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  Rogue Artists

  Copyright © 2022 by Origins Game Fair and E.D.E. Bell

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the US Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the copyright holders.

  Cover illustration “Unbound” by Charles Urbach

  (originally designed for Noble Treachery by Great Northern Games)

  Published by Atthis Arts, LLC

  Detroit, Michigan

  atthisarts.com

  ISBN 978-1-945009-89-1

  Each story in this collection is copyrighted © 2022 by the story’s author.

  Content notes are listed in the back of the collection.

  Art Holds Our Broken Hearts Together

  Cat Rambo

  A handful of my family and I were in the last wave to leave the planet.

  We clustered around my cousin, who held out their pad so we could see the ship’s jerky feed from a rear camera.

  Everyone was so quiet you’d think they weren’t breathing, jostling side by side. We watched the Pipperi missiles hitting. The globe lit with a flower of fire, the first one in northern Thool, then two burst out on either coast of the emirates, then more and more, until all its surface was lacework of red and gold.

  Those impacts hit me in my gut, way down low. I’d always wanted to go out into space, but it was so costly. Someone like me could never afford it. Dreams, only.

  Now here I was, on the government’s coin, and all I could do was focus on not throwing up on anyone, rather than looking at the stars. People around me trying to hold still but there, breathing out little gasps whenever a favorite part of the world died.

  They hadn’t let us bring our pets. I’d begged and pleaded for the bakha that I’d raised from a wriggling spraggling, and my parents said no with an exchanged look that I didn’t understand until we got to the port and I found out there was only room for me, clutching the carrybag my mother had packed for me and marching forward while they waved goodbye. I only got that one look back over my shoulder, to see their faces, trying to smile at me, trying to smile through their tears.

  No one had anything more than that government allotted carrybag, enough to hold a change of clothes, a few toiletries.

  Everyone had stuffed something from home in there. My mother had put in my little stuffed fish, and a packet of play cards my uncle illustrated. Holum, the biology teacher, had cuttings in plastic bags stuffed everywhere, not just in the bag but her pockets. Cleran had their grandmother’s prayer robe wrapped around her like a second skin, a little shocking to see something everyone thought so holy exposed like that, but I could understand why she’d not wanted to leave something so precious behind. Gold twined the embroidery’s threads, coiling feathers and ferns sprawling thick and lush over the graying fabric.

  Sami was my cousin. We’d rescued each other in childhood from one thing or another, but then we’d lost touch after we both got older and went off with our own friends. They brought dyes along with their pad, ones they used in their weaving, made from roots and flowers that no longer existed anywhere else in the whole universe. That thought picked at my soul like someone plucking out bits of it, and not gently.

  We all stared at the screen and it showed us the stars, and we had no home beneath our feet. I thought about my bakha, how I’d let it loose out the back door, so it would have those last few hours of freedom before everything turned to fire.

  I didn’t think about my parents, but I thought about not thinking about them.

  The Pipperi didn’t shoot the handful of fleeing ships. Most of the vessels rendezvoused at Perim, out at the edges of the solar system, but it was only a matter of time, everyone knew, before the Pipperi came to clean those outer bases away.

  Some other species would have to defeat them. We weren’t the first, and wouldn’t be the last. Our species, which had branded the war in its hubris at first, had learned to its dismay that it was not capable.

  And so, with that, we were refugees.

  The Volloloy had donated a few planets to housing refugees from the Pipperi but they were packed, and the waiting list was long. Most of us were shipped to Kyuro, but the last groups, mine included, got allotted elsewhere, government after government shifting responsibility, until we ended up on TwiceFar.

  -

  TwiceFar was a scavenged station, an ancient relic that had been repurposed, and then repurposed again and again, till it housed its own population, serving the ships going back and forth from the nearby gate.

  No one seemed to know how long we’d be there, Jerf, who was our appointed leader for going and trying to wrestle information out of the authorities, came back muttering under her breath, “Hurry up and wait, hurry up and wait,” and spat whenever anyone asked her what the timeline was.

  Rumor had it that much of the station’s population were refugees who’d been assigned there and never gotten off. That was the uncertain thing.

  I kept walking around trying to think what would it be like if this were our new home. The biology teacher took out her cuttings and made temporary homes for them in cups of water. She even traded a few leaves to the stations’ gardeners. There was a lively trade business for those that had managed to bring small, precious things, or even things that were unique because they were made of hard to find materials, like wood or shell or bone.

  Sami traded a little flute for credits, but refused to spend them, tucked them away in a pouch. Others were more profligate, usually buying stuff to flavor the daily meals, bars of food of an unvarying and unpleasant consistency and no flavor whatsoever.

  -

  Two days after we got there, Malia and Lydia, sisters, committed suicide. We knew it wasn’t an accident with the airlock, because they left a video saying goodbye. Then they went into the airlock and set it to open so they could step out into space.

  I saw the video. It was short. First Malia saying, “I just don’t see any point to continuing,” and then Lydia saying, “I have to go where my sister goes, there’s no choice.”

  I hadn’t known them but Sami had, had been in schooling with them. Not good friends, but better than acquaintances. The news hit them hard, deepened the shadows under their eyes. For the first time they gave up on their appearance, stopped brushing their hair and teeth, and appearing sometimes throughout the day with sleep crust still on their face.

  To cheer them up, I talked Sami into going exploring with me. It wasn’t exactly forbidden, but it wasn’t encouraged. But Sami and I had both found that a lot of people let us capitalize on our youth. They thought it was a shame we were here, and so station folk would look the other way sometimes.

  Sometimes not. We certainly got chased out of places that we shouldn’t have been in, more than once. An elevator control center whose overseer had stepped down the corridor to investigate mysterious noises, not realizing they were a rattletoy that Sami had set bumping against the wall.

  A storage chamber full of cargo going from one place to another. We didn’t fiddle much with things, but we did open up one of the smaller crates, and found it full of bricks of some sour yellow paste, sour to the point of inedibility, else we might have stashed some away, desperate for some alteration in our ship rations.

  We never got to where the station’s brain was stored, but we got to that deck, reaching the transgression that finally pushed the ship authorities’ patience past its limits. Uncaring, we were hauled back to the group and scolded multiple times, since every adult, it seemed, felt the need.

  After that we stuck to our own deck. Even there, there were plenty of disused spaces, empty holds and vacant s
uites. TwiceFar was enormous, this version built for a population whose numbers actually had never reached expectations for one reason, then another, which was why it was currently a refugee processing center.

  There was a vast cargo hold near us on this deck, totally bare. It was cold in there, bone-chillingly cold, and the walls were metal painted white, the only color the station paint came in.

  Still, I said to Sami as we walked through it, “This is big enough that we could all live here.”

  “That’d explain why it has atmo,” Sami said. They tilted their head back, contemplating the ceiling so far overhead for three long breaths. “Yeah, maybe,” they finally said. “I don’t know how we make it home, though.”

  We’d seen other holds like this converted into living quarters, so I know they weren’t hesitating about the material possibility of it, but rather the people-side.

  The unspoken question was, would everyone be willing to do that? Some kept insisting that someday the Pipperi would be defeated, the planet would be inhabitable again. Others wanted to club together on some money-making scheme, get enough to give some of us buy-in to a colony planet. Then they’d work to bring the rest in. A few people just walked around poo-pooing ideas without ever proposing any of their own.

  I said, “Maybe we go back and suss out how people feel about it.”

  Sami half-laughed, half-sneered. They were as unhappy as I was, shredded and raw and not yet able to see a future. “With what, a poll? A survey?”

  I looked around at the walls. I waited as long as they had to answer. I said, into the silence, “It’s something at least.”

  “Breathing is something.”

  “It’s the least effort anyone can make.”

  “Not the least,” Sami said, abruptly as a knife’s edge. Malia and Lydia, the idea of them out there in space dying before the station’s salvage nets caught them, hung between us.

  I could see they were thinking about it. I said, “I’d miss you, you know,” quietly and they made a sound in answer, not yes, not no, almost a grumble.

  But when we got back, there was no need for polls or surveys. Word had come that we were to be relocated again, but this time for good, to a colony that had recently suffered plague and needed new bodies, new hands.

  Someone dug out spices from their carrybag and spent them with lavish generosity, let everyone sprinkle a little on their food bars, the illusion of food.

  I closed my eyes and chewed more slowly than I ever had in my life, letting the bar soften in my mouth, tasting the two little seeds that had come with the spice, feeling their shape with my tongue before I positioned them, one, then the other, between two teeth and bit down, tasting pepper and sweet, a smell that swelled out through my mouth and nose, a smell that took me for the moment, vividly, viscerally, to a home that no longer existed.

  -

  The next few days were less quarrelsome, more serene than any had been before. How could they not be? Food tasted better because hope seasoned our tongues. It lightened our steps. Buoyed us up like stepping from heavy gravity to light, that happy upsurge.

  It lasted two and a half days, that happiness.

  Who knows why the clerk had overbooked colonists? But we were lowest on the list, and the message came with the implication that we would always be lowest on the list. Vestiges of our hubris. Our species wielded power no longer; we had no holdings other than what we had stuffed in our carry-bags, and the clothing on our backs.

  That was the lowest moment of the journey for me. For a lot of us.

  I said to Sami, bitterly, “We will be here forever.”

  Sami said, “It will be all right.”

  I turned away, as I never had from them. I turned away as though I could not hear them.

  Sami said, softly, persuasively, “I have thought of a way to spend my credits.”

  But I didn’t care. I kept looking away.

  After a while they left and it was then that I let myself cry.

  How many hours later was it that Sami came to find me, curled on my cot? It must have been many, maybe even half a day. They said, “Come with me.”

  “I’m not hungry,” I said. “I’m tired. Too tired to move.”

  They flicked the blanket off me, and I sat up, despite myself, indignant. They stood staring at me, with the blanket in their hand, and I tried to muster up anger, but there was something about the quirk of their lips and then before I knew it, we were both laughing.

  “Come with me,” Sami said again. They held out their hand and this time I took it and let them pull me up.

  “I traded my credits for paint,” they said, and tugged me by along until we were at the hold again.

  But no longer white. Sami had used their dyes to tint the ship’s paint. They’d painted the walls.

  With pictures. With our towers, and the trees that had lined our street. With my bakha running free. The peppers that grew in everyone’s gardens, and the sky at night and the sky at dawn. The leaves and little insects and the people, so many of them. Even Malia and Lydia walking together, hand in hand.

  Everyone was there, they’d crowded in after us. How they’d known to come, I couldn’t guess, other than Sami had told them to. Everyone went around from wall to wall, looking at the pictures.

  Sami shifted beside me, and I said, “Why?”

  “I thought about making a home,” they said. “And I started it by making art.”

  Someone started a praise-song, over in the corner, and Cleran was dancing, holding out the edges of her grandmother’s robe, dancing the way our people always had. I knew then that we would stay between the stars, but I also knew that we were home.

  I could hear them singing, and I could feel a little of my sorrow seep away as I looked at my bakha, running on the wall, always free, always there.

  We make our homes as we make our art as we make meaning out of our lives.

  ~

  Cat Rambo’s 250+ fiction publications include stories in Asimov’s, Clarkesworld Magazine, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. In 2020 they won the Nebula Award for fantasy novelette Carpe Glitter. They are a former two-term President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). Their most recent works are space opera You Sexy Thing (Tor Macmillan) and an anthology, The Reinvented Heart (Arc Manor, March, 2022), co-edited with Jennifer Brozek.

  Catharsis

  C. S. E. Cooney

  Last night, there was a priest at the box office. Not doing anything. Not standing in line. Not even standing across the line, at the other side of the picket, ringing a bell, proclaiming the wrath of la Diosa, wearing one of those daunting tabards embroidered with the two swords: one short, one long (silver and gold for the two moons, Plata the little moon, Oro the big moon), and glaring. No, this priest was just standing there. Arms folded. Still face. Plain clothes. But you can always tell a priest by her tattoos, and the two enameled hairpins that double as throwing knives when loosened from the plaited knots.

  Her presence was enough to thin the line in front of the warehouse-turned-theatre. But not all Espadans fear the priests of la Familia de la Diosa these days. Some of the queue scowled openly at her. Others drew up hoods or pulled hats lower, or loosened their hair so that it fell like lace over their faces.

  But the priest said nothing, wrote nothing down. Just watched. After I admitted the last person in my line, I collected my money box and went in after them, shutting the door and locking it.

  Locked eyes with her first, though. Couldn’t read a thing in the priest’s stone-still features. Distracted maybe, by her tattoos: the right side of her face split with a vertical golden slash, the left side with a shorter silver one. They marked her as an interrogator.

  Maybe she nodded at me, a little? I closed the door too fast to be sure.

  Last year, when the queen made her abrupt volte-face regarding her “one nation, one goddess” policy, we were all too shocked and weary to trust it. After all, who changes their mind in a nig
ht? And what was to stop her from changing it back? Pass all those old laws anew, insisting that we worship according to her decree or be tried as heretics. No, release from that fear is not an overnight endeavor.

  But months passed. The number of priests policing our streets began evaporating like fog at sunny noon. Something inside us began to thaw. And by us, I mean the atheists, agnostics, and religious minorities of Espada. And us actors, of course. Actors may worship all kinds of gods, or none at all, but even the saint-sworn, icon-wearing, sacred-well-sipping Goddess-lovers among us still risked arrest—merely for existing. Because, see, we were actors, and the priests of la Familia had it out for us.

  At least now they had it out for us without the benefit of the queen’s explicit endorsement. From what I could tell, the religious of la Familia expressed a range of reactions to that change: from relief to chagrin to livid-with-the-bruise-of-rage. But despite the crushing pressures brought to bear upon her from some pretty mighty folks in some pretty holy mantles, the queen was still showing no sign of returning to her previous leanings. It was an improvement, I thought. While it lasted.

  It wasn’t till a few months ago, when the public gallows were finally broken down in la Plaza de la Fe, and the coal circles swept clean, and the various mutilated effigies buried in the midden, that Yasmin judged it safe enough to bring Teatro Milagro back to the surface. We’d been operating in secret, in cellars and sewers, for several years by then. Underground street theatre, you know? But even before our profession was criminalized, we were by no means high society performance artists.

  -

  I myself caught the theatre bug when a raggedy troupe of traveling actors stopped by our little farming village with their puppets and masks. I was four years old, Mamá and Papá said, and I kept pointing to the painted wagons and insisting, “I want to live there.”

  Yasmin had been a theatre professor. Not here, of course; Espadan universities did not offer degrees in the arts. She came to Espada when our troubles began, believing that trouble was the true time for theatre. She set up her workshop in the slums. She could have lived in a much nicer neighborhood—with linden trees and paving stones and actual gutters—but I’m glad she didn’t. The slums are where I met her: me, busking on the streets with a few friends, doing one of our song-story cycles for petty change.