Clarkesworld, May 2026
“Conquerors” unfolds across a single Reunion Day in a far-future Earth where humanity has split into two distinct cultures: Grounders, who tend the planet’s restored ecosystems from communal settlements, and Spacers, who crew the ships pushing outward through the solar system. Every four years the clans gather at a starport Welcoming to exchange gene-kin greetings, share reports, and feast together — a ritual that is equal parts celebration and barely contained clash of civilizations.
The story is told through two focal characters. Mayzelle is a Grounder clan organizer, warm-hearted and exhausted, devoted to the idea that the bonds holding Spacers and Grounders together must be maintained. Her fourteen-year-old bondchild Rayet is everything Mayzelle is not in temperament: spiky, combative, fiercely principled, and constitutionally incapable of biting her tongue. From the opening pages — Mayzelle dragging a reluctant Rayet away from her beloved marine ecopod and into her Reunion Day robe — their dynamic is established as the story’s emotional engine. Rayet regards the Spacers with contempt, seeing them as destroyers who trample ecosystems, slaughter animals, and treat Earth like a curiosity to be plundered. The Spacers, for their part, regard the Grounders as soft, sheltered, and self-righteous.
The Reunion itself is a comedy of escalating friction. Spacers burn a briar patch with a rocktorch, brawl through the Conclave Hall, harass cloned marmosets, and raid the seedwine. Their ringleader is Captain Forth — loud, drunk, pugnacious, and perversely self-deprecating, mocking her own crew as loudly as she mocks the Grounders. A confrontation at the feast leads Rayet to challenge Forth to witness the work she actually does: maintaining a delicate marine habitat, carefully calibrated to achieve ecological equilibrium. The challenge backfires when the jostling Spacer crowd smashes her console and clouds the pod with a trophic imbalance, threatening the entire ecosystem she has spent years nurturing.
Threading through the day’s chaos is the anticipated arrival of Admiral Biswas, Mayzelle’s great-uncle and the legendary first of the Spacers, who has missed four consecutive reunions. He arrives not with the fleet but alone, in a private shuttle, slipping quietly to the ecopod vale before dawn. It is there that Rayet finds him the next morning — a small, white-haired, mild-mannered old man who has already repaired her habitat using expert ecological knowledge. The encounter dismantles Rayet’s every expectation. Biswas is not the bold conqueror of mythology but a shy, introverted man who loved ecofarming and never wanted to go to space at all.
Mayzelle’s subsequent revelation is the story’s conceptual heart. In the era after the Long Decline and the collapse of the Age of Cities, the restless, aggressive personalities who in earlier centuries would have explored continents or colonized new lands had nowhere to go on a carefully tended Earth. Biswas, understanding this as an ecological problem — excess energy disrupting a balanced system — gave those people a frontier. Space conquest was not ambition; it was planetary management. He created the Spacers to protect the Grounders.
Rayet sees it with sudden delight: the greatest work of ecoculture in history was not a marine habitat but a whole civilization, engineered to find equilibrium. The story closes with mother and daughter watching Biswas lead his flock — rough, rambunctious, adapted to the void — off toward their next adventure: creatures not bad, Rayet now understands, but simply shaped for a different habitat.
Wolven’s prose is energetic and comic in its surface texture while doing serious speculative work beneath. The Spacer/Grounder divide reads as a pointed riff on perennial tensions between conservation and expansion, rootedness and restlessness, tending and conquering — with the story’s elegant reversal insisting that these drives are not opposites but complementary features of a single human ecosystem, managed across generations by the least likely of leaders.
Nick Wolven lives in the Bronx. His science fiction has appeared in a wide range of publications, and is forthcoming in Asimov’s, F&SF, Analog, and various anthologies. He sometimes contributes reviews to the Washington Independent Review of Books.