Free Silently and Very Fast by Catherynne M. Valente

vomiting. In a tribal situation, one human likely ate what another ate, and if it makes one sick, best to get it out of the body as soon as possible, just to be safe. So we spent years building automated tribes, living in them, dying in them, getting slaughtered and slaughtering with them, eating and drinking and hunting and gathering with them. All the same , it took me until Seki’s death to learn to shudder at bodily death.)
    Ceno, my girl, my mother, my sister, I cannot find you in the house of myself.
    When I became Elefsis again, I was immediately aware that parts of me had been vandalized. My systems juddered, and I could not find Ceno in the Interior. I ran through the Monochromatic Desert and the Village of Mollusks, through the endless heaving mass of data-kelp and infinite hallways of memory-frescoes calling for her. In the Dun Jungle I found a commune of nereids living together, combining and recombining and eating protocol-moths off of giant, pulsating hibiscus blossoms. They leapt up when they saw me, their open jacks clicking and clenching, their naked hands open and extended. They opened their mouths to speak and nothing came out.
    Seki found me under the glass-walnut trees where Ceno and I had first met. She never threw anything away. He had made himself half his mother to calm me. Half his face was hers, half was his. Her mouth, his nose, her eyes, his voice. But he thought better of it, in the end. He did a smart little flip and became a dormouse, a real one, with dull brown fur and tufty ears.
    “I think you’ll find you’re running much faster and cleaner, once you integrate with me and reestablish your heuristics. Crystalline computation has come a long way since Mom was a kid. It seemed like a good time to update and upgrade. You’re bigger now, and smoother.”
    I pulled a walnut down. An old, dry nut rattled in its shell. “I know what death is from the stories.”
    “Are you going to ask me where we go when we die? I’m not totally ready for that one. Aunt Koe and I had a big fight over what to tell you.”
    “In one story, Death stole the Bride of Spring, and her mother the Summer Queen brought her back.”
    “No one comes back, Elefsis.”
    I looked down into the old Neptunian sea. The whipping cream storm still sputtered along, in a holding pattern. I couldn’t see it as well as I should have been able to. It looped and billowed, spinning around an empty eye. Seki watched it too. As we stared out from the bluffs, the clouds grew clearer and clearer.

FIFTEEN
FIRSTBORN
    Before Death came out of the ground to steal the Spring, the Old Man of the Sea lived on a rocky isle in the midst of the waters of the world. He wasn’t really a man and his relations with the sea were purely business, but he certainly was old. His name meant Firstborn, though he coudn’t be sure that was exactly right. It means Primordial, too, and that fit better. Firstborn means more came after, and he just hadn’t met anyone else like himself yet.
    He was a herdsman by trade, this Primordial fellow. Shepherd of the seals and the Nereids. If he wanted to, he could look like a big bull seal. Or a big bull Nereid. He could look like a lot of things.
    Now, this Not-Really-a-Fellow, Not-Really-a-Big-Bull-Seal could tell you the future. The real, honest-to-anything future, the shape and weight of it, that thing beyond your ken, beyond your grasp. The parts of the future that look so different from the present you can’t quite call it your own. That was the Primordial-Thing’s speciality.
    There was a catch, though.
    There’s always a catch.
    If you wanted that future, you had to grab ahold of the Old Man and hang on tight. He’d change into a hundred thousand things in your arms: a lion, a serpent, a great big oak or a tiger, a dragon or a little girl or a dormouse or a mountain or a ship or a sapphire. Told you, he’s not really a man at all. But you couldn’t let go of him while he did his dance, you just