The Best of Galaxy’s Edge 2013-2014 by Larry Niven, Nancy Kress, Mercedes Lackey, Ken Liu, Brad R. Torgersen, C. L. Moore, Tina Gower

deeper, until I am sure that it is a drum. One by one the Gartners’ sentences trail off and their faces turn toward the traveling theater.
    With a last furious rumble, the drum player leaps out from the cart and lands on the top step of the folding stage, arms upraised. He is dressed as a monster—I do not know what kind of monster, for it is too big to be a horse, but it is beautiful. Its whole body is redder than any brick in the town, and its huge silvery eyes flash our reflections back at us as the man inside the costume turns his head. Is he a lizard? Or a tremendous bird?
    I have no time to decide; the next moment, the man is back to drumming, and the bright colors of his costume flash metallic in the sun. The whole square is silent, except for that drumming, which rattles my fibers until I feel as though I have a human heart beating in my chest.
    And then the drumming stops again. And She appears.
    Every human in the crowd gasps, and I hear Mikkel’s yip of surprise. The woman that pops up from the cart is like no woman I have ever seen. Is she beautiful? Her flesh is dark, just like Sissel said, dark as soil that has never seen the sun. But she gleams , she glows with something that I have never seen before, not in a Gartner, not in a neep. She is convinced of herself. Her features are not small and delicate like mine, and I am the one Mads created to be beautiful—but this woman, the actress, is nothing like me, and yet she smiles as widely as if the difference between us does not matter.
    And she is dressed as a neep in blossom.
    As the drum starts again, she begins to dance. That too is unfamiliar—she moves too freely, without the sneering reservation of the Gartners, and her wild gestures send the papier-mâché leaves and the silk flowers bobbing, as if they are an extension of her own body. I have never moved like that.
    I am more like her than I have ever been like Mads.
    As she dances, the monster that is the drummer begins to circle her, his costume flashing. The light has not changed; it is still midafternoon, with the low weak sunlight of our springtime sloping across the rooftops, and yet the sun seems to have focused all its strength on that little stage so that it is lit from within, while the rest of the world is overdrawn in shadow.
    “A trick of mirrors,” mumbles Mads.
    I do not look at him. I do not look at him again until the dance is done, and the drummer circles toward the actress in her purple-blue neep costume, and spits a gout of paper-ribbon fire at her, and she collapses across the steps. The papier-mâché leaves ignite with real flame.
    “What a spectacle,” says Frue Holm, but even she claps. All the humans clap, because at least the wild neep has met a fitting end: roasted by flame, as all turnips must be in time.
    We neeps applaud as well, though more softly. We, too, have seen something that seems right and true—and we have learned from it, though it is not, I think, the lesson the Gartners would have us learn.
    * * *
    There is no hope now of Mads falling for the actress. This does not trouble me as much as I would have expected. The main fact, which had not occurred to me before, is that no wild thing like her could stand to have a man like Mads yapping at her heels. So I am left with only my Gartner, who sits impatiently while the drummer and the actress take their bows, nods to Frue Holm, and leaves the performers to pack up their stage. He does not leave a single krone for their trouble.
    “What strange nonsense,” he mutters.
    I follow him, my scheme in tatters. Now I am less prepared than ever to become Mads’ supper.
    All through the ride home, I run my roots across the stump where my finger once was, and I consider. How to be rid of Mads Poulson? How to transform myself into a wild neep like the one I saw on stage?
    That night, I smoke my last secret cigarette. And it does not escape me, as the smolder eats away at the paper tube, that my cigarettes are