Before the start of market day, the Market unfurls its ribbons in the tender light of dawn. Today, it’s nestled in a seaweed forest on an unnamed planet. Yesterday, it was hidden behind an asteroid bright with unmined ore. Tomorrow, it will be elsewhere, finding the place it fits among stars and galaxies and superclusters.

The stalls are full of artifacts from across the universe. So many wonders—discarded spoon-ears and vine-laced tea cozies, emotion cubes, visions of the future wound up in string.

Together, these artifacts give life to the Market, and the Market thinks, schemes, decides, dreams, and wanders.

* * *

Kalive dashes into the Market as soon as the sticky, translucent gates open. Her backpack is filled with precious gems. She doesn’t know what the Market will want, only that she will give whatever it asks.

She nears a table of emerald gears.

“I need to change my past,” she says out loud, because she doesn’t know that the Market can read her mind.

With one undulating motion, the table presents her with an emerald gear-thing. Underneath, a paper says, “Two years of your future for two seconds of your past.”

“I will pay it,” she says.

The Market knows she has already paid much–in grief, in guilt, in true remorse–so the Market will help her, if it can.

The gear twists. She chooses where to go.

She doesn’t transport herself to the flyer accident (how stupid she was, to fly without a license, so young and filled with hubris), but to the hour before, the choice. Into her past self, she pushes her memories. Her younger self hops back from the flyer, trembling.

Back in the Market, Kalive’s scars disappear, and new scars form.

She exits, shaking, her relief and the strangeness of a newly-remembered life melded together. The Market can change her past, but it cannot take away her guilt.

The Market tucks two years of the future into an emerald gear.

* * *

Tanler saunters into the Market wearing the brocaded coat that was awarded to him upon his 20th year as a professor. He browses the offerings, unimpressed by the skyful of ribbons or the stalls that stretch out forever.

Golden beetle rinds glisten on lace tablecloths. Water-bundles swirl before him. Clockwork eye-legs skitter over tables lush with iridescent foam.

“Tell me of star civilizations,” he says.

The Market can see Tanler’s pride, his arrogance, the research papers he has written, the awards he has won, the ideas he has stolen from his students (who were so fragile, so ripe for plundering). His desire is not for truth, only fame and academic splendor.

The Market leads him farther into the stalls, until he is lost. Tanler will never learn of the Tassel-minds of the planet Iodol, who gallop with their tessellated legs over lime-soaked mountains, or the reeds of Mir, who sing discordant melodies when the rains run silver. He will never know how to coax the fox-like creatures of Zin from their dens, or the right gift to offer an Alodian.

Frustrated, Tanler scatters emerald gears, and one catches on his coat, melding to his hand. His screams are swallowed by the gears that fly at his face and attach to his mouth and nose. Soon, he is covered completely, his skin a living mess of metal teeth.

A gear whispers in his ear. “Give me your fine coat.”

He shucks it off quickly.

The gears dump him outside the gate, then detach. The imprints of their teeth will stay with him for days. His rage will stay with him for longer. Although he’ll spend years searching, he’ll never find the Market (or his beautiful coat) again.

Emerald gears fold up the coat and set it among the wares.

* * *

Yuel finds the Market by accident. The only thing he has to trade are three buttons.

The Market shuffles through Yuel’s brain. He is a poet, his mind a symphony of words.

A sign from a stall unfurls, asking what Yuel wants, but he doesn’t answer. He doesn’t even think of something he desires, so the Market cannot glean the information from his mind.

Instead, Yuel wanders.

First, Yuel finds the holy anchor, which gleams wicked in the sunlight. The Market brings to him the whispering orb, the tusk of a discarded spaceship, the memory of a starfish submerged in an ocean thick with waves.

Yuel is awed by these artifacts; the Market can see wonder blossom in his brain. But when Yuel speaks, it is not to ask for an exchange of goods.

He turns to the emerald gears. “What is it that you want?”

No one has ever asked the Market this question.

The Market exists to trade one thing for another—to give, to take. It has never had the capacity for introspection. Yuel’s question is like asking a pond to reflect itself. The Market is an amalgam of disparate desires and sentient ripples, so much joyous aliveness. For the first time, the Market wonders if it could be more.

The Market remains silent, but Yuel doesn’t seem to mind.

A poem starts to form in Yuel’s mind, bright as seafoam and just as ephemeral. Even the Market cannot know what the poem will be, for it shifts too much in Yuel’s brain, a thing not yet created.

Yuel pulls three buttons from his coat and places them on the gears. In winter, he’ll suffer from the cold, from cruel and chilling wind, for on his poet’s salary, he cannot afford to replace them.

The buttons are gifts. He asks nothing in return.

* * *

It’s the end of market day. The ribbons wrap up the stalls. The translucent gates close.

To barter is transactional, the only mode the Market has ever known. What does it mean, to give, to ask nothing in return? The Market does not understand, but perhaps in time, it might.

The Market wanders across the universe, cradling three buttons in the center of itself, like three beating hearts.

* * *

Ⓒ Beth Goder