I am aware of light. I am not aware of waking up; I was not aware of being asleep, any more than being dead. But now there is light, shining faintly through the bone clay of the hull. We have entered a star system.
As we head deeper into the system the light will get brighter, the whole pale lozenge of the ship’s skin glowing warmly, kindling, glaring. The thick layer of organic ash inside my own skin will keep the light out of the space that is me, even as it floods the space that is the ship. We are not our skins; they are a container, a ceramic membrane, connecting and separating the space that is me, and the space that is ship, and the space that is the infinite void.
I lie on the gentle curve of the floor, my edges blurring into its clay. The egg-shaped hollow of the interior is filling with light. It spills over the curve of my head, the smoothed-over angle of my elbow, the soft rounded mass of my hand, the faint individual nubs of my spine, and leaves wells of shadow behind. If we get close enough to the sun, even the shadows will glow, until they too are gone. Nothing else casts a shadow, now. I am the only disturbance of the smooth clay floor, the only protrusion. The little flying thing, the bird, departed in the last system, on a planet with an atmosphere so wet I could taste it through the shell of the ship. We felt sticky. We were not underwater, but it was close, the water was close, and coming closer. The bird roused itself from its long slumber, pulling its clay free from the membrane of the ship and through to the outside. I could no longer feel its void in the ship’s space, but I could feel vibrations from the flap of its thick, blunt wings against the heavy, humid air. We left before the floods consumed us, but the bird stayed.
There were more, once.
The bird came with others—many others. We had been on that planet, the bird’s home, steeping in its soil, the ship slowly feeding. I was becoming aware of the taste of the soil and the fibrous hum of the roots that laced through it. We were not the only ones feeding; the ground was thick with life, growing up and away toward that system’s golden-white sun. The life overshadowed us, half-buried us in deep gloom, but I had been awake enough to see the glow on the way in.
The carbon taste in the soil grew stronger, and the hum grew to a buzz, and I paid no attention. I stayed curled on the floor of the ship, our clay mingled, my curled-up form unmoving. Eventually the light became noticeable, hot and orange, and the creatures began to arrive, passing through the wall of the ship in their terror, huddling in the smoky red-darkness as the walls flickered, the wildfire glowing through. The soot they brought with them on their bodies and in their lungs mingled with the thin layer of soft grey dust on the floor. The heat tasted familiar, the smoke calling out to the char inside my skin, and I was somewhere else and nowhere else, for a time.
When I was aware again, the sun’s light fell faintly on the ship’s skin, bare to the sky. Many of our guests were gone, the scorched and smoke-sick survivors departed to do their best to heal alongside their desolated territories. Those who remained had not yet cooled, but neither had the ship, its fired hull pinging and ticking as the heat dissipated. The clay, so freshly enriched and strengthened, crept up their still bodies, encasing them as statues: the flying one, the small scaled thing, a fast-lived running creature, a plant-climber. By fire had they come, and by their own sun’s fire would they become again, clay forms fired, voids lined with ash.
I don’t remember the transit of their sun. I remember the flash of their firing and the taste of their char in the skin of the ship, but I only remember it, recalling it after the fact—much as I recall prior forms’ presence in the ship alongside me. Only knowledge of a memory, of something not recognized at the time. I am sure I was not alone for every journey, every sun, but at the time: I was alone, or I was not.
We tasted fire again some systems later, near an erratic, turbulent sun, on a planet so unstable that it cracked and oozed beneath the ship. Some rare, electric mineral fed us here, and the scaled creature, the lizard, flicked out its thick white clay tongue and burrowed out through the hull, the ship’s skin closing seamlessly in its wake. It was not long before the pressure of the heat—so intense I felt I might crack—burst beneath us and we were hurled spaceward once more, into the dark, into the cold, into the sleep.
But I stayed hot for a long time. I remembered.
The space within me is large, and the heat pushed at it, held by the clay. I remembered when it had done so before, in the intimate embrace and wholly impersonal violence of my own sun’s plasma. When my body burned.
I had walked for so long.
When I was turned out, and all doors were closed to me, the weather was fine and the land was kind. I was grieving, and angry, but thought that all I needed was a little time, a little distance, and a new way would present itself. A fresh start, in a strange place, with strange people, perhaps as a strange self. I did not yet truly know fear.
But the doors remained closed, near and far, and I was not just turned out, but driven. I stopped sleeping at night; I walked instead. I walked as the days grew colder. I walked when I was hungry. I walked, and I heard pursuit behind me, and I ran, until I had to walk again. I walked until I stopped being hungry. I walked until I stopped being cold. I walked until one day in the frozen fields I stumbled into a huge, smooth stone I hadn’t seen until I hit it. I had to keep going, and so I was not especially afraid as I fell through the clay and into the still, white cave. I could not hear the pursuit behind me, and I had walked for so long.
I do not remember lying down, into this fetal curve, or what the cold clay felt like against my body as I shivered there. I do not remember—I cannot remember when my body—I did not remember the searing fire of my system’s sun as it vaporized my body under the blanket of clay the ship had drawn around me. But as we passed through other fires, little by little, I remembered knowing it. It drove me out of myself, time and again, away from the empty space that is me into something even less present.
In the heat of the molten planet’s eruption, I remembered knowing. My atoms as an excited gas bounced off the clay in familiar patterns. The heat, after a long cold. The embrace of clay, the softness of form. The skin that contained me, inside the skin that contained ship, inside the sun.
This sun washing over us now is growing brighter. I can feel its radiation, its bright determination, reaching out to its planets. It is not reaching for me, this time. We are headed toward one of the planets; always when we enter a system we are planet-bound. I can feel our course from the angle of the light, and the growing caress of gravity against the ship’s skin as we enter its orbit. Atmosphere is overwhelming, a sudden explosion of tastes after the crisp dark smoothness of vacuum. This one is tangy, almost sour, but getting sweeter and richer as we descend. Gravity is demanding, and liquid vapor and wind currents fight for attention. It is too much, the hands and mouths and eyes of the physical world all over our skin, and I pull back into my space, my char, my membrane, my void.
I become aware of the ground and the illusion of stillness, still moving through space at immense speed but now in lockstep with the planet’s giant bulk. I can still feel the young light of the sun. The earth here is rich in silica and calcium; it will feed the ship well. But currently the bone-clay hull is quiescent. It feels asleep. I cannot remember being awake while the ship itself slept—but my memory is not what it was. I think. I rest too.
The air on this planet is pushy, changing often, brushing different odors and sounds against the hull. I can feel them like glazes on the clay, metals oxidizing, salts bubbling, murmurs stippling, and creature-calls bumping and chipping. I can feel echoes of the hull’s sensations in my own skin like goosebumps. The hull does not move, once it has landed, but sometimes the force of the wind rocks me within it.
The earth is quieter, arid and cold, but now and then vibrating with some distant potent movement. There is a tension to it, a reverberation greater than the movement of animals going about their daily business. It is like frisson in the planet’s skin—fast and shallow and ominous, rather than deep and seismic and inevitable. When it comes, I tremble, and each time the tremor persists a little longer.
The ship sleeps on. It barely feeds, nestling in the soil for all the world like an extraterrestrial moraine.
A vibration comes through the soil and this time it does not stop. It reverberates within the space that is the ship, shadows’ edges blurring as the whole skin rings, and my skin rings, too, the space within me sounding like a bell. I feel my char swirl inside my skin and ripple in rings, driven by the soundwaves. I am overwhelmed with sound and motion and expect to stop knowing, to wake up again under another sun, but I am still here and the sound is still shaking me, it will shake my atoms loose from the universe, the clay of my skin will grind itself to dust and mix with my char, and my space and the ship’s space will be one. I shake and shake and shake, and I realize that the ship itself is still. I am shivering, quaking, but it is not. The sound is within me, inside the quiet space of the ship. Even as I realize it, it becomes a memory. I tremble, and rock in the wind, and realize that I have been moving, on this planet, even as the ship is still. It frightens me, and I curl up tighter, and in that motion I can feel my body sliding through the skin of the ship to attain its new position. The edge between us is sticky, smearing, but unmerged.
I listen and taste. I can still feel the glazes oxidizing but I cannot tell on whose skin they are painted. I shiver from the sound of the wind on the clay of my head. I try to sleep; the wind carries new sounds, from a new place, sharp and metallic on the tongue. I pull my head in tighter and am aware of the space inside its clay-formed chin pooling into the space of my chest, opening into itself, my single void. I can feel the tremor in the soil, far distant, as it syncs with the sounds on the wind. I think sounds had meaning once. I had not remembered meaning until now.
The next time the sound comes, I brace myself against the floor of the ship, thick clay fingers lumped into fists, knuckled into the ground. It is several sounds, a fast and a slow, high and relentless and low and throbbing. I remember meaning again, and remember that I had remembered it. The shaking lasts longest at my feet, the organic ash there still quivering inside my skin after the rest has stopped.
I remember it again the next time.
I push my flexed feet against the hull of the ship. It is softer than I remember. Soon the feeling of the sun on the ship’s skin doubles, and in an instant, halves, as I feel my skin under a strange world’s sun. My soles are still buzzing from the last shiver in the ground, and they can hear a sound, soft and distant. The relentless air pushes at the ship, and its clay yields, and the wind tastes my feet, my ankles, my shins. I see the softly radiant interior of the ship through narrowing vision as bone-white clay closes over my eyes, and then it is gone. I remember, distantly, knowing another time that clay had covered my face, but this time I open my eyes and see the soft grey-white of the ship’s exterior.
I am outside.
I return to my familiar curl, and huddle against the curve of the ship, and try to understand.
My feet buzz against the ground. It resonates into the space that is me, inside my own skin, not the ship’s. Within me are echoes of the sounds with meaning, one chasing the other. The wind has shifted but the taste of metallic stress is still in my skin. It is a meaning, too. I want to understand. I tilt myself toward the sun and stretch my skin upwards. I can hear in the ground where the movement comes from. I step toward it.
It has been so long since I walked.
I walk, and keep walking.
I can taste the silica in the ground, and feel the pull of my body on the soil, enriching itself with minerals, feeling, tasting, feeding. Just a little; enough to walk. The vibration within me reverberates and resonates closer and closer to the shiver in the soil, until it drowns it out, until I am the sound, I am the motion, and the earth trembles beneath me.
When I realize this, I stop. I can feel the sun on my head. The earth here is rich and the air is sweet. I lie down on the soil to taste it better; I am hungry. I take my curled shape again, and the wind rocks me on its curve, until I make a groove in the earth, nestling. I can hear the sounds more clearly, but they echo off every curve, inside my limbs, my face. I want to understand. I feed my skin, and rock it smooth, and shiver it outward, making my void gentler, larger, a clarifying chamber. I listen. I can remember meaning; I can nearly taste it, it is nearly drawn in my char, the dust vibrating through my skin. I need more space. The young sun shines through my translucent walls and somewhere I can’t quite hear yet, it is making a promise. I can feel the pulse of desperation jittering in the earth and I call out to it, trapping and bouncing its echo in an inverse wave. Where the two meet, a path of stillness is drawn.
When they reach me, I hold them. They are so small within my skin. They make a sound in the air, while they are still breathing, and it is so tiny compared to the chemical clamoring of their cells, which persists a little longer, their meaning sustained. I can taste salt and sorrow. I help the wind rock them as their vibration keens and fades.
I wrap them in a memory made of clay, and carry them to their sun.
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Toby MacNutt (they/them) is a queer, nonbinary trans, disabled author and artist living in rural Vermont, USA. Their short fiction and poetry have also been published by Strange Horizons, Liminality, Capricious, and other magazines, and their collection If Not Skin was published in 2018 by Aqueduct Press. In 2025, they’re editing queer-disabled-poetry round-robin Infinite Branches for Interstellar Flight Press. Find out more about their writing, dance, and other work at www.tobymacnutt.com or on instagram @tobymacnutt. |