I’m a fraud.

That said, you know half of what you need to know about me. I’ll tell you the rest now, and it’ll be the truth. I’m an honest fraud.

Damkina came up with the idea.

We’d known each other as kids, me and Damkina, we grew up in the same House. The Caretaker, old Samash, had reproached me in the past, saying, “Wherever she sets her feet, you follow, Nergal. You’re not a person, you’re a shadow.”

In the kibbutz, exclusive affection is frowned upon; everyone must be friends, collaborative, ready to extend a hand to the inhabitants of the other Houses, prone to ask for help without fear of unfamiliar faces, glimpsed at the canteen or during linen-carding.

I prefer to handle things on my own and help only those who have nice faces; the others fall into my web of words and weave, wash the dishes, sow the vegetable garden in my place.

There was a place that attracted the kids of every House. Even if you had just started walking and were still stumbling, you wanted to go see the Ship—what us kids liked to call this particular hill with a mysterious cave cut into its side. The young ones climbed along the steep slope, dangled from the flagpoles, collected magnetic splinters, and with those, amused themselves by dragging other pebbles along; the older ones competed to hop on the plank—a branch stretched over the dark precipice that led to the cargo hold. But only Damkina entered the hold. Among us Green House kids, she’s always been the most audacious.

She made a rope ladder, stealing the waste from the hemp process, tied it to a large qur root, and then descended into darkness, conquering the interior of the Ship. I arrived soon after. No one else followed us; they were all afraid.

The hold was vast, well-lit, covered with fine white sand, caressed by a lake of clear water that became turquoise at noon.

The kibbutz, in the period between Famenoth and Mesore, suffers from a lack of water. The tarpaulins for nighttime condensation collection aren’t enough; the wells dry up. I asked Samash, “Little Father, why don’t we take the water from the Ship? There’s a lot of water down there.”

He’d answered me: “Son, that’s accursed water. It’s as salty as the goat meat on the feast of Tammuz. You need to avoid it.”

And he gave me the stink eye, arthritic hands shaking, but I couldn’t stay away from Damkina. She was my water, and Damkina couldn’t stay away from the Ship for very long.

We spent entire afternoons diving into the liquid expanse, swimming from one end of the lake to the other.

Creatures of every kind lived in the water: red and black ribbons, calves that grazed the submerged prairies, golden-striped trays, pink chandeliers.

The rocky bottom was covered with velvety green-and-blue threads through which silver needles chased one another. Deep, dark crevices appeared here and there, like entrances leading to the center of the planet. One time, we saw a greenish glow coming from the chasms and perceived the movement of an immeasurable body shifting a huge amount of water. Its waves bumped our immersed bodies, pushing us far like twigs in the wind; we swam toward the shore and sat in silence on the sand, hugging our knees as our teeth chattered. Not from the cold, I assure you.

We often lay on the beach to dry out under the sun. The subterranean coolness made it less intense. In those moments, Damkina spoke, weaving fantastical stories about the cave . . .

“We come from the stars and we happened by chance on Sargon. The Ship is the wreck of a spaceship; our ancestors were exploring this galaxy, five thousand years ago, when their spacecraft broke down. To fix it, they approached this planet, but the ship fell out of stationary orbit and started to dive, increasing in speed minute by minute. Some, to save themselves, wanted to abandon their companions, unhook a part of the tail to resume altitude; others, instead, tried to avoid the worst and maneuvered it to land here, in the desert. Those who attempted the rescue are the kibbutz’s ancestors, the legislators of the community; those who thought only of themselves are the ancestors of the townspeople, the selfish inhabitants of Erech.”

I knew these were lies. Or maybe not. How would you prove it? They were well-told lies.

The time spent there made us bold. Exploring the hold, we had discovered that the main lake, through a series of side galleries, could be accessed by some secondary pools. Little light filtered through the slits in the rock above and transformed the pools into dark, mysterious bodies of water. Here we found the pincushions. They nestled inside of small rocky cavities under the water’s surface. When I tried to extract one with my knife, it broke into pieces; that’s how we discovered that inside, in the middle of disgusting grayish matter, there was a five-pointed star-shaped egg, soft and fragile, of a beautiful color like that of the sun at dusk.

The kibbutz’s inhabitants are always looking for new sources of food, so we tried to feed some of the animals of the Undersea to old Tza, Samash’s pet sarg, who scarfed down anything that was edible. When we put the pincushion star in his bowl, he licked it with his thin tongue and devoured it at once; immediately afterwards he began to hop and roll onto his back, legs in the air, playing like a puppy. Finally, after being silent for twenty years, as Samash told me, he started to sing the pleasant, painful lullaby of the sargs.

“They sing only when their hearts overflow with joy,” the Little Father explained to me.

People came from all the Houses to hear the sarg’s song. Tza sang for three days straight.

“Old Tza truly seems like he’s in paradise,” I blurted out, while I was lying down on the beach of the hold together with Damkina.

“The reason is that the pincushions spend all their time thinking, in there, in their dark puddles,” she began. “They think and think because they don’t have any distractions; they’ve been doing it for millennia. Therefore they’ve developed all sorts of concepts, deepened each kind of philosophical system, analyzed every mental category.”

With the sand prodding my back, the sun warming me, and Damkina speaking to me, I would have liked to sing like Tza.

“The intense meditative work of the pincushions has turned into an amino acid,” Damkina went on, moving her hands around in the air to sketch the atomic form that she was inventing. “The chain of amino acids has codified a protein, which is the main component of the stars, and thus the pincushions store the enormity of their thought in a comfortable and compact form.”

While Damkina spoke, our tanned shoulders touched, and though I knew the depth of her navel, the shape of her breast, the curve of her hips, the hair that covered her sex like thin algae on a round rock, I felt more naked than I was. I jumped up and dove again. The cold water turned off my thoughts.

It seems, sometimes, that the wind brings the stories, along with winged seeds that fly in the desert and sprout in the most unlikely places. In the heads of the wealthy citizens of Erech, they sprout the desire for pincushion eggs, and so new faces started circulating in the kibbutz.

The outsiders were convinced that eating the gelatinous stars would give them original thoughts; not extravagant ideas or dream visions but rather strokes of genius, such that when one thinks, the others are open-mouthed, applaud, and offer prizes of money, of attention, and say that the thinker has advanced humanity by twenty years.

The townspeople considered themselves more advanced than us; they were rude, nervous, sizing up me and Damkina, acting like they were God’s gift to Tammuz. But only we were able to get them what they wanted, in exchange for a nice bag full of money.

Usually, we picked them up as they strolled unhappily near the Ship; they had gotten nothing from the other kibbutz inhabitants except bread, salt, and fruit—gifts due to guests. Damkina was very good at haggling, making the townspeople believe that the pincushions were rare, that getting to one was a heroic undertaking, and she never delivered an entire star, always half, or two arms, to confirm the difficulty of the task. The other half of the star was sold to the next dupe.

Dealing with the townspeople was amusing but also tiring; they had difficulty following a few simple instructions. One absent-minded biologist insisted on seeing the place where the pincushions lived, promising us ten thousand laz. At first glance, we figured it was harmless, so five thousand in advance and we lowered him into the hold, with the warning not to touch anything, not to take samples, not to insert fingers or objects into the crannies. Well, that idiot managed to get bitten by a ribbon when he dipped his stupid feet into the main lake. How the idiot screeched!

We brought him back limping and half-paralyzed to his helipod; he gulped down all sorts of antidotes from the vehicle’s first aid kit, but his leg was turning blue. We reluctantly had to call Samash and Nin, the caretakers of the Green House, who were able to stop the infection.

The Little Father stared at me for a long time with his owl eyes, without saying anything. We told him that the idiot from the city had been bitten by a scorpion. The biologist saved his skin, got his great spoonful of ideas, and gave us the rest of what we were owed. Ten thousand laz!

“Where do we hide the money?”

It wasn’t a dumb question, since in the kibbutz, money means very little. Mostly, you barter what you have for what you need, the community provides basic subsistence, and no one feels the need to have what he doesn’t use.

“We put it in a safe place,” Damkina answered. “The nest of forks. When we get to a million laz, we leave here.”

“Leave? Where?”

“To see the world. There are a lot of places to explore outside of the kibbutz.”

“We don’t need that.”

“I want to see Erech, buy a helipod, and get to the slopes of the Tramonto Mountains.”

“They’re clouds, not mountains.”

“The clouds are in your head, Nergal.”

I looked at Damkina and wondered who she really was; after many years spent side by side, she had never spoken to me about such desires. She was resolute, almost trembling at the prospect of abandoning the kibbutz; I felt her confident anxiety about the future like the sharp smell of ar berries crushed in a mortar, and I felt as small as a berry. After that, there were no more stories on the beach.

Of course, we continued to fish the pincushions and sell them to the townspeople. She wanted me to accompany her to every client, but for some reason that had escaped me, the carefreeness had abandoned us both and, despite much effort, we couldn’t recover it.

I feared the inevitable disinterest that at a certain age turns you away from the brothers and sisters that have grown up with you, in the same House. Marriages between people raised in the same House are very rare; maybe due to the fact that they’ve rubbed elbows for a long time, that when you reach a certain age, having pissed together is a cause for shame, not love.

Damkina started going around holding Sin’s hand, that sucker of the Yellow House whose hair looked like a diarrheal camel had shat on his head. Then one evening, around the fire, I sat next to Tishtrya and kissed her. I knew that Tish was after me, since she’d flirted with me when we were on duty together in the kitchen.

However, one time when a townsperson appeared in search of stars, Damkina and I came to an agreement again.

We soon noticed a strange phenomenon: once tasted, the pincushion stars became obsessions, tormenting the eaters and making them crave a second bite.

Many townspeople returned to the kibbutz with anguished eyes, mean-looking, more restless than before, because they hadn’t known what they were missing; now they knew and wanted more. It was the right time to raise prices. I divided a single star into five thread-like parts, then each portion into fragments as small as a flax seed. I finally enclosed this microscopic amount in a sagyz pod. Price: five thousand laz.

Unfortunately, all of this coming and going of the townspeople alarmed the Caretakers. They understood that something unusual was happening; rumors circulated of illicit trade, underhanded activity. Damkina and I had educated and properly scared the townspeople: they had to shut up or their ration of pincushion eggs would be totally cut off. Some, though, were dissatisfied with the modest quantity that they could buy; they were fighting with each other, there was even a fight in the kibbutz canteen, two townspeople were stabbed, and only the intervention of the Caretakers stopped them from killing each other. I was passing that neighborhood by chance and Samash gestured threateningly at me, as he used to do when I was a kid and he was promising me a spanking and punishment.

One day, I saw Sin walking ten steps behind Damkina, an abandoned dog in search of caresses; that same day, I had broken up with Tish and her vanilla scent, and I was so happy that I went straight to the hold for a swim. Along the road I passed four approaching helicopters, a blacker and larger version than our helipods. They landed in the field between the Hills of Tammuz, discharging a multitude of black and chitinous humans, armed with a flaming rostrum; they obeyed an unarmed man who gave his orders by blinking.

I felt unease rising up from my toes to my fingertips and up to my tongue. I ran to the hold and found Damkina, who had just caught a load of pincushions; I counted twelve overflowing nets.

Those dangerous insect townspeople had come for the stars and Damkina wanted to hand them over in exchange for more money than she’d ever asked before.

“It’s not right,” I stopped her, putting myself between her and the ladder; I was shaking because, for the first time, I was standing up to Damkina. “The townspeople have too many ideas, all ugly and dangerous.”

She laughed.

“Do you think they’ll be satisfied with your alms? Damkina, those are people used to taking what they want by force. Do you ever wonder what the people do when they return to the city? What ideas they’ve gotten? And if the stars inspire hateful thoughts, foul actions, even . . . crimes, or the will to overpower other human beings?”

Damkina took a pincushion from a net, opened it with her knife, divided the star, and ate half under my terrified eyes. Now I understood what had changed, understood where the idea of leaving the kibbutz had come from, to see the city, to reach the mountains.

“You can eat it, too, Nergal, taste it,” she said, putting the other half of the star in the palm of her hand.

“No!” I backed away disdainfully.

She picked up the nets, lashed them together with a rope, and headed toward the ladder. She then turned to look at me as one looks at a beautiful and distant place, where one was happy a long time ago.

My heart in turmoil, I presented myself to Samash.

“Little Father, I have a confession to make.”

“Better late than never,” he muttered. “Speak, guilty shadow.”

The Caretakers summoned the kibbutz’s inhabitants, and explained that our quiet life was threatened by the presence of evil people; together we opened the Tammuz Gorge and we hid in the underground shelters. Throughout the night, Tammuz’s breath passed over the Gorge, and the day after, everything in the kibbutz and around it was covered in kefer, very fine sand. Our farming machinery had been protected but the strangers’ hovercraft and the gears of their weapons were saturated with tiny white particles; every mechanism was clogged. The townspeople were forced to return to the city on foot.

I turned to the Ship and discovered that the sand had almost completely filled it, the hold, the beach; the lake didn’t exist anymore. I went to the Green House with a sinking feeling. Nin, the Little Mother, told me that Damkina had been there, taken some food, and left. I looked for the nest egg in the nest of forks, five hundred thousand laz were there, exactly half of what we had accumulated. My half.

So, now you know the truth, the pure truth, because I can’t make up stories. I can cheat the people, I’m so good at deceiving that I scammed myself, I cheated myself. I thought I was fishing and selling pincushion eggs for money; instead, I did it for her. Only for her.

Now I lie down on the white sand on top of the Ship and feel cold. The sharp granules irritate my skin. I tried to dig and I found gray, greasy, dull water. Sometimes Tishtrya comes to see me; at night we join in silence, during the day we don’t even glance at each other. But Samash looks at me worriedly.

One morning he calls me into the icebox, with the excuse of helping to repair the insulation; he uncovers a pot full of frozen barley and pulls out a small metal tin. Inside, still well-preserved, is a whole pincushion.

“I bought it from one of the first strangers, to try to understand what you were planning,” he explains to me.

My eyes fill with tears.

What can the eggs reveal to me that I don’t already know? I should have thought first, understood first, tasted them with her.

The tears fall on the pincushion and its black spikes move. It’s still alive; the salt water from my eyes has woken it up.