The Best of Galaxy’s Edge 2013-2014 by Larry Niven, Nancy Kress, Mercedes Lackey, Ken Liu, Brad R. Torgersen, C. L. Moore, Tina Gower Read Free Book Online Page A

actress,” I tell him.
    “In plays? Or pictures?”
    “I do not know, Gartner,” I admit. “But they say she is very beautiful.”
    “Beautiful,” he says. “Well.”
    “I would very much like to see her,” I say.
    The bread stops before it reaches his mouth, which hangs open, forgotten.
    This is a bold thing to say; I have never said I would like anything before—we are not supposed to want things besides what they tell us to want, or what they shape us to want.
    He will think that if I want to meet her, he must also want to meet her. Oh, there are so many truths that humans do not know about the things they make.
    He returns the bread to his plate. “How long will she be here?”
    I say, “Not very.”
    “Well, if it will please you”—his eyes roam over my leafy head—“then we will go.” His meaning is clear: yes, we will go, because I might as well be happy in the time I have left. He is still the Gartner, and I the neep. To drive this home, he spears the largest potato and bites it in two.
    I flinch away. He tells me that other roots, so long as they have not been carved, do not feel pain. But how would he know?
    * * *
    “How much longer will the actress be here?” I ask Sissel.
    “Tomorrow is her last performance,” she says. “All the finest Gartners will turn out for it. You are interested in her now?”
    I nod, flicking the ash away from the end of my cigarette. “Gartner Poulson has promised to take me. What kind of actress is she?”
    Sissel flaps her hand before her face. “What a question, Pluto!” She tucks her apron across her grinning mouth, and the purple-red of her cheeks is just close enough to the color of a scandalized human’s that I cannot help but grin too. “She is, of course, a lady !” But after a moment her merriment fades, and she pats her apron back into place. “They say she is not like other women. They say her skin is as dark as soil beneath the earth.”
    “Impossible,” I say. I puff. And I think of Mads telling me that my skin, in secret, is as white as his. “Have you ever seen a woman like that?”
    Sissel frowns. “No—not a beautiful one. The Gartners do not care for soil.”
    I do not want a woman whom the master will not find beautiful. That will do me no good at all. “Let’s hope it isn’t true, then,” I say. “I would not want to go into town only to find an ugly woman.”
    “Nor would anyone,” Sissel agrees.
    * * *
    When Sissel is gone, and my second-from-final cigarette is burning low, I feel a tingle on my scalp so sharp that I reach for it before I even register what I’m doing. At first my fingers find only the ordinary wrinkles and the thick squarish stems of hair that I am accustomed to. But then, in between them, I feel a little knot, a tightly curled lump.
    Ugh , I think, a beetle . I tear it loose.
    The pain is instant and excruciating. To keep from crying out, I must stuff my fist into my mouth and bite down, and for all that my teeth are no more than square crenelations, even that is painful.
    The knot, no beetle but instead a tight-wound bulb of leafy green, glistens wetly in my hand. It shows no yellow yet, but I know what lies within. It is a flower. A turnip flower. Part of me.
    I throw it with all the strength I can muster, and it arcs through the air and falls into an unremarkable patch of brittle, salinated grass.
    When I bid Mads good-night, I pray that he does not notice the sappy fluid leaking from between my leaves. For once the Tuber of Many Roots answers my prayers, and I am permitted to retire to the cellar in peace.
    * * *
    Even a full night beneath the ground does not revive me, and when I rise from my plot groggy and tender, I feel a sour ache all through my body. I know what Sissel would say—that my attitude has seeped into my flesh—but Sissel is not the one who fears my death. She would hardly be put out if the Gartner found my unripe bud abandoned in the withered grass, but I …
    Mads finds me