Lake of Souls

by Ann Leckie

Genres: Short Stories; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Sci-fi Anthologies & Collections

Synopsis

Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke award-winner Ann Leckie is a modern master of the SFF genre, forever changing its landscape with her groundbreaking ideas and powerful voice. Now, available for the first time comes the complete collection of Leckie's short fiction, including a brand new novelette, “Lake of Souls.”

Journey across the stars of the Imperial Radch universe.

Listen to the words of the Old Gods that ruled the Raven Tower.

Learn the secrets of the mysterious Lake of Souls.

And so much more, in this masterfully wide-ranging and immersive short fiction collection from award-winning author Ann Leckie. 

Release date: April 2, 2024

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 416

Sample

There was a lake by the village, but it wasn’t the Lake of Souls. Just water, and mud and stones, and out farther, deeper than Spawn could really see from the shore, a green-brown darkness where something lurked, something, Spawn began to feel, that was waiting. The dark depths of the lake exerted a troubling fascination. So much so that as days went by, Spawn spent more time on the lakeshore staring toward those compelling depths than any other activity.

Sometimes a mother would scuttle over to where Spawn sat and cry, “What, what? Are you still a nauplius, staring one-eyed, no need to eat? Come away, come away!”

“Yes, Mother,” Spawn would say, and sometimes even obey, but sometimes not.

One day old Darter Spine came over to where Spawn sat by the waterside and said, “What are you doing, little spawn, little egg, you aren’t a larva anymore. You are a nymph, only one more molt until adulthood. It won’t be long, little spawn, before you feel the next molt coming on, and what will your name be? What shape will your soul take? The mothers are worried about you, little egg, staring all day into the lake.”

“Why worry?” asked Spawn. “My soul will be what it is.” And would have said more, but there were no words to describe the pull of the lakebottom. Spawn wanted more and more to walk out into the water, sink down into the depths of the lake, burrow into the mud, dark and cold and solitary.

“Little egg, little spawn,” said Darter Spine. “Our souls enter into our eggs, the gift of the Lake of Souls, but we also make them what they are. The mothers are worried about you, little egg. Little spawn. Come away from the lake, don’t stare so, don’t be…” Darter Spine clicked fretfully, agitated. “Don’t. Come away.”

Spawn came away, and tried to stay away, but the pull of the lake (the wet dark, alone, alone, cool and dark and alone) was strong and the mothers noticed it. Spawn’s broodmates noticed it, and scuttled on by without speaking.

And one afternoon, while Spawn was resting in a fresh-dug burrow (the dirt was moist and cool and whispered of the lakebottom) two mothers stopped, not knowing Spawn was there, and spoke.

“That little spawn,” said one, “I worry. Always staring out at the lake. Like one of the soulless drowned.”

“That little spawn took so long to come out of the hatching pool,” said the other. “I worried. I worried. And now.”

“Always staring. Always staring out at the lake. Like one of the soulless drowned. Should we have culled, should we?”

“That little spawn,” said the other. “The little eggs, the little spawns, they love the water, but this one more than most, always, always. Always trying to dive back into the hatching pool. Always walking into the lake.”

“Like one of the soulless drowned.”

“What if,” asked the other, “what if there should be no soul mark, when next that little spawn molts? What if that little spawn has no soul?”

“Then that little spawn will have no name,” said the first mother, sadly, fearfully. “That little spawn will go into the lake and drown.”

“Oh! Oh!” cried the other. “I hate to think it! The little egg! The little spawn!”

“Only an animal,” said the first. “Not one of the people at all. Not if there is no soul. We should not worry. We should not worry, things will be as they will be. Some little spawn are devoured by animals, some are killed and injured in accidents. These are things that happen. Some little eggs hatch without souls. This is a thing that happens. There is nothing we can do.”

The other clicked sadly again, and the two mothers scuttled on.

After that, Spawn wondered more and more about the Lake of Souls. Would watch the mothers tending the hatching pool—“I bring the water of the Lake of Souls to the eggs,” a mother would say, when she would bring fresh water to the pool, and sing. Oh, the waters of the Lake of Souls are endless. Off to the east, all the people are born there. Little eggs, your souls are with you in the water, fluttering like flowers, bright like stars.

Spawn went to find Darter Spine, who was pulling weeds in a village garden. “Darter Spine,” asked Spawn, “where do souls come from?”

Darter Spine paused, a thorny stem in one pereopod. “This little egg, this little spawn, has been listening to gossip.”

“Do I not have a soul?” asked Spawn. “Am I only an animal? Will I not have a name?”

“How can I know, little spawn, little egg?” asked Darter Spine, and reached for another thorny weed. “How can anyone know until the little egg molts into adulthood and shows a soul mark?” Darter Spine tugged on the weed. “And even then, sometimes one loses one’s soul, and the village sits for days beside the corpse and sees nothing, not a hint.”

“Because a soul eater has attacked them,” Spawn suggested.

“Sometimes, yes,” Darter Spine agreed. “Sometimes a sickness. Sometimes, who knows? And sometimes, little egg, sometimes a little spawn hatches without a soul. Or so they say.”

“Do souls really come from the Lake of Souls?” asked Spawn. “The mothers say they pour water from the Lake of Souls into the hatching pool, but it’s just water from the stream, I’ve watched.”

“Here, little egg.” Darter Spine gestured with another pereopod, toward the weeds. “Help me. We will talk as we work. This is good, this thing. Learning to live, not staring out at the drowning waters.”

Spawn hesitantly plucked at one weed, then another one.

“Good, good, little spawn,” said Darter Spine. “You ask a big question. The answer is complicated. I do not know if the Lake of Souls is a real lake or not. I do not know if the mothers give little eggs like you their souls by pouring water into the hatching pool and singing their song.” Darter Spine made an amused click, and then sang, “The waters of the Lake of Souls are endless. The mothers sang that even when I was an egg, and I am very old. Pull harder, it will come out. There. Good. Now.” Spawn and Darter Spine continued their slow progress across the garden patch. “I do not know if the Lake of Souls is really where souls come from. But it is obvious, is it not, little spawn, that the people are different from animals?” Darter Spine tilted so that Spawn could better see the bag strapped to Darter Spine’s thorax. “It is this, little egg, that is the proof that people are not animals. We make a bag to carry things. We make containers. We build a pool to hatch our eggs in, we don’t leave them at the stream side, or curl them in our tails. We make things to hold things. And we speak. And why, tell me, little spawn, little egg, why do only the people, of all the creatures in the world, do these things?”

“Because we have souls?” guessed Spawn.

“Maybe,” said Darter Spine. “Maybe, little egg. No animal has a soul that I ever knew. Have you watched, after a hunt?”

“We don’t wait to see it, maybe,” Spawn suggested. “We eat them right away.”

“There is a village, far away,” said Darter Spine, “where they let every animal they hunt lie for three days, just to be sure it doesn’t have a soul. They will tell you, if you ever meet them, that someone in the past, some mother of mothers, saw a soul come out of an animal, but they themselves have only ever seen the regular sort of scavengers.”

“Maybe animal souls look different from ours,” offered Spawn.

“Maybe,” clicked Darter Spine. “And maybe it isn’t our souls that make the difference between people and animals. But difference there is, little egg. And whatever the reason for that difference is, one of the things that makes us people is that we learn from those who came before us. We ignore those lessons at our peril, little spawn. And one of those lessons is that it is bad to let those without souls live among us. And if one soulless is allowed to live in a village, there are always more hatched eventually, and more and more, until something unpleasant must be done.”

Spawn felt thoracic muscles tense, and restrained the instinctive, alarmed scuttle backward. “What would you do, what would the village do, if I didn’t have a soul?”

Darter Spine pulled a few more tough, thorny weeds. “I have worried about you, little egg. So late to come out of the hatching pool. Late to all your molts. As a zoea you wandered here and there instead of following some adult and learning from them. And drawn to the lake, so strongly, so obviously. You think of it now, do you not, little spawn? The cold and dark and deep?” Darter Spine clicked reassuringly. “But we all are so drawn. Some say they are not but I believe they lie. We all are drawn, but we know what we must do. We learn the lessons passed down to us. And here you are, doing as you should. You see? Put these worries from your mind. Continue to do as you should. Continue to ask questions, but… discreetly, little egg. Discreetly. Soul or no, some in the village do not want to ask themselves questions about what is true or not true, or to hear anyone say that truth may be complicated.”

Some days after their conversation in the garden, Darter Spine retreated into a burrow and the villagers whispered one to the other that Darter Spine was molting.

“A dangerous time,” whispered one mother to the next. “Especially for the old.” And the whisper scurried through the village. And close behind it, a day or so later, another whisper, that Darter Spine’s molt was not going well, and that many had over the years wondered about Darter Spine’s soul, soul mark or no soul mark. That elder had always been peculiar, so the mothers and mothers’ mothers had said. “What if?” the mothers whispered. A good person, who made beautiful gardens and was kind to all in the village, but peculiar. “What if? What if Darter Spine’s soul has died. What if this elder dies and a soul does not emerge? This elder will be lost!”

Eventually the village’s doctor visited Darter Spine, trailed by a nymph Spawn knew, one that no longer spoke when they crossed paths. That one will be a doctor after the next molt, Spawn thought. What will I be? But there was no answer to that question, and no explanation, when Spawn looked for it, to account for why Spawn had never chosen a path, found some adult to learn from. I might have learned from Darter Spine, came the thought then, but perhaps it is too late now.

Four days into the molt Darter Spine died. The doctor and the nymph assistant dragged the corpse out into the middle of the village, and Spawn was stricken with unnameable emotion at the sight of the old one bent over, half in half out of the old shell, the long triangular soul mark visible even on the soft pale body underneath.

Everyone must have felt it, because the whole village was silent for some minutes, and then a mother began, faintly, to sing. Come out, soul, emerge! Flutter, soul, flutter! Fly, soul, fly! Spread your beautiful wings and fly away!

Another took up the song. Circle around us, flutter, soul, flutter! See the village where you have lived, fly, soul, fly! Observe the garden you tended for years. Spread your beautiful wings and see for the last time your life here!

“It will be a day or so,” said someone, as more villagers gathered. “It will be a day or even two before that soul emerges.” And they sat down on the ground to begin the vigil.

But two days later no soul had emerged. The vigil, which had been by turns loud with happy and admiring remembrances of Darter Spine, or quiet with susurrant admonitions to the dead elder’s soul, fell silent.

“Is it time?” asked someone, very, very quietly. “Is it time to put this person into the lake?” Angry hisses greeted this question, but someone else said, “This elder is beginning to smell and there has been nothing.”

“Wait!” cried Spawn. “Wait another day.”

“This little egg,” whispered one mother to another. “This little spawn finally had found a teacher, and now is alone.”

“The little spawn!” replied the other mother. “The little egg!”

“One more day,” said the doctor. “No longer.” Because the smell was beginning to attract even more and larger scavengers, and the vigil keepers could only do so much to drive them away.

And the next morning, Darter Spine’s putrefying corpse twitched and heaved, as though something moved within it. Then dozens of tiny holes opened like mouths, and out swarmed the soul. Black and wet, drying quickly in the cool morning air, they flexed their limp wings, which filled and stiffened and caught the light of the rising sun, casting bands of color, like light through water drops.

Flutter, soul, flutter! Sang the mothers, relief clear in their voices. Fly, soul, fly!

One mother gently pushed Spawn forward into the cloud of newborn winged things and others made approving noises. “Say goodbye, little egg. Say goodbye, little spawn. Let that elder say goodbye.”

One winged, jeweled bit of soul landed on Spawn’s carapace, crawled a few steps, and then flew off, its shining wings humming.

“You see, you see,” said a mother. “That elder would say goodbye to this little egg. That elder will live on. That elder will still care for this little spawn.”

“Goodbye, Darter Spine,” said Spawn, filled with some emotion that, on consideration, must have been grief, though who that grief was for Spawn could not have said.

The soul fluttered around the village for the rest of the day, lighting on people, creeping into and out of burrows, darting over the hatching pond. People made way for them, careful of their delicate wings, speaking respectfully to the soul of that elder, Darter Spine. Saying, Goodbye, all will be well, we will maintain your gardens you worked so hard on, the village will be safe and will remember you. And the next morning, when the sun rose, the soul was gone, flown away into the forest, into the air, into wherever the dead go when they leave us.

Spawn sat by the lake for a time, after Darter Spine’s soul had gone. Thinking.

The next day, Spawn caught and skinned a mudcreeper and began working its hide into a bag. And three days later, the finished bag held in one pereopod, Spawn left the village.

Avacorp Mission Data: Project 33881-B66

THIS DATA IS PROPRIETARY AND SUBJECT TO ASCENDANCY NONDISCLOSURE LAWS

I came to, cold and paralyzed. No worries, right, because I knew I’d be cold coming out of cryo. All that meant was, I was alive, and my assignment was over. Because no one was actually going to need me, no terraforming survey has needed an anthropologist for more than a hundred years.

Subjective, that is. I have no idea how much time passed while I was on ice.

But I didn’t care about that. I didn’t care either way. I waited, like I’d been told to, for the doctor to come and help lift me out of the chamber and give me meds. Except no one came.

And I couldn’t get myself up at first. I was shaking too hard, and having trouble moving my arms and legs, let alone getting my hands to grip the sides of the chamber. It took me a while, I don’t know how long, but eventually I managed to haul myself up and out, and stumble, shivering, to the first open door I saw.

I’d done the training, before they iced me. I hadn’t paid much attention, not really, but at least I knew I should find the infirmary through that door, light and warmth and a doctor to take care of me until I was ready to move, but instead I found dim blue emergency lighting, and a mess—packets, trays, instruments scattered everywhere, drawers and cabinet doors hanging open. Shattered glass. Smears of what looked like dried blood.

Hello, I tried to call, but my voice wasn’t working yet. “Is anyone here?” That came out as a choked hiss.

I found a blanket in the jumbled mess, and managed to get it around my shoulders, and I sat there on the floor of the infirmary, shivering, wondering what the hell I was supposed to do now.

At some point I fell asleep. As if I needed more, after however many years I’d been on ice. When I woke, everything was just the way it had been. And I was still cold, but I needed something to eat, and I needed to find out just what was going on.

There was no food. The dim emergency lighting was everywhere on the ship. Everywhere was a mess, as though someone—something?—had pulled everything out of its place and then discarded it. I did not find one single other person. Though I did find, here and there, more smears on the floor that looked remarkably like dried blood.

Training. What had the training said to do if something like this happened?

I hadn’t paid much attention, but I’m sure I would have remembered if the training had said anything about this kind of situation. The training was useless. I needed help.

There was an ansible on the bridge. I could use it to reach Avacorp headquarters. I could call for help. Help that wouldn’t be here for decades, but I could think about that later. Right then, at that moment, I needed to hear from someone, anyone, because I was beginning to feel like I didn’t really exist, like I was some insubstantial ghost.

But there was no ansible on the bridge. There was instead an instrument panel spidered with cracks and gouges, and a ragged hole where the ansible should have been.

At first I sat down and cried. I was lost. I was billions of miles away from any other human being. I would die, the last icy particles of myself subliming away in the lonely vacuum.

After a while, though, the practical part of my mind took over. I was still cold. I was hungry. I could use a shower. If I was going to die I might as well be as comfortable as possible. I wiped my eyes and got up and went to the refectory.

The cabinets in the refectory were bare, that should have held the day-to-day rations of the crew, but in the kitchen I found slabs of meat in cryo. And there were potatoes in the ag section. I chewed raw slices of meat while those cooked.

After a while—after I’d eaten, and slept again—I did my best to pull what data I could from the smashed drives that held the ship’s surveillance recordings. Most of them were incomprehensible fragments—one second of empty corridor, half a word from someone I couldn’t see except a shoulder, that sort of thing. But then I found a stretch of intact data.

The recording shows three people looking at a data display, two of them sitting and one standing behind them. On the display is something that looks like a phylogenetic tree. The person on the left side of the display points to it and says, “Right there. Why is it putting the jewel flies and the lobster dogs so close together?”

The person sitting on the right side does something on a panel of controls in front of her and then swears. “One hundred percent homology? No way. Who processed those?” She turns to look at the standing person. “Fim. You did both of these in the same day.” Her voice is thick with contempt. “Did you clean the homogenizer between samples?”

“I did!” insists Fim.

“Really?” asks the person on the right. “I’m having trouble believing that.” He gestures at the data display.

“You need to be more careful, Fim,” says Left. “Double-check everything. Avacorp isn’t paying us to be sloppy.”

Fim seems agitated. Angry. I can’t really blame him. I wouldn’t like being talked to like that. On the other hand, maybe he has a history of being slapdash with his labwork. “Let me see,” he says, and reaches forward to fiddle with the controls, scrolling through the tree, more data in a sidebar. “See?” he says. “It aligns within a longer sequence. Inside the genome. It’s real.”

“It can’t be,” pronounces Right. “It’s because we don’t have a reference genome, so it’s going to be more sensitive to contamination. We need to run those samples again. And I’m prepping it this time.”

Well, that didn’t tell me anything helpful.

I’m embarrassed to say how long it took me to remember that all the ship’s landers and emergency pods could track the ansible. No one’s ever going to access this recording in my lifetime, probably not even me, but I still don’t want to say it. So I’ll just note that I discovered that nearly every single emergency pod had been damaged beyond repair. The landers too—I checked those even though I knew I couldn’t pilot them. I thought there was a lander missing, but I really had no way to double-check that, just vague memories of the training I hadn’t paid much attention to before they iced me down. Because why would I need it? Right?

Anyway, the ansible is down on the planet. Why is it down on the planet? Obviously someone took it down there, but why?

Obviously if I want to call for help I need to get to where the ansible is. And all the vehicles that might take me there have been purposefully damaged to prevent that. What the hell?

But I have all the time in the world, and a lot of the places I’ve been, nearly everyone has a bit of experience repairing things like emergency pods and locators and such. You don’t waste that kind of thing, not on a poor, isolated habitat. I’ve learned some things from my fieldwork.

I really should be recording as much as possible in this journal. So that whoever comes and finds… whatever they’ll find here won’t be wondering what the hell happened. But I don’t want to talk about it. I’m down on the planet, I’m alive. That’s all. That’s… that’s all. The pod isn’t getting me out of here, not that I thought it ever would, but.

On the way down, I thought I was going to die. I wasn’t just afraid I would die. I was certain I would be dead in the next few moments. And.

I mean, you don’t take the backup crew job unless you’re all right with maybe coming back to find everyone you ever knew dead, or unthinkably old. And that goes double for the anthropologist position—you’re only there in case. And that’s an in case that hardly ever happens. If you’re healthy enough to handle the decades in cryo, it’s a guaranteed way to lose everyone and everything in your life, to go to sleep and wake up to a world where nobody knows you, a tidy sum in your account that you didn’t even have to do anything for but lie there in a freezer. It was perfect.

But in the pod, waiting to die, I saw suddenly that I was totally alone. There was no one. Not just no one coming to help me, but no one to see me die, no one to even know I’d lived. No one to wonder what had happened to me, no one to care. It was…

I don’t want to talk about it.

Been a few days. Sorry. I… who am I apologizing to? I guess Avacorp will turn up eventually, but it’s not like I’ll be here when they do. Not unless I can find that ansible. And even then maybe not.

I have potatoes, and strips of dried meat. The pod has some emergency rations, and some clean water. I have the ansible tracker that I pulled out of the pod—I didn’t even have to wire it up to anything, it’s made to snap free, thank all the gods. I’d hoped the pod would come down near the ansible itself, but it’s not like emergency pods are easy to steer, or like I know how to pilot anything in atmosphere. So I’d brought a pack, and a lightweight, waterproof sheet I’d found on the ship.

There wasn’t really any point in staying with the pod. The sooner I can get to the ansible the better. So I shoved everything I could into the pack, shouldered it, picked up the ansible tracker, and headed off.

I guess I should take notes. Even if I’ll never see my paycheck now.

The ground where I came down was spongy. Like, literally spongy, water pooling up when I set my weight on the ground. There were weird fungal-looking growths here and there, and pink tendrilly things that for some reason made the hair on the back of my neck stand up, and when I realized they were actually moving, squirming just slower than I could see right off, and the ones nearby were reaching for me, I almost took off running.

Which wouldn’t have been smart. I made myself take a few deep breaths, checked the direction I needed to go, and started walking.

The pink squirmies reached and reached for me, all the way across the sponge-soggy ground, but they were rooted. They brushed my ankles as I passed, and I was glad of the trousers that kept my skin covered.

There was more here than the fungus and the pink squirmies. There were black and brown things that popped up out of the ground and then disappeared again. There were shapes that floated above me, brown and gray and pink. Mostly they were vaguely triangular, but some of them seemed like collections of bubbles. After a while I came to… I guess I’ll call it a forest. There were tall things like trees, with thick, rubbery trunks and fleshy blue limbs. The ground was drier, and there were hardly any of the pink squirmies, which was a relief. I didn’t like the fleshy trees either, but night was falling, and I thought about the adventure vids I’d watched as a child—they all seemed to agree that resting on the ground was a bad idea. And I didn’t know what sorts of predators there might be down here. They probably couldn’t digest me, but maybe it would be too late for me by the time they found that out. So I thought maybe I should climb a tree, even though I didn’t like touching them, and I pulled myself up onto a lower branch when this thing flew out at me and bit me in the arm.

I swatted at it but it clung on, making chewing and sucking noises, and fuck it hurt. The thing was a good twenty centimeters long, black and pink, and slimy, like a giant slug. The pink stripes started to turn red and I thought, Holy fuck that’s my blood, and I saw it move just a bit farther into my arm.

No matter how I swatted and pulled I couldn’t get it off me. I had to slice it away with the knife I’d brought, and it kept moving and scooted off somewhere, and I’m pretty sure some of it is still in my arm. So that’s a no on sleeping in a tree, then.

I turned on my handlight, but I was almost instantly surrounded by flying things, and every pink squirmy on the ground strained toward me and I turned off the light and wrapped myself in the waterproof sheet and here I am, hoping nothing comes along and tries to eat me. Nothing else.

I decided that if I was going to die it didn’t matter what I did, and if I wasn’t I might as well sort through the remains of the project data.

I already knew that the air down here was more or less breathable—I’m not stupid, I’d checked before I got into the pod, but obviously I was breathing, so the crew members talking about the atmosphere wasn’t terribly interesting.

There was a fragment of gossip—Fim, he of the sloppy lab techniques, apparently had something sketchy in his past. Well, who on this mission didn’t? I mean, everyone had signed up to basically lose contact with everyone they’d ever known, for the rest of their lives. We all had something sketchy in our past, something we were trying to outrun.

Another fragment—the captain explaining to someone that they kept a close watch on things that might be entering or leaving the system because Vancorp would just love to get its hands on a world like this, and they would surely try to. They’d tried it before.

Is that what this is? Did Vancorp do this? Sabotage the mission somehow, kill the crew, so that they could show up and claim salvage on the ship and claim the world before Avacorp could stop them? But there wasn’t another ship in orbit, and if Vancorp turned up and murdered the crew, that wasn’t legitimate salvage. Avacorp would surely litigate, and it would be a pretty clear-cut case in Avacorp’s favor.

Oh, but if someone in the crew was working for Vancorp. If someone in the crew managed to kill everyone, space the bodies, grab the ansible, and come down here… so the ship in orbit would be abandoned, and Vancorp would know it, because their agent would have told them.

Whoever it was, they forgot about me. They must have, because I’d have been so easy to get rid of, just lying there on ice. Sloppy.

Spawn had never traveled far from the village before. People did travel, sometimes quite far—Darter Spine had visited the other surrounding villages, or so Spawn had understood from that elder’s stories. But it would be better to avoid others just now. Or so Spawn felt, though without entirely understanding why that should be. It was just a feeling.

The limits of the village’s territory were marked by the Mounds of the Prodigies. These were raised burrows large enough to hold three or four people, and inside each one, lit by carefully cultivated bioluminescent mosses, was a prodigy.

Each prodigy was different. One was part of a tree that had been struck by lightning. Others were particularly large or misshapen animals or plants. Each one had a story attached to it—each was something that had brought a lesson, or an opportunity for bravery.

Spawn considered stopping to make an offering at the prodigy directly east of the village—it was a rock that had fallen fiery from the sky long ago, and now sat, pitted and red, in its mound. But something far away eastward pulled, and Spawn went past the mound without stopping.

Then Spawn felt both a lifting of some burden and a tickle of fear. There was no one else out here. There was nowhere safe to sleep, unless Spawn dug a burrow every night. It was dangerous out here for an adult, for a group of adults, let alone a single nymph like Spawn.

By sunset Spawn was in a forest thick with trees. The ground was harder than Spawn would have preferred—indeed, th