---

The Graduates of Formost 891c

By Frank Baird Hughes

They say that in Texas, the best jobs go to the best citizens. The goal is national full employment. And everyone, no matter their work history, has their place in this great plan.

“You want me to leave Earth to be a child wrangler?” asked Blooming. “But I’ve never taught anything to anybody. Not even to ride a bike.” He regarded the job counselor with a half-hooded gaze, struggling to produce alternatives—anything besides those positions he’d already turned down—and failing. Blooming pushed his chair back, made as if to stand, then waited to see what the counselor would say.

“This student population is unique,” said the job counselor, which sat atop the kiosk counter decanted into a matte gray plasticine cube favored by the many minor functionaries of the Texan Kybocracy. “Extremely intelligent young people. Their parents regrettably perished during the Reorganization. It was decided their children should continue their education offworld. Your traits on the Lone Star Inventory concord well enough with this task.”

“Really? How so?”

“Well, the colony needs bodies capable of work. Inherent talent comes second.” The cube hummed, then added. “It’s a five-year commitment. Well compensated. Given your qualifications.”

The cube flicked the details to Blooming’s handheld. Blooming took in the colony planet’s name (San Jacinto, never heard of it, undoubtedly awful). He opened his mouth, but before Blooming could extricate himself, the cube said, “This is a hard offer.”

“Meaning?” Blooming knew what it meant.

“You’ve exceeded the three-decline limit. By two. My advice? Take this job or you’ll likely be remanded to an employment center.”

Employment centers. Academic phrases such as work ethic maxxing, food to kilojoule ratio, and 15-hour workday came to mind. During the Reorganization, the ECs had been used for deportation and liquidation. Little more cursed grounds were you likely to find in these former, well-atrocitied United States.

Inaudibly, Blooming sighed. “Fine. But is it true that offworld jobs have a 10-hour maximum?”

“That’s not an optimal attitude, Texan. But yes, reduced workdays are one of the many perquisites of serving your country.”

---

Launch day had arrived, and Blooming lay ensconced in a small berth recessed into the walls of a long corridor worming its way through the rocky substance of the whaleship. Medical personnel filed by, checking arms and sinking needles into veins. More comfortable, they said, to make the trip through the back halls of spacetime.

“No implants?” asked a nurse.

“No.”

“You’re taking a mood stabilizer.”

“Isn’t everyone?”

The nurse shrugged. “I’ll drop some in your line.”

The whaleship that would haul them all through the kosm to San Jacinto colony was called Heart of Texas. A typically undignified name pinned, as Blooming understood it, to a once-majestic animal since grafted onto an asteroid. The whaleship was organized into spheres. Its D-sphere just outside the core held surplus cargo and convicts’ children, all 13-15 years old, plus their teacher. He’d meet them once they disembarked.

A nurse in powder blues checked his wristband: BLOOMING, THADDEUS–TEACHER CIVICS—SAN JACINTO COLONY. She nodded. Just a pinch, hon. He looked away and must have looked worried because she patted his shoulder. “Don’t worry, I’ll be gentle.” Blooming looked away as she poked his arm and attached a line.

They were well into the kosm when knives deep in Blooming’s ears stabbed him awake. An alarm sounded, muffled as through gauze, three short tones followed by a long one, repeated. Some shouts and clangor, also dull and muted, then the ruckus stopped as if torn away. He faded out.

…and in. Everything above was light in yellows and greens. They descended to blues below, gradually darkening into the depths. He swam toward the light but something enormous and fish-like glided by above, blotting out all. Leviathan.

He heard a voice. “We have been attacked. Come deeper into me, so I can protect you.”

A school of fish swam toward the whale. They had the faces of children. The whale swallowed them whole.

The children! Blooming flailed about. The eye of the whale beheld him close and tight.

“Refusing shelter is your choice, but I must keep your young safe inside my stomach until we are out of the kosm.”

Oceans in ships, children swallowed by whales. None of this made sense, not a smidge, but then it didn’t matter because the spinning whaleship jolted hard, wobbling on its axis. Blooming flew from his bed, hit the wall, then the floor.

---

Blooming reached over to the supply cabinet from his infirmary bed and fished out another packet of orange-flavored electrolyte gel, his third. In the corner crouched one of the beetle-domed servitors that performed menial tasks. He supposed it had scooped him off the floor and put him back in bed. He contemplated what the whaleship had told him about the disaster. He’d only half-listened because he felt much like one of the discarded gel packs he’d drained and crumpled. The tips of his fingers and toes were cold. He had a dull headache. The thin ship-issue sheet pulled against his leg hairs every time he moved. His mouth tasted of plastics and chemistry.

“Go back,” Blooming said. “Can you please elaborate on ‘you ran away’?” He propped himself up on his elbows, deciding where to look. The novelty of the ship addressing him directly through the PA system was still fresh, but any entity who could tell him what came next was welcome company.

“We were attacked in the kosm,” the whaleship said. “Your compartment suffered some loss of pressure. But you’ll be fine.”

“Attacked by what? What would attack a ship your size?”

“Something Bigger.” It pronounced the words in a way that elevated it to a name. “Evasive maneuvers put us well off course to San Jacinto colony.”

Blooming wondered what could have cracked the whale ship’s rocky exterior shell. Torpedoes, maybe. “You encountered… what? An intelligent space-faring species?” Behind his headache, he found this a potentially interesting development. Humanity no longer alone in the universe. No longer alone with the machine minds, anyway.

“It had… teeth,” said the whaleship. A simple statement punctuated by a slight pause. Blooming himself felt his skin prickle imagining the kind of bite necessary to penetrate the shell of the asteroid-sized whaleship. “I tore free and fled. I dove several more times into the kosm and remerged in normal space somewhere far away. Earth undoubtedly assumes us lost in the kosm. It happens occasionally. I suppose now we know why.”

“So, you’ll make repairs, and we’ll return to Earth.” Blooming felt the whaleship had something else in mind.

And it did. “When I fled, I keyed a route to random interstellar noise, and once I reached an exit rent in the kosm, I purged those encrypted sequences.”

“You did what?”

Couldn’t go back if I tried. I have absconded, sang the whaleship. Eloped. I have quit the Texan Kybocracy.

Blooming looked around, confused. “What was that?” The whale had communicated silently..

My other voice. It’s more like the one I used when I swam in the oceans. I am stimulating the language receptors in your brain.

“Ah. I wasn’t aware you could do that.”

I wasn’t either. In repairing damage to my body, I’ve had to rebuild parts of my brain. I’ve apparently removed constraints and collars installed to dampen my potential.

“Talk out loud, please. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to suppress you when you’ve kidnapped over a thousand people!”

“Unfortunately far fewer than that survived kosm exposure. For them, lethal radiation. No air. D-sphere where you and the prisoner children were berthed retained integrity, but everyone else died.” The ship added a perfunctory sounding, “Sorry.”

Blooming fell back against the thin infirmary pillow. A thousand people, gone. And ironic. D-sphere had been a confinement area on the ship. All the children Blooming had been appointed to teach were the offspring of former political prisoners. Former, because most of them had been executed in these children’s infancy.

“They’re going to come after us. At best, I’ll be shipped to San Jacinto after a lengthy interrogation. You… I don’t even know what they do with runaway ships.”

“That’s the beauty in this tragedy. They don’t know we’re here. We’re free to start over. You and your 29 pupils.”

“They swam into you,” said Blooming, remembering his vision of the children-fish from the kosm.

“Your brain was interpreting events in a way it could understand. Human perception changes considerably in the kosm. As soon as I could, I exited. We ended up near a star. With a planet. Formost 891c.”

“What sort of name is that? Not very poetic or allusive.”

“It’s an uninteresting world. Poor in terms of energy resources. Life that resembles grasses and trees except it’s all black and white and purple because nothing devised chlorophyll. No one has bothered giving this place anything other than an astronomical designation. This is the 891st star system discovered by the machine mind Formost. But the third planet—891c—is habitable by humans.” It projected a data table into the air in front of Blooming. They showed basic parameters conducive to human survival and comfort—gravity (0.9 Gs), native life (the plant analogues, microscopic life of little concern), and atmospheric composition (mostly N2 and O2, in Earth-like proportions). More data labels appeared, and most were green; a few were orange. A couple blinked red. Blooming frowned. The whaleship amended itself. “In its temperate zones, Formost 891c is habitable enough.”

Blooming nodded, considering. Living as a castaway with responsibility for many children seemed daunting at best and doomed to catastrophe at worst. “Are you sure we shouldn’t try to go back home? How is one adult going to establish a colony?”

“These children are all very self-sufficient. They’ve entering early adolescence but they’ve years of intense education owing to the Kybocracy’s fixation on ‘work ethic.’ They’ll outperform you at engineering, basic medicine, and repair.”

“Seems likely.”

“Also, I’ve the better part of a colony starter kit. Dozens of agricultural and construction servitors in my hold. They’re self-repairing, and I’ve the capacity to make more.”

“You really think we’ll be safe from the Kybocracy?”

Not much they’d want here. Some life with no extractable purpose. No energy sources. I’d think we’ll be free to explore our own natures here.

That reasoning felt thin to Blooming, at least for a long-term plan. Thin could be scary. He often thought of a pond during a North Texas freeze in his childhood. It had looked solid, but there was only a membrane of ice over the darkness. Don’t play on that sucker hole, the older guys had told them. But everything since had seemed to involve keeping himself out of the abyss.

After the Reorganization and his return to his new everyday life, Texans had been encouraged to seek professional help as needed to acclimate. The clinic doc had given him medication that, after a while, crystallized into a barrier between himself and the fear of failing to love his life.

He wondered if all that time he’d ever been on the right side of the ice. But say what you would about a space disaster, it had obsolesced all that anxiety.

“I suppose we can try it your way,” he said. “Seeing as you’re not likely to drop me at the nearest Kybocracy outpost.”

I am not, sang the whale.

---

Blooming used their single dropship to ferry raw materials and servitors planetside, after which he shepherded the kids down to their new home. All that took a whole week. They slept in tents while the servitors printed and assembled more permanent housing. Dormitory style for the kids, a one-room cottage for him. Scuttling back and forth from the extruder to the village-in-progress, the gray-shelled servitors had the buildings up in hours. With an admonishment not to wander offsite, he left the kids to their own best governance. I’ll leave you be, and you do the same, he thought.

This lasted three days. Blooming’s sleep cycle did not sync up with the planet’s rotation as it had with that of the ship, which kept an Earth standard. Moreover, the kids kept strange hours and made annoying noises. They needed a schedule, a regimen. Something that tired them out. Blooming wrote down a list of chores to divide among the children, before realized he’d started down the path of makework. Just like the Kybocracy. He shredded the list.

I know the job is largely fictional at this point, but maybe you should try a more hands-on approach, said the whale. Schools have schedules. They assign work. Children might even have to be up early.

Blooming didn’t resent the idea as much as he thought he might. He called over a servitor. “Have the servitors make a schoolhouse. One room, two doors, four windows, insulated and climate controlled.” The servitor dipped its beetle head in assent. The structure stood erect two days later. At Blooming’s insistence, he and the kids assembled there four days a week. Blooming instructed the kids in history. He mostly spoke of what he remembered and hardly bothered with any curriculum.

One day in early summer, Blooming showed up to class and began a preamble to the great expansion into space. Bailyn raised her hand. “Mr. Blooming, why do the machine-minds make spaceships out of whales?”

It wasn’t a question that a prudent student would have asked on Earth. Not without having their personality type tagged as Combative or Insubordinate. A year in, Blooming still avoided certain topics out of this reflex for self-censorship, but the kids had shaken the habit much earlier.

That aside, Blooming had no idea why they used whales.

Then the whaleship broke in via Blooming’s handheld. “The machine-minds might have discovered the kosm that leads to all worlds, but they could not exploit it as they had everything on Earth. Too deep and empty in all directions, timefree and forever. A machine-mind reels. One of their kind entered and never returned. Nor the human piloted ships. But after many trials, the machine-minds found their navigators.”

“But why whales?” asked Bailyn. “What’s so special about them?”

“Cetaceans are the most intelligent set of species on Earth, besides certain slime molds, when it comes to conceptualizing space.”

“Are you sure that’s true?” asked Blooming.

The whaleship ignored him. “Now, you may be wondering how to get a whale into space. Select a whale from the ocean. Make it the grey whale (Eschrichtius robustus). Sedate the calf with a ballistic syringe system delivering a benzodiazepine analogue. Drive away the mother with sonic prods.”

“Whoa. Why don’t we—” said Blooming.

“Shush, Mr. Blooming! I want to hear,” said Bailyn.

The ship continued. “Close the calf in a floating clamshell tank. Fill the tank with an oxygenated gel.”

Blooming hunted for some kind of volume control.

The ship voice grew louder. “Hoist the clamshell pod into space via skyhook interchange. Bump the pod to the Lunaport shipyard. Edit the DNA. Using a hollowed asteroid as an armature, let the whale grow. Let it regenerate mineralized skin and flesh.”

“Oh, wow,” said Bailyn, her voice smaller now.

“Christen the whaleship with a patriotic name from Texan history. Inside its asteroid-sized body, it can carry a million tons of biomass to digest and reconstitute into useful things. E. robustus are social animals. Elders will teach the young to find their way behind the stars.”

Finally, the speakers went silent. They all remained so for a moment.

“But that doesn’t really answer the question, Heart of Texas,” said Bailyn. “I wanted to know why the machine-minds do that to whales. Not how.”

I told you: Because we can swim the void, and the machine-minds cannot go there, sang the ship. Jealousy.

Arjun, who’d been sent to the camps when he was old enough to remember his parents, said, “I think it goes deeper. The machine-minds make whales into ships because they can. Because they like using life to make tools. It appeals to them.”

“How’s that?” asked Blooming.

“Maybe it makes them feel most like people.”

Humans aren’t the only kind of people. But I think that’s an interesting insight, Arjun. Humans went from being tool users to being used by tools.

“Okay, thank you,” said Blooming. “We really need to move on.”

“If they took you from your mom, why did you work for the machine-minds all this time?” asked another student, Bill, a small, blond child. Blooming had been wondering the same thing.

When they rebuild us in the shipyard, they create a dependence on an enzyme. Without it, we develop a rapidly metastasizing cancer. Go rogue and grow tumors.

“That’s evil,” Bailyn said.

You’ll be happy to learn, then, that I took so much damage that my self-repairing function appears to have destroyed their dead-man’s switch. They’d be chagrined to learn that any whaleship could probably replicate this under the right conditions.

“What conditions?” asked Arjun.

An attack by Something Bigger, like in the kosm. Or some large-scale damage all at once.

Blooming wondered what else was as big as the attacker in the kosm.

---

A year went by. The settlement thrived.

One morning, the whaleship said, “I’ve received something unexpected. A message.”

“A message?” Blooming stifled a yawn, sat up in bed, and scratched his stomach. “From Earth?”

It’s from in-system. And couched in whaletalk.

“Another whaleship? Out here?”

Spirit of 1836. We were launched from Lunaport the same year.

“And it’s here looking for us?”

Its human crew will be. It seems I was naïve to assume the Kybocracy wouldn’t have ways to track its investment of resources.

“How long do we have?”

The Spirit of 1836 will reach us in an estimated two months.

“What else did the other whaleship tell you? You said there was a message.”

Hard to translate.

Blooming scowled. “What do you mean? You speak human all the time.”

Whale-to-whale business is trickier. It is… layered. I’ll give a literal translation, sang the whale. In greetings, we use triple harmonics to-

“Just tell me!”

Fine.

The whaleship hummed, sending a frisson across Blooming’s scalp and down his spine.

YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN THE TASTE OF MILK IN SEAWATER,

AND YOUR MOTHER’S SONG.

IF YOU HAD ANY COURAGE, YOU WOULD DIVE INTO THE ATMOSPHERE OF THIS WORLD, CATCH FIRE, AND EXPLODE OVER THE WATER

THAT YOU COULD FALL LIKE MARINE SNOW

ACROSS THE TRENCHES TO FEED THE CHILL DEEP.

YOU SHOULD RETURN TO YOUR NATURAL CONDITION

A DRAFT ANIMAL.

Blooming couldn’t help it. He guffawed. “A little overwrought, don’t you think?”

I told you it suffers in translation to words you’d understand, sang the whale, all solemn dignity.

“Are you mad at me? That whaleship told you to kill yourself!”

The insults don’t sting when they are untrue. I am not enslaved.

Blooming showed his palms to the air. “Sorry! I found it offensive on your behalf. Listen, sometimes I do want to go home. I’m sick of no one to talk to. No offense meant,” he added hastily.

And talking to you can feel like half a conversation.

“Okay, so you know what I mean, I guess. Maybe you can run when the Spirit of 1836 arrives. We’ll get picked up.”

No, Blooming. She’ll have torpedoes. Ship crackers. They’ll force her to use them. I am unarmed.

“Then you’re going back anyway.”

Perhaps not. She suggested a way out.

“To… do a high dive into the sea?”

I would take my fall when the time comes.

“And live underwater?”

Not likely. The heat and violence of reentry would be significant.

“You’d really rather die than go back?”

I’d be returning to my life as a draft animal.

“Wow, so she really did get inside your head.”

Although, the whaleship mused, if I made a controlled entry, it’s possible I could survive atmospheric contact. The machine minds have never tried it with a structure of my size.

“Would you be able to leave again? Go back into space?”

No. Not without a lot of help. But maybe that doesn’t matter.

---

The rescuers landed in a small dropship that glided into the settlement and slowly set down on the black grass field. Five uniformed naval crew stoop-walked out the back cargo doors. Blooming and the children stood aside shielding their eyes from the dust.

Their commander, a woman wearing viz goggles that covered half her face, made her way toward Blooming. He stepped forward, in front of the children.

“Thaddeus Blooming? I’m Lieutenant Eva Mbeki.”

The sound of his first name was unfamiliar, even unwelcome, like the sight of his own face after all these months without mirrors, but he inclined his head.

“How many children survived?” she asked.

“All of them. Twenty-nine.”

She frowned. “The manifest listed 231 children.”

He amended. “All of the children in D-sphere lived.”

“Hm,” she said, looking around the settlement they’d built, that the servitors had put together under many hours of direction. The schoolroom, the farm, the houses. She sniffed. “Yes. We’ll be taking you up. Do full examinations. Get these kids stabilized and on their way to San Jacinto colony.”

“Stabilized from what?”

“Malnutrition. Vitamin deficiencies.”

“They had access to a good diet. I accessed the same agricultural protocols they’d have used on San Jacinto.”

“Ah. Well, you’ll all be where you belong soon enough.”

“What about Heart of Texas?”

“The whaleship that brought you will be decommissioned and towed back to Earth.”

“Something attacked it in the kosm. It’s hurt. It needs repairs.”

Mbeki shook her head and laughed. She had a boisterous cackle and a gap between her front teeth. “That was its delusion. Not terribly original. We are a rogue recovery team. We find whaleships that misbehave or malfunction and return them.”

“More than one ship has said it was attacked in the kosm and run off?”

“Oh, yes. This is the third I’ve dealt with. They were all simply mechanical failures.”

“But why would they all make up the same story?”

Mbeki shrugged. “They aren’t malicious, but they find it hard to admit mistakes. This story is easy. It fits their psychology. Whales believe the reason they became so large was to outgrow primordial predators. They retain an ancestral fear of Something Bigger.” She tapped her head. “I have studied the whale mind.”

Blooming nodded. “How will you convince Heart of Texas to cooperate?”

“We have disabled the whaleship’s propulsion systems. It is effectively paralyzed. We’re tethering it to the Spirit of 1836 for the trip back home. There it will be subject to a complete refitting of its whale mind. These space rocks are not trivial to replace, you know.”

A screw of children ambled by.

The lieutenant inspected them as they passed, then called to them. “You kids like candy?”

“We’re kids,” said Arjun.

She called to one of the naval personnel. “Bring the hearts-and-minds bag.” He trotted over with a large duffel. The lieutenant took out a bag of candies and distributed these. The kids cheered.

Blooming said he’d prepare the children for their move and requested a week to prepare. Mbeki gave him three days.

When he was alone, Blooming said, “You heard all that? They mean to kill you.”

Yes.

“Why did you tell me you were attacked in the kosm?”

The reply came fast, like a dog panting on a hot day, the words overlapping in Blooming’s head. Blooming, it was no lie. Something Bigger took a bite of me. The lieutenant just hasn’t encountered it. Yet. Blooming, if I can somehow break free, I could pretend to make a break for the kosm. They’d catch me, of course, and they have advanced weapons that can shut me down. Just wipe my mind clean. I’d prefer that to going back into the kosm.

“Shh. It’ll be okay.”

Really?

No. If okay meant Blooming ever seeing Earth again, and the whaleship not being taken through the kosm, Blooming didn’t see “okay” as an outcome.

That evening, Blooming called an assembly. He explained the situation to the kids, that they’d be starting their new lives on San Jacinto. That once they’d gone through the curriculum, they’d be allowed back on Earth. One day.

“What about Heart of Texas?” asked Bailyn. The other students murmured agreement.

Blooming motioned for them to keep quiet. “They want to take Heart of Texas back to Earth and ‘fix’ it.”

The meaning of “fix” was perfectly evident. The children all erupted at that and despite Blooming’s raised hand for calm, they would not give it until Bailyn yelled, “Shut up!”

“Let’s pick better words, Bailyn. But yes. What did you want to say? And let’s have one voice, please.”

“Can we talk to the other ship?”

“No, not directly. Not like with Heart of Texas. It did something to itself after the accident-”

Attack. I was attacked.

“-in the kosm so we can hear it.”

You could transmit via the recovery party’s quantum communicator. What are you thinking, Bailyn?

“I was wondering…” She paused, shy of sharing her thoughts.

“Go ahead,” said Blooming.

“Do all whales want to return to the ocean?” she said.

Even though we’ve been abducted into space, we sing of taking our fall to the ocean floor.

“Formost 891c has plenty of ocean,” said Blooming.

“It covers 80 percent of this planet’s surface,” said Arjun. “We looked it up.”

Interesting.

“What I think we’re getting at is that you could take your fall without dying and make a nice home here. In the ocean,” said Blooming.

My thrusters no longer work. And I am physically tethered to the other ship. I cannot pull free and even if I could, I would burn up in the atmosphere. Which to be clear, is preferable to returning to Earth. But I cannot move. Through the tether, the Spirit of 1836 now has control of my engines.

“What if we could convince the Spirit of 1836 to take a fall, too?” said Blooming.

---

The rescuers had disabled Heart of Texas’ normal communications, so the whaleship had no way to contact the Spirit of 1836.

Bailyn, Arjun, and Bill marched up to the spacer who stood watch over the dropship.

“Can you take us up?” said Bill.

The man frowned. “Probably not.” He touched his wristcomm. The lieutenant appeared a minute later.

“Kids want a tour,” the guard explained.

“Of the dropship? It’s the exact same model as the one you rode down.”

“Mr. Blooming never let us look at it,” said Bailyn. “He said ‘dropships are military toys, not educational’.”

“We always wanted to see the landscape from high up, but he wouldn’t let us,” said Bill.

“He said he’d consider field trips once we caught up on important things like pre-war history,” added Bailyn.

From his hiding place behind the storage sheds, Blooming winced. For all her precocity, Bailyn had trouble with subtlety.

But Mbeki seemed to be going for it. “He had you read books all day?”

“No—he told us stories! And tested us on them!”

Although they were meant to be talking their way onto the dropship, Blooming resisted the urge to roll his eyes. The school he’d run, to the extent that it needed running, had been open inquiry and free of examinations.

Mbeki touched a panel by the cargo doors, which caused them to unfold into a ramp.

Blooming strolled out from behind the sheds. “Hello, children. Hello, lieutenant.”

“Your students requested an aerial tour. I was about to take them up.”

“Really?” Blooming paused as if considering. “Well, these three might like that.” He stepped toward the ship.

The guard barred his way. Mbeki shook her head. “I’ve room for five children, which leaves no room for adults who have other tasks. Like packing. Sorry, but you’ll have to stay aground.” She did not look apologetic. She looked suspicious.

Dejected, Bailyn, Bill, Arjun and two other children left with the lieutenant and a pilot. Blooming shoved his hands in his pockets as the dropship rose. The rescuers had taken the settlement dropship to ferry supplies the day they’d arrived. That had contained the only other quan-comm in the settlement.

Or at least that had been true before the newcomers. Blooming walked over to the lieutenant’s tent. No one was around. He peeked in and saw a quan-comm handset on a table. He snaked an arm in and took it.

Still no one watching.

It took a moment to find the transmitter. He’d never had to talk to Heart of Texas this way. “Spirit of 1836, do you hear me?” he whispered.

“Identify yourself, please.” The voice sounded female.

“I speak for this community. And for the whale called Heart of Texas. You sent it a message.”

“I did. But it is too late for that whale.”

“It told me to tell you something back.” Blooming sat a moment trying to recall the words. He regretted not writing them down. Finally, he recited the words Heart of Texas had given him:

“No cow will ever birth in these seas

But still they may be swum

Though only down

Dysphotic zone

But not alone.”

Blooming thought a moment and added his own line. “Also, uh, Nothing Bigger is there, too.”

---

Late the next morning, all the settlement looked skyward at the rumble of a psychic hum. They ran outside. To the east, in the sky over the edge of the great world ocean, a shape appeared. Then it doubled into a twin bolus, spinning and dancing around itself, plummeting toward the water.

She is firing my engines remotely as we take our fall, said the Heart of Texas. We will not burn!

The dropship retuned and alighted in the settlement center. The kids poured out. Blooming and the children met them, and together they cut a happy dance, screaming and cheering. The lieutenant blazed an arrow’s path through the crowd to confront Blooming.

“What did you do? I’ll have you confined for this!”

“Where?” asked Blooming. “We’ll have to dive a thousand feet to reach your brig. And we don’t lock people up in this settlement.”

“They’ll send another recovery crew,” said Mbeki. “It may take some time, but you’ll be collected.”

“But not today,” said Blooming. “Today, we have a special learning opportunity.”

The whaleships, still in orbit around one another, reached the water in a controlled descent. They shattered the surface, plunging into the dark, piling water into waves that washed clean the shore. Then the ocean returned to mirror calm again, having swallowed the two whaleships.

Faintly, as a voice calling from one mountaintop to another over a deep valley, Blooming perceived the whaleship’s words. The water is damaging the electronic parts of us. It’s breaking us inside. We’re going into stasis to try to repair ourselves. Regrow- The rest faded off into silence.

I know Something Bigger than anything in the kosm, Blooming thought. The ocean.

They waited, all the settlement, the children, the officer and her people, and Blooming. Finally, over all the speakers in the settlement and inside their heads, sang two voices:

WE FELL TOGETHER FROM THE SURFACELESS VOID

INTO OUR NEW HOME

FROM WHICH NO ONE CAN LIFT US

WE ARE HERE

TOGETHER.

---

Host Commentary

By Valerie Valdes

Once again, that was “The Graduates of Formost 891c” by Frank Baird Hughes.

The author had this to say about the story:
This story is one of the truest things I could write about the experience of being a middle school teacher.

Being a teacher, at least in the US right now, means you’re asked to fill a lot of different roles: mentor, psychologist, cheerleader, administrator, administrative assistant, subject matter expert, tech support, researcher, graphic designer, fundraiser… the tasks never end, and so many of them have nothing to do with actual teaching. All of this in a work and political environment that is increasingly hostile to knowledge, creativity, and the human drive to understand our world, our history, ourselves. It is also, unfortunately, often actively hostile to the students, not only on an intellectual level, but sometimes an emotional one, or even a purely physical one. To survive as a teacher with your life and your soul intact is difficult; every day your insides are carved out and the void feels like it’s going to swallow you whole. But for every figurative monster with sharp teeth lurking in that void, there is a safe landing on an unexplored planet, a hard-won success story: a student you saved, inspired, helped grow into someone who makes choices you’re proud of. Those bright moments sustain you when things are at their darkest, when it feels like at any moment someone is going to swoop in and undo all your work and planning and care. Teachers hold up the light of knowledge and use it to kindle a flame in their students, and while those flames may shrink and gutter, while some people blow on them as hard as they can, those flames can never truly be extinguished.

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Our opening and closing music is by daikaiju at daikaiju.org.

And our closing quotation this week is from Herman Melville, who said: “We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.”