inspector. But, that never stopped clients from hiring me under the table, paying the steep fees I charged for breaking this law rather than swallow the exorbitant cost of sending a real inspector with me.

I had taken to accepting these jobs more often in those days. The extra money helped, but the real reason was the planet time it allotted. The average trucker couldn't afford to stop and smell their destination's evolutionary equivalent of a rose. Inspectors could. So, while I worked to guarantee that the recipient of my shipment wouldn't destroy their home, I would fill out the answers to a secret inspection that Ileel would prepare for me. Questions that Ileel couldn't find satisfactory answers to. Answers she would use to create little wind-up dioramas depicting scenes from my travels. I lived in the ultimately futile promise of our little ritual, cradling a paper notepad that she filled with questions about Myremcar just before she passed—written by hand like only she did.

My bones drank in the prickly sensation of the tractor net passing through them and then shook with the thud of arrival. This environment was non-hostile, but not ideal for the evolution of mammalian bipeds thanks to the mixture of low gravity, high oxygen, and dangerous ultraviolet levels during its multi-day "days". My boots and stabilizer were a convenience. According to the readout, human visitors would eventually grow accustomed to this swampy, alien world, assuming they had the desire to trek this far out. It was always nice to see a world like this preoccupied by native intelligences; Goldilocks' luck saved it from the psychopathic Settler's Union.

The doors slid open. Yellow light and swamp air drooled into Delilah, coating my tight buzz cut with alien water droplets. My eyes adjusted; compared to the hundreds of worlds I had visited in my career, the occupants of Myrmecar were a novelty. One of the few cataloged instances of an intelligent invertebrate, and the only one bigger than the average human. No amount of research could have prepared me for the creature that stood at the end of my ramp. It towered at twice my height, a body supported by a dozen long, spindly legs which splayed out in all directions. Rising from the bulk of its mass was a swan-like neck that ended in an angular beak adorned with countless fangs and eyes. The only garment on its long, segmented body was a tiara of knotted ebony and gold thorns perfectly molded to its spiky head. Question number one in the notebook asked me to find out what the crowns were.

My giant greeter broke the silence, "Sunset, Cor. Welcome to Earth. I am Sister Ksticlia. Words cannot express our gratitude for your assistance."

"Sunset, Sister Ksticlia. My pleasure." It always used to tickle Ileel that the translator caused every species to call their little home in the void, Earth. I chased that thought from my mind; unchecked emotions can be a dangerous thing while talking to another Earth's apex-predator-turned-overthinker. I busied myself with taking notes about the cargo deployment for the report. Ksticlia watched Delilah's antique cranes and pulleys spit out the shipment of giant reactors. A loud click echoed from the spider-alien's body—from what part I couldn't determine—and a workforce of Myrmer, kitted out with silver armor, approached the shipment. From their bodies unfurled large pedipalps baring one of the marks of intelligence: opposable digits.

The port was enormous and empty of any activity save for us. "Not a busy day for shipping?"

Ksticlia continued to stare at the atmoformers. "Today is the beginning of our mating season. We are the only ones whose responsibility requires us to be here." It paused. "Is this enough to save our world?"

"It should be. They're the only reason we still have our Earth. When I return for the follow up report next year, I'll be able to bring more or remove superfluous units as needed."

I wondered if the translator passed on my tone: pleasant but tired of hiding the truth. Did the Myrmer have a mind that forced them to feel something and say something else? I swallowed my desire to break protocol, reveal that it would be years before their climate was healed, if ever. Inspectors, even counterfeit ones, were required to feign incompetence; telling a world on the verge of apocalypse that we outfitted them insufficiently on purpose was a great way to start a war. The Myrmer would need to endure years of ecosystem collapse while the bureaucracy sated their need for control.

"That's reassuring Cor. We are hopeful. Recent changes in our distance from the moon have threatened us. We are placing our faith in you."

I tried to imagine a life where the behemoth that cloaked this planet in night for days at a time could be a moon, but we only ever know what we evolve in. I wrote gravitational changes under the cause portion of the report and made a mental note to pull data from the nearest space station to confirm. "Will you be the guide for my inspection? If so, I have a few identification questions to ask."

"No. That honor belongs to Trtiant. It has taken charge of this responsibility. It will meet you in the front of the port and escort you to The Communal."

~ ~ ~

I was never able to tell Ileel the whole of what I did, what it means to inspect the planets I shipped to. It was the opinion of the Guild that extinction events be permitted except in the case of worlds that meet their expectations for being civilized—expectations marred by the biases of those represented in the Guild's membership. Perhaps, official inspectors were able to fudge the reports a little, permit survival to worlds a bit too different from ours. I had to do everything by the book; one mistake was all it would take to reveal my crime. Ileel never asked about the contents of the inspection. Her silence saved me from feeling the whole of my dilemma, the double bind of protecting the little bit of security and joy I had made for us at the cost of some of the worlds she dreamed of visiting. The results would have been the same whether or not I took job or left it to the officials, but that was cold comfort. Seven worlds that I knew about struggled in the aftermath of my initial inspections, and, of them, I knew three were doomed to wink out as their environments hotly or coldly cannibalized themselves. I stood in the glass covered walkway that surrounded the port and stared out at Myrmecar, wondering if I would become its doom too.

I let the eclipsing sun etch this world into my mind, in case I became the last to behold it. Precarious was Myrmecar. It always feels like you can fall off small planets; a single wrong move and I might slip across the endless gold and red forest that covered this world—cursed to orbit shipless. I bore the nausea, and the sense that such a punishment might befit what I might do, and let the etching continue. Myrmer architecture inherited its world's precarity. The port rested high above the surface on a skyscraper of knots, spirals, and thorns—perfect for receiving spaceships and making truckers sick as they stared downward. From it, a skyway shot out, suspended high in the air with no support structures beyond its origin and destination. In the distance, that destination loomed large and impossible.

A craggy peak, barren and bleeding some strange golden ooze, jutted out from the surface of a world with no other notable geographic features. Its loneliness was a wonder that the inspector guide had no explanation for. Resting against it, was an enormous bronze-dipped tumbleweed, many hundred times the height of any city on my Earth. It reflected the fading sunlight in countless directions; ephemeral beams of gold slid along the trees growing like weeds at its base. My heart split: I wanted desperately to discover how a thing like that could hold a people, and I was fearful of the moment when I would learn the answer—an answer I would whisper into the wind in hopes that I was wrong about what happens when we die, that a beautiful woman I'd never see again might learn something new.

A loud click echoed behind me. "Sunset, traveler!"

Three Myrmer towered, adorned with three subtly different tiaras; streaks of gold flowed through the inky black knots that wrapped around each one's unique set of horns. The largest Myrmer had a more subtle crown, only wrapping around the horns on the left side of its head. It rubbed its pedipalps ever so slightly.

"Sunset, friends. Thank you for your hospitality."

"It is our pleasure. I am Trtiant, and these are my wives Ttla and Zlltili." The two other Myrmer made no gestures upon being introduced. I wondered how to ask which was which politely.

Translators can only ever approximate words. They can be quite good at it where it counts, which is mostly business, but in issues of culture and identity, noise gets introduced. From my research and eavesdropping on the conversations between the portworkers, I understood that this language didn't possess gendered pronouns—a thing we shared that made me more of an alien at home than here. The translator settled on it. However, the introduction of the word wives complicated things. Were the workers in silver husbands? Did wives necessarily have to be women? Were they married in any way I would understand? Did my translator have no way to approximate the relationship between these three specimens and instead settle on lesbian polycule? Was I doomed to have every part of this trip remind me of what I had lost? These types of questions are bad to ask during an introductory experience between two species. They require one to find some way to explain the endless baggage that humans have about stuff, before you could even ask if giant spiders that evolved 400 light-years away from earth have lesbian marriages.

Trtiant continued, "Before we do the inspection, it is the responsibility of all our people to give thanks to those who will mate this season. I am uncertain if any rules prevent you from participating, but it would be convenient if you would join us."

I was absolutely doomed. "It would be an honor."

Wordlessly they turned and, in a flash, disappeared down the skyway, answering my question about the lack of transportation systems outside of the hanger. Halfway down, the large one paused and then returned as fast as it left.

"You are slow?"

I laughed. "I guess so."

It stood motionless eyeing me before it spoke again. "Would it be insulting to offer for you to ride on my abdomen?"

"It would not." I climbed aboard. "What was your name again?"

"Zlltili." the translator's synthesis collided with the clicks that radiated from its neck.

Zlltili flew down the tunnel after its wives; the wind from our speed threatened to unseat me from my host and force me to hug its long neck. Despite the armor-like appearance, its exoskeleton was coated in a shiny black peach-fuzz, which up close looked like the ends of fiber-optic cables; it felt like velvet. I held on tight and watched as the skyways's web-like frame animated from our speed, undulating around the world on the other side. The metal supports slithered and spun along the glass, diving into the crimson foliage of the dense canopy beneath us and bursting out into yellow sky. Before long, the city replaced my view of the sunset world. We slowed and climbed up the scaffolding towards the top of the city.

"How long have you been with your wives?" I spoke up towards Zlltili's head.

Zlltili's voice dripped down its neck, higher pitch than the others, like twinkling crystal. "Four-hundred and thirty years."

I gawked at it. The one thing a translator would never mess up was time measurements. "How old are you?"

"I am young. Seven-hundred forty-six years old."

Ttla looked back at us; its voice was lower, it gurgled and plopped, "Young but very wise. I am two-thousand two-hundred and three years old, and even with all those returnings behind me, I still feel so inexperienced."

It seemed impossible that the lifespan of this species would not have made it into the briefing my client gave me. How could the people back home hope to decide on a civilization's ability to fiddle with its climate if they didn't even know this?

I leaned closer to Zlltili's neck. "How old is Trtiant?"

"Trtiant is of another age, before it was fashionable to count the years. It is an eldest sister. We are very fortunate that it is our wife"

Curiosity overtook my grief, and I flipped to Ileel's questions. "Wives has a specific connotation on my world. Is it normal for a Myrmer family to be comprised entirely of members who can birth a child?"

Zlltili paused and considered my question. "Some families are mixed with people who were able to give birth and others who weren't."

"In that second group, is there a word for the ones who can't give birth? On our world, we sometimes call them husbands."

"We do not have husbands. This word is foreign."

"So, every family is comprised of wives."

"Yes. Those that receive can become wives if they choose to."

I considered interrogating the use of receive before deciding to continue with my line of questioning. "Could you clarify what sex you three are? I apologize if this is an awkward question, but I must be thorough with my report."

"We were prepared for being asked strange things, little alien. Could you in turn explain to me what you mean by sex?"

It was my turn to pause and consider Zlltili's question. "It's not that easy of a question for us either. I guess one answer is some of us are born with the ability to have a child and others aren't."

"Then Ttla and I did not have the ability to have a child and Trtiant did."

The sun hit the outer branches of The Communal, trickling down. By the time it reached our procession, it had long since become shadows and speckles of light drenching us in a blanket of refracted camouflage. I watched the light snake down Zlltili's elegant neck and, for the first time in my life, found myself wishing I was a part of a different world. Ileel felt that often, telling me about her desire to be reborn on worlds that never saw sunlight, worlds that treated those who were sick kinder, worlds where being gay or changing your sex was normal. For a long time, I was grateful for the world I was born into, that it gave me a life with Ileel in it. It broke me to know how she felt only after she was gone forever, here on a world that would've been a gentler home for us, where we could've been long-lived, genderless wives.

We broke through the metal canopy of the city. In the center of a web of dense, bronze lattices, an enormous spiraling structure pierced through the glass that covered the outer branches—worn upon The Communal like the Myrmer wore their strange crowns. Radiating around its base was a small city of silk covered canopies; the sun shined brightest here, piercing through the tarps and illuminating the reflective setae of thousands of Myrmer bodies. Black chitin glistened like an oil spill—faint and rainbow. I dismounted Zlltili and followed my three companions into the crowd, whose sounds assailed my translator—overflowed with words of rituals and concerns with no adequate translation. It revealed the extent to which my guides had spent time learning to alter their speech for my benefit. As I attempted to thank them, a pall of silence rippled through the crowd.

The silence followed the emergence of a group of Myrmer from the temple-crown. They walked slowly between us, towards an elevated platform that reached out from the top of the city and held on to the peak of their mountain. Unlike my new friends or the other attendees to this celebration, this group lacked crowns. Their bare heads reflected the fading sunlight—a brighter rainbow than the other members of their people. These were the ones who had just molted into adults; ready to mate, fresh and young but undoubtedly far older than me. Nine of them stood facing us, bathing in the shadow light of the sun that passed behind their colossal moon. These arachnid bachelorettes stood strangely; their bodies had less limbs than the Myrmer I had recently met. The inspector guide implied that the standard amount was twelve, not including the two pedipalps. I stared at their stumps and at an individual in the center who was missing its left pedipalp; the holy silence smothered my curiosity.

A wave of little taps began. Then more as all the Myrmer around me began to gently drum on their bodies with their pedipalps. The sound fluttered, wishing the sun farewell as it dove into the yellow murk above. The last of its flaming aura sunk, and the nine crownless spiders turned and descended down the peak. I felt it land within the neurons of my mind, pushing aside lesser memories—bright and burning like how Ileel's prized possessions glowed menacing within the mess I made of Delilah. In the feeling of it, I hardly registered as the crowd dissipated, nor the sensation of walking spellbound to the edge of the windowed roof, where I watched the nine climb down the mountain.

"Why are they missing legs?" I asked at last.

Trtiant's voice was metallic and resonant, like when I would drag my toolbox across the floor. It shattered the silence. "The weather has become too cold and dry. Without the warmth and the moisture, our kind becomes stuck in our molts. It damages our bodies. Each season less are able to pick up the responsibilities. The young are affected by it more than the old."

In that moment I resolved to make them pass the inspection no matter what I saw. "Can it kill you?"

"No. At least it has not happened yet. It is very rare for one of us to die."

The young Myrmer were like specks then. Without a human to worry about carrying, they flew down the mountain unfazed by their missing limbs.

"Thank you for sharing this with me. It was–" I paused and then looked up at my companions. "My mate passed away before I came here. Seeing this, seeing your world was beautiful."

"It is our honor." Trtiant replied.

I watched the nine disappear along the side of the mountain. "Where are they going?" I asked.

"They go to the side of the world, to tap for their mates." Ttla stated.

I stared at its crown. "Do the crowns have to do with mating?"

"Crowns?"

"The thing you wear on your heads."

Trtiant answered. "These are our embolitum. Do they look like crowns?"

"In a way. Would you be able to explain what the embolitum is?"

The three Myrmer looked at each other. Trtiant took the lead, "It is complicated, but I shall try. The embolitum is a gift we are given by our mates when we receive them. They are made when–" the translator cut out, unable to process Trtiant's explanation. Mixed in with the metallic clicks of words I couldn't know were the words "love", "semen", and "gift". At the end of the explanation the translator kicked back in. "–they are each unique to us. A sign of the promise of the return."

"I didn't catch a lot of that, but I think I understand."

Ttla spoke up. "The return is such a beautiful thing. We are fortunate that one as different as you can understand."

"How do you pick a mate?"

Trtiant came to stand text to me and faced the mountain. "Those that molted to bear a child wait on the other side of the mountain. Potential mates head into the woods to make the embolitum. As the sun reaches the deepest point of the moon, the air… changes. Those that wait will then tap their pedipalps, calling for their mate, a tap that their destined one can hear irrespective of distance. Those that weave follow the call. The embolitum is gifted and, for those who can, a child is conceived."

I smiled at the idea of a species that could hear its soul mate across impossible distances, purely by some chance magic in their evolution. "So, you were each other's mates?

Ttla made that shaking sound, which my translator didn't bother to parse—one of those non-linguistic affects. The sound ceased and shifted into words the translator could regurgitate. "No, we are wives. We met our mates on the side of the world, just like they will."

The translator had a bad habit of getting in the way whenever I got too deep into concerns such as this. I tried a different line of questioning. "Do you not stay with your mate?"

"They are with us, always." Trtiant replied.

"Where are your mates, now?"

Ttla made the shaking sound again. "They went inside of us."

I laughed and tried to find a better way to word the question, to avoid the confusion the translator kept causing. "No, I get that. I'm sure they did. But where are they now?"

Trtiant paused to assess my question, before responding plainly. "We consumed them."

The wind howled as it grated against the side of the mountain, or as they called it the side of the world. "You ate them?" I asked, hoping to have them clarify our misunderstanding.

Zlltili turned to me. "We did not eat them. They became one with us. The ones who return are consumed by the receivers in the process."

"They're killed?"

"Killed, is a word for prey! They are returned." Zlltili interjected. "They are returned to the bodies of those who receive to become one with the end of all things and to give us another chance at defying it."

I stared out at the barren mountainside, realizing that I looked not upon a place of marriage, but of sacrifice. When learning the ways of some distant world, it isn't unusual for your parent culture to claw into you, preventing understanding. There are many things about humans that I could never stomach, despite being one. Chief among them is our endless desire for worth, and our punishment of those who cannot prove theirs—a punishment enacted on the one person who understood me, sentencing her to die in my arms. In all the opportunities for exchange that I had before this one, I approached alien ways without judgment. It made being alien to my own culture's ways easier knowing that none of it was ordained. We made it all up over thousands of years like every other world.

"Which of the nine will d–" I corrected my question. "Which of the nine will be returned?"

"None of them." Ttla replied. "They molted with the chance to carry a child."

The memory that shifted my neurons burned different. "So, you raised up their mates knowing their fate, and didn't have the courtesy to celebrate them, too?"

Trtiant spoke. "No one knows if they will molt to return or molt to receive. It is only apparent when you become an adult."

"Do the ones who return fear it?"

"When they molt out destined to return, they lose their faculties of thought and speech. We do not hold a celebration for them, because they would not understand it. They leave for the forest as soon as they harden. There they feed and to prepare for their return."

A horrible, bubbling anger pushed at the seams of my restraint. "Why do you continue to allow this to happen? There are all sorts of fates that my people solved with science. I was not born in the right body, and so I changed it. People on my world defy the call of our biology all the time. Would it not be better to find a way to save your people from this fate?"

Zlltili let out a horrible sound, one that I immediately understood to be anger despite our differences—an anger that ripped tears out of me. "To be blessed to return and fail to is a curse!"

Trtiant placed its pedipalp on the larger spider. "Zlltili! It does not belong to our ways. What right do you have to question its curiosity and perspective?"

Zlltili recoiled from the touch and rubbed its pedipalps in a gesture I interpreted as nervousness. "I have no right. I lost myself."

Trtiant turned to address me. "Those that return are released to watch over us, to shepherd new life. To defy them their right would betray them. Those of us who receive and then linger bear the burden of this world, a burden marked by our embolitum. We carry their weight, and they comfort us. It is good."

"I…" I was unable to accept that any creature would want their mate to die. "Do you love your mates?"

Ttla looked out at the mountainside. "Dearly." Its voice was fragile.

"Do you miss them?"

"No." All three said in unison.

"Monstrous." I spat out.

They stared at me.

The pain that filled my chest cauterized; my desire to protect their ways spoiled. "I apologize, I think my translator is confusing me. Let's–" I swallowed tears and mucus. "Let's finish the inspection."

~ ~ ~

We climbed down The Communal, past doorways that led into buildings, globular wasp-nest structures without windows, built out of an organic, gray material. Bursting from the walls, bronze tubes meandered this way and that, passing into buildings or latching onto the support beams that we crawled down. We passed detours into conversations that would answer Ileel's questions, detours that the unhealing wound in my heart kept me from taking. My guides would speak and, instead of carefully manipulating them into sharing their world with me, I carefully held back sobs.

Zlltili whispered down its neck. "The nursery."

Ileel's request for information on how they raise their children burned in the notebook I shoved in my pocket.

Ttla gestured toward a larger structure. "The farm."

The structure it referred to rumbled with the calls of creatures that were not Myrmer. Ileel would have wanted to know how the food they loved tasted. I wasn't hungry.

Trtiant stopped, halting our procession, and stood in front of a small building that shined in a way the others did not. Technology full of right angles not of their winding world jutted out of its top. "Weather station. It is new. Perhaps we will go back to not needing it if the machines you brought us work."

They wouldn't, I thought cruelly. You will have to face the change and find a new way around it. Build a kinder world where no one had to die. I seethed and whimpered.

Ileel always wanted to know if the aliens I met feared death like humans did—for her, death was a looming inevitability that she faced with a courage I could not. Worlds where they did not fear it were dear to her—places where, in a different life, she could've lived, surrounded by people that wouldn't make her feel weird for not dreading her own end. I used to put so much energy into pretending that I was like that. I almost wished that I had been away when she died, that she could've left thinking that I was telling the truth; before the end she saw the despair and fear that I was too weak to hide.

We marched downward, the metallic webbing that bound their city to itself and to their mountain clicked and sang under the weight of our bodies. At its base, we passed through a large tunnel out into a freshly cleared patch of land at the foot of the mountain. The air was mild, but still humid. My sun hat cast a shadow on my face and hid my furious, red eyes. A large, two-hundred square meter slab of stone and metal bracing stood ready to hold the atmoformers.

"I will need to carry on this work alone." I said, emotion drained from my voice. "If you could give me some space and send someone to collect me in a few hours."

"We would prefer to st–"

"Leave me alone!" I shouted; the anger and sadness that had simmered as we traveled to this site rushed out all at once, consuming reason.

The three stepped away from me. Trtiant spoke, "Of course, friend. Thank you for your help. Zlltili will return for you when you are finished."

I walked through this culture with no sense of the perils hidden in the words and acts of its upholders. What snippets of my intentions and my heartbreak passed through the translator, I could not know. I walked across the surface of the site that would hold the atmoformers and graded harshly, taking off points for things I ignored a hundred times before. I deleted the information already gathered and filled the questionnaire with answers I knew would ensure they failed. The weight of Ileel's still empty notebook dragged me down, forcing me to collapse on the edge of the platform that faced the forest. Months of denial shattered at once and I shook as my guilt crushed me.

~ ~ ~

A soft yet assertive thwup alerted me that I was no longer alone. I peeled my wet eyes from the expansive, shimmering marsh lands and turned towards the source of the noise. Zlltili towered over me, holding a silk satchel tightly in its pedipalps. It was so strange that a creature so large could be so quiet.

It stared out at the landscape. "The trees are not supposed to be gold."

"They aren't?" I wiped the mix of tears and sweat off my cheeks.

It spoke quietly; at full volume, the voices of this species were crackling with energy, full of dangerous plosives and roars. Zlltili sounded like a delicate work of glass shattering on the floor in another room.

"Their leaves are dying. It used to happen rarely, but it has been like this for decades now. The world was never supposed to be this cold."

"I'm sorry for my outburst, Zlltili. It is not my place to judge something that is different between us."

"Sorry. What is this word?"

"Oh."

I always spent so much time apologizing to Ileel—apologizing for being gone all the time, for being unable to support her in the ways I wanted to, for being dense. She always told me to stop, that I had nothing to apologize for. In truth, I think she liked that I was gone as much as I was; the loneliness suited her. She would have made an excellent trucker for that alone. Perhaps, I wasn't feeling sorry, I was feeling sad. Sad that I lived a life where I couldn't spend every moment with her—a life she wouldn't have wanted. Zlltili's question shot through the murk of my mind, dredging up dust and particulate, revealing a memory I hadn't had the chance to confront yet. Ileel held me in her arms, after another one of my dumb outbursts about how she deserved better than me, and asked, do you think there's a species that doesn't have a word for sorry?"

"I'm sorry, but I'm probably the wrong person to explain sorry. I never seem to use it right." I searched for a way to explain apologies that wasn't tarnished by my awkwardness. "It is a word we use when we make a mistake or feel badly for someone. Though it's more complicated than that. My species says sorry in all sorts of situations, and I don't always understand them. One example is that I regret that my emotions got in the way of celebrating your culture. It makes me feel sorry"

"Feel badly for someone…" Zlltili continued to stare out at the forest. "I think that's a feeling that I have, though I don't think it's normal for us."

"You feel badly for me?"

"No." It faced me, unaware of how funny it was to say that to someone it made cry. I didn't laugh. "I must ask you to do something for me." It placed the silk sack in my lap.

I untied it and revealed a black and gold replica of an embolitum. It bore the subtle angled marks of a portable fabricator's limits, only noticeable to someone like me with years of experience spitting out projects, most of which sat unused in Delilah. I closed it and stared up at Zlltili.

"Why did you make this?"

"My people do not know what it is like to morn a mate. Death is a holy rite here. So, I am sorry that they cannot sympathize with you. I am also sorry that I became angry. It was not your fault. I-" Zlltili lowered its voice until it became the sound of burning coal, delicate and hot. "I became angry because I did not want to admit that I can sympathize, in a way. You must never repeat this. My mate did not die."

"What do you mean?"

"It did not die. Rnma was its name. We grew up together. I can't explain it other than that it survived our mating. Afterwards it left into the wilderness to save me from the shame and horror. I've thought long about its sacrifice and mourned heavily for its curse. There is no way to give it a return; I was hoping to give it something else." Zlltili rested its pedipalp on the bag. "Could you find it? Could you give it this gift? Mates that don't return should bear the embolitum, even if I could not spin it from my own body like it did for me."

"Why ask me to do this? Why trust me?"

"I cannot betray the sacrifice it made by laying my eyes on it. When I learned a creature unlike us was visiting, I saw a chance to alleviate our profanity. I hoped an alien might not care or understand."

I stood and cradled its gift—its sin. "I will do it. Where can I find Rnma?"

"I do not know, likely as far away from The Communal as possible."

"I'm sorry that you had to endure this, Zlltili."

All seven of its giant, glassy eyes addressed me; it placed its pedipalp on my cheek. "You do not need to give me sorry. You are giving me my only wish."

~ ~ ~

What happened to Zlltili and Rnma was neither of their faults—a consequence of the lowering temperature. Like arachnids back on earth, the sex of spiderlings is heavily affected by outside factors like weather. As I flew around the tiny world searching, I began to see it as a solution, proof that they could take advantage of this change in the weather—a chance that the terrible sin I had been sent to commit might instead be a gift like a crown woven artificial. Rnma would be found happy and alive, and I would show them that a different world was possible. They could all live and be wives and create a world that I would have given anything to be born into—the world I thought they were.

I searched tirelessly through the sickly forest; marinating in its dryness that was still far too humid for me. At a certain point, I removed my jumpsuit and rode my air bike in shorts, grav-boots, a sun hat, and nothing else. It was still light out, though not deadly thanks to the sun hiding behind the moon. Delilah hovered above, relaying area life scans that sent me on goose chase after goose chase, acquainting me with the fauna of this world. An enormous beetle-like creature, with giant clawed hooves and an hour-glass shaped shell, trudged through the woods. Four-winged birds with green scales instead of feathers fluttered between the trees. A group of them were stalked by a smaller, Myrmer-esque creature, with a shorter neck and a striped body. Eight-legged antelope-like invertebrates hopped by in a pack. The creatures' bodies were mostly green or black, evolved to match a foliage which was dying.

I was close to accepting that the abundant biological heat signatures made my task hopeless, when I encountered a Myrmer walking aimlessly in the direction of The Communal. Unlike the citizens I met, it was pale and yellow like the strange moonlight that bathed everything around us. From my vantage point near the clearing, I could see that it carried an embolitum in its pedipalps. The crown shifted with each step, like it wasn't settled on its shape. After trailing it for a few miles, I called out to get its attention. It didn't respond, continuing its journey towards the side of the world. I pulled away above the canopy after I saw another and realized that these were newly molted males and not Rnma. Like Trtiant said, their minds were gone, replaced with a mating death drive. As I burst above the trees, a status update on the life-signatures around me beamed down to the monitor of my bike. Two Myrmer and nothing else; the animals of this world knew instinctively who stood at the top of the food chain.

A larger scan of the local area unveiled a handful of voids shifting in the direction of the city—voids that could have held any Myrmer, including one not permitted its death. With little else to go on, I traversed the world—an easier task for a rock a seventh of the size of earth—and scanned for similar heatless voids, discovering strange lakes of tar and holes that bored into the crust. In an area of dense, impenetrable forest, as far from civilization as was possible, a small cold disc caught my attention. I descended, artificial embolitum in storage behind me.

Hidden deep in the trees, hanging above the forest floor, was a nest, just like the ones in The Communal on the other side of the planet. I parked my bike and approached.

"Hello! Rnma?"

From behind me a voice replied. "What are you?"

I spun around, my heart in my stomach. "I–" My voice was stuck in my throat. I coughed. "I am Cor. I'm not from this world. I am visiting, with a shipment of technology to fix the climate. I was told to find you by a person named Zlltili."

It stared at me in a way that appeared curious. I kept my distance; any emotion that I prescribed to the individual in front of me was wishful anthropomorphizing. This Myrmer looked unlike any I had seen. The body plan was the same, but a line divided it in half long-ways. The left side was black and rainbow like the residents of the city; the right was pale and yellow like the ones wandering the forest.

"You would save us from my curse?" Its voice was so gentle, even more so than Zlltili's. It clinked and rippled like thin metal tines ringing sympathetically in the wind. Delicate whistles accompanied its alien words, carrying them down to me.

"That was my job." I hated myself.

It looked up at the sky. "Ah, it is almost time. I cannot be outside. Please come with me."

I grabbed the gift from my bike and followed it into the makeshift house. I wondered if primitive Myrmer made their homes in the woods like this, or if this too was a strange sacrilege. The home was bare, containing a bed of thick, alien silk and a small workstation by a window sealed shut with an see-through chunk of exoskeleton. Whether it belonged to one of Rnma's older molts or one of the giant beetles I discovered, I did not know. Multiple carcasses were hung to dry next to the window. They appeared to have once belonged to the four-winged birds that lived deep in the marshes. Pots and cups full of powders and liquids lined a small table underneath. I followed it over to the bed of blankets, underneath a little hole carved out of the ceiling.

"Can you feel the change in the air?" Rnma asked.

"No, I can't."

"Where are you from?"

"A world far away. A place very different than this."

"Do you like it there?" Its voice sprinkled the air like pulverized glass.

"I... don't. I left for good recently."

"Why?"

This was the first time anyone questioned my decision to leave. "My mate died. On my world that's normal; it will happen to me too. But, she died too soon. It wasn't right." Pale moonlight illuminated us. "I didn't want her to die. But she did, and I couldn't take in anymore. I ran away."

Rnma stared at me. This species was so like Ileel in that way, never responding if they didn't have something to say.

"Why did Zlltili send you?"

I handed it the silk bag. "It told me to give you this."

With its long, dangerous looking pedipalps, Rnma slid the artificial embolitum out. It made a strange sound that I hadn't heard the others make and that my translator couldn't parse.

"Foolish one." It said towards the ceiling.

"Zlltili said to me, mates that don't return should bear the embolitum, even if I could not spin it from my body like it did for me."

I watched as Rnma carefully placed the crown on its head, a strange humming sound emanating from its mouth. "Foolish one. Mercy."

Its body trembled and then dropped on to the silk blankets. Rnma stared up into the not-quite-night sky of its world, listening to a sound that I was not built to hear. Sickly yellow light dribbled in through the moon roof of its hide. The black side of its body, stood differently, erect, with its noble, terrifying pedipalp twitching inward and out, towards and way from its chest. Slow and fast it tapped, always gently—delicate little articulations that felt so familiar.

"I long to hear it, but I hate it so." Rnma's crystalline, little voice barely punctured through the sound of its tapping.

The sound took me to another time. Clicking and whirring of a dozen half-working dioramas punctuated the otherwise silent apartment. I busied myself in their maintenance, pouring through pages of notes left by Ileel. Little drips of water slid off my nose and splatted on a script that would disappear one day after I did. It was like Ileel said, not a care in the world for these little odds and ends. It didn't feel right to be true, but I had come to begrudgingly agree with Ileel's assessment. I once pressured her to submit them to museums, to show the world what she was capable of; months of submitting this lifetime of her love and work and not a nibble. She died and I kept them running. As I struggled to remember even the way Ileel pronounced the delicate, alien names depicted in these scenes, I was beginning to lose too the strange little sounds they made. The last few stood spinning, shaking, tapping in their loops—antique mechanical tricks that the Ileel would've known and laughed at. I, in my lifetime of nothing but the emptiness of space and the cargo bay, did not understand them. The first night after she was gone, I turned all of them on. Without the sound of her endless, maddening tinkering, I hadn't a chance in the world that I'd find sleep. Over time, as I accepted that these anachronistic devices mattered only to me, one by one they ceased like the rattling of her last few breaths. Ileel always said they weren't meant to work for that long—too delicate for all this. I left home for good before the last one broke.

Rnma's crinkling voice pierced through my memory. "When you left the world you and your mate shared, did your call cease?"

I sniffed. "It dulled, but it's always there."

Rnma considered this as its left pedipalp continued to beat against the plating on its cephalothorax. "Could you take me with you?"

"It would mean that you and Zlltili would never see each other again."

"We never would, it's not our way. I want to be able give it what it deserves."

Delilah drifted down above the trees, extending a lift to the ground beside Rnma's home. With the pedipalp that wasn't quivering, Rnma loaded her with the remains of its food and blankets. I helped for a moment before sneaking upstairs to grab a jar out from one of my haunted, sealed boxes. Out of sight of the ship was a patch of soft, muddy soil. I slid my hand into it and carved out a temporary pocket in which I poured a pile of ashes; she was more inorganic than I expected, like finely crushed limestone.

Gravity, moisture, and I sealed the grave. "You'll like it here, Ily. It's strange like you. I'll keep it safe. Goodbye."

The empty cargo hold was not built for hospitality, but nowhere else would fit my new companion. Later on, we would put Delilah to rest and find a ship that could fit us both. I set the autopilot to carry us to the first set of gates and then returned to create a makeshift room out of silk blankets and the mattress from my old apartment. Delilah rumbled and I sat next to Rnma to complete the last inspection of my career, filling it with answers to convince the guild to permit the survival of Myrmecar. With the curse of my haunted boxes temporarily lifted, I also retrieved the last of Ileel's wind-ups. It was her favorite: a scene of us on the beach of a world drenched in eternal midnight—a world that I had doomed to die, which I never told her. I wound it up and watched as the waves moved away and towards a miniature us, a different life. Rnma and I floated away from the little, yellow world and its tapping slowed as the magnetic waves weakened. The wind-up's camshaft reached the cycle where the moon would rise above the waves. It jammed. Silence filled the hull as the last cycle of Ileel's gift and the last tap of Rnma's sin ceased.