The Long Game (The Far Reaches collection)

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Otherwise, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Text copyright © 2023 by Ann Leckie All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher. Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle www.apub.com Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Original Stories are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates. ISBN-13: 9781662515675 (digital) Cover design by Caroline Teagle Johnson Cover image: ©mikroman6 / Getty Who put you in charge? Someone has to make the plans. Someone has to tell people what to do. Why shouldn’t that be me? It makes sense. I’m the biggest. Look at you, little thing, quivering, the tentacles by your mouth trembling. Even the eggs tucked into the bases of the radioles tufted here and there on your body are shivering. You’re afraid of me. And you should be. I’m bigger than anybody else I’ve ever met. Well, except the humans, but, I mean, humans. They’re not exactly people, right? I don’t know what they are. But they mostly don’t get involved in that everyday stuff, like digging burrows or fetching water. Which really isn’t fair, when you think about it. Humans are just about made for carrying things and digging; they’re all stiff and they only bend at corners. They have cold, stiff containers for carrying all sorts of things with their stiff, cornered not-tentacles. People have to hold a stick or a right-shaped stone in a couple of tentacles and scrape at the dirt, and if it’s too dry, you take a plant membrane to the river and get a little bit of water and go back and forth and back and forth. You don’t get very far if you’re working by yourself, and some of the time a monster comes up out of the river and tries to eat you. If someone planned it, though . . . if someone planned a big thing and then made people do parts of it, everyone working all at once, you could get a lot done. Like, if you had two or three people to dig at the same time, and another half dozen to carry water, and more to shove the babies out of the way, you could dig a channel from the river and make a nice, wide muddy space that would always be wet, with no monsters. And after that you’d still need someone to be in charge. Someone to tell some people to keep the babies from getting underfoot, and someone to drag old sick people away from the colony before they cause trouble or die somewhere inconvenient. And I’m the biggest. It should be me. I did it! We have a nice wet place now, with no monsters. We have a special place for growing algae and people to make sure it grows well, and to distribute it. We have people who watch out for the babies so they don’t get eaten as much. And it used to be you couldn’t go a day without some crazy old person waving their stiffening tentacles in your face, threatening you incoherently, or crying out as though their entire bodies hurt them. And they would curl up and die right where they were, and there would be dead bodies everywhere. But now I have them dragged off, away from our nice muddy place, as soon as they start wandering and raving. “It’s very impressive,” said Leeyay, the human, when I showed them. They had folded themselves down to the ground so they didn’t tower so high over me. It’s the only thing I don’t like about humans, the way they’re so much bigger than I am. “A lot of people have thought of this, and even tried to make it happen, but I haven’t seen anyone get quite this far.” I was disappointed not to be the first, the only. But I had still done more than anyone, ever! I couldn’t resist a flourish of tentacles, a happy shiver that made my radioles flutter as if caught by a breeze. “I will go farther still,” I declared. “I will go over the hills and kill the monsters that keep us from getting the rocks and plants that you like. And then we will bring you oh, so many, and you will give us all sorts of things. Boxes and bricks and tools.” Maybe even the secret to making those boxes and bricks and tools for ourselves, but I didn’t say that. “That would be nice,” said Leeyay. And for a while we watched people coming and going, the harvesters harvesting, the baby minders herding the infants out of the way of the agents who made sure the people did the things they were supposed to do. At length, Leeyay said, “It looks like you’ve thought of nearly everything. Tell me, Narr, what are your plans for making sure this continues after you’re gone?” “After I’m gone?” The question puzzled me extremely. “I’m not going anywhere, Leeyay. Even if I go over the hills, it won’t be for that long; I can just leave my agents in charge until I come back.” It was difficult for me to read the reactions of humans, but Leeyay seemed taken aback. Or amused. Or sad. “Narr,” they said, “I have been here for . . .” They paused, as if thinking. “For more than ten years.” Ten years! That was a long, long time. “Only one person of all those I met, when I first came, is still alive. How old are you?” How old was I? Why would I even know such a thing? But Leeyay didn’t wait for me to reply. “You’re not quite a year old. You will live maybe