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For the seventh dusk in a row, the human girl comes to our tree with an offering. She approaches on all fours, moving almost as clumsily as I do when I crawl from the knothole and amble out along my favorite branch. Her face is hidden by a ceremonial mask. It’s a simple wooden thing, not half so ornate as the ones I know humans fashioned in the time of our ancestors.
Spotnik knows the humans haven’t forgotten him, because kibble still clatters into Spotnik’s bowl at six a.m. sharp. They’ve been gone long enough for all the vegetables in Hydroponics to shrivel up, limp and dead. Spotnik eats his kibble and licks up the crumbs, because he is a Good Boy, and Good Boys eat their rations. Even when the kibble goes soft and develops a white coat of mold and begins to stink so bad that he has to struggle to choke it down.
Once upon a time, there was a king who married a witch. Together, they had four sons and one daughter, and they were very happy as long as the king lived. When my father the king died and my oldest brother was crowned king, life went sideways for me, my sister, and our mother. The new king, our oldest brother, decided to use our sister as coin to buy our country’s safety. He planned to marry her to the king across a perilous border to our south.
The humans crawl into us, carrying their instruments and consulting their manuals. Their hands run over us, searching for nuts and bolts and hidden crevices. We are big toys that they all long to play with, to tear down and study. Our origin baffles them. They express endless awe at the complexity of our systems and are always asking themselves who built us. They come up with theories that get increasingly bizarre as time passes.
They were not so much rumors as warnings. Beyond the mountain that overlooked the plateau was an ancient forest, enormous and wild. It was dark and treacherous and full of dangerous animals. The warnings were not about the danger of the beasts, but rather the ancient legend of a knight who entered the forest to pray at a desecrated shrine. Why he decided to pray to a devil or demon was long forgotten, but the response from the evil that lived there was still known to everyone.
I learned from Bernadette that there are two ways a star can go supernova. The first is in a double star where one partner dies first, turning into a white dwarf, and the surviving partner swells in grief and dumps mass onto the compact star. But the atoms of compact stars can only hold up to a certain limit. The resulting explosion destroys both stars and nothing is left except a thin nebula, returning the atoms to space.
The stores are selling off their inventories and clearing out. The trains and buses have posted their shutdown schedules. People are returning borrowed objects, cleaning out their refrigerators, and packing to leave for the assembly spots. What to bring? Parents tell children to bring warm clothes, just in case, and toothbrushes, but no one knows if we will need them. We are vacating, leaving everything behind, taking only what we can carry or drag in a roller bag.
DIRECTIONS: Fill in the correct letter with a #2 pencil on the answer sheet. Do not use ink or ballpoint pens. Questions left blank will be marked incorrect. Completely fill in each circle.
Esteemed neighbors, emissaries, ambassadors, and dignitaries, I write to you today not only as a statesman but as a scientist. We in the city of Omelas have been exceedingly lucky in recent years. The wars, diseases, and financial instability that have rocked the world have so far passed us by. Partly that’s been due to prudent precautions and smart public investments, but it’s also true that our fine city benefits in unique ways from ancient, dearly-held customs.
We saw her staggering down the promenade, gills flaring as she sucked for the gods’ aether that no longer fueled her breathing. By her gasping breaths we knew the god had moved on, swimming the invisible aether to another, leaving her gasping in the void as she fell back into the strained, recycled, and slightly fishy-smelling air of the space station.
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