Today, we have an excerpt from the Rabbit Test and Other Stories, a highly-anticipated debut short story collection by Samantha Mills. Specifically, the (substantial) excerpt is from the story “Anchorage”.
The book is due to be published by Tachyon Publications in April. Here’s the synopsis:
A subversive debut short-fiction collection from one of the hottest talents in speculative fiction: 2025 Compton Crook Award winner and Pushcart Prize nominee Samantha Mills (The Wings Upon Her Back). These riveting stories range effortlessly from fantasy and science fiction to literary fiction, from the here and now all the way into the farthest reaches of space. The central tale of this collection is Mills’ pivotal Nebula, Locus, and Sturgeon award-winning story “Rabbit Test,” which interrogates the past, present, and future of abortion rights.
Introduction by Meg Elison
A time-traveling fisherwoman keeps landing on the right shore, but at the wrong time. A pair of witches fight over the gate between life and death. A new consciousness, intent upon seeing all the wonders of the universe, visits a floating library. A rock-and-roll legend squares off against a town full of devils. Humanity makes first contact, but falters when put in charge of selecting the world’s representatives.
In her strange and emotional worlds, with stakes ranging from the epic to the personal, Mills creates ample room for humor and hope amidst tragedy and struggle.
*
The anchorage appeared on my radar screen as a blip, a blotch, one bit of detritus among many. The accompanying message was gentle but persistent, an invitation repeated on loop for anyone who might pick it up: visit if you like. The politest distress call in the universe. Visit if you like, and please bring food, printer fuel, next gen wires, conversation . . .
I forwarded the signal to Captain Rousseau. This action revealed impatience on my part, excitement, an inability to wait until after breakfast. But I couldn’t help it.
Novelty. Newness. I craved it like a subterranean lizardman craved phosphor. I craved it like Captain Rousseau craved silence. Over the past year, my crew (yes, my crew, my crew, the word still sounded the way I imagine liquor tastes, warming and biting and frightening and loud)—my crew made medical deliveries to a dozen colonies. We saw titanium waterfalls and genetically enhanced caribou. We walked through bone-lined catacombs. We rode air trams through toxic jungles. We stopped a necrotic worm outbreak and vaccinated three thousand children against belly rot.
More. More. Everything I’d hoped for and more. But the crew was too busy bickering to appreciate any of it. Everyone was angry and nobody would admit why, so they picked something inconsequential and battled a year’s worth of hurt over it.
I listened in through the mess hall intercom. I could have listened in through Captain Rousseau’s cochlear chip, but then he would know. All four crewmembers of the Metrodora were licensed pharmaceutical technicians, but he was the only one who ever scrutinized my vitals. Terrifying, but I loved him for it.
“We’re out of breakfast bars,” Olivia complained.
“I said to log things as they run out,” Malala said.
“I would have, if I knew somebody ate them all.”
Santiago grumbled, “Just ask when resupply gets here. Either they have some or they don’t.”
I pictured it: Olivia aggressively shoving waste into the trash chute because she always cleaned when she was angry; Malala mumble-hunching because it wasn’t her fault, not according to Malala; Santiago interjecting even though nobody would listen; and Captain Rousseau, my beautiful captain—well, he was always a bit of mystery, a bit of light-and-shadow, a bit of dusty-air wondering, but he would hold them all together in the end.
Captain Rousseau cleared his throat and said, in his beautiful voice, “Geneva has picked up an anchorage.”
A beat of silence. Then:
“No,” Olivia said.
“Ooh, fun!” Malala said.
“No,” Olivia said again. “I’m not risking contamination for some—some obsolete religious experience.”
I was clawing inside my own chest to contradict her. A ship could travel years without encountering an anchorage. Decades! This was newness, exploration, questing, curiosity. This was a thousand-year flower at millennium’s dawn, this was birth canal, this was sunlight through a canopy fire. (Surely at least one of these metaphors was correct?)
“I would hardly call the practice religious.” Santiago, of course. He would know what he was talking about—he had taken three long-distance history courses! “They’re rich women with enough money to outfit a hundred-year pod and the nerve to expect everyone else to feed them.”
“Ridiculous,” Malala said. “Nobody commits to a lifetime of seclusion because they don’t want to feedthemselves.”
“It’s hardly seclusion if everybody stops to say hello, is it?”
“You might not see anybody for years!”
I waited anxiously for Captain Rousseau to weigh in. I had tried to read him once, shortly after I came on board. We were flying over a sandstorm on the moon colony Bevel 6, barely on schedule to complete our delivery before the upper atmosphere calcified. The sands formed brilliant tornados beneath our hull, violet and viridian, glorious, glorious. Captain Rousseau was pressed tight to the view portal, and I heard Santiago tell Malala that the captain’s ex-husband lived on the surface, a research warrior on long-term assignment with a militant university fellowship.
Never having had an ex—husband or wife or colleague-lover or otherwise—I was bursting to know more. I crept into his neural network, quiet as the void, and I swear I wasn’t going to intrude on his actual thoughts, I only wanted to know what he was feeling. But I didn’t even get that far. He gently nudged me out of his sensors, no words, only the sensation of please do not, and off I skittered, too mortified to ask how he knew I was there.
Captain Rousseau was a dark lake, a spider beneath a trapdoor, an antediluvian stress-wombat with its caffeine taken away—
“Geneva,” he said. “What do you think?”
Startled, I lost touch with the intercom. I reconnected in time to hear Olivia complain, “—tell us when you’re listening in?”
My thoughts were: want, want, want, now, give me, now, want. But I said, “The chances of coming across another anchorage in this region are extremely remote. It is distinctly possible this is the only one.” I hesitated. Rushed ahead. “The resupply barge is four days, sixteen hours from materialization. Our energy stores are ample.”
“Mmhm.” I could hear the smile in his voice, warm as hotcakes, warm as fresh growth beneath a twelve-hour carcass. “Since we are waiting anyway, I see no harm letting the pod dock to recharge. You can visit in pairs.”
Wonderful! Fantastical!
“Absolutely not,” Olivia said. “Those pods are a perfect microclimate for lichen. If one strand has hitchhiked in on a visitor, then it’s infested. That kind of recklessness lost us the Earth. It’s irresponsible, shortsighted . . .”
Olivia went on for a while. A quick peek at her sensors revealed the depth of her rage, a howling inside her, a tempest, but I responded anyway, it came flowing out of me like hot sap.
“The organism concerning you is not a lichen,” I said, quite reasonably. “The nickname comes from the wolf lichen, Letharia vulpina, which is a similar shade of green and also composed of thick, shrubby tendrils. The organism you are referring to, cerebro digitus, is not even vegetal—”
Olivia roared, “Quit explaining things to me, Geneva! Did you forget how I got this?” She banged her prosthetic hand against the table, flesh-encased metal on metal, causing Malala to yelp and Santiago to suggest muting the intercom (uncalled for) and then Captain Rousseau finally, firmly, thankfully took charge.
“Your objections are noted,” he said. “Anyone who visits has to go through the shower on their way back. And yes, of course we’ll run a full scan and test the atmosphere first.”
“There you go!” Malala said brightly. “We’ll send the bot first.”
I burst from my cabinet in the portside emergency wall station, barely extending the bot’s head and limbs in time to keep upright. I locked its feet into magnetic boots and click-clack-clunked past the EVA suits, the generators, the maddening lights like angry balls of gas overhead, rancid things exposing everything—what a terrible way to live.
The crew floated in the mess hall, their feet hooked casually into bars below the table. Olivia, pale with irritation; Malala, still in her night clothes; Santiago, struggling with a drinking tube; and Captain Rousseau, my beautiful captain, thick black locs floating around his head, trying very hard to read.
Every one of them stared at me with bewilderment, and, frantic, I cycled through possible reasons. I was dusty. My limbs were overextended. Pale gray, open joints, mismatched sensors welded to the chest.
Hair. Everyone else in the room had hair. The bot’s face was barely expressive, a decade-old skin-model mounted onto a shiny silver cranium. It would look less uncanny with hair.
“Geneva,” Captain Rousseau said gently. “What are you doing?”
Panic! Nobody had summoned the bot body from storage.
“The anchorage is prepared to dock,” I said. I assumed this was true. Why wouldn’t it be?
Captain Rousseau squinted at me. I felt him in my vitals, scanning for abnormalities. He wasn’t going to find anything out of the ordinary. The bot’s programming was perfectly functional, I just wasn’t using it. For his sake, I almost wished I really was Geneva, the A3 Delivery Robot.
“All right,” he said. “Let her dock.”
Success!
*
Samantha Mills’s Rabbit Test and Other Stories is due to be published by Tachyon Publications in North America and in the UK, on April 21st.
Civilian Reader 