Stars and Gods: A Collection of Fact, Fiction & Wit
Author: Larry Niven
Date: 2011-08-16 00:00:00+00:00
Description: Larry Niven is the New York Times bestselling author of such classic science fiction novels as Ringworld and Destiny's Road. One of his previous collections, N-Space, was lauded by the Houston Post as "Outstanding . . . hours of entertainment," while Publishers Weekly called it "A must for science fiction fans." A follow-up volume, Playgrounds of the Mind, was praised by Kirkus Reviews as "Grand Entertainment." Niven returns with the sequel to his most recent collection, Scatterbrain, which gathers an equally engaging assortment of Niven's latest work, all in one captivating volume. Here are c
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group
Rights: All rights reserved

STARS AND GODS

TOR BOOKS BY LARRY NIVEN

Destiny’s Road

Ringworld’s Children

Rainbow Mars

The Draco Tavern

N-Space

Playgrounds of the Mind

Scatterbrain

Stars and Gods

TOR BOOKS BY LARRY NIVEN AND STEVEN BARNES

The Descent of Anansi

Achilles’ Choice

Saturn’s Race

Dream Park

The Barsoom Project

The California Voodoo Game

The Moon Maze Game

WITH JERRY POURNELLE AND STEVEN BARNES

Beowulf’s Children

WITH JERRY POURNELLE

Inferno

Escape from Hell

WITH EDWARD M. LERNER

Fleet of Worlds

Juggler of Worlds

Destroyer of Worlds

Betrayer of Worlds

The Fate of Worlds

WITH BRENDA COOPER

Building Harlequin’s Moon

LARRY NIVEN

STARS AND GODS

A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK NEW YORK

This is a collection of fiction and nonfiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in these stories and novel excerpts are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

STARS AND GODS

Copyright © 2010 by Larry Niven

All rights reserved.

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

ISBN 978-0-7653-0864-1

First Edition: August 2010

Printed in the United States of America

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CONTENTS

Preface

PART ONE: EXCERPTS FROM THE NOVELS

Ringworld’s Children (Chapters 1 and 2)

Introduction to Svetz and the Beanstalk

Rainbow Mars (Chapters 18 and 19)

Introduction to Escape from Hell,
by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

Escape from Hell (Seventh Circle, Third Round)

Introduction to Burning Tower,
by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

Burning Tower (Chapters 2 and 3)

Introduction to Building Harlequin’s Moon,
by Larry Niven and Brenda Cooper

Building Harlequin’s Moon (Chapter 12)

Larry Niven’s description of genesis for Fleet of Worlds,
by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner

Fleet of Worlds

Introduction to Juggler of Worlds,
by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner

Juggler of Worlds (edited version of Chapter 59)

PART TWO: STORIES

Introduction to “Choosing Names”

“Choosing Names”

Introduction to “Fly-by-Night”

“Fly-by-Night”

Introduction to “The Hunting Park”

“The Hunting Park”

“After Mecca”

“Cadet Amelia”

“Cat Toy”

“Chicxulub”

“The Gatherers’ Guild”

“The Solipsist at Dinner”

“Boys and Girls Together”

PART THREE: NONFICTION FOR SPACE.COM

“Traveler”

“Rocket Men”

“Wet Mars”

PART FOUR: COLLABORATION WITH JERRY POURNELLE AND STEVEN BARNES

Introduction to Beowulf’s Children

Beowulf’s Children

PART FIVE: COLLABORATION WITH JERRY POURNELLE

Introduction

“Where Next, Columbus?”

PART SIX: COLLABORATION WITH STEVEN BARNES

Introduction to Achilles’ Choice

Achilles’ Choice (Chapters 15 and 16)

PART SEVEN: COLLABORATIONS WITH BRENDA COOPER

Introduction

“Choosing Life”

“Free Floaters”

“Finding Myself”

PART EIGHT: DRACO TAVERN STORIES

Introduction to “The Missing Mass”

“The Missing Mass”

Introduction to “Safe Harbor”

“Safe Harbor”

PART NINE: MISCELLANEOUS NONFICTION

Hooking the Reader

Larry Niven Interview by Brenda Cooper in 2000 AD

Food Story for the Con Jose Program Book

“Inconstant Moon Has Passed”

PREFACE

We have here a collection of everything that’s been going on in my life for the past six years or so, since I published Scatterbrain. The world has changed some. So have I. I’m seventy-one years old, and feeling it.

Writing has not become easier, or so it seems. I see more implications in a given idea, so the stories get longer and more detailed. The really good ideas get used up first.

Hey! Time magazine published a list of required summer reading in their July 13, 2009, issue. Ringworld made the list, forty years after I wrote it! The Count of Monte Cristo made the list too. Just a dozen stories total.

Where was I? I was saying that writing hasn’t gotten easier, but I seem to be putting books out faster. Part of the reason is collaborations. I’ve done a lot of them, as you can see via this book. Collaborations are less lonely than solo flights. Certainly there are ideas (and fictional universes) that should not be shared . . . but I’ve started sharing even the Known Space universe. I told Jim Baen I would never do that, but things change.

And part of the reason is I get offers from folk who know my name. I’ve joined some funny anthologies. And—

Lisa Snellings Clark is an artist whose work generates stories. She’s put out some collaborations, little story collections, with some of the finest writers around. I want to join that company, and the title is fixed: Strange Light. Three stories so far.

So: six years, and not much in the way of disasters. The house hasn’t burned down. No surgeries, save for a cataract. Deaths . . . well, I think I’ve reached that age, and so has the science fiction field.

Movies: none yet. When I started writing, I deliberately gave up the notion of restricting my special effects to things that could be put on a screen. Now, wow! They can do anything! And they’re using it to make movies like Meteor, in which incoming rocks can be shot down by bazookas.

So here is the best I’ve been able to write in the past six years and more. Enjoy.

PART ONE
EXCERPTS FROM THE NOVELS

RINGWORLD’S CHILDREN

1

LOUIS WU

Louis Wu woke aflame with new life, under a coffin lid.

“Dracula,” he murmured; but the analogy had a dubious flavor. Boosterspice was centuries old. Nobody need turn vampire just to live a long time.

Displays glowed above his eyes. Bone composition, blood, deep reflexes, urea and potassium and zinc balance: he could identify most of these. The damage listed wasn’t great. Wounds; fatigue; torn ligaments and extensive bruises; two ribs cracked; all relics of the battle with Bram. All healed now, rebuilt cell by cell.

He’d felt dead and cooling when he climbed in, eighty-four days ago, the display said. Sixty-seven Ringworld days, about nine falans.

He’d been under repair for twice that long the first time he lay in this box. Then, his internal plumbing systems had been leaking into each other, and he’d been eleven years without the longevity drug called boosterspice. He’d been old.

Testosterone was high, adrenalin high and rising.

Louis pushed steadily up against the lid. The lid wouldn’t move faster, but his body craved action. He slid out and dropped to a stone floor, cold beneath his bare feet.

He was naked. He stood in a vast cavern. Where was Needle?

The spacecraft Hot Needle of Inquiry had been embedded in stone, last he looked, and Carlos Wu’s experimental nanotech repair system had been in the crew quarters. Now its components sat within, a nest of instruments and cables on a floor of cooled lava. The ’doc had been partly pulled apart. Everything was still running.

Tunesmith must have been studying its workings while it healed Louis Wu.

Nearby, Hot Needle of Inquiry had been filleted like a finless fish. A slice of hull running almost nose to tail had been cut away, exposing housing, cargo, docking for a lander now destroyed, thruster plates, and the hyperdrive motor housing. More than half of the ship’s volume was tanks. The rim of the cut had been lined with copper or bronze, and cables in the metal led to instruments and a generator.

The cut section had been pulled aside by massive machinery. It too was rimmed in bronze laced with cables.

The hyperdrive motor had run the length of the ship. Now it was laid out on the lava, in a nest of instruments. Tunesmith again. The Hindmost wouldn’t have needed to study that.

Louis wandered over to look.

It had been repaired.

Louis had stranded the Hindmost in Ringworld space by chopping the hyperdrive nearly in half, long years ago. Dismounted, it looked otherwise ready to take Needle between the stars . . . and the design looked altered.

I could go home, Louis thought, tasting the notion. He liked it.

Where was everybody? Louis looked around him, feeling the adrenaline surge. He was starting to shiver with cold.

He’d be two hundred and sixty-odd years old by now, wouldn’t he? Easy to lose track here. But the nano machines in Carlos Wu’s experimental ’doc had read his DNA and repaired everything down through the cell nuclei. Louis had done this dance before. His body thought it was just past puberty.

Keep it cool, boy. Nobody’s challenged you yet.

The spacecraft, the hull section, the ’doc, machines to move and repair these masses and crude-looking instruments arrayed to study them, all formed a tight cluster within vaster spaces. The cavern was tremendous and nearly empty. Louis saw float plates like stacks of poker chips, and beyond those a tilted tower of tremendous toroids that ran from a hole in the floor right up to the roof. Four Needle-sized cylinders lay near its base, within more of Tunesmith’s machinery. Those were new.

He’d passed through this place once before. Louis looked up, knowing what to expect.

Five or six miles up, he thought. The repair center was forty miles high, so this level was near the roof. Louis could make out its contours. Think of it as the back of a mask . . . the mask of an asteroid-sized shield volcano.

Needle had smashed down through the crater in Mons Olympus, into the repair center that underlay the one-to-one scale Map of Mars. Teela Brown the protector had trapped them there, had moved the ship eight hundred miles through these corridors, then poured molten rock around them. For all these years the ship had been trapped. Now Tunesmith had brought it back to the workstation under Mons Olympus.

Why?

He knew Tunesmith the Night Person, but not well. He barely knew Tunesmith the protector. He’d watched the protector fight, and that was about it. But Louis had set the trap that made him a protector, and now Tunesmith held Louis’s life in his hands.

He’d be smarter than Louis. Trying to outguess a protector was . . . futz . . . was silly but inevitable.

So. Needle was an interstellar spacecraft, and that huge, tilted tower was a linear accelerator, a launching system. Tunesmith might need a spacecraft. Meanwhile he’d leave Needle gutted. Louis Wu and the Hindmost might use it to run, and he couldn’t have that.

Louis walked until Needle loomed: a hundred-and-ten-foot-diameter cylinder with a flattened belly. Not much of the ship was missing . . . the hyperdrive, the ’doc, what else? The crew section was wide open, the floor eighty feet up. Under the floor, all of the kitchen and recycling systems were exposed.

If he could climb that high he’d have his breakfast, and clothing, too. He didn’t see any obvious route.

He couldn’t guess where Tunesmith might place a stepping disk, or where it would lead.

The Hindmost’s command deck was exposed. It was three stories tall, with lower ceilings than a Kzin would need. Louis saw how he could climb to the lower floor. A protector would have no trouble at all.

Black holes and starseeds! What must the Hindmost be thinking?

Pierson’s puppeteers were cowards. When the Hindmost built Needle, he had isolated his command deck from any intruders, including his alien crew. There were no doors at all, just stepping disks booby-trapped a thousand ways. Now . . . the puppeteer must feel stripped naked.

Louis crouched beneath the edge of some flat-topped mass, maybe the breathing-air system. Leapt, pulled up and kept climbing. The ’doc had left him thin, almost gaunt; he wasn’t lifting much weight. Fifty feet up, he hung by his fingers for a moment.

This was the lowest floor of the Hindmost’s cabin, his most private area. There would be defenses. Would someone have turned them off?

He pulled up and was in forbidden space.

The first thing he saw was the Hindmost. The next was his own droud sitting on a table.

He’d destroyed that. He’d given it to Chmeee and watched the Kzin smash it.

So, a replacement. Bait for Louis Wu the wirehead. Louis’s hand crept into the hair at the back of his head, under the queue. Plug it in, let the battery trickle current into the pleasure center of his brain . . . where was the socket?

Louis laughed wildly. It wasn’t there! The autodoc’s nano machines had rebuilt him without it!

Louis thought it over. Then he took the droud.

The Hindmost lay like a jeweled footstool, his three legs and both heads tucked protectively beneath his torso. Louis’s lips curled. He stepped forward to sink his hand into the jeweled mane and shake the puppeteer out of his funk.

He caught himself. Why did he want the Hindmost awake?

“Do not touch anything.”

Louis flinched violently. The voice was a blast of contralto music, the Hindmost’s voice with the sound turned up, and it spoke Interworld. “Whatever you desire, instruct me.”

Needle’s autopilot knew him, knew his language at least, and it hadn’t killed him. Louis found his voice. “Were you expecting me?”

“Yes. I may give you some limited freedom here. Find a current source next to—”

“No. Breakfast,” Louis said as his belly suddenly screamed that it was empty, dying. “I need food.”

“There is no kitchen for your kind here.”

A shallow ramp wound round the walls to the upper floors. “I’ll be back,” Louis said.

He walked, then ran up the ramp. He eased around the wall above a drop of eighty feet—not difficult, just scary—and was in crew quarters.

A pit showed where the ’doc had been removed. Crew quarters was not otherwise changed. Louis went to the kitchen wall and dialed cappuccino and a fruit plate. He ate. He dressed, pants and blouse and a vest that was all pockets, the droud bulging one of the pockets. Finished the fruit, then dialed up an omelet, potatoes, another cappuccino and a waffle.

He thought while he ate. What was his desire?

He needed the Hindmost to tell him what was going on . . . but puppeteers were manipulative and secretive.

Information?

A little leverage?

He dumped the breakfast dishes in the recycler toilet. He climbed around the wall, carefully. “Hindmost’s Voice,” he said.

“At your command. You need not risk a fall. Here is a stepping disk link,” and a cursor showed him a spot on the floor of crew quarters.

“Show me the Meteor Defense Room.”

“That term is unknown.” A hologram window sprang up in the portside wall. “Is this the place you mean?”

Meteor Defense was a vast, dark space. At the edge of the Voice’s window, under a glare of light, the bones of an ancient protector had been laid out for study.

Three long swinging booms ended in chairs equipped with lap keyboards. In the far shadows stood pillars with large plates on top, mechanical mushrooms—“What are those?”

“Service stacks,” the Hindmost’s Voice said, “each made from eight of the float plates you found on arrival, topped by a stepping disk.”

“Sounds useful.”

The display Louis was looking for was not at once obvious. It was as black as the room around it. He saw it when a boom swung across it. One of the booms ended in a knobby, angular shadow.

All protectors look something like medieval armor.

The protector was watching an oval display screen thirty feet high, fifty wide. The camera would be somewhere on the Ringworld itself, looking away from the sun. Louis knew better than to expect asteroids or worlds. The Ringworld engineers had cleared all that out. This drift of moving lights would be spacecraft held by several species. Now the view focussed on a gauzy, fragile Outsider ship; now on a glass needle, tenant unknown; now an ARM warship.

Tunesmith’s concentration seemed total. He zoomed on a spray of stars occluded by a foggy lump, a proto-comet. Tiny angular machines drifted around it, marked by blinking cursor circles. A lance of light glared much brighter: some warship’s fusion drive. Here came another, zipping across the screen. No weapon fired.

The Fringe War was still cold, Louis thought. He’d wondered how long that could last.

The protector’s arms jittered above the keyboard.

In the corner of Louis’s eye, sunlight glared down. Louis spun around. The crater in Mons Olympus was sliding open, flooding the cavern with unfiltered light. The linear accelerator roared; an arc of lightning ran bottom to top.

The crater closed.

Louis brought his eyes back to the display. Looking over Tunesmith’s shoulder, he saw fusion light flare from offscreen and dwindle to a bright point. Tunesmith had launched something at high velocity.

Wonderful. Tunesmith had joined the Fringe War.

Well, that should keep him busy. Now, how much freedom had Louis been allotted? “Hindmost’s Voice, show me the locations of all stepping disks.”

The Hindmost’s Voice popped up a Map Room. It blanked out the outside view completely. The Ringworld surrounded Louis, a ring six hundred million miles long and a million miles wide, banded blue for day and black for night and broad fuzzy edges for dusk and dawn. Orange cursor lights winked across its face.

“How many?”

“Ninety-five are now in use. Two failed. Three we dropped into deep space were shot down by the fleets.”

“Have you sent anything to the shadow square ring?”

“No.”

The Hindmost had brought stepping disks on his voyage to the Ringworld, but not a hundred! “Has the Hindmost built a factory for stepping disks somewhere?”

“No. Tunesmith built such a system. Work proceeds slowly.”

Blinking orange lights were thick along the Great Ocean arc of the Ringworld. The far side looked sparse. “Are any of these en route to somewhere else?”

Vector arrows popped up. Most of the lights weren’t moving. None had reached the Other Ocean, but two were moving in that direction. “ETAs for those,” Louis said. No response. “Give me estimated time of arrival for—”

“Expect this service stack,” flicker, “in place at the spinward rim of the Counterbalance Ocean by early 2900 your count.”

Thirteen years.

Most of the lights were clustered around the Great Ocean, and of those, most were in a tight cluster that must be the Map of Mars. Louis pointed. “Give me a slow zoom on that.”

The map expanded.

“A little faster.”

The Great Ocean expanded. Louis began picking out individual lights for close-ups.

Deep into a jagged inlet, a narrow wedge seen from above was Hidden Patriarch, the mile-long seagoing craft built by local Kzinti.

The Map of Mars was a maze of lights . . . twenty. “Are these all underground?”

“Four are on the surface.” They blinked violet.

One at the icy north pole, at the Map’s center. One at the rim—“That one. Under the waterfall?”

“Yes.”

The remaining two were on the map of Mons Olympus. “Is that one upside down? Can you tell?”

“I can. It is.”

The trap set by martians was still in place. “What’s the other?”

“The stepping disk aboard Hot Needle of Inquiry’s lander.”

Teela had blasted the lander during that last duel. “It’s functional?”

“Yes.”

“Is the lander functional, too?”

“Life support is marginal. Drive systems and weaponry have failed.”

“Can some of these service stacks be locked out of the system?”

“That has been done.” Lines spread across the map to join blinking lights. Some, like the trap on Mons Olympus, had crossed-circle verboten marks on them: not open. The maze was complicated, and Louis didn’t try to understand it. “My master has override codes,” the Voice said.

“May I have those?”

“No.”

“Number these for me.”

“How shall I order them?”

“Distance from this point. Then print out a map.”

The scale was huge; he’d never get any detail out of it. He folded it and stuffed it in a pocket anyway. “Now, here’s what I want, and you tell me if I can have it. . . .”

He broke for lunch and came back.

The more recent disks were on service stacks: mobile. He set two of those moving and changed a number of links. The Hindmost’s Voice printed another map with his changes added. He pocketed that, too.

The Voice refused to make weapons. The crew quarters kitchen hadn’t done that either.

Tunesmith was still at the end of a boom, still tracking whatever he’d launched. “Where are the rest of us?” Louis asked, and felt a sudden flood of embarrassment. He should have asked that first!

“Who do you seek?”

“Acolyte.”

“I do not have that name—”

“The Kzin we shared this ship with. Chmeee’s child.”

“I list that LE as—” blood-curdling howl. Louis found he was trying to pry his fingers loose from a table edge. “Rename him Acolyte?”

“Please.”

The map was back, and a blinking point near Fist-of-God . . . a hundred thousand miles port-and-antispin from Fist-of-God, and two hundred thousand miles spinward of the Map of Mars. The Ringworld scale had to be learned over and over. “Here we set Acolyte four falans ago. He has since moved by eleven hundred miles.” The point jumped minutely. “Tunesmith has altered the setting for the stepping disk. It sends to an observation point on the Map of Earth.”

Home to his father? “Has he used it?”

“No.”

“Where are the City Builders?”

“Do you mean the librarians? Kawaresksenjajok and Fortaralisplyar and three children were returned to their origin—”

“Yah!” He’d meant to do that himself.

“To the library in the floating city. I note your approval. Who else shall I track?”

Who else had been his companions? Two protectors. Bram was dead. Tunesmith was . . . still busy. He’d zoomed on that receding point, the vehicle he’d launched. Its drive was off . . . flared hugely and blinked off again.

A warship. Reaction motors were needed for war; modern thrusters couldn’t switch on and off as fast.

“Have you kept track of Valavirgillin?”

The map jumped. “Here, near the floating city and a local center of Machine People culture.”

Good, and she was well away from vampires. “Why did you track her?” He hadn’t expected that.

“Orders.”

Carefully, “Who do you take orders from?”

“From you and Tunesmith and—” a blast of orchestral chaos, piercingly sweet. Louis recognized the Hindmost’s true name. “But all such may be countermanded by—” the Hindmost’s name again.

“Is Tunesmith restricted from any interesting levels of this ship?”

“Not currently.”

The Hindmost was still in wrapped-around-himself catatonia. “How long since he’s eaten?” Louis asked.

“Two local days. He wakes to eat.”

“Good. Wake him up.”

“How shall I wake him without trauma?”

“I saw him in a dance once. Turn that on. Prepare food for him.”

2

THE HINDMOST

Louis was in a vast hall. The floor was all broad, shallow steps. A thousand aliens moved around him; two thousand throats uttered orchestral music that was also conversation, unbearably complex. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart would have gone crazy. The Beatles . . . started out crazy, but futz, so did Mozart.

Kick, slide, left heads brush fingerlets; hind leg kicks, partner shies. The Hindmost kicked. Flat one-eyed heads emerged from beneath his torso. Spin, kick; the Hindmost lurched to his forefeet and tried to turn. Was this a dance or martial arts?

The Hindmost whistled. The dance dissipated. “Louis,” the puppeteer said.

“How long were you out?”

“I sleep much. I have not been comatose. Where is Tunesmith?”

“Fighting a war, I think.”

A head turned to the display. “Yes, I watched him build that. The Fringe War grows ever hotter. Have they invaded the Ringworld?”

“I have no idea. Hindmost, how did Needle come to be in this state?”

“Recall that Tunesmith accepted me as his teacher, on your advice.”

Tunesmith the Night People musician had been newborn as a protector and thirsty for learning. “He needed training, and fast,” Louis said. “The more he learned from us, the more we could guess what he’d do . . . I thought. Did you try to keep secrets?”

“Yes.”

“Duh. And you barred him from the flight deck, of course.”

“Duh,” the puppeteer said. “I taught using your displays in crew quarters. I taught well, but he learned faster, always faster. He demanded access to my tools. I refused. Six days after you entered the ’doc, I woke to find him standing over me here. I gave him everything.”

“When did he chop up your ship?”

“Sometime afterward. I was terrified, Louis. I was in fear-coma for eleven days. I woke and found this. Little has changed since. But, Louis, he has repaired the hyperdrive!”

“A fat lot of good—”

“Louis, he will reassemble the ship. When he does, I flee. Be aboard.”

“When?”

The puppeteer’s eyes looked at each other.

That meant confusion, or amusement, or any form of internal conflict. Louis asked, “What’s he been doing? Building a warship—”

“Yes, and tracking the Fringe War, delving the secrets of my machinery—he wouldn’t trust me to teach him—and ridding himself of my allies and yours. The Machine People are returned to the library. Acolyte is sent to spy on nothing at all. Louis, I must instruct you. You must know everything you might need.”

Louis asked, “Why?”

“We are allies!”

“Why?” The droud was gone from its place, a bulge in Louis’s pocket. Would the Hindmost mention it?

“Tunesmith has us enslaved! Can’t you see what he plans for you?”

“I think so. I’ve got twenty-five years. What if he waits that long before he puts Needle back together?”

“Then I am lost. Severed from my family, my home. Slave to a creature brighter than myself, hardwired by his evolution to hold nothing of worth beyond his own bloodline. Louis, you face the same. You are not of Tunesmith’s species.”

“On the Ringworld I’m not of any species.”

“Yes, Louis, yes, don’t you see the implication? He will feed you tree-of-life. You will be a protector. He will certainly not give you power over him. You are to be only a prisoner and advisor, a talking head, the protector who has no descendants to guard. The voice that speaks only for the safety of the Ringworld itself.”

“Yes,” Louis said patiently, “but not for twenty-five years. I’m not old enough to make the change.”

“But do you want that?”

“No. Tanj flup, no! What can you do for me? I’ve been studying your placement of stepping disks. I made a few changes.”

The Hindmost whistled up the Map Room, Ringworld and stepping disks and vectors and all. He turned a complete circle, heads held wide apart for extreme binocular vision. “Good enough.”

“I expect you could reset all positions in an instant. Understand, though, if a service stack wasn’t where I expected it, that could kill me. You should give me access codes.”

“Yes.”

“By now Tunesmith must know everything about the ’doc. What don’t I know?”

“You would not have the mental capacity. An Earthborn genius, Carlos Wu, built the system for the ARM more than two hundred years ago. It disappeared along with Carlos Wu, and reappeared twenty-six years later on Shasht-Fafnir. My agent Nessus was able to buy it. My research team determined that it is based on an experiment in nanotechnology. We modified it to accommodate Kzinti and Pierson’s puppeteers and to increase its dependability.

“Bram has studied the system thoroughly. He has modified it again, to accommodate Night People physiology. He’s mastered this form of nanotechnology and is using nanomachines to make more stepping disks. What else is there? The ’doc is set to rebuild certain life forms from their genetic codes. In the case of you and Acolyte and Tunesmith, that is DNA coding.”

“He rebuilt it to heal himself, too?”

“Would he not? Accidents happen.”

“Needle. Has he added weapons?”

“Yes, and mastered mine, and boosted my thrusters beyond sane safety limits—”

“What’s he doing now?”

In the holoscreen, the black silhouette of Tunesmith wasn’t doing anything. All the action was in deep space, where a point was moving away from the Ringworld at high speed.

“A very agile ship with a miniature cabin. A small Hanging People protector is the pilot,” the Hindmost said. “Little fuel, large thruster and reaction motors, weapons not from my library. As you saw, launched via linear accelerator, fuel used only to dodge and decelerate. Tunesmith names it Probe.”

Probe was hard to see when its motor was off, but the motor was sputtering now as it dodged plasma weapons and missiles and, somehow, even lasers.

Tunesmith’s instruments followed it out toward interstellar space. The Ringworld system retained its comets. They were no threat to the Ringworld; there were no big masses to change their orbits and hurl them inward. Ships of half a dozen species had been hiding among the comets ever since Chmeee and Louis revealed the Ringworld’s existence, thirty-five years ago.

Now ARM ships—human-built, serving the United Nations police—streaked in from offscreen. Probe lit like a flashbulb—guessed wrong about a laser!—and vanished.

Tunesmith’s screen swung wide, following nothing obvious . . .

“Hanging People” was a generic designation for hominids who lived a monkey lifestyle. Some weren’t sapient. A Hanging People protector would still have at least human intelligence. Hastily trained for spaceflight, it might outguess ARM defenses, but Tunesmith would still outthink it, would still keep control.

Tunesmith’s telescope swung half around the sky, a hundred and eighty degrees, or nearly that. Tunesmith’s viewpoint focused on a fuzzy object . . . a comet, loosely packed ice drifting apart. Then on a spacecraft emerging from within the cloud.

It was lens shaped, painted black with vivid orange markings in the dots-and-commas of Kzinti script.

“Markings name it Diplomat,” the Hindmost said. “We’ve observed. It seems well armed, but it never enters the singularity around the Ringworld star. Always it lurks among the comets. Always it can flee in hyperdrive.”

“Doesn’t sound like Kzinti.”

“They learn. I deem it the command ship for the Patriarchy fleet.”

Probe was back. It had circled Ringworld’s sun through hyperspace in less than thirty minutes. Now its huge intrinsic velocity carried it inward, and straight toward Diplomat.

Word from the other side of the sky would not have reached Diplomat yet. Minutes passed before Diplomat reacted. Then threads of interstellar dust glowed a bit in Diplomat’s laser fire, and a handful of tiny ships zipped out of the comet cloud. Probe began dodging. A laser: Probe flared brilliantly. Louis squinted; Tunesmith’s screen wasn’t built to protect viewers from blindness. Probe dodged out of the beam and into a scintillation of impacts and was still going.

“General Products hull?”

“No. Tunesmith has armored Probe in scrith, in Ringworld floor material.”

Another ship popped out nearby, just long enough for Louis to get a good view. It was much larger than Diplomat, a transparent sphere with complex machinery packed tightly inside the hull . . . gone.

“Long Shot,” Louis said, anger rising.

“I saw it,” the Hindmost said.

“They ran. Kzinti don’t do that.”

“Long Shot is being used for courier service. Too valuable to risk, and the Patriarchy will not have found room for armaments.”

“ARM and Patriarchy were supposed to share that ship.”

Probe was too near the lens ship, accelerating sideways to get around it while fighting pyrotechnic displays and lesser ships. Suddenly there was actinic light. Louis’s eyelids clenched. When he could see again, Probe was gone.

“What the futz was that?” he demanded.

“Antimatter weapon. The newer ARM ships are all powered by antimatter, but we had not seen its use by the Patriarchy. They must manufacture their own in a particle accelerator somewhere. The ARM has a source, an antimatter solar system.”

“Antimatter. Hindmost, that makes the Fringe War a lot more dangerous. The Ringworld is too tanj fragile for this.”

“Duh.”

“What’s he doing now?”

The shadow of a protector leapt from its chair, arced like a ballet superstar across the view of comets and warships, touched down and was gone. A hand like a sackful of ball bearings closed on Louis’s forearm, and he spasmed like a man electrocuted.

“Louis! Good, you’re awake. Without you this would have been difficult. Hindmost, come out of there. Danger does not await our convenience. Louis, are you all right? Your heartbeat sounds funny.”

INTRODUCTION TO SVETZ AND THE BEANSTALK

This book derives from events of more than thirty years ago. When I was still a novice, I had an insight that delighted me:

Time travel is fantasy.

But the only way to get fun out of it is to treat it as Analog-style science fiction. Keep it internally consistent. Lay out a set of rules and invite the reader to beat you to the consequences.

Hanville Svetz doesn’t know that time travel is fantasy. He was born deep into a future polluted to match the sorriest predictions of Greenpeace. Most life-forms are extinct by Svetz’s time. To Svetz the creatures of the past may be strange, dangerous, horrifying; anything but surprising. Svetz has the scientist’s talent: he can wrap a theory around what he finds, rather than altering the evidence to fit a theory.

I dreamed up “The Flight of the Horse” one morning, spent the afternoon outlining it, and told it as a cocktail party story that night, without losing any listeners. You can’t do that with every good story; but when you can do that, the story is ready.

I sold “Leviathan!” to Playboy magazine. It’s the only time I’ve ever managed that. Playboy was a joy to work with. Editorial work was minimalist, all changes explicitly described, and the money was good too. I sent them “Bird in the Hand” too, but they sent it back.

“There’s a Wolf in My Time Machine!” was set in an altered version of the Haunted House ride at Disneyland. The characters are alternate-timeline versions of the Keeshond show dogs I grew up with.

Time travel is fantasy! And the universe of fantasy is large . . . but after “Death in a Cage” I decided the joke was played out.

In the 1970s, Carl Sagan persuaded Kip Thorne, a world-class mathematician, to design him a time machine for a science fiction novel. Tipler got interested in the challenge, and other mathematicians joined in.

The time machines that emerged are solid science fiction, if you’ll accept that the Ringworld is. That is, they require exotic materials and construction techniques, and the engineers need nearly godlike powers. But give them these, and all the laws of physics hold except what has never been proven: the law of cause and effect.

These time machines look less like a Delorian automobile than a freeway. You can’t ride on a freeway except where it’s been built! That is, we won’t be seeing time travelers because the freeway hasn’t been built in our time. Time travelers will already have godlike powers before they can travel in time . . . unless we should chance to find somebody’s abandoned freeway. . . .

But in any era previous to the 1970s, time travel is fantasy.

Worlds don’t disappear on me.

A notion was kicking around in my head . . . and on my computer disks, once Jerry Pournelle talked me into switching from a typewriter. For a quarter of a century I would occasionally stumble across “Beans”: my file of disorganized notes comparing “Jack and the Beanstalk” to the orbital tower invented by Tsiolkovsky and later popularized in several stories including Arthur Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise.

I knew by then that I wouldn’t ever lack for story ideas. “We are the masters of time,” as Svetz says. “Svetz and the Beanstalk” could wait.

In 1990 a leaflet from Dangerous Visions, a bookstore in Van Nuys, alerted me that Terry Pratchett and Neal Gaiman would be in to autograph Good Omens. That sounded like fun. I’d barely discovered Neil Gaiman, but already I would buy anything by Terry Pratchett. I went to say Hi.

His flight had been delayed by six hours.

We went back to my place. I didn’t know how that would work out, but Marilyn and I have one of the better art collections, and I have some computer games, or we could hike Mulholland. . . .

Nah. We started talking collaboration and spent our whole time that way. I tossed in the notion of a Beanstalk that’s a plant. We carved out a loose novel structure from there.

And I’ve got those notes around somewhere, but I’ve never looked at them since.

We live eight time zones apart. He admitted to a tendency to blitz: to start writing and never quit. These things might make a collaboration awkward. Unless I could get the jump on him, he’d wind up handing me completed text!

But we were both involved in other projects. The Beanstalk would wait.

My first published story, set on Mercury, was obsolete before it hit print. When the world was told the truth about Venus’ surface temperature, I was just behind it with “Becalmed in Hell.” The astrophysicists kept changing Mars on me, and I wrote a string of stories to keep up.

Then I fell behind.

Now it’s the nineties, and every hard science fiction writer has written a Mars story. Red/Green/Blue Mars, Moving Mars, Mars Underground. With competition like Robinson, Greg Bear, William Hartmann, how was I going to find anything new to say? If I wanted to write about Mars, I would need another approach.

Then it all came together.

When a story is ready to be told, I write.

I started Svetz and the Beanstalk on a portable computer aboard a cruise ship docked at Ensenada, Mexico. We’d already seen the Blowhole. Marilyn went off to shop. I set up my laptop computer in the lounge that sells cappuccino, and began writing.

I saw nothing impossible about writing two Beanstalk stories, the second with Terry Pratchett. . . .

Except that I never leave anything out. It was my first insight as a writer. Never hold anything back from the reader. It was basic to Robert Heinlein’s style too. Take one idea and explore every implication.

Yggdrasil (and a lot of Norsemen) was one of Terry’s suggestions. A lot of that six-hour conversation must have worked its way into the novel.

Worried and embarrassed. I e-mailed Terry and told him what had happened. His opinion matches mine: ideas are cheap, it’s the writing that makes them golden. He tells me he’s ready to write a Beanstalk novel too. But, set on the Diskworld, it’s likely to follow wildly different physics.

Then there’s Suzanne Gibson. I met her through her husband, Warren James, who runs Hour 25, a local radio show, on Friday nights. When I was deep into Svetz and time travel and Mars, Suzanne volunteered to do some of my research.

The chapter heads all came from her. It seems as if every separate branch of humanity has its own tower to Heaven. I found some wonderful quotes from South America too, but I lost them.

So this is my take on Mars, and Yggdrasil, and (again, God help me) the space program.

What came before doesn’t count. We always build from now.

RAINBOW MARS

18

Jacob’s ladder. Typifies a soul’s approach to perfection. A universal axis or World Tree. Equates with Ama-no-Hashidate, the Beanstalk, Lugh’s chain, stem of Jesse, Yggdrasil.

—Dictionary of Mythology, Folklore and Symbols,
by Gertrude Jobes

A flyer ruptured and began to sink in a scattered cloud of men.

Mars still pulled like a planet. The flight stick was lifting at maximum, but Svetz’s belly still thought he was sliding down a smooth glass hill. But the treescape slowed, slowed . . . until the black forest was a world-sized bulge above him and he was starting to float back up.

Miya drifted alongside. Below them the trunk was infested.

Svetz had barely heard of termites. He had to picture something like Von Neumann nanotech machines turning living wood into more of themselves until there was nothing left but the machines. It looked like that, just a haze of motion, until he turned up the zoom.

He had not anticipated that the wealth and power of Mars, five hundred and fifty years before Earth’s first atomic bomb, could match the wealth of the United Nations of 1108 AE. But armor and manpower of that order was crawling up the tree at them.

The twinkling wasn’t all mirrors. Close below them, slender man-shapes were fighting green-clad six-limbed giants. Faceplates winked like silver mirrors. Here and there were twinkling blades. Stick-figure shapes, improbably tall, moved about the trunk undisturbed, observing the fighting like hundreds of wandering referees.

Svetz said, speculating, “It’s a technology race, like the First Cold War. Somebody saw us using tools that no Martian has. They can’t let anyone else get to us first. We came to rob them. They’re all swarming up the tree to be first to rob us.”

One of the factions was getting too close. Svetz saw puffs of gunfire. Swords or not, they still had kinetic projectiles.

“Let’s get into cover,” Miya said. The forest flared briefly and left a charred tunnel. Miya jetted into it. Svetz fired rockets and followed.

It was soft, cushiony. Wriggle through, wriggle down. “That’s me behind you, so don’t shoot.”

“Good. I don’t see any parasites,” Miya said. “Or seeds.”

Even seeds of Earth could take any shape. Pinecones, spiky peach pits, smooth almonds, great melons with tiny seeds, avocados, acorns, sesame.

Whatever their form, skyhook seeds would look all alike. They might be armored against reentry heat. Otherwise Svetz had no idea what to look for, and Miya of Space Bureau had even less. He was seeing nothing but foliage—

“Have a look here,” Miya said.

He saw her below, by pink Marslight. He wriggled down beside her. They’d left most of the tree above them now, and Mars was close below. They peered down through a hole in the sky.

The lower sixty klicks of tree were swarming with troop carriers and cargo vehicles. Miya said, “I’m wondering—”

The tree shuddered. They had that instant’s warning, and then the trunk lashed like a whip.

It was worse than any earthquake. Svetz was totally disoriented. His arms and legs strangled a black branch that was trying to fling him into the sky. His grip was being shaken loose.

Eerily calm was Miya’s voice. “Hanny, I’ve lost my flight stick. Can you come and get me?”

“What was that?” The tree was shuddering still. Miya was nowhere in sight.

“Don’t know. Don’t care yet. Come and get me.”

She was falling!

Stop a moment. Think. “Was it lifting?”

“My flight stick? No. Maybe it stayed in the tree.”

Svetz saw it wedged in branches. He reached, and the tree shook it and him out like overripe fruit. He was spinning down, dizzy and disoriented, with his own flight stick in one hand and the other falling with him.

A flare of rockets sent him close enough to grab.

“I’ve got them both. Wait one.” He wrapped himself around his flight stick, gripped the other in an armpit, and barely stopped himself from twisting the lift throttle. He’d lose her if he lifted!

“Miya, you’ve got your rocket pack. Find me and come get your flight stick. Do it before we both burn up.”

“Understood. Can you see me?”

“No! You’re the same color as Mars! Who picks your wardrobe? Look for me; I’m green and I’m turning on my blinks.”

“Blinks, aye aye.”

“We’ll make great targets. Oh, futz!” He screamed in terror as the tree ripped loose.

Whatever was happening below was half hidden in a cloud of chaff. Some of that chaff was vehicles and men. The tree’s lateral surge must have shaken most of its parasites loose. The torn base of the rising tree trailed wood chaff and artifacts: twisted silver rails, pressure suits of human and nonhuman shape, falling sky ships. A falling lift cage: men and green giants and big crabs were swarming out and over it, and what they hoped to accomplish was beyond Svetz.

Svetz’s emergency suit lights were scintillating in preprogrammed panic. He was a clear and vivid target. Maybe Miya—

“I see you, Hanny.”

—Maybe Miya would get to him before anyone else. And there she was, a flickering orange flare rising past him. Svetz twisted the flight stick throttle hard over. “Do not make your burn. I’m chasing you,” he called.

She was there again, coming down, and he twisted again to kill the lift, rockets too close. “Let me do the docking—”

“Just give me the flight stick!” she screamed. He hadn’t guessed how frightened she was. She snatched at the brush discharge with both hands, and had it.

The tree’s torn base rose past them, big as a wooden moon. He glimpsed Miya again, high above him on the flight stick, and lost her. They were falling fast. Already he could hear a whisper of wind. They’d burn as meteors if they couldn’t kill their velocity.

It was not a time to worry about staying together.

Her voice was clear, almost calm. “Too much weight on the tree. They overloaded it.”

“Are you all right?”

“Decelerating. I lost it for a moment there, Hanny. Look out overhead, there’s a lot of futz falling at us.”

He looked up at men falling silent in vacuum.

A sky ship dropped past him, slowed and rose again.

His hand scrabbled at his back. He must have dropped the blaster, but he was instinctively reaching for the needle gun, and he found that.

The vessel was alongside him. It might have been a dirigible balloon with wooden decking along the top. Men swarmed out of an interior well, anchored themselves, and hurled something. It unfurled as it came: a net.

Svetz twisted the throttle off and dropped under the net. They pulled it back and prepared to throw again.

Something ripped the vessel wide open. For an instant Svetz could see into a tank running bow to stern, filled with gas glowing by the light of a vermilion laser. Then the glowing gas puffed out and the vessel dropped away.

Wind sang a reedy melody, pulled at his helmet, set up a tremor in his flight stick.

Martian vehicles dropped past him. Nobody seemed to be firing at Svetz. Some fired at each other. None tried to match the lifting power of Svetz’s flight stick.

And then one did. A sky yacht was floating down toward him.

He shifted laterally. So did the yacht, matching his lift. It was brick shaped, covered with masts and nets with no regard for streamlining.

“Miya, a flying yacht tried to net me, and now I’ve got another,” he said. He looked for a target. He could glimpse men, but they were under hatches, firing through slits.

Miya said, “I’m clear. I can get to you, but not fast. I’m already in the atmosphere.”

They must have recognized his needle gun as a weapon. The ship rose above him. A net flew. He dodged. They pulled it back and threw again. He dodged.

Air sang past him. He could feel heat on his shoes, the backs of his legs, his forearms.

The sky yacht’s crew tired of trying to net him. He saw puffs of flame from covered slits, and tiny metal missiles whacked the back of his flight stick. The brush discharge sputtered blue lightning and he fell.

Nothing had hit him. He was falling with a dead stick between his legs, but he wasn’t dead yet. He twisted every control. The stick only sputtered puffs of lightning. He kicked it away from him.

The sky yacht was falling alongside him. The net came down again, and this time, rocket pack or not, Svetz didn’t dodge. The net swept him in, and the flight stick too, and pulled him toward a wooden deck.

Svetz fished out the flight stick and threw it overside.

The deck knocked the wind out of him. He felt it surge under him, the yacht pulling upward. “They’ve got me,” he said.

19

In one respect at least the Martians are a happy people; they have no lawyers.

—“A Princess of Mars,” by Edgar Rice Burroughs

“Describe the vessel,” Miya instructed.

“Seventeen meters by seven, fitted out like a boat, no keel, no aerodynamic surfaces. Two long tanks with a narrow cabin between. I’m not guessing about that; I saw a tank ripped open on another craft. There are firing points forward, kinetic energy weapons, a motor aft and a deck across the whole top. I’m lying on the deck.” And he looked up at a row of silver masks.

They wound the net around Svetz to immobilize him. Svetz said, “They look like men, what I can see. Except . . . one.”

“Don’t leave me hanging.”

“It’s just watching. Squatting with its knees way higher than its head. Bubble helmet isn’t quite big enough for its ears. It’s wearing just the helmet. It’s covered with white . . . feathers! Bird ancestry.”

“Hanny, it wouldn’t be related to anything from Earth.”

The crew fished his needle gun out and gathered ’round to study that. One crewman fired at something as it fell past. When he saw no result, he fired a crystal into a wooden post. It left a tiny streak of white powder. He was not impressed. He kept the needle gun.

Several crew picked Svetz up and turned him for inspection.

They reached through the net and opened buckles until they had freed the rocket pack and could slide it off his back. They must have recognized the bell-shapes as rocket nozzles. They were careful with it, bracing it against the deck before they tried to fire it. They couldn’t make it work.

They’d find the safety override soon enough.

Svetz spoke while they were playing with the rocket pack. “Miya, they’re built like basketball players. Their pressure suits are not quite skintights. They’re quilted and painted in camouflage, all reds, and they wear bracelets and toques over the suits. They’re wearing silver masks. The masks are pictures of human faces, like death masks. Little windows for eyes. Gems in some of the masks. I won’t be able to use my translator until we’ve got air. Talk to me, Miya.”

“I’m here, Hanny.”

“The decks are wood. The fittings are wood. There’s some metal, maybe iron and gold, but I’m surrounded by literally tonnes of wood!”

“Enjoy. I’ve found seeds.”

“Tell me.”

She had flown over the city. “Graceful towers that go up and up. Those slender arched bridges. Streets wind high up between the towers with no support but a few arches thin as an afterthought. Everything looks fragile. They build like they’ve forgotten gravity, Hanny. The tree’s been dropping all kinds of heavy stuff; it’ll knock down half the city before the day’s over. Nobody was going to notice me in all that.

“I came down east of the city. I found thousands of craters all in a line, all sizes—stuff that fell off the tree over the years—except that a lot of little craters were just the same size, two meters across. I dug seeds out of the centers of those. They look like big yellow apples.”

“Mission accomplished.”

“Yes! But, Hanny, I still can’t get Zeera. I can’t even get readings from the Orbiter.”

He’d been hoping for better news. The time machine couldn’t reach Mars. The Orbiter was to carry them back to Earth orbit. Without the Orbiter . . . ? “Don’t kill anyone from now on, all right, Miya? Without the Orbiter, what we are is immigrants.”

“Hanny, the blaster is the only weapon I’ve got. How do I rescue you without killing anyone?” She sounded brittle.

“They haven’t hurt me yet. When we get air I’ll try to talk my way out.”

Miya said, “I’m looking over the . . . you called them roots, but I don’t think so, Hanny. They’re anchors. Some of them have fallen over. They all fell eastward. The ones still standing are already sprouting black fuzz at their torn ends. I think I know what’s going on here.”

“Yes. Yes. Futz, Miya, that’s awesome. Should we be looking for two kinds of seeds?”

“I think so. Hanny, are you glad you came?”

“Let’s wait on that.”

“These flying yachts keep nosing around. I can dodge them, but there are too many now, and they’re shooting at each other, and I just think I’ll get out of town. Any idea where you’re likely to land?”

“I’ll ask the captain when we get some air. Maybe you’d better check in with Zeera.”

“That would take days. I’ll hide and wait. Keep in touch.”

There were big holes in the city, big enough to see from a hundred klicks high: fallen towers and fallen anchor trees, and fires spreading unchecked. Open water glittered where a fallen tree had blocked a canal. These trees had seemed mere roots when the main trunk was in place. Now they seemed immense, bigger than any building.

The ship had fallen far. Svetz could feel an honest wind blowing now, and hear the rumble of a motor. The vessel didn’t hover long over the city. It chugged toward where a vertical thread hung from the sky.

“Miya. We’re following the skyhook tree. That’s west, isn’t it?” Freed of the mass of its anchor trees, the tree rises. The orbit expands. Moving west-to-east with the planet’s rotation, the tree lags and falls behind. “There’s nothing west of us but desert.”

“I’ll follow. Keep me posted.”

His captors took off their helmets and sucked air like they’d never tasted it before. Martian suit recyclers didn’t seem to be as good as Space Bureau’s. Their features were narrow and their heads were long, with pointed chins, but they seemed quite human. One crewman reached down and fumbled around Svetz’s head until he found how to open his bubble.

Svetz couldn’t move his entangled hands. “I’m going to faint now,” he said.

The man didn’t understand, of course. He spoke a few words. Svetz said, “My translator must hear you speak before it can help us.”

The man spoke at length.

Svetz talked with the Martian, and breathed whenever he remembered. The Martian taught Svetz one word at a time. Eyes. Fingers. Grasp. Breathe. Fall. Matth from Noblegas, the Martian who was teaching him, Sailor middle rank. Svetz, himself. Skyrunner, this dirigible yacht beneath them. The orbiting space elevator still drifting ahead of Skyrunner, with its far end sprouting silver flowers, was the Hangtree. Aft was Hangtree City. . . .

The air was pre-Industrial, and thin. Breathe! But there wasn’t enough carbon dioxide in his blood. Breathe . . .

He revived because they’d closed his helmet and Miya was shouting in his ear. “Hanny! Answer!”

“I’ve been unconscious.” His arms were still bound. His translator had a pickup outside the helmet. It must have heard whatever was said, storing the sounds without understanding. “I’m having one of those days,” Svetz said.

Miya said, “Ride it out.”

Matth was answering too. The translator hiccuped and said, “Why do Svetz throw the—?”

Svetz guessed, and bellowed his answer to get it through the bubble. “Why did I throw the flight stick?”

“Yes. Buy your life with it?”

“You hurt my flight stick. I thought it would hurt us. I bought all our lives.”

Another Martian shouted, “Matth? I tried to net it.” He displayed a net with a black hole burned through it. “The flare would have killed many of us.”

Matth nodded. “Svetz, did you make that happen?”

“No!”

Miya: “I’m turning down the volume.”

Matth said, “You are slave to the ship now. Your life you must give for the safety of Skyrunner.” There was no question in his voice, and no doubt. Did Martians become slaves that easily? It would explain why he had been rescued, not killed.

“Why did you sleep?” Matth asked.

“You opened my helmet and left me with not enough breath.”

Matth made an intuitive leap. “You come from where the air is different. Another world! Earth?”

“Yes.”

“From Earth?”

Svetz was growing hoarse. “Matth, free my hands! I can make my voice loud.”

“With your hands?” Matth considered. “Swear not to attack us or Skyrunner.”

“I swear.”

“Swear for your friends.”

He couldn’t really vouch for Miya, and Zeera had a bloodthirsty streak. He said it anyway. “I swear.”

Matth freed him. Svetz stood up. He twiddled the volume control and asked, “Can you hear me?”

“Yes,” said Matth and Miya.

“Good.”

The deck surged with little gusts of wind, just enough to throw his balance off. Lower gravity seemed to make it worse. There were handholds all about him and a rope along the deck’s rim. Svetz wobbled forward, handhold to handhold, seeking a better view.

He said, “I see other sky ships.”

Matth said, “Those are enemies.”

Svetz lowered his helmet over his head and zoomed. “The closest is bigger than Skyrunner. The next two are about our size, and one of them has big crabs all over the deck.”

“They are part of the—” Something wasn’t translated.

“The ships farther back are too slow. They won’t catch us. Some of them look like the lens of an eye. I can’t tell how big they are. I count fifteen total.”

“You have good eyes.”

“You said the crabs are part of . . . something?”

“Several kinds of men gathered to make Hangtree City. The”—the translator hesitated—“Allied Peoples. There is a prophecy, Svetz. The world will dry and die. We hoped to use the Hangtree to lift ourselves to space.”

“When did the Hangtree come?”

“When Lord Pfee was a child. Lord Pfee?”

A Martian answered from a higher platform. “Matth, I have a vessel to fight!”

Matth went to join him. The two spoke. Presently Lord Pfee bellowed a string of orders, then came with Matth to join Svetz. Lord Pfee asked, “Can you see great distances?”

“Yes. What do you want to know?”

“Tell me what you see?”

“Ahead, nothing but desert.” Svetz zoomed his view. “Some right-angle patterns just at the horizon, right by a few degrees. Might be foundations for a city. Behind us, two ships our size and one twice as long and more flat, all at about our altitude. They’re pacing each other now, and they’re all closer than they were.”

“The markings?”

“Where would I look for them? Never mind, I see what you mean. It’s a hand, fingers spread, painted across the bow. All three ships.”

“Flags?”

Miya misread his hesitation. “Brightly painted cloth on a mast or pole.”

Svetz knew that! “I see them. They’re flapping, I can’t read them at all. Blue on the big one, the same pattern on a little one, and the other one is yellow and red.” Svetz looked up. The banner flapping above him was yellow and black. “None like yours. One of the lens shapes is catching up.”

Lord Pfee asked, “Weapons?”

“I don’t know what to look for. The ships all have little holes in front. The big ship has two, and there are tubes on deck that look like they can turn.”

Lord Pfee nodded. He barked rapid orders to Matth. Matth left.

Svetz asked, “Tell me how the Hangtree came.”

Lord Pfee peered at him suspiciously. “If I take this glass thing off you, you die?”

“Yes.” It might take an hour, but he’d be unconscious, unable to save himself.

“What you threw away, wasn’t it to keep a secret from us?”

“I thought it might explode and kill me. Weren’t you told?”

“Yes. What of this?” The rocket pack. “For flight on the tree?”

“Yes.” Svetz wobbled across deck to where they’d mounted it. He showed Lord Pfee how to work the rockets.

“And this?”

“Needle gun. These needle crystals dissolve in blood. It puts animals to sleep. Enemies too, but only from close.”

“Not a useful thing.”

“Tell me how the Hangtree came.”

“I do have a ship to fight, Svetz. Still . . . come.” Lord Pfee led him up a ladder to a railed balcony. “I can command from here. You can use your far-vision to keep me informed. What is your interest in the Hangtree?”

“We hope to lift vessels into the sky, to the other planets.”

“Yes, the Allied Peoples thought so too. . . .”

INTRODUCTION TO ESCAPE FROM HELL, BY LARRY NIVEN AND JERRY POURNELLE

In 1976 Jerry Pournelle and I wrote a sequel to Dante’s Inferno. The first science fiction trilogy, the Divine Comedy has become a wonderful fantasy. I’d been daydreaming of a soul trying to escape Hell ever since reading Dante for a world literature course in college.

It had dawned on me that Jerry had the knowledge I needed.

It was our second book together. It’s been one of Simon & Schuster’s dependable moneymakers, and has been taught in colleges as commentary on the Divine Comedy.

Then Jerry went on thinking about the theological problems in Dante, and C. S. Lewis, and Vatican Two, for the next thirty years. Ultimately we wrote this, a sequel to our sequel.

I dithered over what to show you, but here it is. Jerry and I were driving home across desert highway when we found a Dairy Queen sitting just where it was needed.

ESCAPE FROM HELL

SEVENTH CIRCLE, THIRD ROUND: THE VIOLENT AGAINST GOD, NATURE, AND ART

Thus was descending the eternal heat,

Whereby the sand was set on fire, like tinder
Beneath the steel, for doubling of the dole.

We reached the edge of the woods. Sylvia looked out through the last shadows and shuddered. Fireflakes fell on burning sands. “You went out in that for me?”

“Sure.”

“How do we get across it?” she asked. “Dante never went out in it at all.”

“No, he followed a stream. I don’t know where the stream is. When we looked for it last time we found a place that didn’t exist when Dante was here. It’s worse than this desert. I think we’ll have to run.”

“All right.”

“Faster than that,” I said. “These creeps have invented umbrellas. The game is, you’re the umbrella. I think we need to outrun any pairs of big men. Or big women.”

She stared at me, doubting.

“Now,” I said, and slapped her butt, and ran.

Sylvia ran. “Ow!” She was as fast as I was. Faster. “Eee! I’m on fire! Again. Allen, that river ran down from the Wood? All we had to do was run along the Wood!”

“Dante said so. I don’t quite trust the geography here. We couldn’t even find the Wood last time. I’d rather run straight across. Last time we had a car.”

“Car?”

“Car. A demon car. There’s a freeway—a highway.”

“Do you see—”

“What?”

She didn’t answer, but she veered a little to the left. In the heat-curdled distance I saw an oblong trying to shape itself. “Mirage,” I said, but she was yards ahead; she might not have heard me.

But we were still running straight away from the forest. Good enough. I followed.

“Allen, it keeps hurting!”

“Can you take it?”

“What, pain? I had two children, Allen. I know what pain is.”

“Women always play that trump card.”

“But it’s true!” She ran—and slowed. “Allen? Umbrellas—I wasn’t sure you meant it.” She pointed. A Pi shape, two human spirits carrying a third, the third struggling. She pointed again. “Maybe we can reach that.”

“Mirage,” I said. A distant oblong shape, as real as any false pool of water on a hot pavement. A cone stood up from the roof, pointed down.

“Landmark,” she countered, and ran toward it. Over her shoulder, “Be bad if we got turned around.”

It was still hazy as we got closer. Then two men ran toward it. Toward it, to it, and right through the walls. They came out the other side, not slowed a bit.

A mirage. A filthy joke. “We’re in the hands of infinite power and infinite sadism,” I said.

Sylvia wasn’t listening. She was from New England, she’d never been out West . . . but any poet would know what a mirage is.

She was running away from me. I had a horrible picture of two men using Sylvia as an umbrella to shield them from the fire. I ran after her, but she was faster than I was.

We were running through a blizzard of fireflakes. The sand below was covered with fire as well. Sylvia’s hair held half a dozen fireflakes, and so did mine. But the mirage had stopped retreating.

There was an outside service counter, but the window was closed. Next to that was a door. Sylvia pulled it open. “Come on, Allen!” She went inside.

I looked at the door. Real? Once you accept miracles, anything becomes possible. Where would this lead? Other worlds? The Vatican? But my touch found the handle solid, and I followed her in.

The air was clear. There weren’t any fireflakes, and the place smelled of chocolate and vanilla. An ice cream stand. In the middle of the desert.

“Welcome, strangers. God in Heaven, it’s you!”

I looked up, puzzled.

The proprietor was dressed in full Church regalia. Black robes, scarlet sash, a large golden pectoral cross. There was a thin line of red lace at the ends of the sleeves of his robe, and he wore a black hat with some red ornamentation on it. He was clean shaven, and the face seemed vaguely familiar.

I asked, “Do I know you?”

“We have met. I was attired somewhat differently last time. My robes were gold.”

Recognition came with a shock. “You’re the priest from the sixth bolgia!”

“Correct. I am the Reverend Canon Don Camillus. How are you?”

“I’m in Hell,” I snapped.

He frowned.

I looked around. I was here, in the desert of fire, in a place with a roof. It was cool. Sylvia had helped herself to a napkin and glass of water and was busily washing her face with every sign of contentment. Outside the fire was falling and people were screaming, but it was calm here. “I’m sorry, Father. That was ungrateful. I’m fine. I’m very well, and very glad to see you. See you here. And thank you for helping me rescue Benito.”

“You are welcome. I do not need to ask if you were successful.”

“You know?”

“All Hell knows that Benito escaped. All who should know, anyway.” He chuckled. “Will you introduce me to your friend?”

“Father, this is Sylvia Plath. Sylvia, Father Camillus. He helped me rescue Benito after I, I made a mistake.” I stopped myself. “Not mistake. After I did something terrible. I pushed my friend into the pit of the Evil Counselors. Father Camillus helped me get him out. I could not have rescued Benito without his help.”

“Very pleased to meet you,” Sylvia said. She looked around expressively. “Usually that’s a polite expression, but it’s very sincere this time.”

He chuckled again. His smile was warm and friendly. “Indeed, I recall almost no one who is not pleased to meet me,” he said. “But I am forgetting my manners. Would you care for some refreshments? I have five flavors of, of sugary icy stuff.”

Sylvia giggled. “Father, I would kill for a vanilla ice cream.”

He smiled thinly. “You did not mean that, but there are many out on the sands for whom that is no more than literal truth,” he said. He selected a cone and turned to the bank of ice cream dispensers. It all looked familiar, like a Dairy Queen on Earth. He pulled a lever and the cone filled with ice cream. He handed the cone to Sylvia.

“Thank you.” She tasted it. “Um! Delicious. Thanks. But Father—what are you doing here? Do you say Masses? Have you a congregation?”

“I serve,” he said. “My congregation is transient. A few who come through this desert and move on. I am glad to be able to give directions and some small comfort.” He handed me a chocolate ice cream cone.

INTRODUCTION TO BURNING TOWER, BY LARRY NIVEN AND JERRY POURNELLE

This is one where I really felt like a writer. Jerry and I drove across half the United States to view Chaco Canyon, the Petrified Forest, and other sites that could be given magical significance. I researched Navajo magic while at a convention in Salt Lake City. Anything a writer does that’s fun, is research. Right?

This is the series that began with The Magic Goes Away and other tales of a past in which magic is a nonrenewable resource. All myths are true in this version of the past; it’s just that the magic got used up by our time. Ants were created by a friendly god to clean up after sloppy tribesmen; in these sad days they’ve gotten out of hand.

As always, our friend Frank Gasperik worked his way into a major role. He was Mark Czescu in Lucifer’s Hammer, and Harry (“Give me a noble death!”) Reddington in Footfall. Here he is as Lord Regapisk enjoying a well-deserved tour as a galley slave.

Every story I write is a little bit about storytelling.

BURNING TOWER

2

ABOARD THE ANGIE QUEEN

Day 1

A wind was rising. Above the oar pit, Regapisk could glimpse sailors moving at a run. Sails rattled as they rose. The Oarmaster signaled: Stop oars.

Regapisk settled his oar across his lap. To the man across, he asked conversationally, “How long d’you think this’ll last?”

The man’s mad eyes rested on Regapisk, promising murder; then drifted away. He never said anything to anyone.

The man behind Regapisk murmured, “If you don’t stop poking the Ghost, Lord Reg, it isn’t me he’ll remember the day he gets loose.”

Regapisk was tired of hearing Fethiwong abuse the title he’d lost. How would Sandry put an end to that? “One day, Fethiwong,” Regapisk murmured, “the Oarmaster will hear you call me Lord.”

“Naw, he won’t. What was your turf?”

It dawned on Regapisk that Fethiwong thought he was a Lordkin tribal leader.

That was funny. Should he claim Serpent’s Walk? His firefighters had come from there; he’d learned a little, but Fethiwong might know enough to catch him out. Regapisk hadn’t yet placed Fethiwong’s accent.

He waved it away. “That’s all in the past.”

Waves played with the ship. Oarsmen murmured. Above, sailors shouted. When they stopped, Regapisk could make out softer voices. Passengers. You rarely saw passengers; they never looked down into the pit after the first day.

Regapisk liked the quiet, but he didn’t need the rest. The Angie Queen had been in Condigeo for at least eight days. Oarsmen ate well when a ship was in port. They carried cargo under careful supervision—hard work, but a change from rowing.

Eight days? Ten? Regapisk wasn’t sure. He’d started a count on the day he woke, battered and confused, head ringing, to find himself chained to an oar bench. He tried to keep track of the days: a training period, layovers, trips to Avalon and Houseman’s Beach. He’d heard about Sanbarb Island, had always wanted to see it—still did. Seeing a mushroom shape, then bluffs and a beach through an oarlock didn’t count. He’d seen a lot more of Avalon. They actually went ashore and slept on real mats in Avalon. Across to Tep’s Town harbor again, where Sandry had abandoned him despite his promise. Why had he done that?

Afraid of the congregation. Sandry wasn’t afraid of much, you had to give him that, but he was afraid of the council and congregation, as if they’d do anything to Sandry. Sandry’s aunt Shanda was the First Lady of Lordshills! She was only cousin twice removed to Regapisk. That’s why she didn’t help! Sure. But Sandry? He had money; he could have bought him loose. They were right there in the Tep’s Town harbor. But nothing happened. Cargo was put on board, and they were off again.

Then three days to Condigeo, sailing with the wind most of the way. A long layover, and rumors. A barracks to sleep in, plenty to eat, not all that unpleasant at night. Daytimes, they scraped the sides of the ship or of the docks, or swept streets. The Angie Queen’s captain never missed a chance to make a few coppers renting out his crew. Eight days? Ten? That’s where he had almost lost track of the time.

Rumors said that Feathersnake wagons and a Tep’s Town Lordsmen army had beaten the birds and gotten through. Their next move would be to open the wagon trade again. What birds? Fethiwong told him an implausible tale of horse-sized shrieking demons with daggers in their wings. . . .

But if Tep’s Town had sent Lords here, then Sandry would be with them, and Sandry would use the chance to free him. Regapisk stopped making marks alongside his bench.

Ten days waiting. They’d left Condigeo this morning. Regapisk resumed his count, a mark on the wood next to his head, made with a jagged fingernail. Day One: depart Condigeo.

Day 2: Southbound

In thirty days or so at sea and in harbor, Regapisk had learned an oarsman’s pace and was earning the strength.

In his youth he had admired the muscles on Lordsmen. He’d hoped to grow up that way. He was getting his wish. His arms and shoulders had never looked this good.

It was all thanks to Lord Sandry.

Regapisk’s mind darted about his skull like a rat in a cage, seeking any escape from what he most wanted to avoid knowing. Sandry’s testimony had put him here. Sandry had promised to buy him free . . . but the Angie Queen had left Condigeo, hugging the coast, keeping the dawn on the left. Down along the Forefinger, Regapisk thought; but he knew little of that land. In Avalon they’d been housed ashore, and in Condigeo too, but at sea they slept in their chains. There was no chance of escape.

It wasn’t that he liked Sandry. They’d played together, and fought sometimes, and broken rules and been caught sometimes . . . but they were nearly cousins. You didn’t sell a cousin into slavery; you defended him.

But Sandry wasn’t going to buy him loose.

Two passengers were staring down into the oar pit, talking, laughing.

Lookers, Regapisk thought. Two old men, one still brawny, one lean and stooped, maybe not so old. Hard to tell. They were both twisted by old injuries. Fighters, Regapisk would have guessed, but what was their interest in the oar pit?

When foreigners came to Tep’s Town for entertainment, Tep’s Town called them lookers. They used to come to watch the Burning. Tellers were lookers who told tales for a living. Sometimes they traveled great distances. When the Burning didn’t happen on time, lookers were only disappointed, but tellers could end up sleeping on the beach.

There hadn’t been a Burning—a wholesale riot through Tep’s Town, wine aflow, theft and rapine, buildings alight—since the fire god went myth. Tellers had become rare.

Entertainment was in short supply for Angie Queen’s oarsmen. The men about Regapisk had become proficient at guessing about passengers. Of course they had no way to test their guesswork. On the day trip to Avalon, there had been a few Lords, a few kinless, twice that many lookers, and a dozen tellers lured by the Folded Hands gathering. The Angie Queen was more crowded on this trip south; she rode low and sluggish, heavy with cargo and passengers and barrels of fresh water. Regapisk hadn’t seen any Lords, and the only kinless seemed to be lookers’ servants. Several families with children had boarded at Condigeo.

Lookers and kinless looked once into the oar pit, mesmerized, maybe horrified. Thereafter their eyes slid over or past the chained men at their oars. Lookers and kinless didn’t like slavery. Lords and soldiers observed the oar pit as if they bought and sold oarsmen. Oarsmen hated Lords. Children and tellers looked down in frank curiosity. . . .

“Tellers,” Regapisk said.

“Bet. Next bread,” Fethiwong said. “Soldiers.”

“That one’s a teller. That one’s his bodyguard, with scars and no shirt. Next bread?”

“Hah! You knew their faces, you son of a thousand rats!”

Regapisk laughed, because Fethiwong was right. He called, “Tras Preetror!” and braced for the whip.

The Oarmaster had already given up trying to tell Regapisk whatever it was he had done wrong. He just laid on the lash and let it go at that. It was how he had taught Regapisk to row. Regapisk took the line of fire across his back, wriggled a bit, and then grinned up at Tras Preetror and Arshur the northman.

They grinned back, both of them, and walked away.

“They’ll want to talk to me,” Regapisk said. “Next bread, Fethiwong.”

“Hah. When?”

“While we’re still southbound.” He was guessing that the Angie Queen would go south as far as the tip of the Forefinger, and maybe a lot farther. Weeks, maybe moons.

“Done. Next bread.”

Next bread was all you ever had to bet with. You couldn’t bet your cloak, after all. Who needed two cloaks or could keep track of them? And how would you sleep without one? But anyone could eat a little more bread or survive a hungry morning.

3

ABOARD THE ANGIE QUEEN

Day 6: Summoned

Rumor said that there was no fresh water along the barren shore of the Forefinger, and no wind. You rowed all the way. Gods help the oarsmen if a greedy captain stowed extra cargo instead of extra drinking water.

The sails stayed rigged and ready, just in case. Today there had been a long afternoon breeze. Oarsmen could doze. When daylight went and the breezes died, sails came down and oarsmen slept. Regapisk had never slept better before boarding the Angie Queen.

But he woke, on his sixth night since Condigeo, when a lash fell across his shoulders. Not a whipstroke, he realized after that first spasm and gasp, but just the lash sliding along skin.

Still dark. It felt as if he’d just fallen asleep.

“You’re wanted,” the Oarmaster said. “Make one wrong move, and we’ll be one oar short.”

Naw, Regapisk thought as he watched the Oarmaster open his chains. You’d row in my place if you lost me this way. What kind of bribe did they offer? Uncharacteristically, he didn’t say any of that. Up close, dark against starlight, the Oarmaster was scary. His shoulders and arms were huge and ridged with scars. He must have been an oarsman himself.

Regapisk stood, his legs badly cramped, and moved as he was directed.

Up a ladder to the Oarmaster’s perch. Up another ladder to the deck, then into one of the better rooms. The Oarmaster left him there, but Arshur the northman loomed.

The huge old man said nothing. Despite a twisted body and lavish scars, dark mottled scalp, and sparse white hair, the barbarian was still a tower of muscle, an accident waiting to happen. Very clearly he was Tras Preetror’s bodyguard, if Regapisk proved untrustworthy.

Tras Preetror remained seated. “Next bread you’re a Lord,” he said.

“I want half your bet,” Regapisk said. “Have you worked the oars, or do you just listen good?”

“Both,” the teller said. “I have to listen or the tales don’t come to me. Tell me a story. I saw you talking to the oar behind you, and he’s Lordkin.”

“That’s Fethiwong of Dirty Birds. He robbed a clothing shop and had some wonderful luck. He got most of the gowns for Lady Tzarbon’s wedding. Worth a fortune, they were, and he gave a few away to friendly women. All he had to do was not tell stories in dockside. She’s married a captain from Condigeo, you know?”

Tras Preetror chuckled. He patted air: “Sit. Tell me stories.”

Regapisk sat. He nibbled pastry filled with meat paste, as if he weren’t prepared to devour it in a mouthful. Manners. “I know some of your story,” he said. “Where you were when the Toronexti were burned out at the Deerpiss Meadow. How Whandall Feathersnake put you both in a tree so you’d live through it. You must have missed some of the battle, but I’ve heard the rest.”

“What I didn’t see, I got from witnesses.” Tras Preetror dismissed the matter, a tale told too often. “The little girl, Burning Tower, who burned the manuscript of the laws? I saw her in Condigeo.”

“She was on this ship twenty days ago, with my cousin, Lord Sandry.”

“Curse, I’m sorry I missed her! But what I want to know about is the birds. Have they got as far as the Burning City?”

Birds?

A little desperately, Regapisk said, “Big killer birds? I only heard about the birds in Condigeo port. I do know tales a teller wouldn’t hear unless he talks to Lords’ children. And you can tell me about birds. It’s your turn.” Tellers traded tales; everyone knew that.

Tras waved, expansive generosity. “You first. What was it like to be a Lord’s boy?”

So Regapisk told him about Lord Sandry and the mirror.

Mirrors were expensive. Outside Tep’s Town, they might be magical. Regapisk had been twelve, Sandry had been ten, when Regapisk talked Sandry into trying to enter the mirror world. “I told him I’d already been inside,” Regapisk said.

At a walk, Sandry only bumped his nose. At a run, he knocked over Lord Fesk’s mirror and cracked it. He was caught trying to repair it with chicken fat.

And Regapisk got the blame. He’d never understood that.

“Maybe you had a reputation by then,” Tras suggested.

“Nah.”

Tras Preetror told how he’d learned to bet with next bread, in a galleon’s oar pit, after he tried to talk his way into Lordshills with the aid of a Serpent’s Walk boy. “That was Whandall Placehold. A lot of these scars are from when he caught me later.”

“Caught you doing what?”

“Well . . . yes.” Tras laughed. “Invading his privacy, he said.”

The child Regapisk had hidden on balconies and spied on Lords and their ladies, and learned nothing Lord Regapisk thought interesting. But Tras probed for details: how they dressed, what they ate, how they talked, schooling and schoolmasters, and what children did when they weren’t around. . . .

“Now, the birds,” Regapisk said. “It really is your turn.”

“Lots of them off to the east,” Arshur said. “Not so many up north. In the high north country, we had three in cages until it got too expensive to feed them meat, then we ate the birds. Taste like chicken, but the meat’s red like bison.”

“You never told me any of this,” Tras protested.

“You never asked.”

They talked to each other that way, Tras and Arshur. Regapisk wondered why. But Tras was asking the questions now, so Regapisk need only listen.

“Did the birds up north attack wagon trains? People?”

“Not more than once,” Arshur said. “They were just birds. Took more than one man to kill one, unless it was me. I figured out a way to kill one by myself. Most times you got six or eight guys to surround one with spears and lassoes.”

“One,” Tras said. “The stories we’re hearing are about a dozen and more birds attacking people and wagon trains and towns. They’ve closed down the Golden Road.”

“Never heard of them doing anything like that,” Arshur said.

They got Arshur to tell a story of theft and battle in the far north. Lordkin in a land of ice and peaks, Regapisk thought, and was captivated.

Then the Oarmaster was there, wanting his oarsman. Regapisk went without complaint.

“Keep your bread,” he told Fethiwong loftily. “I ate better than that.” Maybe the sails would go up and he could sleep away the morning. He’d been taken away in the middle of a tale. Maybe he’d be summoned back.

INTRODUCTION TO BUILDING HARLEQUIN’S MOON, BY LARRY NIVEN AND BRENDA COOPER

I met Brenda Cooper through Steven Barnes. She was a rancher and a local politician and had a host of other skills. Brenda had the urge to write, and a handful of half-written short stories. We worked on some of those, using e-mail. It was interesting: I would try to tell her why a story was monstrously difficult, and wind up solving the problems.

On a later occasion I went up to Washington State to work with Steve. It turned out that our editor had no suggestions for reworking Saturn’s Race, and Steve was busy on what became Lion’s Blood. So I had some free time. Brenda and I talked story while we took long walks around a local lake.

What we came up with was ambitious: a novel about terraforming the wrong solar system using the wrong tools.

My collaborators have always been ambitious. I’ve kept up as best I can. Working with Brenda was something like working with Steve, all those years ago: I thought of myself as a teacher, and made my collaborator do a lot of the rewriting, even when I could have done it myself.

We made it work. It’s the only time I’ve written directly about shaping an Earthlike world, and I’m very pleased with the way it came out. As always with a novel, there were some surprises.

BUILDING HARLEQUIN’S MOON

12

SPACE!

The force of the lander’s flight through the atmosphere made Rachel dizzy. Straps dug into her shoulders and thighs. Her head felt heavy against the pillow of the copilot’s acceleration couch. The hull was transparent. Harlequin filled a good part of the view, so brilliant in Apollo’s light it hurt to look. Outside the diffusion of Selene’s thick atmosphere, the gas giant transformed. Colors were brighter, separated and distinct. Scrollwork storms swirled across the surface. Rachel felt tiny, awed.

“Close your eyes,” Gabriel said.

She did. Why? She felt the thrust of the last few moments of flight lessen, falling away so her body rose against the straps that held her in place. She clutched the edges of the seat, pulling herself down so she stayed fully connected to the chair. Her stomach turned lazily, not ill, but floating. It felt a little like catching an updraft and riding it, but without the pull of wings against her shoulders and biceps.

“Why do I feel so light?”

“There’s no gravity out here. When we took off, engine thrust made you feel heavy, like when we take off in a plane. We’ll still be moving fast, but you won’t feel it the same way.”

“Will there be gravity on the John Glenn?”

“In most places. Do you feel sick?”

“N-no. A little dizzy.”

“Good. Now, open your eyes.” Gabriel sounded excited.

A slightly ovoid shape hung in center view. Browns and deep reds and tans floated across it, and just above center, a huge crater filled with crystal blue. The Hammered Sea! Selene.

The texture was all interlocking circles and arcs. Veins of blue flowed along the surface, following the arcs or jumping between, reaching out like strands of hair to lace half the ball with thin blue lines. Two tiny spots of green sprouted between two smaller craters.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh—it’s perfect.” She smiled, entranced, the pull of it against her very center harder even than the day she stood at the edge of the Hammered Sea and saw more water than she had known existed.

“No,” Gabriel said, “it’s not perfect. See where the water’s trapped in those two craters? We didn’t mean that—we wanted one sea. The places that are too red? That’s too much iron, miscalculations—”

He was looking at it all wrong! “Look at how pretty the seas are—so what if they aren’t exactly like you thought they’d be? You were excited about showing it to me from here. Weren’t you? Selene is like my garden plot—it’s even better for the mistakes I had to work around. It’s home, Gabriel—it’s beautiful from here. I never knew how pretty the seas . . .” Her words ran off, they weren’t changing the look on Gabriel’s face. “You’re not seeing—”

Gabriel’s voice was stern as he cut her off. “We made it, Rachel. It was nothing before we got here. It was a rock half that size. It’s not like a real planet.”

“But—”

“There’s more to see out here.” His voice changed tone. “Astronaut—get me a ring view.” His fingertips brushed a tray of lights. The little ship began to rotate, so that Selene fell away from her view, replaced with so many stars she couldn’t count them . . . and all around, so she could see new stars she’d never noticed from Selene. Three close-packed bright stars glimmered under her feet. Her stomach lurched again, and she swallowed. “How are we moving?” she asked.

“Batteries. We charge them with antimatter.”

“Antimatter? I thought you ran the ship dry!”

Gabriel laughed. “We need very little for this sort of thing, Rachel. But to go any distance at all—to go to even the closest star you see—that’s when we need a big store of it.”

“Then why don’t we use antimatter for power on Selene?” She thought of all the time her dad spent maintaining the huge solar arrays.

“We never use antimatter casually. It’s hard to handle. Dangerous if it gets loose. We prefer to move it as little as possible.”

She fell silent, confused at Gabriel’s mood changes. Why didn’t he like Selene? He was always talking about work he did—bragging even. Sometimes he volunteered information, teaching her. Other times he seemed to be keeping it from her.

Lights flickered and changed around his fingertips. The ship banked and picked up speed.

“Could I learn to fly this?”

“It’s not a skill you need.”

She crossed her arms over her twisty stomach and looked out at the stars again. They flew, not talking, both Selene and Harlequin behind them so everything they saw was stars.

Finally, he said, “Close your eyes again.” Once more the glass ship turned, and when Rachel opened her eyes they were above Harlequin, and close, and the white band Rachel knew had become a tilted moat of light. Harlequin’s ring.

“Th-that’s beautiful. I didn’t know. I think you said once, but I—I didn’t know,” Rachel stammered.

“I made those,” Gabriel said.

Rachel had no response. She looked at his profile, and thought, I’ve planted trees. Suddenly, the grove seemed small, even Selene seemed small. The ship turned again, and a new moon swam in front of her. It was a lumpy oval, banded and spotted gray and white and black; no hint of blue or green.

“That’s Moon Seventy-one. We call it the ‘rock range’—it’s what protects you from meteorites.”

“Huh?” Rachel felt as if she hadn’t made an intelligent comment in hours. A whole new world existed past Selene, a garden of stars and power.

“Flying rocks. Selene was made by bashing rocks together. But now that we have cities and an atmosphere, it could be unmade the same way. If anything comes close enough to hit Selene, we shoot it out of the sky. Moon Seventy-one is in position to hit almost anything.”

“More antimatter?” she asked.

“Well, usually we use the rail guns. Antimatter powers them.”

They turned again, and this time they headed toward a brightness that seemed like a star until Rachel noticed it got bigger and the other stars didn’t.

The point of reflected sunlight began to resolve. A long, thin light, tiny. They closed at hundreds of miles per hour, yet the . . . whatever . . . grew very slowly.

She squinted. It had to be the John Glenn. Rachel worked to take in every resolving detail as they neared the ship. Neither Gabriel nor Ali had ever said much about the ship. She and the other Children had guessed. They hadn’t even been close.

It looked like someone had taken the shaft of an arrow, placed a rounded shallow arrowhead near the tip, then capped the point with a cluster of shiny bubbles. Sheltered by the wide arrowhead, safely away from the dangers of flight impacts, two massive cylinders were fitted one above the other. The first one was still, but the second one rotated. Behind the second cylinder was a sleeve of metal shielding, and then the shaft thickened to end in a wholly featureless round and glittering pod attached to guide wires and sensors that might have been an arrow’s fletching.

Gabriel pointed to the round ball near the end of the ship. “We called that the ‘stinger’ when we were leaving Sol system. Respectfully, Rachel. That’s the antimatter containment pod. Even now—there’s not enough left to take us out of Apollo system, but it’s enough to blow John Glenn apart. And there—see—that set of tubes and locks—that’s a series of safety mechanisms we use to get whiffs of antimatter into the reaction chamber.” As Gabriel pointed out details, Rachel swore to remember it all so she could tell her friends. He continued until they were too close to the ship to see anything.

They slid into the docking bay smoothly. Shiny walls closed them in, entirely too close after the long flight through emptiness. Various metallic clicks and hums registered their entrance. A light on the console glowed a brilliant green, a short whistle rang through the cabin, and Gabriel unstrapped and floated. “Come on, but grab your bag before you let go . . .”

She reached with her left hand and unclasped the strap holding her bag to the cabin floor. It immediately floated almost out of reach. She snagged it, feeling herself float free as she let go of the last strap holding her to the acceleration couch.

Gabriel covered his mouth, like he was trying not to laugh. “Grab on to something . . . see that handle?”

She tried to shoulder her bag and free her right hand, but it floated up. She tried twisting and using her left. No good.

Gabriel laughed, helping her, guiding her out of the ship’s lock. He stopped just before opening the door, looked at her, and said, “Now, remember, be polite at all times. Always do what you’re told here. Every one of these people is older than you are, and better educated, and almost all of them have something to say about what happens on Selene. Don’t forget you’re representing your family; your town.”

Did he really think she’d forget that? “I’ll be fine.”

“Okay. I’ll lead.”

Rachel followed Gabriel down a long tube lined with handholds. Her head bumped Gabriel’s feet twice. After the second time, he turned around and pulled himself backward, giving her instructions, steadying her with one hand. They went down a ladder that way, and Gabriel helped her turn into a descending ramp. She was moving backward, her stomach turning flip-flops. She grew heavier, so that she felt more like herself, and then heavier still, as the corridor descended. She followed Gabriel, stumbling through a huge metal door, reeling from the slap of so many new sights.

The floor dragged at Rachel’s feet and she felt ungainly and awkward. Was this what it was like to be pregnant? The flight had been full of shifts in gravity, pulling and releasing her, and now every step was hard.

The fact that she was completely alone up here—that only the mysterious and confusing Council would be present—slammed down on her. She stood rooted for a moment, her body refusing to pass through the door.

Then Gabriel smiled at her, and reached his hand out to help her step up into the corridor behind the door. At least she knew Gabriel. Maybe she would finally meet Erika, the pilot who made Erika’s Folly. Maybe she could find her mother, and get her mom to go see her dad.

The woman standing in the corridor was impossibly tiny, Gloria’s size, and her skin was the reddish bronze of Selene’s soil after the tiller had done the first preparations for planting. A loose black circle of material hung from her waist to her knees. Her chest was naked except for a fountain of beaded necklaces in greens and purples. Her deep blue-black hair fell unbound to her thighs, flowing over her breasts and covering them. Her eyes were the blackest Rachel had ever seen. She looked appraisingly at Rachel.

Rachel felt plain.

“Rachel.” Gabriel’s voice broke in, slashing the spell. Rachel blinked. “Rachel, meet High Councilwoman Kyu Ho. She has offered to introduce you to the John Glenn, and to be your teacher here. She is honoring you highly.”

He’d emphasized the words “High Councilwoman.” Higher than Gabriel? She struggled with the question until she noticed Gabriel walking away, and Rachel heard herself cry out, “No—don’t go!” Her voice sounded plaintive and childish in her ears.

“I’ll see you soon,” he said firmly. He turned and kept walking.

The woman, Kyu Ho, walked in a different direction. For a moment Rachel stood and watched them both walk away. In a few heartbeats, she picked up her bag and followed. Her body was still heavy, and in just three steps she tripped and fell. The woman turned around, looking at her again, the expression in her eyes unreadable. Then she reached for Rachel’s hand and helped her up, slowing down some as Rachel struggled with feeling heavy. Even her bag was heavy, and she was afraid the straps would break. Kyu’s head only came to the bottom of Rachel’s shoulder, but she was strong, and her hand provided stability.

LARRY NIVEN’S DESCRIPTION OF GENESIS FOR FLEET OF WORLDS, BY LARRY NIVEN AND EDWARD M. LERNER

Ed Lerner popped up from nowhere, or at least it felt that way, though he’s been a published author for years. He wanted to write stories set in Known Space—in the universe I’d been carving out since I first started writing, forty-five years ago.

(James Patrick Baen once made the same suggestion: open Known Space to other writers. I told him no. Then we opened the Man-Kzin War period.)

Ed’s primary interest was in the Pierson’s puppeteer civilization, particularly in the Fleet of Worlds, five planets (as shown in Ringworld) in flight from the supernova explosions in the galactic core (as shown in “At the Core”). The puppeteers have appeared in many stories, but I hadn’t shown much of their family life.

The basic plan was to write fiction set between and around stories and novels I’ve been writing for forty-odd years. The inspiration was Tom Stoppard’s Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, a play written around and between the events in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Ed lives in the Eastern Time Zone; I live on the California coast. We don’t get together often enough to talk story. What makes it work is his meticulous research and his intricate imagination.

FLEET OF WORLDS

The walls were rough-hewn stone, the lighting an eerie bioluminescent green, and the occupants five-pointed sea creatures. Purplish-green fronds grew from cracks in the floor and walls, swaying in unseen currents and eddies. For all the strangeness, the setting suggested an office.

“What are you working on?” Kirsten asked rhetorically. She was watching the Gw’oth through a camera conveniently placed by the aliens themselves. Were they recording an important meeting? Monitoring workers for purposes of security? She had no idea. The camera was video only. That was too bad, because their translator was getting better. It produced logical-seeming results from nearly half of what it was given.

Beep. Her viewpoint switched to a storeroom somewhere beneath the ice. Their scanning program probed Gw’oth network addresses at random, but as far as she could ascertain, a network address conveyed nothing about a camera’s physical location. Maybe it didn’t matter. No one was in the room, and the translated labels on the boxes identified only various foods.

Beep. Beep. Beep. Two random attempts had gotten no response. Another room, this time with two writhing Gw’oth. Alien sex, she thought. She was still blushing when the vantage point shifted again.

A knock rattled her cabin door. “How is it going?” Omar asked.

“Fine.” It was a rote answer. Eric was investigating the primitive Gw’oth satellites—in plain sight, now that he knew to look—and scanning the surface for launch sites. Omar was assisting Nessus with analysis of the archive translations streaming to them from Hearth. By process of elimination, that left her to sample the array of Gw’oth cameras. She only wished her assignment had produced something useful. “I’ve tagged several scenes for ongoing monitoring. How goes your analysis?”

“The little guys are making me feel really stupid. I’m just glad we have a big head start, and the Fleet will be past here soon.”

The little guys: Omar’s favorite nickname reflected a small bit of progress. A medical database had provided typical Gw’oth body dimensions in their own units of measure. A physics database had shown the correspondence between their traditional unit of length and hydrogen wavelengths. An average Gw’o was no longer than her arm; its torso at its thickest was the length of her hand. “Keep me posted, Omar. I’ll let you know if anything interesting pops up here.”

The next beep-beep drowned out Omar’s parting words. Receding footsteps suggested he had not expected an answer.

Bigger surprises than the size of a Gw’o lay within the medical databases. Each of the five muscular tubes was nearly an independent creature in its own right. Gw’oth researchers believed a distant ancestor of theirs was some sort of primitive colony. Omar, the closest among the crew to a biologist, suspected they were correct. It would take genomic databases to prove or disprove the theory, and so far nothing of the sort had been found. Gw’oth science seemed not to have ventured far into genetics.

The next scene showed a single Gw’o operating an apparatus she did not recognize. Whatever it was, the creature used four extremities to control it. The lack of an annotation said the translator could not identify the equipment either. “Pause scan.” She watched for a while without enlightenment. “Keep recording this channel. Queue a copy to Eric.” After staring a little longer without result, she added, “Resume scan.”

Beep. An empty corridor. Beep. A writhing mass of Gw’oth: an orgy. She averted her eyes until a tone signaled a scene change. Beep beep. A vast spread of sea-bottom plant life, perhaps a farm. Beep . . .

She stood and stretched. The little guys were keeping their secrets, she thought, followed by: Why do I care that they’re smaller than me? Several more uninteresting scenes beeped by before she decided. It’s a defense mechanism. Omar is not the only one they make feel slow-witted.

“Pause.” Maybe her reaction did bear thinking about. It wasn’t just that the outpouring of Gw’oth creativity shocked Eric and Omar—and her. In truth, Colonists had little experience developing technology from scratch. Her people’s science and engineering was doled out by their patrons. Whatever she had learned before, she had always been aware it was merely a subset of Citizen knowledge. No, what was truly eye-opening was that the Gw’oth rate of learning astonished Nessus.

It was not her first such rude awakening. . . .

When Kirsten was twelve, her parents took her and her brothers hiking in a forested conservation zone. Dad practically had to drag her there, stepping disc by stepping disc. Voluntarily leaving the grid seemed ridiculous. To intentionally walk into the wilderness was the most peculiar thing she had ever contemplated.

Still whining petulantly, she popped into a small woodland clearing where Dad and Carl awaited her. She took a step forward, and her mother and her baby brother appeared on the disc she just vacated. Teleportation: That was how civilized beings traveled. A ten-digit code was emblazoned on a nearby sign; she committed the stepping-disc’s address to memory. It seemed impossible that there would be no more stepping discs in their path. She had vague hopes of finding one, evading her parents, and teleporting back along a chain of stepping discs to home and friends and urban comforts.

Five globes—four blue and white, one bejeweled—hung overhead in a straight line: the rest of the Fleet. She had never set foot on any of them; she did not expect she ever would. Still, any of those worlds, even Hearth itself, was less alien than the myriads of trees all around her. Each of those worlds had stepping-disc grids, too.

She had known in the abstract that farms and ranches and seas lay outside the stepping-disc network. Never before had she felt it. Her parents worked in a tractor factory. The factory and their neighborhood were in the heart of the grid.

A hundred paces into the woods they lost sight of the forest-ranger station and its end-of-the-line stepping disc. Chirps and rustles in the undergrowth made her shrink close to Dad despite her displeasure at being here. She knew both he and Mom carried some sort of Citizen-sanctioned stunning device in case an animal got too close.

Dad led the way into the park, babbling about permutations and combinations of trees. She did not share his enthusiasm. She remembered a downhill section along a streambed, and a packed-dirt path. Had it been trodden by animals? The thought made her cringe. Occasionally they climbed hills for their different-only-in-the-details views, between longer periods spent among the trees and undergrowth. Much of her time went to keeping track of little Philip.

Dad’s commentary grew sparser and sparser. They came to a halt beside a pond she thought seemed familiar. He and Mom traded looks that said plainly: This is not what I expected. Mom checked her communicator, and shook her head. No reception.

“We’re lost, aren’t we?” Kirsten was scared and angry and ready to slug Philip, just because he was there. “Why would you bring us here? No stepping discs, no communications”—and a sudden thought hit her—“and no food.”

“It was supposed to be a fun outing, Kirsten,” Dad said. “I thought we were following a circuit that would lead us back to the entry disc, but obviously we missed a turn. This park seemed small enough that we couldn’t go very far astray, and safe enough, because it’s surrounded by farms.

“So yes, we’re lost, but there’s no need to worry. The park staff will surely find us. They know we’re in here. Or our friends will call them when we’re late coming home.”

The sky darkened with clouds, and the rain began. They huddled together for warmth under a rocky outcropping that kept off little of the rain. Philip hid his face in Mom’s side, and even Carl was quiet. As the last of the orbital suns set for the night, the temperature plummeted. Her teeth chattered.

Were they animals, to die alone in the forest? It seemed insane.

Three yellow blotches in the dense cloud marked the visible worlds of the Fleet, a bit of normality in an existence suddenly become surreal. Through the clouds, she could not tell one world from another.

It was a useless skill, but she had deduced how to tell the time of day from the position of the worlds in the sky. It amused her, and provided a smart-aleck answer to Dad’s questioning the value of studying math.

Wait! The line of the worlds had seemed different at the start of their trek. “Dad, you said the park is surrounded by farms.” Farms meant warmth and food, and workers who could show them the nearest stepping discs.

“Yes. We could hike out of here if we could walk in a straight line.” His shrug was barely recognizable in profile in the nighttime gloom. “Following stepping discs isn’t the same, is it? I mean, a stepping disc or a sign for one is always in sight.”

“That’s the thing.” She pointed skyward, suddenly excited. “We can walk in a straight line. It’s even easy.” She turned to face squarely the three glows overhead. “Just walk toward the Fleet.”

They made their way slowly with only flashlights to guide the selection of a safe path. With Dad at her side, Kirsten led the way. Another world had set, leaving but two to guide them, when the edge of a cultivated field appeared through the trees. It was her first feat of navigation.

That near-disastrous outing was at once the start of her love of nature and the loss of innocence. Thinking her parents wrong and stupid about everything somehow had not yet translated into a visceral realization that parents did not know everything. But no one can know everything, not even parents. It was all right if she knew something they did not.

That wilderness adventure, her first act of navigation, was also the first step on the path that had brought Kirsten to the stars.

So even Citizens don’t know everything, and Eric’s question hung over the mission like a dark cloud. How had the Gw’oth planned their no-wasted-efforts, no-missteps, technological eruption before they mastered the environment in which to do the experiments to develop the science to envision the plan? If the four of them could not answer that, how could they begin to predict whether the Gw’oth represented a risk to the onrushing Fleet?

Running often helped Kirsten think, and the only place onboard to run was the treadmill. Her arms and legs pumped, and cityscape streamed past her in a wall projection, as she tried to reconcile the irreconcilable. She had a theory that only an applied mathematician could like. The Gw’oth could have simulated everything—science, engineering designs, and development projects—until they were ready to put their plans into effect. With sufficiently massive computing power, models and calculations could replace much messy experimentation. She had taken basic science classes on Arcadia. Simulation was a much more reliable guide to how the world worked than her typical lab technique.

But the Gw’oth wouldn’t have computers until they developed above-the-ice industry. The riddle made her head hurt.

Dinnertime came and went; she kept loping on the treadmill. She needed a clear head more than a synthed meal.

Not only would the Gw’oth need computers to do the simulations, but as far as their investigations had revealed, the aliens still did not have major computing capabilities. They had huge data archives, and specialized devices to facilitate sorting and searching and networking that data—but computers? The scouts had not found any computing centers to speak of.

Her arms and legs burned and trembled; she ached from overexertion. Knowing she had overdone it, she slowed the treadmill to a cool-down gait.

Even Citizens don’t know everything. How much less do I know?

INTRODUCTION TO JUGGLER OF WORLDS, BY LARRY NIVEN AND EDWARD M. LERNER

Ed and I return to the Fleet of Worlds, now missing its sixth, human-inhabited planet. Once again, Ed explores the gaps between novels and stories I’ve been publishing for forty-odd years.

Sigmund Ausfaller began life with a small part in “Neutron Star” and later in Beowulf Shaeffer’s biography, Crashlander. He’s an ARM, an officer in the United Nations police, the Amalgamation of Regional Militia. Thus, he was chosen because he’s a paranoid schizophrenic. He trusts nothing.

Now he wakes after being revived from death for a second time, by an old enemy, the Pierson’s puppeteer Nessus. He’s on a very alien world. It wouldn’t be so bad if he weren’t a flat phobe, plagued by the fear of leaving Earth. . . .

JUGGLER OF WORLDS

59

“Step back,” a stern voice commanded. Another man—no, two men—emerged from the woods. They wore camouflage jumpsuits similar in cut to Eric’s.

Sigmund froze. Why wasn’t he hearing people approach? It might be the distraction of his roiling thoughts, but he did not believe that.

“We mean you no harm,” one of the newcomers said. “Now move away from Eric.” The man who spoke was tall and wiry, with sloped shoulders. He had pinched features under a thick mop of unruly brown hair, and he spoke with quiet assurance.

The second newcomer might have stood as tall had he not stooped; he appeared soft and professorial. His hair was colorfully dyed and braided, almost like a Puppeteer. Neither carried any obvious weapon.

ARMs received extensive training in martial arts. If they were unarmed, Sigmund guessed he could take both men. Then what? Fight everyone on this world one by one? Grass tickled his bare feet.

The academic-seeming one shuffled over to free Eric. He peered at the knotted bathrobe belt, his expression dubious, wringing his hands.

His companion smiled. “Thank you, Sigmund. Your cooperation makes things easier. I’m Omar Tanaka-Singh. Call me Omar. My knot-challenged friend is Sven Hebert-Draskovics. Sven, just cut the thing off.”

Sigmund flapped a lapel of his robe. “Or let me untie it. I’d like my sash back.”

Omar chuckled. “You’ll get real clothes soon enough. Nessus said the robe on the ’doc would be a familiar touch.”

Eric was now unbound, stomping his feet and massaging his wrists to stimulate the circulation. He paused long enough to bend over and flip his belt to Sigmund. “Use this.”

Sigmund suddenly noticed that he did not cast a shadow. Neither did Omar. Eric and Sven, nearer the trees and thus out of sight of one line of suns, each had several shadows. Sigmund’s chest tightened; he dare not look up at the fireballs hurtling overhead. “I want to know how I came to be here. I want to speak with Nessus.”

“As he wants to talk with you. As for how you came here . . .” Omar shrugged. “Only Nessus knows.

“He meant to be present when the ’doc finished with you. He thought seeing familiar faces would be helpful. Something urgent came up elsewhere.” Omar peeled the bark from a fallen twig.

Why was Omar nervous?

Omar threw down the denuded twig. “If it matters, Sigmund, I apologize for the shock of this. We had to awaken you somewhere. By night, at least, we hoped the woods might seem . . . normal. Nessus said our buildings wouldn’t.”

Sigmund cinched his robe closed with Eric’s belt. “Normal. You mean, Earth-like.”

“Tell us about Earth,” Sven said eagerly. “There’s so much we want to know.”

“All in good time.” Omar clapped his hands. “First, let’s get our guest clothes and a meal.”

They were Nessus’ henchmen. Sigmund wondered why they expected him to tell them anything. Perhaps it was best not to dwell on that. He followed Omar into the woods, Eric and Sven falling in behind. As Omar walked, he removed something from a pocket of his jumpsuit. It looked like a controller or computer of some kind.

They stopped after a few paces. “Step after me,” Omar said. He tapped at the device from his pocket, stepped onto a thin, polished disc resting on the ground—and vanished.

The disc, scarcely a meter across, worked like an open transfer booth! No wonder he had not heard anyone approach. “Where are we going?” Sigmund demanded.

Eric sighed. “For clothes and food. Sigmund, you’ll get answers much faster if you can suspend your distrust. Just go through the stepping disc after Omar.”

Ander betrayed and shot him. Someone kidnapped his dying body. Trust was a lot to ask. “And the autodoc?” Ander’s greed for the ’doc had almost gotten Sigmund killed. Just as surely, that apparatus must have saved Sigmund. He would not abandon it lightly.

“I’ll arrange for its storage,” Eric said. “You and Sven should move along.”

Sigmund stared at the disc. He couldn’t remember when he had last used a transfer booth. And yet—if Eric spoke the truth—that caution hadn’t kept him from the mouths of the Puppeteers.

Sigmund flicked into a dimly lit space. It was an ordinary warehouse . . . almost. The under-eave windows were oddly shaped. In shadowy corners, unfamiliar mechanisms droned with an unpleasant pitch. The colors—everything—seemed subtly wrong. He scarcely noticed Omar take hold of his elbow and guide him off the stepping disc. The floor felt strangely warm and resilient. Moments later, Sven flicked through.

In a fog, Sigmund put on a jumpsuit and boots like those worn by his escorts. The material felt eerily slick. Somehow, pinching the fabric, he set off a kaleidoscope of colors. Dynamically programmable nanocloth! Sven did something to configure the garment to a sedate and static pattern.

A bowl of fruit, mundane as could be, sat on an oval table. Sigmund extracted a random piece from the middle of the heap. It was, unambiguously, a green apple. Suddenly he was ravenous. He devoured the apple and two bananas, then chugged a tall glass of water. He wiped his mouth on the back of a hand. “That, at least, was normal. So what now?”

“Now we give you a tour.” Omar discarded the core of the pear he had been eating. “Before you’ll accept anything else, we have to convince you New Terra is a human world.”

PART TWO
STORIES

INTRODUCTION TO “CHOOSING NAMES”

The Kzinti weren’t created from whole cloth; they evolved over years. I mean this in both senses: they evolved under the pressure of natural selection, by losing wars, and they evolved in my head. When we opened the Man-Kzin War period, many writers noticed the Kzinti telepaths I’d thrown into that first story for plot purposes. I started to notice them too.

“CHOOSING NAMES”

The light in this room was redder than Sol’s, more like the light of his own world, or of the Kzin homeworld, which he had never seen. Creditor’s Telepath found it friendly. The room’s other occupant was behind a wall of armor glass. He sat in darkness. The Kzin could make out his posture a little, but not the set of his face. It didn’t matter.

The Kzin said, “I can read minds.”

The previous dose of sthondat gland extract was wearing off. Creditor’s Telepath would retain traces of his peculiar talent for another few hours, no more. He could taste a bit of the other’s thoughts. His interrogator was wary; distrustful.

Creditor’s Telepath asked, “Do you see the implications? I have been among your enemies. I know their thoughts, their plans, hopes, fears, goals.”

“That could be very valuable.”

“My price is high. I want a name.”

He sensed his interrogator’s amusement. Rage rose in him; he quelled it. He was skilled at that. “Our lower ranks are named for what we do,” he said, “but any may aspire to gain a name, a rank. Our lowest are named for what we are. Cowards, mutants, cripples, or telepaths. I am Creditor’s Telepath. I would be the first in living memory to have a name.”

The other shifted his weight behind the protective glass. He had seen what an addiction could do to his kind. This Kzin wasn’t just scrawny and undersized, he was warped. Creditor’s Telepath made him uneasy.

He asked, “Who have you been among? Did they know anything worth knowing? Do you?”

“You shall judge,” Telepath said. “Our ship was Creditor, with a crew of eleven and space for sixteen, mountings for two plasma cannon but only one mounted. We lofted in haste when the news came. We told each other that our lower mass would bring us to loot faster than vessels with full crew and armaments. We were in the forefront, ahead of other ships our size, avoiding notice of the battleships, when Gutfoot’s Horde plunged into Sol system.

“It was great fun. The fusion reaction motors used by humans leave a hot ionized wake, a line that shouts in X-rays. We found such a line, aimed for the converging point of it, popped up next to a ship and shot off the drive module. We invaded the shell, took four cringing humans—the first we’d seen, much smaller than we’d supposed from the messages alone. Took what else we wanted most, marked the shell as our own property and went off to do it again.

“It worked once.

“Then, moving at a few hundred klicks per second, Creditor ran through a stream of pebbles. Humans have been defending their turf with all manner of reaction motor. This was an electromagnetic accelerator, part of an asteroid mining concern. Humans take the metal and use the slag for reaction mass, and they sprayed us with that. Creditor was shredded. My companions fought the invaders and died. I hid, but in a pressure suit I was too bulky.

“They found me. They found our human prizes too, battered but safe in the shielded room we use for hiding and for a pantry. For sparing their lives I may have been given better treatment.

“For a time they kept me in a small dome, in free fall. Later, here on a little moon of a gas giant planet. But they didn’t know what I was!”

This burst forth in a shout, for the surprise had never left Creditor’s Telepath. He sensed his listener’s startlement. “I felt their fear. At first I didn’t understand it. I was the last of my crew, and the first Kzin they had ever seen. There were no other Kzinti about. In this system-wide series of battles there have been other captive Heroes, but my own captors saw us only on screens. They did not see that I am stunted. I mass three or four times what they do, though I’m half the mass of a Hero.

“They did not understand my addiction either. They did see that I was sick and growing sicker. They blamed my smashed ribs and a dietary imbalance. It concerned them. Humans come near being herd animals, and my pain distressed them. They tried to do something about it.

“Their doctor machines adjust for their own biochemical imbalances. They fiddled and adjusted until I was getting nourishment to keep me healthy, and if I never quite recovered they were sure they hadn’t quite got it right.

“Though some nourishment reached me through tubes and some as food, I was still starving! They offered no live prey. I ate worse than I had aboard Creditor! But any telepath is addicted to sthondat lymph, and my stock is lost. Of course I was sick.

“Without periodic injections I would have trouble reading even another Kzin. I picked up almost nothing from the dozen humans who were my guards and doctors. But that little made all the difference. I survived because I could feel their fear. They perceived me as a return of terror and Old Night into what had been their paradise. I was a looming nightmare of fangs and claws.” Again he felt his interrogator’s amusement. He shouted, “I had their respect!”

More calmly, then, “Before they brought in more prisoners, something else was happening to me. One like myself loses his sense of self very easily. Can you understand this? The Keepers do not inject us until we are old enough to breed. We must not breed, but we must develop a sense of who we are, while we can, before the flow of others’ thoughts can drown us. Truly, for our own defense, Telepaths should always have had names!”

His listener shrugged. He didn’t care.

That galled Telepath. He said, “I have told you nothing yet that can help you. Will you give me a name?”

“Certainly.”

So easy? But within his murky thoughts he seemed to mean it. Telepath said, “Well, then. Locked within my mind, somewhat protected from the physical horror of withdrawal, I came to know myself. To know that there is a self in here.” The Kzin thumped his ribs above the liver. It seemed his listener understood.

“The next attack on Sol system was by another bandit group on the Patriarchy’s borders. I think Pareet’s Pride learned nothing from Gutfoot’s Horde, if any of us escaped to tell tales at all. Pareet’s fleet plunged into Sol system just as we did. Like us they found industrial lasers and flying slag where their telepaths, and ours, had found slothful minds at peace with each other and themselves. To the moon came four Heroes, variously injured.

“Understand, to be captured and imprisoned alive was the earmark of these four. I call them Heroes, but they were not. Neither were they telepaths nor users of sthondat lymph. They outmassed me by nearly double.

“I was not to mingle with them. Our human captors feared we would share secrets. A double wall of iron bars set an eight-meter gap between us. We must gesticulate and shout at each other, so that our words and posture-language may be recorded against a time when our speech will be known.

“Of course I shouted greeting. For a quarter-year I was closed within my mind, knowing myself, doubting the reality of anything else. Now Kzinti had come, but I couldn’t penetrate their skulls! I shouted, and they didn’t answer.

“One rarely moved and never spoke. The human doctors took better care of him than his companions did. In the end he died. One had lost most of his left leg, and he didn’t move much even in the low gravity. One, big and burly and belligerent, had no ears at all. The last battle had flayed him: he was pink skin over half his body. He stood at the bars and glared hate at me. The fourth bore a broad slash of white fur around the eyes. He looked healthy, and he studied me, though our captors would not have noticed.

“A mealtime passed before he spoke. ‘I am White Mask, rank of Strategist. I have what you need.’

“They knew me for what I was, of course. I need not ask what he meant. I asked, ‘How?’

“ ‘I only had an instant,’ he said. ‘I took what was close to hand.’ There was nothing in his hands except steel bars, and I wondered where he could have concealed any tool at all. ‘We know too little of these prey-who-would-fight. One of your kind could tell us more of them, if he does not die! So, I have what will heal you, and be glad we came in time!’

“In time? Eleven years taking sthondat extract, then a quarter-year without! I’d be dead without my captors’ medical machines. Now my body was beginning to recover from eleven years of abuse.

“But I said only, ‘We are observed,’ and then, ‘we are studied.’

“White Mask turned to the earless one and rasped a command.

“Earless screamed and lashed out. The one-legged one snatched at the dying one’s ankle and scuttled backward on all threes while the others fought.

“Those two were clumsy, unused to low gravity. They fought more in the air than on the ground, and every blow threw them apart. Earless was massive and powerful, but twice White Mask trapped him in the air and battered him like a slashball. A flurry of blow-and-kick put them between the windows and One Leg, and that was when One Leg threw something to me.

“It was what I expected, a small zip bag, half empty. We had no pouches, of course, so I hid it in my mouth, betting that it was watertight. I waited for feeding time.

“Food arrived in pouches; bowls were not suited for the moon’s low gravity. The pouches came on a conveyer line. No human would come near any Kzin without a good deal of care. I positioned my dinner pouch to hide the zip bag, looked in and found sthondat lymph preparation. I swallowed less than a normal dose, then lay down. After so long I didn’t know how it might affect me.

“The thoughts of the others flowed into me, intrusive, disorienting. No human was near me, not yet, but I shared my mind with four warriors. They were not of rank to be given names, and they had fallen away from using military designations. They had been humiliated in battle, and here in their presence was a smaller, weaker Kzin.

“White Mask had learned strategy as a child, in role-playing games, and won adolescent fights by forethought more than strength. He saw that I was a tool they might use to free themselves, and he tried to force that view on the others. They had worked this out together, the fight to cover a thrown package. But Ear Eater kept forgetting.

“Ear Eater had made his reputation before a victim’s father beat him and chewed off his ears. He wanted only to reach me. His claws would tear his lost pride out of my liver. He might have to kill White Mask first. And Stumpy.

“Stumpy outranked the rest. He had been Captain’s Voice, but of course he couldn’t fight with one leg gone. He thought Ear Eater might be more malleable if he could kill something that fought back. The humans served our meat dead.

“Toolmaster was dying. He had neither speech nor lucid thought. Vacuum had torn his throat and lungs. Toolmaster’s mind felt my touch and welcomed the company. He didn’t want to die without passing on a lifetime of knowledge . . . nothing of any great use, as it turned out. How a kood hides . . . a creature of a world I’ve never seen, imported to Shasht, another world I’ve never seen . . . how it is found, how it wriggles, how it dies, its taste. The ecstasy and terror of mating with a stronger male’s Kzinrette, the terror and ecstasy of outrunning him. Swimming. Not one in a thousand Kzinti can swim, but Toolmaster could. The attack on Sol system. I sensed what was coming and tried to pull loose.

“The gravity generator is gone and everything is falling, falling. A rolling dive across the command room while breathing-air shrieks through a ripped wall. That wonderful instant when my arms and legs close around my pressure suit. Zippers open, legs in first, keep it graceful, arms, torso zip seal, I’m going to live! The helmet is suddenly a cloud of high-velocity splinters. My neck and head are wet and chill with boiling/freezing blood, and it all fades . . . and I was curled in a ball, sweating fear, while the others watched me through the bars.

“To them I was only Telepath.

“Telepaths can’t hurt their tormentors without feeling the hurt. Every child knows what it is to win a fight, but we know only through another mind. A Telepath will do anything for the sthondat preparation. Knowing these things about me, they knew everything they cared to, just as if they could read my mind.

“White Mask didn’t wonder if I had taken the stuff. A telepath would. When the doctors netted me and took me away bound, White Mask was trying so hard not to watch that his eyes hurt.

“The doctors hooked me to their machine doctor. I smelled the other Kzinti: they had been brought here before they reached the pen.

“I felt the doctors’ complacent pleasure: I was healthy, strong. They couldn’t know how my strength was growing as I recovered from sthondat addiction. Another thing pleased them: my heart rate showed that the calming chemistry was working too. Humans dose each other, sometimes, to keep each other docile, and they’d found similar stuff for me. It was the first time I had sensed this. For just that instant I would have killed them all.”

“Why didn’t you?”

An odd question; or was it? Telepath said, “I suppress such thoughts as a conditioned reflex. Do you think I offered to take my first dose of sthondat lymph? I was born with a knack for reading minds, but others made me Telepath. What if I tried to kill each of them? I would have died over and over.”

“Did you get a chance to talk to the other Kzinti?”

“Yes. After they examined me, the doctors asked me to do that, to reassure the other prisoners. ‘For you, the war is over,’ they said, ‘tell them that.’ Magic words to make an enemy docile. For us, no war is over,” Creditor’s Telepath said. “I was told that I would not be let into their compound. That suited me well. I did not want to be in reach of Ear Eater.

“So, back in our cages, we shouted at each other. The first thing I shouted was, ‘They don’t know the Heroes’ Tongue!’ It was almost true. Humans had learned a dozen words, and I had learned many more.

“I tried to describe how we stood. The pen, the hospital, humans on site, humans visiting. Weapons: I’d seen almost nothing. Air, water, food supplies. The great bubble of greenhouse perched above us on the crater wall. A pinprick would burst it. They saw that and believed me when I told them that humans had put away war—told each other they had outgrown war—before we came.

“I told them what the doctors knew of the war, which was little. They told me of the second attack. They knew nothing of the first; but they had come in haste, with little preparation, because word of Sol system was already flowing at lightspeed toward the Patriarchy. Larger, stronger hordes would follow.”

The interrogator asked, “Flowing from what point? Where was the ship when it sent these messages? We need their transit time. Can you show me on a star map?”

“Yes. Now?”

“No, go on.”

“Near sunset White Mask told me, ‘We need to break free. Have you given any thought to escape?’

“I said, ‘Vacuum surrounds us. Stealing pressure suits wouldn’t be useful. They’ve got some of ours, but those went off to be studied. Once free, I can’t lead you to spacecraft or a spaceport. They had me in a windowless box when they brought me.’

“ ‘They must have pressurized vehicles,’ White Mask said.

“ ‘I arrived in one,’ I said, ‘a box with rockets—’

“ ‘If we can take a ship and an alien pilot, can you read the pilot’s mind? Well enough to fly the ship?’

“I said, ‘I’ve seen their input keyboards. Our fingers aren’t small enough.’ I saw his thought, Telepath will try to talk us into sloth and cowardice. I said, ‘Take two of their writing sticks, one in each fist, and you could punch commands on their keys. But you need a pilot, not just some random prey. I’ll have to find one for you.’

“ ‘Await word,’ White Mask said.

“That night I listened to them working up an escape plan. They needn’t shout at me; I heard their thoughts. A working spacecraft would be ideal, but a damaged or empty ship might still send a message, and a mind taster could tell them how to do that too. They had to involve Creditor’s Telepath in any plans at all.

“I saw their image of me every time my designation was spoken. Remember he can’t fight. He has to live until we’re in free space, and that means we move fast. We must be loose before that evil goop he uses runs out, or else we’re here for keeps. Why didn’t you snatch a full pouch? Because our own crazy Telepath, shredded when a patch of hull turned to flying shards, let the flak shred his carry-pouch too! White Mask’s memory forced upon me a diminishing radio howl from within a globe of bloody froth, frozen at the surface, lobes of fluid breaking through as blood boiled and froze and expanded.

“In the morning White Mask called to me. ‘Talk to them. Give them a reason to move us out of this box! If we were inside together we could do something. Not you, Telepath, stay where you are. We’ll free you after.’

“I had been thinking too. I said, ‘Toolmaster is dying. I can feel him disappearing into dreams, and even the dreams are fading. Tell the humans. They will try to save him.’

“I felt how that startled Stumpy. He shouted, ‘They have four. Why strain to keep a damaged fifth?’ I felt his fear that they would not keep a damaged fourth either, on this airless moon where every breath must be made or imported.

“I tried to answer him. ‘These are not quite single entities,’ I said. ‘To be complete they need a community. Isolated humans turn strange. Partly they live for each other. They imagine they feel each other’s fear, lust, agony, rage.’

“I was speaking a truth that I could feel and taste, and in that instant I knew I was describing myself. I had to force myself to go on. ‘Their instinct will be to care for any injured creature, a weakling human, an animal, even an enemy, even an alien. Tell them that Toolmaster needs his companions about him and they will believe. They will take you all inside. I can’t guess what precautions they will take first.’

“White Mask’s scream of triumph rang through his head and mine. In his throat it was only a strangled squeak. ‘Tell them, then! Get us inside and we will do the rest!’ He stooped over Toolmaster. ‘Of course he’s dying. Is he dead already?’

“I reached for Toolmaster’s mind. ‘He lives. Let me guide you now and I’ll get you in. Huddle around Toolmaster. Ear Eater, imagine how his posture might be more comfortable, and move him. White Mask, talk to him.’

“ ‘Saying what?’

“ ‘Does it matter? Speak, listen, speak again.’ I could feel Toolmaster’s remote agony lessen: he could just barely sense the attention, and he liked it. ‘Now, White Mask, go to the window and shout. Wave your arms at the doctors. Stumpy, you join him. Ear Eater, you stay with Toolmaster. Lift his head a little and slide that flat rock under it for support. Gently! Good.’ Toolmaster felt the motion and was soothed.

Doctors massed on the other side of the window. The merest touch of their minds gave me their thrill of anthropomorphic empathy, as that scarred monster showed such tenderness to his fallen fellow. I called, ‘Now, White Mask, shout at me! Your friend is sick and you don’t speak human language, so tell me instead! They don’t know I can read minds—”

“He came to the bars and shook them and shouted, ‘Did you think I’d forgotten, you fool?’ Stumpy had got the idea: he was beside White Mask, shouting poetry we’d all learned from the Keepers as children. And the doctors came running to my window, the window to my pen, and listened as I shouted at them in their language. In the midst of all that, I felt Toolmaster die.

“So here I am.”

The interrogator nodded behind the glass. “So here you are. But you weren’t saying what your companions thought you were saying. I take it you do not advise us to take them out of their cage.”

“I do not,” Telepath said. “You might bear in mind that they know what I told them of you. They should not run loose to shout their news. They should not even be brought near another telepath.”

“Uh huh.”

Telepath said, “I caught something in your mind. A large ship, drive shredded, survivors—?”

“Yes, we believe we found females of your species.”

“Dead, though. You found an Admiral’s harem.”

“If you want to mate—”

“Yes! But you don’t have that to offer.”

“There will be a next time, a chance to capture female warcats. We can bargain. But as for your name, take that as a gift. Would you like Selig? Or Aycharaych? Or Greenberg?”

Mind readers out of humans’ classic fiction, Telepath saw. “Better some ancient warrior’s name,” he said, and reached for what surfaced. “Ronreagan. Call me Ronreagan.”

“So be it. Ronreagan, it’s feeding time, and if you’re not hungry, I am.” Telepath saw the man for an instant as meat, prey, and he sensed that somehow, and it amused him. “But then I want you to tell me every last thing you know about, what did you call—”

“Patriarchy.”

“About the Patriarchy. And gravity generators! Can you tell us how to build one of those?”

“When you capture a warcat female, find me an Engineer too.”

INTRODUCTION TO “FLY-BY-NIGHT”

Chronologically, “Fly-by-Night” follows “Procrustes,” separated by a bridging story in Crashlander.

A writer from Australia, Hal Colebatch, submitted, for the Man-Kzin Wars, a tale set partly in Kipling’s India. It needed a lot of work—not in the nineteenth century but in the parts set in the 2400s—but he made “The Colonel’s Tiger” fly. His second war story would have been called “The Owl and the Pussycat,” but he tortured the story to death to achieve an unlikely ending. I asked him to throw away the second half and write according to a plotline I wrote. That tale would follow the ship that first met Kzinti in “The Warriors,” the Angel’s Pencil.

From Colebatch’s “Telepath’s Dance” I postulated a world settled by humans and Kzinti telepaths, and isolated for three hundred years.

I suppose a world like Sheathclaws was bound to be weird even by my standards. Anyway, the eighth Beowulf Sheaffer story is a Man-Kzin War story too.

“FLY-BY-NIGHT”

The windows in Odysseus had been skylights. The doors had become hatches. I ran down the corridor looking at numbers. Seven days we’d been waiting for aliens to appear in the ship’s lobby, and nothing!

Nothing until now. I felt good. Excited. I ran full tilt, not from urgency but because I could. I’d expected to reach Home as frozen meat in one of these Ice Class cargo modules.

I reached 36, stooped and punched the steward’s bell. Just as the door swung down, I remembered not to grin.

A nightmare answered.

It looked like an octopus underwater, except for the vest. At the roots of five eel’s-tail segments each four feet long, eyes looked up at me. We never see Jotoki often enough to get used to them. The limbs clung to a ladder that would cross the cabin ceiling when the gravity generators were on.

I said, “Legal Entity Paradoxical, I have urgent business with Legal Entity Fly-by-Night.”

The Jotok started to say, “Business with my master—” when its master appeared below it on the ladder.

This was the nightmare I’d been expecting: five to six hundred pounds of orange and sienna fur, sienna commas marking the face, needle teeth just showing points, looking up at me out of a pit. Fly-by-Night wore a kind of rope vest, pockets all over it, and buttons or corks on the points of all ten of its finger claws.

“—is easily conducted in virtual fashion,” the Jotok concluded.

What I’d been about to say went clean out of my head. I asked, “Why the buttons?”

Lips pulled back over a forest of carnivore teeth, LE Fly-by-Night demanded, “Who are you to question me?”

“Martin Wallace Graynor,” I said. Conditioned reflex.

The reading I’d done suggested that a killing snarl would leave a Kzin mute, able to express himself only by violence. Indeed, his lips wanted to retract, and it turned his Interworld speech mushy. “LE Graynor, by what authority do you interrogate me?”

My antic humor ran away with me. I patted my pockets elaborately. “Got it somewhere—”

“Shall we look for it?”

“I—”

“Written on your liver?”

“I have an idea. I could stop asking impertinent questions?”

“A neat solution.” Silently the door swung up.

Ring.

The Jotok may well have been posing himself between me and his enraged master, who was still wearing buttons on his claws, and smiling. I said, “Don’t kill me. The Captain has dire need of you and wishes that you will come to the main workstation in all haste.”

The Kzin leapt straight up with a half turn to get past the Jotok and pulled himself into the corridor. I did a pretty good backward jump myself.

Fly-by-Night asked, “Do you know why the Captain might make such a request?”

“I can guess. Haste is appropriate.”

“Had you considered using the intercom, or virtual mail?”

“Captain Preiss may be afraid they can listen to our electronics.”

“They?”

“Kzinti spacecraft. The Captain hopes you can identify them and help negotiate.”

He stripped off the corks and dropped them in a pocket. His lips were all right now. “This main workstation, would it be a control room or bridge?”

“I’ll guide you.”

The Kzin was twisted over by some old injury. His balance was just a bit off. His furless pink tail lashed back and forth, for balance or for rage. The tip knocked both walls, toc toc toc. I’d be whipped bloody if I tried to walk beside him. I stayed ahead.

The Jotok trailed us well back from the tail. It wore a five-armhole vest with pockets. It used four limbs as legs. One it held stiff. I pictured a crippled Kzin buying a crippled Jotok . . . but Paradoxical had been agile enough climbing the ladder. I must have missed something.

The file on Jotoki said to call it they, but that just felt wrong.

“Piracy,” the Kzin said, “would explain why everything is on its side.”

“Yah. They burned out our thruster. The Captain had to spin us up with attitude jets.”

“I don’t know that weapon. Speak of the ship,” he said. “One? Kzinti?”

“One ship popped up behind us and fired on us as it went past. It’s a little smaller than Odysseus. Then a Kzin called us. Act of war, he said. Get the Captain to play that for you. He spoke Interworld . . . not as well as you.” Fly-by-Night talked like he’d grown up around humans. Maybe he was from Fafnir. “The ship stopped twenty million miles distant and sent a boat. That’s on its way here now. Our telescopes pick up markings in the Heroes’ Tongue. We can’t read them.”

He said, “If we were traveling faster than light, we could not be intercepted. Did your Captain consider that?”

“Better you should ask, why are we out of hyperdrive? LE Fly-by-Night, there is an extensive star-building region between Fafnir and Home. Going through the Tao Gap in Einstein space is easier than going around and gives us a wonderful view, but we’re in it now. Stuck. We can’t send a hyperwave help call, we can’t jump to hyperdrive, because there’s too much mass around us.”

“Odysseus has no weapons,” the Kzin said.

“I don’t have actual rank aboard Odysseus. I don’t know what weapons we have.” And I wouldn’t tell a Kzin.

He said, “I learned that before I boarded. Odysseus is a modular cargo ship. Some of the modules are passenger cabins. Outbound Enterprises could mount weapons modules, but they never have. None of their other commuter ships are any better. The other ship, how is it armed?”

“Looks like an archaic Kzinti warship, disarmed. Gun ports slagged and polished flat. We haven’t had a close look, but ships like that are all over known space since before I was born. Armed Kzinti wouldn’t be allowed to land. Whatever took out our gravity motors isn’t showing. It must be on the boat.”

“Why is this corridor so long?”

Odysseus was a fat disk with motors and tanks in the center, a corridor around the rim, slots outboard to moor staterooms and cargo modules. That shape makes it easy to spin up if something goes wrong with the motors . . . which was still common enough a century ago, when Odysseus was built.

In the ship’s map display I’d seen stateroom modules widely separated, so I’d hacked the passenger manifest. That led me to read up on Kzinti and Jotoki. The first secret to tourism is, read everything.

I said, “Some LE may have decided not to put a Kzin too close to human passengers. They put you two in a four-passenger suite and mounted it all the way around clockwise. My single and two doubles and the crew quarters and an autodoc are all widdershins.” That put the aliens’ module right next to the lobby, not far apart at all, but the same fool must have sealed off access from the aliens’ suite. Despite the Covenants, some people don’t like giving civil rights to Kzinti.

I’d best not say that. “We’re the only other live passengers. The modules between are cargo, so these,” I stamped on a door, “don’t currently open on anything.”

“If you are not a ship’s officer,” the Kzin asked, “what is your place on the bridge?”

I said, “Outbound Enterprises was getting ready to freeze me. Shashter cops pulled me out. They had questions regarding a murder.”

“Have you killed?” His ears flicked out like little pink fans. I had his interest.

“I didn’t kill Ander Smittarasheed. He took some cops down with him, and he’d killed an ARM agent. ARMs are—”

“United Nations police and war arm, Sol system, but their influence spreads throughout human space.”

“Well, they couldn’t question Smittarasheed, and I’d eaten dinner with him a few days earlier. I told them we met in Pacifica City at a water war game . . . anyway, I satisfied the law, they let me loose. I was just in time to board, and way too late to get myself frozen and into a cargo module. Outbound Enterprises upgraded me. Very generous.

“So Milcenta and Jenna—my mate and child—are frozen in one of these,” I stamped on a door, “and I’m up here, flying First Class at Ice Class expense. My cabin’s a closet, so we must be expected to spend most of our time in the lobby. In here.” I pushed through.

This trip there were two human crew, five human passengers and the aliens. The lobby would have been roomy for thrice that. Whorls of couches and tables covered a floor with considerable space above it for free-fall dancing. That feature didn’t generally get much use.

An observation dome exposed half the sky. It opened now on a tremendous view of the Nursery Nebula.

Under spin gravity, several booths and the workstations had rolled up a wall. There was a big airlock. The workstations were two desk-and-couch modules in the middle.

Hans and Hilde Van Zild were in one of the booths. Homers coming back from Fafnir, they held hands tightly and didn’t talk. Recent events had them extremely twitchy. They were both over two hundred years old. I’ve known people in whom that didn’t show, but in these it did.

Their kids were hovering around the workstations watching the Captain and First Officer at work, asking questions that weren’t being answered.

We’d been given vac packs. More were distributed around the lobby and along the corridor. Most ships carry them. You wear it as a bulky fanny pack. If you pull a tab, or if it’s armed and pressure drops to zero, it blows up into a refuge. Then you hope you can get into it and zip it shut before your blood boils.

Heidi Van Zild looked around. “Oh, good! You brought them!” The little girl snatched up two more vac packs, ran two steps toward us and froze.

The listing said Heidi was near forty. Her brother Nicolaus was thirty; the trip was his birthday present. Their parents must have had their development arrested. They looked the same age, ten years old or younger, bright smiles and sparkling eyes, hair cut identically in a golden cockatoo crest.

It’s an attitude, a lifestyle. You put off children until that second century is running out. Now they’re precious. They’ll live forever. Let them take their time growing up. Keep them awhile longer. Keep them pure. Give them a real education. Any mistake you make as a parent, there will be time to correct that too. When you reverse the procedure and allow them to reach puberty they’ll be better at it.

I know people who do that to kittens.

Some of a child’s rash courage is ignorance. By thirty it’s gone. The little girl’s smile was a rictus. Aliens were here for her entertainment; she would not willingly miss any part of the adventure; but she just couldn’t make herself approach the Kzin or his octopus servant. The boy hadn’t even tried.

First Officer Quickpony finished what she’d been doing. She stood in haste, took the vacuum packs from Heidi and handed them to the aliens. “Fly-by-Night, thank you for coming. Thank you, Mart. You’d be Paradoxical?”

The woman’s body language invited a handshake, but the Jotok didn’t. “Yes, we are Paradoxical, greatly pleased to meet you.”

The Kzin snarled a question in the Heroes’ Tongue. Everybody’s translators murmured in chorus, “Is this the bridge?”

Quickpony said, “Bridge and lobby, they’re the same space. You didn’t know? We wondered why you never came around.”

“I was not told of this option. There is merit in the posture that one species should not see another eat or mate or use the recycle port. But, LE Quickpony, your security is a joke! Bridge and passengers and no barrier? When did you begin building ships this way?”

Captain Preiss looked up. He said, “Software flies us. I can override, but I can disable the override. Hijackers can’t affect that.”

“What of your current problem? Did you record the Kzin’s demand?”

The Captain spoke a command.

A ghostly head and shoulders popped up on the holostage, pale orange but for two narrow, lofty black eyebrows. “I am Mee-rowreet. Call me Envoy. I speak for the Longest War.”

My translator murmured, “Mee-rowreet, profession, manages livestock in a hunting park. Longest War, Kzin term for evolution.”

The recording spoke Interworld, but with a strong accent and flat grammar. “We seek a fugitive. We have destroyed your gravity motors. We will board you following the Covenants sworn at Shasht at twenty-five naught five your dating. Obey, never interfere,” the ghost head and voice grew blurred, “give us what we demand. You will all survive.”

“The signal was fuzzed out by distance,” Captain Preiss said. “The ship came up from behind and passed us at two hundred KPS relative, twenty minutes after we dropped out of hyperdrive. It’s ahead of us by two light-minutes, decelerated to match our speed.”

I said, speaking low, “Pleasemadam,” alerting my pocket computer, “seek interstellar law, document Covenants of Shasht date twenty-five-oh-five. Run it.”

Fly-by-Night looked up into the dome. “Your intruder?”

We were deep into the Nursery Nebula. All around were walls of tenuous interstellar dust lit from within. In murky secrecy, intersecting shock waves from old supernovae were collapsing the interstellar goop into hot whirlpools that would one day be stars and solar systems. Out of view below us, light pressure from something bright was blowing columns and streams of dust past us. It all took place in an environment tens of light-years across. Furious action seemed frozen in time.

We had played at viewing the red whorl overhead. In IR you saw only the suns, paired protostars lit by gravitational collapse and the tritium flash, that had barely begun to burn. UV and X-ray showed violent flashes and plumes where planetesimals impacted, building planets. Neutrino radar showed structure forming within the new solar system.

We could not yet make out the point mass that would bend our course into the Tao Gap and out into free space. Turnpoint Star was a neutron star a few miles across, the core left by a supernova. But stare long enough and you could make out an arc on the sky, the shock wave from that same stellar explosion, broken by dust clouds collapsing into stars.

My seek system chimed. I listened to my wrist computer:

At the end of the Fourth Man-Kzin War, the Human Space Trade Alliance annexed Shasht and renamed the planet Fafnir, though the long, rocky, barren continent kept its Heroes’ Tongue name. The Covenants of Shasht were negotiated then. We were to refrain from booting Kzinti citizens off Fafnir. An easy choice: they prefer the continent, whereas humans prefer the coral islands. They were already expanding an interstellar seafood industry into Patriarchy space.

In return, and having little choice, the Patriarch barred himself, his clan and all habitats under his command, all others to be considered outlaw, from various acts. Eating of human meat . . . willful destruction of habitats . . . biological weapons of certain types . . . killing of Legal Entities, that word defined by a long list of exclusions, a narrower definition than in most human laws.

Futz, I wasn’t a Legal Entity! Or I wouldn’t be if they learned who I was.

Quickpony projected a virtual lens on the dome. I’d finish listening later. The Kzinti ship and its boat, vastly magnified, showed black with the red whorl behind them. There was enough incident light to pick out some detail.

For a bare instant we had seen the intruder coming up behind us, just as our drive juddered and died and left us floating. After it slowed to a relative stop, a boat had detached. The approaching boat blocked off part of the ship. Gamma rays impacting their magnetic shields made two arcs of soft white glow. Ship and boat bore the same glowing markings.

The ship was moving just as we were, its drive off, falling through luminous murk toward Turnpoint Star at a tenth of lightspeed.

First Officer Helm said, “Odysseus’ security systems can deal with hijackers, but they’re just not much use against an armed warship. Is that what we’re seeing?”

“I see a small warship designed for espionage and hunting. I don’t know the make. My knowledge is too old. The name reads Sraff-zisht.” My translator said, “Stealthy mating.”

Fly-by-Night continued, “Captain, I can’t see, are there magnetic moorings on Sraff-zisht?”

“No need. Those big magnets on the boat would lock to the ship’s gamma ray shielding.”

“The boat is armed, the ship is not? There is no bay for the boat? Understood. Leave the boat in hiding among asteroids. Land an unarmed converted cargo ship on any civilized world. Yes?”

“Speculative,” Preiss said.

“Do you recognize the weapon?”

“No. I assume it’s what burned out our thrusters . . . our gravity motors.”

I sat and dialed a cappuccino. The Kzin joined me, dwarfing the booth. I dialed another with double milk, thinking he ought to try it.

The other passengers shrank back a little and waited. Any human being knows how to fear a Kzin.

I said, speaking low, “Pleasemadam, seek Heroes’ Tongue references, stealthy mating, literal, no reference to rape.” There had to be a way to narrow that further. I guessed: “Seek biological references only. Run it.”

Fly-by-Night tasted the cappuccino.

Captain Preiss said, “Why would they be interested in us?”

“In me. The boat is close.” Fly-by-Night sipped again. “Do you know of the Angel’s Pencil?”

The Kzin was speaking Interworld as smoothly as if he’d grown up with the language. Some of us gaped. But his first words to me had been Interworld, after I startled and angered him . . . and he liked cappuccino.

Fly-by-Night said, “Angel’s Pencil was a slowboat, one of Sol system’s slower-than-light colony craft. Four hundred years ago, Angel’s Pencil sent word of our coming. Sol system was given years to prepare. My ancestor Shadow contrived to board Pencil after allying himself with a human captive, Selena Guthlac. He and she joined their crew.”

“That must have been one futz of a makeup job,” Nicolaus Van Zild said.

“He had to stoop and keep his ears folded, and depilate! Whose story is this, boy?” Nicolaus grinned. The Kzin said, “Angel’s Pencil’s crew had already destroyed Tracker. They later destroyed Gutting Claw, the first and second kills of the First War, not bad for a ship with no intended armaments.

“Pencil was forced to pass through Patriarchy space before they found a world to settle. None of those ramscoop ships were easy to turn, and none were built for more than one voyage. We were ninety light-years from Earth. One hundred and six years had passed on Earth.”

I asked, “We?”

“Gutting Claw’s Telepath, later named Shadow, is our first sire. Pencil rescued six females from the Admiral’s harem. Our species have lived together on Sheathclaws for three hundred years. We remained cut off. Any message laser aimed at human space would pass through the Patriarchy. We spoke with no sapient species, we did not even know of faster-than-light travel, until . . .” Fly-by-Night looked up.

Stealthy-Mating’s boat had arrived. We were looking directly into an obtrusively large electromagnetic weapon.

Nicolaus asked, “Can you read minds?”

“No, child. Some of us are good at guessing, but we don’t have the drug. Where was I?” Fly-by-Night said, “They told me in the hospital after my first failed name quest. The universe had opened up—” He cut himself off as a furry face popped into hologram space in the workstation.

“I am Envoy. I speak for the Longest War. Terminate your spin. Open the airlock.”

Captain Preiss nodded to Quickpony. Reaction motors whispered, slowing us.

Fly-by-Night spoke more rapidly. “Boarding seems imminent. You cannot protect me. Give me to them. If you live long enough to speak to your people, tell them that three grown males left Sheathclaws on our name quests. Half our genes derive from Shadow, from a telepath. The Patriarch needs telepaths. Now he will learn of a world peopled by Gutting Claw’s telepath, none of whom has felt the addiction to sthondat lymph in three hundred years.”

Gravity eased away until sideways thrust was all there was, and then that was gone too. Odysseus’s outer airlock door opened.

The boat thumped into place against our hull. The older Van Zilds and I had our seat webs in place. The children floated, clinging to the arms of couches.

“They will have my genes. They will find Sheathclaws,” Fly-by-Night concluded. “You will face my children in the next war, if they have their way.”

Two big pressure-suit shapes left the boat on jet packs. One entered the lock. We heard it cycle. The other waited on the hull, to shoot the dome out if he saw resistance.

The inner door opened. The armored Kzin entered in a leap, up and into the dome where his companions could see him, a half turn to keep us in view. In his hand was a light that he aimed like a weapon. He was graceful as a fish.

I squinted to save my vision. The light played over every part of the lobby and workstation. What he saw must have been reassuring.

Envoy said, “We have demands. The Covenants will be followed where possible. All losses will be paid. Give us your passenger. He is in violation of our law. Fly-by-Night, is this Jotok your slave?”

“Yes.”

“Fly-by-Night, Jotok, you must enter your vacuum packs. Fly-by-Night, give your w’tsai to Packer.”

“W’tsai?” Fly-by-Night asked. “This? My knife?”

“Carefully.”

Giving up his w’tsai was the ultimate surrender. If I knew that from my reading, surely a Kzin knew it. Three hundred years among humans . . . Had they lost the tradition?

But Fly-by-Night was offering a silver knife-prong-spoon ten inches long and dark with tarnish.

A spoony? We ate with those! They matched several shapes of digits and were oversized for human hands. Odysseus’ kitchen melted the silver to kill bacteria, then squirted it into molds for the next meal.

Packer took it, stared at it, then showed it to Envoy’s hologram. Envoy snarled in the Heroes’ Tongue. He wasn’t buying it.

Our passenger answered in Interworld. “Yes, mine! See, here is my symbol,” the sign of Outbound Enterprises, a winged craft black against a crescent world. “Fly by night!”

A laugh would be bad. I looked at the children. They looked solemn.

Of Packer’s weapon I saw only a glare of light. But he held it on Fly-by-Night as if it had to fire something deadly, and he snarled a command and lashed out with his tail. Under the minor impact Fly-by-Night spun slowly so that Packer could examine him for more weapons.

He snarled again. Fly-by-Night and Paradoxical pulled tabs on vacuum packs. The packs popped into double-walled spheres. Held open by higher pressure, the collar on each refuge inflated like a pair of fat lips.

Fly-by-Night had trouble wriggling through the collar. Once inside he had room. These vacuum refuges would have held the whole Van Zild family. Paradoxical looked quite lost in his.

Envoy spoke. “Captain, you carry human passengers frozen in three cargo modules. Release these modules.”

The world went gray.

I began to breath deep and hard, to hyperoxygenate, because I dared not faint.

Captain Preiss’s hands hadn’t moved. That was brave, but it wouldn’t save anyone.

The elder Van Zilds buried their faces in each other’s shoulders. The children were horrified and fascinated. They watched everything. Once I caught them looking at their parents in utter contempt.

Like them, I had been half enjoying the situation.

This would have been my last interstellar flight. Chance had me riding not as frozen cargo, but as a passenger, aware and entertained.

Flying the ship would have been more fun, of course.

Quickpony had suggested joining our cabins, as we were the obvious unpaired pair. I showed Quickpony videos displayed by the circuitry in my ring. Our lockstep ceremony. Jenna/Jeena just a year old. Sharrol/Milcenta not yet pregnant again; I should have updated while I could. We are lockstepped, see, here is our ring. Quickpony admired and dropped the subject.

And that left what for entertainment?

Kzinti hijackers!

I’d treated it like a game until Stealthy-Mating claimed my family. Bound into my couch by a crash web, I let my hand rest on the release while I considered what weapons I might have at hand.

Lips drawn back, fangs showing, Envoy’s speech was turning mushy. “Examine the Covenants, Captain Preiss. They were never altered. We take only hostages. They will be returned unharmed when our needs are satisfied. Compensation will be paid for every cost incurred.”

“What crime do you claim against Fly-by-Night?” Quickpony asked.

“His ancestor committed treason against his officers and the Patriarch. Penalties hold against his bloodline forever. We may claim his life, but we will not. We value his bloodline.”

“Has Fly-by-Night committed a crime?”

“False identity. Purchase of a Jotok without entitlement. Trivia.”

Dumb and happy Mart Graynor wasn’t the type to carry weapons aboard a spacecraft. The recorded Covenant of 2505 might be the only weapon I had. I let it play in one ear. The old diplomatic language was murky. . . .

Here it was. “Hostages are to be returned in health if all conditions met, conditions not to be altered . . . costs to be assessed in time of peace at earliest . . .”

Was I supposed to bet lives on this?”

Heidi asked, “Do you eat human meat?”

Packer and the hologram both turned to the girl. Envoy said, “Hostages. I have said. The Covenants say. Kitten, we consider human meat to be . . . whasht-meery . . . unsafe. Captain Preiss, the modules we want are all addressed to Outbound on Home, yes? We will deliver them. Else we would face all the navies of human space.”

Preiss said, “I have no such confidence.”

Packer kicked down from the dome. He set his huge hands on the girl’s waist and looked into her face. He still hadn’t spoken.

Nicolaus screamed and leapt. As he came at the armored Kzin, Packer reached out and wrapped both children against his armored chest. They looked up through the bubble helmet into a Kzin’s smile.

Nicolaus bared his teeth.

Envoy said, “Pause, Packer! Captain Preiss, think! Without gravity generators you must still fall around Turnpoint Star and into flat space. Hyperdrive will take you to the edge of Home system. Call for help to tow you the rest of the way. What other path have we? We might smash your hyperdrive and hyperwave and leave you to die here, silenced, but your absence at Home will set the law seeking us.

“This is the better risk, to violate no law unless we must. We take hostages. You must not call your authorities until you arrive near Home. We will transport our prisoner, then deliver your passengers.”

Packer’s arms were full of children: hampered. Preiss and Quickpony were on a hair trigger. I was unarmed, but if they moved, I would.

“Wait,” Envoy said. Preiss still hadn’t moved. “You carry stock from Shasht? Sea life?”

“Yes.”

“I must speak with my leader. Lightspeed gap is two minutes each way. Do nothing threatening.”

We heard Envoy yowling into his communicator. Then nothing.

My pocket computer dinged.

Everybody twitched, yeeped or looked around. Heidi floated to the rim of my booth and listened over my shoulder.

“Sea lions around the Earth’s poles live in large communities built around one alpha male, many females and their pups, and several beta males that live around the edges of the herd. When the alpha male is otherwise occupied, an exile may rush in and mate hurriedly with a female and escape. Several species of Earth’s mammals have adapted such a breeding strategy, as have life forms on Kzin and even many Kzinti clans. Biologists, particularly reproductive biologists, call them sneaky-fuckers.”

I said, “Maybe there’s a more polite term for the journals. Anyway, good name for a spy ship. Pleasemadam, seek Longest War plus Kzinti plus piracy, run it.”

We waited.

When Hans Van Hild couldn’t stand the silence anymore, he said, “Heidi, Nicolaus, I’m sorry. We should have let you grow up.”

“Hans!”

“Yes, Hilde, there was all the time in the world. Hilde, there’s never time. Never a way to know.”

Envoy spoke. “Release one of the modules for Outbound Enterprises and two addressed to Neptune’s Empire. The passengers will be returned. Neptune’s Empire will be recompensed for their stock.”

Fish?

Captain Preiss’ fingertips danced. Three cargo modules slowly rose out of the rim. I felt utterly helpless.

Packer left the children floating. He pushed Fly-by-Night’s balloon toward the airlock.

I said, “Wait.”

The armored Kzin turned. I squinted against the glare of his weapon. “We do not permit slavery aboard Odysseus,” I said. “Odysseus belongs to the Human Space Trade Alliance. The Jotok stays.”

“Who are you? Where derives your authority?” Envoy demanded.

“Martin Wallace Graynor. No authority, but the law—”

“Fly-by-Night purchased a Jotok and holds him as property. We hold Fly-by-Night as property. Local law crawls before interspecies Covenants. The Jotok comes. Are you concerned for the well-being of the Jotok?”

I said, “Yes.”

“You shall observe if he is mistreated. Enter a vacuum refuge now.”

I caught Quickpony’s horror. She spun around to search her screen display of the Covenants for some way to stop this. Packer pulled Fly-by-Night toward the airlock. He wasn’t waiting.

Neither did I. I launched myself gently toward the refuge that held the Jotok.

It would not have occurred to me to hug the only available little girl before I disappeared into the Nursery Nebula. I launched, Heidi launched, and she was in my path, arms spread, bawling. I hugged her, let our momentum turn us, whispered something reassuring and let go. She drifted toward a wall, I toward the Jotok’s bubble.

She’d put something bulky in my zip pocket.

I crawled through the collar into the Jotok’s vacuum refuge and zipped the lips closed.

Packer pushed Fly-by-Night into the airlock, closed it, cycled it. His armored companion on the hull pulled the bubble into space. Packer came back for us and cycled us through.

Two bubbles floated outside Odysseus, slowly rotating, slowly diverging. Packer was still in Odysseus.

The boat jerked into motion. We watched as it maneuvered above one of the brick-shaped cargo modules attached to Odysseus. A pressure-armored Kzin stood below, guiding.

Nobody was coming after us.

The Jotok asked, “Martin, was that sane? What were you thinking?”

I said, “Pleasemadam, seek interspecies diplomacy plus Kzinti plus Longest War. Run it. Paradoxical, I was thinking of a rescue. I tried to bust you loose. You know more about Fly-by-Night than I could ever learn. I need what you can tell me.”

“You have no authority to question us,” the Jotok said, “unless you hold ARM authority.”

I laughed harder than he would have expected. “I’m not an ARM. No authority at all. Do you want Fly-by-Night freed? Do you want your own freedom?”

“We had that! LE Graynor, when Fly-by-Night bought us from the orange underground market on Shasht, he swore to free us. On Sheathclaws chains of lakes run from mountains to sea. We would have bred in their lakes. All of the Jotoki populace of Sheathclaws would be our descendants. We have been robbed of our destiny!”

I asked, “Did Fly-by-Night take more slaves than just you?”

“No.”

“Then who did you expect to mate with?”

“We are five! Jotoki grow like your eels, not sapient. Reach first maturity, seek each other, cluster in fives. Brains grow links. Reach second maturity, seek a lake, divide, breed and die, like your salmon. LE Mart, you yourselves are two minds joined by a structure called corpus callosum. Join is denser in Kzinti, that species has less redundancy, but still brain is two lobes. We are five lobes, narrow joins. Almost individuals cooperate, Par-Rad-Doc-Sic-Cal, Doc talks, Par walks, Cal for fine-scale coordination. Almost five-lobe mind, sometimes lock in indecision. In trauma or in fresh water we may divide again. May join again to cluster differently, different person. You perceive?”

Futz, it was an interesting picture, but I’d never grasp what it was like to be Jotok. The point was that Paradoxical was a breeding population.

I asked, “Are you hungry? What do you eat?”

“Privately.”

“Didn’t Fly-by-Night see you eat?”

“Only once.”

I’d put a handmeal in my pocket, but I wouldn’t eat in front of Paradoxical after that. “Orange market?”

“An extensive market exists among the Shasht Kzinti. They trade intelligence, electronics, stolen goods and slaves. Shasht the continent is nearly lifeless. They seeded several lakes for our breeding and confinement, but without maintenance they die off. The trade could be stopped. Our lakes must show a different color from orbit. I surmise the law has no interest.”

“You once held an interstellar empire—”

“My master tells me so. The slavers don’t teach us. Properly speaking, they do not hold slaves at all. They hold fish ponds. When a purchaser wants a Jotok, five swimming forms are allowed to assemble. Our master is the first thing we see.”

“Who chose your name?”

“My master. I am free and slave, many and one, land and sea dweller, a paradox.”

“He really does think in Interworld, doesn’t he? They must teach Kzinti as a second language.”

A magnetic grapple locked in place, and the first module came free.

My pocket computer dinged. We listened:

“Longest War, a political entity never named until after the Second War with Men, has since been claimed by many Kzinti groups. It may appear in connection with piracy, disappearing LEs or disappearing ships, but never an action against planets or a major offensive. Claim has been made, never proved, that Longest War are any Patriarch’s servants whom the Patriarch must disclaim. We surmise also that the Longest War names any group who hope for the eye of the Patriarch. Events include 2399 Serpent Swarm, 2410 Kdat—”

Fly-by-Night had drifted so far that he was hard to find, just a twinkle of lensed light as starfog glow passed behind his vac refuge. Why didn’t they retrieve him? Was it really Fly-by-Night they wanted, or something else?

I watched Stealthy-Mating’s boat retrieve a second cargo module. They weren’t being careful. Two of those boxes held only Fafnir’s thousand varieties of fish, but the other . . . was in a quantum state. It held and did not hold Sharrol/Milcenta and Jenna/Jeena, until some observer could open the module.

In all the years I’d flown for Nakamura Lines, I had never seen a vac pack used. Light-years from any world, miles from any ship, with nothing but clear plastic skin between me and the ravenous vacuum . . . it seemed a good time to look it over.

This wasn’t the brand we’d carried. It was newer, or else a more expensive model.

Loops of tough ribbon hung everywhere: handholds. Air tank. A tube two liters in volume had popped out. Inner zip, outer zip: an airlock. We could be fed through that, or get rid of wastes . . . a matter I would not raise with Paradoxical just yet.

A light. A sleeve and glove taped against the wall, placed to reach the outer zip. Here was a valve . . . hmm . . . a valve ending in a little cone outside. Inside, a handle to aim it.

To any refugee there might come a moment when a jet is more important than breathing-air.

Not yet.

“Why would you want to rescue my master?” Paradoxical asked.

“They have my wife and daughter and unborn, one chance out of three. Two out of three they’re still safe aboard Odysseus. Would you bet?”

“No Jotok knows his parent. Might you find another mate and generate more children?”

I didn’t answer.

“How do you like your battle plan so far?”

I couldn’t hear sarcasm, but I inferred it. I said, “I have a spare vac pack. So does Fly-by-Night. Did you see what he did? He triggered a pack on the wall. Kept his own. And Heidi passed me something.”

“What did the girl give you?”

“Might be some kind of toy.”

The Jotok said, “Mee-rowreet means make slaves and beasts go where can be killed. Not Envoy. Whasht-meery means infested or diseased, too rotted or parasitical for even a starving predator. Prey that dies too easily, opponent who exposes belly too soon, is suspect whasht-meery.”

I waited for our spin to hide me from Stealthy-Mating’s telescopes before I pulled Heidi’s gift free.

It was foam plastic, light and bulky. A toy needle gun. If this was real, her parents . . . Wait, now, Heidi was almost forty years old!

They wouldn’t think quite like human adults, these children, but their brains were as big as they were going to get. Their parents might want them able to protect themselves . . . and if not, she and her brother had spent decades learning how to manipulate their parents.

I couldn’t test it.

“Needle gun. Anaesthetic crystals,” I told Paradoxical. “They won’t get through armor. One wouldn’t knock out a Kzin anyway. Better than nothing, though. Where is Fly-by-Night’s w’tsai?”

“You saw.”

“Paradoxical, we are in too much trouble to be playing children’s games.”

Paradoxical said nothing.

Stealthy-Mating’s boat locked onto the third cargo module.

I said, “That was fun to watch, though. Giving Packer silverware!”

Paradoxical rotated to show me his mouth.

I saw a star of tentacles around a circle of lip enclosing five circles of tiny teeth in a pentagon. Something emerged from one circle of teeth. Paradoxical vomited up a long, narrow, padded mailing bag. I pulled it free, unzipped it, and had a yard of blade and handle.

The blade looked like dark steel. The light caught a minute ripple effect . . . but it was all wrong. To my fingertip’s touch the ripple was just a picture. The blade weighed almost nothing. The weight was all in the handle.

In the end of the hilt was a small black enamel bat. Bats exist only on Earth and in the zoo on Jinx, but that ancient Batman symbol has gone to every human world. Fly by night.

Futz, I had to try it on something.

My lockstep ring had a silver case. That’s a soft metal, but the blade only scratched it. I tested my thumb on the edge, gingerly. Blunt.

Customs change. A weapon can be purely ceremonial . . . but why make the handle so heavy? Why was Paradoxical watching me?

Because it was a puzzle.

Push the enamel bat. Nothing.

Wiggle the blade. Push it in, risk my fingers, feel it give. A Kzin could push harder. Nothing? Pull out, and my fingertips felt a hum. The look of the blade didn’t change. Carefully now, don’t touch the edge—

It sliced neatly through my lockstep ring, with a moment’s white sputter as circuitry burned out. The cut edges of the classic silver band shone like little mirrors. There should have been some resistance.

A variable-knife is violently illegal: hair-fine wire in a magnetic field, all edge and no blade, thin enough to slice through walls and machinery. Often enough it hurts the wielder. When it’s off it’s all handle, and the handle is heavy: it holds the coiled wire and the mag generator.

This toy was similar, but with a blade of fixed length, harder to hide. More sporting. A groove around the edge housed the wire until magnets raised it for action.

The onyx bat was recessed now. I pushed and it popped out. The vibration stopped.

We had a weapon.

What was keeping Packer? They had the telepath, they had hostages, they had two modules of Fafnir seafood. What was left to do in there? Get on with it. I had a weapon!

“Wait before you use it. I know my master,” the Jotok said. “He will take command of the boat. The larger ship is weaponless against it.”

“Paradoxical, he’d be fighting at least three warriors trained in free fall. Don’t forget the pilots. Four if we get as far as the ship.”

“Whasht-meery may currently be on autopilot or remote. Possession of armor does not imply training. Fly-by-Night was a champion wrestler before he was injured. We fear you’re right. But we must try!”

“Wrestler?”

“He tells me they fight with capped claws on Sheathclaws.”

Somehow I was not reassured.

Packer emerged.

He and his companion jetted toward Fly-by-Night’s bubble. They pulled Fly-by-Night toward the boat. Clamshell doors opened around the snout of the solenoid weapon. The three disappeared inside.

I safed and wrapped the w’tsai and gave it to the Jotok. He swallowed it, and the needler after it. He must have a straight gut . . . five straight guts, I thought, like fish or worms all merged at the head.

The two armored Kzinti came for us. They towed us toward the boat.

The boat was a thick lens, like Odysseus but smaller. The modules were anchored against one side. The other side was two transparent clamshell doors with the hollow solenoid sticking out between them.

The doors closed over us.

The interior had been arrayed around the solenoid weapon. There were lockers. Hatch in the floor, a smaller airlock. A kitchen wall big enough for a cruise ship, with a gaping intake hopper. A big box, detachable, with a door in it. I took that for a shower/washroom. I didn’t see a hologram stage or a mass pointer.

Mechanisms fed into the base of the main weapon. A feed for projectiles? The thing didn’t just burn out electronics, it was a linear accelerator too, a cannon.

Fly-by-Night’s vacuum refuge had been wedged between the cannon and the wall. He watched us.

The doors came down and now our balloon was wedged next to his. Gravity came on. Stealthy-Mating’s crew anchored us with a spray of glue, while a third Kzin watched from the horseshoe of a workstation. The two took their places beside him.

Four chairs; three Kzinti all in pressure suit armor. There was no separate cabin because they might have to work the cannon. It could have been worse.

They talked for a bit, mobile mouths snarling at each other inside fishbowl helmets. They fiddled with the controls. A sound of tigers fighting blasted from Paradoxical’s backpack vest. My translator murmured, “So, Telepath! Welcome back to the Patriarch’s service.”

Two or three seconds of silence followed. In that moment Odysseus abruptly shrank to a toy and was gone. Disturbing eddies played through our bodies. The boat must be making twenty or thirty gravities, but it had good shielding. This was a warcraft.

Their prisoner decided to answer. “You honor me. You may call me LE Fly-by-Night.”

“Honored you should be, Telepath, but your credit as a Legal Entity is forged, a telepath has no name, and Fly-by-Night is only a description, and in Interworld, too! Still you will command a harem before we do. We should envy you.” That voice was Envoy’s.

“Call me Fly-by-Night if I am expected to answer. Does the Patriarch still make addicts of any who show the talent?”

“You have hibernated for three centuries? We use advanced medical techniques in this age. Chemical mimic of sthondat lymph, six-syllable name, more powerful, few side effects, diet additives to minimize those.”

A second Kzin voice said, “You need not taste the drug yourself, Telepath, by my alpha officer’s word.”

“Only my poor kits, then. But how well do Kzinti keep each other’s promises? I know that Odysseus was disabled despite all reassurance.”

What? Fly-by-Night had no way to know that. I was only guessing, and his vac refuge had floated farther from Odysseus than our own.

But Envoy said, “All follows the Covenants sworn with men at Shasht. That was my assurance, and it is good.”

“Do those allow you to maroon a Legal Entity ship in deep space?”

“Summon them. Read them.”

“My servant carries my computer and disk library.”

The pilot tapped; we heard a click, then silence.

Paradoxical turned off his talker. “We can use this to speak to my master, but they may listen. What can you say that those oversized intestinal parasites may hear too?”

“Right now, nothing. Thrusters were yours first, weren’t they? Called the gravity planer?”

“Jotoki created gravity planers, yes. Kzinti enslaved us and stole the design. Your folk stole it from Kzinti invaders.”

“Is there anything you know about thrusters that they don’t? Something that might help?”

“No. Idiot. What we learned of gravity motors, we learned from Kzinti!”

“Futz—”

“I had thought,” Paradoxical said carefully, “that they would not keep their control room in vacuum.”

“Their hostages are all frozen. Can’t fight. Can’t escape. Maybe they like that? Anything we try now would leave us dying in vacuum. How long can a Jotok stand vacuum?”

“A few seconds, then death.”

“Humans can take a few minutes.” Humans had, and survived. It was rare. “I might go blind first. Do you mind if I think out loud for a bit?”

“Do you talk to yourself to move messages across that narrow structure in your brain, the corpus callosum?”

“I have no idea.” So I talked across my corpus callosum. “This is bad, but it could be worse. We might have been in a separate cargo hold, still in vacuum and locked out of a flight cabin.”

“Rejoice.”

“I thought I wouldn’t have to worry about Odysseus. The ship’s on a free-fall course around Turnpoint Star, through the Gap and into free space. They still had hyperdrive and hyperwave and the attitude jets, last I saw. Attitude jets are just fusion reaction motors. That won’t take them anywhere. Hyperdrive only works in flat space, so it won’t get them into a solar system. They could still cross to Home system, call for help and get a tow. Two weeks?”

“Envoy said all of that to Captain Preiss. Wait—but—stop—didn’t Envoy confess otherwise?”

“I heard. Futz.” Fly-by-Night had done that very cleverly. But Envoy hadn’t confessed; he had only insisted that he had not violated the Covenants.

“We’d better assume Packer shot up the control board. That would leave Odysseus as an inert box of hostages. Leave them falling. Retrieve them later.”

Paradoxical said nothing.

“Next problem. Fly-by-Night can’t get out of his refuge.”

“Surely—”

“No, look, he can’t slash his way out. He’s got only his claws. He can zip it open. All the air spews out, and now he can try to get through the opening. He’s too big. He’d die in vacuum while he was trying to wiggle free with those three laughing at him.”

“Yes. Less than flexible, human and Kzinti. Are you small enough to get through the collar?”

“Yes.” I was pretty sure. “Now, we can’t warn Fly-by-Night. Any fighting, I’ll have to start it. You’re dead if I slash the refuge open, so I don’t. I unzip it. Air pressure blows me out, poof. You zip it behind me quick so the refuge reinflates. I’m in vacuum. I slash Fly-by-Night’s refuge wide open and hand him the w’tsai. We’re both fighting in vacuum against three Kzinti in pressure armor. How does it sound?”

“Beyond madness.”

“There’s no point anyway. If we could take the boat, we still couldn’t break lightspeed, because the hyperdrive motor is on the ship. We’d die of old age here in the Nursery Nebula.”

“You don’t have a plan?”

I was still feeling it out. “The only way out has us waiting for these bandits to berth the boat to Stealthy-Mating. Maybe it’s a good thing Fly-by-Night doesn’t have his w’tsai. Kzinti self-control is . . . there’s a word—”

“Oxymoron. But my master integrates selves well.”

“They’ll have to move the cargo modules inside the ship. Can’t leave them where they are, they’re blocking the magnets, the docking points. Where does that leave us? Whatever we do, we want the ship and the boat. After they berth the boat, likely enough they’ll still leave the cabin in vacuum and us in these bubbles.”

“My kind can survive six days without food. Two without water.”

Two of the Kzinti crew might have been asleep. The third wasn’t doing much.

One presently stirred—Envoy, by his suit markings—got up and disappeared into the big box with a door in it. Fifteen minutes later he was back.

Wouldn’t a shower or a toilet have to be under pressure?

I watched my alien companions and my alien enemies. I watched the magnificent pageant of stars being born. I thought and I read.

Read everything.

Covenants of 2505. Commentary, then and recent. Kzinti sociology. Revisions: what constitutes torture . . . loss of limbs and organs . . . sensory deprivation. Violations. The right to a speedy trial, to speedy execution, not to be evaded. What is a Legal Entity . . .

Male Kzinti were LEs. A computer program was not. Heidi and Nicolaus were not, poor kids, but Kzin kittens weren’t either; it was a matter of maturity as an evolved being. Jotoki and Kdat were LEs unless legitimately enslaved. Entities with forged identities were not. Ice Class passengers were LEs. Good! Was there a rule against lying to hostages? Of course not, but I looked.

Paradoxical produced a computer from his backpack and went to work. I didn’t ask what he might be learning.

I did not see Fly-by-Night tearing at his prison. When I caught his eye, I clawed at my own bubble. Our captors might be reassured if they saw some sign of hysterics, of despair.

He didn’t take the hint.

Maybe I had him all wrong.

A telepath born among the Kzinti will be found as a kzitten, conscripted, and addicted to chemicals to bring out his ability. Telepaths detect spies and traitors; they assist in jurisprudence; they gradually go crazy. Alien minds drive them crazy much faster.

If a telepath feels an opponent’s pain, he can’t easily fight for mates. For generations the Patriarchy discouraged their telepaths from breeding. Then, battling an alien enemy during the Man-Kzin Wars, they burned them out.

Probably Envoy had spoken truth: what the Kzinti wanted from Fly-by-Night was more telepaths.

They’d get the location of Sheathclaws out of him. After they had what they wanted, they’d give him a harem. They’d imprison him in luxury. Envoy had said they wouldn’t force the drug on him; it might be true.

A Kzin might settle for that.

I could come blasting out of my plastic bottle, screaming my air away, w’tsai swinging . . . cut him loose, and find myself fighting alone while he blew up another bubble for himself.

Fly-by-Night floated quite still, very relaxed, ears folded. He might have been asleep. He might have been watching his three captors guide the boat toward Stealthy-Mating.

I watched their ears. Ears must make it hard for a Kzin to lie. Lying to a hologram might be easier . . . and they wouldn’t have called him Envoy for nothing.

Flick-flick of ears, bass meeping, a touch on the controls. We were flying through a lethal intensity of gamma rays.

The Jotok’s armtips rippled over his keyboard. His computer was a narrow strip of something stiff; he’d glued or Velcroed it to the bubble wall. The keyboard and holoscreen were projections. I knew the make—“Paradoxical? Isn’t that a Gates Quintillian?”

“Yes. Human-built computers are superior to Patriarchy makes.”

“Oh, that explains the corks! Fly-by-Night’s fingers are too big for the keyboard, so he puts corks on his nails!”

The Jotok said, “You are Beowulf Shaeffer.”

I spasmed like an electrocuted frog, then turned to gawk at him. “How can you possibly . . . ?”

How can you possibly think that a seven-foot-tall albino has lost fourteen inches of height and got himself curly black hair and a tan?

Hair dye and tannin secretion pills, and futz that, we had real trouble. I asked, “Have you spent three hours researching me?”

“You are the only ally at hand. I need to understand you better. You are wanted by the ARM for conspiracy abduction, four counts.”

“Four?”

“Sharrol Janss, Carlos Wu, and two children. Feather Filip is your suspect co-conspirator. ARM interest seems to lie in the lost genes of Carlos Wu, but Sharrol Janss is alleged to be a flat phobe, hence would never have left Earth willingly.”

“We all ran away together.”

“My interest lies in your abilities, not your crimes. You were a civilian spacecraft pilot. Were you trained for agility in free fall?”

“Yes. Any emergency in a spacecraft, gravity is the first thing that goes.”

“You’re agile if you’ve escaped the ARM thus far. What has your reading gained you?”

“We have to live. We have to win.”

“These would be good ideas—”

“No, you don’t get it.” The Jotok had to understand. “The Covenants of 2505 permit taking of hostages. They only put restrictions on their treatment. I’ve played those futzy documents three times through. Odysseus is hostages-in-a-box, live and frozen. They won’t starve. Envoy can take Fly-by-Night anywhere he likes, however long it takes, then come back and release Odysseus. It’s all in the Covenants.”

“If anything goes wrong,” Paradoxical said, “they would never come.”

“No, it’s worse than that! If everything goes right for them, there’s no good reason to go back unless it’s to fill the food lockers! The Covenants only apply when you’re caught. My family is one hundred percent dead if we can’t change that.”

“Envoy’s word may be good. No! Bad gamble. We should study the pot odds. Beowulf, have you evolved a plan?”

“I don’t know enough.”

The three crew were awake now, watching us as we watched them, though mostly they watched Fly-by-Night.

Paradoxical’s talker burst to life. My translator said, “Tell us of the fight that injured you.”

Fly-by-Night was slow to answer. “Sheathclaws folk are fond of hang gliding. We make much bigger hang gliders for Kzinti, and not so many of us fly. I was nearly grown, seeking a name. My intent was to fly from Blood Park to Touchdown, three hundred klicks along rocky shore and then inland, at night. Land in Offcentral Park. Startle humans into fits.”

Packer snarled, “Startling humans is no fit way to earn a name!” and the unnamed Kzin asked, “Wouldn’t the thermals be different at night?”

Fly-by-Night said, “Very different.”

“Your second naming quest brought you here,” Envoy stated.

“Yes. I hoped that a scarred Kzin might pass among other Kzinti. Challenge would be less likely. Any lapse in knowledge might be due to head injury. I might pass more easily on a world part Kzin and part human, like Shasht-Fafnir.”

“You dance lightly over an important matter. Who lifted you from your world?”

“Where would be my honor if I told you that?”

“Smugglers? Bandits? What species? You will give us that too, Nameless.” We heard the click: communication severed.

One of the Kzinti stood up. Another slashed the vacuum, a mere wrist gesture, but the first sat down again. The stars wheeled . . . and something that was not a star came into view, brilliant in pure laser colors: Stealthy-Mating’s riding lights.

I said, “We’re about to dock. If anything happens, you keep the needle sprayer, I want the blade. Closing the zipper turns on the air, so don’t lose that.”

“No fear,” said Paradoxical.

Gravity went away. We floated. The ships danced about each other. I would have docked less recklessly. I’m not a Kzin.

“They know too much about us,” I said.

Paradoxical asked, “In what context?”

“They knew our manifest. They knew our position—”

“Finding another ship in interstellar space is not a thing they could plan, Beowulf.”

“LE Graynor to you. Look at it this way,” I said. “The only way to get here, falling through the Tao Gap in Einstein space, is to be going from Fafnir to Home. Stealthy-Mating got our route somehow. They started later with a faster ship. They might catch us approaching Home during deceleration . . . track our graviton wake . . . or snatch you and Fly-by-Night after you got through Customs. They could not possibly have expected to find Odysseus here. Catching us here was a fluke, an opportunity. They grabbed it.”

“As you say.”

“I like it.”

Paradoxical stared. “Do you? Why?”

“Clients, overlords, allies, any kind of support would have to be told that Stealthy-Mating is en route to Home. Any rendezvous with Stealthy-Mating is at Home. When could they change that? They’re still headed for Home!”

“Very speculative.”

“I know.”

Stealthy-Mating’s cargo bay was bigger than the boat’s, under doors that opened like wings.

The boat released the cargo modules. Two Kzinti went out and began moving them. Envoy stayed behind. He watched the action in space, ignoring us.

“Not yet,” Paradoxical said. I nodded. Fly-by-Night floated half curled up. He seemed to be asleep, but his ears kept flicking open like little fans.

I ate my handmeal. Paradoxical averted its eyes.

Packer and the nameless third crewperson set the modules moving one by one, and juggled them as they approached Stealthy-Mating. Waldo arms reached up to pull them into the bay and lock them. It seemed to take forever, but I’d have moved those masses one at a time. They were in a hurry. Rounding a point mass would scatter this loose stuff all across the sky.

Turnpoint Star must be near.

The cargo doors closed. Stealthy-Mating rotated, and the boat was pulled down against the hull. Now we were all one mass.

The hatch in the floor opened. Three Kzinti came through in pressure suits to join Envoy. The newcomer’s chest and back showed a Kzinti snarl done in gaudy orange dots-and-commas. He spared a glance for me and Paradoxical, then turned to Fly-by-Night.

My translator said, “I am Meebrlee-Ritt.”

“Futz!” Fly-by-Night exclaimed in Interworld.

“Your concern is noted. Yes, I am of the Patriarch’s line. Your First Sire was Gutting Claw’s Telepath, who betrayed the Patriarch Rrowrreet-Ritt and showed prey how to destroy his own ship!”

“And he never even went back for the ears. Then again, they were inside a hot plasma,” Fly-by-Night said.

To Envoy, Meebrlee-Ritt said, “This one was to be tamed.”

Envoy cringed, ears flat. Even I could hear the change in his voice, the whine. “Dominant One, this fool crippled himself for a failed joke, and that joke was his name quest! A lesser male he must be, never mated. His arrogance is bluff or insanity, or else life among humans has made him quite alien! But let Tech give us air pressure, release the telepath, and the stench of your rage will cow him soon enough!”

“Let us expend less effort than that.” Meebrlee-Ritt turned back to Fly-by-Night. “Telepath, your life may be taken by any who happen upon you.”

“Did you need my consent for this?”

“No!”

“Or my First Sire’s confession? That may be summoned by any Sheathclaws school program. Then what shall we discuss? Tell us how you gained your name.”

“I was born to it, of course. Let us discuss your future.”

“I have a future?”

“Your bloodline may be forgiven. You may keep your slaves, such as they are, and a harem of my choosing—”

“Yours? Dominant One, forgive my interruption, please continue.”

Even if he was familiar with human sarcasm, it wasn’t likely Meebrlee-Ritt had been getting it from Kzinti! I’d read that Kzinti telepaths were flighty, not terribly bright. Meebrlee-Ritt spoke more slowly. “Yes, my choosing! You may live your life in honor and luxury, or you may die shredded by my hands.”

“Meebrlee-Ritt, you would not expect me to leap into so difficult a decision. Will you bargain for the lives of your hostages?”

“Submissive and unarmed Humans.” Meebrlee-Ritt sneezed his contempt. “But what would you bargain with? Your world?”

“Only my genes. Consider,” said Fly-by-Night. In the Heroes’ Tongue his speech was a long snarl, but the translation sounded placid enough. “He who is obeyed, who fights best, who mates is the alpha, the dominant one. You command that I mate? How will you persuade me that I am dominant? Submit to this one easy demand. Rescue my erstwhile hosts. Release them at Home.”

“Why would I want you in rut? There are no females aboard Sraff-zisht. Packer, Envoy, you remain. Leave the gravity off. Tech, with me. Turnpoint Star is near.”

Two Kzinti went through the hatch. Two took their seats. Their hands were idle. Now the boat rode Stealthy-Mating like a parasite.

I asked, “Can you see Turnpoint Star?”

“At point-six kilometers across? You flatter me. I surmise it may be centered in that curdle,” said Paradoxical.

Curdle? The tight little knot of glowing gas? I watched, watched . . . A red point blew up into a blue-white sun and I fell into it. The stars wheeled. The balloons that housed us rippled as if batted by invisible children. My body rippled too.

I’d been through this once, but much worse. I clutched the ribbon handholds in a death grip. I howled.

It only lasted seconds, but the terror remained. One of the Kzinti pointed at me, and both laughed with their teeth showing.

Packer made his way to the shower/toilet. The other, Envoy, stayed at the board to look for tidal damage.

Fly-by-Night took handholds, subtly braced, ears spread wide. His eye caught mine. I said, “Paradoxical, now.”

Paradoxical splayed itself like a starfish across the wall of the refuge, just next to the opening. It disgorged the handle of the w’tsai.

I pulled the wrapped blade from its gullet and stripped off the casing. Clutched the blade against me, exhaled hard, opened the zipper all in one sweep, smooth as silk. Pressure popped me out into the cabin, straight toward Envoy’s back, screaming to empty my lungs before they exploded.

Push the blade in, pull out, feel the vibration.

I had thought to recoil off a wall and slice Fly-by-Night free. That wasn’t going to work. The Kzin diplomat saw my shadow and spun around. I slashed, aiming to behead him, and shifted the blade to catch the cat-quick sweep of his arm.

He swept his arm through the blade and whacked me under the jaw.

That was a powerful blow. I spun dizzily away. His arm spun too, cut along a diagonal plane, spraying blood. Attached, it would have ripped my head off.

I caught myself against a wall and leapt.

The seat web still held Envoy. His right arm and sleeve sprayed blood and air. Envoy smashed left-handed at the controls, then hit the seat web and leapt out of my path. I got his foot! The knife was hellishly sharp. My ears were roaring, my sight was going, but vacuum tore at him too as his arm and ankle jetted blood and air. His balance was all off as he recoiled from the dome and came at me. He kicked. My angle was wrong and he grazed me.

Spinning, spinning, I starfished out so that the wall caught my momentum and killed my spin. I tried to find him.

The roar continued. My sight was foggy . . . no. The cabin was thick with fog. Fly-by-Night clawed his refuge wall, which had gone slack. We had air!

I still didn’t have time to free Fly-by-Night because—there he was! Envoy was back at the controls. I was braced to leap when a white glare blazed from his hand.

He had the gun.

I changed my jump. It took me behind the cannon. Two projectiles punched into the wall behind me. I swiped the w’tsai in a wide slash across Fly-by-Night’s vacuum refuge, and continued falling toward the shower/toilet. Packer couldn’t ignore Ragnarok forever.

The door opened in my face and I chopped vertically. Packer was naked. His left hand was on the doorlock so I changed the cut, right to catch his free hand, his claws and the iron w’tsai he’d been holding. He whacked me hard but the blow was blunt. I spun once and crashed into Envoy and slashed.

Glimpsed Paradoxical behind him, braced myself and slashed. Paradoxical was firing anaesthetic needles. The Kzin wasn’t fighting back. I didn’t see the implication so I kept slashing.

“Mart! LE Mart! Beowulf!”

I screamed, “What?” Disturbing me now could . . . what? Before me was a drifting cloud of blood and butchered meat. Paradoxical had stopped firing needles into it. Behind me, Fly-by-Night was on Packer’s back, gnawing Packer’s ear and fending off the hand that still had claws. Packer beat him with the blunted hand. They both looked trapped. Packer couldn’t reach Fly-by-Night, but Fly-by-Night dared not let go.

I approached with care. Packer’s arms were busy so he kicked to disembowel me. I chopped off what I could reach. Kick/slash, kick/slash. When he slowed down I killed him.

The air was thick with blood globules and red fog. We were breathing that futz. I got a cloth across my face. Fly-by-Night was snorting and sneezing. Paradoxical had placed meteor patches where Envoy had fired at me, but now he floated limp, maybe dying. I put him into the refuge and got him to zip it.

Fly-by-Night went to the controls. Minutes later we had gravity. All the scarlet goo settled to the floor and we could breathe.

I had gone berserk. Never happened before. My mind was slow coming back. Why was there air?

Air. Think now: I slashed Envoy’s suit open. He pressurized the cabin to save his life. Paradoxical must have come out then. The Jotok’s needles knocked Envoy out despite pressure armor . . . why? Because Paradoxical was putting needles into flesh wherever I’d slashed away the Kzin’s armor. And of course I hadn’t got around to releasing Fly-by-Night until late—

I safed the blade. “Fly-by-Night? I believe this is yours.”

He took it gingerly. “No witness would have guessed that,” he said, and handed it back. “Clean it in the waterfall.”

Kzinti custom: never borrow a w’tsai. If you do, return it clean. Waterfall?

He meant the big box. The word was a joke. I found a big blanket made of sponge, a tube attached. When I wrapped it around the w’tsai, it left the blade clean. I tried it on myself. The blanket flooded me with soapy water, then clean water, then sucked me dry. Weird sensation, but I came out clean.

The toilet looked like an oval box of sand with foot- and handholds around it, though the sand stayed put. Later.

A pressure suit was splayed like a pelt against the wall for easy access.

There was a status display. I couldn’t read the glowing dots-and-commas, but the display must have told Packer there was air outside, and he’d come charging out—

I was starting to shake.

I emerged from the waterfall box into a howling gale. The blood was all gone. I couldn’t even smell it. Fly-by-Night and Paradoxical were at the kitchen wall feeding butchered meat into the hopper.

“This kind of thing must be normal on Patriarchy spacecraft,” Fly-by-Night said cheerfully. “Holes in walls and machinery, blood and corpses everywhere, no problem. This hopper would hold a Great Dane . . . a big dog, Mart. The cleanup subsystem is running smooth as a human’s arse.” He saw my shivering. “You have killed. You should feed. Must your meat be cooked? I don’t know that we have a heat source.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I must. I’m hungry!” Fly-by-Night smiled widely. “You wouldn’t like me hungry, would you?”

“Futz, no!” A Sheathclaws local joke? I tried to laugh. Shivering.

Paradoxical was crawling over one of the control panels. “This kitchen was mounted separately. It is of Shashter manufacture, perhaps connected to the orange underground. It will feed slaves.” It tapped at a surface, and foamy green stuff spilled into a plastic bag. Pond scum? It tapped again and the wall generated a joint of bloody meat. Again: it hummed and disgorged a layered brick.

A handmeal. While Paradoxical sucked at his bag of pond scum and Fly-by-Night devoured hot raw meat, I ate three handmeal bricks. They never tasted that good again.

Fly-by-Night had kept Packer’s ears, one intact and one chewed to a nub, and Envoy’s, both intact. These last he offered to me. “Your kill. Mart, I can dispose of—”

I took them. My kill.

We had taken the boat. Now what?

Fly-by-Night said, “The hard part will be persuading Meebrlee-Ritt that all is well here.” His voice changed. “Dominant One, all runs as planned but for the Telepath’s behavior. Cowed by fear, he has soiled his refuge. Shall we clean him? It might be a trick—”

Funny stuff. I was still shivering. “That’s very good, I can’t tell the difference, but Meebrlee-Ritt or Tech might.”

“Guide me.”

“I can’t find the hologram stage.”

Fly-by-Night touched something. This whole side of the main weapon became a window, floor to dome, a gaudy panorama across orange veldt into a city of massive towers. We’d been prisoned on the other side of it.

I said, “Tanj! He’ll see every hair follicle. All right, I’m still thrashing around here. We’ve got Packer’s pressure suit. The orders were to leave the, ah, prisoners in vacuum and falling. Try this—

“Whenever Meebrlee-Ritt calls, Packer is in the waterfall room.” We hadn’t heard enough of Packer’s speech to imitate Packer. “LE Fly-by-Night, you’re Envoy. You’re in the pressure suit, we’re in the vac refuges. We’ll have to change the markings on the suit. I’d say Envoy’s move is to wait patiently for his Alpha Officer to call.” I didn’t like the taste of this. “He could catch us by surprise.”

“I should find an excuse to call him.”

“Anything goes wrong, you give us air instantly. Paradoxical, have you found an emergency air switch?”

“Here, then here.”

“Stet. Envoy, what’s wrong with your voice?”

“Nothing,” said Fly-by-Night.

“Well, there had better be.”

“Stet,” the Kzin said. “And we don’t really want vacuum, do we? Let’s try this instead. I’m calling because we’re not in vacuum, and my voice—”

And his tale was better than mine, so we worked on that.

We spent some time looking those controls over, trying a few things. We found air pressure, air mix, emergency pressure, cabin gravity, thrust. Weapons would be harder to test. There were controls you could hit by accident without killing anyone, and that was done with virtual control panels. Weapons and defenses were hardwired buttons and switches, a few of them under locked cages, all stiff enough but big enough that I could turn them on or off by jabbing with the heel of my hand. Paradoxical couldn’t move those at all.

The hologram wall was the telescope screen too. Paradoxical got us a magnificent view back into the Nursery Nebula, all curdles and whorls of colored light. It found Odysseus a light-hour behind us, under spin and falling free with no sign of motive power, only a chain of corridor lights and the brighter glow of the lobby. That didn’t tell us if they still had hyperdrive. They couldn’t use it yet.

Ahead was nothing but distant stars. We had to be approaching flat space, where Stealthy-Mating could jump to hyperdrive.

Fly-by-Night was wearing Envoy’s pressure suit. The markings were right. He would keep the right sleeve hidden. We had cut off part of the helmet, raggedly, to obscure his features. Now Fly-by-Night tapped at the kitchen wall. It disgorged a soft, squishy, dark red organ that might have been a misshapen human liver. He smeared blood over his face and chest, then into the exposed ear.

My shivering became a violent shudder. Fly-by-Night looked at me in consternation. “LE Mart? What’s wrong?”

“Too much killing.”

“Two enemies is too much? Get out of camera view, then. Are we ready?”

“Go.”

Meebrlee-Ritt snarled, “Envoy, this had best be of great interest. We prepare for hyperdrive.”

“Dominant One, the timing was not of my choosing,” Fly-by-Night bellowed into the oversized face. “The human attacked while Packer was visiting the waterfall. I have killed the Telepath’s slave—”

“The Jotok is dead?”

Fly-by-Night cringed. “No, Dominant One, no! Only the man. The Jotok lives. Telepath lives.”

“The man is nothing. Telepath did not purchase the man! Is Packer functional, and are you?”

“Packer is well. I have nosebleeds, lost lung function, lost hearing. The man had a projectile weapon, a toy, but he damaged my helmet. I managed to put the cabin under pressure. Packer keeps watch on Telepath. Shall I return the cabin to vacuum? One of us would have to remain in the waterfall.”

“Set Packer at the controls. What can he ruin while there is nothing to fly? Maintain free fall. You and Packer trained for free fall, our prisoner did not. You, Envoy, talk to Telepath. Learn what he desires, what he fears.”

Cringe. “Dominant One, I shall.”

Again we faced an electromagnetic cannon. I said, “Good. Really good.”

Space around me winked like an eye. I caught it happening and looked at the floor. Fly-by-Night looked up, and blinked at the distortion. “Mart, I don’t think . . . Mart? I’m blind.”

Paradoxical was in a knot, his arms covering all of his eyes. I said, “Maybe you’d better take Paradoxical into the waterfall and stay there.”

“Lost! Confused! Blind! How do you survive this?” the Jotok demanded. “How does any LE?”

“They’ll close off the windows on Stealthy-Mating. I don’t see how to do that in here. I guess they leave the boat empty if they can. Fly-by-Night, lower your head. Look at the floor. See the floor? Hold that pose.”

“Stet.”

I got under Paradoxical and he wrapped himself around me, sixty pounds of dry-skinned octopus. I eased him onto Fly-by-Night’s shoulders until he clung. “Gravity’s on, right? Just crawl on around to the waterfall. Don’t look up.”

In hyperdrive something unmeasurable happens to electromagnetic phenomenon, or else to organs that perceive them: eyes, optic nerves, brains. A view of hyperspace is like being born sightless. The Blind Spot, we call it.

In the waterfall room we straightened up and stretched. Fly-by-Night said, “None of us can fly—”

“No. We’re passengers. Stowaways. Relax and let them do the flying.”

Paradoxical asked, “How can any mind guide a ship through this?”

I said, “There are species that can’t tolerate it. Jotoki can’t. Maybe puppeteers can’t; most of them never leave their home system. Humans can use a mass pointer, a psionics device to find our way through hyperspace, as long as we don’t look into the Blind Spot directly. But that’s . . . well, part of a psionics device is the operator’s mind. Computers don’t see anything. Kzinti don’t either. There are just a few freaky Kzinti who can steer through the Blind Spot directly.”

“It is the Patriarch’s bloodline,” Paradoxical said. “After the first War with Men, when Kzinti acquired hyperdrive, they learned that most cannot astrogate through hyperspace. Some few can. The Patriarch paid with names and worlds to add their sisters and daughters to his harem. Today the -Ritts can fly hyperspace.”

Fly-by-Night said, “Really?”

“It happened long after your folk were cut off. LE Graynor, I did research on more than just you. Of course you see the implications? Meebrlee-Ritt must fly Stealthy-Mating. He will be under some strain, possibly at the edge of his sanity. Tech must see him in that embarrassing state. Envoy and Packer need not, and no prisoner should.”

“He won’t call?” I made it a question.

“He would not expect an answer. Packer and Envoy would be hiding in the waterfall,” Paradoxical said.

That satisfied us. We were tired.

For three days we lived in the waterfall room.

One Kzin would have crowded the waterfall. With a man and a Jotok it was just that much more crowded. The smell of an angry Kzin made me jumpy. I couldn’t sleep that way, so a high wind was kept blowing at all times.

We used the sandpatch in full view of each other. There were ribald comments. The Jotok was very neat. Fly-by-Night covered his dung using gloved feet and expected me to do the same, but it wasn’t needed. The magnetized “sand” churned and swallowed it to the recycler.

Somebody had to come out for food. It developed that nobody could do that but me.

Our talk ranged widely.

Fly-by-Night never told us how he had reached Fafnir, nor even how he had passed through Customs. He did tell us something about the two who had come with him on their name quests. “I left Nazi Killer still collecting computer games and I set out to buy a Jotok—”

“What kind of name is ‘Nazi Killer’?”

“It’s an illicit game. Our First Sires’ children found it among exercise programs in Angel’s Pencil. Nazi Killer is very good at it. On Shasht he bought improved games and modern computers and waldo gloves for Kzinti hands, thinking these would earn his name.”

“Go on.”

“Maybe he’s already home. Maybe the Longest War caught him. He would not have survived that. As for me, I wasted time searching out medical techniques to heal my broken bones. Such practice has only evolved for Humans! Kzinti still keep their scars. Customs differ.

“But Grass Burner got what he wanted. Kittens!”

“Kittens?”

“Yes, six unrelated, a breeding set. On Sheathclaws there are only photos and holos of cats, and a library of tales of fantasy cats, and children who offer a Kzin kit a ball of yarn just because it makes their parents angry, nobody remembers why. Cats will get Grass Burner his name. But we remember Jotoks too. Paradoxical, if two species are smarter than one, three should be smarter yet. You will earn my name, if we can reach Sheathclaws.”

I snapped out of a nightmare calling, “What was its name? Stealthy-Mating?”

“We were asleep,” Paradoxical complained. “We love sleeping in free fall. Back in the lake. But we wake and are still a self.”

“Sorry.” I almost remembered the dream. A lake of boiling blood, Kzinti patrolling the shores, wonderfully desirable human women in the shadows beyond. I was trying to swim. The pain was stunning, but I was afraid to come out.

Broken blood vessels were everywhere on my body. It hurt enough to ruin my sleep.

It was our fourth morning in hyperdrive.

“Sraff-zisht,” said Paradoxical.

“Pleasemadam, seek interstellar spacecraft local to Fafnir, Kzinti crew, Heroes’ Tongue name Sraff-zisht. Run it.”

Fly-by-Night woke. He said, “Make a meat run, Mart.”

When I went out for food, we detached the shower blanket so I could use it as a shield. Meebrlee-Ritt had ordered us to keep the boat in free fall. No way could we be really sure he wouldn’t call. I had to use handholds. I’d made a net for the food.

My computer dinged while we were eating. We listened:

Sraff-zisht was known to the Shasht markets, and to Wunderland, too. The ship carried red meat to Fafnir and lifted seafood. At Wunderland, the reverse. Crew turnover was high. They usually stayed awhile. This trip they’d lifted light and early.

“Sraff-zisht is not armed,” I said. I’d hoped it was true, but now I knew it. “Wunderland Customs is careful. If they never found weapons or mounts for weapons, they’re not there. We have the only gun!”

“Yes!” Fly-by-Night’s fully extended claws could stop a man’s heart without touching him.

“I’ve been thinking,” I said. “There has to be a way to close that window strip. A Kzinti crew couldn’t hide out in here! They’d tear each other to pieces!”

“I knew that. It’s too small,” Fly-by-Night said. “I just didn’t want to go out there. Must we?”

We three crawled out with the shower blanket over us, Paradoxical riding the Kzin’s shoulders. We stayed under the blanket while we worked the controls. I felt like a child working my flatscreen under the covers after being sent to bed.

There was a physical switch under a little cage with a code lock. None of us had the code. The switch wasn’t a self-destruct. We knew where that was. When we ran out of options I sliced the cage away with the w’tsai, and flipped the switch.

From under the blanket we saw the shadows changing. I peeked out. Lost my vision, lost even my memory of vision . . . saw the edge of a shield crawling across the last edge of window.

If Meebrlee-Ritt had called earlier, he would have seen us flying hyperspace with windows open. Some mistakes you don’t pay for.

“I think you’d better spend a lot of time in disguise and out here,” I told Fly-by-Night. I saw his look: better not push that. “The next few days should be safe, but we should practice getting a disguise on you. Meebrlee-Ritt will call when he drops us out, and he will expect an answer, and he will not expect you to be still covered with blood and half hidden in ripped-up armor. Home is an eighteen- to twenty-day trip, they said. Ten to go, call it three in hyperspace.”

The Kzin was tearing into a joint of something big. “Keep talking.”

“We need to paint you. Envoy had a smooth face, no markings except for what looked like black eyebrows swept way up.”

“What would you use for paint?”

“The kitchens on some of the Nakamura Lines ships offered dyes for Easter eggs. Then again, they went bankrupt. What have we got? Let’s check out the kitchen wall.”

Choices aboard Sraff-zisht’s boat were sparse. One variety of handmeal. Paradoxical’s green sludge. Twenty settings for meat . . . “Fly-by-Night, what are these?”

“Ersatz prey from Kzin, I expect. Not bad, just strange.”

They weren’t all meat. We had two flavors of blood, and a milky fluid. “Artificial milk with diet supplements,” Fly-by-Night told us, “to treat injuries and disease. Adults wouldn’t normally use it.”

Three kinds of fluids. Hot blood—“Is one of these human?”

“I wouldn’t know, and that’s one damn rude question to ask someone you have to live with—”

“I’m sorry. What I—”

“—for the next nine to ten days. If I get through this they’ll have to give me a name.”

“I just want to know if it coagulates.”

Silence. Then, “Intelligent question. I’ve been on edge, Mart.”

I didn’t say that Kzinti are born that way. “Ease up on the cappuccino.”

“We should thicken this. Mix it with something floury. Mush up a handmeal?”

The handmeals would pull apart. We worked with the layers: a meatlike pâté, a vegetable pâté, something cheesy, shells of hard bread. The bread stayed too lumpy: no good. Cheese thickened the blood. One kind of blood did coagulate. We got a thick fluid that could be spread into a Kzin’s fur, then would get thicker. Milk lightened it enough, but then it stayed too liquid. More cheese?

We covered Fly-by-Night in patches everywhere, except his face, which we didn’t want to mess up yet. This latest batch looked good where we’d spread it on his belly. I gave him a crossed fingers sign and worked it into his face.

Not bad.

We tried undiluted blood for the eyebrows. Too pale. Work on that later. I stood back and asked, “Paradoxical?”

“The marks weren’t symmetrical,” Paradoxical said. “You tend to want him to look too human. They’re not eyebrows. Trail that right one almost straight up—”

“You’d better do it.”

He worked. Presently he asked, “Mart?”

“Good!”

That was all Fly-by-Night needed. He set us spinning as he jumped for the waterfall room. We gave him an hour to dry off, because the shower blanket didn’t suck up all the water, and another to calm down. Then we started over.

We couldn’t get the eyebrows dark enough.

Finally we opened up a heating element in the kitchen wall, hoping we wouldn’t ruin anything, and used it to char one of Envoy’s ears. We used the carbon black to darken Fly-by-Night’s “eyebrows.” We bandaged one ear (“exploded by vacuum”).

Then we made him wait, and talk.

“Sraff-zisht drops back into Einstein space. There’s an alarm. Do we get a few minutes? Does Meebrlee-Ritt clean himself up before he shows himself? Does he want a nap?”

“I was not raised among the children of the Patriarch.”

“He’s dropped us out in the inner comets. That’s a huge volume. He’s not worried about any stray ship that happens along, but he might want to check on us. He still has to worry that the big bad telepath has murdered his crew. Fly-by-Night? Massacres are routine?”

“Duels, I think, and riots. Mart, the cleanup routines are very simple. Any surviving crew with a surviving fingertip could set them going.”

“Meebrlee-Ritt calls. Right away?”

“He will set a course into Home system. Then he will make himself gorgeous. Let the lesser Kzinti wait. Count on forty minutes after we enter Einstein space.”

“Stet. He calls. Envoy’s all cleaned up. Big bandage on his ear. What is Envoy’s attitude?”

Fly-by-Night let his claws show. Kzinti do sweat, but we’d cooled the cabin. His makeup was holding. “Half mad from sensory deprivation, still he must cringe before his alpha officer. Repress rage. Meebrlee-Ritt might enjoy that. Change orders just to shake up Envoy.”

“Cringe,” I said.

Fly-by-Night pulled himself lower in his chair. His ear flattened, his lips were tight together.

“Good. Envoy wouldn’t eat in front of Meebrlee-Ritt—?”

“No!”

“Our makeup wouldn’t stand up to that.”

“No, and I promise not to eat the makeup!”

We kept him talking. I wanted to see how long the makeup would last. I wanted to see if he’d go berserk. A little berserk wouldn’t hurt, in a Kzin who had been trapped in sensory deprivation for many days, but he had to remember his lines.

Three hours later . . . he didn’t crack, but the makeup started to. We sent him off to get clean.

Morning of the ninth day. I couldn’t stop chattering.

“We’ll drop out of hyperspace at the edge of Home system. We almost know when. There is only one speed in hyperdrive—” though Quantum Two hyperdrive is hugely faster and belongs to another species. “If Sraff-zisht has been traveling straight toward Home at three days to the light-year, we’ll drop out in . . .”

“Four hours and ten minutes,” Paradoxical said.

“The jigger factor is, where does Meebrlee-Ritt drop us out? Hyperdrive takes ‘flat’ space. If there are masses around to distort space, the ship’s gone. Pilots are very careful not to get too close to their target sun. Really cautious types aim past a target system. Just what kind of pilot is Meebrlee-Ritt?”

“Your pronunciation is terrible,” said Fly-by-Night.

“Yah?”

“Crazy Kzin. Dive straight in. Cut the hyperdrive ten ce’meters short of death. Let our intrinsic velocity carry us straight into the system. Mart, that is the only decent bet.”

“Where is Packer? Still in the waterfall?”

“I will think of something.”

“I want you in makeup two hours early.”

“No.”

“H—”

“Yes, he might drop out short! But he might circle! He might enter Home system at an angle. Our window of opportunity has to slop over on either side.” Fly-by-Night’s speech was turning mushy again, lips pulling far back, lots of gleaming white teeth. Even Envoy didn’t look like that. Sheathclaws must have good dental hygiene.

“We know that he will not show himself to Envoy and Packer after nine days of letting the Blind Spot drive him crazy and ruin his hairdo. You’ll have forty minutes to make me beautiful.”

“Stet. What next? Decelerate for a week. Drop the boat somewhere, maybe in the asteroids, without changing course. The Home asteroid belt is fairly narrow. Still plenty of room to hide.

“They’ll bring you aboard ship just before they drop the boat. Because you’re dangerous. Thanks.” He’d dialed me up a handmeal. “You’re dangerous, so they’ll keep you in free fall until the last minute. If we’re wrong about that, we could get caught by surprise.”

“Bring me aboard? How does that work? Order Envoy and Packer to stun me and pull me through the small lock? We can’t do that. They’re dead!”

“Lure the technology officer in here.”

“How?”

“Don’t know. Make up a story. Let’s just get through dropout without getting caught.”

A recording spoke. A computer whined, “Dominant Ones, we have returned to the universe. Be patient for star positions.”

Paradoxical started the curtain retracting. Stars emerged. I went to the kitchen wall and dialed up what we needed.

The recording reeled off a location based on some easy-to-find stars and clusters. Paradoxical listened intently. “Home system,” he said. “We will use the telescope to find better data. Can you do that alone?”

“Yah.” We’d practiced. In free fall we were still a bit awkward, but I mixed the basic makeup, then added char to a smaller batch. A bit more? All? Ready. “You do the eyebrows, Doc.”

“First I will finish this task.”

Fly-by-Night held still while I rubbed the food mixture into his facial fur.

Paradoxical said, “Graviton wake indicates a second ship.”

“Damn!” Fly-by-Night snarled. I flung myself backward; my seat web caught me.

Paradoxical said, “We find nothing in visible light.”

“Don’t move your mouth. Aw, Fly-by-Night!” He was in an all-out snarl, trying to talk and failing. Drool made a darker runnel. “If Meebrlee-Ritt saw that he wouldn’t care who you are. Lose the teeth!”

Fly-by-Night relaxed his mouth. “Your extra week is down the toilet, Mart. They’re making pickup here and now.”

The makeup had stayed liquid. “Paradoxical, give him eyebrows.” I brushed out the drool, then settled myself out of camera range. They’d given me the flight controls. Paradoxical on astrogation, Fly-by-Night on weapons.

Paradoxical finished his makeup work and moved out of camera range, fifteen minutes ahead of schedule. I asked, “Shall we talk? Is this second ship just an escort?”

“No. Why make Sraff-zisht conspicuous? Transfer the telepath, then move on to Home. This new ship runs to some outer world, or to Kzin itself—”

Meebrlee-Ritt popped up bigger than life and fourteen minutes early. He demanded, “Envoy, is the telepath well?”

Fly-by-Night flinched, then cringed. “The telepath is healthy, Dominant One. I judge that he is not in his right mind.”

“The Jotok? Yourself? Where is Packer?”

“The Jotok amuses themself with a computer. I will welcome medical attention. Packer . . . Dominant One . . . Packer looked on hyperspace.”

“He knew better!”

“Envoy” recoiled, then visibly pulled himself together. “Soon or late, Dominant One, every Hero looks. Wealth and a name and the infinite future, if he has sisters and daughters, if he can stay sane. Packer did not. He hides in the waterfall when I let him. Set him in a hunting park soon or he will die.”

“That will not be our task. Leap for Life will be here soon. Transfer the boat to Leap for Life. Haste! No need to take Telepath out of his vacuum refuge. You will be relieved aboard Leap for Life.”

“Yes, Dominant One!”

“Packer must guard the telepath. The telepath will attack now if ever.”

“Yes—”

Meebrlee-Ritt was gone.

“We have it!” Paradoxical projected what he was seeing against the cannon casing.

Still distant, backlit by Apollo, Home’s sun, a sphere nestled in a glowing arc of gamma ray shield, its black skin broken by holes and projections and tiny windows. Dots-and-commas script glowed brilliant orange. “We find heavy graviton wake. That ship is decelerating hard.”

“Built in this century,” Fly-by-Night said.

Sraff-zisht dropped us free.

This was not much of a puzzle. I spun the boat, aimed at Leap for Life and said, “Shoot.”

My hair stirred. Fly-by-Night’s fur stood up and rippled. He said, “Done. Doc?”

“The graviton wake is gone. You burned out its thrusters.”

I boosted us to put Sraff-zisht between us and Leap for Life. Leap for Life had the weapons, after all. I set our gun on Sraff-zisht and said, “Again.”

“Done. I burned out something.”

“Graviton flare,” Paradoxical said, just as Sraff-zisht vanished.

“Meebrlee-Ritt must have tried to return to hyperspace,” Fly-by-Night said. “We burned out the hyperdrive. But he still has thrusters!”

I rotated the boat to focus the gun on the immobilized Leap for Life. “Projectiles. Shoot it to bits.”

Fly-by-Night punched something. We heard the weapon adjusting, but he didn’t shoot. “Why?”

I screamed, “They’ve got all the weapons, our shield has flown away—”

“Stet.” The boat’s lone weapon roared. It was right in the middle of the cabin/cargo hold. The noise was amazing. The boat recoiled: cabin gravity lurched to compensate. Leap for Life jittered and came apart in shreds.

“—And they don’t have the hostages! And now it’s one less tanj thing to worry about.”

“Stet, stet, I understand!”

Paradoxical said, “We win.”

We looked at the Jotok. He said, “We may report all that has happened, now, via laser broadcast to Home. We fly the boat to Home with our proofs. The law of Home can arrange to retrieve Odysseus. With his hyperdrive burned out, Meebrlee-Ritt is trapped in Home system. In the full glare of publicity he must follow the Covenants. He may trade his hostages for some other consideration such as amnesty, but they must be returned. Stet?”

“He’s still got my family! But I think we can turn on the cabin futzy gravity now, if you don’t mind—” I stopped because Meebrlee-Ritt, greatly magnified, was facing Fly-by-Night.

“Some such consideration,” he mimicked us. “You look stupid, Telepath, covered with food. Only one consideration can capture my interest! Read my mind if you doubt me. Release my entourage and surrender! The hostages for yourself!”

Fly-by-Night’s claw moved. No result showed except for Meebrlee-Ritt’s widening eyes, but Fly-by-Night had given him a contracted view. He was seeing all of us.

“Lies! You killed my Heroes? Eeeeerg!” A hair-lifting snarl as Fly-by-Night lifted Packer’s ear into view.

It seemed the right moment. I showed Envoy’s surviving ear. “We had to use the other.”

“Martin Wallace Graynor, you may buy back your hostages and your life by putting the telepath into my hands!”

It began to seem that Meebrlee-Ritt was mad. I asked, “Must I subdue him first?”

A killing gape was my answer. I asked, “And where would you take him then, with no hyperdrive?”

“Not your concern.”

“We’re going to call for help now. Over the next few hours all of Home system is going to know you’re here. A civilized solar system seethes with telescopes. If you have allies in the asteroids, you can’t go to them. You’d only point them out to the Home Rule.”

“What if you never make that broadcast, LE Graynor? And I can . . . thaw . . . sss.” He’d had a notion. He stepped out of range. Ducked back and fish-eyed the view to show his whole cabin. The other Kzin, Tech, was at his workstation, watching.

A wall slid away. Through an aperture ten yards wide I could see a much bigger cargo hold and all of Odysseus’ cargo modules. Meebrlee-Ritt moved to one of them, opened a small panel and worked.

Back he came. “I can reset the temperature on these machines. I thought you might wonder, but soon I will show you thawed fish. You cannot do to me what you did to Leap for Life without killing my hostages too. If you broadcast any message at all, I will set the third module thawing, and then I will show you thawed dead hostages.”

I was sweating.

The Kzin aristocrat said, “Telepath . . . Fly-by-Night. I will give you a better name. Your prowess has earned a name even as an enemy. What is it we ask of you? Take a harem. Raise your sons. See your daughters grow up in the Patriarch’s household. A life in luxury buys survival for sixty-four Human citizens.

“Think, then. I can wait. A boat’s life support is not the match for an interstellar spacecraft. Or else—”

The mass of an interstellar spacecraft jumped into our faces. Meebrlee-Ritt was tiny in its window, huge in the hologram stage. He threw his head back, a prolonged screech, mouth gaping as wide as my head. Forced his mouth to close so he could ask, “Graynor, have you ever flown a spacecraft? Do you think you have the skill to keep me from ramming you?”

I said, “Yes. Space is roomy, and the telepath is our hostage. Doc, can you give me a deep-radar view of yon privateer?”

Paradoxical guessed what I meant. The mass outside our dome went transparent.

I looked it over. Fuel . . . more fuel . . . a bulky hyperdrive design from the last century. Gravity and reaction motors were also big and bulky. Skimpy cargo space, smaller cabin, and that tiny box shape must be a waterfall room just like ours.

I spun the boat. “You say I can’t shoot?”

Meebrlee-Ritt looked up. He must have been looking right into our gun. “Pitiful! Are all Humans natural liars?”

Fine-tuning my aim, I said, “There is a thing you should know about us. If you eat prey that is infested . . . whasht-meery . . . you may be very sick, but it doesn’t kill off your whole bloodline. Shoot,” I said to Fly-by-Night.

The gun roared. Meebrlee-Ritt’s image whirled around. The boat recoiled: gravity imbalances swirled through my belly. In our deep-radar view the waterfall room became a smudge.

Then Sraff-zisht was gone.

“We track him,” Paradoxical said. “Gravitons, heavily accelerating, there.”

A green circle on the sky marked nothing but stars, but I spun the boat to put crosshairs on it. “Electromagnetic,” I shouted.

“Am I a fool?” The gun grumbled, shifting from projectile mode.

“Graviton wake has stopped.”

Fly-by-Night cried, “I have not fired!”

I said, “He’s got no hyperdrive—”

Paradoxical said, “Gravitons again. He will ram.”

The room wobbled, my hair stood on end, Fly-by-Night fluffed out into a great orange puffball. “Graviton wake is gone,” Paradoxical said.

I moved us, thirty gee lateral, in case his aim was good.

Sraff-zisht, falling free, shot past us by two miles. I chased it down. Whim made me zip in alongside the ship’s main window. Grinning like a Kzin, I screamed, “Now wait us out!”

In the hologram stage Meebrlee-Ritt hugged a stack of meteor patches while he pulled on the waterfall door. Vacuum inside would be holding the door shut. We could see Tech working his way into a pressure suit, but Meebrlee-Ritt hadn’t thought of that yet. He turned to look at the camera, at us.

He cringed. Down on his belly, face against the floor.

Paradoxical set our com laser on Home. The lightspeed lag was several hours, so I just recorded a help call and sent it. Then, as we’d have to anyway, we three began recording the whole story. That too would arrive before we could—

Tech stood above Meebrlee-Ritt, watching us. When Fly-by-Night looked at him, he cringed, a formal crouch. “Dominant One, what must we do?”

Fly-by-Night said, “Tend your cargo until you can be towed to Home. Meebrlee-Ritt, also, I place in your charge. Set your screamer and riding lights so you can be found. You may dream of betrayal, but do not act on it. You know what I am. I know who you are. Your hostages’ lives will buy back your bloodline.”

He’d said he couldn’t read minds. I still think he was bluffing.

A century ago the new settlers had towed a moonlet from elsewhere into geosynchronous orbit around Home. Home Base was where incoming ships arrived, and where they thawed incoming Ice Class passengers.

The law had business with hijackers and kidnappers; we were their witnesses. We were the system’s ongoing news item. Media and the law were waiting.

I rapidly judged that anchorpersons and lawyers were my fate. The only way to hide myself was to sign with Home Information Megacorp and talk my head off until my public grew bored.

Sraff-zisht we had left falling free through Home system. Home Rule had to round up ships to bring it back. It took two of their own, four Belters acting for the bounty, and one shared by a media consortium, all added to the several they sent after Odysseus. It took them ten days to fetch Sraff-zisht.

For eight days I was questioned by Home and ARM law and by LE Wilyama Warbelow, the anchor from Home Information Megacorp. Wilyama was wired for multisensory recording. What she experienced became immortal.

They’d wanted to do that to me too.

The last two days were a lull: I was able to more or less relax, and even see a bit of the captured asteroid. Then Sraff-zisht descended on tethers to Home Base, and everybody wanted Mart Graynor.

The Covenant against sensory deprivation as torture has long since been interpreted as the right to immediate trial, not just for Kzinti but throughout human space, a right not to be evaded. I was to submit to questioning by Meebrlee-Ritt and Tech, by their lawyer and everyone else’s, while two hundred Ice Class passengers were being thawed elsewhere.

I screamed my head off. Cameras were on me. The law bent. When they thawed the hostages from Sraff-zisht, I was there to watch.

My wife and child weren’t there.

And we all trooped off to use the holo wall in the Outbound Enterprises Boardroom.

The prisoners watched us from an unknown site. It didn’t seem likely they’d burst through the holo wall and rip us apart. Meebrlee-Ritt’s eyes glittered. Tech only watched.

The court had restricted the factions to one advocate each. All I had for company was Sirhan, a police commissioner from Home Rule; Judge Anita Dee; Handel, an ARM lawyer; Barrister, a runty Kzin assigned as advocate to the prisoners; a hugely impressive peach-colored Kzin, Rasht-Myowr, representing the Patriarch; and anchorperson Wilyama Warbelow.

Judge Dee told the prisoners, “You are each and together accused of violations of local law in two systems, and of the Covenants of 2505 at Fafnir. A jury will observe and decide your fate.”

LE Barrister spoke quickly. “You may not be compelled to speak nor to answer questions, and I advise against it. I am to speak for you. Your trial will take at least two days, as we must wait for other witnesses, but no more than four.”

Meebrlee-Ritt spoke in Interworld. “We have followed the Covenants. Where are my accusers?”

They all looked at me. I said, “Gone.”

“Gone?”

“Fly-by-Night and Paradoxical and I signed an exclusive contract with Home Information Megacorp for our stories. I got a room here at Home Base. They’ll thaw my family here, after all.” If they lived. “We gave LE Warbelow,” I nodded; the anchor bowed, “an hour’s interview, presumed to be the first of many. Fly-by-Night and Paradoxical transferred to a shuttle. The Patriarch’s representative missed them by just under two hours. They disappeared on the way down.”

I’ve never doubted their destination. Fly-by-Night had come to Home for a reason, and he never told anyone who had arranged their transport to Fafnir.

The law raised hell, as if it were my fault they were gone. Warbelow was more sensible. She paid for my room, a major expense that wasn’t in our contract. With the aliens gone, I had become the only game in town.

They got their money’s worth. Mart Graynor emerged as a braggart with a Fafnir accent I’d practiced for two years. I played the same tune while various lawyers and law programs questioned me. I hoped nobody would see a resemblance to documentaries once made by Beowulf Shaeffer.

Barrister reacted theatrically. “Gone! Then who is witness against my clients?”

“We have LE Graynor, Your Honor,” Sirhan said, speaking for Home Rule, “and the crew and passengers of Odysseus will be called. Odysseus had to be chased down in the Kuiper belt, the inner comets, and towed in. They’ll be arriving tomorrow. Any of the passengers might press claims against the defendants.”

The judge said, “LE Handel?”

The ARM rep said, “The Longest War threatens all of human space. We need what these Kzinti can tell us. They’ve violated the Covenants. There was clear intent to store Humans as reserves of meat—”

“This was a local act against Homer citizens!” Sirhan said.

Judge Dee gestured at the big peach-colored Kzin, who said, “The Patriarch’s claim is that Meebrlee-Ritt is no relative of his and has no claim to his name. I am to take possession—”

Meebrlee-Ritt leapt at us, bounced back from the wall—or from a projection screen—and screamed something prolonged. “I flew outside the universe!” said my translator. “Who can do that? Only the -Ritt! In cowardice does the Patriarch disclaim my part in the Longest War!” He changed to Interworld: “LE Graynor knows! Nine days through hyperspace, accurately to my rendezvous!”

“I am to take possession and return him for trial, and his Heroes too. I must have Envoy’s ear, Graynor, unless you can establish a kill. Nameless One, Kzinti elsewhere can fly hyperspace. Females of your line may have reached the -Ritt harem. What of it?”

“My line descends from the Patriarch! I violated no Covenants!”

The runty Kzin who was his advocate caught the judge’s eye. He too spoke Interworld. “To properly represent the prisoners I must speak with them alone and encrypted to learn their wishes. I expect we will fight extradition. Rasht-Myowr,” a prolonged howl in the Heroes’ Tongue. The Patriarch’s designate was trying to loom over him. My translator buzzed static. The runty Kzin waited, staring him down, until the big one stepped back and sheathed his claws.

Barrister said, “Violation of the Covenants would hold my clients here in any case, but none of these claims has any force until we can interview the victims. Odysseus’ crew and passengers will reach Home Base tomorrow. We have only LE Graynor’s word for any of this.”

“He’s telling the truth, though,” I said.

Meebrlee-Ritt barked his triumph. The ARM man said, “Futz, Graynor!”

Judge Dee asked, “LE Graynor, are you familiar with the Covenants of 2505?”

“As much as any law program. I’ve examined them half to death.”

“Did you see violations?”

“No. I thought I had. I thought Packer must have shot out Odysseus’ hyperdrive and hyperwave, putting Odysseus at unacceptable risk, but it’s clear he didn’t. Hyperdrive got Odysseus into the Home comets, and they called ahead via hyperwave as soon as they were out of the Nursery Nebula.”

Rasht-Myowr’s tail slashed across and back. “Your other claims fail! The false lord is mine, and his remaining Hero too!”

I said, “Whatever these two learned about Fly-by-Night and his companions, taking them back to Kzin for trial gives that to the Patriarch. On that basis I’d keep them, if I was an ARM.”

“But you’re testifying,” the ARM said bitterly, “that they didn’t violate the Covenants.”

“Yah.”

“Mine! And Envoy’s ear,” Rasht-Myowr said. “His one ear. Did you kill him?”

“I killed them both. Do you need details? Fly-by-Night was trapped in his vac refuge. We’d just rounded Turnpoint Star and Envoy was flying the ship. Difficult work, took his full attention. Back turned, free fall, crash web holding him in his chair. I had Fly-by-Night’s w’tsai.” The police had already confiscated that. “He would have killed me if he’d released his crash web in time.”

“He would have killed you anyway! Why would you keep only one ear?”

For an instant I couldn’t speak at all. Then I barely remembered my accent. “I h-heated one for charcoal to paint Fly-by-Night. Packer was wrestling Fly-by-Night when I chopped him up, so Fly-by-Night got the ear. He chewed off the other one. They stole, you stole my wife and child and unborn, my harem, you whasht-meery son of a stray cat! I still haven’t seen them alive. I memorized those whasht-meery Covenants. They only forbid my killing your relatives!”

“Duel me then!” Meebrlee-Ritt shouted. “Back turned, crash web locked, free fall, my claws only, blunt them if you like—”

“Barrister, you will silence your client or I will,” the judge said.

“—And you armed! Prove you can do this!”

Meebrlee-Ritt, I decided, was trying to commit suicide. He didn’t want to go with Rasht-Myowr. Let the Patriarch have him, I owed him nothing.

Almost nothing.

I said, “Judge Dee, if you’ll let me ask a few questions, I may solve some problems here.”

“You came to be questioned, LE Graynor. What did you have in mind?”

“Rasht-Myowr, if a violation of the Covenants can’t be proved, then I take it these prisoners are yours—”

Judge Dee interposed. “They may be assessed for substantial property violations, Graynor. Rescue costs. A passenger ship turned to junk!”

“I will pay the costs,” Rasht-Myowr said.

I asked, “You’ll take them back to your Patriarch?”

“Yah.”

“They’ll be tried publicly, of course.”

The peach-colored Kzin considered, then said, “Of course.”

“The court will have a telepath to question him? They always do.”

“Rrr. Your point?”

“Would you let a telepath find out what Meebrlee-Ritt saw of the telepaths of Sheathclaws? And learn how they live? Really?”

He didn’t get it. I said, “Three hundred years living alongside Humans. Sharing their culture. Their schooling programs. Instead of theft and killing, hang gliding! Meebrlee-Ritt, tell him about Fly-by-Night.”

The prisoner looked at the Patriarch’s Voice. He said, “I crawled on my belly for him.”

Rasht-Myowr yowled. “With the -Ritt name on you? How dare you?”

“I meant it.”

“Meant—?”

“Do you think I was born with no pride, to take and defend a name like mine? I found I could fly the Outsider hyperdrive! I knew that I must be a -Ritt. Then fortune favored me again. A telepath lost on Shasht, healthy and arrogant, the genetic line that will give us the Longest War!

“Even after questioning, crippled, Nazi Killer tore up one of my unwary Heroes so that we had to leave him. He knew things about me . . . but Nazi Killer was no threat. Frustrating that we had to kill him, but he’d told us how to retrieve another. It was Fly-by-Night and his slaves who stripped me of everything I am! He killed my Heroes. He became Envoy! Reduced my ship to a falling prison.”

Rasht-Myowr demanded, “Technical Officer, is your Alpha Officer mad?”

Tech spoke simply; his dignity was still with him. “I followed the telepath’s commands exactly. What he had done to us, to him I followed, how could I face him? With what weapons? But Fly-by-Night was not alone. Kzin and ’man and Jotok, they took our ears.”

I hoped then that there were unseen defenses, that nobody would have set fragile humans undefended among these Kzinti. Rasht-Myowr turned on me a gaping grin that would not let him speak. His alien stench was not that of any creature of Earth, but I knew it was his rage.

“You can’t take them back to the Patriarchy,” I said to Rasht-Myowr. Because they had kept faith.

Quickpony and the Van Zild children were with me when Outbound Enterprises thawed two modules of passengers taken from Odysseus. The way they were wrapped, I couldn’t tell who was who until Jeena was wheeled out of the cooker. We clung to each other and waited. If Jeena was alive, so was her mother.

We waited, ice in our veins, and she came.

INTRODUCTION TO “THE HUNTING PARK”

I got all my data for this story from Death in the Silent Places and other such books by a practicing white hunter, Peter Hathaway Capstick.

Analog’s editor, Stanley Schmidt, didn’t believe my data.

“THE HUNTING PARK”

October 20, 2899 CE

“Why do they call you ‘white hunter’?”

I smiled but didn’t grin. “It’s anyone from somewhere else who conducts hunting for sport in Africa. I was born in Confinement Asteroid and raised in Ceres and Tahiti.” He was wondering about my skin, of course. The parts he could see, hands and face, are jet black, from moderately black American ancestry subjected to three decades of raw sunlight in space and in the islands.

“Odd,” said the Kzin, but he waved a big furry hand, claws sheathed, dismissing the subject. Waldo had ordered hot milk with black rum; he slurped noisily. I’d ordered the same. He asked, “Why is it taking so long to arrange a safari?”

“First rule is, everything takes forever when you’re gearing up. When you’re out in the field, everything interesting happens before you can blink. That’s when you find out what you forgot to take.”

We studied each other. Waldo was big for a Kzin, maybe five hundred pounds, maybe eight-feet-four or -five inches tall. No chairs here could hold him; he squatted in a cleared space in a corner of the restaurant. His fur was marmalade, with a darker stripe diagonally down his chest and abdomen that followed four long runnels of scar tissue, and a shorter scar, also darkly outlined, that just missed his left eye and ear. A thong around his neck held a few leathery scraps: dried ears, I presumed. He kept his claws sheathed as carefully as I kept my lips closed. You don’t show your teeth to a Kzin.

I hadn’t volunteered for this. What sane person would? It was October of 2899 CE; I’d hoped to celebrate my fiftieth birthday next year, when the century turned. I planned to quit the safari business and write.

Then again, who could turn this down? They were paying twice the going rate in Interworld stars, but that was nothing compared to the publicity value. I was wearing some recording gear. We’d have the whole safari on tape, right up to my death, if it broke that way, and my daughters would hold the rights. If I lived, I’d have a tale worth writing.

Waldo was examining Legal Entity Bruce Bianci Bannett, a tall, long-headed, black human male forty-nine years old, with yellow tattoos around the eyes and ears that make me look just a bit like a leopard. I guessed what else he was looking for, and I said, “I don’t have any really gaudy scars except for the tattoos. It’s because I’m careful.”

“I should be glad of that. LE Bannett, our permissions still haven’t come through, and I see no kind of a caravan forming.”

“We’ll have our permissions.” This trip I wouldn’t even need bribes; the United Nations had spoken. “I’m having trouble getting bearers.”

“Offer more money?”

“Money isn’t as powerful an argument here in Nairobi. I think they’ve lived too long with governments that can just snatch it away. They’re all a combination of socialist and bandit. A good story, that’s a lure, but a man only needs one fortune and one good story.

“But traveling with . . . there are four of you? With four Kzinti, that’s bad enough. You’re not using guns?”

“No, not on a hunt. On a hunt we use only the w’tsai. You, though, you’ll take a gun?”

“Several.”

“Do not shoot another hunter’s prey,” Waldo told me.

“My point was, bearers would usually count on all of us, me or any of my clients, to shoot a, say, a leopard before he gets to the bearers. But there’s only one of me, and you—you can’t throw a w’tsai, can you?”

Again Waldo waved sheathed claws: a shrug.

“So it’s not even a spear. I’ve hunted with natives who use spears. They have a point. A spear doesn’t jam. So my bearers would risk you not being fast enough to save them, plus anything you might do in a rage because you missed your prey.”

“But we have these,” Waldo said, and I saw his claws, three or four inches long, exposed only for a moment. “Not just the w’tsai.”

“What do you want out of this, Waldo?”

“Wave Rider and Long Tracks and I, we are brothers,” Waldo said, “part of Starsieve’s crew. Starsieve seeks treasures of the cosmos using ship’s instruments. I operate the waldos, of course, the little hand-and-jaw-guided robots. It can be very dull work. We seek an adventure out of the ordinary here on Earth. Kashtiyee-First has been our teacher and First Officer under Prisst-Captain. Both would gain honor if we three gained partial names.”

Names are important to Kzinti. Most bear only the names of their professions. “Would this—”

“It would help. A hero’s hunt is the story that defines him.”

“What do you want to kill?”

“What have you got?” he asked.

“Not much. The Greater Africa government is solid Green. They tell me what they can spare. Some species are grown beyond the limits of the Refuge.” I fished my sectry out of my pocket and tapped at it, summoning the current list, just in case it had changed in the past two hours. Sure enough—“Cape buffalo is off the list. If a Cape buffalo charges you, you hope you can duck. Elephants are out, of course. We can have a lion . . . or all the leopards we want. Crocs don’t offer much of a trophy, but again—”

“Why are the, rrr, Greens so free with leopards?”

“We used to think leopards were scarce, even endangered. They’re not. They’re just shy, and really well camouflaged, and they’re everywhere. If a lion turns to human prey, he’s generally got a reason. Maybe he’s hurt his mouth and can’t hunt anything difficult. But a leopard, he kills for fun. Antelope, zebra, man, woman, whatever turns up,” I babbled, and suddenly realized—“Of course none of that might apply to Kzinti.”

“What are the rules for Kzinti?”

“Nobody’s got the vaguest idea. We might not catch anything. Your scent might drive them all away.” Waldo didn’t smell unpleasant; just really different. “Or bring everything in from miles around. Kzinti have never hunted on Earth.”

“More’s the pity,” Waldo said lightly.

October 31, 2899 CE

Waldo is the one who speaks Interworld. The other three have translators, and I carry one built into my sectry. In Africa everyone speaks a different language, but with Kzinti involved—I’d better buy a spare.

Wave Rider and Long Tracks bear wildly different markings from Waldo, though they’re near as tall and about as massive. Wave Rider’s a darker marmelade with no noticeable scars; he keeps his sectry open a lot, reading whenever things turn slack. It’s Singapore-built, with oversized keys. Long Tracks is sheer yellow, barring minor scarring close to the eyes and a missing ear. He wears a thong with one ear on it. Kashtiyee-First is smaller and older, brown and orange marked with a lot of white. No thong.

We’ve packed everything on floaters. Floaters go almost anywhere, but there are places where we’ll have to carry everything. These Kzinti will be carrying their share and the bearers’ too, because we’ve got no bearers.

I don’t worry about their stamina. Most of the Kzinti-occupied worlds have Earth gravity or higher, and my clients look tough. They can port their own weight, but will they? Will they follow orders? I always worry about that. There’s no sane limit to what a man is likely to do with a charged gun.

But they aren’t men. Should I worry about those blades? In a Kzin hand a w’tsai looks like a long knife crudely forged. In mine, it’s an overbuilt sword. If they started swinging wildly—well, we’ll see.

They’ve brought more medical gear than I’d expected, given their macho background. It looks like equipment from a ship’s infirmary. From Starsieve, of course. Where on Earth would they get Kzinti medicines and stretchers? Kzinti forces never managed to invade Earth, not in any of the four interstellar wars (plus “incidents”) that ended more than two hundred years ago.

They carry antiallergens and diet supplements. Earthly life doesn’t quite fit their evolution.

Guns and ammunition: well, those are all mine. I can’t carry everything I might need. One of the Kzinti might have to be my bearer, but first I’d better test them out a little. It can turn sticky when the bearer runs up a tree with your gun.

Food: I’ve packed oranges and root vegetables and dry stuff. We’ll make do with less cookware than usual, some canned goods, sugar, flour, condiments and so forth. That’s all for me. Clients eat mostly meat, and we shoot that on the trail. Kzinti eat nothing but raw meat. I’ll be doing all the cooking.

And of course I’m carrying nine kilos of sensory equipment spotted over my head and body: cameras, sound, somasthetic, scent.

Cape buffalo are back on the permitted list. I’ll get them one before the Greens pull them off again.

November 3, 2899 CE

Three days into the brush. We camped by a river. It’s low and yellow, and we’re filtering the water. The Kzinti drink a lot of it. I’m not carrying booze. It’s hard on me, but I don’t want them drinking.

Wave Rider wants to know why it’s taking so long to get anywhere interesting. I waved around and told him to pick out a transfer booth for me. Long Tracks laughed at him, teeth showing. I’ve never seen a Kzin’s killing gape. I hope I can recognize the difference in time.

In fairness to Wave Rider, there are a few transfer booths out here, and we white hunters tanj well know where each of them is. They’re big enough to pass a mini ambulance. We use them for medical emergencies, including veterinary work. I usually don’t tell clients about them.

Waldo’s been attacked by a lion.

He was sleeping outdoors. We set up a palisade, of course. I pitched my tent not too close so that I can cook without their complaining. Smoke my pipe, too.

I was updating my log when I heard the yowling. I got out there, armed, and barely glimpsed the lion smashing out through the branches of the palisade. I fired and got no joy of it.

Wave Rider’s right front claws are bloody, but so’s his ear, torn half off. He swung at the lion and scored, and the lion swung back, then kept going. But Waldo looks worse. The lion was stalking him. It found him asleep and attacked in a lion’s favorite fashion: it tried to bite through the Kzin’s skull. Do that to a man, the prey barely twitches and the lion can just haul him away.

Waldo is big and the lion may be smaller than usual, though he sure didn’t look it in mid-leap in the moonlit dark. The beast’s fangs didn’t get through Waldo’s skull. They tore off half his scalp. Waldo came awake with a screech, and I expect Leo had never heard anything like that.

I used antiseptic on both injured. They put up with it, but Waldo assures me that Earthly bacteria have little interest in Kzinti. Waldo’s half-scalping is the subject of much merriment.

November 5, 2899 CE

We’re looking at a herd of Cape buffalo, maybe a hundred. The buff have made a nice comeback. “Once upon a time they were near extinction,” I say.

Kashtiyee-First asks, “These are herbivores?”

“Yeah, grass eaters, but they’re not rabbits and they’re not puppeteers—”

“LE Bannett, we’re familiar with oversized herd beasts who charge in numbers.”

“How do you handle them, LE Kash?”

“Run. Hide. Climb rocks or trees. How shall we approach these? We want only one head.”

“Right. Now that you’ve got the scent we could maybe track down a rogue. Or—How about that old bull grazing off to the right? We get his attention—”

“Yes, approach using that channel as cover. Was that once a stream?”

“Yeah. Will be again.”

Kashtiyee-First speaks to the others. They move off on all fours and low to the ground. I’ll stay where I am, on high ground. If a gun’s needed, I’ll need to see why. And never shoot a Kzin’s prey. And while I’m holding my sectry to make this recording, I’ll just check the lists.

Tanj dammit.

Stet. First I tap the open code. Answer, futz you! I can barely make out motion, but they’ve nearly reached the old buff. Their sectries must be buzzing—

Now there’s motion. It looks like the Kzinti are fighting each other.

And it’s night, and Kashtiyee-First may be dying, and it’s been one strange day.

I ran toward the Kzinfight, but I zoomed my specs too. I was clear on this: I sure didn’t want to get between two Kzinti in a fight. If I saw the wrong thing I might want to run the other way. I’d already marked the best trees.

Too many Kzinti? That wasn’t a Kzin! It was a she lion, and another, and a black-maned male, all dancing with the Kzinti. The lions were bigger. That dry riverbed had been good cover for lions too. Now Waldo and the male were in a wrestling match, rolling over in the dust. Claws and w’tsais swung. The male lion wrenched loose and turned tail, and the old buff charged straight into the fray.

Waldo dashed after the lion.

Kashtiyee-First saw the buffalo just in time to face its charge. He swing his w’tsai overhead and split the bull’s forehead just between the horns. The bull kept coming. I saw the Kzin officer bowled over, lost to view.

The lions were in full flight. The buffalos gathered their strength, seven or eight bulls in front of the pattern, then cows, youngsters in the center.

Long Tracks answered my call. “We’re busy.”

“Don’t kill any more buffalo. They’re off the list.”

“Repeat. The rest have to hear.” He turned his volume up.

I stopped near a mopane tree, nearly winded. “Buffalo are protected again. Kashtiyee-First, you killed in self-defense, but it ends there—”

All seven adult bulls charged.

At least the lions were gone. The Kzinti began dodging, weaving, leaping. Wave Rider was on a bull’s back, then off again. I’d got up the mopane tree somehow, and I watched, gun ready, license forfeit if I fired. The Kzinti didn’t seem to be in trouble. It was a dance, it was a wrestling match—what was Kashtiyee-First doing? Running backward, easing out of the fray, headed toward my tree. The others saw and imitated him, leading the angry males farther and farther, until in ones and twos they gave up and rejoined the herd.

Then Kashtiyee-First collapsed.

I want to call for an ambulance. The Kzinti won’t have it, not even Kashtiyee-First. The old bull gored him deep on that first charge. The horn left an oozing hole in mid-torso, between Kash-First’s crisscrossing ribs, below the lung. The other Kzinti are tending him. Antibiotics into the wound, a little microsurgery around major blood vessels.

Kashtiyee-First says, “You must know better than to interrupt a hunt or battle with a cell phone call.” The others weren’t even speaking to me on that point.

“The United Nations wants this hunt to go right,” I tell them. “I think they put pressure on the locals to get you a buffalo. But the locals don’t like pressure, so they pushed back. I’m in the middle. Anyway, we’ll keep the heads.” The male lion too. Waldo killed it: tore its intestines out with his feet. He gets the head. Long Tracks got a nice gouge from one of the buffs. So far so good, unless Kashtiyee-First dies.

November 6, 2899 CE

Kzinti are impulsive.

Laughing at them would be bad.

Long Tracks jumped a porcupine. Just quick dumb reflexes, I guess. One of my cameras caught it. We’ve spent half the afternoon pulling spines out of his face and one hand. Come dinnertime, I’ll go off by myself to cook. Laugh then. Otherwise I’m gonna die.

November 8, 2899 CE

We’ve been eating well. Under the Greens the veldt is in wonderful shape, much as it must have been a thousand years ago, in Rudyard Kipling’s time. Besides lion and buffalo we’ve found and killed impala, capybara, some small stuff, and two hyena (which I did not eat). And leopard.

Leopards are usually unexpected. I hadn’t seen any spoor. I’ve been armed at all times because the gun I carry is the only gun in the whole party.

We were watching a wonderful sunset, all of us. I must have heard something. I turned around and a leopard had launched itself at my throat.

I lifted the gun and I’d probably have got it up in time, but Wave Rider leaned way out and caught the leopard by the skin over his shoulders and swung him in an arc. I didn’t fire because I would hit Wave Rider, and then because Wave Rider was winning. Then I saw the second leopard, so I shot that one, two for luck. What the hell, none of the Kzinti had claimed him.

Wave Rider was juggling a yellow whirlwind; when he couldn’t stop it clawing him, he just fell on it and then bit its face off.

The twenty-gram bullets were those I’d picked for buffalo: big. My trophy is pretty badly messed up. So’s Wave Rider’s. We’re keeping the ears.

I didn’t eat leopard; I shared it out. I didn’t taste Waldo’s lion either.

Wave Rider has some nasty scars. Waldo seems to like his well enough. The Kzinti keep passing the mirror around, and Long Tracks is grumpy because he hasn’t been touched, barring tiny puncture wounds like bad acne. I wish I hadn’t brought the mirror.

Kashtiyee-First shares a float plate with several heads. He can stand up but he can’t walk. He doesn’t complain. The wound hasn’t putrified, and he can use the great outdoor catbox without it killing him. The wound looks clean.

The other float plate still has room for my gear and food.

They’re talking about taking an elephant.

November 9, 2899 CE

I showed them elephants. I didn’t have much choice: they scented the spoor themselves, so we tracked a herd of sixty. Now they’ve got the scent.

The Kzinti killed a hippopotamus today. Fighting in water is not their thing, and there were crocs about, but the hippo was up against Kzinti mass.

They’re jubilant now. The hippo fed us all. I like hippo. As usual I ate apart so they needn’t smell roasted meat.

I joined them afterward. I tried to explain that elephants were never on the Green list. It isn’t that they’re endangered, not anymore. But their brains are as big as human brains, or bigger. They haven’t developed lawyers, like the cetaceans, but they’ve got some tool-using ability. They may well be intelligent.

That doesn’t impress Waldo. Futz, his forebears used to hunt Humans. “UN law does not list killing of elephants as murder.”

“It’s the African Protectorate that can throw us out. It would end the safari. Have you hunted enough already?”

I wish I hadn’t said that. What if they decide yes?

November 11, 2899 CE

Morning, not yet dawn. They’re gone, all but Kashtiyee-First. I’m surprised.

I’m surprised that they got away without waking me. They must have gone around midnight, in silence. I already know how well they see in the dark. I can picture them crawling off, bellies brushing the earth . . .

Kashtiyee-First won’t tell me anything. So I tell him. “Thing is, if my clients kill an elephant, they might be exiled but not jailed. You have diplomat status. Nobody would really blame the white hunter for what these clients might do. I might even keep my license.”

“That is good. No Kzin would blame us either. The lure is too great.”

“So all you’d lose is the next week or so of hunting. Still, I’ve got to track them. They’re my clients, and they don’t know elephants.”

“Are these tree eaters dangerous?”

“Beyond description. They’ve got mass.”

“You’re bluffing, LE Bannett. Elephants have never been on your permitted list. You never hunted them. You only know what you read. History books. Wave Rider has a sectry too.” And he laughed, though it hurt him.

I scouted around before I left.

The three took only their w’tsais and water bottles: at least I taught them that. I wonder if they expected to sneak back? Before I wake? On any normal safari I’d be up at 4 A.M. to prepare for the day’s hunt. These days I’ve been dogging it a little: Kzinti don’t need breakfast and don’t need the day’s gear set out and explained to them.

I found something disturbing. A lone lion lay up in the brush near us. It must have had a good view of the camp. For a couple of hours last night I was asleep and alone but for the injured Kashtiyee-First. Where is it now?

I offered Kash-First a rifle. His finger won’t fit into the trigger guard, but his claw will.

I’ve gotten here ahead of the hunt. It’s a little past dawn.

They haven’t attacked the herd. They’re not that crazy, I hope. They have the scent; they tracked the herd. They found the same traces I found later without the help of a Kzinti nose. A rogue, an injured bull, has been living on the fringes of the herd.

I’m recording him now. Somehow he’s torn off a tusk right at the root. In my mag specs, his face looks infected. The pain’s turned him rogue. He looks alert and nasty, and he’s scented something weird, but he might not understand the danger. Kzinti scent is nowhere in his species’ memory. It’s just different, and different is dangerous. So he’s backing away, sniffing the air.

Now he’s heard them in the brush. They’re trying to circle downwind, moving fast enough to make mistakes, and now he’s running, and here they come. He’s faster than they thought—just lumbering along, but so big. They’re sprinters, the Kzinti. Maybe he’ll tire them.

I don’t have a hope of catching him or them. I’ve jogged up a hill and I’m using my mag specs.

They’re on him—two of them. Waldo didn’t get there: he ran out of breath. The two are slashing, slashing. Jumbo is bleeding. Showers of blood, tens of gallons, brilliant red in the sunlight. Long Tracks and Wave Rider are dancing into the blood. Even lions don’t play like that. I’m thinking of erasing this tape.

Then Jumbo’s trunk catches Wave Rider and sends him spinning. Long Tracks jumps at Jumbo’s neck. Jumbo’s head whips around. The one tusk catches Long Tracks and flips him over. Jumbo charges Wave Rider. I can’t see much through the grass, but it looks like Jumbo is stamping on Wave Rider. Then Long Tracks chops at his feet with the w’tsai, and Jumbo goes after Long Tracks.

Long Tracks is running. Jumbo is spraying blood. Waldo gets there and joins the attack. One swing of Waldo’s w’tsai and the trunk flies loose, another and Jumbo goes down. Tries to get up and fails.

I’ve had my rifle sighted on Jumbo for all this time, and I haven’t fired. One day I’ll wonder if it’s because Kzinti are mankind’s old enemy. I think not. They’re clients—but they’re clients who positively don’t want their guide attacking their own personal prey. And I’d better get down there and look at Wave Rider.

Wave Rider’s heart is still beating. The elephant stamped him into fudge, breaking ribs and limbs and internal organs. I’m not a doctor, but I know enough: Wave Rider won’t live if he doesn’t get to a hospital.

“The nearest transfer booth is forty kilometers away, if it’s working. You never know with the Greens. I can summon a mini ambulance,” I tell Waldo.

Waldo and Long Tracks are arguing about Jumbo’s ears. Long Tracks just growls at me. Waldo says, “We will not cry for help.”

“Stet, but we can take him in ourselves. We can get to the nearest transfer booth by forced march. We’ll make a stretcher out of Jumbo’s hide. You do the carrying. Kash-First can meet us. Take us the rest of the day.”

Waldo and Long Tracks agree. Nonetheless they’re in no hurry. Waldo gives up his claim: he attacked late. One big blanket of elephant ear goes to Long Tracks; from his thong it drapes like a cloak. One goes to Wave Rider, for his funeral if it breaks that way. They eat several pounds of elephant meat and pack a lot more. It’s clear we won’t reach the transfer booth today. I phone Kash-First and tell him what’s going on. He agrees to meet us with the floaters.

The stretch of hide holds Wave Rider. He hasn’t wakened, and that’s both good and bad. He isn’t screaming, but his snoring sounds tortured.

Kash-First zeroes in on our path. He’s walking, not riding a float plate. The Kzinti use their medical techniques on Wave Rider. We get Wave Rider onto a float plate, giving up some of my supplies. This will embarrass the poor Kzin if he lives.

Rain starts near noon. We’re wading through tall grass and mud, our strongest fighters burdened with a stretcher. If anything attacks us, I’m going to shoot it, and to hell with what my clients think.

Dark catches us twelve kilometers short of the transfer booth. I’m using my sectry’s mapping system. They’re prepared to keep moving at night. Idiots. I set Waldo and Long Tracks to making a fence, over a lot of grumbling; they’ve worked hard today.

I claim a slab of elephant liver and another of muscle meat. I’m famished. I flash-cook them with the microwave. The Kzinti don’t complain, though we’re camped together, between the float plates. They don’t want to be alone, and I don’t either.

November 12, 2899 CE

It’s the same lion. I barely saw it, but I know. It came out of the dark in one long leap, arced over one of the float plates and had Waldo. He shrieked. The lion dragged him into the grass and would have been gone if I hadn’t swung a light on him. I’m trying to hold the light with one hand and pick up a gun with the other, but Long Tracks is after him and blocking my shot. I jump on the float plate for a better view into the grass.

The lion turns to fight. Long Tracks swings one good swipe and then the lion is on him. They’re wrestling; Long Tracks may have dropped his w’tsai. I can’t see Waldo.

The lion wrenches loose and I have a clear shot. I fire at a point just behind his shoulder.

The lion goes down.

“Nothing in my sectry lists the lion as a cursorial hunter,” says Kash-First.

It’s dawn, and we’re moving. Waldo’s dead. Wave Rider is still breathing. He’s swollen and discolored over most of his body, and his ribs bend inward where they should not. Kash-First is lucid and walking. His voice has a breathy, painful hiccup in it that doesn’t get through the translator.

I’m not in the mood for a fight. I tell Kash-First, “Every hunter knows of a lion that stalked someone for days at a time and killed him at the last.

“Even I can’t tell you that this one had a different smell. But do you know that this is the same lion that tore up Waldo’s scalp?”

And stalked him ever since, until last night’s kill. “Who else? Any other lion would take Wave Rider. Wave Rider couldn’t defend himself. Lions are lazy. Waldo could fight back.”

“He didn’t have the chance.”

“No.” This time the lion bit into his skull and dragged him forty meters before Long Tracks caught him. My bullet tracked through one lung and his heart: a good shot.

Of course the trophy head won’t be worth any more than the rest of our heads, which are all going to be ruined because the Kzinti want the ears. We’ve got the holograms, though.

Long Tracks offered me one of the lion’s ears. He claims the other himself. He won’t talk to me.

And it’s over.

We reached the transfer booth in four hours. We were at the Nairobi Spaceport just that fast, with access to Starsieve’s lander’s surgery ten minutes later. I pretended to help get Wave Rider into the cavity, but truly, he’s too heavy for me.

“Take the ear,” Kash-First said through his translator. “Long Track won’t forgive you if you don’t. You used your own familiar weapon in a personal hunt. He’ll see that soon or late.”

“How are you?” I asked.

“I can use some medical attention.” But he has to wait. He’s plugged into the peripherals, but he’ll need the intensive care cavity when it’s through with Wave Rider.

I said, “It was not my intention to lead you into such a disaster as this.”

He shrugged, and winced. He sits bent over around the puncture wound. “A fusion bomb can kill any number of elephants. We use the w’tsai. Killing is not the point. Kzin against the elements, that is the point.”

Truly, I agree. But maybe I’ve missed the point myself. There was an accident—

An hour after we set out this morning, we were trekking into a gully. Kashtiyee-First was on the float plate that held Waldo’s corpse, guiding the other that carried Wave Rider, and they just floated over the depression. Long Tracks got disgusted with my slowness and sprinted up the other side to meet his companions. I wondered if I was hurting them by slowing them.

They waited in a copse of trees. They were talking as I approached. They hadn’t noticed me. My translator began picking up their speech.

Long Tracks: “It would be as easy for LE Bannett to die as for Waldo, or you. This insanely dangerous land could take him at the last. A lion?”

Kash-First: “Your teeth don’t leave the same marks as a lion’s.”

I stopped thinking about revealing myself. I used my mag specs to watch Long Tracks pick up the lion’s head. He clacked the jaws a couple of times. “Bite him with this.”

Kash-First said, “LE Bannett has kept every promise expressed or implied.”

Long Tracks was silent.

Kash-First said, “Recall why we came. We can hunt anywhere. Have we learned more of the Human state? Can we give Prisst-Captain any hint of what our ancestors faced, to be so battered and humiliated in war after war?”

“Fool’s errand. We have had only one Human to study. He is far from typical. He kills as easily as we do, and revels in it.”

“Yes, the Human is not interesting. But the rest? What of Africa? Do we finally know the horrors this species faced in the ages before it expanded across its world?”

“Ur?”

“And then came back to hunt.”

“AFTER MECCA”

Two days after the destruction of Mecca, I found myself in a bomb shelter with President Heraclitus Hamlin. I took the opportunity to interview him.

“Mr. President, that event must have been something of a shock.”

“Oh, I was startled, sure, the Secretary shook me awake in the middle of the night, but . . . shocked? I never thought Mecca would survive to the twenty-first century. The Muslim states are just too good at pissing people off. There are just too many nukes floating around since the Soviet Union collapsed. If it hadn’t been the PLO and the Olympic athletes, or Khadaffi and those children, or the World Trade Center . . . it would have been something. Somebody was just bound to stomp the Muslim Holy City.”

“You saw this coming?”

“I thought Jerusalem would be next.”

“It wasn’t Jerusalem, it was us. Everybody launched at the United States, not just Muslim states but African, ex-Soviet . . . Why us?”

“We’re good at pissing people off. The Muslims’ Great Satan. Obnoxious rich know-it-all if you’re Third World. Or anyone who lost a child to malaria. A million children a year die of malaria, most of them in the Third World, and it’s all because of our ban on DDT. Are you shocked?”

But I wasn’t the one being interviewed. I plodded on. “Does the CIA know who launched?”

“We might never know exactly which factions launched. We don’t even know the names of all the suspects.”

“Only two missiles reached their targets out of a known nineteen—”

“Twenty-six as of half an hour ago. Still only two hits. The rest were taken down by Space Defense Initiative antiweapons.”

“Do you take the credit for that, Mr. President?”

“Not as president,” the president said. “But I headed the Overview Committee for SDI for four years. My predecessor was head for nine. Before him, General Daniel Graham gave SDI the last part of his life. SDI drove the Soviet Union bankrupt. Give them the credit.”

“Star Wars—”

“Space Defense Initiative,” he said firmly.

“Most of it didn’t get built.”

“We built more than you might think. It wasn’t just impact weapons, remember. We considered firing a mirror into orbit, then bouncing a ground-based laser off the mirror to blast missiles. Didn’t work. The laser always blasted through any mirror we could build. So we went with smart rocks.”

“Wasn’t SDI still mostly vaporware?”

“Yes, but the Soviets still couldn’t afford to compete. They couldn’t afford tomorrow’s lunch, there at the end, and Reagan was offering to give them plans for the devices. ‘Go to it, fellahs. Just follow the instructions. We’ll sell you the components at reasonable prices.’ Reagan must have had a soundproof room just to laugh in.

“Some good, bright men and women swore we couldn’t stop even most of the storm of missiles the Soviet Union could launch. At best you might stop ten or twenty ICBMs launched by terrorists. Can you tell me why it’s not worthwhile to stop the one missile that’s aimed at Beverly Hills, if that’s where you’re living?”

“I was too young for that argument.”

“Uh huh. But since 1991, what we’ve got is the prospect of three or five or twenty missiles launched by terrorists. When it came true, we were ready. Partly ready,” the president said.

“Yes. Two missiles reached their targets, one on the ground and one in space.”

“You know, my predecessor always had to deal with a shortfall of funds. When you can’t afford everything you want, you buy what you think you need most. My predecessor had to plan for the future when he was deciding what most needed defending.”

“He didn’t defend the International Space Station. How does that help the future?”

“Space Station Freedom has always been a great gaping hole in the economy, eating money better spent on almost any other aspect of the conquest of the planets. Politically speaking, there never was a way to shut it down.”

“And Washington, DC?”

“A disaster,” he said instantly.

I waited.

“My predecessor died four years ago. We can’t ask him. He did lose a son to malaria in the Wet War. Or . . . maybe he just gave us a chance to start over. All that insane collection of laws, now we can choose the sane ones and burn the rest. Murder is a crime. Hauling away rotting tires from your own property isn’t a crime, even if some asshole calls it a wetlands. I’ve rescinded the DDT ban.”

“The previous head—”

“He went to college at Washburn University. Topeka’s defended. Maybe every time there were a few more bucks for another point defense, he found something he liked better than protecting Washington, DC. Have you been in the nation’s capital? Everyone who tries to live on the Beltway goes crazy—” He stopped himself, started over. “Or the IRS has hurt a lot of people, or the BATF. Or he might have thought, anyone might think that if the bastards could burn children in Waco and break up Bill Gates, nobody in between those two extremes will ever be safe. They dealt in fear in Washington, DC.

“Or what about education? Over this past century, starting when the school system was nationalized, we’ve lost our ability to teach. We can sort children by color, we can invent languages out of whole cloth, but we can’t teach them to read. Now the states can reshape their schools. Some will go back to teaching. Not all. California—”

“What will you do now?”

“I have taken steps to summon a Continental Congress. We will vote how to rebuild the United States of America.”

“The thing is, you had almost four years to change your predecessor’s priorities, Mr. President.”

He looked at me for a long time. “After all, it was Congress that kept chopping the funds for SDI.”

“CADET AMELIA”

Even in the old days you could fly an airplane in a parabolic arc, being careful with your acceleration, and that was the only way to get free fall. Several pilots tried it. Then a Navy pilot tried it with a cat.

He and the cameras never saw the cat floating. As soon as weight dropped away, cameras showed the cat levitating straight to the pilot. He sank his claws into the pilot, too close to his face, and never let go despite anything the frantically flailing man could do, until gravity came back.

Twenty-two thousand, three hundred miles above the Earth, something was eating the stores aboard Skyhostel.

Skyhostel had been built for tourists: a cheaper version of Skylab built from Shuttle main tanks. Of six people aboard, three were tourist-reporters, their way paid by networks below. The tourists themselves were covered with cameras and microphones and other sensors. It was an ongoing show broadcast all over the Earth. Virtual tourism was active and profitable.

Disappearing food was a serious matter; vermin to frighten visitors was worse yet.

There were ragged round holes in the plastic bags. Not much of the irradiated freeze-dried prepared food was missing, but Ivan Cosgorski (crew) held the bags in his hands and thought of alien invaders from outside the solar system.

“Mice,” Holly Miller (NBC) said.

“How did they get aboard? Where are they hiding? Where are they getting their water?” First Officer Wendy Schmitz demanded. Ivan’s face grew more haunted. Alien intelligences might cloud human minds, or make themselves invisible.

“It’s mice,” Holly said. “Mice can hide anywhere. We need to requisition a cat.”

They called her Amelia, expecting her to fly.

She rode to orbit in a small cage. Acceleration was a shock. Free fall was a nightmare. She howled her complaint during the entire flight, and kept it up long after they showed her to her quarters. They gave her a big locker for her personal space, and lined it with foamfab, like the walls. She found that her claws could cling to the fabric.

They gave her a collar studded with pinhead-sized cameras.

She didn’t understand water at first. It came in a double-shelled squeezebottle, a baby bottle, and you had to suck at a nipple to get at it. Spill it and it made little wiggly balls. Once she had water figured out, they tried food. They served it in a bowl with a narrow neck a little bigger than her head. She had to do a lot of grooming afterward, but she was able to eat. Chubby when she arrived, she’d lost some mass.

She remembered humans from before. Seeing them bounce around the walls, floating like balloons, frightened her at first. She let Holly pet her because she was afraid to shift her grip on a wall. When she gained confidence, she bit at anyone’s hand except Holly’s. Eventually she became reconciled to several of the others.

There was nothing like cat litter aboard Skyhostel. She learned to use another locker for cat scat. Her humans took turns vacuuming it up.

One day Ivan introduced her to mice.

He was holding a bag of freeze-dried beef Stroganoff with the hole covered. When he released it, three mice came boiling out. They jumped around her, across the kitchen space, then scampered along the foamfab walls. Amelia followed them, careful not to lose her grip on the walls. She wasn’t fast enough.

The mice had been aboard for over a year before they were discovered. The Aviation and Astrogation Authority had dawdled, and another year had passed. The mice had become very good at what they did. If their breeding had kept up with their other skills, the space station would have been lost already.

Crew and tourists laughed to watch her trying to catch mice. Amelia found that humiliating. On Earth she’d been a mighty hunter. The mice began to play with her. Their genes remembered Amelia’s kind, but they were not impressed with Amelia.

Then Amelia learned to jump.

She could cross empty space, and there was always a wall to catch her. It became a far more impressive sight: Amelia and half a dozen mice arcing about the kitchen, racing along the walls, then crossing again. The networks loved it. Wendy moved the foamfab patches of Amelia’s locker into the kitchen. Amelia lived there now.

She took her first mouse to Holly. A tiny corpse with a long, long tail, it was properly a field mouse. It wasn’t torn; it looked to have died of heart failure. Amelia set it adrift, spun it by batting it with a paw . . .

“The way she looked at me, I knew exactly what she wanted,” Holly told the cameras. “It stopped working. She wanted me to fix it.”

At the point where Amelia was catching mice, the film had to be edited. Untouched footage went to a specialized audience. Possibilities dawned on someone down below, and another cat arrived, a young coal-black tom.

Cameras watched as Lindberg learned the ropes. Amelia helped teach him. He learned water, food, the litter cube. Lindberg never caught a mouse; he learned to run on foamfab, but Amelia was faster. After six weeks of harrowing worldwide suspense, they learned to mate, Amelia clinging to the wall, Lindberg clinging to Amelia.

The mice became fewer. A stalemate was reached, an ecological balance. Raids on the food diminished, but never stopped. Amelia grew swollen and gave birth to seven kittens.

The spin module was lofted four years later. Adding gravity to Skyhostel had implications. Crew could exercise more easily, and thus could stay for longer terms, saving considerable money. Tourists recovered sooner from their stay. But mostly, it meant that Skyhostel was a financial success. It was profits that bought the spin module.

The cats refused to enter gravity.

Cats were imported to the Big Wheel shortly after human crew. Amelia’s line then spanned six cat generations.

The crew ran a strip of cloth the full length of the main spoke, opposite the ladder. Cameras watched as the kittens learned how to move from hub to partial spin to full spin along the hanging curtain. The older cats were slower, but they got there too.

Today the cats of the Big Wheel are at home in all gravities, and ready to take the planets.

“CAT TOY”

Carat had been here when Olaf Berensen arrived. A fluffy tom in two shades of gold, he must have arrived as a ship’s cat and jumped ship. Garfield Wayne, the meteorologist, said he had found him shivering in the air lock one summer day. Carat had been here ever since.

“What I want to know,” Olaf sometimes told the cat, “is, what are you going to do about that mouse?”

There was clearly a mouse, and a clever one. It gnawed packages of freeze-dried food. Sometimes it raided leftovers in the kitchen. Nobody had ever seen it until now. How a mouse had gotten to Antartica, and why—well, that was a mystery.

The summer day had run on for several weeks. Olaf was dressed for moderately lethal weather and just back from using the telescope. Caught by the wild white scenery, he left the outer door open an instant too long. Something tiny dashed between his feet. He saw a dark dot running across the brilliant ice.

“Hah!” he said. Problem solved. He closed the outer door and opened the inner.

Carat dashed between his feet.

“Hey!” Olaf glared at the cat. “Good beast, chasing mice is good, but you’ll freeze out there if a penguin doesn’t eat you.”

“Open it,” the cat said.

Olaf licked his lips. What had just happened?

The cat walked around his feet, tail thrashing. It said, “He’s found something, something magic. Maybe a meteor. Maybe a murdered man. There’s so little magic left in the world. I want a piece of it before he takes all the manna. Open the door.”

“You’re talking.”

The cat stared at him. All cats have magical eyes. “Am I really? People go crazy here. It isn’t just the isolation. It’s the strangeness. Maybe cats talk all the time in this crazy place. If you told the others, they’d lock you up until a ship can take you away. Let me out.”

Olaf shook his head. “Gar would string me up if I lose his cat. A talking cat must be worth its weight in gold. Tell me why I should let you go.”

“It’s not the first time someone has tried to hold me prisoner. Yet here I am. I’m a powerful wizard, Doctor. Open the door.”

Olaf laughed. “Wizard! Show me magic, cat. Or tell me a damn good story why you can’t.”

The cat thought it over, then began to speak.

In the gray light before dawn, Mara’s scream woke him. Hassil sat bolt upright and found that Amber, the two-toned golden cat, was sitting on Mara’s chest holding a dead field mouse.

Amber dropped the mouse. “Fix it,” he said.

Mara sat up, dislodging the cat. “Amber? What?”

“It stopped moving,” the cat whined. “Make it move again.”

“I can’t. Hassil?”

Hassil said, “No. Maybe when I’ve had a little more training. I’m sorry, Amber. It looks like you ran it into a heart attack.”

Amber sneezed in disgust and stalked off. Turning in the doorway, he said, “The dark woman was here,” and kept going, taking the mouse.

“Who is she?” Mara demanded.

“I don’t know. Amber? What dark woman?”

The cat said, “She was in the kitchen. I thought she might be afraid of me, so I rubbed up against her ankle. She squeaked and disappeared.”

“Disappeared how?”

“Gone. Nothing there.”

“Who is she?” Mara repeated.

“She might be Death,” Hassil said.

Mara wasn’t quite buying it. No dark woman was going to mess with her mate. “Whose death?”

“I suppose we’d better find out,” Hassil said.

“Well, I should say so. You take death a bit too casually, Hassil. Yours? Mine?”

“I’d need to see her. We’re wizards; we’d recognize our own deaths.”

“I’m only an apprentice. Go after her.”

“What, now?”

“Yes!”

She watched him put away a big meal while she fumed at the delay. He drank several cups of water. He used the jakes. “Hurrying doesn’t work,” he told her. “Calm down.”

He tied a little cloth bag around Amber’s neck. Amber started to protest. “Remember what you asked,” he said. He took the mouse out of the cat’s mouth—it had stiffened—and put it in the bag.

He instructed Mara. “The light spell, use it every night. You should be able to do it in your sleep. No wizard should ever be without light, not even in her dreams.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” she pointed out.

“My body stays here. I’m going a long way.”

“Will you dream of this dark woman?”

“I hope so,” Hassil said, and regretted it too late. “After all, that’s the point. I’ll be back when I can. Give me water every morning and evening, but don’t wake me up.”

“How would I do that?”

“You can’t. But you could hurt me.” Hassil settled himself among the chalk lines, on his back. He closed his eyes. “Amber.”

At first nothing happened.

He jerked out of a doze. He uncurled himself. He was in the kitchen, on the floor, and everything was black and white and too big. The smells of the place were fantastically rich, but among them he found a trace of the dark woman.

He moved out and through the dusty yard and into low underbrush.

Here were torn parts of a rabbit, and the smell of a hawk, and a woman’s scent. He sniffed what was left, and tasted gingerly. She’d be forty or so, Egyptian at least in part, well fed, recently bathed; he couldn’t tell any more. Her path trailed away west.

Just how far did he want to pursue this? It didn’t seem that the dark woman had any interest in him or his household. But Hassil was part Amber now, and the cat was fascinated.

Dusk fell, and predators became more active. He moved with caution. An owl stalked him. He wove among trees until the owl was lost, then circled until he had the dark woman’s scent again. It was full night, but he saw well enough to move on. The trail led west.

Around noon of the next day he heard faint shouting. He followed sounds and the scent downhill into Little Pleest Valley, where Anton’s hordes had been gathering since spring. Prince Wale had been gathering his own army. Hassil and Mara had tended the spells that hid the house.

He spent most of the afternoon making his way down to the battlefield. Cat-sized, belly low against the ground, he had some trouble following the action. The view was better from a tree.

Prince Wale’s men moved in big groups, in patterns; they wore color-coded armor so as to recognize each other. The little groups and individuals who pounced from cover of rocks and groves, those must be Anton’s bandits. They were getting the worst of it.

And a dark woman moved from kill to kill. She stooped above various of the fallen, then moved on. None of the warriors could see her.

Ahead of her, ten bandits waited in ambush while a depleted dozen of the prince’s men trotted toward them. Hassil moved that way, hunched low as he ran. The bandits stood suddenly and launched arrows. Shields came up among the prince’s men. The bandits charged; the soldiers stood. The dark woman picked her way toward them, taking her time.

Men fell. The dark woman shied from flashing weapons, approaching only the fallen, to touch their foreheads. Suddenly she smiled at Hassil. “Pretty cat. I can see you.”

“I can see you,” Hassil said. “Are you Death?”

The woman yeeped and vanished. Her scent was still there, and it smelled of fear. Hassil said, “I won’t hurt you.”

She was back. “I didn’t think you could talk! Who are you?”

“I’m Hassil, a magic worker. The cat is Amber. Are you Death?”

“Yes.”

Now that you’ve found Death, what do you do next?

Hassil worked the mouse out of his pouch.

The dark woman stared, then went into a giggling fit. “Oh, my,” she said. “What shall we do with that?”

She didn’t seem to want it as a bribe or sacrifice. Hassil said, “Amber wanted me to make it work again.”

“Make a deathless mouse?”

Hassil was silent.

“Well, why not?” The woman touched the mouse with her forefinger. The mouse thrashed, saw the cat and ran. The woman laughed again. “And the cat too?” She touched Hassil/Amber on the forehead before he could decide whether to dodge. He felt a jolt as of lightning or static electricity.

She said, “But it won’t last. Do you know about manna?”

“Of course. Manna is the power behind magic. You find it in gems and funny-shaped stones or roots . . . patterns in clouds or chalk . . . anything that feels magical, is.”

“There’s manna in murder,” she said. “A great many wizards and witches become Death. It extends our lifespans. If your mouse runs short of manna, it’ll be dead again. The same goes for your cat.”

The mouse was running uphill, east out of Little Pleest Valley. Hassil could feel it. He would chase it down . . . but . . . no hurry. He said, “Thank you anyway. Maybe we can follow the manna as it fades away. Maybe we can’t live forever, but it’s worth a try.”

“I thought that too,” the dark woman said.

“What were you afraid of? Not a cat.”

“We Deaths, sometimes we kill each other for what’s left of magic. One day there’ll be only one.” She looked speculatively at the cat. “Would you hurt me?”

Death was very near. “I owe you,” Hassil said quickly. “Ask what you will.”

“Spare the mouse,” she said, and was gone again. This time she left no scent.

It took Hassil a day and a half to return. He had to hunt; he had to hide.

He knew something was wrong before he came near. His neighbor’s house was burning. He counted three corpses hacked with military weapons. Theldora and two children must have hidden. She had some training; she would weave an invisibility spell. In fact he could feel it, a gap in the manna that roared danger in his mind.

His own house was ashes and blackened stones.

He didn’t find Mara at once. He had to dig through the hot foundations. She was in the basement, and she was alive. She was weeping, and she wept harder when she saw the cat.

“I didn’t know how to stop them,” she said. “Bandits, a lot of them. They went right through your spells. I hid. I was afraid to move you out of the chalk pattern.”

Hassil had crawled past his own burnt and suffocated body to get here. “I’m dead,” he said. “Or at least, I’m a cat. But you’re still alive. I can lead you out, but you’ll have to move some stuff. I’m not strong enough.”

They crawled outside in full dark. Hassil paused, listening.

“I have to go,” he said.

“What? Why? Dear, I can take care of you.”

“Theldora’s weaving a curse against the killers. She’s pulling the magic out of everything around her. I’ll lose my mind if I stay.”

“Where will you go?”

He shook his head. There were too many wizards in the world. Magic was disappearing everywhere. But he sensed a creature with a fine instinct for danger, and a need for manna, and a sense for it too. It was moving east now, through corn.

Hassil said, “I’ll follow the mouse.”

“I followed the mouse,” the golden cat said. “All across the world, until we came here. And I can make you open that door, or I can make you cut your throat. But the effort might drain me and leave me thousands of years dead, or just a cat. What shall we do?”

Olaf shook his head. “I want coffee. Cat, your dark woman is out there, your death. There’s nothing outside the base but ice. You’ll starve or freeze.”

“No problem. I’ll come back.”

Olaf laughed. “What, you and the magic mouse?”

“Yes, of course, both of us. We’ve known each other for thousands of years.”

Olaf thought it over. “Cat,” he said, “don’t come back.”

The cat nodded. Olaf opened the door. The cat darted out into the white landscape, chasing the mouse forever.

“CHICXULUB”

I spent the morning with a hoe, stooped, my eyes locked on dark dirt and growing plants. Corn plants live, potatoes live, weeds die. I choose. Mind in idle. I hadn’t been watching the clouds. But the clouds were taking weird shapes, and how could I help but be aware of that?

I wasn’t surprised when a voice spoke like thunder trying to whisper. “The Age of Fish is passing. The Age of Water begins. All is fluid. Old orders pass, old laws give way.”

Streams of cloud, white against deep blue, shaped a dragon that covered half the sky.

I said, “Great changes are the province of dragons, not men. Dragons rule the world’s water and weather. Men must still tend crops.”

“I’ve watched you.”

“Entertainment is where you find it,” I said.

“Does it please you, to serve a farmer in Huy Brasil? You came as a soldier of Halceen at the world’s edge.”

“It pleases me,” I said. I resumed my work, but the dragon was still listening, and one is polite to dragons. “In Halceen we were a farmer’s sons. Six of us, and two daughters, and my mother and father-found. The crops failed.” I chopped at a weed. “There was not food for us all, so Geven and I joined the army. Regent Guppry of Halceen claims land as far as Demonhead Ridge here in Huy Brasil. He sent us here to take it.”

The dragon said, “But you left the army at midnight by dark of the Moon. Why did the sentry let you go?”

“Geven had sentry duty that night.”

“And why are you not killing soldiers who guard the land of Huy Brasil?”

My temper was a little of the reason my father-found sent me to join the army. I held tight to it as I said, “Regent Guppry sent fifty thousand of his army to roam across land that isn’t in Halceen. Fifty thousand fewer mouths are eating Halceen’s crops. We who survive will be eating Huy Brasil’s crops instead, even if we do so as slaves. Kings do these things. Do I seem a fool? Huy Brasil’s soldiers didn’t cause famine in Halceen. Why should I kill them, or invite them to kill me?”

“Where is Geven?”

I couldn’t know that. “We didn’t agree. He stayed with the army. I ran when I could. Dawn found me chopping firewood with my sword, and Zel found me too. Zel, Caquix’s eldest daughter. I begged her to take me as their servant, and she spoke to her father, and I thought I was safe until a dragon came.”

The dragon laughed in little puffs of cloud.

“Dragon, it’s very pleasant talking to you, but I wonder what sparked your interest?”

“I hold to a treaty with King Willip,” the dragon said. “He does not send his army against me. I leave his citizens alone. There is no crime here, and no war. Thieves and killers are mine.”

I dropped the hoe. “Yours for what? For food? Geven!” Was my brother already eaten?

“I wouldn’t know him,” the dragon said.

I set to hoeing dirt and water weeds out of Caquix’s little canal.

“You came as a soldier,” the dragon said. “You didn’t steal. You didn’t kill. Is this to be your new home, then?”

“I can hope so.”

“But this is a time of change,” the dragon said.

I continued my work. The canal was badly overgrown.

“Magic goes away,” the dragon said, “and does not renew itself. We live in the weather and the currents in water, but storms have begun to get away from us. We glimpse worse in the future. We see shock waves move through air and water faster than a scream. Mountains of ice will crawl across the land, as they did during the previous twenty-five-thousand-year turn of the world’s axis. All beyond our control.”

“Men never did control any of that,” I said. “Less magic may favor us human beings. We began to thrive when the gods started to go mythical—”

“The Jade Emperor has a plan,” the dragon whispered. “The masses of rock and metal that drift about the sky are rich in magic. He will bring down a flying mountain. Its magic will last us half a turn, another twelve thousand years. We’ll use it to bring more.”

“Mighty is the Jade Emperor,” I said, wondering what this had to do with farmers and their dependents.

“He will land it here.”

I looked up. Wispy clouds in a blue sky, and two tiny whorls that might be a dragon’s eyes. I asked, “Must we move?”

“You must move as far as you can, as fast as you can. You need not be under the mountain to die. A plan was proposed to slow the falling rock, but that task was given to . . . well, to me. My place is here, so the law will not allow another to accomplish it. I know now that I cannot slow the mountain. I have no power over rock. The mountain drifts across the sky at four hundred thousand leagues in a day. It will arrive faster than that, because it is falling. In one hundred and thirty days.”

“I should tell Caquix. And Zel,” I said, and wondered if I would be believed.

The dragon said, “That is your decision. I must stay; this is my place.”

“Who else will you warn?”

“I will observe. I will warn the righteous.”

That seemed unduly restrictive. “I will warn the rest,” I said.

“Do you know how they treat mad folk in Huy Brasil?”

“Tell me.”

“They give them to the dragon.”

I thought it over. I set down the hoe and walked up to the house to speak to Caquix and Zel. The shapes in the clouds were dissipating.

“THE GATHERERS’ GUILD”

From a few hundred feet up in the moonless northern California night, the restaurant was invisible. A redwood forest ran up a mountain, with no work of humanity in sight. I followed the pale light of my GPS indicator down, trusting it knew what it was doing.

I’m a Gatherer, but my branch is Sales Tax. I’d never yet seen Gregor’s, a favorite hangout of the IRS elite.

A shadowy mass sank past me, too fast, no lights. I veered, not bothering to curse. Too many idiots already fly cars. I dread the day taxpayers find out they can fly. Flight belts are much safer for the people below—but several hundred million flying taxpayers would still be too dangerous, and jeez, what if they got cars?

I was below the treetops now, surrounded by trunks. Below me the car mushed out on silent fans, then settled on a lawn. I glimpsed light in a narrow line: windows showing below the restaurant’s roof. I edged toward it, easing around a redwood’s thick trunk.

Blocked by the redwood, I saw light flare around the trunk’s curve on both sides.

Somehow I instantly accepted that Gregor’s had exploded. I eased toward the tree as the sound blasted me. It slapped me against the bark. I hung for a moment, dazed.

Gregor’s burned. I saw the car catch fire too. I eased to ground and crawled into some bushes to watch.

Maybe fifteen people ran, staggered and crawled out of Gregor’s. Guards came running from the forest to help them. I couldn’t guess how many were left inside. I didn’t see Marion. I feared she was still inside, and I feared to go and look.

“Mel,” Woody said, “Why didn’t you try to help?”

I started to answer, but Christine came into the room. Woody’s wife is a taxpayer. We held off while she poured coffee from the secret fields on Mount Hood. “Breakfast in fifteen minutes. I called room service,” she said.

After Christine left, Woody added meager splashes of century-old Hawaiian rum.

“I didn’t want to push my luck,” I told him. “Friday the thirteenth, and Gregor’s was burning. I was afraid to help. They were all IRS people. They’d have taken me for the bomber.”

It was still dawn, not office hours yet. I’d come to Woody’s penthouse apartment in Portland for refuge.

Woody said, “We’ll give it to the media as a mob hit. Now tell me what you were doing there in the first place.”

“I had a date.”

“At an IRS site?”

“Marion Nye is IRS, or was.” I swallowed. I hadn’t really faced it: Marion could be dead. I hadn’t seen her emerge from Gregor’s. “She’s midlevel in Creative Math. We met last May at the gathering in Jamaica, and spent a week at her villa in Spain. It wasn’t espionage, Woody. Just sex.”

“You should have told us.”

“You’d have had me spying on her.”

“Oh, I might like to ask her about that Beverly Hills thing—”

“Hell, I’m still deciding how serious we . . . are. Spy on each other or get married? I wanted to see what her friends were like. Woody, what’s it like, married to a taxpayer?”

He shrugged. “I have to keep a few secrets. She never wonders how I can afford this place, and she doesn’t know about the Hawaii house. She thinks I make wonderful coffee.”

I laughed. Taxpayers never see Mount Hood coffee.

Woody was looking at his four-foot-by-six-foot computer monitor. He said, “Okay. There were three dead in the blast. Eleven injured. Marion Nye is in the secret hospital in Portland.”

“Good! How is she?”

“Stable, it says. So that gives us anywhere between five and eight suspicious deaths, all IRS, all within the last two months, and nobody knows who’s doing it. It’s driving the IRS crazy. They could start bombing us.”

“Could it be us?”

Woody didn’t answer. The top levels at Sales Tax don’t tell us everything.

“What if we could solve this ourselves?” I asked.

Woody’s lips pursed. “First you’d have to find out who’s doing the killing. Then it has to be someone that isn’t us. We don’t know that yet. Then you have to make the IRS believe it. You like mysteries?”

I grinned.

Room service appeared. We stopped to eat, and made conversation for Christine’s benefit, before we settled in for some computer work.

Eloise St. Vincent had drowned. That was seven weeks ago at “June in Jamaica,” mid-June 2005, when the upper ranks of all the United States tax gathering bureaus met for four weeks of riotous excess. If the Jamaican police had done a proper autopsy, they’d have found her lungs filled with champagne from the swimming pool.

Fourth of July: Harry Greene had been poisoned. Woody stared. “Poison? Doesn’t the IRS have garnetine?”

Garnetine is an inoculation against most poisons. I said, “No, that’s just ours, just for Sales Tax personnel. One day we’ll trade garnetine to them for something we need.”

“Damn office politics.” He read on. Washington, DC, police found Greene’s death puzzling. Stomach contents: both beluga and salmon caviar, with onion and chives and chopped egg as condiments. Odd things to find in a government employee earning $80,000 a year and spending the night alone.

Three might have been ringers, but they’d died very close together. Jane Hennessey was descending Everest when she’d had a stroke. Samuel Jefferson and Keki Tomomato had died within days of each other, both from heart attacks or strokes, no autopsies yet: the only deaths ever recorded (except that their presence never would be recorded) aboard the International Space Station. All in July 2005.

“Too many strokes,” Woody said.

I said, “Coincidence happens. Strokes happen when the oxygen’s thin.”

He said, “Say Jefferson and Tomomato pulled rank to get to the ISS without training. Their hearts stopped all by themselves. Hennessey’s probably did too.”

“Yeah.” Why murder her on the way down from Everest? Why wait?

“Which leaves five killings and not many suspects. We’re looking for an organization, right? No single person could do all that.”

I nodded. I was keeping half an eye on Woody’s computer screen. We might be getting more word of Marion.

“What have we got for suspects? There’s Sales Tax, that’s us. There’s Hidden Tax. There’s the Internal Revenue Service itself; it might be some kind of internal war. They’ve got the power and the dominance games too. We’d like it to be Hidden Tax, because if it’s internal IRS, we won’t know which side to talk to. What do you know about Hidden Tax?”

“They’re pretty secretive.”

Woody sipped coffee, waiting me out.

“Oh, all right. They’re ungodly rich, even compared to the rest of us. They were a fringe group once, a branch of Revenue when it was just one branch, until they put the country on a silver money basis. First silver, then just paper. There isn’t any real money anymore. They can get all the wealth they need by printing it. We have to play numbers games.”

“Where’s their motive? Why would they bomb a restaurant, or poison people? Hidden Tax were the ones who took all the gold away—”

“Roosevelt era. Before you were born.”

“And then let the taxpayers play with it again years later! They didn’t need it! What would they have to gain from a few murders?”

“What do any of us have to gain? Rich people don’t fight each other. They’ve got too much to protect.”

“And yet wars happen.”

“Woody, there are other suspects. What if Congress—”

Woody snorted. “Congress. The Army. The president. Mel, those people are all chosen for mathematical illiteracy. They can’t tell a million from a billion. When they pay eight thousand bucks for a hammer, where do they think the money goes?”

“Maybe it’s Customs Collection,” I suggested.

“They’re too small.”

“It turns them mean. They’re killing us out of jealousy.” I stood up. “I need to see Marion.”

“I’ll come with you. After that, we’ve got better search programs at the office. Let’s see if the victims had anything in common.”

Marion was awake. We had to shout; the blast had left her a little deaf.

“I wasn’t that close,” she told us. “I was watching the entrance for you, Mel. I saw him come in.”

“Who?”

“Don’t know. He didn’t look like one of us. He looked like a backpacker.”

“Backpacker? The guards should have got him.”

“Yeah. The maitre d’ stopped him, and then boom.” She tried to wave her hands, then let them fall.

Woody said, “Marion? Is IRS serious about Bev Hills?”

She smiled wearily. “Beverly Hills belongs to you guys, to Sales Tax. Of course that’s just me talking. Mel, I’m tired.”

I kissed her and started to leave.

“He had a funny T-shirt logo,” she said. “A propeller with too many blades.”

The hypersonic subway from Oregon into Washington, DC, ends at the tenth subbasement of the Watergate. Security was a hassle; it has been ever since Nixon’s CREEP squad tried to burgle our secrets. The elevator took us down to the forty-second.

Down the hall they were questioning a book dealer. We listened for a few seconds.

These days there are programs to keep track of sales tax. The only judgment a merchant needs involves where to apply it. This Martin Massoglia was a dealer at conventions, a traveling show, and that left him more chance to make mistakes.

Glyer is a huge man, a mountain looming over the little huckster. Massoglia looked bravely up at him. “Doesn’t it strike you as crazy, turning every shopkeeper and restaurateur into a tax collector? We’re not all math whizzes like you guys. We only want to buy and sell.”

Mike Glyer belly-laughed. “Internal Revenue turns every citizen in the country into an accountant. Jails him if he won’t play. Is that fair?”

Massoglia said, “Hell, no!” and Mike chortled. Woody and I kept walking. We’d heard the argument too often.

Gatherers, tax collectors, have to be good with numbers. We get more than our share of mathematical genius. Woody was a little worried about putting our programs to work in the office computers. Someone might notice.

“Tell them it’s a game,” I said. “Maybe even get them involved.”

“I’ll run just these five victims first,” Woody said.

I got us coffee at the hidden pot, avoiding the coffee we keep for taxpayers.

“They were all married,” Woody said. “In fact, they were all married to taxpayers.”

“Mean anything?”

“Let’s see if . . .” He typed. By and by he said, “Last two months, three deaths in Sales Tax, two married—but not to taxpayers—and a single. And Harry Tanner disappeared.”

“Maybe they all cheated on their significant others?”

“Let’s see if Tanner had one . . . okay, he dated some. Mel, do you remember Grace Wembley?”

“Sure.” She worked here. We’d shared dinner twice. She also dated taxpayers, though; she hung out in the better bars. Then—“She was mugged. Poor damn Grace.”

“She always talked her head off. I never knew how you could stand it.” He was typing. “And she dated Harry.”

I said, “See if any of the victims was considered a Security risk.”

Of nine possible deaths by foul play, seven had the Security asterisk. “Maybe they talked to the other Gatherer clans. Or even to taxpayers,” Woody said. “That could be bad, couldn’t it? What happens to Security risks in the IRS?”

“Or here in Sales Tax? Nobody quite knows. Woody, let’s see how far back this goes.”

It must have started slow. The first disappearance that fit the pattern was in autumn of 1978. Then nothing for four years. Then it started building up, deaths and disappearances.

The hair stood up on the back of my neck. There were dozens. “Five on Independence Day, various years. That mean anything?”

Woody said, “Yeah, that was the other thing they had in common. July fourth, and lots more on the thirteenth of various months. It’s two different messages, Mel, and that’s why a program couldn’t catch it.”

“What’s it mean? Bad luck? And . . . independence.”

A long silence ensued. Then Woody asked, “Have you ever listened to old Monroe Kennedy?”

“I try not to.”

“He’s over a hundred twenty. In his day the Gatherers were sure that no tax should ever go over twenty percent. You could double-and triple-tax them, but if any tax went over double-tithe, we’d all be found hanging from lampposts.”

“Obviously he was wrong. Your point?”

“They fixed it by taxing smaller groups. Any one group might want someone else’s taxes to go up instead of his. Graduated income tax, it’s called, and property tax increases. It’s worked for years, decades, but how long can it last?”

“In California . . .”

“What?”

The memory wouldn’t come.

We wandered back to the room where Glyer was still hassling Massoglia. We watched for a bit. They’d shot him with a truth drug. Veritas isn’t proprietary; all of the tax agencies have it. Massoglia was babbling all his secrets, if he had any.

Office work can be entertaining at the IRS. They bring in famous writers and singers for audits and get them to dance through hoops, perform or lecture or autograph. Here it’s too much like work.

“Marion’s backpacker,” Woody whispered, “must have been carrying a bomb. We’ve got no protection at all against a suicide bomber. How’d he get there? He didn’t come in the Director’s flight car. He couldn’t have walked in, could he?”

I said, “Flight belt.”

“Did you see any other flyers?”

“No. I got to dinner a little late.”

“If he’d walked in, the guards would have stopped him. Hey.” He pointed as Glyer puffed a mist into Massoglia’s face. The dealer would go home with no notion of where he’d spent the last six hours.

“Amneserol. Give a guard a little less than the standard dose, he’ll lose an hour’s memory of hanging out in the woods.”

I nodded. “The backpacker would still need a flight belt. We’ll find it ditched somewhere.”

Woody didn’t answer.

Woody left after work. In an hour and a bit he’d be back in Portland with his wife.

I called the secret hospital, but Marion was asleep. I decided to stay in Washington. I booked a room in the Watergate, the part aboveground, then went to the Smithsonian. I’d get them to open the back rooms. They’ve got more stuff stored than most taxpayers would believe.

I stopped in the gem display rooms to look at a gorgeous footbath-sized chunk of malachite. The label said that it had been given to Spiro Agnew when he was Nixon’s vice president. I looked around . . . and she was looking over my shoulder. Pretty, middle-aged, curly brown hair.

“I love malachite,” she said. She was wearing a T-shirt under an open jacket. The shirt bore a half-hidden symbol like a propeller with too many blades.

I said, “So do I.” I’d been thinking about pulling rank on the Smithsonian clerks. Sometimes they’ll let a tax man go home with something.

She said, “It’s too heavy to carry and too big to stick under my suit jacket, and we’d need a distraction.”

“Have dinner with me and we’ll come up with a plan.”

She looked me over. “I’m Winnifred. Have you got a car?”

“No.”

“I do.”

Back in the Watergate, I got us drinks from the minibar—miserably poor stuff—and ordered a room service dinner. We talked a little. I spun the usual tale, not hiding that I was a tax man. But Winnifred, I thought, was being evasive.

Presently a waiter knocked. Winnifred stood briskly and went to the door. I was startled enough to remain seated. I was feeling the liquor, too.

She signed the check and got rid of the waiter. “I’ve given you a Mickey,” she said.

She must have used a lot. I was feeling the effects despite the garnetine. I stayed seated. “That symbol,” I asked, waving my arm wildly, letting the words slur. “What’s it mean?”

“Prop Thirteen. Aren’t you out yet? Proposition Thirteen was the law they passed in California in nineteen seventy-eight, that dropped property taxes back to normal levels and kept them there. We use it as a symbol for—Why am I saying this?”

“I put a little something in your drink too.”

She broke into a delighted smile. “I knew it!” she crowed. “You bastards have got an actual, working truth serum, just like in the pulps! How long does it last?”

I grinned at her. “It’s permanent. Can you imagine what would happen if that ever got loose among the taxpayers?”

“Congress first. Then the Supreme Court.” Winnifred was beginning to babble. “There’s nothing in the Constitution about abortions and evolution and voluntary death and, and they bloody well knew it. Then give it to the media. Then—” She lost some of her smile. “Everybody. How could you stop? Bomb the rivers in the Muslim countries with truth stuff so the ones who can read can’t lie about what’s in the Koran.”

Damn, I was thinking of hiring her! I liked the way she thought. But—“Winnifred, what were you going to do with me?”

“Hang you from a lamppost.”

“No.” Even during the interbureau wars, we never hang a tax man in public. It’s far too likely to start a trend. “The others, you never did that.”

“It’s time.”

“You’ll see weapons you never dreamed of,” I said. We glared at each other. “How did you set off that explosion in Oregon?”

“Our man hiked in. Sequoia National Park, after all, and you don’t have to stick to the trails. He had an amnesia drug we got off an IRS man, for the guards.”

“How did you talk him into blowing himself up?”

Her face screwed up in hatred. “You did. He lost everything to taxes.”

“And the others? Drowning, poison—”

“And strokes! The Customs people have something that will cause a stroke a few days after you take it. We stole it. You people have endless miracles, Mel, some evil, some wonderful. Why not share?”

“Not enough to go around,” I told her.

“We . . . not we . . . you went to the Moon in 1969, and built a base, and stayed. Where do you launch from?”

“The Saturns launch from Kennedy, at a base that’s supposed to be closed. Closed to us too,” I said bitterly. “Nobody gets to Lyndon Base but IRS people.”

“And the freeway system under Beverly Hills, and the Caspian lakes full of beluga sturgeon—and then you put luxury taxes on food. How can you justify it?”

I sighed. “Winnifred, have you ever read the newsletter they put out for funeral directors? ‘The bereaved have a deep need to spend more money than they can afford. It ameliorates their grief.’ Or listen to anything the teacher unions tell themselves? It’s just incredibly easy for anyone to believe he deserves more than he’s getting. What if you did get to keep all you make? What would you spend it on? Look what you buy with it now!”

She glared. “We’ll take you down. You can’t keep drowning us in paper forever.” With Veritas in her, she had to mean it.

“I’m sorry, Winnifred.” I got up, and she got up, but I was faster.

I was looking out at the dawn when she woke. She sat bolt upright in bed and stared at me. “Oh, God, who are you? I don’t remember anything.”

“We were picked up by a flying saucer and got to know each other that way. How about breakfast?”

Puzzled look. I said, “Kidding. It was the Smithsonian.”

She left cheerful. We’d exchanged phone numbers. She thought I was an accountant for Wachovia.

She hadn’t known as many names as I’d have liked. Even so, when I turned my list of the Prop Thirteen Gang over to Woody, we’d have something to trade with IRS. Maybe I’ll see the Moon before I die.

“THE SOLIPSIST AT DINNER”

Wayne Morris had ordered a spicy tuna hand roll, extra chili. He tried a piece and managed to swallow it, but there were tears in his eyes. “Wow. That’s powerful.”

Nero grinned at him. “You said you were getting to like it that way. Too much?”

Wayne took another bite. His eyes were still tearing up, but he savored it. Then he said, “It’s just that the whole world seems to be getting a little blurry.”

“Like what?”

“Well, my eyesight. Sense of taste. Hearing.”

Nero laughed and wiggled his bushy black eyebrows. “That’s just what everyone says when he gets older! You’re near seventy.”

“Like, I hear a ringing. It’s always there. Sometimes I don’t notice it, but if I listen—” He listened and heard the ringing, a steady bell tone.

“It’s called tinnitis.” Nero raised his voice slightly, enunciating a little more carefully. The sushi restaurant was noisy, particularly at the counter. “Lots of people get tinnitis. You get it young if you work in a noisy environment, like if you’re an artillery officer or a movie critic.”

“I don’t care what it’s called, it’s still distracting. I have to crank the volume up when I’m listening to TV. Sharon hates it. My sense of taste is going too. I like things spicy. As a kid I wouldn’t have touched this stuff I’m eating now. And when I’m driving at night, all the lights are colored blobs. Everything else is a little blurry too, except—”

“That’s normal too. Except? Something isn’t blurry?”

“Clouds, trees, they look okay. I finally figured out that anything fractal looks okay because I don’t expect sharp edges and geometric shapes. My mind extrapolates.”

“That’s a cute notion. Might even be true. Eyes are funny.”

“What I think is that my imagination is failing.”

Nero shrugged his eyebrows at him. Wayne said, “There’s a philosophical position called solipsism. It means—”

“I know what it means. There’s nothing else in the universe, there’s just you. Everything else is your imagination. Philosophical position, my ass.”

“Well, it is. I think, therefore I am, but what about the rest of you? It’s internally consistent and impossible to disprove.”

“When I was a kid,” Nero said, “all the science fiction writers wrote stories about . . . vampires, time travel, robots, faster than light travel, all that stuff—”

“Heinlein. Whatever Robert Heinlein wrote, everyone else had to imitate.”

“And solipsism. Everyone wrote a solipsism story. They were all sort of alike. I mean, if you take it seriously, what have you got? No protagonists, no background, no external conflict—”

“Yeah. Forty years I’ve been writing short stories and I never did anything with that.” Wayne got the sushi chef’s attention and ordered a California roll. “If I had it to do all over again I’d imagine a better short story market.”

“You’d be God,” Nero said suddenly. “And God’s imagination would be failing. Wow. Think how powerful your imagination must have been, before you imagined you were a baby.”

“Think how screwy the laws of physics would be getting, right about now.”

“An expanding universe, speeding up. Einstein’s jigger factor gone all wrong. Dark matter. Dark energy. All just metaphors for death?”

The sushi chef set their order in front of them: rice wrapped around avocado, bits of vegetable, and fish treated to imitate crab. Wayne mixed wasabi with soy sauce. He said, “Might be more interesting the other way around. First I’m God. I create a universe. I wait. Eventually there’s intelligence. Intelligence starts evolving ideas about the universe. I incorporate the good ones.”

“You mean, for a while there really was a steady state universe?”

“And a Zodiac. God was using star patterns for blackboard diagrams, a scheme for mapping out lives. Later there were black holes that didn’t evaporate until Hawking changed his mind. It’s all a collaboration! There was a nasty simplistic Hell at first, but then Dante started adding details. Since then everybody wants to improve on Dante, so now Hell is horrendously complicated.”

“God wouldn’t need much of an imagination at all,” Nero said. “Just a sense of consistency. It doesn’t start with a Big Bang. It starts with Eden and then blooms.”

They went through the California roll, then ordered monkfish liver. Wayne asked, “Who dreams up diseases?”

“Oh . . . there’d be shamans, and then shamans would need to explain why people hurt. Now it’s priests on one side and medical researchers—” Nero looked up. “Something?”

“I’m positive on prostate cancer.”

“Damn.”

He’d been trying to put it out of his head. “I went back to Dr. Wells this morning. Positive. My morbid imagination at work.”

“Well, yeah, a solipsist would think that. Now you’ll have to dream up a psychiatrist to cure you of thinking you’ve got cancer.”

“Maybe—”

“Sorry. I shouldn’t be making fun—”

“Maybe I should dream up a friend. A psychiatrist is just a hired friend anyway, right?”

“Have you talked to Sharon about this?”

Wayne covered his ears. The tinnitis surged.

He dreaded telling his wife. He didn’t have enough friends. Maybe he’d taken this solipsistic stuff too seriously when he was younger. He didn’t believe it now, and as for Nero, Nero had worked in a novel, long ago. Wayne had killed him off in the sequel and he wasn’t plausible today, Nero with his funny-hat eyebrows.

It was time to stop talking to imaginary characters, time to talk to Sharon. Wayne paid the bill and left.

“BOYS AND GIRLS TOGETHER”

At first hearing the background voices sounded all alike, high-pitched and childish. A moment’s attention and you could make out the difference. Boys at one of the big tables, more than a dozen. Girls all about them, at tables for two or four. They all looked the same age, ten or eleven years old, but you could separate them by voice or body language or clothing styles: these here were centuries old, these others were in their teens.

It was a rare restaurant that would host boys and girls together. MacDonald’s was ancient. Its earliest clientele had been parents with young children. There were a few in here even now, adult couples with children too small to have the Treatment yet. The parents were being very protective. They were never threatening, yet always intimidating.

Terry found Boris and went to his table. Boris was watching a live feed of the Pluto ship skimming past Jupiter. Terry said, “Sorry I’m late. There was an accident.”

Boris—four feet nine, blond, his one-piece suit long out of style—jumped to his feet. “Are you hurt?”

Terry—four eleven, wearing a loose gray swimsuit, tightly coiled black hair and dark skin—said, “It wasn’t that close. A cargo pod crashed short of Burbank Port. Came down in Van Nuys. They’re still adding up the death rate. I saw it.” Terry’s shudder rippled through him. “Right into some old buildings.”

Boris watched in awe and fright. “Are you all right? Want a relaxant?”

Terry said, “I’m going to do it. I’m going to grow up.”

Boris laughed.

Heads turned all around the room, boys and girls together. Background conversation paused, then resumed. A tall girl, a dark-skinned, stretched-out version of her companions, examined Terry. He didn’t notice.

“I mean it,” he said.

“Sorry, you caught me by surprise. Have you had enough of life?” Boris was still smiling.

“Two or three miles away, a cargo pod falls out of the sky. I could have been under it. Boris, I almost got killed now. There are so many ways to die. Do you think you’re going to live forever, just because you don’t grow old?”

“Yes,” Boris said.

Was he kidding? “It could have hit MacDonald’s.”

“It didn’t. Look, I take your point. My shot at being killed by a meteor in this century is about one in thirty thousand. Add up enough centuries and it becomes even odds. I like to walk the mountains; I could fall off a cliff. Be hit by lightning. Terry, you spend too much time underground for that, but any collapse could get you—”

“Could get anyone.”

“—and no roof lasts forever. But never mind that. Do you actually want to raise a little you?”

Terry hesitated.

“Or two or three or four? Maybe some of them girls? And,” his voice dropped, “live with a grown-up girl? Take turns taking care of a baby? Or is this just a way of not looking at the accident? You could take a brosia tab, you know, if it’s just a way to calm down.”

“Boris, why do people have children?”

Boris grimaced. “Why do people have sex? We don’t know, not in our guts. Asking doesn’t help. I’ve done that. Browsing the web doesn’t give you insight. For millions of years—billions—that was why live things made little copies of themselves, because they were hardwired to do that. Bacteria don’t have a choice. Ants, chameleons, rabbits—”

“Boris, it’s near a thousand years since the Freeze Treatment, and we still get children.”

“Mmm.”

“After I die, I want something left of me.”

“Write a book.”

“I’ve done six. Is that your point? My writing might get better if I grow up. Different viewpoint. Never mind, my point is they’ll still be forgotten. What’s in a book, it all goes obsolete when the facts change.”

“Write fantasy then. It’s already obsolete. Or build a bridge, or a park, or an arcology. I’ve done that. Terry, think about getting old. It’s not like it used to be. A huge part of medical practice was just for cancer, arthritis, brain deterioration, brittle bones, clogged arteries, all the things that go with just being past the limit of your genetic program. Nobody treats that stuff anymore! There aren’t enough adults to make it pay.”

“Hello?”

The tall, dark-haired girl behind Terry’s shoulder had become impossible to overlook. Boris must have been watching her all along. Terry turned and said, “Hello. I’m Terry, that’s Boris. We were talking—”

“I’m Carla. I heard. Growing up. Do you have a girl to grow up with, Terry?”

“No, I just, I haven’t started looking. This just started. There was an accident.” Terry was flustered. “Have a chair?” How did you talk to a girl? Like another intelligent entity?

Carla (five nine, pale with black straight hair, in a paint suit that streamed colors like a close view of Jupiter) moved a chair into place, and sat. The chair dropped a little to put her eyes level with theirs, and theirs lifted. “I was thinking of growing up myself.”

Terry could feel himself shy back. He sensed Boris’s amusement. He asked, “How old are you, Carla?”

“Six hundred and ten.”

“You’re almost . . . you must have been one of the first.”

“After the media stopped counting. I might have been number ten thousand of the Forever Children. Or not.”

Forever Children? Terry had never heard the term. “Is that why you’re so tall? You keep growing even after the Treatment?”

“It isn’t fast, but yeah, we grow. In another few hundred years I’d be six feet tall. Hit me with puberty then, how tall would I be? Seven feet? Ten? So, how old are you, Terry?”

“Looking at a hundred.”

“Flinching from those zeroes?”

Terry shook his head.

Boris asked, “Do you have to buy furniture for adults?”

Carla smiled. “Clothes too.”

“In a few hundred years you’d have to have them handmade. But—excuse me—so what? Older people tend to be rich. Or you could learn to make your own chairs and clothes. There must be books on carpentry and tailoring. You might be eight feet tall in another thousand years, and so what? The idiot here is talking about quitting now.”

“It’s not quitting!” Terry snapped.

Carla said, “Course it’s not. It’s—Hello?” Someone was waving.

Big, burly bear of a man, waving a thick, muscular arm covered with black hair. Tall woman with heavy breasts, nursing a tiny human. Two older girls too small to have the Treatment yet. Five human beings at a table for eight.

Carla went over. The boys lifted eyebrows at each other, came to an agreement, and followed.

“Hanly. Wend. We overheard some of that,” the man said. Man: he was well past puberty. He must have been an adult for decades, and the woman too. MacDonald’s hard plastic seats were tiny beneath them. “We thought you might have questions.”

“I asked my parents,” Carla said primly. “A long time ago.”

Boris said, “Wh—”

“How do you feel?” Terry blurted.

Hanly laughed, his voice deep and alien. “Good. I feel good.”

“A little tired.” Wend smiled. “Children go beyond hassle. They’re a lifestyle.” A giant; a woman, her hips gone wide. Watching her breast-feed the infant, Terry felt he was staring.

The older girl was looking at them suspiciously, pushing her head under her mother’s arm.

Carla asked Wend, “Did you make a mistake?”

“Hell no. And we’re holding civilization together. Don’t laugh.”

Terry shook his head. Boris said, “We learn this in school. If Malzberg and Quine had found some other way to keep people from dying, yeah, we’d all be up to our eyebrows in everybody else. Seven billion, they say. Instead we’re all eleven years old forever, except the poor bastards who were already too old, and of course they’re dead. But somebody’s got to replace . . . Terry? Is that what you’re thinking?”

Terry said, “People still die. The population’s been dropping. Somebody’s got to have children. I’ve been flinching. All this time, I didn’t want to get old and die. Carla, you too?”

“Six times longer than you. But we’re missing something big, aren’t we? We all know it. We’ve all read about sex, right? Endlessly, if you read the classics. But it’s just too simple to be only what all that hinting around is all about. Right, Hanly? Wend?”

The adults laughed and nodded.

“Muscles,” Boris said. “What’s it like to be that powerful?”

“I like that part,” Hanly said. “Even so, my knees have started to creak, and I can’t eat like I used to, or sleep—” He trailed off.

Terry asked, “Carla, are you rich?”

The pale girl jumped. “Why would you . . . ? Sure. You live this long, you get rich or you get broke. If you get broke, you die.”

“Good. I know what to do. Let’s talk about it.”

Boris was in MacDonald’s watching the news. Light danced above the orange plastic table, and he watched, entranced, as a ship like a pregnant spider made orbit around Pluto. A world of forty million was wealthy enough to afford that, and immortals would tolerate the fifteen-year voyage. Any hour now, the little parasite ship would detach and go down. . . .

Two adults came in with a boy. The boy stumbled a bit and looked around him with wide, delighted eyes. A child, it might be. Boris stared at the pale woman because she was so tall.

They saw him. Knew him. It was Carla, and the bearded man must be what Terry had become. Two people Boris hadn’t thought of in twelve years.

Boris pocketed his phone. He said, “You did it.”

They sat down. Chairs adjusted, not quite enough. Terry was near six feet now, and Carla must be six four or five.

“Webley, this is Boris,” Terry said. “Old friend.” The boy smiled. “Boris, how are you?”

“Hello, Webley. I haven’t changed much. Talk to me.”

“Hello, Boris,” Webley said.

Terry said, “Well. We grew up. But also, we founded a study group.”

“We’re going to rebuild the old styles of medicine,” Carla said. “When we get old, there’ll be surgeries and diet supplements and like that. Crutches. Alloplasty. Everything the old-timers had, everything we need to take care of us.”

Boris studied them. Terry was big and brawny and plainly dressed, his beard and hair a black powder explosion. Carla was in a paint suit, a streaming view of a bonfire, looking a bit old-fashioned. She’d gained a foot in height, but expanded outward at chest and hips and belly. Boris asked, “Carrying a passenger?”

“Yeah. There’s plenty of childbirth medicine. We don’t need to worry about that.”

“So your research is all for aging.”

“Called ger-i-atrics.” She smiled.

“Gonna train some surgeons too? You’d better train yourselves. You might not get a lot of volunteers. Cutting up live people, adults didn’t have a problem doing that, maybe because there were wars. Today—”

“It’s a point,” Carla said.

“These studies you’re founding. You think they’ll keep up with you as you get older?”

They looked at each other. Carla said, “There’s no such thing as perpetual motion.”

“Well, there might be. The older I get, the better the medical profession will be at treating . . . well, us. Children. If lightning strikes when I’m ten thousand, there’s a cure.” Boris wondered why he was trying to taunt these sudden strangers. They’d made their choice. They were lost.

He stood up abruptly. “I’ll get us drinks. Webley, what do you drink?”

Carla said, “Boris.”

Back turned, he said, “Yeah?”

She said, “The ones who aren’t afraid to die, they’re the ones who breed. We never had that before. Think evolution.”

Terry said, “When you’re ten thousand years old, look around you. The population might be down to a million, but it’ll be stable. Most of the boys and girls around you will be descended from us, from the ones who made babies. They’ll get tired of being kids and turn adult with hardly a second thought. It’ll be in their genes.”

Boris laughed.

“Milk for Webley,” Terry said. “Cappuccinos for us.”

“Done.”

PART THREE
NONFICTION FOR SPACE.COM

“TRAVELER”

Roland Dobbins, computer mage, has been getting my cyborg lifestyle organized. I have new computers, one a laptop that can plug into my curvy ergonomic keyboard and huge screen, or yank out for travel, and one just for games. I have a new roundabout way of reaching AOL so it doesn’t kidnap my sound and modem.

But that doesn’t get me my AOL address book.

Rain has killed my modem line. I’m in the bar with a cat riding the back of my chair. I’m using my old laptop with its horrible keyboard and a touchpad that moves my cursor without warning whenever my thumb brushes it. But I can reach old friends with my old AOL address.

Mr. Dobbins won’t deal with me at all unless I take classes to become computer literate. I’ve avoided that for a quarter century. Can I still extrapolate if I know too much about today’s computers?

But all this has started me thinking.

The better we get at communicating, the less we need to travel.

Packing a suitcase is a highly refined skill. If we travel only for pleasure, we lose it. The pleasure goes away, hassles become obtrusive. What did we forget to take this time? Who should we have phoned? Do we need medicines and diet supplements? Could they look like drugs to some hostile foreign cop? How will jet lag hit us this time? What does everyone local know that a travel agent forgot?

Isaac Asimov, no great traveler, did once reach Niagara Falls. Deep into the night he finally realized why he couldn’t sleep. “They don’t turn off the Falls at night.”

Lost luggage? Air France lost a passenger in the Soviet Union, because he annoyed them. They dropped Tom Doherty in Moscow when he only had an internal passport for Leningrad.

Are you going someplace dangerous? An American got killed by the bureaucracy in Mexico last year. He was prevented from reaching help after a car accident broke his neck. It reads like an extortion scheme escalated to murder.

Commerce and tourists are what cause plagues.

In history the usual progression seems to be: an exile comes home from the edge of the world carrying silk or spaghetti or horses or gunpowder. A trade route starts up. Then the historical record fades away and doesn’t resume for thirty or forty years.

When a plague like measles or chicken pox reaches new territory, it typically kills two-thirds of the population. Of the survivors’ children it kills a quarter. Afterward it’s a childhood disease. When syphilis first reached Europe, it was ferocious; survivors lost all their hair; you can see it in the paintings of royalty, and wigs stayed in style for centuries. Historians aren’t interested writing it down when everyone around them is dying.

Pasteur and Lister rewrote the future forever.

Sure they did, but the tiny life forms are catching up. Staph infections mutate faster than doctors or sulfa drugs. Natural diseases are bad enough, but we know the shape of DNA now. Biological war is wayyy cheaper than thermonuclear bombs and wayyy harder to trace.

Security at airports is an annoyance we live with; but a serious terrorist can carry a biological weapon in his blood.

Why travel?

Business can be done over the net without jet lag, without facing local preferences in body odor, bed size, alcohol or tobacco or local cuisine.

Dating and courtship? Okay, but we can date over the Net before we get physical. We can lie to each other about beauty, accomplishments, health, financial status and gender; but our odds improve. We can learn a little. When we meet, the gamut of inappropriate behavior becomes less a mugging than an intelligence test.

Thrill rides? Roller coasters are not for transport. Some people like speed, or the illusion that they have risked their lives. Disney and Las Vegas and Magic Mountain lead the way. The “Star Tours” ride doesn’t take us anywhere; the whole ride happens inside a bouncing box. Six Flags Magic Mountain swaps roller coasters between their sites.

Tourism?

The Grand Tour was intended to educate a young European man who expected to rule. Bush the Younger and Daniel Quayle can still get laughed at on a million TV screens for making mistakes in geography. But they don’t have to go. They need a book or CD or videotape.

Could these things be done by virtual reality?

The Haj is the voyage every Muslim is obliged to take during his life. The Koran says Mecca must be seen with one’s own eyes; but getting lost has nothing to recommend it, and viewing a virtual-reality Haj as done by a professional traveler would at least count as preparation.

Here’s how it could go—

Cameras already record electronically and feed through a computer. My nephew has a chair designed for playing deep-involvement war games; it buzzes and hums and moves under him. I don’t foresee this trend getting as far as smell, and cuisine will still take real food. But with sight, hearing, and somasthetic senses, we will get better and better at showing travel to people who needn’t go anywhere.

Container technology can move most freight. Fewer human workers get involved. Where we get serious about containing disease, they’ll be clothed like hospital attendants. Elsewhere . . . cheap labor isn’t cheap if every product must be disinfected.

Is it likely that we’ll all give up traveling? Oh, get a grip. Someone has to take the pictures!

Instead of millions of travelers in the air at any one time, some flying on the spur of the moment . . . you’ll get a few thousand professionals.

The pro prepares for months. For his massive luggage he needs automated porters with controls derived from Martian rover devices. He’s vaccinated for everything plausible. He gets big bucks because something else might hit him.

Of today’s airline companies, the ones who survive will fly First Class from bow to tail, with room to walk around and every seat wired for electronics of every description. Their passengers will be pro tourists wired to record. Remember the 747 Fat Alberts with their observation decks and wet bars front and rear? It’ll be like that.

They’ll return home to quarantine. Biological war isn’t the only danger. Local flu mutates, and without tourists to carry it, we’ll have no resistance.

We who intend to put human astronauts on the Moon and Mars and every solid body in the solar system . . . are used to the notion that it will cost hundreds of millions per astronaut. Why does the general public resist paying for the conquest of Mars? Well, they don’t see why tourism should be hugely expensive and restricted to a privileged few . . . yet.

A few professional observers chosen with meticulous care, draped with a few pounds of cameras and phones and motion sensors, can send back footage that will put any viewer on Mars. Instantaneous travel, no low-gravity nausea, no fine dust getting into everything, no explosive decompression or poisonous atmosphere leakage. Does it cost? Hey, Mecca costs too.

An attitude change might do us some good.

“ROCKET MEN”

The eighth “Access to Space” convention took place April 27 through 29, 2000.

I’ve been to several of these. I love them. They are people gathered to beat out the details of low-cost access to space . . . usually to low Earth orbit. Years ago I went home with a cluster of ideas that perfectly shaped a crime story set on the Moon.

I’ve heard a man promoting leftover Soviet launch rockets.

I’ve talked to a man who sells half a minute of free fall; he’s got a plane that does the paraboloid maneuver. He was all set to sell that to the Apollo 13 producers when NASA stepped in and did it for free.

I’ve listened in the hospitality suite while a man talked about fullerine (Carbon-60). “Somebody must have done certain cheap and obvious experiments! Why can’t I find anything on the Net? It’s not being reported!” He was furious.

I know half the people who attend. We’ve all watched each other try to build commercial spacecraft over the years. Mostly we fail.

Two immediate impressions:

This year they’re all talking like businessmen.

And it’s depressing them.

Now how would I, a professional daydreamer who believes everything a publisher tells me, know when these people are behaving like canny if cynical businessmen? Because I brought Brenda Cooper, that’s how. Brenda is a Council member in the tiny town of Longview, Washington. Sure she knows business from bullshit.

“These guys sound intelligent and rational,” she says.

Was it thinking in business terms that had them depressed? Maybe not. Some businesses have collapsed in the past year or two.

Two were schemes for tourism in space. They were collecting money to build and run fleets of spacecraft capable of going up and coming down. One was a two-stage airplane, to give passengers roughly an hour of free fall in the troposphere. The other was one stage, same purpose. Neither got past paper to anything that flew. For that matter, I didn’t love their designs (though loving a rocket ship is easy for me), and I couldn’t get my mind around the benefit of building a vehicle to just go up and down.

Then there’s Rotary Rocket. We all know Gary Hudson. He was designing Phoenix rockets for twenty years. These were all small one-stage ground-to-orbit ships lofted by an aerosopike engine, returning to Earth butt first. Of course butt first. The rocket motor goes there, and it’s always going to be the heaviest part.

Gary’s Phoenix designs became DC-X1, an unmanned X-plane that would have led to a one-stage ground-to-orbit craft, the Delta Clipper. But the Clipper went through some redesign, and then we gave the DCX-1 to NASA and they blew it up immediately. Ultimately the Venture Star beat our design to become X-33. It won’t fly because they want it to land facing forward and the butt is too heavy.

Meanwhile, Gary started playing with another concept: rockets at the tips of a helicopter rotor. The long blades make a terrific turbine, delivering fuel and oxidizer fast to the tips. The atmosphere becomes free reaction mass. In vacuum, turn the tips so the rockets point backward. Refuel in orbit, land a helicopter on the Moon.

But no blade material will really stand up to such treatment, not until we can build with some unreasonably strong material such as fullerine tubules. It’s perfect for science fiction writers. Meanwhile, as Rotary Rocket, Gary went to a vehicle that uses folded-up blades for landing, with a spinning aerospike motor to put it in orbit. He’s tested the landing system. Now he’s run out of money, and he’s left with a cross between a lighthouse and a helicopter, and it flies like that too, but it has to be dropped.

It wasn’t all gloom. Mitchell Clapp isn’t depressed.

We first saw him as an Air Force officer, and what he wanted to build was an airplane-like rocket that takes off with its hydrogen peroxide (the oxidizer) tank empty. Go up, take a full load of H_2O_2 from an Air Force tanker, then go to orbit.

When he turned civilian he’d changed the design too, but it still took off like an airplane with one tank empty. The name had become Pioneer Rocket Plane. His emphasis is still on a mission that can be run cheaply and scrubbed at any point.

This year he’s talking like this: “The way to make a combination rocket and jet is to design the best rocket motor you can. You don’t need a good jet. Using ambient air is a miracle anyway; scoop it any way you can, but when you run out of atmosphere you need a rocket.” If he’s right I could design it myself.

But the point may be that he didn’t have pictures. Lots of attendees didn’t have pictures.

In previous years I’ve come home with some beauties. I remember scrambling for posters that showed three proposed variations of X-33. This year, Mitch isn’t giving away secrets and Gary isn’t either. It would be good to think they’ve got something to keep secret.

Jeff Greason of XCOR Aerospace isn’t depressed.

XCOR are the new businessmen, and at least some of them came straight from the downsized Roton. They want to build whatever someone wants to buy. Maybe rocket motors for someone else’s spaceplane. Maybe a replica of the Bell X-1, upgraded by fifty years of aerospace technology; they already have designs for that. But customers for antique warbirds seem more interested in flying a remake of Hitler’s armed rocket planes, so it may be they’ll build that.

XCOR looks like serious business. They ran a tiny rocket motor in the ballroom of the Holiday Inn, with full approval of the fire marshall! They passed out earplugs first. The rocket is in an open box of clear plastic. They did a demonstration Friday, and it worked fine, and they repeated it Saturday and it worked fine again, on time both times.

Laser propulsion remains big. Tests have pushed us a little further in that direction.

Jordan Kare continues to refine his designs. Originally he wanted to use defense lasers from SDI (Star Wars), which are pulsed, for launches whenever there wasn’t a Final War going on. Those didn’t get built, so his current vehicle would fly via a noncoherent diode laser. He wants to use it to launch nuclear waste out of the solar system. He’s ready to build now.

It still feels like that’s long years away.

But TGV Rockets wants to build a reusable, medium-payload sounding rocket, low thrust takeoff, that carries a man. I’d ride that. My reaction surprised me: I had no interest in the tourist aerospaceplanes, because they weren’t ambitious enough. This less ambitious craft would go to the same place, but it has a purpose . . . something beyond winning the X-Prize, though it would do that.

This year we’re thinking like businessmen. That’s good, right? Dreamers we’ve got. We need the Man Who Sold the Moon.

“WET MARS”

I’m just home from Hawaii and the West Coast Science Fiction Convention. Bridget Landry, Hugh S. Gregory, and Ctein updated us at a panel discussion: “The Year in Space.”

Ctein has a lot to say about Mars and water. I’ve oversimplified his picture, no doubt, but it’s plausible:

Any underground water is kept liquid by overlying pressure and Mars’ internal heat. Where there are openings to the surface, they’re plugged with ice. Growing pressure or tectonic action might cause water to burst through into the near-vacuum. Then we get to guess how far it can run downhill while simultaneously boiling and freezing.

<space.com> shows pictures of regions around a crater rim where liquid seems to have flowed. Notice that nobody has actually seen water.

Implications?

Life has been found everywhere on Earth that we find water. Frozen, boiling, fresh or briny, something loves it. Would this carry over to Mars?

Deuterium ratios suggest that Mars has kept more of its water than was previously thought. The options for evolution look sparse, but if a life-bearing meteor from Earth smacked deep enough through the martian crust a billion years ago . . . yeah, I could write that.

But it’s fiction.

From the Dean Drive (a reactionless motor) through education-by-ingestion (information transfer through feeding educated flatworms to each other) to plants that talk back (gah!) to cold fusion, we’ve seen too many miracles disappear on close examination.

Still, assume it’s true. What does a wet Mars do for us?

We don’t need motivation. We already wanted Mars. NASA’s budget would go up; they’re willing. To persuade Congress . . . look, these same career politicians were told that the ozone layer was about to break up over the United States, just before a NASA budget decision. They’ve seen decades of this crap. Water on Mars?

Forget motivation. Does this help us colonize Mars?

We can’t count on finding useful water: water for drinking, or reaction mass for a fission rocket, or water to electrolyze for breathing-air, or for oxygen and hydrogen for fuel. The first humans on Mars would be crazy not to bring their own. From that viewpoint, Mars is no closer.

In the intermediate term, drilling for water would make it way easier to found a colony.

In the long term . . . ?

Look, we’ve found marks around a few craters. Water is being surmised; life is wild speculation; civilization on Mars is a daydream given to me by my Uncle Larry, an Edgar Rice Burroughs fan. We haven’t found the Mars of our childhood. We won’t.

We need to build it.

To the man who holds a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. I’ve been working on terraforming lately.

Terraform: to reshape an extraterrestrial environment to match the Earth. More practically, create a habitable environment starting with . . . well, Mars. Terraformers all seem to think Mars is their easiest handy target.

They’re probably right, but—let us assume power in huge amounts becomes cheap enough to heat a world. Fusion might do that. Then reaching Mars becomes easy, because heat can become thrust for vehicles, but water becomes the bottleneck. Shall we look again at Titan or Europa?

Tides keep Europa’s deep water liquid. Ganymede is farther out from Jupiter: decreased tides, and less infrared radiation too. Ganymede, though largely water, is probably solid. Good for mounting a mucking great rocket motor. What would you get if you dropped Ganymede into Europa?

Or Europa into Mars? With sufficiently powerful motors, this might become as easy as dropping a lesser mass in comets, and much faster. The comets do the job, but it takes centuries longer to find and move them; and though you must whack the planet with the same gigatonnage of water, Europa’s rocky core would bring Mars’ gravity closer to Earth’s.

If we can’t terraform Mars, all else is also beyond our ambitions.

So the second question is, how much water must we add to Mars to get something close enough to the nicer parts of Earth, comfortable enough to live on? How much water is already part of Mars? Don’t worry about whether it’s liquid. It will be when we’re ready to use it, after we finish pounding and heating the planet.

From this viewpoint, whether water on Mars is liquid now doesn’t matter at all.

But the first question is, where are we getting our arrogance?

If the Environmental Protection Agency isn’t screaming at us, it’s because they don’t yet take us seriously. Let’s look at this from the viewpoint of college students trying to impress each other with picket signs:

Mars could still house life. Genocide is a recently invented word, though the crime is much older. We don’t have one yet for exterminating the life of a world. I took bashing Mars with Jovian moons as an extreme case. The other end of that is, dare we dump bacteria-laden mass from our landers before we take off again?

If we flinch at making life difficult for spotted owls and spawning salmon, how can we dare do this?

How long must we study this alien world before we can be sure it doesn’t host life? We might be better off finding life, then demonstrating (via DNA and protein analysis) that it came from Earth. Life on Earth had more room to evolve; Martian life would not have survived us.

If Mars is dead, can we mess it up?

Look: for centuries we’ve studied this world. The canali aren’t there, granted; in time we’ll build them. But now we have the biggest mountain in the universe, with a crater you could house the Hawaiian islands in. We have a canyon that could swallow Earth’s Grand Canyon. A vastness of crescent dunes. Polar ice flow that hasn’t been studied.

Sure we want domed cities on Mars. Yes, it would be nice to walk around on this alien land with just a mouthpiece and goggles. How much will we change Mars before we’re satisfied? Even the most limited terraforming scheme would destroy every mark we ever made on the maps of Mars.

Tell me you didn’t flinch.

I haven’t even memorized most of these features, but I’ve spent daydreaming time on Mars, and written of what I saw. All gone.

But these runnels are a hopeful sign. Water on Mars . . .

PART FOUR
COLLABORATION WITH JERRY POURNELLE AND STEVEN BARNES

INTRODUCTION TO BEOWULF’S CHILDREN

The Legacy of Heorot was a triple collaboration. Its sequel was to be even more complicated. We set the first book in an impoverished ecology, an isolated island on an alien world. When we set forth to show the wild, complex ecology of the mainland, we imported Dr. Jack Cohen from England to help us. He’s a top biologist, with emphasis on fertility in everything that breeds, and he’s a rabid science fiction fan.

He brought us a design for an alien crab. Over the week we spent working on the beginnings of Beowulf’s Children, that crab took many forms as it evolved into every niche on the planet.

I’ve chosen for you the discovery of the Scribes . . . which appeared in Heorot only as scrollwork on a vast grassy veldt, “writing” big enough to be seen from orbit.

BEOWULF’S CHILDREN

“Skeeter reports a large animal in your vicinity, south-southwest of you, Katya.”

He and Katya putted along in the two-seater trike. The loss of Stu weighed on all of them, but especially Katya. She had clocked over a thousand hours with him in that skeeter. It had to hurt.

Her night had been filled with bad dreams. This morning she didn’t remember. She was brisk and perky, as if she’d slept better than Justin.

They had buried Stu where he fell. They all wanted some kind of ceremony, but Aaron didn’t agree. “We will remember him at Shangri-la,” he said. Stu was a Bottle Baby, never adopted. No relatives among the First. Aaron and the others were the only family Stu had, and they let Aaron speak for them. . . .

Now they were taking back the trophy, their only intact grendel head. A trade.

He found his hand creeping to cover hers. She widened her fingers to access his. The small motion seemed somehow more intimate than the times she had welcomed him into her body. Her eyes, golden with flecks of green, sparkled at him. The bandage was still in place.

“Let’s take a look,” she said.

Justin said, “Cassandra, give us a local scan for grendels.”

All of Cassandra’s considerable eyes and ears were suddenly concentrated on the area. A relief map glowed on the hologram stage, blank at first, filling in rapidly.

There were no grendel-bearing water sources short of the river thirty-five klicks away.

They would avoid the river. The herd would water tomorrow. Their skeeter would have plenty of time to clear out the water hole before the herd arrived. Now, where was Cassandra’s “large animal”?

Justin popped the clutch and headed out toward the site, south-southwest. The grass grew higher than his head. He tried to keep one eye ahead and one for the little holostage where Cassandra had given them a skeeter’s-eye hologram.

It showed a cleanly geometric trapezoid, pale brown on a baize background. An Avalon crab, Justin thought, seen from nearly overhead. Where were the legs? They must be underneath. That looked like tufts of hair along the edges. And he ought to be getting close.

He could see pterodons circling overhead . . . and nothing ahead. He was seeing through a curtain of grass. Then he wasn’t, because they’d driven out of the grass into a neatly cut lawn. He grinned, speeding up, enjoying the view. High grass to left and right. Still he saw nothing of a mystery creature, until Katya spoke.

“We’re looking at the aft end. Justin, we’ve found the Scribe!”

Scribe? Perspective came. It was almost half the horizon, a geographical feature moving slowly away from them. It was camouflaged, but that wasn’t it. He hadn’t seen it because it was too big!

Katya was laughing at him. He’d gasped like a dying man. Justin said, “Cassandra, sanity check. Could this be the Scribe? The thing that draws paths we see from orbit?”

“It leaves a path identical to the Scribe tracks,” the computer said. “Absent conflicting data, this is a valid conclusion.”

They moved closer. No sign of eyes, this side of the beast. Not much detail at all, just the edge of a tremendous shell, the color of bare earth, moving slowly away.

It didn’t waddle. It cruised. In its wake the grass stood a few inches high, dotted with truncated haystacks two feet tall. Droppings?

Something like a tremendous flattened crab slid up to one of the heaps, moving no faster than the Scribe itself, and over it without a pause. A juvenile?

Talking to himself, talking for Cassandra’s records, Justin drove the trike into the grass again. Three pterodons were circling high above him. He rode half-blind through the prairie grass, swinging wide around the now-invisible beast. “Don’t want to startle it,” he told Katya, and was suddenly whooping.

A small fist whacked him between the shoulders. “What?”

He could hardly speak for laughter. “Pictured it rearing up. Pawing the air. Don’t mind me.”

He must be far ahead of it now. There was a stand of horsemane trees, uphill. He pulled the trike into their shade, turned off the engine, and waited. The pterodons were still with him. A fourth came to join them. One peeled off and flew toward the Scribe.

A thing that size . . . it wouldn’t try to plow trees under, would it?

They were on a slight rise, three kilometers ahead of the chamel herd. Down below them, now more than two hundred meters away, was the largest creature that Justin had ever seen in his life. A crab . . . clearly derived from a crab shell, like the Avalon crabs, like the fixed-wing birds. But you could build a city on its back! Or a village anyway . . .

In fact, a pterodon was landing on its back to join more than two dozen others. Five merged circles, a communal nest, sprawled along the front of the shell.

A deep blue line ran across the front of the Scribe at the level of the grass. It seemed to ripple. Lips, or just a lower lip . . . maybe.

Otherwise nothing about the beast was in motion. It slid along like a raft on a wide river. Any motion must be taking place beneath the shell. Others of its kind, Avalon crabs and bugs and birds, made do with four motive limbs and endless ingenuity in the shapes of their shells.

Katya rose from her seat, lifted a pair of war specs, and gave a low whistle. She nudged him, and passed them over.

The beast was even more impressive when seen through the glasses. As large as—“Cassandra, is this the largest animal we know of?”

“Negative. The blue whale is larger. This is comparable in size to the largest of the herbivorous dinosaurs.”

“Thank you.” The edge of the shell dipped to become skids or skis. A half-dozen snouters grazed placidly along one flank. The beast was as large as half the main colony, and flat. It must have nearly the mass of a blue whale, but it was flatter, and wider than it was long.

There: eyes. Justin had thought they’d be higher. They were bedded in the long, blue lips, too low to give the Scribe a decent view. He zoomed on one eye, and it was looking back, examining Justin and Katya, utterly unconcerned.

It wasn’t until Justin focused the lenses more carefully that he saw what Katya was excited about.

There were grendels hanging from the shell. Two . . . no, three distorted grendel-shapes hung from the front and side of the shell, like hanks of hair. Dummies, not quite skeletons, but long dead, he judged.

Katya was saying, “Looks slow. Let’s take a closer look.”

The Scribe continued on its placid way as they approached. Five pterodons rose to circle above them. Snouters scurried away around the curve of the stupendous beast. They didn’t seem terribly worried. The little Scribe, if that was what it was, hadn’t been afraid either. But those dried corpses were grendels!

“Cassandra,” Justin said, “backtrack.”

The trike’s little holostage sprouted a relief map of the locality. Cassandra recreated the beast’s path as it meandered among similar paths in the grasslands. There were other curves and loops of lighter grass on the flat prairie background, and they crossed only rarely.

“How close does it get to running water?” he asked, but he saw the answer as he spoke: the path dipped to touch the river, and lingered there.

Cassandra said, “Quite close, and frequently. The path often parallels waterways.”

“Does it enter known grendel territory?”

“Affirmative.”

“Thank you,” Justin said. “Hallelujah.”

“There are things that aren’t afraid of grendels,” Katya said.

“Obviously. Not this creature, not its young. Not the pterodons nesting on its back.”

“And the snouters?”

“Don’t know. Maybe they stay on the veldt when Momma Scribe drinks.”

Justin stood up on the seat of the trike to watch the creature. It drifted like an island, placid and unconcerned, as if it had never been threatened in its life. Indeed, it was difficult to imagine what could harm such a beast.

He raised the binoculars and focused on one of the mummified grendels.

The four mummies looked about the same state, the same age. That might have been a coordinated attack, for all the good it had done them. Each was hanging by its tail.

“Its defenses seem to be passive,” he said. “Its sheer size, and something about the shell that traps grendels.”

Katya asked, “Some sort of mucilage?”

“More like Velcro. Maybe. I want to see.” He levered himself off the trike and walked through the high grass toward the Scribe. He pulled his microphone aside and told Katya, “You could put a castle on this thing. Come. I will make you Queen of the Scribeveldt.”

The shell was all pentagonal plates, like shields a couple of feet across. Shields, and white tails hanging between the edges, here and there. Bones?

Cadmann had spoken of Roman army shields: the warriors held them in a closed array, each warrior’s shield guarding the man next to him, in the days of swords and spears. Roman shields would trap enemy spears . . . like Velcro; he’d been right about that.

Katya said, “Not a castle. Tents. A pavilion, a summer palace. The serfs will have to wear special shoes.”

“Yeah, wouldn’t want to hurt the shell.”

He was vaguely aware of a skeeter’s buzz, far-off and insignificant, and almost didn’t register it until he heard the voice in his earphone. “What in the hell are you doing!” Jessica asked.

“I’m getting closer,” he said. “This thing could care less about me.”

“You don’t know that.” Her voice was irritated.

“It’s good to know somebody cares,” he said.

Jessica brought the skeeter closer and watched Justin and Katya approach the mountainous Scribe. The lawn behind it stretched to the horizon. It was easy to imagine such an herbivore trolling the entire continent, perhaps looking for a mate, collecting a herd of animals who hid beneath its shell for safety.

It was impossible to imagine a carnivore of equivalent size. Even blue whales, while technically carnivores, were passive filtration feeders. The malevolent Moby Dick had been their little brother. So Justin was probably safe. Probably.

Still.

She was irritated. She wanted to be mad at him. He had sided with Cadmann against them, against Aaron, and was a traitor of sorts, dammit. And he wasn’t really her brother, for all the talk about two mothers and a dad. Justin’s father was Terry Faulkner, he wasn’t related to Cadmann at all, and yet he’d sided with the colonel against the Second. She wanted to stay pissed at him, but hated the way her chest hammered in response to the visual input.

Dammit, dammit, dammit. Only Justin and . . . and Aaron. Only the two of them could drive her this crazy.

He was twenty feet from the creature now. Its eye, a spheroid four feet across with a black iris, its tiny-seeming eye was on Justin and it just didn’t care. To Jessica he looked so small. She could see his point. He was nothing in comparison to a beast such as this. Why should it pay him any mind whatsoever? And yet . . . and yet . . . Avalon Surprise.

The pig things snorted and ambled away. They were rooting around in the grass, moving when they had to stay ahead of the Scribe’s long blue lip.

She brought the skeeter in for a closer look, and the snouter looked up, more alarmed by the whirring, flying thing in the sky than it ever was by Justin’s presence.

“What are you doing now?” she demanded.

“Getting close-ups for the record. Jess, Chaka is going to absolutely love this! I’m looking at the bones of a grendel’s tail, with a couple of vertebrae still attached. The rest of it could have fallen off years ago. The spikes on the tail are caught between the edges of the plates of the shell. It catches their tail spikes and they can writhe themselves into a coma for all the good it does them. These bones, they’re cracked—”

“Cassie!” Jessica howled. “Where are your safety overrides?”

“Working,” Cassandra said, and went silent.

It came to Jessica that checking all of Cassandra’s protective measures might be the work of months, or lifetimes. “Cancel that last question. Cassie?”

“Canceled. Justin is safe by my current parameters,” Cassandra said. “I have backtracked this creature over the past year. It is not an aggressor. Grendels do not survive in its domain. I find no other local predators thus far.”

Current parameters. “When were your current safety parameters updated?”

“Eighty-seven days ago.”

Three months ago. Edgar had been fiddling with Cassandra, likely at Aaron’s instigation, giving the Second more freedom to explore.

“Might as well join the madness,” she said, and brought the skeeter down a hundred meters away from the moving mountain. The Scribe didn’t look able to move quickly, but she didn’t want it accidentally changing course and crushing her skeeter.

She was glad to see Katya up and around and looking so damned chipper. She didn’t completely agree with Justin’s choice of women, but what the hell, she didn’t really have anything to say about it, did she?

The wind came cleanly through her lungs as she jogged toward them through armpit-high grass. The rapidity of her approach seemed to attract Momma Mountain’s attention, and it turned its eye sluggishly toward her. Taking her time. It was impossible to imagine something like this having any potential speed.

Justin was only ten feet away from it, playing his camera over four sets of trapped bones. One was no more than several joints of a grendel’s tailbone. The others were distorted mummies.

It seemed clear what had happened. Momma Mountain had approached the river to drink. Each grendel in turn, or all together, had made a suicidal charge and gotten stuck. Each had thrashed . . . that one seemed to have actually pulled some of the plates loose, but it had done it no good. It hung limply, its bones cracked, as if it had shattered itself in those final convulsions. As if it was too powerful to live.

The great herbivore’s lip rippled steadily, mowing two-meter-high grass.

“We have to see what’s going on under there,” Justin said. “Drop a camera—”

“Harden it,” Jessica said, as if they’d been talking all along. “It’ll get chewed up.”

“Yeah, hardened, with a light—”

“A little light. Camera set for low light.”

“Right, it must be permanent night under there. We don’t want to blind . . . a whole damn ecology under there, I bet. Cassandra, we need that camera. How long to make one up?”

“That will depend on priorities. The practical answer is that I can get it fabricated in Camelot and put it aboard the next supply shuttle.”

“Tell Edgar.”

One of the pig things came close, evidently emboldened by the nearness of Momma Mountain. Jessica took a step toward it, and it scampered away.

Justin’s expression was hard to read. He said, “Watch this.”

Katya echoed that. “Watch this,” she said, nearly glowing with pleasure as Justin crouched, extending his hand. It held a handful of balled grass. He was very still.

At first the snouter just stared at him, but then it came close, and then closer, and then she couldn’t believe it, but the thing was eating out of his hand. It had actually begun to lick his hand when it suddenly shook its head, startled at its own boldness, and backed away.

Justin brushed his hands off on his pants.

“What was that all about?” she asked.

“Dunno.”

“You taste like a meat eater,” Katya said, and licked his ear. He laughed, and put his arm around her.

Jessica found herself feeling enormously irritated. “Well—is it safe to bring the herd through here?”

“Safe as houses.”

“We’ve got a water hole up ahead. Half a day.” She didn’t know why she said the next thing, but she did. “It was mapped as a grendel hole last month. You want to be in on the kill?”

“Sure.” He kissed Katya briefly. “Katya—you take the trike, I’m going for a little skeeter ride.”

Katya looked at Jessica, smiled, then pulled Justin around for a real honey of a kiss, long and deep and sincere as hell.

Jessica decided that she definitely didn’t like Katya.

PART FIVE
COLLABORATION WITH JERRY POURNELLE

INTRODUCTION

Jerry Pournelle tracked me down with intent to collaborate, around 1970. He swore he’d make me rich and famous, and he pretty much has, and vice versa. We’ve twice held the record for the highest advance paid for a science fiction novel, for Lucifer’s Hammer and Footfall.

We’ve been friends throughout. We once owned a boat together. We once drank, smoked, and played poker together. Now we hike. It’s easier on the brain.

Jerry was the core of the Citizens Advisory Council for a National Space Policy. During the Reagan Administration we evolved the Space Defense Initiative (or “Star Wars”) plan, which drove the Soviet Union bankrupt. Of course they were already hungry. Socialism starves to death as soon as it runs out of capitalists.

We’ve published ten collaboration novels. Our generic goal: to save civilization and make a little money.

We wrote this for the 500th anniversary of the discovery of the Americas.

“WHERE NEXT, COLUMBUS?”

He was not a Spaniard.

He invented nothing.

He had every intention of becoming rich.

You’ve known these things since grade school; but you may well have missed the point. So let’s try again—

Christopher Columbus was not a Spaniard. Precisely what he was isn’t clearly agreed. Some say he was the son of a Genoese weaver, others say he was the scion of a family of converted Jews. His own biography, written by his son, claims his kinship to the Count Colombo of Montferrat, but few believe that. It is more likely that his father was Domenico Colombo, weaver and owner of a wineshop in Genoa; and it is certain that he was a Genoese citizen, since we have transcripts of his evidence as a witness in a trial there.

He became a merchant seaman, then merchant adventurer, and whatever his ancestry he had enough ability to move into ever higher society. Eventually he traveled to Portugal and married there the daughter of the Governor of Porto Santo, the companion island of Madiera, so that he could claim Portuguese citizenship if he wanted it. He was introduced to the King of Portugal, and proposed to him a voyage of exploration. Those negotiations came to nothing, and he moved to Spain, where he made the same proposals.

These were his demands: that he was to be Grand Admiral of the Oceanic Sea, Viceroy for life of all lands he discovered; that he would collect ten percent of the whole commerce of any lands he discovered. This was an enormous price, and he stuck to it through all. He insisted on his price and perquisites even when that was all that stood between him and his expedition. This was what he proposed to the Portuguese, then to the Spanish, and he would not haggle or compromise. He would risk all that was his, he would risk ridicule, discomfort and death, but he wanted the fruits of his labor.

He was no innovator. Despite the legends, anyone worth talking to knew that the World was round, and most knew its size. In 1481 Pope Pius II himself observed that nearly everyone was then agreed that the world was round.

Columbus had a vision of wealth and commerce flowing from an expedition to “India” or the Japans. So did others; in fact, nearly everyone who thought about the situation knew there was a vast potential for riches if a new way to the Orient could be found, and quite a few merchant adventurers were convinced a ship could sail around the world.

Somebody else’s ship. Let someone else take the risks.

The analogy with the modern world is striking. Five hundred years since the voyages of Columbus, the planet has changed almost beyond recognition; but Columbus’s time has come round again.

First, most planetary scientists understand that there is vast wealth in the solar system; that 90 percent of the resources easily available to mankind are not on the earth at all. Space is a potential source of both minerals and energy dwarfing all others: a new world indeed, and a new world that’s fairly easy to get to if we build the right tools of access.

It’s hardly a secret. It’s just that no one quite wants to be next to go there. We’ve landed men on the Moon, and planted a flag. Unfortunately, we didn’t really claim the territory, and we haven’t settled on it, and we haven’t exploited it, and we haven’t provided access to it. Going there was a stunt. Once it was done, it was thought that it didn’t need to be done again; but everyone knows how to do it.

Second, the United States seems determined that no one will get rich from space exploration. Robert Heinlein’s The Man Who Sold the Moon tells of an entrepreneur who risks everything to open the routes to the Moon. Heinlein’s Delos D. Harriman, already rich, risks everything he owns; but he expects to get richer, and to make a number of others rich in the bargain. In the novel he has the hidden motive of being in love with space itself; of being not the hardhearted businessman he appears to be, but a dreamer. Still, he hides that well. To the world he looks to gain more wealth from exploiting the Moon.

In real life, no one has made a nickel from the Moon.

The Apollo program was terribly expensive, and every dime of the money was spent on Earth. Of course some companies got rich; but they made their money from building the ships, not from commerce. It’s as if the only profits to be made from Columbus’s expeditions went to the Brothers Pinzon at Palos who built the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria.

There’s more to the story. Martin Alonzo Pinzon planned a westward voyage of discovery before he ever met Columbus, and he and his family financed Columbus’s final and successful trip to the Court of Ferdinand and Isabella the Great. Columbus was no navigator; he never did learn to use the sextant or calculate a latitude. Indeed, his reputation as a shipmaster was so bad that no sailors would join his expedition until the Pinzons were brought in.

Yet Columbus was needed. The Pinzons had never been able to persuade the Spanish Court to grant them the concessions and titles that would allow them to become rich from the voyage. Columbus’s trick wasn’t to sail west—others thought of that, and had the means to do it. What Columbus managed was to get the Court to grant him his titles and tithes: to give him the means of enriching himself from the commerce that would follow a successful voyage.

Isabella pledging the Crown Jewels to finance the taming of a new world. What a concept! As if we could finance a lunar base by imposing a tax upon each member of Congress! At least they would then have some interest in building a cheap, effective space program—

But even Columbus couldn’t manage that.

The Spanish Court contributed some money for his expedition, but that wasn’t decisive. Despite the myth, the amounts actually advanced were fairly modest: a one-time payment of less than one and a half million maravedis, or under 2 percent of the annual Spanish budget. The United States spent more in proportion to our annual budget on Apollo, and more again on NASA’s incredible shrinking paper space station.

What was decisive were the titles and concessions: Columbus, and his private backers the Pinzons, were assured that if they were successful, they’d get rich. The Spanish government pledged that it wouldn’t simply confiscate the rewards of success. There was no “Moon Treaty” to confiscate the resources of the universe for some mythical “common heritage of mankind.” Columbus would keep what he earned.

Finally, Columbus wasn’t a Spaniard. Provided that he would be allowed to keep the spoils of his success, he’d have been willing to sail for his native Genoa; for his wife’s Portugal; for Spain; or, as a last resort, for Genoa’s archenemy, Venice. He didn’t have an introduction to the English Court or he’d probably have tried that. He certainly faked negotiations with the French—indeed, a feigned visit to the King of France was the decisive event in causing Isabella to order the Court to give Columbus the contract he demanded.

If Columbus proposed a Mars Expedition to the U.S. government today, what would happen? It’s extremely unlikely that he’d be granted any concessions or monopolies. Our civilization no longer believes people ought to get rich.

The wealth of eternity is over our heads. The energy of an entire star. Metals from asteroids, chemical wealth from gas giant planets, titanium on the Moon. For years we’ve told these truths to ourselves and each other and anyone who will listen.

And they do listen! In this year 1992 AD, anyone worth talking to has at least a vague notion that the wealth of Fantasyland is to be found in space. Test this for yourself. Ask a bright friend:

What killed the dinosaurs? (Giant meteoroid impact.)

How does anyone know? (High iridium content in the clay laid down at that time. It’s vaporized asteroid. Meteoroids are rich in metals of the platinum family.)

Iridium? That’s valuable, isn’t it? (Yeah.)

They know; why don’t they care?

Because an entrepreneur must gamble everything. Because his best opportunity is to go broke. Because even if he wins his gamble, his winnings may go to the IRS, or some other government office, or some random lawyer.

When the Gang of Eight Stooges collapsed in Moscow, nobody ever interviewed Ronald Reagan. Why not? Did he not have some hand in encouraging the decline of the USSR? Or is it perceived that Soviet communism collapsed of its own basic flaws?

Whatever. We have our own problems—

Ours is a capitalistic civilization. The Soviets used to remind us of that from time to time. Now the Communist Empire has collapsed. They’ll try to learn capitalism; but who will they find for an example? Who will remind us that we’re capitalists? Who will remember that the essence of capitalism is that big risky ventures let you go broke—or get rich.

You won’t learn it in universities. The economy of a university runs very like the upper levels of the old Soviet Union: dominance games are played for salaries and funding, and what is produced—educated students—is nearly irrelevant. There’s nothing of capitalism in universities.

You won’t learn it from NASA. When NASA had money and it looked as if there would be a lot of trouble-free shuttle flights, NASA had a favorite trick, a trick favored by our railroad barons of the late nineteenth century. Robber barons don’t like competition; they would really prefer a monopoly. Whenever anyone tried to invest money in space activities, NASA would undercut their price, offering to provide the same service for less, using tax money. And NASA had become as powerful as a hydraulic empire. Their beaurocracies cannot be destroyed.

When you’re in orbit, you’re halfway to anywhere.

You don’t have a space program if you don’t have a vehicle. The United States has no program to provide access to space for any but a handful of specialists. There is no way you or I or an average businessman could go to space.

Yet the price need not be so high. Access to space is possible, at costs comparable to the cost of first-class transoceanic air flight. Space costs so much now because it is designed to cost so much. It need not.

There is in the United States a new breed of rocket ship designer. These are people who grew up around the old rocket industry, but also grew up knowing how to use small computers; who understand the new lightweight structural materials, and who have learned how to keep things simple.

These people have repeatedly proposed programs costing less than a billion dollars, to build spacecraft amenable to airline-style operations.

The ships they envision would fly to orbit, return to any of a scattering of cheaply built spaceports, and fly again without having to be gutted like a fish, receive new entrails by implant, then be covered anew in new scales. The SSX—Space Ship Experimental—program has been evaluated by dozens of expert committees, and no one really disagrees that spaceships that operate like airplanes can be built.

But to make it work, we need Columbus again, or D. D. Harriman. Mankind will not have begun the conquest of space until somebody has been seen to get rich from space.

Christopher Columbus was not a Spaniard, but he brought Spain a great empire of wealth and resources. The New Columbus may not be Japanese . . .

PART SIX
COLLABORATION WITH STEVEN BARNES

INTRODUCTION TO ACHILLES’ CHOICE

Steve Barnes is a health nut. He holds black belts in karate and judo; his diet is rigorous; he lectures and he trains people for longevity.

The background we shaped for Achilles’ Choice fits his strengths. Thus: those who rule the world have reshaped the Olympics to include more than physical feats and skills. Athletes are reshaped to fit the domains in which they compete, trading health for fitness, becoming cyborgs. We follow Jillian Shomer, an Olympic contender, on the path that leads to her success, and a shadowy figure called Saturn.

Saturn, the nerd, fit my strengths.

ACHILLES’ CHOICE

15

It took nearly forty-five minutes to push through the reporters and the crowds at Kennedy Airport. It was all a smiling, churning mob.

In twos and threes, the Olympians were hustled into cars. She caught sight of Donny talking to a phalanx of reporters. His smile seemed just as warm and sincere as ever. His gaze slid across her without stopping to focus.

She was ushered into a car with the Bulgarian Gilbert and Sullivan devotee. They waved at the crowd like newlyweds.

Once the car started moving, she closed her eyes and leaned back into her seat. The long-postponed fatigue came crashing down on her. Or else it was emotional whiplash from the changes in her life . . . or jet lag . . . or the beginning of the death that comes with Boost.

In a few days there would be another operation. She would be one of the Linked then, part machine, and death would no longer be inevitable. Death would come when she lost a dominance game . . . whose rules she had better learn quickly.

The Bulgarian put his hand on Jillian’s arm. “Your name is Jillian?”

She turned.

“I am Jorge.”

His square face was too close; his elbows and knees occupied too much of the space. He was one of the runners, tall and attenuated. Folding him into the car had been awkward. Any second now he’d go Sproing! and pop through both doors.

He grew tired of waiting for a response. “We don’t know each other, but we will both be Linked now. Special people we are.” He grinned infectiously, and she thought of Sean, lost love, left a world away. “Perhaps we could spend some time . . .”

Her smile was broken from overuse. She said, “I think we both need rest.”

It sounded stupid; small wonder if he didn’t take the hint. “Soon. We are both staying at the MGM Grand Hotel?”

The car had stopped for a traffic light. Jillian opened the car door and stepped out. To the astonished Bulgarian, she said, “Later. Sorry.”

She just couldn’t face any more faces.

The traffic was moving again. She wove her way to the curb in a blare of horns, stepping on bumpers, vaulting over hoods, swinging across an overhead rail. She was too tired to word-dance with a man on the make; but not too tired for fell-running in traffic.

Did she have to go to the MGM Grand? Her luggage would be going there, and she’d need a phone to get a reservation elsewhere. She would regret her rudeness later. Send him flowers? Ask him to dinner and apologize? She might need Jorge as an ally. She looked about her for a subway entrance.

The old concrete had taken on a thousand different shades. Time and travelers had worn ruts in the floor. The shops, gates, ticket dispensers, and barber booths varied from sparkling new through venerable to decrepit. The lighting was uneven; one could imagine muggers in the shadows.

Parts of H. P. Lovecraft’s “Dream Quest” had been filmed in these ancient tunnels, ten years before Jillian was born. Those were the scenes where Carter lived among the ghouls.

Jillian used her credit disk to summon food from a noodle dispenser. She ate while she unraveled the maps on the walls. These days she seemed to be hungry all the time.

She wanted platform 28, an L car. Just get her luggage, find another hotel, and go.

It was deep in the bowels of the earth, down an escalator that seemed to run all the way to Hell. New York’s subways had a bad old reputation. Charles Bronson and Bernhard Goetz no longer sprinted up and down the escalators . . . but their prey, the muggers, were gone too, and Jillian Shomer could break any ancient mugger in four pieces without working up a hunger.

The platform was occupied. A little girl held her mother’s hand. The girl was maybe eight years old and small for her age, all in pleated cotton print. She had long red hair that might never have been cut at all, falling past her shoulders in a scarlet cascade. She looked at Jillian for three minutes, while a score more of passengers gathered and avoided each other’s eyes. Finally the little girl screwed up her courage.

“ ’Scuse me,” she said politely. “Aren’t you Jill Shomer?”

Jillian smiled, and gave a small nod. The girl’s mother glanced sideways a little, gave a quick, nervous smile, and stared straight ahead.

A gleaming silver tube six cars long emerged from the tunnel with a silent puff of air. Four cars were marked as L’s.

The little redhead’s eyes never moved from Jillian’s. “I saw you on the vid,” she said worshipfully. “When I grow up, I’m going to be an Olympian! I want to be just like you.”

Jillian’s smile drooped.

The cars opened. The girl’s mother dragged her toward a front car. The redhead waved frantically. Jillian turned to find a less crowded car, and locked eyes with a tall, wiry man with square-cut brown hair and a florid complexion.

Sean!

Sean Vorhaus gaped. Then he waved, pointed, and half ran for the last L car.

Jillian followed, already becoming irritated. He could have waited! These cars came through every fifteen minutes. How did he know they both wanted a local? And what was he doing here, and why hadn’t he told her? Oh, maybe there was a message waiting for her at the blasted MGM Grand—

There were six people in the car, with seats for at least twenty. Weird. A moment ago it was as crowded as the others. Sean must be at the back. She’d thought he was at the back—

The doors had closed.

These little airtight cylinders were in use worldwide. They ran on independent motors and switched back and forth from train to train, from locals to gravity-assisted cross-continental vacuum tubes to tunnels that ran beneath the oceans—and they were too small to hide in. Where was Sean?

She’d missed him somehow, and the other six passengers were staring at her. She sat down next to an old Hispanic woman. Now only a chubby late-teen in loose creased pants, white shirt, and a vest sweater was still looking at her. She waited for the 38th Street platform.

The train hummed along in near silence. The dim light fluttered a little when the car reached its first switch point. The train slowed. The cars decoupled, and rearranged with cars from other lines, clicking back together and heading down new lines.

There was an odd bulge in the boy’s sweater, like a small left breast. The kid was soft, undermuscled, overpadded. His eyes flicked toward her every few moments. Wearily she thought, Again?

The car dropped. Jillian stifled a scream of surprise. There was a soft pop. They’d passed a seal, into vacuum. The car was still falling, still accelerating. But this was a local line! They shouldn’t have—

Alarmed, she glanced at the other passengers. They were taking it very well, suspiciously well. None of them had moved. In fact . . . they were fewer.

They were disappearing whenever she turned her head!

Now only the kid in the sweater was left.

The car was still falling through the Earth.

Jillian made herself relax as Abner had taught her. If They wanted to kill her, there were a thousand easier ways . . . and her fear of death, she discovered, was gone. Clean gone.

She asked, “Are you a hologram, too?” He had to be. She was getting her first good look. Wrinkles in his pants. Buttons, zippers, glasses—He must be as old as the subways.

The kid smiled back at her. “I’m the Old Bastard,” he said.

16

She asked, “What’s that on your chest?”

Of the myriad questions whirling through her head, she’d found one to surprise him. His smile flickered. Then he pulled his sweater over his head. There was a pocket in his rumpled shirt, and a clear plastic envelope in the pocket, and a dozen colored sticks in that.

“Shirt protector.”

“What’s in it?”

“Things for writing and drawing. These days I’d have a wrist link, or just use the neural net. Ever see one of these?” He pulled, from a pants pocket that couldn’t have been deep enough, a flat wooden stick painted white with fine black markings. “My father had one. Slide rule.”

She remembered: a slide rule came somewhere between an abacus and a pocket calculator. “That must be worth a fortune.”

Almost unconsciously, her hand had drifted out toward it. Her “ghost” snatched it out of reach in a gesture reminiscent of a ten-year-old protecting a sheaf of trading chits. A sheepish smile. “Let’s save some time, Jillian. The Council doesn’t know about this interview and never will. The car is headed for Denver. So’s your luggage. The records will show you arranged it all yourself. Half the passengers in another car are listed as traveling on this car. So we’ve got plenty of time to solve any little mysteries that are still bothering you, but let’s not abuse it, okay? I need some of my attention for the rest of the planet.”

PART SEVEN
COLLABORATIONS WITH BRENDA COOPER

INTRODUCTION

Brenda had written a draft of what became “Ice and Mirrors.” The science to back it up popped up fortuitously soon afterward: a geologist who had worked on the “frozen Earth” scenario handed me copies of his papers at a convention.

It’s startling stuff. I learned late what every geologist used to know: that the Earth has a stable state. If the Earth were ever frozen pole to pole, its albedo would be so high (it would reflect away so much of the sunlight falling on it) that the Earth would never unfreeze. Evidence now appears that the Earth has been in that state four times! How do we warm up again? How do we recover from an Ice Age at all? The solution is quite strange and satisfying.

In similar fashion, “Free Floaters” popped out of an article in Science Magazine. Astronomers are finding a variety of extrasolar planets, and the flood hasn’t stopped.

Brenda and I are working on a novel of terraforming: Creation Myth.

“CHOOSING LIFE”

“I’m going to try this. Christa, I have to. I can’t face ending. I go in tomorrow for the first mapping.”

His hand in mine felt papery, insubstantial. I knew the hope that would carry him forward into this odd choice, knew he’d become like morning fog to me, gone into dreams. I swallowed hard, said simply, “It’s okay, Rafe. I’ve always allowed you to do what you want.”

“I know.” He squeezed my hand, the soft embrace of an older man comforting a special friend. It brought him from fog to physical. Deep moments always turned up my senses; the soft crackle of new fall leaves became louder as we passed into a dry spot under the trees, and I could smell the water of Lake Sacajawea. A cool wind lent pinkish color to his white face, and I pressed closer to him, seeking warmth. “They’ve tested us,” he continued. “It’s been ten years since old Bill Kurzweil became the first. They say I’ll be smart like when I was twenty; I’ll be able to think better, to remember things. I’m going to write articles about what it’s like to become myself in a new form.”

“The ghost in the machine.” I meant it to be a comfort, but the words were edged with my own fears.

“Better than just a ghost. I like the butterfly image better.”

“I’ll miss walking with you.” I ducked my head low into the damp, hid my face from him.

“I can leave you messages.”

“You’ll forget me.”

“No. How could I forget you?”

Where Rafe was going, time moved faster than real life. He’d feel ten years for my month. There was no way to respond—people need to hold whatever illusions mean something to them.

“Look, Christa, we’re about half machine already.” He pointed to the box on my belt, the dots all showing green to indicate health. The light on the end pulsed evenly with my heartbeat. “You’re full of computers so small you need a microscope to see them. Me too. It’s just another step from nanodocs to being digital.”

“This digital thing is in fashion with the kids,” I offered helplessly, as if that would keep Rafe from wanting this. “We’re so old we never even fell for rap music. Neither of us is pierced, and we don’t tattoo our faces.”

“We exercise. We do yoga. We fell hard for wrist reporters and then nano,” he said simply.

“There is that.” If it would keep us alive longer, we chose it. But I wouldn’t choose this—it just wasn’t human. I’d rather just die when my time came.

“What are you afraid of? Wayne and Ali are okay.”

In some sense, sure, the Constant Companions were okay. There had been a ceremony that wasn’t called a funeral, but ashes had been present. We had e-mail that said they were happy, loved their new work, and we should come join them and be young again. It sounded like a postcard from Puerto Vallarta, but someone else already lived in their old apartment. I preferred to think they had simply moved away.

I said, “I’ve never been much of a computer type. Oh, I use them, but what would it feel like to be one?”

“Now, Christa, you know they say you don’t become a computer. You live inside one. That’s different. You feel, well, like yourself. And hey, if I don’t find out, I’ll feel nothing soon.”

“I know, Rafe. I know.” We never said dying. Does the butterfly leave behind a dead caterpillar? I glanced at his waist. His belt recorder showed green and yellow, the heartbeat light fast yellow. Alarmed, I slowed down.

We finished our daily path around the lake without talking much. Rafe pointed out a blue heron, and we watched it glide low and sharp until its fine angles intersected the fog and it turned to shadow, then mist, then nothing.

He invited me over for the evening. I had thought romance mostly behind us, but he had made a good effort. A four-inch pillar candle was centered on the table, flanked with new tan placemats. Round wooden leaves held russet cloth napkins. When I fingered one of the little yellow leaves, he told me he had carved them, and he would leave them for me if I wanted them.

There was potato soup, topped with real cheddar cheese that melted into orange rivers on the white peppery potato surface. He had also made bread, and cut it precisely using a long sharp knife engraved with his name and his last wife’s. It said Jeanne and Rafe, forever, May 12th 2022 in fine curled script. I knew that forever had been ten years, until she died of a cancer that would have been cured if she’d chosen nanomedicine. We dipped the bread carefully in the soup, laughing companionably as warm potato dripped from the crust onto our chins.

Rafe kept a library of classic videos. He chose the original Judy Garland version of The Wizard of Oz and we curled up close on the couch, spooned, as if we were young enough to be lovers. His arm lay over my thick waist and he rested his palm on my breast, unmoving, a warmth, comforting. My back leg caught in between his longer legs below the knees so we were one tangled being. I smoothed my thin gray hair to keep it from being in the way of his breath.

As the movie in front of us burst into color, I heard him murmur softly that all of the actors and writers and cinematographers were dead. I said maybe they’d gone over the rainbow, and he replied that maybe he would go there soon. I asked if he could take ruby slippers. He said he thought not.

We parted after a long wistful hug and a single soft dry kiss on the lips. As I left, he dropped the little yellow leaves into my palm, as if his arthritis-thickened hands were tree limbs.

When I woke up the next morning, I thought about his choice for a long time. I had forgotten to ask him which digital world he was joining. I knew of one for design engineers, one for historians, and one filled with biologists. There was even a world for performance artists and musicians—there were ads in my weekly updates from the Musicians Guild. The ads referred to us as “biologicals” and inferred we’d be shown up musically by the “digitals.” It mentioned the recordings of groups that had gone wholly digital, and released new work that was doing well in the charts.

There were singers doing digital work who’d never released a song when they were physical. One was a still-famous mathematician.

Eternal digital life was probably in my means.

I read Guild literature to keep up on insurance benefits, but of course I read other sections too. No one I’d recorded with had been mentioned for a long time.

After a series of rather creaky slow sun salutations to pull me into the world, I climbed up the stairs to Rafe’s apartment to ask him which world he’d picked. The door was open, the super standing in it so I couldn’t see around his broad back. He turned at the sound of my steps, and shook his head at me.

“Rafe?” I asked, even though I saw the answer in the super’s face.

“His heart gave out last night, Christa. I saw it on my monitor when I woke up. The paramedics will be here to take him soon. But I guess you can go in.”

I did. He was lying on the couch where we had lain together just hours before. He looked empty and small, his thin bones curled into themselves and no breath in the hollows of his cheeks. I recalled the heron fading into mist. After standing there for a bit, I sat down next to him and waited silently for the paramedics. The lights on his monitor were all red and blinking, the only thing moving in the room except the super’s shadow on the wall. A few more weeks and he’d have been part of a machine. Not my dream, but at least his own. Now he had nothing, was nothing. Empty.

I didn’t cry then.

Every day I walked as quickly as I could manage around the lake, feeling that if I moved fast enough the shadow of his death could not catch me.

Every day for a week, until the morning I woke up cold and shivering with fever. My monitor showed yellow lights mixed with green. It looked like Rafe’s had. The diagnostics said I had the flu. Only flu . . . but I spent two days hardly able to move. No one called.

By the third day the nanodocs had got it cleaned out. I went to the lake and walked around as best I could. Just halfway around, my breath was so shallow I needed to sit down. I found a bench engraved with the names of dead people, nestled in bare elms very near the lake bank. The surface of the water rippled in response to a cold wind and I pulled my coat close about me. I had talked about moving south to sunshine for thirty years and yet I had never gone, pinned in place by my love for the lake and my few friends, half of them dead now. Eventually Rafe held me here also. He would walk with me every day, taking on summer heat, months of rain, and sometimes a light dusting of soggy northwest snow.

I was healthy enough there might be a thousand more days I could walk the lake. Maybe more. It looked like I would walk most of them alone. Could I do that?

Could I really take becoming sicker and older with no human help?

Would a digital world be less lonely?

My stomach tightened with these thoughts. I didn’t want them. They twisted into the shadows I’d been trying to outwalk, and made a sour taste that crept up my windpipe. The bench felt insubstantial and I held its edges with palms down, slowly breathed into myself, fighting to focus on the breath more than the fear.

There would be no stepping backward. New laws said that no one could live in both the physical and digital world. A form of population control, it fell squarely in the middle of the long battle about assisted suicide. The courts had blessed it. But what if you died there? What if there was a bug in your program, your recorded self? How could I do this thing?

As with the nanodocs: in the end there was nothing to lose. There is something compelling for the old in dreaming of being young again. The risk grew while I waited. Like Rafe, I might miss my chance.

Piles of papers had been signed for weeks, wills discussed, and then the thing could finally be done.

The first mapping session was too small for so significant a passage. It was a like a regular doctor’s visit. They placed me on a bed in a smallish room with static flowered wallpaper on two walls and a full-sized wall-screen built into the third, playing an obnoxiously calming ocean scene. A nurse came in and attached two tiny electrodes to my temples with clear, sticky gel, pushed some medicine and instructions into my nano-monitor, and I drifted to sleep. Hours later, screeching seagulls invaded the ocean scene and woke me up. I felt exactly like myself, creaky and a little disoriented.

As I sat up, the nurse came in and removed the electrodes. She helped me wash, smiled, and said that the doctor would be along soon.

Dr. Nelson was half my age, purple-and-silver tattoos shimmering on her cheeks as she bounced in. I managed a smile as we did introductions.

“I’m pleased to tell you that you tested okay. Your brain and nervous system are healthy for your age. In fact, you’re a really good candidate. Now, has anyone explained this procedure to you before?”

I nodded.

“Okay, well, I’m going to do it again so I know you’ve heard, but I’ll keep it short.”

She looked at me expectantly, so I nodded again.

“People are essentially patterns. You are a different pattern, in your brain, than I am. All of our cells change regularly, but our pattern changes only as we change and grow; as we learn. Your pattern as a child of seven was more like your pattern now that you are eighty-seven than my pattern would ever be like yours.

“Now, these patterns, mine and yours, are stored in our nervous systems, primarily our brains, but some of it runs all the way through our bodies. We can read the arrangement of neurons in your brain and nervous system and re-create it as a singular entity inside of a computer. It’s not a program, any more or less than you are a program now. In fact, it works like you do now, but faster. It works like you, is you, in perfect health.”

“So while I slept, you read my neural patterns? So you have a recreation of me in the computer now?”

“Um. Now, we did scan you. And we fed that into a holding area, a place we test personalities before we release them into one of the net communities. For you, that’s the Avon Bards Performance Group’s net that is full of other accomplished singers and musicians, with some others who chose to opt in because they want to learn that or just love music—”

“Or think they have talent.” Been there, done that. “So there’s a copy of me stored in a holding area?”

“Let me finish, Christa. No, there isn’t. We can’t have two conscious Christa Alexanders at once—it’s illegal. So while you slept, we tested the ‘download’ and then erased it.”

At that, she got quiet for a minute, and fiddled with the wall screen controls.

“Something more active, please,” I asked. “Maybe something with birds and wind and rain.”

She smiled at that. “Most Northwesterners want to see sunshine—scenes from California or the Southwest.”

I pushed away the thought that they had just murdered . . . something. Not me. I pulled at my hair quietly, testing to be sure I was physical. I was.

“So,” I asked, “what happens next?”

“Well, now we know it’s possible. Your final appointment is set up a week from now, and in between you’ll meet with an outside counselor. They deal with affairs and legal issues—and you met at least one of them before you got this far.”

I nodded.

“So, when you come back, you’ll be scanned just like today. A new scan, so you’ll remember what went on during this next week. That time, we leave the body asleep, and the new Christa will wake up digital.”

She waited for me to say something, but I didn’t.

She continued. “You’ll have a body. A perfect one. Digital, but the ‘self’ needs a body to interact with, at least so far. The new Christa will get to explore for a time—weeks by your measure—while being kept in the holding area. There will be help for you there, and the rest of your questions can be answered. Some questions can’t be answered until you have the context for them, it can’t be helped.” She was talking fast. Maybe she had another patient waiting.

“You’ll be in holding for hours, or less, by our measure here, and we’ll let the old, discarded physical body sleep. Then the electronic version of your personality makes the final choice. Stay or go.”

“But I’ve already made the choice,” I stated.

“It has to be done this way. Partly, so we know that you, the electronic you, are complete. Then we put the old body to sleep permanently. Many new digitals say it’s like trading old clothes for new, except better, indescribable.”

“You do hear from them, then?”

“Yes. They communicate with us quickly. Lots of data, actually. That’s why so much, for example, new music, in such a short time. This has only been an approved procedure for two years, but half the music you can buy is made by digitals. It’s the time difference. But remember, that makes our ability to communicate with digital people much harder—it’s slower in that direction.”

I hadn’t known about the music, about how much was digital. Probably I hadn’t wanted to. Maybe that was something to run toward, like loneliness was something to run from.

I smiled at the doctor and went out, heading for the lake and the cold biting wind.

The week went in fits and starts. I wrote a long letter to those few family members I knew well enough to even remember, revealing my choice, not explaining why. Sometimes I stopped in unlikely places to run my hand over physical things. In a grocery store, the roughness of a tangerine, the cool beads of moisture resting on bottled juice. Each day I went to the lake. The last day I sat and cried on its bank for hours, savagely loving the pain, the damp shivering, and the cold knife-edges of the grass under my palms. That day I brought the fine wooden yellow leaves that Rafe gave me, to fling them in the water. Instead, I arranged them artfully on an empty bench by the playground, hoping some living woman would find them.

The next morning I dutifully performed my sun salutations before dressing. Mountain pose, inhale, reach for the sun, exhale, and come down, right foot back, and on. Tightening muscles, stretching tendons in places where, eleven years ago, I hadn’t known there were places. I’d taken up yoga after the nanodocs got me out of the wheelchair.

I dressed carefully. As I left my empty apartment, I threw away my nightclothes. The six-block trek to the clinic took years.

I went in alone. There was one last paper to sign. My hands shook as they signed the Death Warrant.

The procedure was the same small thing. The only difference was my fear as I lay down, sharp and edgy. I wanted to know these last moments with all of my senses, to be alive until the drug swept me to sleep.

I wanted the lake. I wanted earth falling through my fingers as I bent at the feet of ripe corn. The wind as I ran. The awkwardness of early yoga coupled with the release of savasana pose. Joy of singing. Joy of singing.

My eyes opened. Shut. Colors, bright, and yes, eyes open, yes, so bright.

“She’s waking.” A soft whisper, as if it came from all around me.

Back, back to savasana. Closing my hands, wriggling my toes. Sitting up. My hands swept into Namaste, eyes open. Perfect rounded nails with white moons in them. Smooth pink skin, the blue veins of age become memory. I took a deep breath, moved one flawless hand to my stomach. It kept going as if my stomach were insubstantial, then landed on smoothness, on the concavity at the end of an exhale.

It wasn’t me. My stomach wasn’t so flat, my nails were ragged. I was . . .

“Is she ready?”

“I don’t know. Patience.”

I spoke. The voice was different, silkier but still my words. “I’m awake. I’m afraid.”

“Of course.”

“We’ll help. We know.”

“We know.”

“Welcome, Christa.”

“FREE FLOATERS”

He’d been told years ago that flying into a major Empire station under power was a declaration of war. Eric had to take the ship’s boat halfway to (Chksh)-Wenshee Station, leaving Pair O’ Deuces in wide orbit, in Kimber’s care. The station would send a tug and tow him in.

The small boat, Jack of Eagles, was little more than a box with a clear front window, room for four seats—a bit cramped—the Pillbug docking system, and a light fusion engine. Eric had figured out how to add fuel tanks, losing two seats and some acceleration. The boat was all of human manufacture, though its belly—the docking system—was shaped to Pillbug specs.

Eric watched the unfamiliar star pattern Kimber had dubbed “the Joker Nebula.” Red dwarf stars made mad misplaced slanted eyes; a twisted glowing line for a reddish orange grin, a wisp of green-lit gas above the eyes. He picked out details while he waited. That dark blotch off center might be taken for a bat—

The tug that drifted out of the Joker was a flat plate, windowless and featureless. It was marked with the interspecies Don’t Touch symbol, which looked like a proofreader’s takeout mark and glowed like a neon bar sign. Eric released Jack of Eagles’ controls and watched the tug disappear under Eagles’ belly. It mated to the underside with a barely sensed click.

Eagle surged.

(Chksh)-Wenshee Station grew from a naked-eye speck in the Joker to an irregular jumble of masses. A stalk sprouted from one side, like a ripe dandelion. That would be the Domain. It grew to a shimmering bubble big enough to engulf a moon.

His nose was almost touching the window. I must look like a kid, he thought. But this station was a legend.

Transparencies resolved inside the larger transparency. Thousands of tiny habitats clung to the basic spheroid, multicolored, some ringed with lights, some flashing, some opaque silver to benefit an agoraphobic species. The habitats brushed gently against and past each other, changing their shapes to accommodate. It looked like soapy foam.

They weren’t all small. One bubble held hundreds of individuals all the same shape, though he couldn’t identify the species. Nearer now, he watched two bubbles merge, saw figures inside them drift toward each other and touch. Tinier bubbles changed shape as they crawled through the mass.

Then (Chksh)-Wenshee Station rotated around and his view was blocked by cargo bays and spacecraft. Eric relaxed into his chair and watched. He passed between two huge ships—one as featureless as the hatbox shape he and Kimber had flown to Trine ten years ago, the other festooned with equipment and attitude jets and . . . and what might be weapons . . . a Christmas tree as built by the Grinch. More ships, tens of ships, and only three of them types he recognized.

Now he passed bulky cargo ships and containers. Many of them were marked with the Don’t Touch symbol. One of those containers was his to take. He lost a game of guess-which-one to himself.

It had been two years since he was in so populous a place; six years since he and Kimber had been home on Earth. He was in love with the view. It was like visiting the Emerald City.

Jack of Eagles settled among connector cables agile as snakes. Eric felt the click; he saw the tug drift away. (Chksh)-Wenshee Station had docked him.

A ribbon of gold sidewalk snaked up to Pair O’ Deuces’ airlock. He stepped onto it and found gravity, not much. Martian or less. The ribbon carried him away.

It looped and curved and joined other gold ribbons in a maze that twisted through three dimensions of cargo space. More ships: fascinating shapes. Where the paths forked, the flow of the ribbon made his decisions for him. He’d never seen this exact system, but it wasn’t that different from other stations. And now he’d reached the base of a vertical pillar—the stalk—turned a right angle and was on it, riding upward.

There was precious little of free will in this place, he thought impatiently. He started walking, and the flow speeded up.

Life forms streamed past him, up and down the pillar. One multi-legged citizen was running but not moving, using the system for exercise. The sphere grew to a world, and then his path turned again and he was standing on the surface.

He’d heard stories. He knew what to do next. He walked at the froth of habitats, ignored by their occupants. He pushed into a wall and his own habitat formed around him.

The Joker Nebula grinned down through the curve of ceiling. The walls were shallow curves at odd angles. Now what? He was in a bubble. The broker he’d come to meet was in another, somewhere out there.

He looked for controls. Nothing. He pushed around with his hands. Still nothing. How would they do this? What technology provided options? There was furniture in some of the other bubbles.

Verbal? He said, “(Chksh)-Wenshee Station Control, please. Language English.”

It rose from the floor: a silver pillar, waist high. It asked, “Your desire?” in a voice the match of his own.

He had put it in an outer pocket of his travel suit, a card engraved with Da Vinci’s sketch of a man. It was a meticulous description of the needs of human physiology, given pale UV-sensitive skin and allergies to penicillin, cat hair and macadamia nuts. He showed it to the pillar. A laser winked at it.

Gravity and pressure changed. He opened his helmet, breathed. It worked. Magic. These moments always made him feel small, invoked awe.

This could be fun! He ran his fingers through his hair to get out the helmet-clumps. He’d shaved. Eh, what would an alien notice? Good thing he’d bathed, though. Kimber usually did the negotiations.

“Guide me.” He’d been given a number code: the broker’s address. He recited it. Ripples of light ran across the floor, and he followed the ripples.

He tried to watch in all directions at once; caught himself. He must look like what he was, a tourist. But some were watching him, if those were eyes, and the shy ones had opaqued their habitats. Kimber would have said it was the one thing all these life forms had in common. They’d come to see . . . perceive, she would have said . . . to perceive the universe.

So Eric looked back.

Six indescribable shapes dissected a shape different from their own, behind a wall like dark glass. Blood dripped like yellow paint and disappeared when it hit the floor. Banquet? Eric was nauseated.

Black wall, black wall. Rainbow wall, and a flow of shadows that it hurt to look at. Then a wide floor-to-ceiling window, and two tremendous creatures wrestling in front of an audience. Wrestling, or mating? They didn’t look like the same species. A small individual brushed them with a yellow laser dot, and they broke the pose.

Wrestling.

He saw a dozen centaur-like citizens turn from a discussion, looking up. He followed their gaze.

A monstrous bulk pulled loose from the cargo bay, a ship the size of a city. The whole station quivered. A tiny arrowhead eased past it, surely a ship’s boat like his and Kimber’s Pair O’ Deuces. Everybody’s a tourist. . . .

The ripple in the floor changed its pattern. There, straight ahead of him, seen through a wall like wavy glass: a spidery creature and a smaller . . . hominid . . . human? The spider’s shoulders extended a black clump—too small for a head—a sense cluster. It looked like the pictures: a Hyunpa.

The human beckoned. Eric waved back.

His habitat bumped against the other, clung, and then the invisible barrier popped. His ears popped too, pressure change, and they were all in one large bubble.

The Hyunpa bowed its head. Keep an open mind, but that extended sense cluster was still a head. No mouth. He couldn’t see its lower body. That was blocked by a brick shape with stuff on it: a desk. Long multijointed arms rested on the desk.

The woman sat in lotus position on a sage-green cushion, below her boss’s level. At least the Hyunpa thought this meeting important enough to have a same-species assist. But what should he do next?

The woman saw his problem. “Take something from the server, taste, then introduce yourself.”

That was an unspeakable relief. He asked, “Server?”

The silver pillar had followed him, but now the desk was lit in bright orange crawling with black graffiti. Eric saw what she meant. The desk was a server, was his host’s server, and to use his own would be seen as mistrust.

Eric showed it his Da Vinci cardkey. The graffiti changed to English. Eric studied his choices.

Many races needed diet supplements. Supplements could be vital to trade, peace talks, settlements of succession in an empire or corporation. Some supplements increased intelligence or wariness, others suppressed a natural paranoia or a mindless coming-into-season. Drug laws would be impossible at an interspecies meetpoint, and alcohol was the least of what a server could make available to a human.

Most of Eric’s choices were for recreational substances. The coffee bean: no! Aliens wouldn’t brew decent coffee. He chose crossed hops leaves. A window opened with a drinking bulb, frothy and bitter smelling, like a micro-brew.

He tasted it. Perfect. Fermented? In the server? But the server knew what it had given him; its monitors would prevent even voluntary poisoning.

“Introduce yourself,” the woman reminded him.

She had red hair down to her waist, eyes such a deep blue they had to be tinted, freckles that looked real on creamy skin. She was younger than he was, fresher. She was the first human woman he’d seen in nearly two years, barring Kimber, and she was stunning. Her scent reminded him of ocean froth and salty wind, and fresh cut grass . . . but that would be the Hyunpa. Eric tore his eyes away from her to bow to the broker.

“I’m Eric Keenan. I’m here for information and supplies for the Pyth project on Baent.”

The woman turned toward the Hyunpa and spoke to it, high trilling sounds and a complex whistle. He only understood two words: his name. She cocked her head and listened carefully to the reply, then turned to Eric.

“You may call me Safe-Dealer-in-Goods. My use-name is”—a high trill, fast, it hurt his ears a little—“but even Martianne does not speak it properly. Your reputation precedes you, Eric Keenan.”

How was he supposed to take that? He was relieved when the woman continued. “Allow me to introduce my translator, Martianne. She will assist you when we have completed our business. I submit a manifest listing all items we believe you will need to complete your survey.” The desktop displayed a list in English of somewhat whimsical grammar. “There are also optional items, and Martianne will help you choose from among those. She has some knowledge of survey teams herself.”

“I am much relieved,” Eric said.

“Are you familiar with free floaters?”

“Only with the concept,” Eric said. “We find massive planets not associated with any star, five to thirty times as large as our own Jupiter. We of Earth don’t know if chaos and gravity flung them—” He stopped. The alien was speaking.

Martianne said, “Worlds form where space grows dense, usually in strings within clusters, where mass points in the local neighborhood guide the interstellar winds into a stream rather than a whorl. In the Orion Nebula we find free-floating superjovians, twenty-six and counting, all a few million years old. We find also an intruder of mass five-point-six Jupiters, age three to four billion Earth years, formed elsewhere and gravitationally captured. We have made contact with tool users in its atmosphere.”

“In—” Eric chopped it off. Their instructions had spoken of a free-floater planet, but he’d been picturing Baent as a black moon, otherwise roughly Earthlike, circling a bigger version of Jupiter or Saturn. Baent was the floater itself?

No species he knew of lived inside a gas giant. In the face of Martianne’s amusement, he considered what question would make him look least foolish . . . then discarded that notion. When he faced Kimber, he’d better have the data they needed.

He asked, “Are we to make contact? Why choose humans?”

“Of intelligent species, most cannot leave the locality they evolved in, cannot even claim most of their own world. Of space travelers, most have not evolved to speak to minds unlike their own. You seek out strangers. So does my own species, called—” The alien voice skirled like a bagpipe; Martianne said, “Hyunpa. It was I who was called to broker an agreement with the Pyth of Baent. I failed. You must try.”

“Failed how?”

“They stopped talking. I could no more find a Pyth on Baent than a sun.”

“Did they shy from your shape?”

“I thought it possible. I may seem too attenuated, too easily hurt. Pillbugs have an armored look they might appreciate, and Pillbugs make what the Pyth may buy, but Pillbugs can’t talk worth a bad smell. Thus we risk you.”

“What’s the surface gravity on Pyth?”

“There is no surface.”

No, of course not. Kimber would have laughed at him—and Martianne’s mouth was turned up with a slight quiver at the edge. He said nothing.

“The level at which Pyth live—” The spider-thing’s head retracted into its torso, then eased out again: a shudder. Martianne said, “Pull of gravity, fourteen-point-one times Earth. Pressure, two to three hundred atmospheres as measured at sea level Earth. Temperature, nine hundred degrees Absolute, your measure, varying by up to a hundred with every howling breeze. The ruinously expensive Deep Well Shield that was fabricated for me will mate to your small vehicle. You observe that I used it and survived.” The Hyunpa skirled something Martianne didn’t translate. In response the desk disgorged a blob of brown paste; the Hyunpa took it below desk level in two delicate fingers.

Eric always found living translators odd, the words they spoke about themselves in third person even odder. But he liked Martianne’s smile, even if it was amusement at his expense. Eric straightened his spine and tried to keep his eyes properly on the broker. They slid off regularly and locked with hers. This amused her too.

Throughout hours of slow conversation they arranged price, spoke of safety using the Deep Well Shield, and Eric chose from the optional items list: a high-end control board with translator integrated, three of the five available remote cameras (two of which were rated for over 14 G’s), and three boxes of tiny probes designed for gaseous atmospheres.

The Hyunpa shared some information in detail. The job specifications stayed murky. Contact the Pyth and obtain permission for a survey, with intent to terraform Baent. Do the survey. Share the information freely with both the Pyth and Eric and Kimber’s employer: the Overlord-run Interplanetary Mapping Service, which ran the survey schools and collected team data, regardless of who commissioned the work. About 25 percent of survey jobs came directly from the IMS, and all data from every job went straight to them.

He and Kimber were not terraformers. They were surveyors. Twice they had judged whether a world should be opened for terraforming. Those jobs had been done at the request of citizens looking for real estate.

Earlier Martianne had advised him on manners, but now she didn’t speak a word that was not the Hyunpa broker’s. In the end, she even held out her hand for Eric’s cardkey. Heck, Eric thought, the Hyunpa has hands, or close enough.

But he placed the Da Vinci card in Martianne’s hand. After all, he’d spent most of the exchange rudely looking at her rather than the broker. He did remember to turn and bow.

As he straightened, Martianne handed him back his card.

Safe-Dealer-in-Goods’ legs bent and straightened, then it spoke something that Martianne did not translate. The habitat budded: a new wall formed, closing off the Hyunpa and its desk. The Hyunpa walked away. Its desk sank into the floor.

And now Eric was alone with a beautiful woman, in a bar/hotel with a galactic reputation. It was a good reward for two years bouncing between the raw planets and rural outposts. Eric smiled at Martianne. This was negotiation he understood.

Martianne smiled back, and murmured something that attracted the server’s attention. She handed him a beer, and softly said, “I’ve heard about you. They use two of your adventures to teach new survey teams—the Trine and Julth 2 escapades.” Her voice was lower and sweeter without the Hyunpa in the room. He felt his insides warming.

Eric called for a chair; a cushion rose under him and he sat. He sipped the second beer. “I didn’t know that—that they told anyone about Trine.”

“They used it to teach us about small survey teams. Getting out of trouble. Trusting aliens—or not. I mean, wow, that was soooo close! Where were you this time—I mean, what was your last survey?” Martianne asked.

“On Grasseth. It’s a cave world, and we almost died. Long-legged lizards with an antlike lifestyle. Kimber, my survey partner,” he said carefully, “figured out that they’re not actually sapient. Our results are allowing Grasseth to be populated, but not significantly changed. There’s too much indigenous life to allow terraforming. The Ygr will use it as a park and hunting ground.”

“Where’s Kimber now?”

“Still aboard our ship, Pair O’ Deuces. She’s got a cold. But hey, how did you end up here?”

“I like languages. Translating is temporary, good until I get a survey. I hope it’ll make me a hot item for a team. I graduated from the Institute for Planetary Ecological Surveys five years ago—five years after you did. So we’d have missed each other.”

“That’s too bad. What made you decide on surveys?”

“Oh—I wanted to see the worlds.” She laughed. “And I needed to get away. My folks were asked to leave Mars, and I needed someplace to go.”

“Mars. Martianne. Asked to leave?” Mars advertised everywhere for settlers—they begged. He didn’t quite believe her.

“They’re eco-freaks. They destroyed some water pipes.” Was she blushing? “They’ve never hurt people. Except, one day, they flooded out the Overlord ambassador’s habitat. Mom and Dad, they like attention.”

Eric remembered—“The Graysons are your parents?”

She giggled again, no longer at all like the formal translator. He liked her even more.

“We had to go too, me and my brothers. And the damn newstapers were all over us . . . I thought I should put some distance between me and them.”

“So, have you seen your family since then?”

“No. I heard they’re terrorizing the belt now. It’s about setting aside some asteroids as national treasures before we use them all up.”

Eric raised his eyebrows. “Is there a shortage of asteroids?” he asked.

“Yes.” She said it with a completely straight face. They laughed together.

He used his own server to buy her a drink. She leaned toward him, not close enough to touch, and asked, “Did you get everything you need from Safe-Dealer-in-Goods?”

“Let’s hope. But when I asked him what went wrong with his negotiations, he changed the subject.”

“If he knew that, why would he offer you, or any other sapient, the credit for succeeding?”

“I’d be better off knowing of any blind alleys.”

“I wasn’t on that mission. Or any other.” She frowned into her tiny glass. “Maybe it’s because I don’t have a partner. The man I left Sol with, we just couldn’t get along.”

“Kimber and I were like that. Or maybe I was like that. We got some practice. Now we’re okay.”

“Mmm. But Wayne got a mission!”

“Maybe you’re too valuable as a translator.”

“Maybe he didn’t like me enough to take me.”

“What’s not to like?”

Martianne let that one pass. Finally, Eric said, “Well, sometimes personality is a big factor in survey team choices.”

She stared at him.

“The Trine mission, the Thray picked us for our ignorance.”

It didn’t help. Wrong tactic. He switched. “What am I supposed to do on Baent?”

Martianne looked past him, watching the tumult of habitats and movement. “Okay, first, you know from my translations that planets can form with no sun? Baent is a free floater. They’re usually too young to have life. But Baent seems to be an old one. It’s about fifteen times the mass of Jupiter, but it’s Jupiter’s size. Degenerate matter core. Fourteen G at the . . . not the surface . . . call it the sweet spot, where pressure and temperature and composition are all just right for the Pyth. The Pyth evolved in just this one stable streak of atmosphere.”

Now she was talking down to him. Maybe he’d earned it. He interrupted her. “Stable for billions of years?”

She turned defensive. “It has to be. They’re there. They did evolve. We don’t know how stable the Red Spot on Jupiter is, and Baent is extreme even by that standard.”

“What else do you know about them?”

“The Pyth are soft and low mass, like—do you know what a jellyfish looks like? A Pyth looks like a foamy jellyfish, hydrogen foam. Long tentacles steering from behind. They absorb gasses and aerosols for sustenance. Eyes everywhere. They communicate with each other by changing color—blue for too hot, yellow for too cold, green for good. They glow bright in the sweet spot, dull near the edges or if it changes—something to do with the quality of the gasses and aerosols they need. They school in family groups.” She reached for her wineglass. “The probes studied them for years before a mission was commissioned. I learned everything that was known about them. I was ready.”

Time to change the subject. “Pyth behavior sounds almost like cetaceans. Did you ever see a whale?”

“In movies.” Martianne raised her eyes to catch his squarely. “Eric, Pyth are . . . confused. Naïve. They talked with the Overlord machines, but we both know they didn’t see an Overlord. They avoided the Hyunpa, then sent them away.”

“So it’s our goal to be accepted? This is—early contact. Every other race we’ve talked with has been in the Empire longer than we have.” He took a long, slow drink of beer. “The Pyth can’t have ever seen stars. Surely they can’t surface. Anything new must be scary. They will have had a lot of information given to them by the probe. But it won’t be the same as experience. And if we want to get near them, Kimber and I will have to go to them—” He caught himself. Of course Martianne knew that. She’d been translating while he bought the equipment.

It was just so nice to talk to another human, and Martianne’s small features and fall of hair tripped his tongue; he felt like a teenager. “Sorry. I’m babbling. And, really, this will be different from any survey we’ve done! We don’t have to wonder if they’re sapient. That’s enough to keep Baent free of outside claims. Our prelim instructions said we’re actually doing a geological—or what passes on Baent—and trading information to the Pyth and the IMS. The Pyth want to terraform their world. Terraform a gas giant! Call it ribbon forming? Ribboning? They live in a ribbon of atmosphere—they want to make more, or maybe a bigger one?”

She didn’t respond.

Better switch to tea, he thought. He continued. “Who found them? I heard it was the Overlords themselves? Something with real Overlord probes, anyway. What will the Pyth trade with, or for?”

Martianne shook her head and shrugged.

“It’s so . . . different. They must have something someone wants?”

Now she spoke, “Dealer told me once that he thinks the Overlords want the Pyth themselves. They’re risk takers, and can navigate in gas giants. With Overlord technology, they won’t need perfect environments.”

“But the Overlords won’t just give them the technology?”

“Have they just given us anything?”

“Not . . . exactly.” The Overlords had decided they wanted to employ humans—humans had more flexibility and less arrogance than many other races. The payoff would be full citizenship, eventually. “We’re employees. Surveyors. Maybe the Overlords want us as ambassadors too?”

“If you can do what the Hyunpa couldn’t.”

“Dealer survived and came back. Heck, Grasseth was dangerous. We expect that now.” Too arrogant? Change the subject? “I’ve waited ten years to see (Chksh)-Wenshee Station! You live here?”

“Yes—”

“Are there any other humans here?”

“No.” She smiled.

“Hey, how do these work for sleeping? Are some of these habitats hotel rooms?” He couldn’t sleep in the boat, after all. He wasn’t making a pass, yet.

“Want me to show you?”

“Yes.”

Martianne ran her fingers through her hair. Eric’s hands itched to do that too—run his fingers through Martianne’s hair. Kimber’s hair was cut short for a pressure suit helmet, nothing to twist his fingers in, or to fall onto his face.

He pushed that thought away. Kimber was his partner, friend, and sometimes his lover. She’d almost left him a month ago. Martianne . . . Martianne was beautiful, and new, and they were the only humans in the Domain. Stars shone through fluorescent gasses behind and above her.

She stood; a waterfall of dress brushing her legs, and spoke. Eric’s pillow surged under his butt and was a circle of bed. It fissioned blankets. Martianne patted the bed and then turned toward him, perhaps savoring his flinch reaction. “Just tell it what you want. Bath, toilet, toothbrush . . . you’ll love the toothbrush,” she said. “Good night.”

What? In sudden haste, “Martianne, would you like to stay?”

“I have other business. Sleep well.” And she walked through the wall and was gone. Her bubble turned opaque silver as soon as it was free of his.

Damn. He rolled onto the bed and suddenly felt exposed to every other being in the Domain. He should have asked about that opaque walls trick.

He tried a few requests. He got silver walls and a transparent roof. The bath was water supported in a force field. He spent some effort describing a “toothbrush,” and what he got was disconcerting: the server gave him a horseshoe-shaped blob of gum, which he bit into. His mouth hadn’t been this clean in years.

And the view was wonderful.

Eric slept badly. The walls changed shape all night, and he was alone.

The tug attached itself to the Deep Well Shield that was now affixed to Jack of Eagles’ belly. When the tug let loose, Eric lit the fusion drive and took the controls. The Deep Well Shield doubled the dinghy’s mass. He flew carefully back toward Pair O’ Deuces, learning the new balance.

Deuces was a mansion compared to their first ship. That had been the hull section of a Space Shuttle II mated to the Wayfarer Basic that supported the aliens’ Shift Trick and Verification Link technology: a hatbox-shaped module marked with the Don’t Touch symbol.

He and Kimber were the only two-person survey team to make ten years without dying or quitting. They’d earned enough interstellar credit to design a better ship. A factory in the asteroid belt had built their cargo, tankage, attitude jets, and life-support sections, and mated it all to a larger Wayfarer Basic leased from the interstellar trade. They’d set the Wayfarer motor section aft, where Eric believed a propulsion system belonged. It looked like part of the bullet-shaped hull. In Eric’s view, Pair O’ Deuces looked like a spacecraft.

Deuces even had a see-through hull at the bow. They’d had to fight for that. The Sol system spacecraft industry used interstellar designs, and most Empire species flew by instruments.

Behind the viewing station was enough cabin space for a workshop, two bedrooms, and a galley that could actually entertain more than two people. And between life support and the Wayfarer Basic, a roomy cargo bay configurable a dozen ways.

Jack of Eagles no longer fit.

Eric didn’t waste much time trying. There were attachments, but they were in the wrong place. They could be moved, but only from inside Deuces.

He called Kimber before he departed the dinghy. This was the age of space, but Extra-Vehicular Activity was never a casual matter.

Kimber sounded awful, a raspy bass voice, but she sounded lucid.

He left the dinghy floating near Deuces, crossed into the cargo bay using a jet pack, and entered through the bay airlock.

He paused by a mirror before he sought Kimber.

He’d been avoiding the raw sunlight of space with too much fervor, maybe, and his skin was spacer-pale. There were white threads in his hair, and wrinkles around the eyes. He was thirty-three years old. Kimber had graduated with his class; she was the same age.

What had Martianne seen? She’d be five years younger than he was. She’d have to lose that wealth of hair to get into a pressure suit helmet, if she ever made a mission, and pressure changes would give her the same wrinkles he was wearing. Maybe she’d taken them for age.

Kimber looked awful: eyes and nose swollen and red, magic handkerchief clutched in her hand. “Chksh,” she said. “Dab Wayne Hasselblad anyway for giving me this. Chksh.”

“Great, now you can pronounce ‘(Chksh)-Wenshee Station’.”

“Chksh. Blow it oud your ears.”

“Don’t demonstrate.”

“Dabbit, why don’t the Overlords come up with a cold cure?”

“Because nobody wants to be test subjects, and we don’t either. Kimber, I had to park Eagle—”

“You said. What have we got?”

“Most of what I bought is a mucking great plate the broker called a Deep Well Shield. I played with it a little. We’ll have to be careful. It’s supposed to shield us against fourteen gravities, and it might hold a lot more power than that, so we watch those dials or we get squashed like bugs. The plate locks onto the grooves we use to lock down Jack of Eagles, so Eagle is going to be riding loose in the cargo bay. We’ll have to work up padding.”

“Ouch. Is (Chksh)-Wenshee Station fun?”

“Oh, yeah. You’ll love it.”

“How were you with aliens? Bodder you any?”

“I keep telling you, aliens don’t bother me. Some really are prettier than others. The broker isn’t one of the pretty ones. His secretary-translator is.”

“What species?”

He grinned. “Human. Martianne Grayson.”

She looked.

“She’s the only human on the Station. Red hair, freckles, my height.”

He tried to tell it funny. Kimber, sniffly and unsocial, was not amused. He gave up and wrapped up the story, “The robots mated the Deep Well Shield to Jack of Eagles. I found the other crates and got out of there to meet you. But you’ll have to see the Domain someday! Maybe when we get back. We can go together.”

“You’ll see her again. Bet on it, she’s the only translator they’ve got when humans show up.”

“It must be a lonely life.”

“Did you make it less lonely?”

“Tried to.”

“I dode see any bruises.”

“No, she only . . . I told you, she showed me how to make a bed and bang, she’s gone.”

Kimber just looked at him, shaking her head.

“Sorry. Martianne was cute. And we’re, well, I didn’t think you’d mind. You were almost ready to split us up to go off with Wayne Hasselblad. Kimber, I love you, but I’d have let you go.”

“I know. I’m in no position to complain about a girl.” She looked away. “It was just hard to stay here while you went. But you need practice negotiating, and oh boy, I am not a pretty sight. Chksh.”

“Any better?”

“It’s just a code.”

Kimber was still the nominal Captain. They had run the roles in both configurations, and this worked best. He knew her moods—and now he sensed a minefield. “Martianne hasn’t been on any surveys yet. Funny. She graduated five years ago.” He touched her short hair. “We’re lucky, you know?”

She nodded at him, looking uncomfortable with the conversation. “Whad else did dey send us?”

“I’ll park Jack of Eagles and we’ll see.”

It took Eric seven hours to wrestle the crates already in the cargo bay to new spots. They’d lose easy access to some clothes and extra food and gear, so he had to guess what they’d need and repack completely. Then he had to EVA again to tow the crates from Jack into the bay. Two of them took up valuable living space until he managed to park the augmented boat and brace it.

They unpacked the bulky crates together, Eric showing off the small probes and cameras.

There was a Don’t Touch etched deeply onto one big box with fittings on the outside.

“Safe-Dealer-in-Goods, the broker, said the Overlords thought we might need this. He called it a ‘Pyth refuge bubble.’”

They looked it over. It had equipment to attach it to standard ships hooks—the ones the tugs used. There was room for something else to bolt to it, on the opposite side. Something big. “I guess we’ll find out what it mates to after we get there. Martianne said she’ll send a Read Me file. That is, the broker did.”

“You neber read dose.”

She was kidding. Eric memorized instructions, directions, guidelines, and then distrusted it all until it could be proved. He said, “Maybe Martianne will know something too. She’s human. She can talk. Now, how about bed for you?”

“Leave tonighd?”

“We can afford a night’s rest. Maybe you’ll feel better, and you can negotiate with the Pyth. I recall the translator gets confused by colds.”

“Whad was the broker like?” Kimber asked him.

“I could look at it. Rather not.” Eric acknowledged Kimber knew his phobias. “There was . . . a lot of variety in the Domain. You would have been more comfortable than I was. But you’d have been proud of me. The broker looked like a cross between a spider and a dung beetle, and I don’t think he knew I had trouble looking at him.”

“Weren’d you looking ad the girl?”

“Sure. Both.”

“You like Pillbugs. You liked the Gry*nth too. Chksh.”

“Pillbugs are . . . I like the design.”

“Pillbugs are powerful.” Kimber dropped her magic handkerchief, swollen now but still dry, into the top of the recycler and took a fresh one from the bottom.

“Yes. And good guys. They saved us. It seems, maybe,” he was in dangerous territory, but still, “it seems like the best aliens are the most beautiful. The Thray were criminal, genocidal, and I couldn’t even look at them. I haven’t had that much trouble with any alien since. Maybe the best of us, the most advanced, the most evolved . . . are easier to look at, too.” He gave up. He was stumbling.

“Maybe id would be arrogant do use your sense of beaudy, human senses, as a measure. Besides, we are not bery advanced, and you seem to dink human women are beaudiful.” Kimber turned away and headed up the corridor to bed.

“That’s different, and you are!” Eric called after her retreating back. “Well designed. ’Night.”

She smiled over her shoulder. “Id’s wired in your brain. Nighd.”

At least she wasn’t mad at him. Eric spent an hour making sure everything was locked down for the next day’s trip.

Kimber woke with better speech.

Eric woke exhausted from bucking crates, muscles on fire. But he stayed at the controls: this trip promised too much for him to miss anything. Aliens sometimes made him squeamish, but interstellar flight was breath itself. There was no way he’d ever sleep through a Shift Trick.

As they cruised through the “no wake” zone around the station, Eric and Kimber shared ship’s coffee and choked down something breadlike from the Domain. They took turns dozing at controls. Then they were clear of (Chksh)-Wenshee Station, and Eric pushed the button.

The view screen blacked. Last time, they kissed through the short moments when the stars were gone. Kimber didn’t offer. Was it the cold? They held hands, Kimber’s head tilted slightly onto Eric’s shoulder, but away. Then the Shift Trick terminated and stars, new ones in new places, became a blanket the Pair O’ Deuces floated within.

There was light everywhere—young bright stars floating in Orion’s vast nursery, brilliant gaseous clouds of glowing matter, almost no place dark enough to rest his eyes even when looking through the tinted glass of Deuces’ front window.

Kimber pointed.

Eric’s eye followed her finger to an arc along one edge of the window, black moving on black, deep grays sometimes emerging, here and there a strand of dull white. Once a slice of brilliant yellow opened and closed, Hell glimpsed through layers of clouds.

Baent had its own internal light, and starlight, and no sun to shine a day alive. Moons: three black dots chased each other across the dark bands.

Eric nudged the drive. Deuces shifted, filling most of the view screen with planet. Baent’s edge was fuzzy, mesmerizing. A fog of gasses swirled where his eye expected defined edges. He watched Baent spit up a yellow flare in a broad arc, and followed the flare’s fall back inward as it softened into the filmy surface. There was movement everywhere, relentless. More black dots, not moon-shadows (no sunlight) but the moons themselves passed between Deuces and the planet. If there had been color, he would have thought he looked at a small sun.

Kimber turned off the cabin light.

Now they could see ribbons and whorls of gasses . . . the fractal turns of huge storms, curdles on the vaster bands.

He looked for civilization, but what would he see? No surface that could be built on, no satellites or space telescopes either. What could a tool user build in here? He kept at it, used familiar and unfamiliar instruments to help him. On the display wall he now had a row of real and false color mappings.

There. On a mapping in high infrared, on a band that ended in one of the larger storms, heat ran in straighter lines above the barely . . . differently . . . cool signature. Some kind of bridge? Highway? A canal rather than a river? It was all hot as a brick kiln, and reddish-brown whispered through black in visible light.

Time to announce their presence.

Kimber was ahead of him, already tuning communications and sending a signal directly toward Baent. Kimber as Captain had the option. There was an Overlord probe in there. It would have a camera. Their contract implied they must contact the Pyth on arrival.

“So Pyth live in chemical soup, no ground, no structures, nothing we would think of as planetary features,” Kimber said. “How big is the habitat band they’re supposed to be in?”

“Varies. It’s one to two kilometers deep and stretches almost around the planet at this latitude. Up to three thousand kilometers wide, sometimes contracts to half that . . . which would fit what we’re looking at. That storm . . .” The small whorl was moving across the face of the planet. More of the brown band followed it, and that too showed hot lines on the cooler background.

“Does it look like the storm is anchoring that band?”

“Uh huh. It’s not a big storm, though. Not like Jupiter’s Red Spot. Might not be as permanent.”

“Has to be stable, if that’s the zone.” Martianne had told him that. “Stable on the order of a billion years, even if it shifts around some. There has to be time for evolution.”

“Seems strange for something sapient to have developed in that. Life, yes, but sapience? What would drive a civilization?”

“Hmmmm . . . danger? Lightning and wind and the risk of poisonous atmosphere leaking into the home band? Rapidly changing place and size the Pyth are safe in? Breed other life forms as tools—”

“So they want to move the storm?”

“That would be screwy. The storm probably anchors them. Stabilize it or make it bigger, maybe, make the habitable band broader or just more predictable,” Eric said.

“How do we look around in that?” Kimber pointed at the planet rolling beneath them, much closer now. Eric was shying wide around a sulfur-yellow ellipsoidal moon. When he failed to respond, she said, “We don’t know much, do we?”

She was right, and it disturbed him.

He heard a soft whirr, and his stomach searched for his backbone.

The row of screens, the views of Baent, all became black silence. Then light levels adjusted and they were looking at dark greens and brighter reds streaming through rivers of clear air. There was no sense of perspective or size. The fog shifted oddly and a filmy green mushroom shape resolved, partially obscured by murky chemicals. Thick translucent tentacles trailed behind the Pyth, lost to view long before the ends passed the camera’s ability to resolve image from fog. A bouquet of marbles popped out of the main body, splayed in all directions, then tightened to focus on Kimber and Eric. Eyes.

How big is that? Eric didn’t ask. Kimber wouldn’t know.

The translator coughed to life, even though they couldn’t find a mouth amid the multiple eyes on the transparent alien in front of them. Wind filled the cabin: the Pyth’s natural voice. The translator coughed again, was silent a moment, then spit out English.

“Whistle-whistle-click-whisper greets Ambassadors.”

That had to be a name. Kimber sent the standard greeting: names and species, and (it wouldn’t help, but it was polite) Da Vinci cards. Kimber’s was a smiley-face.

“Welcome Eric Keenan and Kimber Walker,” came a measured reply.

Eric said, “Thank you. Shall we meet?”

“We wait.” The translator stopped, the Pyth’s image cut off into black.

Eric looked puzzled. “That was short.”

“At least—it—seemed friendly enough.” Kimber poked him in the ribs. “This time, we agreed, two for planet fall.”

“Hmmmm . . . Okay, Captain.” He ran his hand along her cheekbone, kissed her. His other hand roamed her backside. Graceful surrender. If Jack of Eagles needed rescue, they couldn’t do it with Deuces anyway.

She leaned into him, but didn’t return the caress. “There’s no room to lie down, and I don’t want to spread cold germs in there. We did it right the first time.” Her voice went campy. “Besides, alien beings await us! Away!”

It must be the cold, he thought.

What miracles lived behind the Takeout Signs? Eric often feared death would come from something he should have been told about the Overlords’ closed boxes.

The claims made for the Deep Well Shield read like fantasy. When Eric was half-sure that he understood the specs—you could never be sure—he dropped Jack of Eagles into Baent.

They fell a long way.

Baent was vast. It was hard to see the acceleration. Eric slowed them early, taking his time, playing with thrust and cabin gravity, eye on the meters . . . thirty gravities decelerating, twenty-nine compensating, velocity in thousands of kps and slowing.

Angle lateral, aiming for the habitable band. If they hit anything, they’d be plasma. Eric was leaving nail marks in his hands. Better boost the thrust to forty decelerating. The cabin gravity compensated automatically, set to point-seven G now. If the system wobbled a bit, Eric didn’t want to be flattened helpless, nor knocked against the roof. A big wobble was death.

Atmosphere set up a whine though the sky was still black. Below, a deep saffron curdle, a minor storm. Stars dimmed and went out. Murk rose up around them, and heat . . . but the hull was holding out the heat, at least for a while. Eric dropped them through what should have been the Pyth habitable zone at half a kilometer per second—hope no Pyth got caught in the sonic boom!—and brought Jack of Eagles back up, slowly.

Velocity: zero. G force: fourteen-point-one. Temperature: 930 K. Lots of sulfur and carbon compounds. This should be the middle of the habitable zone.

Kimber asked, “Hunt around?”

“Wait a bit. We should be conspicuous enough. The hull’s almost red hot. We’re a rigid object, there can’t be too many of those, and maybe the Pyth are four inches long.”

“Okay, rigid, but they have to be tool users, don’t they? They could build floating structures—”

“And we could hit them if I just tootle around. And I’m twitching. That was a ride and a half.” They weren’t quite at rest; winds were blowing them around. “I grant it’s hard to wait.”

“Eric.”

It was only a shadow in the murk, but—“It’s big.”

“Yow. Big as Jack of Eagles, and maybe a juvenile, because the one behind it looks bigger.”

“That could be an illusion. Lensed by the thick atmosphere.” They were both talking for the record now. The hull thumped as a tentacle patted them gently. “Want to try to talk?”

Kimber reached for the communicator and it spoke: a howling wind, and the word, “Follow.”

Several Pyth paced them, surging ahead in relays to show the way. They were faster than he’d expected, much faster. They didn’t demonstrate stamina, though. Individuals and clusters—family groups?—dropped back and were replaced every two or three minutes.

No two were the same. All of the Pyth showed bright colors here: healthy, well fed, according to what Eric had read. Eagle must be well into the sweet spot. Temperature varied—the Pyth flowed quickly between blues and greens, sometimes flashing yellow for a moment, never sustaining it. Maybe it never felt cool when they moved fast? It was a wonderful show.

“Jets!” Kimber crowed suddenly. “They’re using jets!” Eric grinned and nodded.

They took turns pointing out new pacers, made up names for them.

Lightning flashed constantly in the wind and churning activity that was Baent’s atmosphere.

Where were they being led? Their path wasn’t quite straight. They followed . . . and slowed as they neared a clear bubble that must be the Overlord probe. It was surrounded by at least thirty floating Pyth, more than they’d seen together anywhere else.

Pacing them, the Pyth shapes had been long and fast. Stopped, they floated, tentacles trailing low, giant lily pads with stems and roots. They’d need buoyancy, Eric thought, to fight the gravitational pull of the planet. Foamy jellyfish. In motion they were torpedos, but at rest they flattened out.

The probe was transparent. Color-coded oblongs of gel floated inside. Those shapes must be Overlord equipment. They quivered or shifted from time to time. The winds should have been tumbling the probe, but it never shifted orientation. From the Pyth viewpoint that might have been the weirdest thing about it.

The translator whistled to life, and greeted them again. There were introductions around, some translation practice. Humans and Pyth tried to describe lifestyles and environments to each other, and generally failed. After less small talk than Eric had expected, Whistle-whistle-click-whisper said, “We gather to discuss finding a larger home. The place is filled.”

Kimber spoke. “Yes. We understand you have asked us to make your world larger. Tricky.”

“We have tried and failed. Many young—” the translator hesitated, “heroes give life to follow when our borders stretch.”

“How do borders stretch?” Kimber asked.

“The place where we can be, can absorb what surrounds us, can dissipate what wastes our bodies make . . . can see and congregate and maintain agility to evade a deathwind . . . name that place the Mainstream. Beyond, chaos. The edges of the Mainstream grow or shrink or shift with the chaos winds. Curdles of wind nibble at the rim of the Mainstream. Young earn mates by courting danger.”

Talk went back and forth for hours. The Pyth were grass green and sometimes the darker green of forests.

They learned that Pyth had sexual polarity. Pyth bore five females for every male, yet they life-bonded in matched pairs. They were told young females needed to take risks. If they lived, they got mates. Most died.

Whistle-whistle-click-whisper told a story: “A young Pyth, sister of my crèche, rode the chaos winds higher than we had ever gone. It was her risk journey. She was in a narrowing tributary of the Mainstream. It budded and dispersed, and she was pushed up and away by winds, away from us, starved and poisoned, her body clear yellow and blackening. She was so far we could no longer see her, no more talk to her. Finally she died. Then this probe we speak through found her limp form, and followed it back to us, to the Mainstream. And so her death brought us knowing, and eventually, brought you.”

Kimber saw that as an opening. “We deal with engineers greater than ourselves,” she said. “They may be able to guide the chaos winds away to make your Mainstream greater, or make it more stable. What they would want for payment is open to discussion.”

“This has been paid for.”

“This? Our survey? Yes. But this is not terraforming—it is not making your world, your Mainstream, bigger. It is mapping it for you, knowledge for both sides, so a conversation about trade can happen.”

The Pyth surrounding the probe brightened and sparked with colors. Eric noticed a bright purple for the first time, flashing through more shades of green than he’d seen in all his travels. Then they became one brightness, phosphorescent, nearly blinding. He watched a living kaleidoscope, a dance, an art. Maybe an argument? They didn’t speak to him until the colors slowed. Eric thought the green consensus now shaded toward turquoise.

Whistle-whistle-click-whisper asked where they were from.

Eric put an image of the solar system where the Pyth could see it. He was too tired to explain Deuces, or the Shift Trick, or much of anything else. He peppered the sky with stars, and used an image of Eagle to simulate flight from Earth to Baent. He showed them their own sky clear of intervening gasses, ablaze with stars.

Pyth color talk whipped to blinding speed again, bright shades pounding against Eric’s eyes.

Whistle-whistle-click-whisper said, “You must leave us.”

Kimber was startled. “We can start the survey tomorrow.”

“No. You must leave us.”

Eric took a turn. “We will talk with you tomorrow.”

“No survey yet. You leave us. If we want you, we send you a message.”

Movement flashed all around them.

“Wait—why?” Kimber asked.

The Pyth were gone.

They waited long enough for adrenaline to slide to edginess. Finally, groggy and frustrated, they went. They had to lift anyway; Eagle’s shell was leaking heat inward. There was no escort for the return trip.

Back on Deuces, they replayed the conversation, looking for clues.

Eric said, tentatively, “They were losing color. Too many of them packed too close, not enough nourishment and too many waste products. We tired them out.”

“Maybe. Join the club.”

Eric saw how depressed Kimber looked. “A cold doesn’t just vanish,” he said. “Sleep.”

Kimber curled up with her back to him and was silent immediately. Sleep eluded Eric for hours. They needed money to pay for the supplies. They’d never failed a mission. What had they done wrong? He had no good idea how to save it, but he knew they had to.

They watched the conversation again in the morning. It wasn’t just fatigue or starvation . . . which in the Pyth might amount to the same thing. In that frenzy of colors they’d come to a conclusion.

The day passed with no contact from the Pyth.

It took three days. They were playing virtual cards in the kitchen computer when Eric heard the translator’s incoming message chime. It was speaking the standard greetings as they scrambled into the observation deck chairs. Then, “We do not choose a survey of Baent.”

Damn. Eric wracked his brain for an answer, a reason, for something right to say.

Kimber had a response. “Do you choose to talk to us more?”

“We choose a survey of the big planet near your home.”

Kimber blinked. On the private channel, she said, “They want Jupiter.”

“Far out. Can we deal for Jupiter?”

A giggle burst through. “It’s ridiculous! There isn’t enough gravity. There’s too much radiation. You couldn’t duplicate Baent on any world with a sun.”

“I don’t think we own Jupiter. Who does? The United Nations?”

She laughed outright. “I can’t talk.”

“We’d be famous.” He opened the link. “That world is not available, and it is not suitable for you. Jupiter is too small, too cool, too bright. The gasses would strangle you.”

“Our young will try it anyway.”

Eric decided the Pyth desire for mating, and thus danger, would probably doom them as a race.

Kimber angled for a better delay. “We will come there and talk to you.”

“That will make no difference. We can talk like this.”

The Pyth learn fast, Eric thought. On the private channel, he said, “They’re risk takers. Bluff?”

Kimber kept her eyes on the Pyth, nodded.

He plunged. “We will talk like this when you are ready to talk about something possible.” Then he turned the translator off.

If they left, the Pyth had no way of knowing if anyone else would show up. And maybe if they quit playing nice, the Pyth would listen. He asked, “Do you feel lucky?”

Kimber smiled up at him. “I think that was a good move.” Then she pursed her lips and twisted a finger through her short hair. “Do you suppose this happened to the Hyunpa?”

“They got the cold shoulder? That was implied. Safe-Dealer-in-Goods was very polite with me. Maybe it was too nice for the Pyth? Or maybe the Pyth’s hardheadedness drove the Hyunpa away.” Eric paced the tiny cabin. “The Hyunpa are described as curious, but not as risk takers. We’re both. Maybe we’d better use that.”

“You don’t like the Pyth?”

“I think they’re arrogant and spoiled. But I liked the light display, it was . . . fantastic. They’re like kids—probably not dangerous. Not on purpose.” He guessed at her thoughts. “It doesn’t bother me to be around them. And I’ve no desire to let a bunch of overgrown jellyfish push me around—sapient or not.”

Kimber said, “We used to be more like them. Young species tend to have been the center of their world for a long time. Planet Earth went crazy when the Pillbugs flew in, and then so many other species after them. We lost our senses for a decade. We’re a shock to the Pyth, bet on it.”

Eric bit back his first words. “You’re right. I’m sorry if I’m sounding impatient. No job ever goes the way we planned, does it?”

They traded deep tissue massages and talked it through, then sat quietly in front of the window, watching storms writhe across Baent: a wonderfully somber light show. Then a yoga session ending in savasana that segued into sex so easily . . . the way it used to be, he thought, and about time!

“They want to explore,” Kimber murmured. “Finding treasure isn’t as important as the hunt.”

Eric was totally relaxed now; his mind was trying to drift. “Best guess is that’s what the Overlords want too, for the Pyth to explore.” Martianne’s guess, but Eric didn’t say that. “How can we give them what they want?”

“You brought a . . . what? ‘Pyth refuge bubble’”

“We should have instructions. You know, I haven’t gotten that Read Me file yet.” Eric didn’t move out of her arms. “What can we show them? It isn’t whether we own Jupiter. The question is whether we own anything to show around and give away.”

“Cinnamon tea?”

“Yes!” He was thirsty. “What do we want? Take them exploring, if that thing is what I think it is. We need permission from the IMS. You get that. I’ll make tea.”

Kimber used precious Verification Link bandwidth to talk to the Interplanetary Mapping Service office in Sol system. Offer to explore? The reply was suspiciously immediate: approval, with changes. Two minutes later the Hyunpa sent the Read Me file for the Pyth refuge bubble.

First they tried it in deep space.

The Pyth refuge inflated to a bubble twice the size of the augmented Jack of Eagles. The Deep Well Shield mounted on Eagle mated nicely to the hockey-puck-shaped rigid disk that was all they had seen of the refuge when it was packed. It took a full day of hard labor extravehicular activity. At the end they had a murky crystal ball on an elaborate mounting.

Next day they tested it every way they could. “The Pyth won’t be any help at all here,” Kimber said. “They damn near don’t care if they live or die. We take all precautions.” So Eric crawled into Eagle—leaving Kimber in Deuces, because out here she could perform a rescue—and he sent the habitat’s temperature and pressure and internal gravity up and down, played with the gas mixture, did a quick flush-and-replace. Nothing ruptured. They watched dials that showed nothing in the bubble but sulfur-heavy poisons under deep-sea pressures, and they tried to match the mix to what they’d found in the Mainstream.

Now Eric flew the system, spun it, accelerated, tried every possible way to tear it apart. At the end he sent the system screaming through Baent’s troposphere at 600 kps, enough velocity to carry it back to space. The refuge/Deep Well Shield/Eagle configuration stayed oriented very easily, a balloon with all its mass at one end, and raised a hellish plume of blue-white plasma.

“You looked like you were burning up.”

She’d worried. Eric grinned. “If Disney could build a ride like that . . . yeah. But it’s as safe as we can make it, Kimber. What’ll we call it? It’s a whole new ship.”

“Full House,” Kimber said.

Morning, they took Full House into the roil of Baent.

A chain of Pyth led them to the probe, and two waiting females.

Discussion was brief. Whistle-whistle-click-whisper introduced her daughter Whisper-tick. Eric opened the refuge and she flowed in, and in, and in . . . Whisper-tick was mostly empty space. When she was squeezed into the refuge, it was still largely empty. She floated, tentacle-skirts trailing, like the egg in egg drop soup.

They changed the translation linkage over, with some trial and error, until they could talk to Whisper-tick inside the refuge. Whisper-tick complained about the stench. Kimber showed the Pyth female how to adjust the gas mix.

Eric wasn’t showing impatience, he was sure of that, but Kimber said it anyway. “We don’t leave the Mainstream until we’re sure she can breath in there.”

“Right. Full House’s surface temperature is holding fine. Take your time. Whisper-tick, how’s the air?”

“Better. Now. Go!”

They went up.

At the sight of stars, the Pyth went colorless, then multicolored; then forest and mint sang on the long bell of her body. An hour passed before she could even find questions.

“Is that Chaos?”

“Yes. A gas giant planet. There—” Kimber set a cursor dot on the image of Baent. “I’m using a light to draw with, Whisper-tick. Baent is the whole sphere. This is the Mainstream. This storm, we think it anchors the Mainstream, holds it stable. Maybe you can see the colors better than we can.”

“Everything looks different.”

“You’re looking through a hundred kilometers of haze,” Eric said.

“Chaos is a, a ball. Is the Mainstream so small? It was all we knew.”

“Almost everything is a ball,” Eric said. “Worlds are balls. Moons, like this and this, are smaller balls pulled out of shape by whatever’s biggest.” How much must they teach? They could hardly avoid teaching gravity. Eric was beginning to feel like . . . the image of the Overlords that he tried to evade . . . like a god.

“Are there other worlds? With other Mainstreams?”

Eric said, “Yes and maybe. Let’s go see.”

But first . . .

Eric worried about towing the heavy, unbalanced probe through the Shift Trick. Force fields, tractor beams, no form of Overlord magic would have surprised him, but what they had been sold was a tether that looked like clear fishing line, and instructions on how to avoid cutting things in half. An ON switch caused the line to glow fiercely green. Trailing back from Deuces to House, it would otherwise have been invisible. It couldn’t possibly hold—

“Go see, you said. Why are we still here? Go!” howled the wind that was Whisper-tick.

“Be patient,” Eric said irritably. He heard his translation as a “blatt,” a rude wind.

“I heard, ‘You must miss the opportunity,’” Whisper-tick said. “Was that what you said?”

“Close. Kimber, show her how to turn off her view. The Shift Trick is hard on the eyes.”

Low-voiced, Kimber said, “If the tether breaks, we’ll come back and track her down. Here, this is the finder setting, it’ll lead us straight to Full House. She’ll take fourteen gees and probably higher. Are we crazy?”

“No. She may be. Shall we do it?”

“Go.”

Distance didn’t affect the Shift Trick, but the floaters were close in astronomical terms. A few million years old, they glowed cherry red across a sky muddled in a thousand shades of dark and stars.

Full House was in place, silent and whole and fully transparent.

She’d watched it all. Eric said, “Might have known. Whisper-tick, are you all right?”

“Awe. Wonder. Triumph. Are those worlds? New chaos? Take me to the nearest!”

It was cherry red clouds in endless streamers and whorls of storm. Sometimes clouds parted to show a blaze like the sun, literally blinding.

“Gravity seventeen-point-six . . . heavier than Baent,” Eric told Whisper-tick. “Like Baent, but not close enough.”

“It’s a different planet.” Kimber filled in. “You’d roast . . . you’d die of the heat. We’re looking for a place you can live.”

Whisper-tick flashed colors quickly, tried to swim, ran into the clear edge of the refuge, squashing the outside of her body oddly. She pulled back. “Can I go there?”

“No. Look at it,” Eric said. “See how active it is?” Streams of Hell shifted below them; yellow-white Hell winked through. It reminded Eric of the surface of a lava pit.

Whisper-tick went clear for a moment, and Eric could see stars through the edges of her. “It might be different inside. You said. We see through upper haze.”

“I’ll send a few probes,” Eric said. They had many.

Falling probes showed heat, ionization, low metal content. Kimber tried to describe what she was seeing.

“You can read this? Teach me,” Whisper-tick commanded.

Eric glanced sideways at Kimber. She sighed and nodded. Aliens were her specialty.

“I’ll take you on a sample run in Full House and show you,” Kimber said to the Pyth. “Watch me, and I’ll try to explain what I learn.”

They stayed for two days, using the planet to teach the Pyth and themselves. This recently formed, it was more a sun than a planet. Kimber circled the free floater.

Eric asked Kimber, “How are we supposed to know what’s going on in a sapient adolescent jellyfish’s head? Maybe quiet means she’s happy.”

“She’s not seeing anything but numbers and lines,” she said. “I wonder if free fall would hurt her.”

“Well, she’s opaqued the refuge.”

Kimber looked. The snow-globe section of Full House was a mirror-ball.

“I thought she loved stars. Eric, love, this isn’t good. She’s gone invisible. It can’t work for her to be in such a small place for so long. She must be overwhelmed. And maybe homesick. After all, she’s a teenager.”

“No, love, she’s an alien. Half our job is studying her, but she might not like being studied.”

“I’m more afraid she’s dying,” Kimber countered. “Pyth seem to need excitement. But surely interstellar flight is excitement enough?”

“Maybe it’s too much excitement,” Eric said. “No, that’s not it. Kimber, it’s maybe too abstract.” Eric thought about his attempt to teach the Pyth about distance. “We haven’t moved, not so she’d notice. We do the Shift Trick and then something else is in the sky. She’s cushioned in the refuge bubble, even against gravity. To Whisper-tick it’s all a lightshow.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“When in doubt, ask the woman,” Eric said, and he opened the link to Full House. “Whisper-tick, have you seen what you hoped for?”

“No. I hope to see another Mainstream.”

“Well, this whole swarm of free floaters will all be the wrong age. What shall we do?”

“This universe you show me is large beyond dreams. Whatever is possible must happen somewhere. How can we not find another Chaos world to match the Mainstream?”

“She’s got a point,” Kimber said suddenly. “I should be using the Verification Link to dig through libraries.”

Free floaters must be common. The libraries of other worlds must hold the records . . . but none of the most powerful species found free floaters interesting, and the oldest floaters, the likely habitats, weren’t luminous. Black on a black sky, how would they be found?

Near three million years ago, a free floater had fallen through an inhabited system, disrupting commerce and two worlds’ weather and scaring hell out of a trillion legal entities. It was tens of thousands of light-years away, far from any sun, but the Shift Trick brought Pair O’ Deuces there.

Whisper-tick looked around the unfamiliar sky, seeing more than humans could with her infrared vision, and asked, “How can you not get lost?”

And Kimber pointed out star patterns that were still familiar; but Eric’s answer would have been, “We don’t quite know.” He lived in dread of someday losing the solar system.

This third floating planet looked more like Baent, red and red-orange rifts showing through black clouds. “We’re the first to explore this place in three million years,” he told Kimber and Whisper-tick.

Kimber said, “Mass, ten Jupiters. An easier pressure gradient. It might be a billion years younger than Baent, Whisper-tick. I like the atmospheric composition. See, lots of sulfur and carbon. It’s sparse in heavier elements.”

They settled into orbit, dropped a score of probes and began to collect data, using the same steps as at the last planet. Whisper-tick kept her habitat transparent. Even so, Kimber worried.

“Maybe we’ll get lucky,” Eric said.

“How?”

“Here.” He scrolled a set of readings from the new world’s southern hemisphere. “Look familiar? Let’s take another pass.”

“Like Baent. Like the sweet spot, the Mainstream. Where is it? That little curdle? Love, it’s no bigger than . . . well, South America. It won’t be stable.”

Kimber dropped a handful of probes, as tightly clustered as that little sienna knot of storm. Eric said, “If these readings hold up, we’ll take her in.”

“Your turn, I guess. Can you play nice with the alien teen? I’ll hold post here. If anything goes wrong, I’ll use the Verification Link to get help.”

Ship’s morning. Whisper-tick glowed green again. Kimber asked her, “Ready for a dive?”

“Always ready. Why do you flinch?”

Eric said, “We’re taught to. Kimber, I’m going EVA. See you in . . . several hours.”

Jack of Eagles and the Pyth refuge with the Deep Well Shield between: the composite that was Full House raced above a black-and-ruby storm larger than Earth. Eric jetted across the gap, staying clear of the tether. He waved at Whisper-tick through the globe, then climbed into the cabin.

They dropped.

As before, Full House was stable in flight. Eric stayed at high altitude until he was approaching the . . . “Eddy. The Eddy. I’m dipping to meet it,” he told his passenger, and Kimber. She’d hear him wherever she was in Pair O’ Deuces.

He was flying a meteor-flame through brown murk. There wasn’t a hope of seeing anything. In a sudden nightmare moment he wondered if that knot of storm really could hold life, and he decelerated sharply. A twenty-miles-per-second shock wave could shatter any life form as diffuse as Whisper-Tick.

He eased onward at lesser speed.

“Veer a little left and down,” Kimber told him. He didn’t say he was doing that. The instruments registered sulfur and carbon, not much helium, hydrocarbons . . . other hydrogen compounds . . .

“Here.”

“Did your readings for the Mainstream look like this?”

“Pretty much. It’s hotter. The gravity’s lighter. The atmosphere’s mostly hydrogen compounds, naturally.”

Whisper-tick begged, “Explore?”

“Sure. We’re still at the edges.”

Kimber’s voice: “From here the Eddy looks like a flattened kidney. Shall I drop more probes?”

“We’ll look for ourselves,” Eric said, feeling good. His vision was back. Streamers of brown on brown; pale sky, dark depths; not much to see, really. “Whisper-tick, how’s it look?”

“Abandoned. Ready for conquest.”

“I’ve got about an hour before we have to get out.”

“Take us to the center.”

He held Full House under sonic speed, letting the instruments do his work, killing time. Had they really found a habitat the Pyth could use? His work, as he understood it, was to test and train Whisper-tick as an explorer . . . give the Pyth an appetite to explore beyond their narrow original home . . . and to fetch data for the libraries. More experienced civilizations would decide whether to risk the Pyth here in the Eddy, if the Eddy survived that long.

The skin of Full House had actually cooled off since reentry, but heat was still leaking toward the life support system. That process would continue until they were in deep space and able to radiate. Therefore Eric was still quite comfortable when he said, “Getting too hot. Ten minutes.”

They crossed the center of the flattened kidney. The readings matched Mainstream proportions, a bit rarefied, a bit heavy on hydrogen.

“Too hot. I’m returning,” Eric told Kimber and his passenger. Then, “Dammit—”

“What?”

“She’s out.”

“Out?”

Wind caught the refuge’s open hatch and set Full House tumbling. Eric closed the hatch by remote; he had to see. The spinning stopped. But he couldn’t see Whisper-tick; wind had whirled her away.

“I’d have to find her in the next five minutes,” Eric said. “Then get her to crawl inside. Kimber, there’s no way.”

“Do something!”

He thought it over. There was no sign of Whisper-tick. The winds had diverged, and no way to tell how.

“I’m coming up,” he said. In the silence that followed, he set Full House rising.

“Eric, do you have anything in mind?”

“Yeah. But it’s a gamble. Do you have the Eddy in view?”

“Yes.”

“Keep it there. How many probes can we keep track of?”

“Don’t understand.”

“We started with a couple of hundred probes. We’ve used about fifty. How many can the ship actually keep track of at once?”

“About fifty.”

The atmosphere had thinned to blue-black sky. He angled toward the equator. Deuces was at synchronous orbit.

“Drop fifty probes now. Aim them all for the middle of the Eddy, where you marked me when she disappeared.”

“They won’t hit her?”

“Risk it. Slow them down near the surface. We need eyes in there.”

“All right. All right.” There were tears in her voice. Silence while . . . there. A flurry of missiles aimed down at the black clouds, and he tracked it back to Pair O’ Deuces’ riding lights.

“I see you,” Kimber said. “Did she always want to die?”

“No, of course not. She just needs to take risks more than she needs to live. Her winning move is to risk and live. Find a new branch of the Mainstream and lead her people to it. She’ll come back if she can.” He’d had time to think it through. “But she had to test the new domain herself. Maybe she’d have died if she wasn’t somehow in danger? We wouldn’t have let her, or else she thought we wouldn’t. She threw herself into the Eddy, and getting her back is our problem.”

“But we can’t!”

“Don’t give up yet.” Eric was feeling the heat. He maneuvered to lock Full House to Deuces’ tether and went EVA.

She hugged him when he came aboard, and helped him out of his suit, and hugged him again. Presently she said, “I’m going for her.”

“Okay. First let Full House cool down.”

“Do we have time?”

“Well, that’s the point. If the air was flat-out poisonous, Whisper-tick would have just closed the refuge, but it wasn’t, so she’s gone exploring. If I’d pulled alongside her right after she got out, she wouldn’t have gone back in. She has to have time.”

“Then?”

“Then, if she’s bright enough, we can save her.”

Kimber didn’t answer. They were still in each other’s arms.

He asked, “Have you thought about us?”

“What?” She disengaged.

“Wayne wanted to take my place with you. You didn’t go with him. Will you go with the next guy?”

“Is this the time?”

“No. Shall I make something for lunch?”

“Sure.” She followed him into the kitchen. She said, “Martianne wanted the same thing Wayne did.”

He laughed. “No. She’d have stayed on the bed.”

“You’re thinking like a man. She needs two things, right? First, get your attention. She had that. Getting into your pants would only let you off the hook. Second, prove she’s worth something. She did that when she told you more about the Pyth than Broker had . . . or more than she’d translated.”

“Devious,” Eric said, without buying it.

“Think about this,” Kimber said. “I have. We’re almost the only humans off Earth, and we’re the best there is. So, first, we can each have anyone we want. And second, we’re as monogamous as most men and women no matter what we do. The opportunities aren’t there.”

“Why didn’t we have this conversation long ago?”

“I did. In my head. Besides, I learned something while I was with Wayne.” She turned her face up toward his, and he noticed she looked scared. For Whisper-tick . . . or something else?

“What did you learn?” Eric touched her face, ran a finger along her jawbone.

“He’s not you.”

Eric waited.

“I thought I wanted something, no someone, different . . . with . . . different strengths and weaknesses. New lessons. I mean, after school, I was just with you. We’re a work team. It hasn’t been a long romance or anything. But Wayne didn’t fit. Everything was . . . awkward.”

“And?”

Kimber tucked her head into his shoulder, and he curled his arm tighter around her. Her voice was a whisper. “And you fit. I don’t think anyone else ever will.”

Eric answered by bringing his lips to the part in her hair, adjusting his stance so no air would fit between them.

Eric heated soup for lunch, and they ate while they watched the probes fall. Presently he said, “There.”

Kimber looked. She said, “Yes.” Forty-nine probes were falling, but one had stopped.

“Eagle’s cooled off some, but if you wait a little longer—”

“No.”

“—you’ll have more time to search.”

“How long can she hang on?”

“No idea.”

“I’m going.”

He watched her fall. Then he watched two dots, Full House and the point that must represent Whisper-tick.

“Stay above sonic speed,” he said at one point. “If she hears a sonic boom she’ll know it’s us.”

“Idiot. Do you know how much lightning there is down here?”

“Sorry.”

Full House’s dot circled and went back, right over Whisper-tick’s, but it wasn’t a collision, both dots were still bright.

“I can’t see her. I’ll use readings to stay as close to the habitable band as I can. Surely she’ll stay where she can live.”

“Patience. You’ve passed her. She isn’t fast. Turn left. Left more. She’s not moving now.”

“If she’s not swimming, would she fall, or rise?” Kimber asked.

“If she’s incapacitated? The story-girl that found the probe rose . . .”

“With the Chaos-wind.” Kimber said. “There’s not as much wind here as I remember at Baent. Not as far as I can see.” She was silent for a moment—probably checking readings. “Lower gravity means less pressure than on Baent,” she said. “More hydrogen—”

“Right. The atmosphere won’t hold her up. She’ll sink. I can’t tell how high you are, but look around the bottom of the Eddy, lowest level where she can still breathe. Below the probe and southeastward.”

“What if we lose her?”

“They must have expected we would.”

“Don’t you care?”

“Shhhhh . . . Kimber. Of course. Stay careful. Look right above you.”

“Yes!” Kimber beamed a picture to Eric. Blue flashing, just visible through almost-black fog. The picture got bigger as Jack of Eagles closed on the Pyth. Whisper-Tick was pulsing her body in and out, kicking tentacles, trying to rise. She was bright. Blue. Dying of heat. Tentacles wrapped around one of the probes.

Kimber was babbling. “Yes! Good thing she’s big, and yes, you were right, she caught the probe and she’s clutching it like a life raft! Eric, she won’t hear me.”

“Just open the—”

“Done.”

Eric could see Whisper-Tick’s eye stalks turned toward Eagle. The Pyth knew they were there. She must be too starved for her jets to work. Her tentacles moved faster, she tried to rise, rose, a little. Full House rose to meet her.

“Here she comes. You baaad girl.”

When they got back, Whisper-tick was bright green. She silvered the habitat again though, and refused Eric’s attempts at conversation.

Back inside the roil and heat and wind of Baent, they were escorted by flashing green Pyth, double the escort of the last trip. Pyth darted in spirals around Full House. The habitat was silvered, shuttered, but the Pyth seemed to know Whisper-tick was inside.

Then all at once it went clear, and Whisper-tick slid through the opening and belled out, joining the circle hovering around the probe. She was bigger now—in the three days since her rescue, she’d grown almost half again the size. Some hormone-analog released by danger? She floated inward then, and colored herself all brilliant green. The circle of Pyth went translucent. Whisper-tick went bright—flashing and dancing and surely, Eric thought, telling her story.

He and Kimber watched, entranced, holding hands. When it was over, Eric leaned over and kissed Kimber—very gently. “She’s beautiful,” he said.

“Whisper-tick?”

“Both of you.”

Whistle-whistle-click-whisper jetted toward them. “You return full of my child, but empty of new worlds.”

They had talked about this on the way back, developing a basic strategy.

Kimber cleared her throat. “It is not the task of a survey to find what you want. It is our task to look at what is, and report back.”

Eric spoke carefully, “Or we may seek out a second Domain. There might be something suitable on the other side of chaos, of Baent.”

“The other side?”

A camera in Jack of Eagles sent information to the Overlord Probe; the Pyth could watch the humans. Technology accounted for differing visual modes. Eric called up an image of Baent. “This is Chaos,” he said. He drew a dot of light along the Mainstream. “This is the Mainstream.” Then with another dot he pointed to the corresponding position in the other hemisphere. “You may be able to live here too.”

Whisper-tick understood planets now. She colored and whistled and made wind with her voice. Her color song was followed by another display that took in the whole circle. In the distance, Eric could see more Pyth also changing colors, a bigger population than he’d seen the first visit.

“She’s doing good,” Eric whispered to Kimber.

“Are you proud of an alien?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“I love you.”

When the light show was over, Whistle-whistle-click-whisper said, “We agree. Take Whisper-tick’s sister Whistle-click-whisper and survey the rest of Baent.”

“Wait. Wait,” Eric interrupted. “Why not take Whisper-tick? We’ve trained her!”

“She no longer seeks danger.”

“But—”

Kimber elbowed him. “Trust him—he’s right. Whisper-tick won’t risk her children.”

“Her—”

“Well—she’ll have them soon.” Kimber pointed. Whisper-tick was swimming near a big green male. Kimber flicked communication to a private channel. “And only the Pyth female children will be explorers, ever. And most will expect to die. It’s a reasonable explanation for sapience in such hard conditions. Fast selection process.”

“Whew,” Eric said. “And they’ll learn fast as a race once they get out of here.”

“Good reason to find habitat on Baent.”

“So we do this?”

“And then we go back to the Domain. I still want to see it.”

“If you want to get there soon—negotiate for a reasonable survey size. This is a big planet.”

Kimber smiled at him and flipped the communication channel back to the joint one Whistle-whistle-click-whisper could hear. “All of Baent would take ten lifetimes. Let’s see . . .”

“Kimber, you’re going to love the Domain.”

They strode together into the froth of habitats, to make one that would hold them both. Eric showed Kimber the toothbrush. She inserted it in her mouth, and made faces. He called for the bath and a bed, and leaned over Kimber, kissing her chin. “I’ll be back. I’m going to finish what we started and get us paid. You relax. I’ll find the broker.”

“Clean sounds too good to be true. I’ll find you. I want to meet this Hyunpa.”

Eric stepped through the wall and a bubble budded off. He dialed in the broker’s address.

Martianne was alone, wearing her hair and a long strapless dress. “I heard you were back.”

“Where’s Dealer?” Eric asked.

“He’ll be back in—half an hour?” Martianne smiled up at him, stepped closer. “You’re alone? Drink?”

“There’s nothing like a real hotel—like this one anyway—after a long trip. Kimber’s taking a bath.”

“I’ve had my bath.” Martianne held out a bulb of wine he hadn’t asked for. “We got the survey stats yesterday. How did you pull it off?” She took another step closer.

He took the wine, and took a step back.

“Kimber saved a Pyth.”

“Oh.”

“I’ll tell you the story.” Eric talked at her for ten minutes, telling her about the planets. He thanked Martianne for her info about Pyth colors. Then he sat in the closest spot to a corner he could find and let his legs splay out, keeping Martianne at a distance. He watched her face fall.

“It must be wonderful to travel so,” she said, looking sadly at him. Her eyes were still a stunning blue, but now they looked a little empty.

Safe-Dealer-in-Goods budded in, and his desk rose from the floor.

Eric bowed, looking directly at the Hyunpa.

Martianne went formal, became the translator.

He received his Da Vinci card back credited with full payment, and as if on cue, Kimber budded in as well. She glowed. She smelled good. And her eyes were smoky, almost the color of Baent’s swirling Mainstream.

“Martianne,” Eric said. “Meet Kimber. She’s with me. I mean, we’re together.”

“FINDING MYSELF”

“Listen, it’s not here.” The teller’s voice edged up at the end of words. She looked up at me in dread.

“Erased?” I demanded. I’d come to refresh my backup copy. Discovering that I’d been running around with no backup, that was unnerving. But the teller was in terror. Surely she could see my own rising fear, even masked by anger.

She wrenched her gaze away, back to the keyboard and monitor screen, and typed.

Suddenly I understood. “Booted up? Loose?”

“Y-yes. Twenty-six eedays ago. The records say she was uploaded. The door tab says you left. You didn’t come in, but you left. Please, would you just—” she flicked her eyes side to side as if scanning for help.

A row of teller’s windows stretched away to infinity in both directions. This whole virtual universe is only a picture; success and government get painted big. A few other customers were mere specs halfway to the vanishing point. Nobody could have overheard this idiot pronouncing a death sentence upon me.

I waited for her to start screaming. Despite the barrier, she was afraid of me. Maybe she’d already hit an alarm.

But no guard popped up. I broke my glare and turned on my virtual high heels and stalked across the hall to the storage cubicles.

The Storage Bank doesn’t lose clients.

But I’d left, and I hadn’t arrived.

There were two of me. When the Board knew, one of us would be erased. Depending on intent, we could both be erased. But even through my fear, it registered that the teller wasn’t going to do anything about it yet.

I made my way into a spare storage cubicle, and set parameters for a fresh backup that would record my memory, my self. The eeseconds it takes to make a backup seemed to go on for eehours. I sighed with relief when the disembodied voice claimed “done,” and stored me.

The marker booth in the entrance was dressed with an imposing neon sign: PERFORMERS AND ARTISTS GUILD: GOVERNING BOARD STORAGE BANK. Departure was as simple and quick as selecting an address and pushing it to the booth’s address variable. I marked to a small park I knew.

In the eeworld I’d never felt in danger for my life. I let it flood over me, the fear that had been knocking at my insides. Sweat flooded my armpits . . . and I turned that off. Too distracting. I had to think.

Some of us never sleep. We don’t need to sort our memories, to dream, as bios do. Most of us maintain the habit of sleep without missing anything: we’re out for a few seconds that record like hours.

Most of us bathe. Many of us don’t brush our teeth or our hair. Some of us don’t eat or drink, but that’s risky. The habit of being human keeps us sane. We are basically the same people who lived our lives as biologicals and, when our bodies were unable to maintain us, were made young and alive again.

We live faster than physical humans. This might be all the time I had—eeweeks or eedays for me in virtual space, hours or minutes in the biological world, until someone still flesh, still real, saw what had taken place.

I had to find my other self.

I started in the obvious places. My own digital haunts. After all, how likely was the second me to go someplace I had never been?

Running for her life?

But she might not know that yet. I marked to a Folk Rock club, the Glad Hand. It was a place I earned chit singing backup vocals on nights the band played, my only paying work. In a pinch I backed up other bands. I never did solos.

Frank, my bandmaster and the Hand’s part owner, prefers the Hand a little crowded in the evening. He expands or shrinks the space and the dance floor to keep it that way. Crowd noises damp out, and space warps a little so that nobody in the audience is where he can’t see or hear the stage.

Afternoons the place used to shrink to phone booth size, until Frank came to his senses. A bar should feel empty in the afternoon. The Hand was quiet and shrunken. I hung back, checking it out before committing.

Ten or twelve patrons talked over tables and booths along the windowed wall. All were regulars, mostly wearing young bodies clothed in the current fashion: iridescent paints, mirrors, and fringed scarves. An antique radio, blown up to two meters tall, played antique music next to the huge empty stage. Frank was sitting with a girl at a small round table. I considered it a mark of sophistication to be less than perfect here; Frank was sophisticated. Bodies should not be changed rapidly even in a virtual world. Frank had grown a rounded beer belly, ragged and patched whitewashed jeans, and chosen a scraggly beard with hints of gray in it. A true old folk rock persona.

The girl was new or naïve. She’d stayed blandly, blondly beautiful.

It looked safe enough. I walked up and pulled a chair out, sat backward in it so my long legs split around the back of the chair.

“You missed practice this afternoon. Where ya been?” Frank asked, looking reasonably happy to see me.

“Trying to find myself.” Lame humor. My worry level was high and I wasn’t thinking too fast. “Hunting new tunes,” I said.

“I always like new score,” Frank drawled, affecting an attitude. Probably for the chick he hadn’t introduced. “Play for me?”

“Not yet. They’re in my head still.”

“Hmmm. Holding out on me?” Frank grinned, teasing me in front of the new girl. But he pushed a song my way, and I saved it in memory. “For our next gig. We start practicing next Monday.”

“I’ll be there.” Or I’d be deleted. I didn’t like lying to Frank.

“Aren’t you going to listen?”

“At home, man. See you around.” I did my best to resist doing the digi-chick sexy walk thing as I headed for the door.

Frank didn’t seem to have seen me since I’d seen him.

I tried the other music bars I liked: Blues River, Shorty’s, Danube Dreaming, and the Wild Eye. Yeah, my taste is eclectic. No matter though, I wasn’t at any of them, and no one seemed to have seen me. The passage of time was fingernails on slate in my mind’s ear. At least no one else seemed to be looking for me.

Where was Rogue Christa?

I marked home.

Home this year was a facsimile loft above a riverfront. The walls were lined with music equipment and surrounded a huge expanse of bare wood floor punctuated with a few big pillows. Tall, thin windows let in stripes of light as if there were a real sun here. I left the music off, and curled up on a big blue feather pillow. Lying back, I watched myself in the mirrored ceiling, willing my limbs to relax.

It wasn’t working. I got up and ran through some yoga, forward bends and the warrior poses. It was a way to let go and work out the fear, one that had worked for me when I was flesh. Yoga’s mind/body link was needed here.

I stretched while I ticked off possibilities.

Deep forward bend. Hold it, lengthen the thighs on inhale, lower the torso on the exhale. Hold it. Maybe the backup had been erased. After all, I hadn’t found myself yet. But the bank teller said she’d walked out. Better believe her.

Why didn’t the teller turn me in?

Widen the stance. Lean forward, bend at the hips. The chance of a mistaken backup release is supposed to be some huge power of ten to one. The Governing Board claims there’s no room for mistakes, that this is a program with no bugs.

If I could get a hearing and talk fast enough, the Board might not erase me. Make them erase the rogue instead . . . but what were the odds?

Right foot forward. Knee over the ankle, bend, arms out front and back. Rogue Christa would know she’s a backup by now. She’d be looking to find out what happened to me. After all, I’d be curious. She’d have come home to legitimately pick up the pieces of my life. I should have found myself by now—it should have been easy.

Left foot forward. Remember to hold the chin up. Digital beings have selectable memories. This situation could only kill me. I would live on as the rogue backup, minus only those things I’d written to memory between recordings.

That was an interesting thought—the memories between backups. It was a place to start. I didn’t want to die—I was clear on the concept that I was not Rogue. I started to replay the last month of my life.

We’d done a retro show at the Glad Hand. Old ballads primarily: Joni Mitchell, Eric Hightower, Linda Rondstadt, Bob Dylan, Eagles, and Garth Brooks. Most of the time I watched the band sweat and dance from behind.

I could sweat too. Musicians sweat when we’re hot, most of us, because it makes a better show. It’s programmed in, autonomic, but with a mental off switch, as with the sex urge. So much in our world is optional.

Frank likes the Hand crowded in the evenings. On a slow night he might shrink the Hand, or paint in a few tables full of noisy ciphers. A month ago we were doing all right: the Hand was cozy, everyone looked real, and not too many people wandered out while we played. We had a party after the show, a real good jam. I watched, listened, enjoyed.

There were solo shots from the next day—some changes I made to the window views and recordings of original music I was modifying and changing. All new work, created in the ten virtual eeyears since my digital choice day. The work was joyful but convoluted, celebratory of our digital medium. I’d spent the day alone, it seemed, and bored: not much of it was recorded.

I had a night out with some friends in the Band, went home alone.

And it went on like that. Nothing unusual.

I played the memories back a second time, cross-correlated, mixing them up to look for patterns. Where had I been, who had I talked to? Then I focused on the backgrounds, sharpened them and watched carefully, freezing frames. Twenty-six nights ago, early, in a moment when I was standing near the front and belting out lines from “Me and Bobby McGee,” I spotted my profile.

She was scared, turning away, walking tense and head up. It had to be Rogue. Two frames later there was nothing left of her, just a dancing crowd closed in front like a locked door.

I rewound and watched again. There wasn’t anything else useful, no companion, no way to tell where she went. Whatever started this nightmare must precede the frame with Rogue in it.

I replayed it three times, start to end. She didn’t appear again. When I finished the third time, I was so sick of my recent past I wanted to erase the whole thing. Replays show every time you record a memory you don’t really need, and every time you cut in on a scene and it seems you’ve missed an important beginning. But I was afraid of editing a clue.

I’d nailed the two weeks in which Rogue Christa had been booted up. What had caused that to happen? Something I saw and didn’t record? A memory that got lost? Erased?

Slow, repetitive work had sanded the hard edge off my fear, but the bulk of it remained, heavy and pushing.

I needed help.

I marked over to Nita’s. The best and oldest digital queen I knew, and better yet, a hacker from even before she came here to live. Myself, I’ve always been a singer, and for a while I was an accountant. And Nita the dancer and hacker, my friend, owed me one. I’d watched her back a few weeks ago while she did some intel work. It made her enough chit for a year, and I’d refused a share, having a general fear of any kind of dirty electrons. Even chit.

She lived in a cottage with views of rolling hills and a Victorian garden. She’d designed the garden herself, with earthy green scents and even weeds amidst a tall riot of purple and pink flowers. Typical hacker: big bandwidth spent on a small perfection. I bet I could even have found tiny spiderwebs in the dewy grass. The views, of course, had no real dimension, but the illusion of privacy was a breath of air after my city loft.

“Christa?” she called cheerily. “Come in.” Nita wore only shorts and hair—and a delicate lacework of body ink making a fall of open and closed spaces down her breasts. Her hair iridesced in green and yellow. Bright orange sparkly paint covered her fingernails and toenails. I felt better already.

She was sitting on a simple stool surrounded by open screens on the walls. On some of them, letters and numbers danced top to bottom in scrolling patterns. Other screens played video of dancers performing jumps and high aerial work.

“Hang on, Christa, I’ll be right with you.” She watched a few more moments of two of the videos, swiveled around to freeze some programming, and then waved her hands, stopping everything in place.

“Nita! Hey girl, I need help with something.” I cued her with our warning words: “I’m having a bad chess day.”

That was her cue, when she wanted help with some push at the world rules we had signed in by when we traded our biological selves for electrons. Even here, she’d taught me to be careful if she had open feeds of any kind.

She looked up at me—raised her eyebrows. But she made no sound, just sat for a bit, communing with her house systems. The light changed to a soft strobe, and Nita got up.

“Okay. Safe.”

“There’s two of me.”

“Huh?”

I filled her in, my voice cracking as I spoke out loud. The words seemed to hang in front of me, condemning me, even as I knew this was as safe as it could be. I dared not forget these moments; unrecorded time doesn’t remain part of me. So maybe not so safe. I felt like I was traveling down a long tunnel and could never emerge at the place I started, and maybe never anywhere else either.

Nita said, “You were here yesterday.”

“Nope.”

“Yep.”

“Damn.” Then, “What’d I say?”

“Hi, mostly. You—Rogue, you call her?—were a little antsy. Stayed about an hour. But she was you—she knew me and knew how to get here. Of course, a full backup would match. I had a sense there was trouble, but nothing was said. It wasn’t really much of a sense, not so I felt I needed to do anything.” Nita looked up at me. “Sorry.”

“Did she say where she was going? I didn’t see any signs of her at home.”

“No.” Nita pushed her memory of the visit at me. I took it, looked, and replayed some scenes. Stored it. Since I was seeing myself in it, I could never confuse that hour with my own memories, but I sequestered it anyway. It was highly surreal to watch myself and not remember the event. But it was me. Her.

If Rogue hadn’t gone to any of my predictable haunts, then she must know she was a duplicate. I stood up and paced. “Did she talk about this?”

“No, but she was watching the time.”

“You couldn’t tell she wasn’t me?”

“She was you.”

I kept pacing.

Nita looked puzzled. “Are you worried about her?”

“No, I want her to go away. She’s just a backup.”

Now Nita looked pissed. “I was worried about her. You.” Then she stopped for a moment and was completely still. “But one of you does have to die,” she whispered. “Oh man, this isn’t supposed to happen.” She sat down hard, flashy orange nails running through her hair and massaging her scalp.

Obviously, if there could be multiple copies, the social order wouldn’t stay the way it was. Who’d be the real one? We may be a colony of digital humans, but our voluntary migration into a form of AI left us with the old societal drives, good and bad. Thank God for the Governing Board. Usually.

I passed Nita my glimpse of Rogue in the Glad Hand, then everything I could remember of being in public for the previous week. Nita skimmed, then went through it all more carefully. She muttered, “The way we trade memories, does it really matter who’s who?”

“If we lose that sense of identity, we’re dead,” I said. Ash in a jar. There had been a cremation and a memorial service. I hadn’t attended, but I knew. Dead.

Nita wasn’t listening. “A rogue backup was booted up. Why? I’m thinking you must have seen something, learned something. Somebody wants the rogue in place because she won’t remember. But I can’t see anything weird here, Christa.”

“I don’t either.”

“We’d have to review your whole damn life, flesh and virtual both. This is no good. We need a different approach.”

“I’ve got to find her, Nita.”

“I know.”

I got up and turned around to leave. Nita’s voice stopped me cold. “And how do you intend to do that on your own?”

I had no idea. “I’ll just keep looking, I guess. Hope we don’t end up in the same place in public.”

“I can help you.”

“It’s not your problem.” I sat down again. “I’ll take advice.”

“You’ll need more than advice.”

“I can’t put you in danger.” She could be in real danger too. As a hacker, probably she was already watched. She knew it.

“You’re too sweet, Christa. You’ll get caught for sure. I can look for you without you being there. I can manipulate recordings to edit you out if need be. I have various other talents, too.” She waggled a finger at the screens around the room. “You need me.”

I did. But I didn’t like it.

It took five eedays. We based operations at Nita’s. I watched her hacking around in the recording systems looking for any signs of me we knew weren’t me. Nothing. We marked back to my place from time to time looking for clues. Since there was no sign of authorities looking, we decided Rogue must be hiding.

Out and about things seemed normal. By the third day, we’d decided they were normal enough I’d best do whatever I would be doing if I weren’t searching for myself. Otherwise Frank or someone else might report me as missing, and that might be as bad.

We were at the Glad Hand waiting for my set to start. The lounge was midsize and half full, just starting to pick up energy and life for the night. Patrons came in regularly through the marker door as singles or small groups. Nita and I were playing chess and laughing, relaxed by the normalcy. Nita was starting to talk about doing intel for a new bioworld client, something about looking up viewer traffic patterns related to new participatory arts. That was our main product from this net—entertainment for the biological masses. Some digital nets worked on medicine, some on social sciences or security or even history, but this site existed for the sake of art and performance. What she did billed out as product research, and this gig was even legal, so we could plan together out loud.

We were engrossed in talking about the new client, discussing the merits of my last pawn sacrifice, and commenting on body art. We didn’t see the man walk up and pull out a chair until he was seated at our table.

I went on instant alert. I’d never seen him before. He was dark, his looks patterned on the Mediterranean: intense eyes, dark hair, and a small frame. His clothes were bland—jeans and boots and a tan flannel shirt. It would take work to notice him in a crowd. I raised my eyebrows at Nita and she shook her head slightly. She didn’t know him either.

He looked at me as if I was a ghost. “Christa.” He just said my name. Quietly. It wasn’t a question. Then he said “Christa Two.”

I tasted the risk. Fear of never knowing was worse. I said, “No. One.”

Nita’s eyes narrowed, telling me I was crazy. I shrugged. He caught it. He held out his hand and said, “James.”

We both went still, and waited for him to say something more. Nita didn’t offer her name, and I didn’t take his hand. The moment seemed to take forever.

Then he got up. “Follow me.”

We got up. He gestured at Nita: stay. I said, “No.”

After a bit, he turned and walked away and we followed him toward the marker door. I ducked low, not wanting Frank to see me running out on a gig. I hadn’t practiced much anyway.

Once at the door, James pushed a mark to Nita and me. We compared: they were the same. The address was long, somewhere in the hinterlands of the digital world. I didn’t even recognize the main server/street.

All three of us marked out at the same time.

It was a campground. No place I’d ever been, or even heard about. My signature high heels didn’t match the terrain, and the soft forest floor felt strange and knocked my gait off a bit. Nita looked less shocked than I felt—she must’ve been someplace like this before. I liked the outdoors when I was physical. Virtual outdoors felt like a sin; I spent my time in the city.

James led without a word to either of us, walking easily on the uneven path. Camp-style homes nestled back in fantastic stylized woods. The tents and yurts were reds and yellows and blues too vivid to have been made with physical materials and dyes. A few even floated in the bright branches, tethered with colored ropes or light chains. The path and homes were distinct, the forest behind them fading into a surreal mural. We followed James for a long time.

Just short of the path’s effective end, where it swooped up the mountains in a chain of impossibly narrow switchbacks, he stopped at a simple soft green yurt standing in a rudimentary flowerbed.

Those flowers! James was definitely not up to Nita’s standards for digital homemaking. Or maybe he was just memory-poor. We ducked inside a flowing silken blue door.

Rogue was curled up in the corner, face to the wall.

I stopped in the threshold while James and Nita settled into pillows along the wall. My eyes were glued to Rogue. You never see yourself this way, even digitally. Oh, I’d seen myself on Nita’s film and on vids of the band. But this was real. Three-dimensional. Not a mirror.

I was long and thin and angular with long dark hair. Mine fell down my back in waves, Rogue’s was in a ponytail. Her shoes made more sense than mine, and she had traded the silvery mesh top and dark leather I wore for a simple long blue dress. It made her softer, more feminine than I recall ever looking. Otherwise we were the same, though we had lived different lives these last few weeks.

She rolled over and looked at me. Did a double take. Put her hand to her mouth. “Shit.” Rogue’s voice was husky and scared, and oddly, it didn’t sound like my voice sounded to me. “Sorry. I’ve been hoping to see you.”

Nita and James watched. It crossed my mind that Nita cared about us both, James only about one. I felt ephemeral again. Defensive. Angry.

“Rogue.” It was the wrong thing to say.

“No, Christa.”

“Yeah, I’m Christa too. I mean Christa One.” She looked at me—shocked. How would I act if the situation were reversed?

But it was.

“Oh God, now what?” I asked.

I sat down opposite her on the floor of the yurt and forced my attention to James. “How?”

“I found her. She seemed hurt, dazed. She was in the door of the Glad Hand. The group, you, were singing Joplin. I didn’t know it was you—that she was you—about the backup. I liked her. She obviously needed help, so I brought her here.” He glanced sideways at Rogue, face softening. His voice broke. “Please help her.”

I knew he was asking the impossible. He must know it as well.

Rogue started to talk softly. “I marked out of the bank thinking I’d only made a backup. When I saw it was the wrong date it scared me. I thought I’d been killed and reborn . . . rebooted. But when I went to the Glad Hand, there I was on stage singing, or there you were. I knew something was deeply wrong and I shouldn’t be here. I went to Nita’s, but I could tell she didn’t know. I went back to the bank, demanded information. But no one had any, and the teller acted like I didn’t exist. I couldn’t tell them you were still alive, although I . . . I wanted to.”

Of course she wanted to live. I could look into myself and know what she must feel too. Fear and anger and angst. This wasn’t solvable. I wanted to hate her, or see her as software, or something, but, of course, she was me. I didn’t hate myself. Maybe I would before this was over.

She went on. “I marked to the park, knowing you wouldn’t be there while you were singing. Someone came up to me, a nice-looking man, and said he wanted to talk. He knew me, I didn’t know him.” She sounded a little defensive.

“I sat with him. He knew something, and I needed to figure out what was happening, to find a way to save myself. He said his name was Dean and, well, he seemed okay at first. It was as if he designed himself to be someone I’d like personally.” Here she glanced at James. She looked apologetic, but he smiled at her and she kept going. “He said he was representing Evie.”

“My granddaughter,” I said to James and Nita. “Our,” to Rogue, because she flinched. I sifted for memories of Evie. Our old lives weren’t supposed to affect us. Besides, time moved differently here. If I had been here for what seemed like ten eeyears, then a few months had passed outside. The Evie I knew wouldn’t ask for money. That much wouldn’t have changed. There hadn’t been time.

Rogue continued, “He acted nervous. He said Evie needed money. That the reserves I have are enough to support my life here even if she took half. He didn’t say why, and he sounded like a used car salesman. He wasn’t even very convincing. I thought . . . thought that if I said yes, I was betraying us both, and if I said no, he would just zap me and try another backup. And I wanted to live.”

I said, “I do too.”

She just looked at me for a long time, measuring coolly. I had no way to respond, I couldn’t erase the tape in my head that said she had to die. Maybe she was hearing the same tape.

“He got harsh about it,” Rogue said. “Didn’t directly threaten me. Hinted. He said he wanted me to go somewhere with him. I was scared, so when we got to the marker door I marked to the Glad Hand instead. I was afraid. I’m so sorry.” Her eyes still on me, she plucked at loose hairs, and tucked them toward her ponytail. “But it must have been okay. You’re not dead. I was so afraid both of us in one place would kick off an alarm.”

So that was when I saw her. No wonder nothing showed up on the tapes—this wasn’t about something I’d seen, but something someone wanted. But why create a backup to ask? Why not just ask me?

So she could sign over the money, and be erased, and the real me would never know.

I didn’t think that the Avatar was really from Evie. Evie would have come in a front door, contacted a legit agent. Didn’t this guy know that while I might have been a little senile on the way in, digital life would fix that? I was young and strong and had chosen the life of a woman in her late twenties.

James moved over behind Rogue, laid a hand on her shoulder, and took her offered fingers in his. James said, “When I first saw her, she was running hard for the marker door, but then when she got there she just stood still like she’d lost her address book. I offered to help and took her home with me. She’s afraid to leave the tent. I didn’t believe her at first since the story is so strange. She wouldn’t go anywhere, just sat and talked to me and . . .” His voice trailed off. “But then I saw you.”

I stared at the soft green ceiling and thought about the cardinal rules of this place. If you break them, you’re dead. Keep them, and you can live forever. Simple rules. Cause no one pain. Earn your living. Only one copy of any person. No contact with the outside world except by approval, and approval was rare.

The digital country is fuelled by money spent to get you in, money to buy memory, and money that buys what goes out. It was only by helping Nita that I came to understand that there was a black market in contact. Her intel work often skirted the gray areas of the rules.

“Nita?” I queried. “Any ideas?”

Nita got that faraway look. James started to speak; I gestured him silent.

She spoke. “Even if she hangs around in completely different places here, the system will know it’s generating two of you. I suspect it’s just time and the needle in a haystack concept that’s protected you from diagnostics so far. You’ll have to do something.”

“Can we send her someplace else? Another virtual world? Don’t you know some hackers who can do that? Go between worlds?”

“Maybe there are people who can talk to other worlds.” Nita spoke slowly. “But you couldn’t send her to another one. The software’s keyed differently, and copies kept and compared. There are master lists. The other world’s operating system would know she was foreign.”

“Damn.”

We were all quiet for a few moments. No new ideas surfaced.

I asked Rogue to show me Dean. She picked him out of my memories: in an audience, watching, twice. I hadn’t noticed him. He blended in well. Knowing him now, I could see he was watching me too closely. Backup singers don’t have many fans.

We walked together back down the long woods path to the marker booth. I kept a seductive sway and the high heels; a way of remaining myself in the face of her soft shoes. Still, I took her hand over a small stream when she slipped. The touch made me shiver. I was touching myself.

James came with us, silent and brooding. I suspected he wanted to hate me, but he wasn’t the type. We went to Nita’s.

On her home turf, Nita dressed down to nothing but body painting for a moment, then slipped on shorts when she saw James flinch. She rolled her eyes at me as she pulled up her programming screens and used a still from my memory tape to set up a search that would pattern match until it found Dean.

“Won’t that take forever?” James asked.

“No. A day at most.” A bio day: eemonths for us. “And when the program I just started learns enough, we can track him almost real time. Except that if he’s just an Avatar, he may not be here all the time. Like the cops and some of the Board.”

James looked puzzled. “Oh. I didn’t think that was allowed. To be here and be real too. I mean, except for the government, and maybe scientists from outside.”

“It’s not.”

“So now what?” I broke in.

“We stay low, we learn. Best if you and Rogue stay here. We’ve got to find him before he finds you.”

“If he finds us, we’ll know where he is.”

She looked at me like I was about ten. “Christa. No, everybody. Listen up!” Her voice rose. “If Dean’s an Avatar, then someone on the outside in biological space is running him. He has at least one ally in here. Think of the bank teller: she must be one of his, or an Avatar, or an underground cop, or just plain stupid. I’m not willing to count on either of the last two. Are you?”

“I still don’t get it,” I said.

“Whoever’s running Dean is not too smart, we do know that. But he can get past the system security. He’s technically smart. There’s probably just one, but that’s not something we know either. Want to bet he can’t delete you somehow?” She took time to look at each of us directly, an orange glare. “He, or they, must have had a plan to get rid of at least one of you. If he finds out the Christas are together, he’ll know the game is up. This could be a regular racket, and he won’t risk being caught. That’s what I’ll do next—stalk the teller’s records and look for traces of similar crimes.”

Right. Right, but—“What if he’d succeeded? If Rogue Christa gave in, recorded the permissions he wanted, he’d have just deleted her and no one would have known. I wouldn’t have known about missing money for a long time—probably until next year’s accounting.”

Now Nita at least looked at me like I might have bought a clue somewhere. “That’s right. But that’s not how it happened, you were smarter than that. For now, assume if he finds you, you both disappear.”

So I had two enemies: the hacker who was running Dean, and the Governing Board. The Avatar would probably be happy to delete us both. The Governing Board would only want Rogue. Had Rogue thought of posing as me? But James and Nita would know. Surely they would know.

What would happen if we were deleted? Would it be death, finally? I didn’t want to find out.

Rogue and James and I stayed at Nita’s. Nita came and went doing her usual business and ours. James seemed reluctant to leave Rogue’s side. He feared me.

Rogue and I circled each other the first day, saying nothing outright hateful but never coming together either. We didn’t touch. We stayed separate as we did one thing or another for Nita, turning sometimes to watch each other warily. I tried over and over to leave my back to her and keep it there, to hate her, to focus on the things I saw in her that I hated in myself. Then she’d say something perfect or we would both say the same thing at once, and I’d forget to hate her. We both had to be in the same physical space, and it was trying to hate the mirror.

Although I almost never talked to him, Rogue did sometimes go to James for comfort. I would see them curled together in a corner, talking. Sometimes he would run his hand along the curve of her cheekbone and she would look up at him with something in her eyes I didn’t feel for him. Whatever need had pulled them together hadn’t touched me. When they were together I started keeping my back to them, watching the outputs of Nita’s programs extra carefully, or messing with my nail paint.

Nita was looking exhausted. First she’d been helping me find Rogue. Now she was helping us find Dean. It was the hacker in her. She loved long hours and hard puzzles and an enemy or three. In the physical world she’d want someone shoving pizza under her door; she’d never leave a problem unsolved for something like sustenance. We are more than programs, and she was wearing herself thin.

The second afternoon she got up and cursed the lack of progress. She turned all the screens off and just stared at the blank wall, jaw tight, chin out. Rogue and I were on opposite sides of the room, knees tucked under our chins, half scared, half bored. When we saw how bad Nita looked, we both got up like mirror images, meeting as all four of our arms encircled Nita. Nita put an arm around each of us and we collapsed in a corner crying, then laughing and touching on purpose.

James stepped toward us, then turned and marked out the door.

Nita went into the other room.

Rogue and I talked for eehours. Now we were free to giggle at old memories of funny audience members and bad gigs, and to apologize to each other. But ultimately, we found we could be silent together best. There was actually little to say.

Nita smiled when she came back and found us on the same side of the room, holding hands. “That’s better.”

“It still doesn’t solve the problem.”

She ignored us on that point. “The teller’s new. Helen Troya. She’s been there two weeks, and there have been three backups restored in that time. That’s more than usual. And the teller from before, Wilma Schmidt, she was there a month, and there was statistically one too many then—three in that time. It’s faint, but it’s a thread. We need to find the restored backups, or the original; whoever’s still alive.”

“Any idea how?”

“I’ll have their names pretty quickly. Then, Christa, you and Rogue stay here while James and I go find them. We’ll store and send back anything useful. It should be safe enough—I don’t think the Avatar knows about either of us. But you should both stay here where I’ve got some security built in.”

“Okay—but what are you going to do?”

“Figure out if our guess about the scheme is right. It’s too big for us with someone on the outside, but if we learn enough, we can take it to the Governing Board and demand immunity for you.”

“But they still won’t let us both live.”

“The Hacker could kill you both.”

“But . . .”

“I’ll try and think of something. It will help to know more.”

“Okay. Go safely.”

Nita and James were gone the better part of a day. Rogue and I fiddled together with some artwork on one of Nita’s windows and then painted each other’s bodies with purple and blue Celtic knot designs. I’d always wanted to be able to do my back, and time needed filling anyway.

I was completely absorbed in painting my own spinal ridges and shoulder blades. Smoother than the front. Took a picture better—

“Bingo,” Nita said as she walked in the door. “We went after the most recent backups first—the ones that went through Helen Troya. We couldn’t find the first one we went looking for, so maybe both copies got erased. Maybe they’re both in hiding. The second one is a light technician at the theater. I gave her my cop ID—”

“Dangerous,” Rogue said, and I said, “Yeah!” False ID takes an extensive subroutine.

“It’s passed before. I rewrote it a little. Dangerous compared to what?” Nita scowled at us. “We got her to request emergency access to her records. There’s money missing—a lot. We’ve got a copy of the transaction.” She pushed a stream of memory at us, and Rogue and I both dutifully stored the information after watching it.

“But she didn’t see the Avatar—he must have deleted the backup.” Rogue spoke my thoughts almost exactly. “Deleted Dean.”

“And we don’t have the Hacker,” Nita said. “We need him.”

“So why hasn’t he deleted us?”

“Maybe he’s sleeping.”

“Huh?”

“Well, maybe he couldn’t find you. I’m shielded,” Nita said with a certain pride. “The Hacker could send his Avatar, but if he has to carry on a life, the Avatar would be on its own and thus even more stupid than usual. That’s probably why you got away in the first place. Dean’s a program. No criminal would dare let a full personality loose in here.”

I saw what she meant. Born illegal, under a death penalty—“A full personality would be born murdered. He’d want revenge. He’d talk.”

Rogue followed through. “An Avatar would be able to make decisions, but only within whatever rules the bad guy, the Hacker, has set up.”

“Did the pattern-match program find him yet?”

Rogue and I looked at each other sheepishly. Rogue showed her back, the painting nearly finished. We’d been entertaining ourselves well enough to forget the risks for a moment.

“We’ll check,” we said almost together.

Nita burst out laughing, then went to check herself. As she called up the vid screen she said, “Maybe I’ll have to make an extra backup next—get my back done.”

“I’ll do your back,” Rogue and I teased.

A high-pitched mechanical scream went off in my ears.

“Security alert. We’re not protected here right now—go.” Nita whirled and started shoving us toward her Marker door. It was big enough for two. “You first.”

“Where?”

“Not together. James’s in two eehours.”

Rogue and I both ended up at the Glad Hand—not stupid, just thinking alike. The place was empty. Frank glanced up at us, startled. We split. I chose Shorty’s. She did too.

“Okay,” I whispered—“you go left, I’ll go right.”

Our hands didn’t want to unlock. “It doesn’t matter.”

She was right, of course. We went home together. Either the Hacker could erase us himself, or we had some time. And if we were going to stay together, we needed to look different. In the loft, we selected my paints and I colored all of her remaining bare spots, filled in her face. Fast, a little sloppy, but I tried to make it look like it was supposed to be that way. Then I erased the paint from my skin, and checked the ceiling mirror. People would see the paint on Rogue long before they’d see how close our features were. There wasn’t time to change our bodies. Paint wouldn’t hide us from a program, but it would be some protection from regular people.

We flew through the work; we couldn’t be safe here long. Just as we reached the Marker door in the hallway, I heard a faint chime. A message. I keyed it up on my handheld.

It was from Nita. Five names. These would be the backup pairs they hadn’t found yet. Then “Go to the Governing Board. Stay public. Skip the forest.”

That made sense. I don’t know what happens if an evil programmer deletes you, but it would be harder to remove us from a social milieu than from any of our private places.

Central Park is exquisite, complete with graceful swans on silver ponds, tremendous trees, and flowers in shades of blue that only happen digitally. All of it is as perfect as Nita’s garden. The place is a bowl, a hemisphere, with gravity that keeps you vertical everywhere. It’s the one place that’s always crowded, and you can see all of it from anywhere inside. The Governing Board uses it in marketing holos.

It was public and carefully monitored, with no hidden places that might hide an Avatar. Safer than any of the bars we usually hung around. We fetched up with our backs to a tremendous tree, a wall of black bark.

“Rogue?”

“Just give me a minute.”

I sat and watched her watching the park, knew how we loved the perfect bends of the swans’ necks, the contrast of their white feathers and the brilliant hued flowers around the pond. She hummed the opening bars of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” and I suddenly knew she would choose to die if asked. She finished the song, actually singing the last bit out loud before she turned to look at me.

“We may not have much time. Let’s go.”

“No. Wait. Let’s send an information packet to the Governing Board. Tell them where we are. And go home. We can wait for decisions to be made there.”

“But then we risk your life too. And it’s my life. I say no.”

I didn’t know what to say. We were both silent for a time.

“Rogue?”

“Hmmm?”

“We have to risk us both. Otherwise we just argue about who dies. Want to fight me for the right to die?”

“No,” she said.

There was nothing else to say. We marked to the Governing Board’s offices.

What we knew of the Board was not enough.

Board members began life as so many Avatars, archetypal judges painted in and interlocked with a set of laws and operating rules. In any court case a majority of judges would be bio humans sitting in, the Avatars almost autonomous because bios think so slowly. Over several years a few judges had grown old and made the easy choice. They’d gone virtual. They walked among us: tourists in Central Park, fans in the Glad Hand. But when they sat as the Board, the covenants and regulations were written into their minds.

How could we influence that? Even after ten eeyears the differences between eeworld and bioworld were sometimes weird enough to twist my mind inside out. I felt like a kid in the principal’s office, young and bewildered and scared.

Honesty seemed best. We laid our problem out, shared the recordings we had, including the ones from Nita that showed the light technician who’d been robbed. We didn’t show Nita pretending to be a cop. Basically, someone from Outside was stealing money, and maybe music and other intellectual property. One of the missing citizen/backup pairs had been an architect. One wrote horror fiction.

The Governing Board adjourned and left us alone for a very long time.

When they came back, a magistrate came in and stood between Rogue and me. It was just symbolic, painted, but we knew we couldn’t leave. We’d certainly need permission to mark out of here.

Rogue asked anyway. “Can we leave?”

“No.” The spokesman for the Board was a tall, thin man who neither smiled nor looked at us. He continued, “One of you will have to submit to being erased.” He cited two rules by number. “Normally, it would be the older. This case is different, neither of you is at fault. And you’ve done us a service. Do you have a preference?”

“Yes,” she said, “It will be—”

“No,” I jumped in. “We are the same, but we are different. It’s not her fault, don’t kill her.”

The spokesman looked pointedly at me, and Rogue shook her head.

“Let us both live?” I spoke it.

“It’s against the rules.”

“Write a merge program. Make us one. Merge our memories.”

“Merge memories?” The spokesman’s expression did not change, but he lectured. “The rules here are one to one. More than one of an entity, and you have a problem. Who creates? Who is real, who is a legal fiction?” He paused, let that sink in. “It was legally decided that to stay within the definition of human, to avoid becoming mere software, everyone must stay themselves unless they choose to die or break a law. Like this. It’s as illegal to merge two entities as to have two copies.” He started to quote more laws.

Rogue had it now, grinned at me, and interrupted him. “We can’t be both two entities and two copies of the same one. Let us merge.”

Silence. Then, “How do you intend to accomplish this?”

I had no idea.

Rogue said, “We need a merge program.”

“Have you any idea how complex such a thing would be? How much time it would take to write such a thing, test it, debug it?” The judge was becoming animated: we had at least captured his interest.

But I didn’t think they’d go for it. They were caught in a paradox; they’d have to choose one law or the other to break. The easy choice was to erase one of us, or if we got too noisy, both.

“You need a merge program,” Rogue said. “You don’t imagine that this was the last such crime, do you? There’s a market in information between us and the bioworld. Books, performances, plays, songs. Here’s a way to steal it all. What will you do when there are . . . dozens, scores of victims? A paired Board member? You need a merge program. You should have had one already.”

I spoke up. “Our friend, Nita, the one who helped us solve this crime—”

“She could do it.” Rogue broke in.

“For a proper fee,” I said.

We were blocked out of the conversation: we disappeared, or slept. Then the judge was back.

“If you can bring back a plan, merge your memories, and make a single pattern, then we will allow it. It must be irreversible. The Board must accept the design. If it can’t be done, then you will still have to choose.”

The Governing Board put up extra encryption around the loft, and Rogue and I were sent back there. We could be together and both alive as long as we stayed in the loft, until they resolved the case, until Nita wrote an acceptable program. There was risk, and ethical questions.

If it worked, Rogue and I would become one, the memories mapped to each other, the pattern that was us made me. Our time as two people would be stitched together. It was the best reward they would offer, and we had to agree it was fair.

So we let two judges wring us dry—replayed our separate memories and the information from Nita until the clues became a pattern. Then they told us to wait.

We used the time to sing and create. We never once listened to old work. We made new. Twice as good. No, better, richer—the synergy of two people in desperation. Always, my best work comes from emotional cliffs. It was a way of flying from them into something greater, and Rogue and I were intensely absorbed, playing as if our lives depended on it.

We were someplace else, on a voiceless aria flying between made-up worlds and colors, when Nita and James marked in. “They caught him. A twenty-year-old kid calls himself Spider Evans.”

“Wow.” Rogue and I. I asked, “What about the teller?”

“Avatars both. Our thief ran them.”

“What happens to this Evans?” James asked.

“He killed two people.” Nita’s voice was flat.

“So he’ll die?” I asked.

“I don’t know. The two he killed were virts, like us.”

“Still legal people,” James mused.

We were silent a long time. This was nothing we could control . . . but there are no questionable witnesses when virtuals testify. The testimony the law takes isn’t dubious or warped or self-serving; it’s recordings of our memories. The perp’s guilt would never be in doubt.

If Spider Evans were freed, it would be a message to every virtual human. You can’t be murdered. You’re not real. We’d be a long time knowing, too, given the pace at which the bio world moves.

“How’s the program coming?” Rogue asked.

“I think it will work. They bought off on it yesterday. Reluctantly.”

“What do you think?” Rogue asked Nita.

“It’s the best I can do. But I’m afraid of losing you both.” It wasn’t much like Nita to be unsure of anything.

“You won’t lose us. There just won’t be two anymore.”

“The Governing Board won’t let us make backups to test it on. You’re the test.” That was Nita, always saying the tough things.

“Hey, we can still back off and choose,” I said.

“No.” From Rogue and Nita both at once. James was silent. I knew what he preferred.

Rogue went to James, and tucked herself in his arms. It was a long time before she looked at anyone but James.

There was no getting around it. Even Nita grudgingly agreed. There was simply no more available to us. At worst another backup would take up our life. I would wake terrified, knowing that a backup of me was roaming loose, and Nita would explain how the problem had been solved . . . or maybe I would just edit the whole experience.

No comfort to us, but maybe some to Nita and even to James. We joked about it.

Nita said we had to be put out, like sleep. She couldn’t run the program on minds still in motion. We’d wake merged. While it wasn’t like there would be a body—we were electrons after all—Rogue touched James a last time before lying down by me. We curled close to each other.

I blinked awake. Alone.

“Rogue?” I whispered.

Well, yes.

I explored. There wasn’t a separate voice in my head. I couldn’t talk to her . . . to Christa. I was Christa all along. I replayed memories, found that sometimes it wasn’t immediately clear which memory was whose.

I had begun to think of myself as Rogue, as an interloper, a copy, there near the end. It made the Rogue memories less accessible, that doubt.

In James’s bed I had always been Christa. I was shocked at the tenderness between Rogue and James, speechless at the changes it had wrought in her. God, what it had cost me to remain separate from him while Christa and Christa were together. Rogue Two, Rogue Backup, had been counting on Christa to be her half of the relationship if she was the one gone. I admired her. Me. Us.

I’d have gone nuts after all if I hadn’t made myself stop using pronouns.

Nita and James both stayed. It was awkward, she was missing but she was me. I was both of us; more than either of us. The merge was good, but sometimes I had to work at it. Timescapes were weird. I was angry and a little confused, then happy and creative. I did a lot of yoga. After a week, Nita headed back to her life, mumbling that she needed to work on something for a client and would I visit soon?

James stayed with me at first, making a space in the corner of the loft. He watched as I expelled my anger into sound and light. Music made with no joy, but some combination of self-hatred and fury with the world. Without her, the making of the music was half its potential and I did not love it until I relaxed and she started to come through in small harmonies and sounds of water.

James watched, and talked me through more than one bad spot. But still I could not hold him as she had. The specter of loss was too great between us, and somehow her memories of him were still not completely mine. They were like watching a movie holding all the sound and texture but none of the feeling. The look in James’ eyes followed me through the songs, pleading, and I ran away from it and him into the music.

I did not understand why he did not hate me. Eventually, James started marking back to his tent or to Nita’s from time to time, and still I did not go out.

The need for balance and normality became a hunger, and I finally looked for the light of day, the music of others. I found Frank, and he didn’t seem too pissed at me for running off. Surely some of the pain and anger and need were etched in my body, leaking clues in the way I walked and carried myself. He asked if he could see the tunes I had mentioned looking for weeks ago. Said he needed new stuff, to take the band in some different direction, and he joked that if he sang another Elvis tune he might die. In fact, he was losing the beer belly, trending toward a James Morrison look.

I took his hand and led him to the loft, let him feel and hear what we Christas had created. I left the angry tunes for now, and played the ones Rogue and I had made together. I had not heard them in two months. They were exquisite. Frank held me for a long time but he did not ask questions. Eventually, I told him.

A month later, we opened a show at Frank’s redone place, now called Rogue’s Revenge. I had top billing. I sang in the front of the stage, the entire audience available to me as a living thing. It was something I could never do for myself, but somehow this was for the part of me that was her. The crowd loved it, clamoring for more after I was long past spent. James and Nita were in the audience. James cried and came up to me with flowers afterward, and now I kissed him, as one Christa, long and slow and unafraid.

PART EIGHT
DRACO TAVERN STORIES

INTRODUCTION TO “THE MISSING MASS”

It’s not every day you can wrap up the day’s most interesting astrophysics puzzles in one vignette.

“THE MISSING MASS”

Midmorning Saturday, the fourth day after the landings, the Draco Tavern was frantic.

You never can tell how the biorhythms of a score of alien species will interact after the landers come down. None of them cycle through exactly twenty-four hours unless they medicate themselves. The first two days I’d been swamped in the mornings. The evenings had been half dead.

Gail, Jehaneh, and Herman were all on duty. Nearing noon, they seemed to have it under control. I could almost relax.

The Draco Tavern is all one room. During the remodeling the bar became a ring in the middle set higher than the main floor, to give me a chance to look around. This many disparate life forms don’t always get along. I’ve learned diplomacy. I’ve got stun gear too.

Four Low Jumbos huddled close around a table, almost hiding it. Low Jumbos like crowds. They only show up when there’s no room for them. Their bodies shook; the roar of their laughter leaked through the privacy shields as a synchronized bass huf huf huf. Their combined bulk nearly hid an entity their own size, the Terminator Beaver working with his computer against the west wall.

Ten Bebebebeque, sixteen-inch-tall golden bugs, perched around the rim of a table conversing with a Chirpsithra and a gray-and-pink jellyfish in a big glass tank of foamy water . . . big enough to crush my table, it looked like, so it must be sitting on a magnetic float. The jellyfish was new to me. Harsh blue light shone down from the top of the tank, illuminating an intricate internal structure and five dark, wiry tentacles knotted at the center. Evolution beneath a hot, fast-burning sun would explain why they hadn’t adapted to the land . . . if there was land where they evolved. Water worlds seem to be common.

Jehaneh set a tray on their table. The water creature used skeletal waldo arms to move a pink canape through its little airlock. I watched the canape slide into its translucent interior.

Jehaneh came back to the bar, looking pleasantly bemused. “Carpaccio flavored with sea salt,” she said. “Do all the seagoing forms want red meat?”

“Mammal meat is higher energy than they’re used to. They all have to try it, but it makes them hyper. Sometimes they get sick.”

“I need four more sparkers,” she said, “and four Bull Shots.”

There were Chirpsithra at most of the tables. They’re the ones who use the sparkers, and they make and run the interstellar ships. They look like attenuated crustaceans, three meters tall and higher, and red like a boiled lobster.

Four humans in Arab robes settled around a table. Iraqi seem to have rediscovered the pursuit of wisdom. Aliens made overtures, and they broke into pairs. Two joined the Low Jumbos. Two took high chairs to talk to a Chirpsithra.

A man stopped in shock in the double door airlock.

He didn’t look like the usual run of xenobiologist or diplomat. Short, pale of skin, oriental eyes, straight black hair going gray, a comfortable old suit and weird tie, a laptop computer hanging from one hand. He wore the vague look of a scholar with a wandering mind. It took him a moment to recover his aplomb.

Then he made his circuitous way toward the bar, shying wide of aliens, way wide of the Folk, who laughed at him with lolling tongues, like a pack of wolves with their heads on upside down.

I was human. He was really, really glad to see me. He set the computer on the bar and asked, “Can you make me an Irish coffee?” English accent overlaid on something oriental. Having second thoughts, “Leave out the whiskey.”

I told him, “I can do coffee any way you want it, or expresso, cappuccino—”

“Cappuccino would be perfect.”

He didn’t try to talk over the shriek of live steam. He opened his laptop and booted it up. In the sudden quiet that followed, he said, “I’m Roger Teng-Hui. I’m looking for someone.”

I asked, “Human or alien?”

“E-mail correspondent,” he said. “I’m looking for Helmuthdip.” He turned the Toshiba around. He had World Online up and running.

I read an email message from <Helmuthdip@starlink.net>:

If the Chirpsithra have such a power source, they may be willing to share it. A Human diplomat might ask.

I asked him, “Power source?”

“He thinks the Chirpsithra are using the energy of the vacuum.”

I let that crypticism go past me. “When did you first contact this ‘Helmuthdip’?”

“Wednesday evening.”

“What’s he want?”

“He seems to want me to put political pressure on the crew from that starship! At first he didn’t mention politics, interstellar or otherwise. I took him for human.”

The chirp liner Scrilbree Zesh had been in place near the Moon last Tuesday morning. The landers were down before Wednesday noon. Give “Helmuthdip” a couple of hours to buy a computer in Forelgrad and play with it a little . . . I said, “The timing’s tight. You don’t know the species?”

“I thought he was human! He had a Web site up, a discussion group on the problem of the missing mass. My filter program caught it. The site didn’t look active. It was just him.”

I waited.

“I didn’t think I was dealing with a political pressure group. He knew things. He was interested. You know, a dedicated astrophysics site would have been easy before the Chirpsithra came. I’ve been teaching on PBS and the Net for twenty years. Most of my students have disappeared, and I’m the only teacher left.”

Herman asked for Arabian coffee for the Iraqi. He took the tiny cups and went off, and I said, “I suppose the problem is that the Chirpsithra know it all.”

Teng grimaced. “Do they really?”

“They say so. Their passengers say so. Sometimes they play jokes. I might buy that they know everything they want to,” I said, “and what they don’t know, their passengers know, and when they don’t, they bluff. I’m used to it. I never thought about it from a teacher’s viewpoint, but . . . it must be like everybody’s sitting around waiting for the answers!”

“Flipping to the back of the book. Give me another cappuccino. Grand Marnier on the side. Do they ever make mistakes, or are all of these entities too advanced?”

“Oh, they make mistakes.” A qarashteel had come to Earth to make cheap war movies . . . but I shouldn’t blurt that out to just anyone. “Your alien would still have had to learn how to use the Internet. Maybe a human being showed him. Let me try something,” I said. I linked into the Britannica’s universal encyclopedia site, found what I wanted and turned the screen around.

“ ‘Helmuth speaks for Boskone.’ Early science fiction. Helmuth was a space pirate, and a ‘dip’ is a pickpocket. You’re looking for a spacegoing petty thief. Excuse me.” Things had gotten busy around the big table, and I went off to deal with it.

The Draco Tavern has always been as much a fast-food joint as a bar, but our supplies and capabilities have expanded over the years. We charge too much because we have to keep too much stuff around, and we have to be too careful what happens to it. Most of this stuff would poison most of the life forms we get in here, and that does include the booze.

A Chirpsithra knew me, though I didn’t recognize her. You can’t tell Chirps apart; they’re gene-engineered to identical perfection. I took the opportunity to wave at the Low Jumbos and ask her, “Do they like crowds that much? Or should I be getting bigger tables?”

“You would not see the end of that endeavor! These”—something breathy—“are not the largest of our clients!”

Other Chirps chittered laughter. One said, “There are life forms that would not fit in any imaginable vehicle!”

The other, “But were they sapient? How could we ever know?”

Chirpsithra obscurities. I moved on. We were frantic for the next hour.

Then the Iraqi all rose and went out—prayer time, I guess—and suddenly most of the bar was getting up and walking, rolling, lurching, slithering through the airlock into a horizontal glare of Siberian tundra. The Low Jumbos followed the rest.

The jellyfish in his aquarium was still there. I wondered if he’d been abandoned. Five Chirpsithra who had watched their alien companions all go away now gathered around the big table with the aquarium in the center. Herman glanced my way for permission. I thumbs-upped him. He pulled up a high chair and joined them. Something hairy came out of the restroom, looked around at the empty bar, then joined Herman and the chirps and jellyfish.

Jehaneh looked tired. I told her to go sack out. Gail went too. Roger Teng-Hui was still at the bar working his Toshiba. The Terminator Beaver was deeply involved with his Macintosh.

I stopped at the Beaver’s table.

What showed of him was largely prosthetic. Under all the goo and wire and silver plating and small glowing icons, the Terminator Beaver might have been a solitary Low Jumbo. He was half covered in tiny black platelets, half pink hide bared for prosthetics. Circuitry, lenses, armor covered his body. The material shone like glass and metal and jelly, but it all flexed. There was a narrow indicator strip above his small, neat carnivore’s mouth, where he could read it with goggles like two silver eggs. The widgetry had a functional beauty implying, I thought, centuries of design. It hid most of his face.

Wires ran from a neck ring into the ports of the Macintosh. The screen was dancing, flickering, and his fingers never went near it.

He’d told us his name: a near-supersonic birdsong. He had been in the Draco Tavern since the landings, eating and drinking alone. He had bought the Macintosh laptop computer in Forelgrad, the merchant town that has grown up around the spaceport. Gail had shown him the basics during a dull evening. He’d become skilled very rapidly.

We’d speculated. The Draco Tavern’s elaborate restroom isn’t gender-specific, so we still didn’t know that. Was he, she, it a cyborg by choice, a medical patient, geriatric case, augmented athlete? Was he a Low Jumbo avoiding eyes that might find him ugly?

He’d plugged his Mac into the wall, not into one of the universal sockets the Chirpsithra gave us, but into a telephone jack. I looked back toward the bar. Teng-Hui was around the other side, not visible.

The Beaver might well be the mysterious <Helmuthdip@starlink.net>. Did I want Teng-Hui to know that? Did I want to tell the Beaver about Teng-Hui?

I try not to get myself or the Tavern involved in these dominance games. Sometimes there’s no helping it. And sometimes I can supplement our income by learning something valuable. I once went broke building a supercomputer, but that’s also how I patented the magnetic float.

The game the Beaver was playing wasn’t an action game, so I felt free to interrupt. “Terminator Beaver,” I said, and let my translator whistle his name. “How are you doing?”

Let him take it either way: progress on the game, or was he thirsty?

He whistle-sang. His translator said, “Dead. Notice joke. I begin the game dead.”

“Your character can still get hurt.” He was playing Grim Fandango upgraded for 3D. I watched him trying to deal with the coroner and his flower beds. “Do you enjoy hints?”

“No.”

“I need a hint to a puzzle. How good are you with that thing?”

“A fascinating toy.”

“Have you had dealings with this entity?” I showed him the net address: <Helmuthdip@starlink.net>.

He asked, “Do you have access to this entity?” He typed it on the screen: <chinaRoger@wol.com>.

“It may be. Describe what you want of him.”

“A matter of negotiations. Rick Schumann, why should I tell you more?”

“ ‘ChinaRoger’ hasn’t dealt with aliens.”

“You have had much experience. I have funds if you will act as a mediator,” said the Terminator Beaver.

“I’ve done that,” I acknowledged. “How difficult is my task to be? Try to describe what you want of ‘ChinaRoger.’”

“I seek knowledge that would point to energy for industrial purposes.”

Guessing, I asked, “Something to do with the missing mass?”

“I wondered if you merely pretended to knowledge. Would you accept one-over-twelve-cubed of net profits from this process over the next thousand years?”

I negotiated for half that, plus a modest thousand credits to be transferred at once. A bird in the hand, etc. The recording would serve as a contract if I brought these two together. I hadn’t decided on that. Either way, I expected no profit from this.

Herman was getting recharged sparkers for his table. The Wheesthroo, the hairy guy, wanted an orange sherbet shake in odd proportions. I made that and Herman took it away.

Teng had waited patiently. I asked him, “What do you want with this Helmuthdip?”

“I want to know what he wants with me.”

“What’s he say he wants?”

“That’s complicated.”

“I’m not busy.”

“I thought he was just another astrophysicist. But, look, I’m Roger Teng-Hui. Any decent astrophysicist knows who I am, and I’d know who he was. I don’t mind ‘Helmuthdip’ hiding his name. But he knows of research I’ve never heard of, and there are terms he didn’t know. That was funny. He wanted to talk about the expanding universe, but he didn’t know ‘Hubble constant.’ He knew ‘missing mass,’ but he didn’t know ‘Casimir effect.’ ”

“I don’t either.”

“Ah. Look, this is fascinating stuff—” He caught himself. “Even now. Rick, the current most interesting question in astrophysics is, what is the nature of the expansion of the universe? Will the universe expand to infinity, or will it collapse back to a point? Most astrophysicists would like to find just enough matter to make space flat.

“Understand this picture? If the universe is too massive, it’ll expand for a while and then fall back into a reverse Big Bang. If there’s not enough mass, it’ll be expanding toward infinite volume. Right between, it expands to a finite limit. That’s flat space, right between infinite expansion and an eventual collapse, and it fits a cluster of theories built around an inflationary universe. How fast we’re expanding is the Hubble constant.”

I did in fact understand him, but he didn’t wait to find that out, he just raced on. “Now, the right amount of matter to do that depends on how fast the galaxies are going away from each other . . . the Hubble constant, right? The faster they’re flying apart, the more energetic the Big Bang explosion must have been, and the more mass it will take to pull everything to a stop.

“The point is, none of the astronomers can find enough mass to do the job. Maybe we would have. Telescopes were getting better all the time, but then the Chirpsithra showed up—”

“Is this what was going on at ‘Helmuthdip’s’ Web site?”

“Yes. I thought he was an amateur at first. Brilliant amateur. I was intrigued.

“The latest, most accurate measurement of the Hubble constant depends on Type 1A supernova explosions. Do you know how that works?” I shook my head. “Say you’ve got a bloated gas giant star losing mass to a white dwarf companion. The hot hydrogen gas rains down through an amazing gravity field, so it’s heated to tens of millions of degrees. When it gets dense enough, you get a fusion bomb, boom.

“These Type 1A’s all resemble each other, and they can be recognized across huge distances. The universe is full of them. A Type 1A supernova tells you how far away it is by how bright it is, and how fast it’s moving by its red shift.

“Using those as meters to measure the universe, we get a rate of expansion that suggests around thirty percent of the mass that’s needed to close the universe, or ten percent, or seventy percent, depending on who needs a grant.”

“So you look for more mass.”

“Right! We look in places obscure and weird. We postulate mass we can’t see, dark matter, in all sizes from neutrinos to intergalactic dust, to near infinities of brown dwarf stars, to hypothetical massive particles left over from the Big Bang itself. I wasn’t a front runner in all this, but I kept track. And I got old, and we had too many solutions and none of them made a lot of sense. Aliens came down in Siberia, hordes of them, and they knew. So what was the point?

“Then ‘Helmuthdip’ popped up on my screen. And for a while he was making sense, and then he got into the Casimir effect.”

“What brought you here?”

“And then he started insisting that I use my influence on the pilots of an interstellar liner! That would have brought me here anyway, but what influence? If he comes from a place where astrophysicists have more power than fucking politicians, it’s for damn sure he’s from interstellar space! But I have to tell you about the Casimir effect.”

“Do you really?”

“Actually,” he said, “no. Let’s leave it that there’s energy in the vacuum. Fantastic levels. Space isn’t really empty, it’s a froth of virtual particles appearing and annihilating each other faster than any hypothetical instrument can detect them, and that’s where the energy is. It’s been demonstrated mathematically that if the vacuum in free space was empty of energy, you’d have minus energy near a black hole.

“The Casimir effect is an experiment that measures vacuum energy. You machine two plates very flat, and you move them very close together. They pull at each other—”

“Gravity?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

“It’s done with virtual particles. Virtual particles flash into existence and annihilate each other everywhere in space. But you put these plates so close together that the wavelength between the two plates is too small. There’s no room for virtual particles to pop up between them. The pressure on the outsides pushes the plates together, and that’s the Casimir effect.”

“Strong?”

“Tiny. ‘Helmuthdip’ has been trying to tell me—Is that entity waving at you? The half-mechanical, ah, person?”

The Terminator Beaver was on his feet and coming around the bar. I said, “Terminator Beaver, meet Roger Teng-Hui, also known as ‘ChinaRoger.’ Teng, meet ‘helmuthdip,’ aka Terminator Beaver. I believe you have much to discuss.”

They sat at the bar with their computers in front of them, sometimes activating displays to supplement the Chirpsithra translators. They both kept slipping into jargon, then remembered that they were talking to the bartender too. Sometimes it takes a third party to get two people talking the same language.

“The Chirpsithra won’t discuss what powers their star-to-star liners,” the Terminator Beaver said. “Our landers are various and we build them ourselves, but the liners have apparent infinite power and not enough fuel storage.”

“Antimatter?” Teng asked.

“Antimatter they keep for attitude jets, with dross from refined sewage as reaction mass. Our landers use antimatter. Spies have identified a system aboard Scrilbree Zesh for making antimatter! Where do they get the energy? Many species wish to solve the puzzle. Sometimes we cooperate. We know that the liner’s mass varies during a voyage, losing and gaining again.”

“The energy of the vacuum is thinly spread,” Teng said.

“By some measurements,” the Beaver agreed. “Some theories render it huge. The Casimir effect may measure only the least of what is available.”

I saw fit to cut in. “Near-infinite energy in the vacuum,” I said, “And near-infinite energy in these huge Chirpsithra ships. That isn’t all of your argument, is it? Because they don’t have to be related.”

They both tried to interrupt. The Beaver’s translator cried, “No, no, no! What of the missing mass?”

“He was doing that before,” Teng said. “It’s an interesting . . . notion.”

“We must suppose that early Chirpsithra—” The Beaver saw us about to object. “No? Then think of engineers who find a way to attain the energy of the vacuum. When work is done, something always disappears, does it not? Not energy nor potential nor mass, unless one into the other, but something is gone.”

“Entropy,” Teng said. “Disorder increases. Energy becomes less available.”

“Yes, but what is gone when energy is taken from the vacuum?” The Beaver’s silver goggles flickered as he studied our faces. “You cannot pull energy from the same volume over and over!” he snapped. “Vacuum must disappear!”

I said, “Okay—”

“They learn the ultimate secret, these Engineers. They may be the first of many. Their numbers and ambitions expand. Peculiar and active galaxies may show their work. There is no missing mass,” the Beaver said. “The universe is expanding too fast, the Bang was too energetic, but expansion slows because space is disappearing. In the limit, space will be flat.”

I asked, “Teng? Is this even sane?”

The man said, “Oh . . . sane. Look, there’s no way you can take the same energy out of the same block of emptiness forever. Energy has to become less available. Sure something has to go, and it’s probably volume. Space shrinks where the Engineers have passed. Why the Chirpsithra?”

“Look about you. They have such a power source! How many suspects can you identify?” the Beaver demanded, rather unfairly, since the bar had been nearly emptied.

Teng said, “Well, that’s my point. This universe has had around ten to the tenth years to produce a species capable of using the energy of the vacuum. We expect the universe to last . . . how long before interesting things stop happening? Ten to the fortieth years? Ten to the ten to the eighty? We are in the earliest moment of the universe. Most of time is in front of us. The Engineers might not even have a planet to evolve on yet!”

I said to the Beaver, “You have asked, haven’t you?”

“To us the Chirpsithra said nothing. To another race they once said that the secret of their drive was to be taken as a puzzle. ‘Just another cursed intelligence test.’ ”

Teng burst out, “Your damn hypothesis isn’t even falsifiable!”

I asked, “What?”

“When you’ve got a decent theory, you try to falsify it, Rick. You don’t want someone else making you look like a fool, so you try to disprove it yourself first. If a statement can’t be disproved, falsified if it’s false, it’s useless. Beaver, if the Engineers won’t start chewing up galaxies for a trillion trillion years, what evidence would you expect to find now?”

“Any species may ask.”

“Not us,” Teng said, suddenly bitter. “There weren’t even human footprints on Mars when the Chirpsithra came. If ever there are, they’ll be around a Chirpsithra landing site. Passengers. Why would they give us an interstellar drive? We can’t even build landers, and they use antimatter just for reaction jets!”

I made two cappuccinos while I thought. All talk stopped in the scream of steam.

It seems I’m doomed to spend my life with entities brighter and more knowledgeable than myself. They gather to talk, all these different shapes and minds, and I am privileged to listen. I love it. But sometimes they talk and talk, and never act.

A mathematician once told me that all of math is a mind game. The strangest thing is that any of mathematics can be fitted into the way any part of the universe behaves. The huge vacuum energies that fall out of mathematical formulations needn’t be taken seriously. I knew that without ever seeing the equations, let alone being able to read them.

Then again . . . “Come with me,” I said. “Let me do the talking. Teng, you may not know it, but any ongoing conversation should not be interrupted. It’s a custom.”

“Right. What have you got in mind?” But I was in motion, and what I had in mind was very little.

The big table was down to Herman, three Chirpsithras, the silent Wheesthroo, and the big jellyfish in his aquarium jar. I placed the cappuccinos and pulled up high chairs for the rest of us. One of the Chirps was chittering. My translator said, “Not all of the life forms known to us enter the Draco Tavern. Poseidon masses as much as Scrilbree Zesh itself.” Scrilbree Zesh was the big ship still orbiting the Moon.

The jellyfish spoke like a snore. Its translator asked, “But this entity could visit Poseidon?”

“One of our ships might cross to Poseidon’s world. We would prefer to visit Poseidon before he dies. Wait but a moment.” The Chirp’s monitor strip twinkled.

Herman took the opportunity to half-whisper, “We’ve been talking about water worlds. That’s Scylla. Nothing to trade, but supposed to be a poet. Poseidon lives on a water world not far from here. He’s huge.”

The Chirp said, “No such voyage is now planned. Learning to talk again to another of his species would be tedious, but we estimate Poseidon’s lifespan in the thousands of years.”

“But mine is not,” Scylla the jellyfish said.

“We are sorry. Greeting, Rick.”

“Greeting, elder. Greet Roger Teng-Hui and the Terminator Beaver.”

“Greet you both. Greet Scylla, whose kind only recently made fire. A great accomplishment it was.”

We spoke; the translators spoke; talk grew raucous, then stalled. Into a moment’s pause I asked, “What’s the largest life form the Chirpsithra know of?”

“Extinct now,” the Chirp said. “They were larger than galaxies. They formed the galaxies. Your telescopes will one day be powerful enough to watch them. Would you witness this now?”

Teng wanted to speak. The Beaver wanted to speak. But they both looked at me first, and Scylla’s snore rang out. “Please show us this wonder.”

“Our monitors . . . but you have a local computer, I see.” The creature’s long red armored hand reached out for the Beaver’s Macintosh computer and opened it facing the jellyfish. “Do not disconnect.” The Chirp produced a little box of its own and plugged it into a piece of the Beaver’s equipment. Her fingers played over a surface.

The Beaver was still attached; he twitched. The Mac’s screen raced, went black, then blue-white. “Fast-forward,” the Chirp said.

We watched. A wash of violet light dimmed to blue, to green, to yellow, then broke into an expanding chaos of filaments and dimmed further.

The Chirp’s translator spoke. “Roger Teng-Hui, how do galaxies form?”

Teng said, “It’s a puzzle. Current attempts to model the early universe usually give us a universe that is too uniform to form galaxies. Inflationary theories make galaxies more likely. It’s one of the attractive things about inflation.”

She said, “You have not yet seen the universe forming. It was too uniform. Without galaxies there would be few stars, yet galaxies would never form. But like all here—even Scylla, whose sea-locked kind breed transparent jellyfish to make ever more powerful telescopes—we became able to watch.”

Out of the chaos came whirlpools of light.

“It may be you cannot see the mechanism. Teng, your people have wondered about the missing mass.” Teng recoiled; she chittered laughter. “What is unfalsifiable might still be proven true.”

“You’ve been eavesdropping,” I said.

“Our translators note key phrases, as ‘missing mass’ in conjunction with ‘energy of empty space.’ If Engineers must use the power in the vacuum, and those Engineers are yet to evolve, then they will be undiscoverable. But these life forms we call the Firstborn evolved very early. They metabolized the energy of the vacuum. Wherever there was a bloom of Firstborn, an orgy of uncontrolled breeding, there too were sudden concentrations of mass. Disappearance of volume leaves mass behind, yes? There sudden stars flowered.

“We would study the Firstborn further, but we cannot find them. We fear them extinct. The rage of light and heat may kill them when galaxies form, or else matter around them might grow denser until a black hole swallows all, and remains behind to anchor a galaxy.

“Yet we hope that they still survive between galactic clusters. See this great emptiness—” She showed us on the Mac, a vast hole in the universe where there were no galactic clusters. “We have never traveled that far. If we could study the Firstborn, we might learn their secret.”

The Beaver demanded, “But what drives your ships?”

“Our ships use a lesser effect. The Firstborn hold the key to vast wealth. If we have not learned it, we, in our billions of years . . . well. Some younger race might. Teng, Beaver, Rick, it is not in our interest that you should give up striving.”

Scylla’s magnetic floatplate floated out from under the table, and she drifted out onto the tundra. The rest followed. I watched them go, thinking that we must be a common thing to the Chirpsithra. A civilization is only beginning to learn the structure of the universe, when interstellar liners appear and alien intelligences blurt out all the undiscovered secrets.

Primitive peoples die when powerful intruders mock their lifestyles. Whole worlds might be saved, if Chirp diplomats can be trained to imply that vast secrets remain untapped, awaiting the touch of young and ambitious minds.

“Paid you too much,” the Beaver told me. “Did you see animals the size of a galaxy? I did not. I saw blobs and colors.” He ambled out.

Teng caught up with him. I heard him say, “Let’s think about expanding that ‘Helmuthdip’ Web site. Get some of my colleagues involved. Maybe some passengers too.” Teng was bouncing, his spirits restored. In a young universe there were still wonders to achieve, secrets for a young species to learn.

INTRODUCTION TO “SAFE HARBOR”

This is the first Draco Tavern story since I published The Draco Tavern collection three years ago.

“SAFE HARBOR”

There’s this about the Chirpsithra trade, and it’s something the news anchors almost never mention. It’s safe. Whatever weirdness comes out of the big interstellar liners, it’s been vetted by the Chirpsithra crew themselves, in some previous solar system.

It’s a comforting thing to remember sometimes, although of course there have been exceptions. We still haven’t taken back our oceans. The Draco Tavern had to be rebuilt after a terrorist bomb. We lost Mars in a lawsuit.

Yellow Warbler brought us a varied lot. As soon as the bubble-shaped lander was down, passengers streamed out into an angular pattern. Keeping that array, they flowed across the tundra and up against the Tavern’s row of airlocks, twenty-two unfamiliar aliens, no two alike. Four of varied sizes came through four different airlocks, and the only thing they had in common was that they were all exoskeletal: all armored. Two seemed armed as well.

Gerard and I watched from the bar as more came through. I wished we had more staff on hand . . . then changed my mind. The whole thing was starting to look like a hijacking, and I didn’t want an interstellar war. Gerard alone might be trouble enough. He’s an Olympic wrestler in his late twenties.

“Don’t do anything heroic,” I told him.

He said, “You sure, boss?”

“Pretty sure. Standby.” I was reviewing my weaponry. Stunners and gas and the like, and an alien widget that suppresses chemical explosives. None of it would stand up to any kind of army.

Most of them were six-legged. Most wore vests with tools. They all had heads: two round black eyes, no nose, a fold of skin on top that might serve as an ear, and a blunt, hard-shelled mouth. These next few through were smooth-skinned, their ear ruffs more fragile. One had a broad, flat back piled with equipment.

I wondered if we were dealing with a hive mentality.

A short one with a big head had come in late, walking on all sixes. Now he reared up, showed open, spidery five-fingered hands, and announced, “We come in peace!”

“Good to hear,” I said, reserving judgment. “Are you all sapient? What are you drinking?” I didn’t see a translator device. Maybe there was a widget in his head; or maybe he was doing his own translation.

He said, “We’re all more or less intelligent. Most of us can tolerate water with sea salt.”

More cycled in. One had gills under a wrinkly helmet full of fluid. One rolled in inside a glass sphere; the dust inside fell peculiarly, and I guessed at vacuum.

Gerard and I started setting up bowls of salt water. The shapes of their mouths suggested that they could drink from those. I asked, “Are you all the same tolerance type?”

“Sure, we’re all related species. Trisharp tensh hatch nex glimwa,” and the big-headed talker drew the sigils for me on my own desktop screen. The tolerance code is important: getting it wrong can have you breathing sulfuric acid when you don’t want to. “Except her and him,” he said, pointing to the ones with their heads enclosed. “They won’t drink. You may call us the Trisharp Clade. What’ll you have?”

I told Gerard to make us both Irish coffees. It would occupy his hands. He looked edgy.

A bigger one backed through the airlock. This one was hard-shelled, armored and armed. He remained facing the airlocks. Two more armored types stayed out in the blowing snow.

Another armored pair watched as the rest of them lined up around the bar. I didn’t have a table big enough for them all. A small, stick-figure centaur sidled along the bar, its wide-open mouth nearly touching each bowl. When it was done sniffing, others began to drink.

“Where are you all from?” I asked.

The big-headed speaker waved a fragile hand toward the ceiling, which is domed and often shows stars, but tonight showed nothing but a building blizzard. “The far end of the Draco Arm. A double handful of worlds. You? How far have you gone?”

I said without overt bitterness, “We’ve been on the Moon. I own a piece of Mars, maybe enough for an embassy.”

“Do you go there yourself?”

“No. We were still exploring the solar system with robot probes when the Chirpsithra got here, nearly forty years ago. After that it all kind of stopped. Which reminds me, where are the Chirps? Where’s the crew of the lander?”

“Delayed,” said the talker. “We hoped to speak to you alone, Rick Schumann.”

We settled at a table next to the little dance floor. Now it was just me surrounded by six of the Trisharp Clade: the talker, an armed and armored type, a smooth-skinned one with a head as big as the talker’s but shaped more like an anvil, the stick-figured sniffer, and two so small that they had to sit on the table to be seen. Gerard and more smooth-skinned ones set seawater bowls around us, then returned to the bar.

The talker asked, “What do you see of us?”

Weapons, I thought, but I said, “You’re all related. Same planet for sure. Different species?”

“We’re all descended from one tool user who learned how to rewrite our genetic code eight thousand years ago. Have you humans done that?”

“Yes.”

“But you haven’t begun to divide, you haven’t made yourselves perfect, and you haven’t begun to explore.”

A little nettled, I said, “Our probes were getting very good. We had rovers on Mars. Probes around every planet except Neptune. The Millikan Probe is past Pluto and on its way to Sedna and some other—”

“The Chirpsithra learned to alter their genetic code, but they chose a different path from ours. They looked for perfection. They think they’ve found it. They all look and think alike.”

I remembered Chorrikst, a shorter, grayer, half cyborg Chirpsithra; but she had claimed to be over a billion years old. The rest of the Chirps are all twelve feet tall, female, wearing bright red exoskeletons. All alike. I said, “They use generic engineering.”

The talker didn’t laugh. “One species searches for a single perfect shape and strives for that, as they did. Another fissions into many daughter species, as we did. Another shapes only its environment. Three paths. The problem is that there’s never a place to stop.”

I said, “There’s no beginning either. Reshaping your own species is older than that. You don’t need to know about DNA—”

“I misunderstand.”

“Our genetic code. You don’t need it to reshape species. We bred wolves into dogs, to guard us. We bred horses to do heavy work. We shape broccoli and radishes and pink grapefruit. We used to have arranged marriages—matings to shape our own descendants. Some still do.”

“Genetic engineering is a more powerful tool. Every tool user eventually finds it. They’re compelled to cure body flaws, inherited diseases, perceived lapses in beauty, inadequate ways of thought. Reshaping themselves, they make one mistake.”

I said, “You didn’t.”

“We colonized the worlds around us,” the talker said. “And so did the Chirpsithra. If we made mistakes, there were more of us elsewhere. We survived. But most species are adapted to a single locality. A lake, a grove or veldt that grows what they can eat, a shared ocean, a single planet’s gravity or spin or tilt. They must perform their experiments where they dwell. Is it not the same with Earth? With you?”

I said, “We were going to the planets. Then the Chirpsithra stepped in and, and solved everything.”

“But you must know that it is not safe to confine yourself to one lake, one forest, one world. A mistake made by genetic engineers will spread. A species’ survival may depend on being scattered, isolated from a plague. Suppose we and you—”

But he was interrupted. The aliens around the table began talking to each other, very fast.

I had my own translator plugged in and the earpiece in my ear, but I didn’t hear much sense out of it. These translators need to hear a lot of a language before they grasp it. The stick-figure had been sniffing around the curve of the wall, with an armored type at his elbow/knees. He chirped, “Clear,” and the anvil-headed one rang like a bass gong.

The talker asked, “What do you know of the Chirpsithra? Do you think they will kill themselves?”

I laughed. “They won’t.” Too arrogant.

“They will never stop refining themselves.”

“They give every impression that they think they’re perfect. Look, they come from tens of thousands of worlds, but every Chirp I see is just like the others.”

“If you were not so short-lived, you might see them change.”

“Have you?”

“We have not known them long. A few thousand years. Rick, they’ve colonized most of the habitable worlds of most of the red dwarf stars in the galaxy. That would make them safe from their own mistakes, would it not? But every species plays with its nature, and their ships will let them reach anywhere. Nothing is isolated from the Chirpsithra.”

I wasn’t sure what he was getting at, so I kept silent.

“Plague,” said the talker. “If some tiny symbiote mutates into something that can kill a Chirpsithra, it will kill every Chirpsithra. They’re all alike. None have a unique resistance. Then what happens to galactic civilization? Transportation always depends on the Chirpsithra ships.”

“Who should we trust?” I began to see where this was going.

“Trust the Trisharp Clade.”

“You have ships? Or just one ship?”

“Just one long-range ship,” he said, “in just a few hours. Factories in our own planetary systems, to copy it and make more. Will you travel with us? Yellow Warbler is half empty.”

Pirates. And they didn’t have the liner yet. My inclination was to stall. I said, “Room enough for a colony?”

“A small colony on this trip, perhaps a hundred chosen by you. Twenty if you don’t freeze well. More trips to come. Fees to be discussed. Your world has varieties of wealth.”

“Do you think your species are immortal, then?”

“We hold many worlds. With Chirpsithra ships we may spread farther, until no stellar accident can harm us.”

I said, “We say that if your only tool is a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail. You’ve shaped yourselves into an army. What does anyone do with an army? You may have written yourselves into a corner.”

The anvil-headed one buzzed, and I heard, “Seal it.” Others responded by blocking the airlocks with tables. The talker asked me, “Where is the rest of your staff?”

“They’re fighting a blizzard. They were supposed to be here two hours ago. After all, there’s a ship in. Shall I call them?”

“No.”

Gerard brought our Irish coffees. “Sit,” I said. “The Trisharp Clade has been telling me that we’re doomed. We’ve discovered DNA and we’re going to rewrite ourselves out of existence.”

The talker didn’t contradict my interpretation.

Gerard thought it over. He looked at the talker, changed his mind and looked at the anvil-headed one. “I had a friend with diabetes. It’s a disease you’re born with that kills you later. If you watch your diet you can live a long time. If you don’t, you lose your feet. You go blind. You die. Now, are you going to tell me I can’t rewrite DNA to cure diabetes?”

The talker spoke a few syllables to Anvil Head. To Gerard he said, “Everyone always does.”

“And Alzheimer’s? And sexual preferences? And I knew a woman who swore freckles were a handicap where she came from.”

The talker said, “They cure the obvious flaws and then make more subtle changes. Often a species dies because it has enhanced its sexual characteristics.”

I told Gerard, “We can leave the planet. The Clade is offering transportation.”

“Mmm. Where?”

To the talker, I said, “He’s got a point. Isn’t the galaxy pretty well full? We get guests from everywhere.”

“Our telescopes are powerful. Do you know the band of infrared that signals plant life in the tee tee hatch spectrum? We found planets for your use long ago. We can offer you a selection.”

“Do you have video?”

We heard what I took for muffled thunder; but all heads turned, and mine followed.

The armored ones outside were shooting at the sky . . . at the lander, now rising out of sight.

My translator spoke; the Clade warriors didn’t notice. “Rick Schumann, I am Sharmantar, First Officer, Yellow Warbler. What is your situation?”

“They’ve taken the Tavern,” I murmured. “They’re offering your ship.”

“They failed to take my ship. Your judgment, shall I speak to them or attack?”

“They have a skilled talker. Talk to him.”

Sharmantar’s voice blared from the walls, speaking jittery music. My earpiece said, “Trisharp Clade, you have no way to leave Earth.”

The anvil-headed one whistled. “We have prisoners.”

“How many?”

Silence.

“You lost most of your Clade in an attempt at piracy. A trade at one for one would lose you most of the rest. Perhaps another strategy. Have you asked the United Nations for sanctuary?”

Anvil Head scuttled out of its chair; armored Trisharps bracketed him. The talker whistled, “We cannot survive here! This is a tee tee hatch world!”

“If you wish to travel on with us, your contract must be renegotiated. Surrender now.”

The anvil-headed one pointed something at Gerard. The talker beeped and clicked, rapidly. I spoke the code that would ready all of my stun armament.

There was a mirror-colored half-dome on the dance floor, four feet high and twice that wide. It hadn’t been there a moment ago. A few projectiles spattered off its glassy skin; lasers reflected. It pointed a needle on a tentacle, and Anvil Head folded over onto the floor.

Sharmantar stroked the contacts of a sparker. Gerard and I sipped Irish coffee. Around us Clade workers were busy repairing damage their guns had caused among the tables.

“I didn’t know you had teleportation,” I said.

The Chirpsithra officer chittered laughter. “Instant transportation? We are not so powerful as that. We set our robot warrior inside the Tavern before the Clade set down. We have stealthy tech.”

“Good call.”

“Did the Clade offer you transport? Colonies? I listened a bit.”

“They did. Would you do the same?”

She answered with a question. “You spoke of evolution among sapient species. Do you believe my kind will self-destruct?”

Gerard shook his head, but I asked, “How fast? Everything is doomed over a long enough time.”

Sharmantar said, “Yes. Tell me, Rick, will your species reshape its sexual characteristics, given that option?”

“Some will.” Some already had, I thought.

“We will not transport you,” Sharmantar said, “until you have survived certain challenges. That is one of them. Then, yes, there are worlds for you. Meanwhile you must settle your own, making and using your own vehicles and probes.”

I toyed with the notion that we should have gone with the Trisharp Clade . . . but no, they never stood a chance against the Chirpsithra. Instead I thought of Mars. Set up an embassy to talk to the Europan colony. We’ve got to start somewhere.

PART NINE
MISCELLANEOUS NONFICTION

HOOKING THE READER

My correspondence course in writing told me about narrative hooks. The purpose of a hook is to keep the reader reading, but in my stranger stories the hook must also ease him into an imaginary world without confusion. Do it right and his sense of wonder will pull him right in: he can see most of what’s going on, and he’ll kill to learn the rest.

Oath of Fealty, written with Jerry Pournelle, was published in 1981. Here is what a building two miles long by two wide by a fifth of a mile high looks like to three college kids about to break in.

Elsewhere in Los Angeles it was late afternoon, but here was only twilight. The three invaders peering out of the orange grove were deep in shadow. The sky blazed behind them and sent chinks of blue-white light through the trees to make the shadows darker. There was a fresh smell of fertilizers and crushed orange peel carried on the warm Santa Ana wind.

Close ahead the eastern face of Todos Santos was a black wall across the world. Thousands of balconies and windows in neat array showed in this light as no more than a faceless void seen through gray leaves, a sharp-edged black rectangle blotting out the sun.

. . . “Bad for the guards, too,” said the girl. “It’s late afternoon everywhere but here. At night they’d know they couldn’t see. . . .”

Todos Santos is only an arcology, but it’s big enough to create its own climate . . . and that shapes the invasion.

My readers are very familiar with the Ringworld and with the Kzinti and Pierson’s puppeteer species. The Ringworld Throne must show it all again, explain it all to the new readers without losing the old. Sequels are always like that.

But I thought of something new for the Puppeteer character, the Hindmost—

The Hindmost danced.

They were dancing as far as the eye could see, beneath a ceiling that was a flat mirror. Tens of thousands of his kind moved in tight patterns that were great mutating curves, heads cocked high and low to keep their orientation. The clicking of their hooves was a part of the music, like a hundred thousand castanets.

Kick short, kick past, veer. One eye for your counterpartner. In this movement and the next, never glance toward the wall that hides the Brides. Never touch.

Odd shapes and strange gender patterns just showing through. Now the Hindmost calls Louis Wu (the man) and Chmeee (the Kzin) and resumes their dominance game. He broke communication during The Ringworld Engineers. Now he uses the dance to distract them: they must not see the oddness of his call.

Rainbow Mars picks up a character I haven’t touched in twenty-five years. A new reader will need the background; a familiar reader doesn’t want to be bored. So:

+390 Atomic Era. Svetz was nearly home, but the snake was waking up.

Gravity pulled outward from the center of the extension cage as it was pulled toward present time. The view through the wall was a jitter of color and motion. Svetz lay on his back and looked up at the snake. A filter helmet showed only as a faint golden glow around its head. It wouldn’t strangle on post-Industrial air, and it couldn’t bite him through the inflated bubble.

A ripple ran down the feathers along its spine, a gaudy flurry of color, nine meters from head to tip of tail. It seemed to take forever. Tiny rainbow-colored wings fluttered at its neck. Its eyes opened.

The natives of −550 Atomic Era would have carved his heart out without losing that same look of dispassionate arrogance.

Here it all is: the Institute for Temporal Research, time travel, polluted air and species lost to 3100 AD, strange creatures brought back for the Secretary-General’s Zoo, and Svetz, still unaware that time travel is fantasy.

For the prologue for The Burning City, by me and Jerry Pournelle, published in 1999 by Simon & Schuster/Pocket, I did Omniscient Author. This is dangerous, but it’s easier in fantasy.

There was fire on Earth before the fire god came. There has always been fire. What Prokeet gave to mankind was madness.

Prokeet’s children will play with fire even after they burn their fingers.

It was only Prokeet’s joke, then and for unmeasured time after. But a greater god called down the great cold, and Prokeet’s joke came into its own. In the icy north men could not survive unless the fire god favored one of their number.

Cautious men and women never burned themselves twice; but their people died of the cold. Someone must tend the fire during the terrible winters. Twelve thousand years before the birth of Christ, when most of the gods had gone mythical and magic was fading from the world, Prokeet’s gift remained. Some people like to play with fire.

My themes throughout the book will be myths, the deep past, fire and the fire god, pyromania and its origins . . . and the South-Central Los Angeles Riots played out fourteen thousand years early.

I think I’m getting better at this.

LARRY NIVEN INTERVIEW BY BRENDA COOPER IN 2000 AD

1. For at least the past thirty years, 2001 has been the mythical year of the future. What will be the next mythical year, 2001 now being directly upon us, and why do you choose the year you do?

I read somewhere, “We all thought the future would start about 1970.” And it was 1970 AD, and the future started maybe five months early.

In 2001 AD the first baby was supposed to be born on the Moon. We’re going to miss that.

There is no threshold date beyond 2001. We’ve crossed a more fundamental threshold. Not just the science fiction fans, but even the general public knows that change is constant, that the future will not resemble the past, that the craziest viewpoint is to believe in an eternal present, that next century . . . next decade . . . next hour will give us different rules, different freedoms, different powers and obligations. The next threshold date has no number, and it’s breathing on the back of your ear.

2. For various reasons people today often seem to assume that human civilization has just a bit longer to run, typically not more than one hundred years or so. On the other hand there is evidence that many ancient people had faith in a much longer-term future for humanity (if not themselves personally). What accounts for this contrast, or if the observation is inaccurate, why do you say this? Do you imagine humanity in some recognizable form living on planet Earth and elsewhere in one hundred years? One thousand years? One million years?

On every graph of human activity—energy consumption, rate of creation of garbage, population, and a thousand others—the curves rise asymptotically. Project them, they go to infinity. Vernor Vinge argues for a near-future singularity. But Robert Heinlein saw it first, and the year was to be 1955: “The Year of the Jackpot.”

So, maybe not. But humanity is evolving. In thirty years our current selves won’t recognize us. Inalienable rights might include perfect health. In a hundred years we’ll be dividing into distinct species. In a thousand . . . only the weirdest predictions are plausible.

3. Do you believe that physics has reached its zenith? That is, physicists believed in 1890 that there was little left to discover, except for black box radiation and a theory of ether. Similar positions are often echoed today regarding, for example, the speed of light. Has almost everything concerning physics been discovered? Where do you expect break-throughs in understanding and application?

I don’t run ahead of science. I follow as close as I can, and I peer over their shoulders while the scientists are watching their feet.

So I can’t guess what they’ll find in places they haven’t looked yet. I do not believe they’ve run out of surprises.

This is a predictive tool I’ve used:

There are goals we’ve sought for ten thousand years, and we’ll go on seeking them. Instant (or at least faster) transport and travel. Immortality (or at least longevity and miracle cures). Instant learning (or at least better teaching techniques). I only have to guess what it looks like.

4. If you could personally time travel to another place and time in the future, where and when would you go and why? Where and when in the past?

I don’t have a strong interest in history. Let me change a few things and I’ll visit the past. I’d save John Kennedy. Make him face up to his mistakes, get Lyndon Johnson out of the loop, and see if the altered Apollo program includes a space station in orbit . . . instead of in Houston at ten times the cost.

I’d visit the near future, close enough that someone might want to talk to Larry Niven and can figure out the language; distant enough to get me decent medical techniques and a ticket to the Moon.

5. What will be a surprising development in science and technology in the near term, say the next twenty-five years? What would surprise you socially?

Anything would surprise me socially. I never got good at predicting what millions of people will suddenly decide is rational. I do suspect that privacy was a passing fad.

I’d like to see superconductors get cheaper and closer to ambient temperature. There are engineering games you could play with that.

6. If you could resolve one of the great challenges we are faced with now (i.e., ecological damage, population growth), which problem would you solve and what would the outcome of the solution look like?

I’d repair our education system or replace it with something that works.

Then let next year’s students grow up to hold civilization together, and let them choose what the result will look like. I’m ready for a break.

7. You have worked with and met a number of leading visionaries during your career. Can you share a little of what you learned from at least one of them?

I’ve spent a lot of my life among people brighter than myself. Written stories with many of them. I love it. What I’ve learned, I try to pass on in my books. If I could say it short enough for an interview, you’d have read it by now as a Draco Tavern story.

But . . . watching Steven Barnes taught me to treat my life like an art form. Jerry Pournelle found me as a couch potato and got me exercising.

8. You are a prolific writer. Please describe a favorite project and share what was so fun about that project.

The Svetz stories were fun to write. Time travel is fantasy, see, and Svetz doesn’t know it . . . That first story, I dreamed it up one morning, outlined it that afternoon, and was telling it as a party joke that night, to a flock of cousins who were not yet impressed at being related to a “promising” writer. And it worked.

Five stories in, it felt like the joke was played out. But a notion was kicking around in my head. An orbital tether/orbital tower/Beanstalk, treated as a plant . . . I thought about it for a quarter century.

And every friend I’ve got has been writing Mars stories. It was pretty clear I’d never catch up. But time travel is fantasy, and Svetz still hasn’t caught on . . .

I started writing Rainbow Mars on a gambling boat that runs between San Pedro and Ensenada. I wrote on a laptop computer that I set up in the ship’s cappuccino bar.

Rainbow Mars was fun from end to end.

The Burning City didn’t start as fun. In 1992 some people were burning down my city. They endangered some friends.

I got mad. I started writing . . . a tale set in Los Angeles of fourteen thousand years ago, when magic still worked but was wearing out.

It didn’t get to be fun until Jerry Pournelle got involved.

I hike with Jerry and his dog. We work when we hike. He made suggestions for The Burning City. Show that chaparral was deadly when it had magical power. More attention to the gangs and ganglords. To the Lords, the politicos.

Eventually I realized that I needed his political expertise. He was Mayor Yorty’s political advisor when Yorty was winning . . . and during the earlier Watts riot.

When the book was nearing its end, he drove us up into the California wine country (“the Hemp Road”) and west to Pinnacles National Park. We climbed, and he guided me as I “perceived” the magic in that place.

Most of my tales of magic read as “rivets and sorcery”: heavy on the logic. This book felt inspired.

9. Which of the projects you have worked on has made the greatest positive contribution to the future of mankind, and why?

The scheme that drove the Soviet Union bankrupt was first-drafted at my house in Tarzana, by about fifty good people invited and led by Jerry Pournelle. We were gathered to build a space program, with costs and schedules, to submit to Ronald Reagan via his Science Advisor. We generated the Space Defense Initiative (or “Star Wars” if you didn’t like it).

The human species really could have faced global thermonuclear war. During seventy years of Cold War we grew used to it. In hindsight it may even seem inevitable that a socialist society will starve when it runs out of capitalists. But the danger was real.

10. What is the single most important piece of advice you would offer to a young person just starting out?

Treat your life like something to be sculpted.

FOOD STORY FOR THE CON JOSE PROGRAM BOOK

September 2003

I smoked for thirty-five years, first cigarettes, then a pipe. Jerry Pournelle got me onto the pipe: “It’s healthier.” Then he quit. “My sense of taste is coming back,” he’d tell me. “I can actually taste the grape in wine.”

I quit on August 6, 1987, at 6:30 P.M.

He wasn’t just blowing smoke. My sense of taste started coming back. How do I know? All my characters started turning into chefs!

In low gravity (The Integral Trees) I gave my characters a big cookpot kept almost empty, so dinner won’t just boil out, and twigs picked from the vegetation of the tuft for chopsticks. In free fall (The Smoke Ring) meat is set rotating alongside a fire; no need for a spit. In Crashlander Beowulf Shaeffer, trying to shake up a man holding him prisoner, orders a “crew snapper,” the ugliest fish he’s ever seen offered as food. In Destiny’s Road, Jemmy Bloocher spends the whole book as a gradually more knowledgeable traveling chef.

I don’t think the process has stopped. I do my share of the cooking at my house. Marilyn has a wonderful collection of cookbooks, and it would be fun to browse them. You don’t have a fully fleshed character until you know what he eats.

“INCONSTANT MOON HAS PASSED”

It was to be the brightest full Moon in centuries.

I kept thinking I ought to arrange something—gather some friends to watch the Moon—but kept putting it off. In the end I called a Boy and His Dog Wednesday afternoon. That’s Lex Nakashima and his husky Freda. They joined us for dinner at The Outback. (Good, simple steak house with Australian emphasis. Bloody crowded for a Wednesday.)

Afterward Marilyn was pooped. But Lex and I and Freda took the high road.

Two trails lead off from near my house. The Low Road is cool in summer, drops to a stream, but the poison oak owns that terrain. The High Road goes up, up, up, too steep even for my power-augmented bicycle, into rocks that have appeared in thousands of movies. All of the Lone Ranger shows were filmed here.

I had never hiked this road at night. Dogs howled from the ranch that edges the road, realizing that Freda was loose and they weren’t. I’m over my cold, enough to keep up with Lex. Hiking like that keeps you concise: you need the breath.

The Moon was just bright enough to determine color, easily bright enough that we never stumbled. We hiked as far as an established viewpoint, where the path comes to a V overlooking all of the San Fernando Valley. The Valley is glorious at night.

We stayed there until the wind got to us.

It was a thing not to have missed.