The Best of World SF by Lavie Tidhar (children's ebooks free online .txt) 📕

of high-pitched arpeggios, improvising on the melodies of ‘Burung Kakak Tua’ and ‘God Save the Queen’.

When a crowd of sufficient size had gathered, e extended emself to eir full height, shook the spores from eir gills, and began to speak.

‘Fellow citizens,’ e said. ‘Truly, this is a time of misfortune.’

They heartily agreed. The guerrilla crusade against the Empire had dragged on for a decade, and atrocities had been committed by both sides. Certainly, they hoped for independence, but they had grown sick of reading of civilian body counts in the newspapers. Why could they not instead prosper on the tide of the post-war boom, dancing to keroncong music, chewing Popplers and sipping Pan-Galactic Gargle Blasters?

‘Also, it is much too hot,’ my grandneither added.

The audience laughed, lifted em from the display case and bore em on their shoulders to Government House, where e was formally installed as the Chief Minister. Here, e had an office to emself, with a private secretary and a state of the art air-conditioning system. Here, e was able to negotiate with the Imperial authorities on behalf of the people of Xingzhou. Using the vilest invective, e unilaterally condemned the terrorists who would destroy all they had built. E also vowed to retain favourable trade alliances, in the unlikely event of secession, so that all parties might stand to benefit from the new cosmic economy.

In secret, however, e met with the city’s finest engineers. ‘Build me a solar sail,’ e told them. ‘One that might harness the full power of our suns. And why stop at just one? Erect me an entire array, each skyscraper-high, on the summit of Bukit Bintang. I have set a new course for this nation, and to reach our destination, we shall need all the strength we can muster.’

In the flame forests, the rebels began to feel a trembling beneath their feet. The firebirds shrieked among the burning bushes, as feathers and fronds suddenly withered, cold and ashen. My grandfather and grandzyther rushed with their soldiers to the cavern for refuge. My grandmother was already there, waiting, a baby pressed to her breast, for the three had mingled their genetic information to birth my father.

‘The Empire will pay for this,’ she growled, as they huddled in the darkness.

But it was not the Empire’s doing. My grandneither rested in eir office, peering through reinforced glass windows, twisting eir reticulum into the semblance of a smile.

The starquake lasted an eternity. Finally, the movement ceased, and my grandmother dared to venture beyond the cavern entrance. There, she saw that the dazzling blaze of the jungle had been extinguished, muted into a landscape of desolate grey. The air was chilly, almost frigid, and her sweat no longer sizzled and smoked when it fell from her skin. Nor, when her feet touched the ground, was there any sensation of pain.

‘We come in peace,’ said a voice. She spun around, phaser at the ready. It was my grandneither, standing in the sooty ruins, flanked by the military police. E had evolved emself once again, growing tall enough limbs to wear a starched white cotton kebaya. For a decorative touch, e had hung a garland of purple orchids about eir throat.

‘Chief Minister. I should have recognized your foul stench.’

‘That’s not very polite to say to a fungus.’

‘I make no apology.’

‘Not even to an ally? Not even to the hero who has fulfilled Xingzhou’s greatest yearning?’

E gestured skywards with eir pseudopods, and she allowed her eyes to linger on the unfamiliar Zodiac overhead.

‘What have you done?’

‘I have separated us from the Empire. Physically, through the fissioning of all our plasma. For the first time, we are independent. We are free.’

‘But you have quenched the stars.’

‘It was necessary for our development. Do you wish for your children to suffer the same infernal agonies as yourself? Or do they not deserve a measure of balm and comfort?’

‘This isn’t right. All our lives, we haved lived by the fire—’

‘Untrue. Many of our numbers, even yourself, were first sown in earth. And to Earth we return.’

Again, e raised eir pseudopods, and my grandmother glanced up just in time to see a blue ball of a planet approaching, an alien rock of iron and silicon and complex carbons, inundated by that most bizarre and most nostalgic of bodies, the sea, now rushing headlong into her homeworld, cracking it, crushing it with its ineluctable gravitational field, burning it up with its soupy atmosphere of pair-bonded nitrogen and oxygen…

It was the last time, she later told me, that she would feel that familiar, volcanic intensity of heat.

They clambered to their knees amidst the settling dust. My grandneither was laughing so hard that tears trickled down eir annulus onto eir stem. ‘Alas, there will be some rebuilding to do,’ e chortled. ‘We shall have to take on new names, new races, new genders, new histories, so as not to startle the natives.’

For the first time in Xingzhou’s history, it was beginning to rain. Beneath the drizzle, the other rebels emerged shakily from the rubble of the cavern. My grandfather and grandzyther gazed at the surroundings in horror, clutching their son.

‘Oh, don’t panic,’ my grandneither told them. ‘There’s no need for us to squabble over power. Look, I’ll make a peace offering. How about I betroth my child to yours, so as to build the next generation of citizens?’

And with a ruffle of eir gills, e released eir spores into the dark soil. There, my neither took root, fertilized by the ashes of a vanished jungle.

In the years that followed, the country flourished. The port swelled with the mundane trade of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. New roads were paved and new gardens planted on the wreckage of the burnt-out stars. My father and neither grew up, attended good schools, graduated from university, got married and moved into high quality public housing. When I was born, all four grandparents doted on me. When I asked for tales of the past, they told me lies.

My grandneither died some years ago.