Eater-of-Bone is a 2012 science fiction novella by Robert Reed. You can read or listen to it here. I would recommend it though content warnings apply. It is in his great ship setting but very far from said great ship on a moon orbiting a gas giant in an out of the way star system.
On this unnamed moon a post-human woman is having a bad day. Prompted by hunger she attempts to remove the bait from a trap only to discover that the apparent trap was camouflage for a much worse trap which catches her arm and launches a flare. Knowing that the trap setters are coming she chops off said arm at the shoulder and takes off running. Down a limb and already weak from hunger she manages to find an alien wasps' nest containing edible wax. Ignoring the wasps who's venom can't effect her biology she gorges herself and begins regrowing her arm. This respite is short lived as the trap makers follow her. They are also human. The chase begins and the enemy has ranged weapons. She runs through a village of local bird people called Nots which attack her pursuers harder than they attack her but the pursuers are made of the same half invincible biology and the whole village barely slows them down. One of the pursuers fires at her and the explosive shot eviscerates the already wrecked fugitive. She gets up, literally pulls her self together, and runs blindly until she goes over a cliff. For a long time she floats insensate, lifeless and deathless, nibbled on by fish which quickly regret ingesting the alien proteins. The zone of death eventually catches the attention of two leviathans which debate what they are looking at. One of them dares the other to eat her and it does. This kills the consumer but not before it voids its digestive tract. Grieving its fellow the remaining leviathan throws her body onto the nearest island where it can't poison the sea anymore.
A human named Mercer is informed by the local fanhearts (which are some kind of bird(I think?)) that another human is on the island. He gears up and takes off expecting a false alarm. What he finds is so destroyed that it takes him several seconds of examination to conclude that the wretched thing was ever a person. Pitching a tent he conducts some first aid which mostly amounts to pouring mineral water into her wounds and feeding her. She remains unconscious as she heals and Mercer talks to her about everything, nothing, how lonely he is, and how he likes it that way. Eventually he passes out next to her. Later, she wakes up feeling well and safe for the first time in her life which really unnerves her. The next thing to unnerve her is the stranger sleeping next to her. Mercer awakens and they have an awkward introduction where Mercer makes an honest introduction and the woman says her name is dream. She was actually trying to express that she doesn't believe the scenario she's in is real but she doesn't bother to correct the miss apprehension. Dream and Mercer travel back to his home and Dream's internal monologue lists all the ways that Mercer is being insufficiently cautious moving through the forest. She decides he is a fool. They arrive at Mercer's home, a one thousand room complex carved into a hill, and Mercer proceeds to make Dream as comfortable as possible. The next several days are spent just talking. He asks for her understanding of the world and she explains the mythology given to her by her mother. Mercer finds the explanation really unsatisfactory both technically and practically.
Mercer pressures her into sex. She claims she'll go along with it but won't like it. To understand this interaction I need to explain the personalities in play. Mercer is a generous host who's constantly putting off mild creep vibes. He is obviously desperately lonely and comes off as needy and maybe entitled. On the other hand, Dream has less than zero social skills and seems to be trying to keep as much emotional distance between them as possible. Nothing in her internal dialog ever hints at a strategic purpose for the frigid facade. She never thanks him, her internal narration is nothing but ignorant criticisms, and she never shows a shred of curiosity about Mercer's knowledge. All of this is to say that I find Mercer's behavior gross but I have a really hard time caring about Dreams feelings because she behaves like a stupid sociopath.
Speaking of stupid sociopaths, Mercer reminisces on how the world ended up this way. He was on the colony ship that came to this planet after missing their first two choices. Low in heavy elements and in a small nebula just outside of the Milky Way proper; it was hard to build a technological base and too remote for hope of rescue. All of that could have been overcome if they'd had a real industrial base to start from. One ancient nuclear reactor on a planet with little in the way of iron much less uranium meant that they had a narrow window to boot strap to technological self-sufficiency. The minuscule colony put forth a valiant effort but when the power source went so did the dream of a better tomorrow. Things got desperate, colonists turned on one another, and Mercer stole a bunch of supplies and left. After a lot of walking he found his island and began a campaign of terrorism against the local Not population that ended in them building and maintaining a dam which acts as a salt evaporation pond which gets him a trickle of those rare elements necessary to maintain (or create) a post-human body. When you are an ageless immortal why not play god?
The summer begins and that means that the huge lake they are on is about to be covered in a traversable plant matter membrane. Dream begins planning her exit from the island. Life in one place feels like a waste and she needs to get back to her nomadic wanderings. She begins stealing the supplies that she wants and planning where she will go. In the midst of this her dead mother tells her she is pregnant in a dream. Receiving messages from her dead mother is normal for her and this intensifies her determination to leave. Mercer announces that his fanhearts have discovered a group of Nots traveling across the sea. Mercer goes to turn the group back so that they can't mess with his island worshiper workforce and soon after he takes off so does Dream. On her long walk out she spots a collection of figures in the distance. Using her stolen telescope she spies on them. It's twenty seven humans! In Dream's experience humans don't come in groups of twenty seven. They are well fed and not looking over their shoulders for pursuit. This is a war party and it is headed for the island. Dream runs back to warn Mercer. The humans head to the Nots' village and burn it. Dream makes it back to Mercer's complex and finds him kitted out for war. He asks why she came back. She can't explain her actions even to herself. She triggers a booby trap that the invaders put next to the entrance and takes a significant injury. Mercer moves her inside and they begin plotting how to eliminate the intruders while she convalesces.
Mercer goes to the village and immediately takes fire and soon damage. Wrecked and barely able to run he makes a planned retreat to where Dream lays waiting. Halfway across the island she is prepping trees for a conflagration. There's lots of oxygen in this atmosphere and a lot of chemical energy stored in the trees. Her efforts are interrupted by the ghost or hallucination of her dead mother informing her that Mercer is a goner and it's time to run. She stays and they argue. Dream recalls how her mother's final directive to her was to eat her bones. She ate the bones and gained the rare and precious minerals that let her survive to this point. She weeps in the present as the ghost/hallucination chides her for regretting the action. Then Mercer arrives with the war band close behind. He's missing an arm and most of his face; only just standing and walking long enough to fall forward. Dream rushes out of her hiding place and manages to lift and carry the significantly lighter Mercer to safety. She doubles back to set off the trap and dozens of very flammable trees ignite and explode which collapses the hillside they are on burying the war party that was tracking them in a mass of earth and fire. Dream begins circling the inferno, rifle at the ready, looking for anybody not caught in the trap but fails to find a single straggler. Dawn breaks and Dream witnesses a mass of Nots brave the heat and drag the disabled Mercer out. They butcher him with stone tools. Hundreds of Nots pour out of the forest to watch or join in deicide. Facing thousands of foes, Dream takes her mother's advice and flees.
The story ends with the Not making a careful inventory of Mercer's home. They don't know what most of his things are but they suspect it may be important in the long campaign their kind are waging against the Eaters-of-Bone. Far away a woman teaches her young son about his father and tells him his father's stories of space ships, dying colonies, and a universe much bigger than their little world.
Escape Pod will attain one thousand episodes this year and I think I've listened to all of them. Eater-of-Bone is in my top ten. The setting is simultaneously grounded and completely surreal. The exploding trees have fire protective water bladders that Dream cut off the trees in the trap which is why those trees burned but the rest of the island didn't. The Nots have a genetically imparted species language which allow all Nots to communicate but also circumscribes their cognition. This story actually manages to create a plausibly unearthly biosphere without straying into random nonsense. The post-human protagonist have wildly over engineered bodies that can regrow limbs in hours and resist rotting. Their ultra-durable bio-ceramic brains which can survive on geological time scale stretch my credulity but given a million more years of science, why not?
What this story really makes me think of is Greek mythology. The gods are damned by their own fecundity. Uranus defeated by Cronus who is defeated in turn by Zeus. Zeus lives under constant threat from his progeny. While parent child conflicts don't feature in this story it's clear that the post-humans have a major problem both at the resources and cooperation level. They will keep reproducing but never die of old age. While it would be reductive to say it's just zero sum the long term prospects seem bleak and not just for the humans. Every organism on this planet is having to deal with this invasive species. Regarding the individual characters in this story: Dream is a ignorant loner savage who's internal dialog reflects a complete absence of gratitude until the end of the story. Mercer is a recluse turned terrorist to the Nots. Both are products of their environments. If I had to try and pin down the tone of that environment it would be pitiless. The story ends on a hopeful note for the Not who are scheming how to address the alien threat and Dream and her child but both face titanic challenges. I think that's a big part of what put this story in my top one percent of Escape Pod episodes. The great ship setting is a whole galaxy of stories but this one planet has three dozen books worth of potential. Imagine a love story that spans ten thousand years, an empire built on salt evaporation ponds with intense cast divisions, Nots armed with human weapons conducting a campaign of extermination, or all three at once. This story might have left me wanting more tales from that world the most of anything I've read and I can't ask for more than that.
SciFiQuest 3025: Revenge of the Deathborg