One Green Hill

by Rudi Dornemann

A picture (a blue sky, a green hill) was found among her belongings.

She was the first of the first generation to die. The generation who knew Earth as home, not as story. The picture became the goal and they began to build the hill.

There was a poetic rightness to it, a commemoration, a remembering together. Their remains, turned to soil, building a patch of nature in the heart of the GreatShip’s endless metal and glass. For those who followed after, everything, always, was recycled.

The hill was their past and future, until they reached their destination, and then there was a planet with green hills by the million. There was talk of transporting the hill down to the surface, to a park in the middle of the first settlement. By now, however, the hill was its own ecosystem, a living thing that wouldn’t survive uprooting and transport.

So they went down without it, and it became a stop on the historical tours. Then history took a turn — disease, strife, struggle against a not-yet-domesticated alien world. A forgetting followed by a slow return. Societies re-formed, cities rebuilt, sciences reverse-engineered from artifacts.

When they were ready, they went up, into the sky, to the Star that Never Moves. They found an entire ship, larger than their largest city, empty and apparently devoted to sustaining a mound of soil covered in grass that didn’t look nearly blue enough.

Not Even for Hazelnut Sauce

by Kat Beyer

Diarmud the Druidess knew she was dying, but she went to the feast anyway, partly because she was Chief Druidess, and partly because she knew there would be salmon with hazelnut sauce. She couldn’t help Seeing the menu beforehand.

After the salmon there was a cold boar salad, and then venison with apple-and-lemon jelly, the lemons having come all the way from Hispania; just as she was served her Druid’s portion, a dragonfly flew in the door and landed on her arm, a blue-green jewel to match any a chieftain might give. She looked down at it and said, “Well; is it time?” And in front of everyone she blew her soul out onto its back and flew away.

She always liked the moment when one shed one’s old bones, returning all one’s flesh and treasure and hopes and fears to the world—there was always the chance one would forget everything, too, and sometimes she did, but not this time, as they flew out over the marshes spangled with sunset water. When she landed in a dragonfly egg she snuggled down for a nice gestation.

She spent all the days of summer skating over the broad stretches of water, flying low to count the circling ripples—

Until a salmon gulped her.

Presently she let the pull of her ichor draw her out of the marsh, into the living river, down to the sea of journeys…

Until a seal pulled her into the thirsty air.

‘Now to get used to fur, fins, and shouting at your neighbor just to be heard,’ she thought. A seal’s life is good, though, even if one isn’t a selkie, and her wisdom became known among all the barking tribes of the coast.

Not too wise, though. A seal hunter was wiser. So she grew from a babe to a boy, bearing the spots and omens that marked her for a Druid’s training, and comely enough for court.

But when she got to the door of the hall, she stood there for a minute, remembering the yards and yards of poetry, the vigils in black caves, the all-night meetings in groves, and a single, blue-green jewel of a dragonfly; and she rubbed the oak threshold with her hand, said, “Not this again, not even for hazelnut sauce!”—and walked back down the hill and out into the world.