For Out of Tai Shan the Torah Shall Go Forth

Zohar Jacobs returns with a new story this year (here’s her 2023 SMT story), featuring an unusual pair of linked interstellar pilots. ~ Julian and Fran, March 24, 2024

This month’s stories are by authors Mary Robinette Kowal, PH Lee, Molly Tanzer, and Zohar Jacobs. The first story of the month is free to read, but it’s our paying subscribers who allow us to keep publishing great stories week after week.

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For Out of Tai Shan the Torah Shall Go Forth

by Zohar Jacobs

In every window of the station, the planet hung expectantly below like a promise not yet fulfilled. Its wide face was hazed with a dust storm. He hangs the Earth upon nothing, thought Jay irrelevantly.

He had a lot of practice being the tenth in a minyan. Being deep interstellar was new.

After a haphazard net of star-crossings, his ship had come to Tai Shan, a small station orbiting an unremarkable Mars-like planet. On Tai Shan lived the only humans in the system. The only humans for hundreds of light-years.

“It’s a backwater,” said Jay. “I don’t know why they don’t just give up on it.”

“Because it’s their home,” replied Sedna, his inseparable pairmate, close by his side as always.

With barely a thousand souls on Tai Shan station, Jay and Sedna would have been conspicuous enough in the corridors as strangers, but they were flight controllers, too: uncoordinated, a little off, their gazes fixed upon the heavens. Although their hair was growing back now, their halos of neural implants were still just visible. Shipboard, where everyone knew him, Jay had forgotten how strange he was, how strange the two of them were together. People looked at them curiously as they walked down the corridor.

- I wish they wouldn’t stare, thought Sedna, struck by shyness.

- Wouldn’t you have stared if a couple of flight controllers had come to your asteroid?

- I used to dream about that when I was a kid. But hardly anyone came to visit us.

Hundreds of people lived in the apartment block where Jay had grown up; Sedna came from a remote trans-Neptunian settlement with barely two hundred inhabitants. All the two of them had in common was their love of mathematics and the metal in their heads.

Through their neural link, Jay could sense the distant ebb and flow of Sedna’s mind, the inevitable background of the rest of his life. One person at the top of their game could navigate an interstellar jump, but it took a pair to keep their footing in reality—and humanity—afterward. As for the philosophical questions, he left them to the experts. Did pairing halve or double a person? Who knew? He didn’t.

All he knew was that being paired was like that old story about four rabbis entering Pardes: one died, one went mad, one apostatized, and one entered in peace and departed in peace. Which of those he was, it was anyone’s guess.