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Read an Excerpt From And Side by Side They Wander by Molly Tanzer
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Read an Excerpt From And Side by Side They Wander by Molly Tanzer
An intergalactic art heist by a ragtag group of underqualified misfits. What could go wrong?
By Molly Tanzer
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Published on April 16, 2026
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We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from And Side by Side They Wander by Molly Tanzer, a space opera that meditates on the nature of love, life and the “culture of the copy”—out from Tordotcom Publishing on May 19th.
For three hundred years, humanity’s greatest works of art have been on loan at the Greenwood Museum. It was finally time for them to come home…but the alien curators were disinclined to return them.Force was out of the question. Earth’s government was clear: They were not going to press the issue. So, all we had was guile and hubris to fuel our little intergalactic art heist.My old friend Tarquin was our leader, but not the captain. That was Tchik-tchik, though whether Tchik-tchik was our insectoid pilot’s name or species is still unclear to me. Misora, with her extremely illegal biotech mods, was our muscle.Jack was there to hack the security systems of the biggest museum in the galaxy. He was a sensynth, a sentient synthetic being, and the most powerful machine intelligence on Earth uncorrupted by alien technology.My name is Fennel Tycho. I’d like to tell you I was there because of my expertise in Art History. Truth is, I was there because without me, Jack would not have agreed to go. He was notorious for being difficult to work with—but it was a mistake to think I could make things any easier.
1
There were five of us on the spaceship, more or less: Tarquin Lennox, Tchik-tchik, Arakachi Misora, Jack Kirby, and me.
Our destination was the Greenwood, a museum on the other side of our galaxy. Earth’s greatest works of art were currently on loan there, and had been for nearly three hundred years. We—humanity, I mean—had approved their removal. Unfortunately for us, the museum’s founders and curators, the Celerians, were disinclined to give them back. All available evidence led to the conclusion that they’d never actually intended to do so—at least not on any timeline other than their own.
Our options were limited. A show of force from Earth was impossible, laughable. Not because Celerian technology was unbelievably more advanced than our own, though it was, but because ours was built on theirs, using their techniques, their code, their proprietary materials. They’d reminded us of this when we’d objected to their refusal to return what was ours. It would be no trouble for them to completely and permanently disable our whole planet from across the galaxy. They offered to prove it, if we wanted to pursue the matter.
We chose not to.
The Celerians accused us of ingratitude, which wasn’t fair. We weren’t ungrateful. Humanity’s continued existence proved that. Back in the twenty-first century, the Celerians had helped us save ourselves from ourselves. In the scorching summer of 2037 they’d come in silver ships that looked exactly and nothing like we’d imagined in our science fictions. The same went for the people inside: like us, the Celerians were bipedal, minimally dimorphic, and warm blooded. Unlike us, they were covered in fine, lustrous gray fur and had prehensile tails, perfect for swinging through the trees they so loved.
They came in peace, they said, and with an offer: if we trusted them with the stewardship of Earth’s art, they would provide us with the solutions to our multifarious but solvable problems. They were preservationists, they said. They wanted to protect humanity’s legacy, for the benefit of the universe, and from our own recklessness.
Not all species are art-makers—at least not the visual arts, which the Celerians claimed was the rarest and most precious impulse of all. They had made it their mission to help those with the inclination. Art is a perishable thing, they said. We humans might marvel at our petroglyphs and pyramids, but in truth they have existed for only a moment of deep time. If we destroyed ourselves, even our more durable accomplishments would one day cease to exist. It would be as if they never were.
The Celerians could ensure their survival. They were a truly ancient species. They’d built their museum long before Earth’s Cambrian Explosion, and in all that time it had never come to any harm.
The arrangement wouldn’t last forever, not if we didn’t want it to. At least, that’s what they said. Once Earth was a safer place for our art—and our art-makers, those too, naturally—we could have it back. In the meantime, they would provide us with a universal vaccine, translation implants, an algae that fed on the plastics clogging our oceans, and the remarkable organic computers we called genesis trees. These biotechnological marvels were crucial to our species’ recovery. Not only did they act as carbon scrubbers with their enhanced photosynthesis, they could be programmed to provide clean energy, and grow just about anything from personal communication devices to replacement bones and organs. They could even be used for sustainable housing.
The Celerians would also provide us with synthetic reproductions of the art they wanted to borrow, compositionally identical to the originals. Functionally the same, they claimed, and as many copies as we wanted. Every museum in the world could have its very own The Birth of Venus, every city its own Obelisk of Theodosius. So could every collector—at least, those with enough influence make their desire known to the right people.
It was a tempting offer. Along with all the other problems facing Earth at the time, sea level rise was threatening the museums of New York, London, Paris. Many of the more famous works of art had already been relocated. It was increasingly difficult to keep even small spaces climate controlled and free of ever more aggressive molds and microbes.
After some debate, Earth’s leaders said yes.
The Celerians were delighted. They made their selections, gave us everything they promised, and disappeared, telling us to “get in touch” when we’d fixed things.
Well, we’d fixed things. It took a few centuries, but we got there. Mostly. By the Celerians’ own standards, our climate-stabilized planet, where poverty was only a memory, was finally safe for our population and our paintings, our monuments, our pottery, and our sculptures. When we proudly told them this, via the ansible they’d gifted us, the response was not what we expected.
They said no. Actually what they said, before the conversation deteriorated into threats, was that they had no immediate plans to visit our part of the galaxy anytime soon. That’s why a group of us decided if they wouldn’t come to us, we’d to go to them.
My old friend Tarquin was our expedition’s leader, but he wasn’t the captain. That was Tchik-tchik, a designation that seemed to refer to both the individual we were working with, and their species as a whole. It was their ship. Humanity had managed some interstellar travel, but our vessels were not yet capable of journeys of such distance.
I admit I found Tchik-tchik terrifying. They were the first alien I’d met, ever. I’d never even heard of the Tchik-tchik before this voyage. My reaction might have been mere xenophobia, but also, they were well over two meters tall, with an insect-like appearance: many arms, segmented body, clacking mandibles. The Tchik-tchik are not insects, which to my mind makes the similarities worse.
Misora was our “muscle,” as Tarquin put it, as if we were in an old heist movie. She was an ori-jin, a set of sextuplets folded into a single body using extremely illegal biotech, and an 8th dan in Goju-Ryu karate. I have no idea where Tarquin found her, but he had ever been an aristocrat and man of the world, and thus kept unusual company.
Amusingly, in manners and appearance, Misora was the least threatening person aboard. She was bubbly, tanned, and sported a bleach-blonde ponytail. She could, however, rip any of us apart, even when there was just one of her. I saw her working out a few times. She was pure muscle.
And then there was Jack.
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And Side by Side They Wander
Molly Tanzer
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And Side by Side They Wander
Molly Tanzer
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Jack was a sensynth, a sentient synthetic being who could interface with computer systems with a supercomputer’s speed and a human’s intuition. Most importantly, Jack had been constructed way back in the twenty-first century. He was the most powerful machine intelligence on Earth without any Celerian augments, which meant there was no worry our alien adversaries could brick him if they caught us.
My name is Fennel Tycho, and my role was much less exciting. If you recognize my name, especially in conjunction with Jack’s, you might guess what I was there to do. I was at one time Jack’s attaché, his liaison, his handler—though that term is a fraught one, given the scandal that led to my dismissal. Perhaps I shouldn’t assume you’ll be familiar with the entire affair, to use yet another uncomfortable double entendre.
This is my chance to tell my side of the story. Finally; I was not allowed to give interviews at the time. Or now, technically. Ah, well. Even if I wasn’t beyond the reach of the nondisclosure agreements I signed, I’m certainly past caring about them.
I realize I’ve begun in the middle of things. It’s difficult to know where to start. I can’t actually assume anything about who will find this recording, if anyone ever does. You might be a fellow human who already knows how we pawned our past for a shot at a future; you may be a Celerian, smiling at my naïveté. Or you might be some unknown-to-me race of starfarers, millennia from now, when all that remains of me is this tale to be deciphered. There won’t be any bones.
2
The Tchik-tchik vessel was all curves; no right angles or hard lines anywhere. The dark, subtly shimmering interior was made of a slick material that felt oily to my fingers. There were no adornments anywhere, no personal touches. What little furniture there was appeared to grow from the floor, though “floor” was a relative concept. Except in specific cases, the rooms and hallways had no up or down, not in the way I was accustomed to understanding those concepts. It was more like a big anthill in space. Tchik-tchik could climb and even hang upside down like a spider. We were issued gloves and booties that helped us cling to the walls, moving omnidirectionally when required. Even so, I never got used to the feeling of entering a gravitationally oriented room from the hallways. It always gave me a touch of nausea. I got turned around—literally—more than once.
I thought the vessel seemed small for traveling such long distances; then again, I had no frame of reference. We saw the cockpit, the mess, a common room, the cargo hold, the one bathroom that had been refitted for human needs, and our quarters—which Tchik-tchik explained were typically used for storage, not individual repose. “Tchik-tchik to fussing not, duty means to sleep around,” they said, gesturing down the hallway. It was always interesting communicating with Tchiktchik. Our translators didn’t work so well with their clacking clicking language. I was just grateful our rooms had beds, even if they were clearly repurposed shelves. Tchik-tchik clung to a wall when they slept.
Once we were settled, Tarquin summoned us to the common room. There were a few data pads on the big central table, and he’d already set up a projector, screen, and a small holo-generator.
We stood. There were no chairs. The Tchik-tchik just fold their legs up under themselves to sit.
Tarquin was wearing a tweed suit cut perfectly for his lean body. His robin’s-egg silk cravat accented the blue veins in his neck. “I expect you’re all wondering why I gathered you here today,” he said, his charming smile freshening up the moldy joke. “I know we’ve just arrived, and that our journey will take several weeks, but we’ve no time to lose.”
“You sound like you’re working up to telling us something bad,” said Jack. He was slouching against the wall, looking cool as always in his black leather jacket and jeans. “If there’s no time to lose, you’d best get on with it.”
Tarquin looked annoyed to be interrupted, especially by Jack. They’d never liked one another. “Patience, my automatic associate,” said Tarquin. Jack stiffened at this. Tarquin didn’t give him a chance to object. “This is just a mission briefing. It’s nothing bad.”
I wasn’t sure I believed him. In my experience, Tarquin always got very formal when he had to tell you something he knew you wouldn’t like.
Tarquin turned on the little projector. On the screen appeared the image of a serene-looking bronze head in a crown, its face covered in markings. “The Ife Head,” he said, and clicked through on his pad. “Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, Banksy’s Love Is in the Bin, Exekias’ black-figure amphora depicting Achilles slaying Penthesilea, Kahlo’s The Two Fridas, and the Flying Horse of Gansu.” He turned back to us. “As you know, our mission is to swap out certain works of art being held at the museum with Celerian copies. These six are what I was able to acquire. They weren’t easy or cheap to obtain, let me tell you.” He grinned, and I felt my stomach tighten. Tarquin was definitely softening us up for a blow. “Ironic, isn’t it? Their being so expensive, I mean. I suppose nowadays they’re nearly three hundred years old so of course the price people ask for them is completely mad.”
“Surely it’s just a drop in the bucket for Lennox Enterprises,” said Jack.
Tarquin got very quiet at this.
“Yeah, I thought we were going to bring back a bunch of stuff,” said Misora, after too long of a pause. “I mean, I knew we weren’t equipped to take back, like, Kinkaku-ji or the entire Terracotta Army. So why only these six?”
“Ah,” said Tarquin, “yes. You see…”
His hesitation finally clued me in to what Tarquin didn’t want to tell us. “Because Lennox Enterprises has nothing to do with this,” I said. “We’re on our own.”
All eyes were on Tarquin now. For once he didn’t like it, not one bit. “Look, this doesn’t change anything,” he said. “Not really.”
“Tell us more about the ‘not really’ part,” said Jack.
“Reduced cash flow has meant some compromises had to be made. Fewer works of art, and fewer resources than I’d hoped for. It’s nothing to worry about! I have several pieces of original Celerian technology for you to explore, Jack. And while I couldn’t find us a map of the museum, I did obtain an early blueprint.”
“‘An early blueprint’?” said Misora. “We are so fucked.”
“We are not fucked!” said Tarquin, a little too loudly. “This is going to work,” he continued, lowering his voice. “My shortsighted former colleagues and I may share a common genetic ancestor, but those clones have ever lacked our progenitor’s vision. I believe in this venture—I mean, look at me, I’m here, I’m on the ship with you. I didn’t just send you all out into the void with Tchik-tchik and hope for the best. I plan to succeed.”
It was a good speech. I almost believed him.
3
Back in the twenty-first century, as part of their pitch, the Celerians had shown Earth’s leaders their plans for the gallery that would display and honor humanity’s material culture, the physical objects that made up our past. It was beautiful, like all Celerian engineering, a graceful upward spiral reminiscent of the old Guggenheim Museum, contained within a towering genesis tree, larger than any that grew on Earth. Individual branches would house our architectural marvels, whereas smaller works would be displayed in the trunk, prehistory down close to the roots, the then-modern age at the crown.
It sounded simple enough to navigate—or it might have been, if we’d had a map. Unfortunately, Tarquin’s blueprint turned out to be even worse than I’d imagined. It wasn’t even a complete file, just a screenshot.
I didn’t have much to say as the team began discussing what they could do with what we had. This wasn’t my purview.
I’d planned to get my Ph.D. in Art History and teach. Painting was my area, portraiture specifically. It was the lips. Thick or thin, pursed, pouting, or quirked, they were always where I found the deepest hints at meaning.
Some people say it’s the eyes that draw one into a John Singer Sargent painting. I say it’s the mouths—just look at Lady Agnew’s. There is a secret, explicit and occluded, in her subtle smile. Caravaggio’s Bacchus intrigues us with his expression. Vermeer’s milkmaid is speaking something gently, perhaps reverently, into the quiet of an empty room. My thesis was tentatively titled “When Soul Meets Soul on Lovers’ Lips: The Silent Language of the Mouth in European Portraiture, 1499–1999,” and I had hoped to publish after I defended it.
Then my little brother died.
I couldn’t believe it when they called me. Burnet couldn’t be dead, he was the most alive person in the world. I was content in libraries. He climbed mountains, explored caverns, took submersibles to the bottom of the sea. He’d longed to go to space—a prospect that, ironically, had never appealed to me.
He’d been free-climbing the ruin of a skyscraper in what used to be New York City when he fell. His citizen tracker alerted the paramedics, but he was dead when they found him.
After his funeral I couldn’t concentrate on anything—not researching, not writing, and definitely not grading. The endless cycle of the academic year felt depressing rather than comfortable; those painted mouths had nothing more to say to me. So I finished out the semester and went home, ostensibly to be with my parents as we grieved.
Rural Long Island is much as it has ever been, except without the appeal of being a train ride away from a thriving metropolis. I helped my mother in the garden and my father with the cooking. I made raspberry jam from the thicket growing around the trunk of our treehouse. Fine ways to spend a day, but I wasn’t fine. I was going through the motions of a life without living one.
About six months after Burnet’s death, just when I was really starting to spiral, Tarquin called me to offer his condolences. I agreed to meet him at a restaurant he’d taken me to many times back when we were both in school together in New Boston.
I said I’d take the solar train; he’d scoffed and sent a whirlybird. It had been an age since I’d been in one—probably since the last time I’d seen Tarquin. Our friendship had introduced me to the finer things in life such as private conveyances, which are widely disdained as an affectation of the wealthy. My father grumbled about what the neighbors would say. When I asked what neighbors he meant he switched to grumbling about the disturbance to my mother’s garden.
As far as I could tell, nary a pea tendril was ruffled when the pilot touched down.
I dressed up for the meeting, or at least, I tried to. It had been months since my last haircut, or even since I’d really looked in the mirror. My face looked strange to me, touched up with mascara and blush, and the dress felt constrictive and weird. But I felt a little flicker of something when the black-clad pilot greeted me as “Miss Tycho” and opened the door for me, like my old self had taken a quick breath after holding it for so long.
The whirlybird touched down a few blocks from Quelque Chose, an exclusive but unpretentious French Revival restaurant. The interior was lovely: sparsely decorated and jungle-lush with plants, with huge windows that let in lots of light. Quelque Chose had always been too expensive for me—Earth was post-scarcity, but that never guaranteed gourmet dining for all. Tarquin, however, could afford the finer things, like the old-fashioned yet still stylish gray flannel suit he was wearing.
When I walked in, he was already seated and sipping a martini from a dewy glass. Always a gentleman, he stood and pulled out the bamboo chair for me.
“Would you like a cocktail?” he asked, as he signaled the waiter. I shrugged. He rolled his eyes and said, “She’ll also have a martini—with extra olives, or she’ll steal mine.”
The silent waiter asked me with his eyes if this was right. I nodded.
Tarquin looked good; better than when I’d last seen him. He’d put on a bit of weight, and was merely pale, not wan. There were fewer lines around his pouty lips. He looked happy, and I said so.
“I am happy,” he said, pleased—and then added, “and I’m as surprised as you are about that.”
I took a sip of my cocktail. It was frosty and dry with just a snap of salt. I observed, but was unmoved by its perfection. “I didn’t say I was surprised,” I said.
“But you are. And that’s entirely fair,” said Tarquin, as some kind of pâté was set before us. I hadn’t seen a menu. I assumed, correctly, that my companion had already done the ordering. “I got a job, Fennel! And I’m here to offer you one—or, well, to tell you to apply for one. You’ll get it. I already told them about you.”
This was typical Tarquin: magnanimous, scattered, elusory. Arrogant.
“Tell me about your job,” I said, “and then tell me about the one you think I want.”
“You’ll want it,” he said. “It’s at Lennox Enterprises.” “That much I’d deduced, given the whole happy thing.”
Lennox Enterprises is, or depending on when you’re listening to this, was, the oldest and only corporation left on Earth. Founded by trillionaire Kirby Lennox in 2029, the company weathered the crises of the twenty-first century and the social upheavals of the twenty-second to thrive relatively unmolested in the stable twenty-third and twenty-fourth. It wasn’t technically a corporation anymore—shareholder dividends and corporate law have been a thing of the past for a very long time—but Lennox Enterprises was allowed to operate much like they always had. The board of directors was entirely made up of Lennox’s clones, as the original Kirby Lennox specified in his will, so there was a lot of legal uncertainty, and lack of precedent for a judicial dissolution.
Tarquin wasn’t a clone. He was a Child of Lennox, and one with an impeccable pedigree. He was 100 percent Lennox stock, with genetics authenticated all the way back to Kirby Lennox’s original pluripotent stem cells. Not all Children can make such a claim. Not all of them want to. Tarquin was exceptionally proud of his lineage, and had always possessed a massive chip on his shoulder regarding the clones, who tended to regard Children with suspicion, and vice versa. Securing himself a position at the company was a triumph, as well as a kind of vindication, given how he’d always viewed Lennox Enterprises with the entitlement and bitterness of an exiled prince.
“What’s the job?” I asked as he preened. I hoped if I kept him talking he wouldn’t notice I was just pushing my food around my plate. It was delicious, but none of it held any savor for me.
“I’m head of the effort to get the Celerians to talk about the return of our art.”
This conversation took place about four years before I am recording this. At that time, the repatriation of Earth’s material culture had been a deciding issue in the most recent global election. The candidate in favor of letting the matter go had won in a landslide. Public opinion had largely turned against the importance of “authenticity” when it came to art, but there were people who still cared about the fate of the real The Night Watch, original Rothkos, Sesshū’s ink paintings, and so on, according to Tarquin. They’d turned to the private sector—specifically, to Lennox Enterprises.
Kirby Lennox was just as arrogant and sociopathic as a typical twenty-first-century trillionaire, but he’d fancied himself a philanthropist on the model of Rockefeller or Carnegie. Lennox built hospitals, funded schools, and was a dedicated patron of the arts. He spent much of his substantial fortune safeguarding works that had been passed over by the Celerians. In the centuries since his passing, Lennox Enterprises had continued this mission, at first by helping improve Earth enough that we could get back what we’d given away, and now by pressing on with the appeal that the Celerians had not received with generosity.
It was a big job, and a prestigious one. I raised my glass to toast my friend.
“Congratulations,” I said, performing the enthusiasm I knew I should feel. “I assume the job you had in mind for me is related to this?”
He smirked. “Nope,” he said, and signaled to the waiter that we’d like another round of drinks. “Saddle up, cowgirl. You’re headed west, to the Great Mycelium. Turns out, it can talk.”
Excerpted from And Side by Side They Wander, copyright © 2026 by Molly Tanzer.
The post Read an Excerpt From <i>And Side by Side They Wander</i> by Molly Tanzer appeared first on Reactor.
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