The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection

David Gerrold has been writing science fiction for fifty years, leaving a long trail of novels, scripts, short stories, columns, and articles in his wake. His TV work includes episodes of Star Trek, Land of the Lost, Twilight Zone, Babylon 5, and Sliders. (He created Tribbles for Star Trek in one of that series’ most famous episodes, and Sleestaks for Land of the Lost.) His novels include the time-travel classic, The Man Who Folded Himself, When HARLIE Was One, The Dingilliad Trilogy of YA novels, The Star Wolf Trilogy, and The War Against the Chtorr series. In 1994, Gerrold shared the adventure of how he adopted his son in The Martian Child, a semi-autobiographical tale of a science fiction writer who discovers his adopted child might be a Martian. The Martian Child won the science fiction triple crown: the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Locus Poll. It was the basis for the 2007 film Martian Child starring John Cusack and Amanda Peet. (The book is better.)

The fast-paced story that follows is a posthumous sequel to Theodore Sturgeon’s well-known story, “Mr. Costello, Hero.” In this one, the eponymous Mr. Costello, a shrewd and persuasive con man with nobody’s better interests at heart except his own, arrives on a frontier colony planet to pitch a grandiose scheme that could change life on the colony forever, and becomes entangled with—and, eventually, opposed by—a pioneering farming family, one of whom gradually realizes the terrible effects Mr. Costello’s scheme could have if it succeeds. This one is a lot of fun, in tone reminiscent of Robert A. Heinlein’s “juvenile” novels, with a hefty dose of John Varley mixed in as well, one of the year’s most enjoyable reads. If you hear somebody say, “They don’t write ’em like that anymore,” here’s proof that they do.

Haven? Yeah, it used to be a nice place, great place even.

You could raise a podful of kids and not have to worry about traffic and cities and taxes—we didn’t have any. In the evening, we’d sit out on the front porch and watch the suns go down, double sunsets worth staying up late for—one red, one blue, and sometimes the two of them together would edge the howling green sky with orange and yellow streamers so brilliant you had to put on goggles. The best was when they lit up the spiral rings that arced across the southern sky, shimmering the night for hours.

There was a fella one time, he said, “There ain’t no Earth-like planets; there’s only wishful thinkin’.” Well, maybe so, but he never saw Haven. It’s as close to the homeworld as I ever found, and I bounced across fifty planets before finally coming to rest on this one. It’s an unlikely planet in an unlikely place—an ephemeral zone of livability around a binary dance, but somehow all the unlikelies cancelled each other out and Haven was the result. A 37-hour day, 93-percent Earth-gee, a dollop more oxygen, a thirty-seven-degree tilt on the axis which made for some spectacular seasons, and a temperate zone that stretched around the planet’s equator like a slippery cummerbund. Yeah, I know what a cummerbund is. Second time I had to wear one, it was time to move on.

I bounced lucky and ended up in a contract family with four beautiful wives and two strong husbands—well, most of the time, except when we switched around, which wasn’t too often, unless one of us wanted to get pregnant, which hadn’t happened yet because we weren’t ready to start a tank-farm and didn’t want to rent a gestation bottle somewhere else, either. As a family, we only had one rule: nobody ever goes to bed hungry or angry; the rest was details. That rule lasted as long as the contract did. Which was quite a long time, and probably would have been a lot longer if it hadn’t been for him.

Some people can’t handle contracts, no big deal to me, I like ’em when I find one that suits me. A few years in a can wrestling vacuum, you learn how to live close with others. Some people don’t learn, and that buys them a one-way ticket out the airlock. I knew several captains more than happy to sign the warrant. That’s how they got well-behaved crews.

On Haven, though, if you and a neighbor started bumping heads, either he got up and moved or you did. One or t’other. Wasn’t that hard; most of the houses were already on wheels. Our closest neighbor was a fella named Jasper, ten klicks to the west, but as long as he kept to himself we all got along fine. He was a good man, when he was a man, and a good woman the rest of the time. Called herself Jasmine then, Jas for short. Never borrowed anything she didn’t return the next week, never spoke bad of anyone, never slept in where she wasn’t invited, and didn’t deserve the shit that came down when it did. None of us did.

But that’s a story for another time and it happened long enough before Costello arrived that it doesn’t matter here. This is about Costello—him and his fancy orange suit. First we heard of him, we thought he was just another star-grazer. Folks pass through Haven all the time, get caught up in her, and start planning resorts or industries or grand utopian communities—their utopias, of course. We listen politely, then go home and get back to the real work. Star-grazers are good entertainment, not much more; though every once in a while, we have to explain to one of them how an airlock works dirtside and why it would be a good idea to build his resort or his industry or his utopia somewhere else.

We didn’t meet Mr. Costello until Midsummer Jubilee. We unhitched and drove in to Temp, short for Temporary, which was all the name that place was ever going to have. Midsummer was the best time for restocking medicines and spices and any other stuff we couldn’t lab ourselves. The weather was calm, traveling was easy, and the bots could manage the crops while we were away.

Temp wasn’t the best-stocked place, but it was a lot more convenient than driving three days to the other side of the mountain, to Settlement, and then driving three days back. We always ordered ahead anyway, and anything Temporary didn’t have, they’d get Settlement to toss it on the next truck over, so we made out okay. I’d only been to Settlement once and had no wish to go there ever again. I don’t do crowds. Not even small ones. And any place big enough to need a jail was no place I wanted to stay. I learned that lesson a long time ago.

Temp is half a day across the Rumpled Hills, up Narrow Canyon and down Abysmal, and then follow Occasional River for another half day. We leave the day before and camp overnight at Empty Meadow. We talked once about carving a road from here to there, but it was a very short discussion. Construction would use up the better part of a year and even if it might shorten our trip to only a few hours, it’d also open up the slopes for traffic. When you build a road, people drive it. And traffic would annoy the glitter-bushes enough to disrupt their breeding—plus careless tourists would encourage the horgs to aggressiveness. The conversation ended when Grampa (his title, not his description) said that roads are too much like civilization and we didn’t come to Haven to be city-folk, did we? But there wasn’t anyone in the family arguing for it anyway.

We crossed the river at the shallows and drove up onto the common track that thirty years of trucks had worn into the turf. We could tell from the ruts, wider and deeper, that traffic from the landing ports was up again. Not a good sign. Tourists are trouble; immigrants are worse, even rich ones.

Thirty klicks along, we came over the crest of the hill and there was Temporary. A busy day. Too many rigs linked in. Even worse, the Jacklins had added an extension to the public dock. Bad news, that. This was the new normal. Regular traffic. It wasn’t unexpected—there was a new station up on the southern ridge, far enough away it wouldn’t bother us and mostly good folks, tho it did make for bigger gatherings.

But Temporary was still the right size for a visit. The Jacklins had started with a six-pod spider and connected it by weather-tubes to a scattering of inflatable domes, all sizes. Each dome wrapped a different cargo drop, the leftovers from when Temporary was a landing site for a resource-development company. The Jacklins bought it after the company was persuaded to pull out by a series of unexplainable delays.

After the first winter, the Jacklins sprayed the domes with a meter of shelterfoam, so now, despite the name, the domes were permanent until further notice and sturdy enough to stand up by themselves, even with three or four meters of snow, ice, and occasionally a few centimeters of frozen carbon dioxide piled on top of that.

One of the larger domes served as a public swap and meeting place. Two of the others had long since been emptied and served now as occasional habitats for migrant workers and transients. Plus the inevitable call-boys and -girls working the western circuit. During the summer, with the Jacklins’ grudging permission, various pass-throughs and unsettleds used a few of the old mineshafts as a retreat. During the winter, too. I say grudging because it’s bad business to kill off customers, but some customers need to be killed. They used the tunnels that weren’t habitated as storehouses and winter-bunkers. The bots had dug a whole network of tubes and tunnels inside the mountain, but the topmost part of Temporary still looked haphazard, unplanned, and accidental.

Most folks land at Settlement or at the bigger port farther north where the beanstalk touches down. They put wheels on their pods and head east and then south. The dumber ones head south first, and then east. Those are the ones who come through Temporary, and sometimes we all make a bit of money off them, especially from towing them out of ditches and ravines, repairing broken axles, or just hiring ourselves out as guides to the caravans and wagon trains. A train can be as many as twenty or thirty family-rigs—standard cargo pods laid horizontal and mounted on six or more fluffy polymer spheres two or three meters in diameter, depending on the terrain. It’s standard practice to use bright colors; it helps identify your rig from a distance, especially if it’s surrounded by snow. Our family colors were Florentine, equal stripes of red and yellow on the trucks and tires.

A cargo pod makes a good house—or a truck. Or both at the same time. Whatever you need. They’re designed to be reused after landing. A standard unit can house six in comfort, eight if they’re friendly, ten if they’re small. If you’re homesteading, you can drop one or two or three on a site, depending on how many of you there are and how much room you need. You can connect as many as eight to a central nexus and call it a spider. And you can link one spider to another to make an estate; I’ve seen linked clusters and chains of twenty or more spiders, but that’s too many people for me. That’s practically a city.

Once a pod is down, after twelve hours of unpacking you’re ready to settle in; sooner if the first thing you unpack are the bots. If you’re smart, you’ll mount the rigs on wheels and give yourself mobility. As the saint says, “A man should be prepared to move fast at least three times in his life.” It’s a lot easier if you can just put the house in gear and drive to the dustoff—something I didn’t expect to do on Haven, at least not until my third or fourth rejuvenation. And that was just the way I wanted it. This planet is far enough out that people don’t drop round because they’re in the neighborhood; Haven is a destination, not a rest stop.

But as much as I dislike crowds, I will admit that other people have their uses. For one thing, making love is better with a partner. And it’s easier to find a partner in a crowd than a wilderness. If you’re looking. I’m not. Not anymore. Not since my husbands and wives picked me out of a lineup, married me, and dragged me into the living pod. It was storm season, which is also honeymoon season for most folks, so we didn’t come out for three weeks and that was only to check the anchor blocks on truck two. It wasn’t the storm making it move, so we went back in and resumed what we’d only just begun. By first thaw we’d slowed down a bit, and by spring had pretty well finished ’mooning for a while. By Midsummer, the new bots were trained well enough that we could take a week off for Jubilee. Lot of work to do before autumn, so we unchocked the bubbles on truck two, unlinked, and rolled. The break would do us all good.

As we bumped downslope, we saw a big black rig that none of us recognized—three industrial pods in a train, like a traveling factory, maybe a bio-refiner, and a couple more drones parked off-site. They had to be passing through, on their way to the richer territories southeast. The huge bulk of the rolling stock loomed over all the other vehicles like a cluster of broodysaurs.

For the most part we can tell who else is in attendance by the other rigs in the field, but sometimes we see a few strangers—not always newbies, this isn’t that kind of neighborhood, just folks just passing through on their way to places they believe are going to be better than the places they left. Over the years, we’ve seen geologists, zoologists, biologists, mappers, trappers, huskers, buskers, peddlers, meddlers, tinkers, dinkers, migrants, handicrafters, and the occasional salesman. Once in a while, even a tourist, though there isn’t really a lot to see, just trees and savannah and occasionally a horg in the distance. But you can see horgs at Settlement; they have a zoo, not a big one, but big enough to maintain a family of horgs, and if you’re a tourist, that’s what you come to see. Horgs. Once, a circus passed through, but I don’t think they made much money. They only stayed for a day. Temp is not a place where anyone stays, not for long; it’s just a place to rest overnight before heading deeper into the continent.

Grampa drove us in and found our dock. Most of the time, you just take whatever slot is open, but for Jubilee, the Jacklins always reserve key slots for local families. It’s not just a question of good will—it’s good management. When trouble breaks out, as it sometimes does, the locals are right there to handle it quickly.

The outside air was warm, by Haven standards, and clean enough that we could have parked and walked. Jackets and air filters would have been enough protection, but anyone who’s lived on Haven longer than a week knows how hard it is to keep the inside air filtered and clean with folks coming in and out all the time. And one thing you learn real fast, running an airlock costs, especially bio- and particle-filtering, and the more you run it, the more it adds up. So as a courtesy to our hosts—Mik and Jik and Tilda Jacklin, the only real permanents at Temporary—we linked to the public access and ran our own airlock.

There’s a ritual to follow. First you all go to the big common dome and say hello and share a beer and catch up on any gossip that’s happened since you last logged on to the community. Then, if you’re living in that kind of a family—I’m not, I’m in a closed contract, but some people are—you start filling out your dance card, who you’re going to sleep with tonight. Then, and only after you’ve taken care of all the social business, then you can start talking about what you’re looking to buy and what you brought to trade or sell. Otherwise, you look rude. Or worse, desperate. And people take advantage of you when you’re desperate. So it’s not a good idea to be impatient. The merchandise will still be on the shelves an hour from now, but the seller’s good feelings might not.

Finn and I always shop together. The rest of the family goes looking for practicals, but Finn and I like to start with the clothing aisles. Of course, there’s not a lot on the hangers that we can wear outside. As good as either one of us might look in a kilt or a pinafore, those are party clothes, not work detail. And Finn is a lot bigger than me, almost burly. But we still like to fantasize, and sometimes it’s fun for whoever’s being a husband this season. This trip, we contented ourselves with some fancy underwear. We’d take turns wearing it for each other.

During melting-season, that’s when the hard work begins. Especially if you’re ranching/farming. We had the long downslope of Restless Mountain, the western side, hence the spectacular sunsets. But the other side was Bareback Ridge. With that behind us, sunrise isn’t until 9 or 10am, depending on the time of year, just a few hours of bright sky first, bright enough that we can get out early with the bots and start herding the glitter-bushes up and down the fields, making sure they get more sunlight per season than they would if they just sat in one place and brooded.

We spend most of summer harvesting, then start moving the bushes up toward higher ground. It’s like herding cats in slow motion, but it’s necessary to the survival of the herd. We have to do it before first autumn, because that’s when the bushes start slowing their metabolism, saving their summer fat and closing up before long winter settles in. That’s when they’re most vulnerable to the horgs. A horg-pack can shred most of a herd in a matter of days, even digging down through the frozen ground to rip out the fatty stores at the heart of each bush.

Left to itself, a glitter-bush will take root inside a grove of tall wailing trees. It’s not that the bushes don’t like sunlight, they do, but swarms of spider-bats nest in the wailing trees, and at night, just before taking to the air, they all drop their guano. The bushes raise their roots to collect the rich fertilizer, so whenever a glitter-bush gets hungry it heads for the shade of a wailing willow, hoping to secure the best feeding spot for itself. Generally, the bushes only venture any distance into the meadows during midsummer because that’s when the intense sunlight excites them to breed.

By having the bots herd them back into the fields where we can bright them, we’re forcing two or three extra breeding cycles in a season, but that exhausts the bushes, so they strive for the trees even harder—despite us bringing them our own rich fertilizer, a lot more potent than the bat-shit they’re accustomed to. One good garbage-refiner can generate both burnable oil and a lot of nitrogen-rich granules.

A determined glitter-bush can cover almost a klick a day. But a more determined bot can herd it by using mirrors to focus even more sunlight on the bush. The bush will reverse course and head back to the center of the meadow and the rest of its community.

An individual bush will breed continually, but when they’re raised in herds, they breed in synchronized cycles, releasing clouds of spores. That’s why we wear masks outside. The air on Haven is breathable, but glitter-spores can take root in your lungs. Not hard to kill, but who wants to inhale that much ammonia?

Because we brighten them, our bushes grow taller and thicker than the wild ones and their seedpods get two or three times as big. And with the bots patrolling the perimeters, we don’t lose many to marauding horgs. Mostly, horgs don’t come up this high, but dry season always sends them uphill, so midsummer usually brings excitement as well as magic.

This year, it brought Mr. Costello.

We were still looking at clothes when Trina came to get us. Finn was holding up a blue longshirt he thought would look good on me—more of a dress than a longshirt, but it could be worn either way. I smiled in embarrassment and said I wasn’t planning to shift back for a while. He said he didn’t care, he’d buy it for me and I could wear it now, it would show off my calves. I admitted it was pretty, but when I looked at the price tag, I told him no, we weren’t that rich yet. Trina came up behind me and said it was cute and she and I could share it and yes we could too afford it and I said, “Only if Grampa approves,” and that was the end of it for now. I was still the newest member of the family and they were still spoiling me a little, but I wasn’t going to be a spoiled brat.

After Finn hung the dress back on the rack, Trina grabbed both our arms. “You don’t wanna miss this. There’s a guy bragging he’s got a better way to commit suicide.”

She dragged us into the big dome which doubled as bar, restaurant, dance floor, auction hall, and flea market, depending on the time of day. A small group had gathered around a stocky man in an orange suit. He had a thick fringe of black beard framing a round, unweathered face. He looked too innocent to be here, but here he was anyway. He had two blank-faced companions sitting at the table beside him. One was dressed in a tight black suit that looked vaguely military; the other looked like some kind of tech.

“—and when each person does their part, everybody makes money. Everybody wins.”

That’s when Tilda Jacklin came up behind him and tape-measured the width of his shoulders.

He turned around, puzzled. “What are you doing?”

“Measurin’. Makin’ sure I got a body bag your size. Ye wanna pay fer it now? Discount it ten percent if ye do.”

Give him credit, the stranger didn’t get angry. He reached up and patted Tilda on the shoulder and said, “You have a fine sense of humor, young man. Very fine. Are you looking for a job?”

Tilda smiled, shook his head, and did a quick vertical measure of the man. “Not even two meters. Got plenty in stock. I’ll put one aside fer ye.” Then he went back behind the counter and poured three beers for Finn, Trina, and me.

“What’s all that about?” Finn asked.

“Horgs,” said Tilda.

“What about ’em?”

“That’s Mr. Costello. Says he can sell ’em.”

“Really…?”

“Ayep.”

“Gotta catch ’em first.”

Tilda grinned and scratched the top of his head, the way he did when he was amused. “Ayep.”

“How’s he gonna do it?”

Tilda shrugged, making that wide-eyed, stretched expression he makes when he’s reacting to stupidity. “Dunno. Says he needs two—three helpers. Says he’s got buyers upside. Says he can fill a pod every ten weeks, send ’em right up the beanstalk. That’s what he says. And he’s already scheduled two empties and a truck.”

Finn frowned, shook his head. “Ain’t possible.” Trina agreed with a snort.

I was already figuring in my head. “That’s a lot of tonnage. Even to fill one pod. He’s gotta be talking at least forty, maybe fifty head.”

“He says sixty.”

“Not possible,” said Trina.

“Ayep. But he says his buyer is payin’ three hundred a ton. So he’s lookin’ to gross fifty-thou per pod, at least six times a year, he says. Mebbe more. Temptation like that, a man’ll go beyond crazy to pure unadulterated stupid.”

“Ain’t never gonna happen,” said Finn. “No way to round up even a dozen of those bastards.”

“Ayep. Horgs is horgs.”

What Tilda said—you hear that everywhere on Haven. It’s a way of saying this is what it is and there ain’t no way of changing it. Rocks is hard, water is wet, and horgs is horgs.

Horgs are … well, they’re big, they’re ugly, they smell bad, and they’re meaner than anything else on the planet, even humans, especially when they’re in rut. Horgs have only one sex—they don’t mate, they fight until exhausted. Or dead. The winner stabs the loser with a spiked penis. The sperm make their way through the bloodstream to the egg sac, where a litter of little horgs gets started. Sometimes the brood-horg survives, sometimes it doesn’t.

Horgs aren’t choosy, sometimes they poke other things—even humans. When they do that, when there’s no eggs available, the sperm self-fertilizes, turns into mini-horgs, and the litter eat their way out. Not pretty. You get a couple hundred rat-sized critters. The big horgs eat ’em. And if it’s a horg with ripe eggs, they get fertilized that way. Crazy biology, but it works.

Some people think Horg meat is a delicacy. I’m not one of them. Some people say that if horg meat is fixed right, it’s delicious. They can have my share. I’ve seen what an angry horg can do. And a horny one.

But offworld, horgs are a commodity. People pay a lot for them—dunno why, there are better things to eat, but there’s a steady market. And that’s why the Jacklins do a fair business in body bags, funerals, and estate planning. There’s always some fool with a plan.

If there’s a safe way to farm horgs, nobody’s found it yet. If there was a safe way to herd them, if there was a safe way to round them up, I’d export every last horg from the planet. And most everyone else feels the same way. But we can’t, and even if we could, we wouldn’t, because you don’t take the apex predator out of an ecology unless you want it to collapse. Without the horgs, we lose the glitter-bushes and everything else that makes Haven so interesting.

It’s complicated, but horgs are essential. Spider-bat swarms feed on the insects that live on horg-droppings. No horgs, no droppings, no insects, no spider-bats, no guano. If the spider-bats starve, the glitter-bushes don’t bloom, and one of Haven’s main crops disappears. And that’s only the first domino.

But Mr. Costello wasn’t the first idjit to think he knew how to make a profit on Haven. He certainly wouldn’t be the last. We’d probably have to dig a few more holes and lay a few more wreaths at Settlement’s own Idjits’ Field before he was done. I just hoped it wouldn’t be anybody I cared about.

So, of course, it was Grampa.

He told us after second supper. We had arrayed ourselves at one of the long tables, the space next to the wall, so we had some privacy for conversation. Grampa was smiling happily about something but he wouldn’t say what. “Not here, not here,” and he resumed slurping his soup.

I started to press, but Trina shook her head. She touched her lips with a forefinger, then touched the same finger to her ear, and pointed at both the table and the wall. Someone might be listening.

I didn’t think the Jacklins would eavesdrop unless it was necessary, like someone with a history of trouble, but you never knew who else passing through might have stuck a button under the table or into the rough paneling of the big common room. So Trina was telling me this was family business and it had to stay private.

Back in the truck, Grampa tamped his pipe carefully and puffed it to life. “Well,” he said, “we found us a rich idjit. That fellow Costello. He offered to buy our entire year’s crop of glitter-bush seedpods. Twelve percent over market, plus travel and delivery expenses—”

“He’s the one says he’s going to catch and sell horgs?” asked Finn.

“Ayep. That’s the one.”

Finn shook his head. “He’ll be dead the first day he steps out the hatch—”

“That’s fine, too. I told him there’s a rich tradition of horg-wranglin’ out here, so he’d have to pay in advance. The fool didn’t even flinch. Paid the first half right then.” Grampa patted his vest pocket, as if the actual money was resting next to his tobacco. “We get the other half on delivery.”

Finn pursed his lips, looked around at the rest of us—me, Trina, Marlie, Charlie, and Lazz who’d just gone male again—then back to Grampa. “I wish you’d talked to us—”

“Wasn’t any time. Couldn’t find all of you. Had to make the deal then. Too rich to say no. And he did pay up front.” As if that settled the matter.

Grampa had seniority because he’d staked the family to get it started. He was the majority shareholder. Even better, he was smart enough with the numbers to keep us buoyant and the way he explained it, it did sound better than trucking the loads all the way to Settlement for transshipment up the beanstalk. I wasn’t going to say anything because I was the junior-est partner, but I could see by everybody’s faces I wasn’t the only one in my head about it.

“All right,” said Grampa, “why’s everybody lookin’ so twisted?”

Finn glanced at Trina, then at me—we’d seen Mr. Costello in the common dome too. He was waiting for either of us to say something, but as the second-ranking male, it was his responsibility first. “It’s like this,” he began. He took a deep breath. “It sounds like a good deal, I mean, it really does. But we saw Mr. Costello in the common room and … well, I don’t think he knows what he’s doing. I think he’s gonna get people killed.”

“Ayep,” said Grampa. “That’s my thinkin’, too.”

“Takin’ advantage of a dead idjit like that—it don’t sit right.”

Grampa puffed a cloud of sweet smoke. “He ain’t dead yet. And until some horg pokes him with a litter, his money’s just as good as the next idjit’s.”

Finn shook his head in resignation. He knew he wasn’t going to talk Grampa out of anything. Grampa had already made the deal. We were stuck with it.

Trina spoke up then. “It really isn’t that bad. I mean, not really. That’s a lot of money. And if he gets killed early, we’ll still have half a crop to sell. We could buy another pod or start a dome or … maybe even get a gestation tank and start a baby.”

“Ayep,” said Grampa.

“And…” she added slowly, “… if we don’t take the deal, someone else will. Then we lose twice. It’s money we don’t make and it’s money someone else makes.” She didn’t have to say who. We were all thinking the same thing.

“Yeah, okay,” said Finn. “Okay, okay.” He gave up with a shrug. “When and where do we deliver?”

“Ten days after harvest. The high savannah, the north end, Little Summerland. Then twenty klicks west into the bush. Reckless Meadow.”

Finn swiveled around and brought up a navigation display. He studied the map for a moment, scratching his head. “Terrible close to the mating fields. It’s a heavy-grazing area.”

“Ayep. If you wanna catch horgs, you gotta go where the horgs are.”

Finn turned back to Grampa, folding his arms. “He doesn’t expect us to help, does he? Because otherwise—”

“Not to worry. Told him that up front. We’re not wranglers. We’ll sell him the crop, nothing else. No bots. No riders. No shooters.”

“And he agreed?”

Grampa puffed his pipe some more before answering. “Says he doesn’t need bots, riders, or shooters. Just a couple of cargo-loaders.”

“Then how’s he plan to—?”

“He didn’t say.” Grampa grinned. “Gonna be a fun time, huh?”

With the up-front money from Mr. Costello, Grampa and Finn and Lazz bought three new bots, replacement parts, a new toolkit, two heavyweight weapons, two suits of body armor, several cases of repellents, four banks of high-powered dazzlers, a hundred meters of shock-fence, and several cases of extra fuel cells. We restocked the larders and the med-kits as well.

And we updated our libraries, too. Winter was long and brutal. We had to create much of our own entertainment. Last year, we’d staged A Midsummer Night’s Dream; this year we were plannin’ a suite of Third symphonies—we’d agreed on Beethoven, Copland, Saint-Saëns, but were still arguing about Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Shostakovich, Williams, Sibelius, and Mahler. We’d probably end up doing them all. Winter was long and brutal.

Meanwhile, Mr. Costello was busy on his own, circling around, taking advantage of the Jubilee gathering, meeting as many families as he could. We figured he was making other deals, but nobody was talking. We had a nondisclosure clause, so we assumed everyone else did, too. Eventually, Mr. Costello had some mysterious crates choppered in from Settlement and loaded immediately into his big black trucks.

Jubilee lasted two extra days; we weren’t the only ones buying and loading, and a lot of us had to wait for the trucks from Settlement to arrive with everything the Jacklins didn’t have to hand. Mr. Costello had pumped a lot of cash into the local economy and most folks were happy to tilt an extra pint or two in his name. By the time the last kegs had been drained, Jacklin’s shelves were just about spare. Everybody bought gifts for everybody. We passed out our family gifts on Goodbye Morning, right after first breakfast, just before dawn, with all the usual teasing and laughter.

Finn surprised me with that blue dress he said showed off my calves. I bought him hair and body brushes for the shower, along with the promise that I’d personally demonstrate their proper use. He grinned and said, “You didn’t buy those for me, you bought ’em for you.” I ducked my head so he wouldn’t see me smiling and blushing, but he was right.

It was tradition that we all chip in to buy Grampa a fresh supply of his favorite sweet-smelling tobacco and a new pipe to smoke it in. We couldn’t pull out until he puffed it to life and pronounced it good. “This is good,” he’d say. “Life is good. Okay, let’s roll. Let’s see what happens next.”

The trip back to Homestead was uneventful. Charlie and Marlie had been monitoring and managing the bots the whole trip. Except for one busted voltivator, swarm-confidence was high and the bushes were sparkling. It looked like an early harvest—a big harvest, too.

Glitter-bush leaves are long. Morning dew collects on the leaves, the leaves curl lengthwise to hold the wetness in. As the day heats up, the leaves dry into needles. Bite the end of a needle and you can suck out the water—not much, but you won’t die of thirst, either. Chew a lot of needles and you can rehydrate almost as fast as you sweat. That’s why horgs and all the other critters come hunting. It’s easier than searching for a water hole.

But if the needle is left alone, if no one eats it, it starts to secrete its oils into the water, and what you get is kinda like honey, only better because bees didn’t walk around in it. And if you wait long enough, each needle develops a seed within the oil-honey, and the seeds are even more valuable. That’s why glitter-bushes are such a profitable crop. The leaves are edible, the honey is perfect, and the seeds are delicious.

Not all the seeds germinate, though. Only the ones that pass through a horg’s gut. So there’s the other reason we need horgs. Just not too many. But the numbers cycle up and down, up and down, because that’s the way the whole thing works, so when they’re up, we have to cull the herds the best we can. If we get to the carcass quick enough, we’ll butcher it—but usually the rest of the herd is right there. They’re omnivores. They’re not just carrion-eaters, they’re cannibals. Another reason to be disgusted.

But if we can get in there fast enough to slice off the drumsticks, the tails, the shoulders, the flanks, the ribs, and the belly muscles, sometimes the heart and tongue, we’ll hang the meat, cure it, smoke it, age it, whatever, and maybe make a bit of cash off it. But we won’t eat it ourselves.

Some people—mostly offworlders—say horg steak is a delicacy. That’s because they don’t know horgs. They say the meat has a sweet aftertaste, probably from the glitter-bush needles. Like I said, they can have my share. The one time I tried it, I puked it all up—and I had diarrhea for three days, too. Horg is tough and greasy and gamey. You have to tenderize it and marinate it and cover it with sauce to make it edible. But there’s some people who like that, I guess. Or maybe it’s just that it’s expensive and exotic. Or maybe it’s because of the side effects. Dunno. Supposedly something in the meat is mildly hallucinogenic and just as supposedly it makes people horny, too, so even if they’re not crazy about the taste, that’s not the reason they’re eating it.

Anyway—summer storms chased us all the way back to Homestead. Not the worst we’d ever seen, but ferocious enough to slow us down. Flash floods scoured Narrow Canyon and the Rumpled River was raging impassible. We had to take the long way around, crossing at The Hump, and we spent the better part of the night parked lee side of Ugly Ridge. Frustrating to be so close to Homestead, but it couldn’t be helped.

We’d spent two extra days at Jubilee and lost another half-day coming back, but after the storm passed, the forecast promised a few weeks of milder weather, so we wouldn’t have to dock and lock the trucks. We could start rigging them immediately for the trek to Reckless Meadow.

When we finally did get back, dawn was just turning the eastern sky pink and the underside of the cloud-ceiling loomed purple. It wasn’t the best start for the day but it could have been worse. Three of the bots were mired in mud and the rest were worrying around, trying to keep the bushes from leaving the meadow.

We unpacked the new bots first, activated them, then rushed to extract the ones that were stuck. It took the entire morning, all of us scrambling to contain the herd, barely getting them settled in and re-rooted and watered before the heat of midday. We didn’t even try to plan harvest until after siesta and second lunch.

Charlie and Marlie woke up early to switch out the herding reflectors on six of the bots, installing the new harvest tools and collection baskets. I ran some numbers, and if the ground dried out enough we could complete most of the harvesting in two nights.

After harvest, the bushes would start getting hungry. We could take a few days to herd them back to the willows, or make up the time by dredging a couple loads of guano and delivering it to the meadow. That’d given us good results before, plus a head start on the next harvest, but it would also upset the local balance. We might have to let these fields go fallow for a season or two, maybe plant some darkberries up here and let the bushes gather on the lower slopes instead—that would mean extra work patrolling for horgs, but if Mr. Costello was right, he’d be thinning out the herds enough to give us a break in the up-down cycle. But using the lower slopes for a whole summer would open up a lot more range, meaning we could raise more bushes and expand the homestead.

If Mr. Costello didn’t get himself killed first.

Right now, we figured him for just another fellow with more money than sense, but if he wanted to throw some of that cash in our direction, we’d bring out the big baskets to hold it all.

As soon as the bots were charged and refitted, we set them trimming. You don’t want to take too many needle-leaves—the bushes need the water—but you want to take the fattest and sweetest pods because the horgs are picky and those are the ones they like most. Those are the ones most likely to germinate after a quick trip through the gut.

The best harvest time is siesta and afternoon, while the pods are heat-sealing. Charlie and Marlie and Lazz napped midmorning so they could work through siesta. Finn and Trina and I took the afternoon shift. We ate first supper when the shadows started stretching east and then began prepping the trucks for Restless Meadow, packing everything we knew we’d need and a bunch more stuff we hoped we wouldn’t. Always makes for an easier trip that way. We finally pulled out with five vans full of ripe pods, chilled but not frozen.

The journey down to Restless Meadow took two and a half days, stopping along the way to install several new monitoring stations and a couple of drone-nests. Skyballs are useful but the weather on Haven limits when they can fly. There’s maybe a hundred-klick range on good days, that’s a three-hour window. So we put the drone-nests in a hexagonal grid with overlapping edges and try to get coverage whenever the winds permit. We can track the local herds and are getting better at predicting the migratory packs. Some horgs migrate, some don’t—still working that out, but we think it’s the brooding horgs that get territorial.

By the time we arrived, Mr. Costello had already set up his camp, with his big black trucks parked on the slope overlooking the meadow. One of them opened onto a large deck with a roof of silk-looking fabric. There were chairs around a table, and even a pitcher of lemonade and glasses laid out.

Mr. Costello signaled us to pull up beside. We anchored our trucks, dismounted, and met him on his deck. He invited us to sit with a wave and poured lemonade for all of us as if this were just another autumn day in back-home dusty Illinois—a place we’d all heard of but none of us had ever been. What the hell, it was lemonade.

“Things are going very well, very well indeed,” he said. “You should be very pleased, very proud, indeed, yes.” One of his two associates—the one who looked vaguely military—came out then with a fresh pitcher of lemonade, and Mr. Costello introduced her. “This is Mikla. Mikla, please welcome our new partners. Please tell me if I have all your names right—”

Mr. Costello went on to explain, “Mikla will be handling the accounting, making sure that everyone is taken care of. And Jerrid, he’s our tech—he’s working on the communications gear. We have such good news to share. Jerrid has created a new communications web.”

Finn grunted. “We already have one—”

“Yes, of course. But Jerrid believes we should have a private web just for our partners. He says we need secure channels for our business operations. If other people can see what we’re doing, we’ll have competition. Don’t you think we should delay that as long as possible?”

Grampa nodded, but Finn looked skeptical. “Most folks don’t go pryin’ into other folks’ business. Ain’t polite. There’s not a lot of secrets on Haven, anyway. Maybe secrets are an offworld thing. But if it concerns y’that much, y’could just use the regular channels with a smidge of encryption. Nobody’ll bother then.”

“A very good suggestion, yes. Thank you, Finn.” Mr. Costello pretended to think about it, then frowned and said, “But don’t you think a flurry of encrypted messages might make people suspicious? Suspicious enough to want to find out what we’re up to?”

“Aye, there is that.” Finn shrugged.

“This way they won’t even know that we’re talking to each other. Wouldn’t you agree that’ll be safer for everyone?”

Finn nodded—reluctantly, but he nodded. “I see your point.”

Mr. Costello reached over and poured Finn more lemonade. “Thank you, Finn. Jerrid worked very hard to set up a private communication network for us. He’ll be pleased that you see the value of his work.”

We sat there for a while longer, exchanging pleasantries, until finally Charlie asked, “But the horgs, Mr. Costello—how do you intend to catch them? You know, it’s not safe to go out hunting them. The whole herd will turn on you.”

Mr. Costello nodded agreement. “Yes, thank you. You’re not the first to point that out. I was thinking—well, Jerrid and Mikla and I were thinking that it would be easier if the horgs came to us.”

“So you’re gonna lure ’em here with glitter-pods…?”

Mr. Costello pointed down the slope. Three of his bots were already at work, installing two thick masts about fifteen meters apart, anchoring them in the ground as deep as they were tall. The pylons looked heavy enough, even our worst winter storms wouldn’t budge them. They glinted like carbonized-polycrete, the bots were wrapping them in tree-bark to hide the metallic finish. But Mr. Costello pointed past them. “You see that level area, down there? Just beyond the posts? Where the bots have laid a polycrete floor? That would be a good place to put out some glitter-pods, yes?”

Charlie shrugged. “One place is as good as another. The horgs’ll find ’em wherever.”

“How much do you think would be a good appetizer?”

“I dunno. I never thought about feeding horgs before. Mostly, I don’t want ’em feeding. Not as much as they want to, that is. They’d eat the whole crop to the ground if they could.”

“See? That’s my point. You know horgs much better than I do. So what’s your advice? If you wanted to get the horgs to come to you, how much would you put out?”

Charlie said slowly, “Well, it all depends. I guess if you want to see most of the herd, you’d put out fifty, maybe a hundred kilos. They’d finish it off right quick, but they’d make a real mess of it and the smell would keep ’em snuffling around for a while searching for leavings. Sometimes they ain’t too smart.”

“That’s what I’m counting on—that we are smarter than horgs.” Mr. Costello continued, “Why don’t we try your idea? We’ll put out a hundred kilos tonight.” He suddenly remembered something. “There are lights on top of those masts. Do you think we can leave them on? Or will the light drive the horgs away?”

Marlie leaned forward then. “I never knew a horg to resist a free meal. Once they figure out there’s food, they’ll come. And once they figure the lights are where the food is, they’ll come whether there’s food or not. Just in case.” She pushed her glass forward and Mr. Costello happily refilled it.

So that was that.

Grampa asked Mr. Costello and his partners to join us for dinner. Lazz and I cooked up a Storm—actually, the full name of the stew was Shit Storm, but not everybody got the joke so we just called it a Storm for short. It’s a familiar recipe. I’ve heard it called Leftover Stew, Ingredient Soup, Glop, Bottomless Pot, Slumgullion, Scouse, Irish Cesspool, Gutter Slime, Desperation, and Oh God, Not Again.

But Lazz is pretty good with spices and I don’t do so bad myself with the basics—rice, beans, and noodles. And we had five truckloads of fresh pods—we could serve up a mess of those as well.

Pods have another virtue in the kitchen, too—it’s one of the better tricks of Haven cuisine. You can add curry powder, red pepper, blue pepper, jalapeños, habaneros, Pot Douglahs, Trinidad Moruga Scorpions, Carolina Reapers, and a few other spices with Scoville ratings so high they melt the equipment—it doesn’t matter. You can neutralize most of the heat with glitter-bush pods, leaving only the flavor and just the slightest hint of sweetness. Mostly, though, we stop at habaneros. The other peppers are better used in horg-repellent sprays. It slows ’em down. Sometimes. But one of the attractions of Jubilee is the spice-cookout. You bring in your hottest dish and see who can eat a whole bowl of it. The survivors win free medical care until they can walk again.

We opened up our own deck, set out tables and chairs, dropped the side-silks to slow down bugs and dust, laid the table for everyone, and rang the triangle. Everyone was already gathered, but it’s part of the ritual. The weather on Haven doesn’t always encourage eating outside, but when it does, you do. We still had another hour of sunset.

Mr. Costello praised the Storm as if it was a culinary discovery of the first order. Jerrid and Mikla even asked for seconds and extra bread to mop their bowls, so we knew tonight’s Oh God, Not Again had been a success.

After they headed back to their own trucks, after both the suns had finally dipped below the western horizon, we all retreated inside for the Circle. It’s how we keep ourselves centered. We sit around the table with coffee or tea, and we go round and round until we’re done.

One by one, first we acknowledge whatever might be gnawing at us, hurts and upsets, simmering frustrations, whatever. You have to say what you want and need to make things right. Nobody interrupts. Nobody gets to offer advice. Nobody gets to play peacemaker. All of those things are arrogant and disrespectful. You have three minutes to say whatever you have to say. Then to the next person, and the next.

On the second round, whatever upsets might have come up—you get to take responsibility for your part of it, you get to offer support to those who need it, you get to be a partner to whoever needs partnership. The second round keeps going round and round until the air has been cleared and everything that needs to be said has been said.

Usually, the first round is about the frustrations of the day’s work, not about our frustrations with each other. While it’s not a firm rule, if any two people in the family have an upset with each other, they’re supposed to resolve it before we get to Circle. So first round is usually about outside annoyances and second round is about creating strength to deal with them. But if a personal upset doesn’t get resolved before Circle, if it’s that important, we deal with it there.

Finally, third round is about completion. We go around and each person acknowledges the strengths they see in the family, the gifts they see in others, the gifts they wish to be to the whole. By then we’re usually on the second or third cup of coffee or tea. We finish by all holding hands and reminding ourselves that being in the family is a gift and a privilege. Then we have whatever special dessert or treat we’ve saved for ourselves.

That’s when the real fun begins. We share all the best gossip we’ve heard, all the most interesting stories and jokes, all the news that’s come down the channels. And … we also take some time to make sure we’re all on the same page about the business at hand. Those discussions sometimes go on for an hour or longer.

This night, we talked about Mr. Costello and his partners. We tried to figure out who they were and what they were planning and whether or not we could trust them—and most of all, what they weren’t telling us. We speculated, we guessed, we imagined, we goggled the web and came up empty. Finally, we paired off for the night, our usual couplings, and headed to our bunks.

I lay down next to Finn and sighed, mostly happy to be with Finn, but also concerned for no reason I could identify. “What I said in Circle. I still feel that way. Mr. Costello makes me uneasy. I don’t know why. There’s just something about him.”

Finn didn’t answer immediately. He was rubbing my back, my shoulders, my neck, working out the tensions of the day. When he finished, I would do the same for him. Finally, he said, “I think it’s because he’s too nice. It’s like he’s trying too hard.”

I had to think about that for a while. “If he’s trying too hard, isn’t that a kind of lying? Maybe he doesn’t trust his own plan?”

“No, I think he trusts his plan. But I wonder if maybe the plan he’s showing us is only the top part of the plan he isn’t showing us.” He patted my shoulders affectionately. “You’re done. My turn.”

He sprawled face down on the bed and I straddled him, digging into his spine. He was all muscle and I had to use all my weight and all my leverage. After a while, I said, “You and Grampa have been here longer than anyone. You’ve seen a lot of schemers and scammers come through here—”

“Yep. Most of ’em are buried on Idjit Hill.”

“—so why do you trust Mr. Costello?”

“I don’t. But his money spends just as good as anyone else’s. What Grampa said—if we don’t take it, someone else will. So far, I haven’t seen any reason to distrust him. Maybe his manner is just the way he is.” He grunted as I worked his shoulders. “He’s a starsider. Maybe that’s how they behave on other worlds.”

I thought about my next words, decided to say them anyway. “I’ve been on a lot of planets, Finn. More than I’ve told you about. You haven’t asked and I haven’t volunteered. Because I’ve done some things—”

“We don’t care about who you were before you got here,” said Finn. “We care about who you are now. If we didn’t, you wouldn’t be in this family. You wouldn’t be here in this bed tonight. And you wouldn’t be screaming my name to the ceiling.”

“I’m not doing that.”

“Not yet, but you will—”

“First let me finish what I was going to say. I’ve bounced around a few systems and I’ve never met any starsider who behaved like Mr. Costello. No, let me say it another way. Maybe I’ve seen a few—he reminds me of some of them. Some of them ended up the guest of honor at an airlock dance.”

“You have been around—”

“If you really want to know—”

“Do I need to?” Even in the dark, I could see the expression on his face. “Or will it hurt you to tell more than it would hurt me to hear?”

I didn’t answer. That was answer enough.

He grabbed me, rolled me over on my back, and pushed my knees up toward my nipples. He leaned his weight on my bent legs so he could look down on me. “This is where I want you, right here, right now. Is that enough?”

I barely had time to gasp my answer.

Sometime after first sleep, when we were all awake for midnight meal, Lazz powered up two bots and had them dump a hundred kilos of pods in the center of Mr. Costello’s polycrete floor. The lights on the pylons blazed down from the two nearest corners. There were cameras there as well, so we had an excellent view of the entire field.

“How long do you think we’ll have to wait?”

“Dunno,” said Marlie, and swiveled to face a wall of screens. One display showed our location. Another tracked the herd. “They’re not directly downwind but they should catch the scent soon enough. See? There.” Marlie pointed. “Some of the outliers are turning.”

“They’re at least ten klicks away,” said Charlie. “That’s an hour, minimum, more likely two.”

“We gonna wait up for ’em?”

“Might could,” said Grampa. “Then again, just as easily I might could go back to sleep. If they got pods to eat, they ain’t comin’ up the hill to see what we’re doin’.” A thought occurred to him. “You sprayed those trucks good, Finn?”

“Five coats, all the worst peppers. I spent two hours in that damn suit. I sprayed until the paint blistered. If any horgs can sniff the pods in our trucks, they’re welcome to ’em. At this point, I ain’t gonna argue. My eyes are still burning. And that was two days ago.”

“Told y’to wear the goggles.”

“I did. Even with the goggles, even with the mask, even with the hood, even with the O-tanks, that spray gets through. Y’know, people have died just breathing downwind from that crap.”

“Ayep,” said Grampa, lighting his pipe and grinning.

In the morning, while Lazz and Trina fixed first breakfast, the rest of us reviewed the night’s videos. Only a few horgs showed up, mostly outliers, mostly curious. Maybe a dozen. Maybe a few more. I didn’t count. They sniffed around the piles of pods cautiously—probably the unfamiliar scent traces of machines and humans made them suspicious—but after a bit, they bent their massive heads and inhaled the pods like so much dandelion fluff.

Horgs are sloppy eaters. They snuffled around, spreading pods every which way, smashing them under their feet, smearing the honeyed juices everywhere. The monitors showed their excitement rising as the scent grew stronger. Even after the last few pods had been slobbered away, they still licked eagerly at the now-oily surface of the polycrete. If they weren’t horgs, it could have been adorable.

But they were horgs and it was disgusting.

Horgs look like the mutant offspring of a rhinoceros and a warthog, only a lot bigger and ruddier and fatter and flatter and hairier. They have sharp razorback armor all along their spines, extending from the ends of their thick flat tails forward to their thick plated skulls. That’s where the armor splits and curves downward around their jaws, finally turning into two savage curving tusks. They have big paddle-like feet, so they can swim as well as they gallop—not fast, but pretty much unstoppable. On the deep savannahs, they travel in herds that can sprawl as wide as a hundred kilometers. They have to—they’d overpower the local ecology if they massed any closer together. Few predators are big enough to bring down a horg, but there are swarms of little things that can worry one to death.

Away from the plains, in the foothills and the forests, horgs become loners. And that makes them even more vicious, because they attack everything. It has something to do with not being able to sync their biological cycles with their fellows. They turn into psychopaths.

Horgs are omnivorous. They eat everything. Mostly, they eat grass, flowers, trees, bark, glitter-bushes, wailing willows, insects, grubs, roots, fungi, mushrooms, snakes, worms, lizards, birds, carrion, and any small horgs that get in their way. Loners tend to overeat, not just because they’re hungry, but because they need to build up bulk in case of a mating fight. Away from the herd, the majority of matings are injurious or fatal.

And those are their good points.

In the morning, after first breakfast, we all walked down to the feeding deck with Mr. Costello’s group and examined the aftermath. One of the smaller horgs had lost an argument with one of the larger horgs. There were still traces of blood everywhere and carrion birds were picking at the few remaining scraps of skin and bone.

Mr. Costello found that very interesting. He didn’t approach the scavengers. They looked feisty, so he studied them from a distance. Mikla and Jerrid frowned and whispered between themselves. Finally, Mr. Costello turned back to us and waved his cigar at the bloodstains on the polycrete. “How many did we lose?”

Finn was studying the blood smears, too. He shook his head. “Hard to say. I’d have to process the video to be sure. And even then, I dunno. Once the fighting started, it was a scramble—impossible to tell what was happening. All I can say for sure is that there were a lot fewer horgs leaving than arriving. Mebbe five or six fewer.”

For the first time, Mr. Costello looked unhappy. “This was unexpected. Very unexpected.” He turned to Grampa. “This—this cannibalism. Is that normal behavior?”

Grampa shrugged. He took a moment to light his pipe while he considered his answer. “Well, there’s a lot of theories about that. Horgs get hungry, they eat what’s in front of ’em. But”—he paused to puff thoughtfully—“sometimes these critters work themselves into a feeding frenzy. Sometimes it’s hunger and sometimes it’s rage and sometimes the mating fights get out of control”—another puff, another thoughtful pause—“but in this case, mebbe you overstimulated them. In the wild, they don’t get big piles of pods. They have to work a bit for every mouthful. But you gave ’em a big fat feast. Drove ’em crazy, mebbe. Leastways, that’d be my guess.”

Grampa didn’t guess. Grampa never guessed. But Grampa rarely spoke in declarative sentences, either. He let you do the work—kind of like Mr. Costello. The difference? Grampa was Grampa and Mr. Costello was Mr. Costello. That’s the only way I can explain it.

Mr. Costello considered, then nodded his agreement. “Hm. That sounds likely. Is there a way to slow them down?”

Grampa frowned in thought. “Now, that depends on what you want to do. I don’t mind horgs eatin’ each other if it thins the herd a bit. But it sounds to me like you want to feed ’em without getting ’em all worked up and agitated, right? You don’t want ’em killin’ each other.”

“We can’t sell horgs we don’t have, can we?”

“Nope,” agreed Grampa.

And that’s how it went for a while. Back and forth, back and forth, with neither one ever quite saying anything in the clear.

Finally, Finn spoke up again—I could tell he was getting frustrated. It’s bad enough having to deal with Grampa’s roundabout talk, but having to listen to the pair of them dancing around the subject like they didn’t know what they wanted, or more like whoever said it first would have to pay extra for the privilege of saying it first—Finn was exasperated.

“Listen,” he said. “We’ll send a few bots up into the trees, have ’em bring down some branches. We’ll put ’em through the shredders and mix ’em into the pods. It’ll mean they have to do a lot more chewing. And instead of putting it all in one big pile, we’ll spread it out in a lot of little piles all over the feeding floor. We could try that.”

Mr. Costello looked to Grampa. Grampa looked to Mr. Costello. They both were nodding thoughtfully, each waiting for the other to say, Let’s do it.

Finn didn’t wait. He turned to Lazz. “Unpack the lumberjack gear. Use bots four and six, they’ll have enough capacity. Number seven can do the shredding.” Some people named their bots, Finn didn’t. He insisted that people are people, machines are machines—mixing them up gets dangerous. I had to agree with that. I’d seen what happens when people forgot. Or worse, when machines forgot.

Finn and Lazz talked for a bit about what kind of branches to cut down and how many and where. The rule was not to take from more than one tree per acre and never more than one of a kind, unless it was a monoculture. There was still too much we didn’t know about Haven’s ecology—all the different ways that all the different plants and animals interacted. Based on the evidence of history, both here and elsewhere, even stepping on a butterfly could have unintended consequences.

By the time that conversation finished, Mr. Costello’s people had adjusted their plan as well. Jerrid was directing his construction bots to put up two more towers, these at the two remaining corners of the feeding floor.

“Yes, that’s a very good idea,” said Mr. Costello. He turned to us. “You’ll have more cameras now with different angles on the creatures as they feed, so you’ll get better information on their behavior. That should be very useful.” Back to his own people. “Thank you, Jerrid. Thank you, Mikla. How long do you think all this will take?”

I spent the next part of the day with Charlie, bringing the family’s finances up to date. Mostly, I handled the day-to-day stuff, paying bills, allocating shares, ordering necessities, coordinating deliveries—if something was urgent, we’d send out a drone to pick stuff up from Settlement or Temporary, if the weather permitted flight—otherwise we’d let the goods arrive on the Monthly. Eventually, Charlie would entrust me with access to the investment portfolios. I hadn’t been married in long enough to qualify for a permanent share, but another year or two, the others would vote. If they didn’t grant permanence, it would be a gentle way of saying, You are free to leave whenever you want.”

I wasn’t worrying about it now. I’d learned that it’s more important to focus on what you can give than what you’re going to get. That works in finance almost as well as it does in bed. And that was another conversation I wanted to have with Finn—

By the end of the day, the two new pylons had been set and hardened, and the bots were more than half-done pre-chewing the night’s meal for the horgs. This time, we’d be putting out only fifty kilos of pods and a hundred and fifty kilos of shredded bark and leaves. Lazz had selected six small trees across the edges of the forest—one anchorwood, two redbarks, a whitemarch, a wailing willow, and a bower-tree. After taking a few branches from each, he’d scattered fresh seeds in fertilizer pods to apologize for the assault. Forest horgs were known to chew into all of these species during the barest periods of winter, but most of the rest of the year they ignored them, so we knew the chaff would be edible without being overstimulating.

Because of the day’s efforts, dinner was flashed from the freezer. Charlie baked fresh bread and Lazz whomped up some of his best tomato-gravy and we washed the whole thing down with Grampa’s special beer, which was only special because he said so. It had the same familiar honeyed overtaste as everyone else’s special brew.

That night’s video revealed a scattering of horgs feeding placidly. Not a whole herd, but enough to justify the effort. Maybe two dozen. The important thing, no fights broke out, although the monitors reported that the animals were experiencing more irritability than we would have liked. Lazz and Charlie decided to reduce the proportion of glitter-bush pods even more for the next day’s feed.

After second breakfast, we met again with Mr. Costello. While he didn’t express any disappointment—on the contrary, he remained delighted with the progress we were making—he did wonder aloud that the horgs were finishing the feed too quickly, leaving nothing to attract the rest of the herd. Eventually, Finn realized he was asking us to put out more food to attract more horgs. But it was our idea, of course. We had enough chaff to handle tonight’s feed, but we’d need a lot more for the days to come.

Lazz and Charlie took one of the trucks north to select more trees. They planned to hit several different groves and would be gone all day, perhaps even two days. Mr. Costello asked why they couldn’t just take whole trees from the nearby slopes and they had to explain to him that the tree roots held the soil in place. If they deforested a slope, the winter storms would wash the entire hill down into the valley below. Aside from the inconvenience that might represent to those of us who lived in the area, it could also change the migratory patterns of various small herds—and nobody would appreciate having horgs wandering through their fields. Most settlers had chosen their sites specifically to stay away from the migration routes.

Marlie and Trina put out the evening feed for the horgs, spreading it thin and wide. That took a few hours, more time than anyone expected, so the rest of us made do with sandwiches and coffee. It was a long night. Because Charlie was gone, I handled the day’s journal-keeping. Not just the personal stats and billables, but the log as well. We logged everything. The family journal was a way of not having to depend on anyone’s memory. The notes we were making about horg behavior would be very valuable—not just for us, but for anyone else who wanted to download the public half of our records. We didn’t make a lot of local money from our logs, but we had a sizable offworld audience and the royalties did add up over time. Grampa wouldn’t let us spend any royalties unless it was an emergency—that money always got folded back into the portfolio. The job was to be self-sufficient on what we could make from the land. I had a thought we might be worth a lot more than Grampa ever let on, but I had no right to ask. Not yet.

We were reviewing the videos even before first breakfast now, gathering around the displays with coffee and fresh donuts to watch an accelerated record, only slowing down to real time if something interesting or unusual popped up on any of the screens. Today we were seeing a much bigger gathering of horgs. At any given time, there were thirty-some animals on the stage, but the total was greater than that—at least a dozen moewsnuffled cautiously around the edges. Not the hundreds Mr. Costello had promised, but certainly enough to demonstrate that he could attract a crowd.

Too much of a crowd, actually. Horgs are always hungry. After cleaning the floor of the feeding deck, they started snuffling up the slope toward the trucks. While it was unlikely that any of the animals would attack the vehicles, they could still do considerable damage. They could knock a vehicle on its side and rip out the undercarriage, just out of pure horgish malevolence. There was a lot of history—with pictures suitable for Goblin Night. Also known as Gobblin’ Night, when all the mini-horgs swarmed. We usually had two or three days’ warning, enough time to get home, lock all the doors and windows, and hide under the blankets.

But right now we had curious horgs wandering up the slopes. Not far enough—not yet, not last night—but tonight? Maybe. And the next night—certainly. Hungry horgs search and scavenge. Wake up a horg’s appetite and you’re asking for trouble. Something else Mr. Costello didn’t know.

We had an emergency meeting on his deck. He served iced tea and English biscuits. “Oh my, yes, the video was very disturbing. It’s a good thing the video cameras have a three-hundred-sixty-degree view or we’d have never known the creatures were wandering up the slope. Thank you, Jerrid, for your wonderful cameras.” He looked to Grampa. “Will we have to stop feeding them now?”

Grampa didn’t bother with his pipe today. He said, “It won’t do any good. Three nights now you’ve been laying out glitter-pods. Even if the place didn’t already reek with the scent of the crushed leaves, they’ll still be coming back. Looking for more. They ain’t stupid. You train ’em to come for food, they’ll come.”

“Well…” said Mr. Costello. “Well, well, well. This will be a challenge. Perhaps there’s some way to keep the horgs from wandering off the feeding floor, some way to keep them from wandering up the hill, some way to keep them where they are and away from the trucks.”

“We could put a fence up,” said Finn.

“Do you think that would work?” Mr. Costello’s face lit up.

Finn was thinking it over. “We could carve out a berm. I suppose we could have a ’dozer lifted out. It’d be expensive, though. And I’m not sure it would stop ’em. If a horg is determined to go over something, he goes over it. If he wants to go through it, he goes through it. Those paddle-feet, they have claws as long as your forearm—they’re good for slashing open each other’s bellies, but they’re also for digging into the ground, especially frozen ground—that’s how the horgs survive the outer-winters. They dig into huge communal burrows. You know those holes you saw from space, the ones that looked like craters? Horg-nests.”

Mr. Costello listened patiently to Finn’s monolog, then turned to Jerrid. “I think you packed something that might work—”

Jerrid nodded. “We have twenty bolts of carbon monofilament, triple-knit—” He looked to Finn. “It’s very lightweight and essentially unbreakable. We can spray it with shelterfoam and it’ll harden nicely.” He pointed at the silk-looking hangings that sheltered Mr. Costello’s deck. “I brought plenty, in case we needed to build a tented enclosure—”

“Ahh,” said Finn. He looked down the slope. “I see … we stretch a length of it between the first two towers, from one to the other and back again, then spray it to harden it, and we create a visual barrier between the feeding deck and the slope.”

“That’s a marvelous idea!” Mr. Costello clapped his hands in glee.

Jerrid looked to Finn. “You know horgs. Will it work?”

“Only one way to find out.”

Before the sun hit zenith, Jerrid’s bots were stringing the first lengths of triple-knit. By the time siesta was over, they were already prepping the shelterfoam tanks. We watched them from the deck while we ate second lunch. “That’s gonna be a tall wall,” said Grampa.

Finn said, “It’s a visual cliff. It should keep them focused on the food instead of the hill.”

Grampa puffed his pipe. “If nothin’ else, Mr. Costello has proven that you can train a horg to eat. Whether or not he can train ’em to butcher themselves, that’ll be a whole other thing, won’t it?”

Charlie and Lazz arrived late in the day with three huge trailers of wood for the shredders. They’d circled through six forests, taking branches from the outliers and the rogues. They’d left the mother-trees alone. No sense pissing off the woodlands. The trees on Haven could be friendly—or they could make life hell for you. As soon as a forest felt alarm, the surrounding trees would start releasing threat-pheromones. That would attract huge swarms of things that bite. It would also encourage local bugs and birds, lizards, and slugs to transform into their more hostile forms. An angry forest was no place for any creature not part of the rage. And if the forest got angry enough, all those different swarms would go into a feeding frenzy. Even the horgs wouldn’t be safe—that’s how the forests protected themselves from aggressive herds. Checks and balances everywhere. Don’t push the on-button if you don’t know where the off-button is.

All of us worked late into the evening, shredding wood, mixing in glitter-pods, and spreading small piles of feed across the polycrete. Well, the bots actually did the work, but we stayed up to supervise. It was a big job and we couldn’t risk a bug in our programming.

The horgs were already gathering downslope even before the last bot trotted out of the way. They snuffled and grunted, annoyed but curious. They approached cautiously. Horgs are suspicious by nature. The lights, the wall, the piles of feed—that was alien to their experience. But on the other hand, a free meal is a free meal.

Finn wasn’t certain that a single fence would deter the horgs, so he stayed up late to keep watch. He armed two bots with pepper spray and positioned them at the top of the slope. But most of the horgs were too interested in dinner to be concerned. A couple sniffed around the edges of the fence, looking to see if there was food beyond, but Finn had sprayed the perimeter upslope of the fence, and that appeared to be enough to deter further exploration.

By the time the rest of us woke up for mid-meal, Finn was ready to crash. Trina volunteered to take over the rest of the watch, and after updating the logs, I went back to our compartment in the second truck, expecting to find Finn snoring like a jelly-badger. Instead, he was awake and waiting for me.

“I haven’t showered,” I protested.

“No problem. I’ll shower with you. We’ll save water.”

There’s only one way to win an argument with Finn. You wrap yourself up in his arms and say, “Yes, honey, you’re right.” So I did. And we did. And then we did it again, just to make sure.

And finally, afterward, with me lying on top of his big broad chest, feeling very satisfied and very comfortable, I said, “Aren’t you sleepy yet?”

“I took a wide-awake.”

“Why?”

“Why not?”

“Not good enough. Why’d you stay up?” I repeated.

“For you,” he said, stroking my back. “For us. For this. I don’t want us to get so busy we forget to be us. What about you? Are you tired?”

“I’ll stay up with you. For as long as I can.”

He stroked my brush cut. “I miss your hair.”

“You liked it long?”

“Very much.”

“You never said. All right. I’ll let it grow out.” I kissed his left nipple. Then the right one, so it wouldn’t feel neglected.

He knew me too well. “You don’t like having your hair long?”

“It’s extra work, especially if I color-glow.”

“You don’t have to do it for me.”

“If it makes you happy—”

“Will it make you happy?” Even in the dark, I could see the intensity of his expression.

“Making you happy makes me happy.”

“I can see I’m not going to win this argument—”

“Oh? Are we having an argument? Wait. I’ll get my flak jacket and helmet. No kissing below the belt—”

He pulled me back down on top of him. “You do whatever you want.” He held me there for a long time, making that purring noise in his chest that attracted me to him in the first place. He never told me how he did it and I suspected an augment he wasn’t telling me about.

Finally, I lifted up, I straddled him, and looked down. “I do have to ask you something?”

“Uh-oh, I know that tone.”

“No.” I slapped his chest playfully. “This is serious.”

“What?”

“Would you like me to change back? Do you like me better as a boy or a girl?”

“I like you in my bed. Isn’t that enough?”

“No. It isn’t. I want to be the best you ever had. I want us to be perfect. I’m—” I looked at the ceiling but the answer wasn’t there, either, so I looked back to him and admitted, “It’s what you said. I don’t want us to stop being us.”

He sighed. Not quite exasperated. Not yet. But I knew that sigh. “Aren’t you happy?” he said.

“I’m the happiest I’ve ever been in my life—”

“Then why are you worrying about the plumbing?”

“Because I want to make you as happy as I am—”

“You’ve already done that.” He said, “If you want to change, then change. If you don’t, then don’t. Whichever, I’ll still find a way to make you scream loud enough to wake up Grampa.” Abruptly, he stopped and stared up at me. “Wait—are you asking me if I want to change?”

“Huh? No. I just—” My turn to stop and stare. “Do you want to change?”

“I wasn’t thinking about it. At least, not until now. Would that make you happy?”

I collapsed onto his chest, playfully frustrated. “Oh, great—I had to ask. Now we’re going to have gender confusion every time we get in bed. Finn, my sweetheart, my playmate, my lover, I am fine if you’re fine. I only asked because if it was something you wanted, it would be all right with me. Whatever—”

He kissed me lightly on the top of my head. “You can stop now. I’m fine. You’re fine. We’re fine. If you want to change, do it for you, I’ll still be fine. If you would like me to change, that might be fun, too. But for now, right now, with all this other business going on, let’s just take things one day at a time—okay?”

And that’s how that part of the conversation ended. The kissing part went on for a lot longer. And somewhere after that, I fell asleep in Finn’s arms, which was always my favorite place to fall asleep. My ears turned off as I cycled down and Finn could snore like a horg all night long if he wanted.

After first breakfast, Mr. Costello and his folks wandered over for a meeting. Nothing important, just an affirmation that everything looked like it was working out well. He agreed that we should continue feeding the horgs. The rest of the herd seemed to be gravitating this way. Perhaps within another few days we might see as many as a hundred or two hundred animals feeding each night. Perhaps we should increase the amount of feed we were putting out.

Somehow, the way he talked about things, the way he drew us into the discussion, it always felt like we were creating the plan, not him. But that was good—it gave us ownership. It put the responsibility on us to make things work. You couldn’t fault him for that.

Afterward, once that was settled, he sat down with me and Charlie and Finn and Grampa. “Jerrid has been working on something else. Mikla, too. They’re both so very smart about these things.”

We listened while he meandered his way toward the punch line.

“Y’see, this whole enterprise has to be a partnership, a team effort, don’t you agree?”

We nodded politely, already wondering where this was leading.

“And from time to time, we have to acknowledge that there are skills we need to add to the team. Jerrid pointed this out. Mikla, too. We’ve succeeded so well already. We’ve proven that we can direct the attention of a herd of horgs.”

“We can feed ’em, yes,” said Finn. He did not say what his tone suggested he was thinking: Any idjit can do that.

“If I might interrupt,” Mikla said politely. “We need to prepare for the next phase of the operation, which is to set up a processing plant for the horg meat.”

“Ah,” said Finn.

“We’ll need to bring in processing equipment, extra bots, and a team of operators.”

“Of course.”

“And that means expanding our partnership.”

“I see…” Finn said. He didn’t. Neither did the rest of us.

“It doesn’t affect our contracts with you, of course. You’re already locked in as a supplier.”

Jerrid spoke up then. “Mr. Costello has negotiated contracts with several other families, all of whom are ready to provide services for processing, packing, shipping, and so on.”

“That’s a good idea,” said Grampa, nodding. “It’s convenient. And it’s good for the local economy.”

Mikla said, “However … the larger the team gets, the more complicated all of the interrelated accounting becomes. So—” Mikla looked to Jerrid.

Jerrid said, “We’d like to streamline the financial channels. We already have a private web, to which our new partners will be added as they come aboard, of course. We’d like to use it as our primary financial network as well.”

Finn looked to Grampa. I looked to Charlie. We all looked to each other. The question didn’t have to be asked, but I did anyway. “Why is that necessary?”

“Well, for one thing,” Mikla said, “secrecy. Just as we’re keeping our business chatter isolated, we think we should take the same precautions with our financial transactions as well. If money is moving around, other people can use that information, possibly to our disadvantage.”

“That kinda makes sense,” said Charlie.

“I always thought our existing networks were secure,” said Finn.

“For most things, they are,” said Jerrid. “But it only takes one leak to sink a ship.”

Mr. Costello spoke up then. He had been looking from one to the other of us, especially Mikla and Jerrid, with a happy expression on his face. Now he said, “Don’t you think with this much money at stake, we should take every precaution possible to protect all of our interests?”

Grampa nodded. Despite the half-scowl on his face, he nodded.

“Wonderful, wonderful. I’m glad you agree. Mikla will set up accounts for all of you today. We’ll run our own private bank—with secured deposits for all pending contracts held in an independent escrow.”

“A local escrow, please,” said Finn.

“Of course, of course. We have to make sure that everybody is well taken care of or this won’t work. Not at all. Not at all.”

After they left, we all looked at each other. “Well,” said Charlie, “it does make sense.”

Finn snorted. Grampa puffed furiously on his pipe. I said nothing. Finally, Grampa took his pipe out of his mouth and said, “Used to be, a man’s handshake was enough. All these secrets—it makes a man wonder.” He put his pipe back in his mouth and resumed wondering.

I said, “The way I heard it, a contract is a list of all the ways two people don’t trust each other.”

Finn smiled. “That sounds about right. If Mr. Costello doesn’t think other people can be trusted, maybe it’s because he knows he can’t.”

Charlie said, “I’ve been studying all these protocols, all the riders, all the guarantees. A lot of it is boilerplate, but I don’t see anything dangerous here. I’m not getting any red flags.”

Lazz hardly ever spoke. He was the quiet one, but now he said what we were all thinking. “It’s just not the way we’re used to doin’ business.”

“He’s an offworlder,” said Charlie. “Maybe he doesn’t know any better. Maybe he’s been burned before—maybe he’s learned he needs strong fences to keep horgs out of his fields.”

“That’s probably it,” said Finn. “Still, it makes the back of my neck itch.”

“I think we’re all a little uneasy here,” Marlie said. “Perhaps it’s just having so many horgs sniffing around—one wrong smell and we could have a stampede or a frenzy.”

“Yep,” said Finn. “I think I’ll spray around the trucks again tonight. All of ’em. Might want to make sure the windows and vents are sealed, too.”

The next few days, we fell into an easy routine—easy only because we were still waiting. Mr. Costello hadn’t said anything about how we were going to get the horgs into the processing plant. But each night, the crowd of horgs gathering to gorge themselves continued to grow. Trina and Marlie went off to gather more wood. This time they went southeast so as not to assault the same forests as Charlie and Lazz had visited.

By the time they got back, we were seeing 70 or 80 horgs coming out of the trees each night. They jostled past each other with the usual snuffling and grumping, occasionally giving deep warning rumbles as they milled about, but by now there was a real order to the process. The largest of the animals approached first. They sniffed around, inspecting the various piles of wood chips and seedpods on the feeding deck. When they were finally satisfied—a process that usually involved selecting the largest piles for themselves—they grunted their approval. The others then followed and feeding began.

The next day, the first trucks from Settlement arrived. We knew the Hellisons, we recognized the Herkles—they were an all-male family, except when they needed to make a baby—but we didn’t know the Maetlins except by reputation. They were big and brawny, the family you called in when you meant business. We had a little meet-and-greet when they arrived, but they were impatient to set up their camp and went straight to work.

I suppose I should mention that a lot of families go unigender except when it’s baby-making time. I can see the logic of it, it makes for a different kind of emotional stability when you don’t have all those unaligned hormonal and emotional cycles in conflict, never really achieving stability, all the different relationships having to be constantly refreshed. But I can argue the other side of it, too—high-maintenance has its virtues. It demands continual reinvention.

But even as I chugged along on that train of thought, I realized what was happening to me—I was assimilating my rejuve. My past was starting to assert itself again and my old ways of thinking and being were coming back. I’d have to watch myself now. I’d have to spend some time apart, so I found a place on the slope that was off the main paths, where I could sit and watch. That was probably a bad idea, too—but I could lose myself in the watching.

The Maetlins started by leveling an area at least as big as the feeding platform, just on the other side of the first wall. They staked it out and raised two conjoined inflatables, giving themselves a good-sized warehouse right next to the feeding floor. Shelterfoam followed, then airlocks and vents. No windows. Even before it hardened, they started off-loading various ominous-looking pieces of machinery. Too many blades and hooks for my liking. They said it would take at least a week to assemble the line.

While they did that, we prepared the biggest pot of Shit Storm we’d ever cooked. The whole family worked on it, cutting vegetables, tasting, adding spices, scrounging ingredients. Everybody contributed. The Hellisons had a half-finished kettle of turkey. The Herkles carved a big chunk of beef from the shoulder they were growing in one of their meat tanks, the Maetlins gave us a fresh spice rack, and we turned the gathering Storm into Last Chance Chili.

After we ate, the newcomers finally asked to see what we had accomplished. They didn’t look impressed, there wasn’t much to see—at least not until the horgs arrived.

By now, the assembling crowds of horgs were large enough that as the feeding subsided, many of the animals were still hungry, so they started searching beyond the feeding deck. Occasionally, several ventured around the edges of the fence and stared uphill, growling. A couple of sniffs of the ground, however, and the blistering stink of Finn’s pepper spray was usually enough to dissuade them, but it always made for an uneasy few moments.

On the third day of that behavior, we met again with Mr. Costello. The short version—it was agreed to put up another fence, this time between posts two and three. The horgs hadn’t minded the first fence, they probably wouldn’t mind the second. We’d find out soon enough.

That night, most of us stayed up late to watch the monitors. The horgs arrived as usual but didn’t immediately rush to the feeding platform. The three largest snuffled forward and sniffed the new fence, then after they satisfied themselves that it was not a threat they turned their attention to the piles of glitter-pods and wood chips. At the first satisfied grunt, the other animals trundled forward. We all breathed a sigh of relief.

But the pack was larger than ever, and Finn said, “We might have to put up a third fence soon. Look at the size of that pack—they’ll wander off the edges of the platform unless we can contain them.”

And as he said that, I realized exactly how Mr. Costello planned to conquer the herd. But I didn’t say anything. Not then. Not so anyone else could hear.

Besides—

There was something else I didn’t want to tell him. And that was more important. I knew the red-haired Herkle twins. I’d met them the week I arrived on Haven. The Herkles were one of the families I’d applied to. The Herkle boys had bedded me—but no invitation had followed. I felt used. I never shared that with anyone, not even Finn.

But in all the hustle and bustle of everyone settling in, meeting and greeting, sorting things out, sharing news and gossip, trading tools and whatever, the Herkle boys had somehow tracked me to the south end of the slope.

One of the parts of our contract with Mr. Costello—we got first dibs on the dung. Glitter-bush seeds need to pass through a horg’s gut to germinate. All that dung—there should be enough fertile seeds to start three, maybe four new meadowlands. This was a side benefit that Grampa had smartly added to our arrangement with Mr. Costello and Mr. Costello had agreed without argument. Either he didn’t understand or he didn’t care. Whatever, this was the real reason Grampa had so readily accepted Mr. Costello’s initial proposal.

See, you could follow the herds and hope to gather dung from areas rich in glitter-bushes. Or you could put out piles of feed near the herds and hope you collected the right dung. Or you could hope that a few passing animals would drop by and eat just enough pods from your crop to give you enough fertile seeds for the next season. More than that, if you had extra seeds that had been fertilized, you could sell or trade them anywhere.

Yeah, there are artificial ways to force a seed to germinate, I guess, but most folks around here don’t think much of lab-germinated. General opinion holds that lab crops are missing something, they’re stunted and flavorless. Mebbe good for industrial use, mebbe good for animal feed, but not exactly a quality product. If anybody has done a real study, I haven’t seen the report, and I haven’t seen any lab crops myself, so I have to take Grampa’s word for it.

Anyway, I went down to the south end, where three of the agri-bots were picking up the dung balls, weighing them, scanning them, and measuring the various compositions—this was all useful information about the health of the herd—and if there were any fertile seeds inside, they’d toss the dung ball into a hopper. The useless dung balls were shredded and spread, which would make it easier for the various soil bugs to go to work faster. The bots could have done the job without me—or I could have monitored their progress from the truck, but I was tired of the truck, I was tired of Mr. Costello, I wanted to get away—and I wanted to see how this worked first hand. I didn’t want to watch screens all the time.

It was a mistake—one I quickly realized. The stink on this field was bad, terrible, even under the hood I wore. But I was too proud to turn around and march back up the hill, so I followed the bots and tried to figure out how they could tell which dung balls were good and which were not. I was beginning to sense that size had something to do with it when the Herkle twins showed up.

Kind of surprising that they found me. I hadn’t gone looking for them. If anything, I’d been avoiding them, deliberately moving to the opposite side of whatever assembly they joined. So I figured they had to be tracking me specifically, and this meeting wasn’t an accident.

I was right.

I never could tell the difference between Dane and Dyne, even when they wore dissimilar earrings, even when they wore different hairstyles and hair colors. I always just called them Herkle. It didn’t matter, either would answer.

I didn’t want to talk through the hood and I certainly wasn’t going to have this conversation on any channel, wireless or otherwise. I’d learned the hard way about people listening in. Actually, I was in no mood to talk to them at all, so I marched up the hill away from them.

They didn’t take the hint. They followed me across the polycrete—which was starting to show some serious cracking from the pounding weight of the horgs—and up into the corner of the fences, out of anyone’s line of sight, before I pulled off my hood and turned around, annoyed. “What do you want?”

Both of them flashed dazzling grins. The one on the left said, “We kinda feel bad you didn’t join our family.”

“I never got an invitation.”

They looked confused. “But we sent you one.”

“No. You didn’t.”

“Yes, we did.”

“I never got it.”

They looked at each other, even more confused. “Well, uh, okay. There must have been some mix-up. But the invitation is still there, still open. Any time you want to be a Herkle—”

I didn’t have a bad opinion of the Herkles. They were mostly a good family. They kept their word, they paid their bills on time, and they were always there for anyone in need. I just didn’t have a good feeling about the twins. They acted like you weren’t allowed to say no to them, and if you did, they couldn’t understand why you’d said it. They weren’t bad in bed, though, I couldn’t say it wouldn’t be fun. And one thing was well known: the Herkles ate good.

I stood there, looking back and forth between them, trying to figure out what they really wanted—and at the same time listing in my mind all the reasons I should slap their faces and walk away.

I’d already earned some credential in Grampa’s family. And whatever happened with Mr. Costello, I could see that we were still going to do very well off this exercise. And I was happy in Finn’s bed. So the only advantage in going to the Herkle twins’ bed would be … what? I’d be just another toy they shared. I’d be back to zero seniority and there were over a dozen invested members in the Herkle brood, so my cut would be proportionally smaller. They were a rich family, but not so rich as to make the offer dazzling.

So … why the invitation? Why now?

Apparently I was taking too long. The one on the right said, “We like having you between us. Even if you don’t want to take up our invitation now … well, we have an empty cabin in truck three. If you want to visit tonight, we could have some fun.”

Well, that was blatant. I said, “Sorry. I’m married.”

“So are we.”

“Not to me.” And I strode away, feeling confused, frustrated, angry—and a little horny. Because, dammit, those two were gorgeous, exciting, and energetic. Also spoiled rotten.

The only thing I could figure—they wanted to pump me. For information, too. Only there probably wasn’t anything I could tell them that Mr. Costello hadn’t already.

I didn’t know if I should tell Finn about it. I didn’t want to upset him. I certainly didn’t want him to get angry. We didn’t need a fight with another family, especially not here, not now. I took a long hot shower, put on the blue dress that Finn had bought—the one he’d said we’d take turns wearing, this was the first time either of us had put it on—and went in to help with dinner. Trina noticed the dress but said nothing. Neither did anyone else. I guess they figured this was between Finn and me.

But during Circle, Grampa looked across to me and said, “You wanna dump it? Or you wanna let it fester?”

I started crying. I didn’t know why. It was everything and nothing. It was silly and I felt stupid. I thought—after all the stuff I’d been through before getting to Haven—that I’d hardened myself. Now I realized the only person I’d been fooling was me.

Next thing I knew, Finn picked me up and carried me back to our cabin. The door slid shut behind us and he put me gently down on the bed. He didn’t say anything, just popped open a water bottle and handed it to me. He sat down opposite and waited, a concerned look on his face—not judging, just ready to listen.

“I’m not a good person, Finn. I don’t know why you took me into your family, but you’re the best people I’ve ever known and I’m grateful for the little bit of time I’ve had here. You should probably invite me out now, before I hurt you.”

“You can’t hurt us,” he said. “No, that’s not true. The only way you could hurt any of us would be by leaving. We love you. We care about you. Whatever it is, we have your back.”

“Yes, that’s the right thing to say. You always know the right thing to say, but you don’t know who I really am—”

“Yes, I do—”

“I’ve been lying to you. Lying to the whole family.”

“Sweetheart, stop it. Just stop.” He tilted my head up and looked me in the eyes. “You haven’t been lying. You’ve just been afraid. With good reason. We know your real age, we know about the rejuve, we know how old you really are. We don’t care. We know what you did on Flatland, we know what you did on Myrva, we know who you were on Borran. We’ve known all along. We don’t care. We know who you are on Haven. That’s the only thing we care about.”

“You’ve known—?”

“We figured you’d tell us when you were ready. And if you never told us, well—that would be fine, too. We’ve all done things—”

“I killed people, Finn. I was—”

“Stop.” He put a finger across my lips. “Are you planning to kill anyone today?”

“No. No, of course not.”

“Then it doesn’t matter.”

“But it does—”

“Another time, another place. You put it behind you. You put everything behind you when you rejuved. You’ve got the body and the spirit—and the confusion—of a brand-new adolescent. You’ll be another ten years growing up again. But here’s the thing, sweetheart. It was necessary, it was the right thing to do—it was the only way you could abandon your past. And it’s one of the things that convinced us to take you in. Even after the way the Herkles treated you—”

“You know about that?”

“Yes, I do. The Family does. That’s one of the reasons we watch out for you so closely—we know how fragile you are. Everybody your age is fragile, even when you’re doing it for the second or third time. Because you’re so full of life and hope and energy and enthusiasm—it overwhelms all the stuff you thought you knew, all the stuff you thought was worth knowing. You know how you say, ‘I wish I’d known this when I was young’? Well, guess what—knowing it doesn’t slow down the impulsiveness of the adolescent spirit.”

He pulled me into a hug and held me close. “Now have a good cry, as much as you need to—but those had better be tears of happiness.” After a bit, after we finished kissing, too, he said, “By the way, I was right. The blue dress really does look good on you.”

“I wore it for you.”

“I know.” He nuzzled my ear. “I knew what it meant. I was glad to see it.” He helped me take it off, pulling it up over my head, hanging it carefully on a hook.

“Next time, you wear it,” I said.

“Promise,” he said.

And then we stopped talking for a while.

Two days later, we put up the third fence. It didn’t slow the horgs down. By now, they were so eager to eat they barely noticed it. They had a nice comfortable U-shaped enclosure with the biggest piles of feed located at the back wall of the U.

And it was finally obvious to everyone what the next step would be. Jerrid and Mikla were already prepping it. But right now, we were just waiting to see how many horgs would show up to feed in a night. We were counting as many as ninety.

Our camp was growing. Another dozen trucks arrived and set up shop, three more families to help with the processing, packing, and pickling. While it didn’t affect our accounting, I could see that Mr. Costello’s bank channels were picking up a lot more traffic.

So at the afternoon meeting, it didn’t surprise me that the Herkle twins—probably at Mr. Costello’s coaching—stood up and suggested we needed some rules and regulations for our settlement as well as for our business. “Just so we’ll all know where we stand. So there won’t be any misunderstandings later on.”

Mr. Costello smiled and said, “Having rules is a good thing, yes. These boys are very smart, they are.”

And because no one wanted to argue with Mr. Costello, the vote was unanimous. A committee was set up to determine appropriate guidelines for establishing property limits—and for personal boundaries, too. That was a week’s worth of wrangling, sometimes heated, because there were a lot of people here now, not everybody knew everybody, and different folks kept imagining various ways to get their toes stepped on.

We kept out of most of it. Mostly because Grampa didn’t like crowds. Neither did any of the rest of us, but Grampa was worst. He kept to his cabin a lot—enough that we were starting to worry about him. But he showed up for dinner and he was okay during Circle, so as much as we worried, we knew he was staying close and connected.

I was feeling a lot better, too. At midnight meal, I went to each member of the family and just hugged them close. There was nothing that needed to be said, the hug said it all. And they hugged me back and kissed me and told me they were proud of me, and that was the end of it. Grampa was funniest, though. He whispered in my ear, “Next time I rejuve, I’m gonna want you to wear that blue dress for me.” And I whispered back, “I promise I will.” He didn’t flirt with me often, but when he did, it was his way of saying, “You’re good with me.”

Meanwhile, after laying out the feed, five hundred kilos a night now—and more wood than we felt comfortable shredding—we focused ourselves on gathering as much horg-dung as we could. We had six bots working the downslope and we kept them out there all day and all night, only pulling them back when the horgs were around. We chilled the dung balls as fast as the bots collected them and were close to filling the first trailer. Lazz was already talking about driving it back home to empty it into the main cellar.

The Maetlins had their warehouse lit up all the time now, and one afternoon they invited everyone to walk through the installations to see how the carcasses would be hung and fed into the disassembly line, where all the separate machines would skin, cut, separate, slice, grade, and process the horg meat. They were ready to go, anytime. They just needed a horg-sized tunnel from the feeding pen into the first machine, the killing machine.

And finally, on the last day, a few more trucks arrived—looky-loos and wannabes, curiosity-seekers and even a few tourists—all of whom had heard the gossip about Mr. Costello’s marvelous horg-catching operation. They’d all come out to see this idjit get himself good and killed. Tilda Jacklin was running a pool.

Afternoon meeting got a little heated, tho. Finn and Charlie and me always attended. Trina usually stayed home with Grampa. Lazz and Marlie kept busy, monitoring the dung-bots.

This day tho, the Maetlins started talking about offal rights. You cut up a carcass, the intestines—or whatever the horgs use as intestines—spill out. The upper part of the tract is mostly full of undigested food, but the lower part is packed with dung that hasn’t been dropped. And a lot of that dung is fertilized seedpods.

By rights, that dung belonged to us, and Charlie stood up to voice our claim. The Maetlins argued otherwise. Their contract gave them rights to all parts of the creature that were not immediately saleable, and that included the undropped dung. We knew they were being paid on a per-carcass basis, plus a percentage of Mr. Costello’s sale price, a very fair deal. They were also getting the ingredients for bone meal and various fertilizers, which was their bonus. So Charlie argued that if they took the dung, they were taking part of our bonus. The Maetlins argued back that if the dung wasn’t dropped, it was still part of the animal and covered by their contract. Obviously, they knew the value of fertilized seedpods.

We already had enough to corner the market—enough to crash the market if we wanted to—but that wasn’t information anyone else knew and we intended to keep it that way. But if the Maetlins got fertilized seedpods from the undropped dung, they’d have enough to be a serious competitor. They could drive the prize down if they wanted to. And they might want to, just because they could. It wouldn’t be the first time they’d savaged another family. If they saw an advantage for themselves, they took it. That was their reputation and it was well earned. There were some abandoned farms to testify to that.

So we argued, first Charlie, then Finn. I kept my mouth shut and made notes. It got pretty ferocious there for a bit and I was afraid a fight might break out. We had a hospital truck. The Hellisons managed that. And surveillance, too. But the kind of injuries the Maetlins were capable of inflicting—I put my hand on Finn’s forearm and he sat back down.

Harm Maetlin noticed it, and I knew he was about to ask who wore the balls in our family—but Arle Maetlin stepped in front of him. The Maetlins might be feisty but they’re not stupid. A fight was the last thing they needed right now.

In fact—just the possibility of a fight sidetracked that meeting, Mr. Costello stood up and said it worried him terribly that we had gotten to such a sad position. Perhaps we needed to consider what kinds of mechanisms should be put in place?

Well, that’s how we got a police force. And a judge. And a mechanism to enforce the application of our new settlement’s rules and guidelines. It all happened so fast, it would have been head-spinning. Except Mr. Costello just happened to have the boilerplate. Because a good businessman is always prepared. And Mr. Costello was a very good businessman. He didn’t say so, he didn’t have to, but he’d been planning this from the beginning.

And that’s how the settlement got named, too. Costello. Of course. In honor of the man who made it happen.

Mr. Costello accepted the position of mayor. And judge. Of course. And as his first ruling, he cut Solomon’s baby in half. We got the offal. The Maetlins got the responsibility of running the police force. They would be paid appropriately for their efforts. The rest of us would be charged a pro-rata user fee for the provision of police salaries, as well as the billables of the judge and mayor, who—because Mr. Costello was so thoughtful and generous—would only be compensated for hours actually served.

That night, while the horgs were feeding, Jerrid and Mikla rolled the last huge section of fence around and slammed it shut with a satisfying clank, penning in a hundred and twenty-three grunting, grumbling mountains of ugly meat. The horgs were so busy scraping the glitter-pods off the deck, they never even noticed.

Almost immediately, the Maetlins started spraying liquid nitrogen into the air above the pen, forming huge clouds of cold steam. A cross-spray of water created flurries of snow, which fell onto the backs of the uneasy creatures like a quiet blizzard. And just as quickly, the horgs started huddling together, their instinctive response to winter.

The monitors showed us that their metabolic processes were slowing, slowing, turning the animals into huge docile lumps. Using nothing more than a bucket of warm glitter-pods, a single man could lead a near-slumbering horg to the receiving gate, through a short tunnel, through the airlocks, and finally into the killing room of the processing plant. Harm Maetlin had the honor of leading the first. The other beasts would follow, one at a time. When the line was fully up to speed, they’d be able to process—kill and butcher—thirty-six horgs a day.

From the hill above, cheers and applause. Mr. Costello had captured a herd. Mr. Costello was going to pack and ship several hundred tons of horg meat. Mr. Costello was going to make us all rich. Mr. Costello, hooray.

Mr. Costello!

I could still hear the clank of that last piece of fence slamming shut. That’s when the uncomfortable little itch at the back of my neck became a lot more than an uncomfortable little itch.

We watched for a bit, then walked silently back to our trucks. Nobody said much. We ate in silence. Cold sandwiches. We’d just seen the future of Haven. It wasn’t pretty.

The videos of what we’d accomplished at Costello Township were already circulating across the public webs. Within hours, new partnerships, new alliances, new collectives of all kinds would be announced—all with the intention of cashing in. The giant herds would be slaughtered, sacrificed to the greed of little men. They’d be annihilated within a generation and the ecology of Haven would collapse.

It’s okay to take one or two. It’s not okay to take a thousand or ten thousand. It’s not okay to wipe out an apex predator. I stayed up late, running simulations. Without enough mates, the horgs would self-fertilize. Without any parents to feed on them, the mini-horg swarms would run out of control. They’d decimate the countryside, eating everything they could, leaving deserts behind, and wiping out every species that depended on the devastated land. The only good news? They’d wipe out most of the human population, too.

The next morning, we had an emergency meeting with Mr. Costello. Just me and Finn, Charlie and Grampa. We told him about our fears.

Mr. Costello looked sad. Very sad. “Yes, of course. Of course,” he said. “You’re very smart to share your concerns with me. This is why I’m so glad we’re business partners. You’re all so intelligent and insightful. So please let me put your minds at ease.” He motioned to Mikla, who arrived with two fresh pitchers of lemonade, his signal that this was going to be a long but pleasant meeting.

“From the beginning, I realized that if our techniques worked, they could be copied. So I incorporated a holding company, patented the mechanics of the entire operation, and transferred the patent to the corporation. That corporation will sell licenses, materiel, and equipment to any other prospective horg-trapping collective. They will only be allowed to take a limited number of horgs in any given year. Their license requires them to sell their catch only to licensed shippers, and the corporation takes a percentage from both packagers and shippers. So there will be a limit on the number of beasts killed and the amount of meat shipped. That will also keep the prices high. The enforcement protocols are all in place. For the protection of the species … as well as for the protection of the market, nobody will be able to ship a ton of horg-meat off this planet without buying a license from me. Well, from my corporation.”

Finn leaned back in his chair. He looked to Grampa. Grampa looked to Charlie. Charlie shook his head.

Mr. Costello sensed our unease. Hell, even a rock would have noticed. “You still look unhappy. Did I do something wrong? How can I make it up to you? You’ve been paid, haven’t you? You even got bonuses. Was it not enough?”

“No, you’ve been fair,” Grampa said. “You kept your word.”

Mr. Costello relaxed in his chair.

“But—” Grampa continued. “To be honest, we kinda expected you to get killed. We was even bettin’ on how it would happen. You weren’t the first idjit to come down here with a brilliant idea. You probably won’t be the last. So we never expected you to get this far. But your money was good and what the hell—we went along for the ride.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“Nothing. Everything.”

I raised my hand politely to interrupt. Grampa nodded to me.

I said, “You’ve changed the world. And I’m not sure—we’re not sure it’s going to be for the better.”

Mr. Costello looked honestly confused. “Oh my. Oh dear. Yes. You must think I’m planning to leave and take all my profits with me. Oh, no. No, no, no. We’re going to lay tracks and build a railroad from Costello Town to Settlement so we can ship horg-meat all year long. Restless Meadow is perfectly situated to draw horgs off the main migratory track. This will be a permanent base for expansion. We’ll have a hospital, a school, a year-round marketplace. Eventually, we’ll extend the railroad across the continent and establish Costello Towns on every major migratory track. That’s where the other collectives will be allowed to build. Liftcore has already agreed to drop a second beanstalk, and we’ve got sites picked out for three and four as well. And you’ll be senior partners. You’ll be among the richest people on Haven. No, please don’t thank me—I’m happy to do it. Haven will no longer be a backwater world. Soon it will live up to its name. Millions of people will want to settle here.”

Well, you can’t argue with good news. And I suppose all that good news should have made us happy, but it didn’t. Finn and Grampa headed back to the truck, their footsteps quiet on the new sidewalks the Hellisons had installed.

Charlie shook his head and walked on down to Jacklins’ Outpost to see what new goods Tilda had driven in from Temp.

Me? I stood alone, shaking. Trying to figure out what to do next.

Was I the only one who could see it?

Bait and walls. First you put out bait. Something juicy. Then you put up a wall. You put out more bait, you put up another wall. Do it enough, you have a cage. Costello did it to the horgs, he did it to us. Glitter pods. Money. Something juicy. No difference at all. Bait and walls. Money and banks, then courts and police. We all get captured.

Mr. Costello saw me on the sidewalk and invited me to join him for a stroll. Some of the horgs were warming up, getting a little agitated. He wanted my opinion on whether or not they needed to be cooled again.

I didn’t know, but what the hell. I followed him.

Yes, the remaining horgs were waking up. Yes, they were getting agitated. I didn’t need the monitors to tell me that. They were hungry and annoyed. They’d definitely need to be fed and cooled. Already a few were pushing themselves against the fences, testing their imprisonment.

We climbed up onto the catwalk that overlooked this side of the pen. “Aren’t they beautiful?” Mr. Costello said. His smile was broad and beneficent. In the afternoon light, he glowed like a saint.

I had to admit—if you looked at them the right way, horgs could be beautiful.

“Someday…” he mused. “Someday, there will be a city here.” He turned to me with a serious expression. “Tell me something. Do you think they might put up a statue of me?”

That’s when I kicked him into the pen with the horgs.

No one saw. And apparently someone had conveniently turned off the cameras without leaving any prints.

It was time for me to move on, anyway.

Finn caught up with me at Settlement and pulled me out of line for the bus to Beanstalk. “Like hell you will,” he said, and wrapped me in his arms.

I didn’t argue. He was wearing the blue dress.

AUTHOR’S AFTERWORD

First, let me acknowledge and thank the Theodore Sturgeon Literary Trust for permission to continue the adventures of one of Theodore Sturgeon’s most memorable characters. I hope I have done him justice. If you haven’t read the story that inspired this, “Mr. Costello, Hero,” you should seek it out now. It is a classic. It will stick to the roof of your mind like mental peanut butter.

Now, let me acknowledge the gifts that Ted Sturgeon represented to the community of science fiction authors—and to me as both a writer and a friend.

One night, when a group of us were gathered at a local restaurant, I asked him about style. He generously showed me one of the most marvelous mechanisms for creating voice and style in a story. He called it metric prose, and it’s a tool I continue to use today.

There’s not enough room to share the details here, but the short version—Ted showed me how it’s possible to write with a poetic meter that carries from one sentence to the next to create a specific mood. When you change the meter, it changes the emotional tone of the prose, as if you’re moving from silk onto sandpaper (his metaphor). Google Sturgeon’s interviews or read James Gunn’s writings on Sturgeon for more information.

But the most important lesson I learned from Ted wasn’t about writing as much as it was about how to be a human being. I can’t sum that up easily, either—the best I can say is that in its expression, you find yourself living at the center of your soul, unafraid and joyous, discovering over and over that the very best stories one can write are about what happens in the space between two human beings.