You are listening to another Clarks World magazine podcast. I'm your host and narrator Kate Baker.

Welcome to the second story for the month of January. A whole new year, a whole new issue,

and it's all thanks to you. So thank you again for subscribing, for telling a friend, for going to

patreon.com forward slash Clarksworld or ClarksworldCitizens.com.

There are a myriad ways that you can support us, bringing you this wonderful fiction each and every month,

the podcast, the art, the nonfiction, and paying the staff what it takes to put it all together.

We simply cannot do this without you.

Our second story for the month is Down We Go Gently and is by M.L. Clark.

ML Clark is a writer, editor, and translator originally from Canada, now based in Medellín,

Colombia. Clark's science fiction appears in a range of venues including analog, Clark's

World, FNSF, and Lightpeed, book and other media reviews appear

in strange horizons. And if you like what you hear, we have a ton of stories here. A planet

full of sorrows, lost and found, love unflinching at low to zero G, mercy and the mollusk, nine

words for loneliness in the language of the umau.

So, my dear listener, I hope that you can sit back, relax, and let me tell you.

A story.

Harold didn't understand the point of merchant streets the first time his father took him

Portsy to learn the tricks of planetary trade. Every module on Goliath was essential, seamlessly

integrated and compact. But the wet, gritty material reeking of biodecae that clung to his boots on polluto had a sprawling geometry,

and everything that extended out from either side of the main throughway was sloppy, haphazard, and inefficient.

If he fell into this muck, Harrell wasn't convinced he would ever get out of it again.

It was strange to both hate and be

...