The Devil's Nebula by Eric Brown

phar day and the ceremony was due to start an hour after dawn.
    Across the clearing, she heard the door of a hut scrape open. She looked back to see the small shape of her sister, Hahta, squeeze through the gap and hurry across to her.
    “Phar day!” Hahta cried with excitement.
    Maatja smiled with feigned pleasure: it would not do to let anyone, not even her trusted little sister, know that she was not as overjoyed at the prospect of phar day as were the rest of her people.
    They sat side by side, cross-legged, in the warming light of the sun.
    “Are you hungry, Maatja?”
    “Of course,” she lied.
    Yesterday her people had run out of dried phar, so today the Harvester excreted fresh phar – a thick, milky fluid that, over the course of a few hours, would set solid in the heat of the day. This was what her people ate, the staple that sustained their life in the jungle here on World.
    All the people, that was, with the exception of Maatja.
    “I can’t wait!” Hahta was excited. “Isn’t phar day the best of all?”
    Maatja smiled. “It is.”
    Over the years she had worked hard at concealing the fact that she did not eat the phar – or, more correctly, that she ate the phar and then later, in the jungle, vomited it back up.
    Thanks to the Outcast she had met, many years ago, she was unlike the other people of the fissure.
    Hahta said, “I heard mummy and daddy talking, last night.”
    Maatja looked across at her sister, a smaller, thinner version of herself; brown limbs, a small, pointed face and, long sun-bleached hair. “Talking about what?”
    Hahta beamed. “Daddy might be going away,” she said.
    Maatja’s heart leapt with alarm. “What exactly did they say?”
    Hahta shrugged. “Just that mummy must prepare herself and that daddy was doing his duty.”
    “But was daddy a Chosen?” Maatja asked, desperate to know.
    From time to time, adults left the fissure people. They left the huts and trekked into the jungle, looking further afield for berry bushes and fruit trees. Always these people returned, after days or weeks. However, the Chosen made their way down river and never returned.
    Maatja felt sickness grip her stomach as Hahta replied with a shrug, “I don’t know.”
    “But what did they say!”
    “I didn’t hear everything, Maatja! Just that daddy was going away and that mummy had to prepare herself. Then I was so tired I went to sleep.”
    Anger or fear must have shown on Maatja’s face, as Hahta peered at her and said, “But wouldn’t you be happy, Maatja, if father was one of the Chosen?”
    She fashioned a smile. “Of course. It’s just that... I would have liked them to tell me, that’s all.”
    Hahta beamed. “They will tell us, if he is a Chosen! Oh...” she clapped her hands together in delight, “oh, wouldn’t that be wonderful?”
    It was at times like this that Maatja felt very much apart from all the other fissure people.
    “Wonderful,” she echoed, without enthusiasm.
    Sometimes the Weird came to the clearing and pronounced: they would be taking this man or that woman – and these people would be the Chosen and, on the appointed day, they would descend into the fissure and take the raft downriver to join the Weird in their lair.
    And they would never be seen again.
    To her people, this was a thing to be celebrated.
    Maatja appeared to be alone in thinking that it was a thing of horror which, soon, might be happening to her own father.
    Behind them, across the clearing, hut doors were opening and her people were stirring, leaving their huts and stretching in the red light of the sun.
    Their mother called across the clearing, “Maatja! Hahta! Here at once!”
    They rose and hurried across to their hut. Outside every other hut, families were gathering. A murmur of expectation filled the clearing.
    Leah and Rahn, the Elders – even though they were only a little older than Maatja’s parents – stepped from their hut and smiled around the gathering. This was the