On May 14th, Wolsak & Wynn are due to publish The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits, a “complex work of literary speculative fiction that spans centuries”, by Ben Berman Ghan. To mark the upcoming release, the publisher has provided CR with an excerpt to share — specifically, taken from Chapter 3. Before we get to that, though, here’s the synopsis:

The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits starts in 2014 with a winged alien sowing the seeds of a strange forest on the moon. The novel then moves through humanity’s colonization of the moon and its consequences, onto a war with alien beings within a space-going whale, a cyborg mind that sleeps for hundreds of years after sheltering the city of Toronto from the worst of the war and finally a re-creation of humanity.

Ghan poses thoughtful questions about artificial intelligence, humanities quest for the stars and ecological destruction in this wide-ranging story, which is held together equally by beautiful writing and deft characterization. The end result is an ambitious debut that leaves the reader contemplating many amazing possibilities for the future of our world.

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Chapter 3: Flowers for Nora

Have we not proof in our own moon that worlds do die?
– John C. Van Dyke, The Desert: Further Studies in Natural Appearances

Know this: In 2070, the engine arrives in silence.

Imagine this: In 2010, hours from any city, a girl kneels in her garden, planting sunflower seeds in the shadow of mountains.

“Those won’t grow in the cold,” her father had said of her plans for sunflowers in January. But little Nora believes in the work and skill of her hands in the dirt. She believes in their power to coax beauty if she’s careful, connects the right dots and waters the right spots. She believes in growth and change.

The night sky above her is clear and cold. When she thinks of the future, she thinks not of monstrous machines, gardens of the undead or killers with cold blue eyes. She thinks of flowers, the boys at school and the circuit board she has completed under her bed. She loves the mountains that hold her little world. She loves the Bow River that pushes blue and joyful past her town. She loves the quiet of the forests.

She places her last two seeds close together, too close for either to have space to grow, and spreads earth over them with her gloved hands. She thinks, perhaps playfully, that if they don’t grow, they will at least remain together – twin companion seeds that reside where only she can find them.

Sweat glimmers on her little forehead as she sits on her knees and looks upward, her gaze following her crystallizing breath. She looks past the little lights of downtown, past the trees and dark mountaintops, past the slice of the moon that hangs silver and silent and lifeless.

Nora looks up at the gentle stars. Then one of them reveals itself as a violent thing and falls to the Earth before her.

Unseen from the eyes of history, a crater burns into the side of the road, smoke forming question marks. Imagine the little girl climbing into it. Imagine as her excitement becomes poison inside her.

“Hello,” she calls. At the sound of her voice, the fallen star unfolds itself. Its flesh is the thick black of space. Its arms are trembling and thin. Its wings remain half-open, crooked and horrible, as if the structures that hold them up have snapped, and the stars inside them flicker, sometimes vanishing altogether. It looks up at her, and instead of a face, there is the deep blue that she might recognize from her river, a spiral growing ever smaller.

It has fallen across the terrible void for her. Call it a Gardener. Call it a Messenger. Call it whatever you want. Call it something that is broken. “Who are you?” asks the little girl. The creature shudders and makes as if to move. “Where are you from?”

The animal that might have changed history, might have put its own seeds in the earth, is dying too quickly to pluck the possibilities from its wings. It wavers, the spiral of its eye glitching and popping in and out of being as the machine stares down at its little companion, contemplating which of her questions to answer.

Nora opens her mouth to speak, and the broken Gardener bursts like a waterfall, the container of its flesh no longer able to hold back the rivers of its body. She screams, and her scream is lost in the waters of the dead machine as it pours itself into her.

For a moment, all is silent. Little Nora kneels in the dirt of her garden, her mouth hanging open. The machine from the stars tasted of pomegranates and ash as it poured down her throat. Her eyes are the black of the void, little stars twinkling in between. As the Gardener dissolves within her, it leaves the gift of memory, a dream of the future.

Little Nora ponders these new memories as they unfold inside her head. Inside the mind of a little girl, the terrible certainty of a millennium of annihilation and the promise of genocide in the arms of a terrible machine burns inside her.

In the dark, Nora screams. But the screams mean nothing. They don’t drive the memories out. The future cannot be stopped.

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Ben Berman Ghan’s The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits is due to be published by Buckrider Books/Wolsak & Wynn on May 14th, in North America and in the UK.

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