Eileen Gunn - Stable Strategies and Others

Soon, however, carp-eyed people came to the town. They went from house to house, knocking on doors. Lichen, hiding under a porch, knew they were looking for her.

She followed them, staying just beyond the range of their sensors. When night came and they still hadn’t found her, they curled up to sleep, right where they were when they got sleepy. People walked around them, giving them a wide berth.

How strange, thought Lichen, that nobody ever attacked the carp-eyed people while they slept. Perhaps if she got help….

Lichen crept back down the street, toward the busy part of town. She approached first one person, then another, but she got the same answer from each of them. There was no use in attacking the carp-eyed people, they said, waggling the fingers that grew out of their ears, because anything that slept right out in the middle of the road like that obviously had nothing to fear. Use your head, girl, they told her, mumbling from mouths concealed in the palms of their hands. Get away while the getting is good, they whispered, skittering away on dirty, callused arms.

Lichen went back to where the carp-eyed people were sleeping. At the school, they had never slept where the children could see them. In fact, she hadn’t been sure that they slept at all. But now they were definitely asleep, membranes covering their huge, gelatinous eyes, tails curled cozily around their bodies. Through gaps in their gill coverings, she could see the gold wires of their circuitry.

And it was then that Lichen realized the value of an education. She reached forward with steady hands and disconnected the leads from their external memories. Of course the carp-eyed people woke immediately, but they were very confused. They didn’t know who Lichen was, or even who they were themselves.

It’s all right, said Lichen soothingly, you are only slightly damaged. Hold still.

And she reconnected the leads just a bit differently.

You’ll be fine now, she said.

The carp-eyed people staggered to their feet. They wobbled about, taking very small steps and bumping into one another.

Best to get out of here, thought Lichen. I’ll be going now, she said. Take care of yourselves.

The carp-eyed people thanked her, bowing erratically, as she walked off down the road.

Finally Lichen found herself on the road to her father’s village. So many things had changed along the route. The land was tough, covered with layers of pebbles and tar. There were alien plants where the evergreens and berries had grown, and the shoreline was oddly displaced and redrawn.

When she arrived in the village, she saw nothing that looked familiar. Her parents were long dead, people told her. Her father’s house was gone and the trees were much smaller than she remembered. The forest looked different, and the whale-shaped rock was not there where she remembered it. This puzzled her the most, for how could a rock go away? Where would it go? What would it do when it got there?

Suddenly, she missed the rock very much — more than her parents and brothers, in fact. She had already long since gotten used to being away from her family, but she had hardly thought of the rock at all and so was completely unprepared to lose it without notice.

The more she thought about it, the more perfect the rock seemed. The rock never scolded her, or made her do her chores. It never teased her, or snatched her toys. (Except once, when a tiny wooden doll had fallen into the crack and she couldn’t get it out.) The best part of her childhood had disappeared with the rock.

A soft rain began to fall, and Lichen sat down in the grey-brown dirt under a hemlock. The road outside the circle of tree quickly became dark and wet. She listened to birds calling and branches creaking and, looking up the trunk of the hemlock, decided to climb the tree. She climbed easily, up and up. Soon she was above the forest canopy, looking down at the tops of trees.

Lichen climbed the tree up through the top of the sky itself, and found that there was another land there, much like the land that she had grown up in. The plants were familiar, the hard road was gone, the air was steeped in the sharp incense of wet forest.

I wonder if I could find my parents’ house, she thought, and she set off in what looked like the right direction. Sure enough, it was just around a turn in the path, and her parents were standing by the door as if waiting for her.

She greeted them respectfully and asked after their health and that of her brothers. Her parents told her nothing about themselves, but said that her brothers were doing quite well, being creators of robots and possessors of property, with pleasant wives and happy children.

Lichen and her parents sat round all evening, eating fried bread and talking about old times. Finally, there came a lull in the conversation, and Lichen asked her parents why they had sent her away.

You didn’t know? they asked. It seemed obvious to us. You were the youngest and the liveliest, and yet you knew nothing but rocks and trees. To get along with the carp-eyed people, you would have to be someone very different — and you would need to know far more than we could teach you. So we sent you to their school.

Didn’t you learn something of value there, her parents asked, something that we could not have taught you?

As they spoke, Lichen realized she knew the answer her parents wanted. They didn’t want to hear about mending circuits or about loneliness. They wanted desperately to know that they had done the right thing and that her life was better and happier because of it.

Lichen was not sure that she could tell them that. Was she better off for having been sent away?

Well, she thought, if I hadn’t been sent to school, I wouldn’t have known how to rewire those carp-eyed people. But if I hadn’t been sent to school, I wouldn’t have run away, and they wouldn’t have chased me.

Who knows? she said to her parents, finally. Would I be who I am if I wasn’t me?

Perhaps your brothers can tell you, said her mother.

Her parents told her how to find the spot in which her brothers were now living. Then they led her to a patch of bare ground and told her to dig. She dug through a crust of hard-scrabble dirt and found that the earth got softer below. Then, with a lurch, her spade broke through into a hole, and she could see an ocean of stars beneath her. She looked up at her parents in surprise, and lost her balance. Lichen fell down into the stars, into the night beneath the stars, and into the modern countryside she had left the day before, landing in a pile of hemlock branches that broke her fall. She looked back up toward her parents. The hole was closing, and her parents were peering down at her with kindly concern. She thought she saw them wave as the hole disappeared, leaving nothing but stars overhead.

How strange, thought Lichen. Are there more worlds nested inside this one? Wondering about this, she fell asleep.

When she woke up under the hemlock tree, it was morning. Following her parents’ instructions, she walked to the area where her brothers lived. It wasn’t in the woods at all, but in town, on a street of small, cheaply made cottages.

She knocked at the door of the first cottage, the one belonging to her oldest brother, but he wouldn’t let her in. Then she knocked at the door of the second cottage, belonging to her next-oldest brother, but he told her to come back later. Finally, she knocked at the cottage door of the brother who was closest to her own age, and he opened the door and invited her inside.