The Moon Carver
May brings with it fantastic Sunday Morning Transport stories by Ken Liu, LaShawn Wanak, Scott Edelman, and Kelly Robson.
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In this month’s first, free story, Ken Liu shares a story told from a very different point of view. Please enjoy and share!
~ Julian and Fran, April 5, 2026
The Moon Carver
by Ken Liu
This story first appeared in the Audible Originals anthology, The Other Animals. This is its online debut.
It’s the night of the new moon, the best time to hunt.
I stretch and flex my abdomen. The scarred tergites and sternites on my back and belly creak and scrape, the horrid grating sound filling my bedchamber.
“Believe me,” I tell them, “I feel the same way. Too bad my last molting is long in the past. We are stuck with one another till death do us part.”
I climb up the spiraling tunnel, pausing from time to time to catch my breath. Back when I built my burrow as a young scorpion, I had wanted to get to the surface as quickly as possible—I never imagined the day would come when I’d have trouble navigating the steep incline.
At last, I reach the flat hall before the entrance. A chance for my legs to recover. Starlight spills through the opening, and the breeze brings with it a thousand smells: hopping jerboa droppings, the musk of a snake, the fading fragrance of flowers that bloom for a day in the aftermath of summer rain in the desert.
I give my tail a test curl: the stinger is primed and ready. I wave my pincers in silent greeting to Scorpius, our ancestor in the sky, before placing them on the rough ground to rest. My eyes gradually adjust to the light—the two on top of my cephalothorax can’t help but drink in the stars. It’s much cooler here at the surface, and I already miss my bedchamber.
But I do not crawl back. I settle down just inside the crescent-shaped mouth of the burrow and wait.
In scorpion legends, we often portray ourselves as a solitary species, and that is true, after a fashion. We build our burrows alone; we hunt alone; we die alone if we’re lucky. The less fortunate die in the pincers of a bigger, stronger scorpion.
In Twin Dunes, thousands of burrows are packed into the sides of the two sand dunes bracketing a gulley filled with cacti and hardy shrubs. One is never far away from the eyes and slit sensilla of one’s neighbors.
I am solitary, but I am not alone.
My pectines brush against the sand. Through them and my legs I feel vibrations in the ground, like ripples crisscrossing a puddle in the rain. Dozens, hundreds of other scorpions are rustling in their burrows, ready for the hunt.
Though my burrow is located on the edge of Twin Dunes, as high up the slope as possible, I can’t really get away.
“Still pining for the moon?” The voice through the sand is mocking, superior.
That’s Coco, my next-door neighbor. She’s been teasing me since the fall, when I fell from the top of Spiny Tower the last time I tried to approach the silent music of the moon. Unable to climb to the top of the tower again with my weakened legs, I’ve been exiled from my only refuge of open solitude, my only light-filled haven of isolation.
I ignore her and hold still. Silence is my shield.
There’s a price to be paid for being eccentric, for yearning after that which others do not value.
Eventually, my neighbors finish with their greetings and gossip and settle down.
My mind wanders. The older I get, the more I seem to live in the past.
#
“Most of hunting is waiting,” my mother used to say, when I was a mere scorpling clinging to her back.
She told us stories about the great scorpion hero, Nepa, champion of Mother Earth, who slew the arrogant hunter Orion with a well-placed sting when he boasted that he could kill every creature in the world.
“That is why Orion doesn’t appear in the sky except in winter, when we’re asleep,” she said. “He’s still terrified of us. Be like Nepa. Patience, stillness, and darkness are your greatest allies.”
My siblings and I hunted with her. For hours, we would compete with one another to see who could remain still the longest on her back, grains of sand clinging to the side of the dune, while she perched just inside the mouth of her burrow.
And then, the barest tremor in the ground; the fresh scent of prey wafting across the sand; a mad, exhilarating dash in starlight; a deadly dance of slicing pincers and waving telson; the acrid fragrance of venom; the dying struggles of the worm, beetle, cricket, moth.
What a fine hunter she was. So graceful, so assured, so magnificent. Like the overwhelming, almost-tangible music of the moon.
My mouthparts water as I recall the smell of home cooking: my mother would methodically slice apart the carcass and spray the pieces with her digestive juices to turn it into a fine stew for the whole family. And we would fight over the meal, jostling, pushing one another aside—
A tremor in the sand. No, a quake, an upheaval. In the present, not the past.
I tense; my pectines and legs struggle to determine the source of the disturbance. Waves of vibrations seem to be coming from every direction, louder than thunder, louder than flash floods, louder than that time a wild boar rooted around the entrance of my burrow, causing so much damage that it took me a full two weeks to repair.
Two bright beams of light sweep over the dune, a thousand times brighter than the moon when it’s full.
I skitter back into the safety of the spiraling burrow before I’m blinded. It’s all right that I won’t be eating tonight. I’ve survived six months on a single caterpillar before. Scorpions are tough, and old scorpions even tougher.
#
The rumbling, pounding, stampeding go on for hours. I settle into a trance in the bedchamber and let it all pass over and through me.
When the noises dissipate, I return to the burrow entrance.
The dune face is covered by faint fluorescent shapes, like stars that have fallen to the desert. My mother told me that scorpions are gifted with the ability to glow in the light of the moon and the stars so that our great ancestor in heaven can see us. It seems that all of Twin Dunes is climbing past my burrow to the top of the dune.
I join the crowd. It isn’t the habit of scorpionkind, deeply attached to the home we dig in bare ground, a refuge in a sea of uncertainty, to explore and wander. But a disturbance this unprecedented requires an unprecedented response.
Like everyone else, I poke my cephalothorax over the ridge at the top of the dune, away from the burrows, my tail poised to strike.
Two smaller dunes loom in the distance, upon ground that was flat but a day earlier. But they’re no ordinary dunes; their sides, incomprehensibly, gently undulate in the summer breeze. I see a gargantuan beast with a boxy, angular frame and four circular feet at rest, its smooth tracks stretching away in the sand like dried riverbeds. Perhaps this is the source of the thunderous noises earlier. A fire burns near the soft dunes. Against its hot, flickering glow, the shadow of a giant, shaped like Orion, struts, its four grotesque limbs waving about like the legs of an uncoordinated grasshopper.
“That’s a human,” says my know-it-all neighbor Coco, tapping out her authoritative pronouncement with a series of pincer-strikes against the sand. “I’d recognize one even if I’ve only got two eyes left.”
Coco claims that she was abducted by humans several years ago. According to her account, one night, as she climbed into a low shrub to search for insects, a bright beam of purple light fell from the sky and enveloped her, causing her body to glow with a searing light, much like the full moon. Blinded, frozen from shock, she was then caught by colossal, fleshy pincers and lifted into the sky, at which point she lost consciousness. When she woke up, she found herself imprisoned within a tank with invisible walls, and her human captors subjected her to unspeakable experiments: flashing lights, loud noises, sensory deprivation, being probed with hard sticks, flipped on her back while her pectines were stroked with a fuzzy brush . . . Eventually, she was returned to the desert, disoriented, memory a jumble, babbling nonsense. If a group of young scorpions hadn’t heard her ruckus and investigated, she might have never made it back to the settlement.
The human stops in front of the fire. It vocalizes, a series of unpleasant, cacophonous vibrations that make the hairs on my pedipalps tingle and curl.
Then it begins to shed layers from its body.
Everyone skitters and taps the sand excitedly. The creature is molting right in front of our eyes! It’s shocking to witness such an intimate act performed in the open.
“Calm down,” says Coco, exceedingly pleased with herself. “A human molts daily, sometimes multiple times every day.”
The human leaves its discarded skin by the fire. Clad in something thin and flimsy, like the soft exoskeleton of the freshly molted, it climbs into a long, tube-shaped bag on the ground, leaving only its head exposed. It makes another noise that seems to indicate satisfaction. After wriggling about for a while, it settles into a slumber, its thorax gently moving up and down within the tube.
“Look at how it cannot even sleep without moving!” says Coco. “Symptomatic of the guilty conscience of descendants of Orion. While we scorpions, comfortable in our own skin, spend ninety-nine percent of our lives staying absolutely still, a human is practically never at rest.”
Personally, I’m skeptical of Coco’s claimed expertise on humans. Even if her outrageous tale were true, I don’t see how she could have learned so much about her captors in her brief time with them. Besides, human abduction is the sort of thing that old scorpions sometimes invent to make themselves feel important, and Coco has produced no proof of her ordeal except one lost leg. I think it much more likely that she simply wandered too far from her burrow while chasing a speedy beetle and got lost.
“What do you think it’s doing here?” I ask, reluctant to legitimize Coco’s authority but lacking a better source of knowledge.
The others say nothing, but by the way they’ve lowered their pectines to the sand, I can tell they’re hanging on every word.
“Not ‘it.’ They.” Coco draws the moment out, glad that she has everyone’s attention. “See those unnatural dunes? They are shelters humans build—like aboveground burrows. I was taken into one. There are more of them sleeping inside.”
“Okay. What do they want?” I ask again.
She shrugs, raising her pincers to Scorpius high above in a mute appeal. Then she gingerly taps the sand, pausing between each syllable-tremor to add to the air of mystery. “Who knows? Humans are unpredictable creatures. They are even more eccentric than you.”
I glance at the dune-shaped human burrows: soft, billowy, reminding me of the body of the human lying on the ground, a mountain of flesh, an oversized caterpillar.
I leave the others to their gawking. There are more important things in life than the incomprehensible actions of humans. I return to my burrow and wait.
With most of the inhabitants of Twin Dunes occupied by the sight of the sleeping humans, the valley between the dunes is so much quieter. I feel my senses extend into the distance, as far as the slope of the dune on the other side, glinting faintly in starlight. It’s such a relief to be truly alone. The world seems to sing to me, a song with the clarity of the wind, the immutability of the sand, and the permanence of the stars. I wish it were the night of the full moon.
A rustle.
I spring into action and dash out, my limbs triangulating and closing in on the source of the noise. I lock my pincers around the thorax of a fat cricket. The creature struggles, kicking, biting, thrashing. I strain to hold it down, clamping hard to give it a quick death. At my age, it takes so much effort to make venom that I’d rather not use it unless I have to.
The cricket manages to turn and kick me in the face, so hard that for a moment I’m stunned. Then sensation returns in a flood: the pain from the crack in my cephalothorax, the smell of blood and gore, the tingle in my loosening pincers.
I grit my chelicerae and hold on. The cricket kicks the sand hard, and digs in. It’s dragging me away. I have no choice but to sting. Once. Twice. Three times.
Finally, it stops moving. I let go, panting. Every muscle in my body feels sore.
I will feast better than I have in years.
#
Stuffed with cricket flesh, I spend the next two days sleeping, climbing up to the entrance only for a constitutional stroll or two. The whole settlement is still obsessed with the humans, congregating atop the ridge every night to watch the strange beings in fascination.
The relative solitude is welcome. I push the bits of leftover cricket carcass out of my burrow; I sweep out the loose sand; I strengthen the entrance, hammering at the walls with my pedipalps.
A sudden noise behind me. The tremors are too strong to be an insect but not fast enough to be a jerboa. I whip around; a hulking shadow blocks the starlight. The fetor of another scorpion, one much younger but also stronger.
It’s not unusual for scorpions to hunt one another in lean times, but it is rare for one to be assaulted in his own burrow. I raise my pincers and brandish my stinger in warning, even though I know it’s hopeless. My venom glands are empty from the hunt; I cannot win this fight.
The newcomer taps the sand in front of my burrow disarmingly. “It’s me. I need your help.”
I comb my pectines against the sand to pick up her scent. I lower my pincers in relief. “Antares, it’s been a while.”
#
Years, actually. I’ve never gotten to know any of my children well—that is the scorpion way. The mothers bring up the babies by themselves and then chase them away after they molt for the first time.
But there is one exception.
Three years ago, on a night of the full moon, I climbed to the top of Spiny Tower, the tallest cactus in Twin Dunes. I liked making that strenuous trip—back then, I was still limber enough. There, I was as far away as possible from the busy valley floor, favored by the younger hunters, as well as the dune slopes, noisy with burrows. It was the only place where I could find the solitude I craved, and where I felt closest to the moon.
“What are you doing?” asked a young voice.
I was so startled that I almost fell from my perch.
“Who are you?”
“Antares, daughter of Serket, and your daughter as well.”
She really does look like her mother: wide abdomen, domineering cephalothorax, powerful legs, large pincers still deadly sharp with the inexperience of youth. Her exoskeleton glowed smoothly in the moon. Even though she still had a few instars to go, she was already as big as me.
“You should see the look on your face,” she said, laughing. “Do I look that scary?”
“You do. Terrifying, in fact.”
She beamed, taking it as the praise I intended. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not hungry.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s just that . . . it’s not often that a daughter seeks her father out.”
“It’s not that often that a scorpion climbs this high either,” she countered.
She was right. Climbing so high on such a bright night was incredibly dangerous. Hooting predators with wings could see me from miles away.
“The others say you are odd.” Her tone was matter-of-fact, not disapproving.
On this, she was also right. Even as a scorpling, I was deemed different from my brothers and sisters. Again and again, my mother had to tell me to scoot back on her back, so eager was I to perch at the very tip of her cephalothorax to bathe in the light of the moon. I can almost feel the light, Mama!
“I saw some of the moon-portraits you made in the base of Spiny Tower,” she said.
I hadn’t thought about those carvings in years. After my first molting, before I dug my burrow, I devoted months to capturing the phases of the moon. I attacked the tough base of the cactus with my pincers until I punctured the thick, waxy skin and reached the fragrant pulp, leaving jagged gashes: a waning crescent, a waxing gibbous hump, a circle as perfect as the course of the stars. I wanted to carve as many portraits as it took to reveal the fullness of time, to unlock the secret of the moon-music. I wanted to memorialize the beauty of the empty solitude one found only in the exposed light of the full moon, alone.
Everyone thought I was mad to waste energy in such a useless pursuit. “He’s trying to become a vegetarian,” Coco used to say, cackling as she thumped the ground with her pedipalps.
“I think the portraits are beautiful,” Antares said. “There’s nothing else like them in the whole valley.”
She really is my daughter, I thought. And a feeling I had never experienced before filled my heart: pride mixed with joy as well as sorrow, a sense of recognition and being recognized.
So we sat down on top of Spiny Tower, careless of how dangerously exposed we were. Bathed in the glow of the full moon, I told her about the music I heard in solitude, the notes that grew stronger in the pure, purple-tinged light, high above the valley bed, away from the noise of the quotidian. I showed her how to raise her stinger toward the moon, so that the eye that wasn’t an eye in her tail could feel the tingle of the music of the spheres.
Together, we held still and waited, not to hunt, but to luxuriate in the music that couldn’t be heard but only felt with one’s whole body.
#
Antares takes me the long way around the side of the dune so that we are away from the gawkers. It’s a more intimate view of the human burrows.
“They are getting ready to leave,” she says.
I see what she means. Most of the human artifacts have been packed away on the angular beast with four circular legs. Its back bulges with a thin cover, as though gravid with children. The two dunes in the bare sand stand bereft, alone.
“I want to go with them,” she says.
I turn to her, unsure that I heard her right. “What?”
“They shed old skins and put on new ones with such ease,” she says, the words tumbling forth like a cascade of loose sand. “They carry their burrow with them; they are not tied to one place; they have no roots.”
The thought is at once terrifying and freeing. I can’t imagine living without my burrow. I know its every curve, every twist, every crack and seam better than I know my thoughts. I’ve spent more time in my burrow than in my present skin. The burrow is literally an extension of me. I’m as rooted as Spiny Tower.
“Don’t you want to know what the world is like outside Twin Dunes?” she asks. “Mother’s burrow is only a meter from the burrow Grandmother built, which is only half a meter from the ruin of Great-Grandmother’s home.”
I think about the noise and chatter among the dunes on a summer’s night. I recall Coco’s mother and my mother scolding me for trying to make a burrow so high up the slope. I remember the snickers and giggles of everyone who watched me trying to carve a portrait of the moon, waving their pincers in circles above their eyes, in consensus that there was something wrong with me.
“Look at that beast with four round legs,” she says. “How far its trails extend into the distance! And how much farther it can still go. In the morning, the humans will get on it and ride into the rising sun. I want to ride it, too.”
I think about my mother telling me to stop being silly and settle down—out of her burrow, but not too far away. I think about the expression of confusion and disdain on Serket’s face, right after our promenade à deux, when I showed her my moon carvings. I think about my dreams, gradually thinning with each layer of shed skin, buried deeper after each round of repairs to the burrow. Over time, fantasies of climbing to the moon faded, replaced by the reality of aging limbs, brittle exoskeleton, the need to burrow deeper into the earth, where the seasons do not change, and time stands still.
“I don’t want to climb onto Spiny Tower once in a while, on the night of the full moon, and seize a pocket of solitude like a drowning scorpion clutching at a floating leaf in a thunderstorm. I want to live in a strange country where I know no one and no one knows me. Why can’t I shed this old me with the next instar? Why can’t I be without ties, without roots? I crave to live where my neighbors are still rocks with long shadows, and silence is as deep and wide as the sky.”
She pauses, her pincers drooping with exhaustion. “No one understands me. I’m . . . too strange.”
A new feeling seizes me: pride mixed with regret as well as hope, a sense of recognition and being recognized.
“I don’t think you’re strange at all,” I tell my daughter. “You are magnificent.”
#
It takes hours to carve through the covering over the back of the beast with four round legs. The material is tougher than any cricket, caterpillar, or cactus. My pincers are dull and my muscles are sore, but I keep at it.
So does Antares.
It isn’t a task that Serket would understand, or Coco, or any of the others who find us odd. It makes me happy.
Finally, we cut a thin crescent large enough for her to climb through.
Together, we turn to look back at the dune, the ridge at the top a silver arc. I imagine everyone looking this way, confused why the two of us are here, restless, out in the open, impatient.
“Well, I’ll be off,” she says. She probes the hole in the covering gingerly with her pedipalps.
“Be careful,” I say. She’s bigger and stronger than me, but I can’t help myself. “Coco says humans are very dangerous. If they see you, they may try to stomp on you.”
She lifts her stinger and waves it proudly. “I’m not scared.”
Just before she climbs through the hole, I blurt out, “Wherever you go, if you look up at the moon, I’ll be looking at it, too.”
She touches her pedipalps to mine, turns around, and disappears.
I try to climb down one of the beast’s round legs, but my legs are so tired that I lose purchase against the grooves and drop down—thankfully back into the comforting embrace of the sand.
On the long, arduous trek back to the dunes, I imagine the journey ahead for Antares: taking refuge in the dark interior of the beast as the sun rages overhead; the welcome arrival of a new night in a strange land; the cautious first steps in a new country; new scorpions, new preys, new sounds, smells, shadows. Will she even build a new burrow? Or will she live like the wandering humans, seeking temporary shelters wherever she goes in the lee of a rock, the shadow of a cactus, the curve of a fallen piece of bark?
Maybe even the stars will be different where she goes. But I hope she’ll still see Orion in winter, when she wakes briefly from hibernation, and I hope she’ll wave her pincers at him defiantly.
I stop to catch my breath. Not from exhaustion, but from an overwhelming giddiness. I haven’t felt like this since the time I tried to carve the moon.
My burrow is up ahead. Coco, waiting inside the mouth of her burrow, taps out a greeting. “Where have you been, oddball?”
“To be closer to the moon,” I tell her. “To fill my belly with light.”
You should see the look on her face.
#
Thank you for joining our journey this week.
Ken Liu is an American author of speculative fiction. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he wrote The Dandelion Dynasty, a silkpunk epic fantasy series, the Julia Z series of techno-thrillers, as well as the short story collection The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories. His latest book is The Passing of the Dragon and Other Stories, a new collection of short fiction that includes “The Moon Carver.”
Prior to becoming a full-time writer, Liu worked as a software engineer, corporate lawyer, and litigation consultant. Liu frequently speaks on a variety of topics, including futurism, the history of creative technologies, bookmaking, and the mathematics of origami.
“The Moon Carver” © Ken Liu, 2019.
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