Asimov's Science Fiction: March 2014
Author: Penny Publications
Date: 2014-02-28 11:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Asimov's #458
Description: The March 2014 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction (Volume 38, Number 3; Whole Number 458) goes on sale on 21 January. Contents of this issue will include: Novelettes: “Walking Gear” by Sean Monaghan “All the Pretty Little Mermaids” by Cat Rambo “Declaration” by James Patrick Kelly Short Stories: “The Plantimal” by Ken Liu & Mike Resnick “Drink in a Small Town” by Peter Wood “Solomon’s Little Sister” by Jay O’Connell “The Redemption of Kip Banjeree” by Genevieve Williams “Through Portal” by Dominica Phetteplace Poetry: “What a Time Traveler Needs Most” by Jane Yolen “Golfing on the Moon” by PMF

Asimov's Science Fiction

Kindle Edition, 2014 © Penny Publications

WALKING GEAR

Sean Monaghan | 9966 words

For many years Sean Monaghan( seanmonaghan.com )tutored creative writing in his native New Zealand. He now focuses on his own writing, although he continues to work as an educator and librarian in a busy public library. Science fiction publications include stories in Aurealis, Perihelion, and Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. Sean has been a finalist in the Writers of the Future contest and has published numerous stories in New Zealand literary journals such as Takahe and Landfall. The author's first story for Asimov's takes a gritty look at family life, alien medical tech, and...

Jenni had become a low-rent hooker by the time Den found her again. She was working out of the back of a ramshackle duplex two blocks off China Lake Boulevard, taking what she could get. She'd lost her right leg from the knee down on account of a festering abcess started from a track of needle sticks. Even after that, she was still getting high most days. If she could score. If she'd had enough clients to front the cash. With the missing leg, and her age anyway, the few clients she could actually get were either the kinky fetish guys who found the stump a turn-on, or officers who'd come up through the ranks, having known her since they enlisted, and felt bad for what happened. Not many of them, but they paid regular rates.

"Yep?" she said as she opened the door. She'd done her hair, done her make up. That made her look kind of classy. She had a second-hand plastic prosthesis strapped up around her knee. Den figured that was probably part of the whole thing. Clients would find out soon enough, and if they didn't like it they'd get violent, or storm out without paying.

"You don't remember me?" Den said. Even through her years of wear and tear, he could see the family resemblance. His father's eyes, his father's chin.

"Honey, please. Much as I'd like to be a sweetie and remember your face and your name, that's not a particular skill I have." She smiled, her teeth wide and straight, though a molar was missing and the rest were yellowed. "However, I'm sure I'll remember what you like."

Behind her a blue cat leapt up onto the table. It fixed Den with its eyes for a moment, then sat, focused on a paw and began washing its head. He could smell meatballs cooking.

"I'm your brother."

Jenni blinked. Her eyes closed and she put a hand up to the doorframe. "Dan."

Before he could respond, she corrected herself.

"Den. Yes. How old are you now?"

"Twenty-six," he said.

She nodded, a kind of wavering nod that began at her waist. She wasn't high, but she was probably coming back down. Probably looking for some Benzedrine or some amorophyl to take the edge off while she got it together to go to work or score again. "You were fourteen," she said.

"I've come with an offer," he said. Having seen the cat he knew she would be open to it.

Jenni laughed. "Well," she told him. "It's so very rare that I get offers." Her laugh went on.

Out on the street a car went by. Too fast. Jenni's laugh trailed off. She stared at him and frowned. "Little brother," she said.

He nodded and glanced out at the tail end of the car. An old Mustang. Probably owned by a seventeen-year-old enlisted man heading back to base from visiting one of Jenni's neighbors.

Jenni's mother had been killed by a car. Jenni had been eight, her mother twenty-four. They'd been walking home from Wal-Mart and a Corvette had been racing a Subaru, lost control and bounced over the sidewalk. Her mother's hand had been torn out of Jenni's. The woman went under the car. The car went through a fence and had been found the next day, burned out at the Inyokern city dump. The owner had reported it stolen, but not until hours later. Official documents showed he'd never left the base, though Jenni's father didn't believe that. The air force looked after its own. In a way.

The kid had died a couple of weeks later in a live fire exercise.

"You better come in," Jenni said. "You're scaring away business."

Den closed the door behind him. "Dad says hi," he told her. Their father was living in Caspar now, fly-fishing through his retirement. He owned a share in a bakery, and with his military pension he was doing all right.

"Yeah. You should tell him to send me some money." Jenni went to the kitchenette and pulled a juice bag from the electric cooler.

"I'll do that."

"It's hot out. You want some?" She held up the bag, reaching around for a plastic tumbler.

"I'm good," he said. "I can get you a leg."

"Got a leg," she said. She held out her good leg, balancing on the prosthesis. "And a spare." She switched. The plastic leg swung like a pendulum. She drained juice into the tumbler. "Mangorange," she said. "With watermelon."

"I'm not supposed to be here," he said. "It's supposed to be a lottery. Chaiston is looking for volunteers, but you have to go into the ballot. I want you to get on it. I can make sure your number gets pulled."

"My number."

"The new organics they're making are perfect. Viable. They integrate." Den walked over to the cat and scratched it under the chin. It leaned forward into his hand, closing its eyes.

Jenni sighed. She put the tumbler to her mouth and drained the juice. "You know what I think? I think that you only ever went to work there because of me. I think you feel sorry for me. You feel sorry because your mother is still alive and mine isn't. Because you're closer to Dad. Because you're some Ph freaking D who makes two hundred and fifty G pipetting liquids from one test tube to another and I'm a lousy call girl with one leg. And yes, I do know all about you."

She knew some, he thought, but had plenty of details wrong. He kept himself framed, but also ran faux snippets with fake data.

"I just—"

"You think I'm not happy? You think that you can come in here and promise me a leg. How am I going to make a living? How do you think I'm going to get by if you get me a leg?"

The cat pulled away and jumped off the table. Its fur flashed iridescent for a moment, the roots showing red and gold. Greer-Klein had been pumping peacock feather genetics into felines.

"Now," she said, "this is where you tell me that this is no way to make a living. That I'm too old anyway. Did you know that I'm thirty-four? Thirty-four years old. I've been doing this for close to twenty years."

"I know."

Den put his deck onto the table where the cat had been. The deck unrolled and booted.

"Fancy," Jenni said, stepping over.

He waved up the Chaiston menus and swept around to legs and arms. "Not real, you understand," he said, expanding to the below-knee grafts. "That would be kind of creepy. These are illustrations."

"Pretty creepy anyhow."

"This is what we're doing."

"How did you find out about my leg?" She waved at the screen. The Chaiston menus swirled off and she plucked at the piano icon. The keys appeared and the screen expanded left and right to give a full two octaves. With a ripple, the keys textured and lifted up. Not quite like a real piano, but the couple of millimeters difference between the white and black keys created a tactile distinction. "Nice," she said. She played a few bars of Hey Jude and followed that with a classical piece he didn't know, running into something by Pink Floyd and changing into a music hall honkytonk rag. Perfect invisible segues. The music stopped and she lifted her hands away.

"I used to play," she said. "Be nice to have a piano again."

Den left the piano on the deck's screen. "You came up on the lists. Local amputees." She nodded. "I'm registered, of course." She squinted. "With a privacy frame." Den shrugged. "Sure. That's not so much of an issue for Chaiston."

"Well, that's just—"

"Because I know you. You're my sister. I overrode. You're going to want one of these legs."

"How much?"

"We pay you."

Jenni grinned. "That's what I meant."

"So you'll do it?"

She kept grinning.

It took Den a moment. "Thirty thousand."

"And if I don't like it?"

"You're going to like it.

Again she didn't stop staring.

"I guess you could take it off again," he said. "Maybe." He knew she wouldn't want it off after.

"Okay. And I want a deck like yours. With a piano."

"Sure."

"Let me get my things."

Again it took him a moment to realize what she meant. "Now? Listen, I was just trying to talk you into it. We can put you into a slot in a couple of weeks."

"A couple of weeks." Her eyes glazed.

Den nodded. "It's a full program."

"It's a medical program, right?"

"Mm-hm. Of course. It's—"

"So why are you talking about weeks? I might have changed my mind in another hour." She pulled up her sleeve to show him tracks.

Den didn't know how to respond. He'd pushed the limits of his clearance and called in favors to get her slotted in at all. If he tried to squeeze her in sooner he was going to lose his job. But now, standing here in front of her, he couldn't argue. She was right, and he was probably lucky to have timed his arrival for a moment when she wasn't either high or working to earn enough for her next hit. "This can help with that, too," he said. "Get your things."

"I'm ready to go," she said, picking up a big handbag from one of the dining chairs.

"Always ready. Where's your car?" She glanced toward the front door.

Parked out at the curb he had a Toyota rental from the Avis kiosk at Inyokern airport.

It was due back in the morning, but he'd planned on taking the next plane out. There were only two flights a day, both in little zippons, direct to LAX. But that wasn't going to work now. He needed time to think, and time to figure out how to slot her into the schedule.

He was going to have to call Melissa and see if she could be sweet-talked into switching some of the patients out.

"We flying?" Jenni said. She had the bag on her shoulder and was heading for the door.

"Thought we'd drive." Den thumbed the deck and it flattened, shrank and rolled up.

"Good. I need to run a couple of errands on the way."

"Errands?"

"How long's this going to take, you think? Gotta find someone to feed my cat."

"Right." The cat jumped back up onto the table and butted its head against Den's hand.

Jenni locked the door behind them and came out to the car. Her swaying gait was odd to watch. "Nice," she said. "Yours?"

"Avis. I drive a Camaro." Inyokern was a small airport. The range had been limited.

"Of course you do, honey."

She nestled into the passenger seat. As Den pulled out, Jenni pointed ahead. "You make a left up here, before the main road."

Den eased the car around the high curbs, into another street of duplexes and trailer homes.

"Guess you earn a lot of money," she said. "Guess you're pulling a quarter mil?"

"Million and a half."

"Now see, I should be complaining you don't send me any money."

"You'd just put it in your arm."

"Yeah, well, putting it in my leg didn't work out so good." She pointed ahead.

"Straight through here, then make another left on Herschel."

The car cruised along at twenty on the back streets, reading the curbside markers. Some kids scooted by on wheelies. A crow danced around the middle of the intersection and the car slowed, easing by the bird.

"Tell me," she said. "Is this grafted limb going to fix me?"

"Fix you? Well, you'll be able to walk."

"Oh, I walk fine. After this left take the third right. What I mean is, my receptors.

This is that alien technology, right? Stuff from the stars? Super dynamic DNA growing stuff that will thread its way through me and make me a better person."

"It's vat-grown, if that's what you mean. It's not a donor limb."

"Donor." She looked at him, then back out the windshield. "Oh, yeah. Like someone from a wreck."

"It's grown for you, from your cells. It grafts on and bonds right to you."

"But the addiction, right, that's part of what it does too. Cleanses me, takes it away. Kind of like a self-regulating methadone pump in my body."

Den hesitated. Was that why she was doing it? Would it put her off to find out that it would only give her a leg, but he couldn't promise a cure? "There's some other research going on," he said. "Elsewhere. Treated organs. A leg's just muscle and bone, really. Sorry, but it's not going to do that."

"Isn't that the whole point?"

"It doesn't work like that," he said.

Jenni nodded. "Just up here. Eleven sixty-two."

Den watched the numbers on the gates and pulled up behind a rusted out Camry jammed in at the curb.

"This is sweet of you," she said. "It's good to spend time with you again."

"Likewise." How long could she keep hooking anyway? How long would she survive doing what she did at all?

Jenni leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. "Little brother." She laughed. "Little brother come to straighten me out." She leaned back and popped the door open. "Be just a few minutes."

Den felt a wash of heat as the door opened. He watched her cross the sidewalk and go through the steel gate on the Hurricane wire fence. The latch clicked shut after her and from somewhere in the yard a dog barked.

Den leaned back into the Toyota's headrest. It was weird seeing her again. He'd been a kid, really, the last time. Their father had decided to drive back down to Ridgecrest to patch things, maybe. At least to make contact.

Jenni had been almost clean in those days. At least that's what he thought. But she had been an occasional working girl. She had nicer digs, and she shared with another woman. Jenni had taken a week off her job at the hospital to show them around. Not that there was anything much to see in the little desert town. The Trona pinnacles, a tiny museum. They'd driven in through Death Valley, which seemed to Den the most interesting part. Below sea level. He'd stood on the roadway, imagining two hundred feet of water above his head.

It had started off fine, but it ended with his father and Jenni arguing. He didn't like the way she was living, wanted her to come up to Idaho with them. She didn't like being told what to do. Didn't think it was any business of his. Hadn't he abandoned her anyway?

"It wasn't like that," he'd said.

"Wasn't like what?"

But his father hadn't replied. Hadn't been able to. Den wished he'd been able to think of something to say. He'd been fourteen, and still stunned to discover that his sister was a prostitute. It had seemed so exotic, so dangerous. The girls he knew in school were developing, and most of them had enjoyed taunting the boys, but none of that was anything like as grown up as what his sister was doing. Prostitutes, to him, were in the movies. They had pimps who beat them up, and they took drugs and hung out on street corners in ridiculous sparkly taffeta and sequined outfits that just stretched to fit as if they were actually meant to be worn as a sock. Those people weren't his sister. Except, as it turned out, they were. She was. And, in the intervening years, she'd just gotten in deeper.

A door slammed and Den looked back up at the house. Jenni glided down the front walk. She reached slowly for the gate, sliding it aside and continuing through. He reached over and pushed the door open for her.

Taking the window edge, she stood for a moment, breathing, then slipped into the passenger seat. "Well," she said.

"Cat taken care of?"

She looked at him with a goofy smile, slumping down a little in the seat. "All taken care of."

"Oh, Jenni," he said. He'd seen her eyes. Dilated. He was surprised she was upright and able to converse.

"I feel like a coffee," she said. "We could stop at Starbuckeroo's."

"Did you—"

"Drop it." She stared through the windshield.

"Yeah." He felt sad, almost choked up a little. He wished that the graft would be able to do something to make her well. "Do you want to close your door?"

"Mm-hm." She didn't move.

Den reached, then pulled back. He got out and walked around to close her door.

She glanced at him, still grinning a little.

He drove to Starbuck's, nestled in a corner of the Wal-Mart lot with Taco Del Mar and a new Century 21 office.

"Mocha," she said. "Litewite, cinnamon, no sugar."

He doubted it would wake her up at all, but he was back in a couple of minutes with a Venti mocha and an espresso for himself. "You're a hon," she told him as he set the styrene cups into the holders in the dash. He headed out of town. She got it together enough to pick up the coffee occasionally and sip from it. She didn't speak until they'd gone through Mojave.

"Guess you still see Dad plenty?"

"Couple of times a month."

"Good. I should get up there and see him. Maybe after we get this leg fitted we can turn around and go up and visit."

"Sure."

"Oh." She looked at him. The first time in miles. "Better. Ditch the rental and you can take me up in the Camaro."

"My car's in Caspar."

"Too bad." She drifted off into unconsciousness.

Den called Melissa. She sounded chirpy, but her tone changed as soon as he asked about the schedule

"Seriously?"

"As a favor," he said.

"I know what you're doing," she told him. "You want me to bump someone from the ballot. Someone who's been waiting for months, anticipating the opportunity."

"Exactly."

Melissa didn't reply.

"Why don't you just call me when you've figured it out?"

"You might as well turn around and go back home."

"This is my sister. She's been through a lot."

"I suppose you're going to try to tell me that she's a vet? That she lost that leg to a landmine in Somalia or Pakistan?"

"Look up her record. It will be on the military lists. You've got access to all of those."

"Sheesh, you think I'm not doing that already? Of course I'm... oh."

"Yeah." Den sighed. At least something had worked. Melissa had the car wreck details.

"Yeah." Melissa expelled a breath. "Okay. I don't think I can do much. Do you know how long this has been scheduled?"

"Yes."

"Call me back in an hour. I'll let you know."

Through Palmdale and Sylmar, Jenni slept on. She woke when the car came to a stop in dead freeway traffic through Pasadena.

"Parking lot," she murmured.

"Pasadena." Six lanes of it. "They're building another overpass."

"Well, that'll relieve things for sure." She smiled. "And you live here?"

"Commute. Lot of time in planes."

"Out of Wyoming?"

"Lifestyle," he said.

"I'm sure. A shining knight."

"What am I doing?" he said. "I mean, aside from trying to give you a leg?" "Just trying to rescue me. It's kind of nice, but also a little creepy. It makes me think you've been spending years trying to work out just how. Years and years."

"It's my field."

"Yeah, but how long ago did you get into it? You didn't tell me that yet."

He didn't have an answer.

"See," she said.

"I could let you out here," he said.

"You're such a kid."

It was an hour before she spoke again. Traffic picked up and they were coming into San Bernardino, near the complex. A standard pair of five story buildings in a commercial park, the labs were discreet and almost anonymous. A small sign over the door—ChaistonLabs—was all that distinguished it from any of the other buildings: housing, records management, and accounting firms.

Melissa met them at the door. "Don't look so surprised," she told him. "I tracked you."

"You're invading my privacy."

"You're jeopardizing my livelihood."

"Hi, I'm Jenni." His sister held out her hand to shake.

Melissa took it. She glanced down at Jenni's leg. "Car wreck?"

"Yeah," Jenni said with a grin. "Let's go with that."

Melissa glanced over her shoulder. "We'll go in the service entrance."

"Wow," Jenni said. "You're going to lose your job, right?"

"No. I'll deny everything. I've already wiped all my phone records of contact with him. To do with this, anyway."

"They can still track it," Den said. He followed along behind the two women. Jenni was still a little shaky on her feet. He knew they were going to do blood work on her before they started with the attachment. He hoped that wasn't going to be too much of a problem. Technically, he knew opiates in her system wouldn't interfere with the graft, but it would bring flags up.

"If they want to track it, they can," Melissa said. "But of course they won't need to." Now she looked around at him. "Because if anything goes wrong, you'll take full responsibility."

"Will I?"

"He will," Jenni said. "He's good like that."

"Yes he is," Melissa agreed.

They came to a loading dock and Melissa went up a set of narrow concrete steps. She wanded her bracelet at the service door and it opened with a clank. "Welcome to ChaistonLabs," she said and ushered them in.

Den followed Jenni into a warehouse space. There were tidy racks and a little fork lift parked in a corner. Melissa gave Jenni a laminated visitor card riveted to light chains to hang around her neck. "In case anyone stops us." She pointed to a long, bright corridor on the far side.

"That way."

Jenni looked at her card, then turned for the corridor.

Melissa grabbed Den's arm as Jenni moved on ahead.

"Mel?"

"Is she high? Seriously?"

"A few hours ago. She'll be fine."

"Was she high when she crashed the car and lost her leg?"

"You didn't see her file?"

"Den. You could have put anything on that. And you probably did. I didn't even read it. I knew she was related to you. That was enough."

Den nodded. He felt like he was on prickly ground. Melissa could just pull the plug any time. "I did fabricate the cause."

"Figures. It's going to light up every medical board from here to Chicago if she's got opiates in her system when we start sampling."

Den didn't say anything. He should have stopped Jenni when she'd gone in to arrange the feeding of the cat. Or gone with her. Simple.

"You hearing me?"

Den nodded. "I figure there's some way around it."

"I'm going to have to talk to Ron."

"This is my sister."

"Who I'm guessing you didn't have anything much to do with until a few weeks back."

"She came up on the databases. Amputee."

"So you decided to play little brother rescuer." It wasn't a question.

"She's family," he said. "If we can't do it now, then some other time." He glanced behind. The door from the corridor to the loading dock had closed. "You brought us in here. You could have asked all these questions on the phone."

"I hadn't seen her wavering yet. Even then it took me a minute or two. She's a hard-core user. High, but upright, almost lucid."

"We had coffee."

Melissa snorted. "Yeah, that'll wake her right up."

"You two should stop talking about me like that," Jenni said without turning around. "I'm an addict, but I'm not deaf."

"The procedure won't cure you," Melissa said. "A new leg, that's all. I don't know what you might have read. We're not organs, just limbs and digits. Organs are a whole other setup."

"The aliens, right?"

"That's right."

"She's not expecting to be cured," Den said. "She's just humoring her little brother.

The rescuer."

Jenni laughed.

"Make a left up here," Melissa said.

In a few moments they were in a small clean-room. Melissa locked the door. Jenni had already clambered up onto the locked gurney.

"I need to strip?" she said.

"Just the leg," Melissa told her. She whipped up a screen and waved her own badge at it. The screen unlocked and she quickly began compiling data. "Have you got your medical info with you?"

"My what?" Jenni said. She grinned at Den.

Den gave Melissa Jenni's memory flake. Everything he'd been able to glean and scam from various databases.

Jenni unstrapped her leg as she stared at him. "You get that I'm only doing this for you, right?"

Den nodded. He didn't trust her anyway.

"Because I'm just an experiment to you, really. You think you're doing right by your family, doing something to help me out. But really it's all veneer."

"Huh?" Melissa said.

"Oh, you can listen, too, honey. You probably know what he's like. Yeah, I see you nodded. Did you two date? Are you still dating? 'Cos that would surprise me."

Melissa pulled back from the screen. "We dated." She looked at Den. "For the briefest moment I thought we might have another run at it."

"You should, girl. My brother, he's an ace. A catch and keeper."

"Jenni," Den said.

"Where have you been? That's what I want to know."

"Tell you what," Melissa said. "I can finish this up in the theatre. I'll send in the nurse to get her prepped."

"Melissa," Den said. "It's all right."

"Don't. I'm trying to help you out here. I don't need to listen to all this family drama." She slipped out the door.

"Well," Jenni said. "Sorry for screwing things up with your girlfriend."

Den stared at her.

"Oh, what a face."

"I don't know what you think," he said. "But she's not my girlfriend." Somewhere in the back of his mind he'd known that he would regret doing this. Perhaps on some level she was right; perhaps he was doing it to try to assuage some kind of guilt from the past. As the thought passed through his head, he realized that she hadn't even said that. It had been implied, but not explicit. Perhaps it hadn't even been implied. She might have scratched into something he'd been trying to avoid.

"Why don't we get this leg pinned onto me, then we can talk on the way home," she said.

"Not as simple as that."

"What? The leg, or talking?"

He was about to be dismissive, but managed to say, "Both."

"Yup."

A nurse came in with a trolley of equipment. "Hi," he said. "Andy." He got busy with setting up things. He handed Jenni a waiver brick, took her temperature, and drew blood.

"That's gonna be pretty cooked," she told him as she scanned through the document.

Andy just raised his eyebrows and continued with drawing more blood and doing other tests.

"I think," Jenni said. "That it's all going to work out." She slipped the stylus from the corner of the brick and signed.

"Oh, it is," Andy said. "We've got all the FDA bull to get through, but we've done enough of these now, that it's no trouble. You're going to be amazed by how quick it takes. You'll be back on your feet in a day or so."

"That for real?"

"Maybe. Dr Travers wants to get it down to outpatient speed. Come in at eight A.M., get your new arm or whatever fitted, and be home in time to watch the game. Or pick up the kids from school. I'm serious."

"Den?"

"That's the plan," Den said. He was off thinking about other things. Could he talk to her about family stuff? Could he tell her that he hadn't seen their father in years either? The old man kind of stayed visible with his online posts. Fishing, football, and flying. Den kept an eye on it, but never answered, never posted himself. In a way he just wanted to keep track. Some days he felt like a voyeur, spying, but he didn't know how to shut it down. Shut down his own thoughts. He just had to know.

"So we can go home right away?"

"Pretty much," the nurse said. "Tomorrow morning, right?"

"Well," Jenni said. "That is convenient."

The nurse drew lines on Jenni's stump, marking out where the new leg would be fitted. "You need to keep still," he told her.

"Tickles."

Andy managed a smile.

The door opened again and Melissa came back in. "Theater's ready. You two work out your stuff?"

"In ten minutes?" Jenni said. "That's years of bedevilment tangled up in there."

"So let's wheel her through," Andy said. "She's ready to go."

While she was in theater, Den sat back in Melissa's office with a vanilla Pepsi. The leg had been taken from stock, fed with her cells from the nurse's sample to make it quicken to her. She would be under a local anesthetic—not that she really needed one, he thought—and the doctors would be making their incisions around the stump to expose the bone and vessels. The artificial leg would be slipped into place, and the knitting would begin immediately. The straps and tubes of the thing were almost intelligent in the way they could bind to the right places. Capillaries would sneak their way up through her flesh, gluing themselves to her own. The pieces of artificial bone would use their own building blocks to fill the gap to the remains of Jenni's bones. Muscles and tendons would all seek out their natural analogues and stitch in and stretch out.

The doctors would have drips running into both the new leg and her own thigh, bringing bonding chemicals and nutrients directly to the site. Healing would be more rapid than any natural healing her body could manage on its own. And her own body would become stronger and faster-healing in general anyway. Den could see a time that people would opt for artificial replacements for injuries less traumatic. A broken bone that might take weeks or months to heal would become unnecessary. Remove the site of the break, implant some of this technology, and the new bone would graft through in moments.

A pity it wouldn't correct her addictions. She was going to have to do that on her own. Or not. Den was surprised that he cared. She was sick, but more than physically. Mentally. Something missing in her that the drugs filled. A cliché.

And he had something similar, he thought. Not that he'd taken the avenue she had, but she was right: there was something missing in him.

"Hey," Melissa called from the doorway. "Mr. 'Lost in thought.' Let's grab a bite to eat."

He glanced around. "Jenni?"

Melissa shrugged. "In recovery. She did fine, but I think they had to knock her out with gas. Wasn't responding to the locals. Which I think they kind of knew anyway, once they'd seen her blood work. I'm going to be backtracking and filling in paperwork over this for days. Anyway, she's asleep for the next few hours. Maybe you and I can catch up over a burger and fries? Denny's?"

"Sure." Den laughed, but it came out as a squeak. Nervous, he thought.

Melissa gave him a smile.

After they'd eaten, Melissa pushed back into her seat. "You're a small talk champ, you know that?"

"Excuse me?"

"You talked sports and weather, and a little bit about the Middle East situation, but nothing from here." She thumped her chest with a closed fist.

Den shrugged. "What do you want to hear? I'm distracted by my sister. All right? I don't know how to reach her."

"Or your father."

Den stared at her. He managed a shrug again. "He's happy."

"I'm sure he is. I don't understand you, though. You go to all this trouble trying to get her into the program. You somehow manage to get her onto the table with a couple of hours' notice."

"With your help, of course."

"Naturally. You jeopardize your career, your livelihood to do this for a woman you hardly know. The only connection you have with her is that you have the same father. A father whom neither of you have any contact with at all. Ever. The two of you are so different—I mean, she's so fluid and casual, and you're so wound up and kind of control-freaky, but you're really quite alike in many ways."

"Control freak," he said.

"Admit it. Anyway, you snipe at each other like a brother and sister should. You have similar mannerisms. It's kind of cute. It's almost like you grew up together."

"Seriously?" Den thought that his sister seemed as related to him as the alien genetics they were using in the limbs and organs. More than just from a different species; from a different planet entirely.

"I've got an idea," Melissa said. "Where's your father now?"

Den scowled at her, wondering what she was up to. "Don't you go calling him. We're doing fine."

"Sure you are. Where, though?"

"Green River, Wyoming. He's probably out in the woods somewhere fishing. You won't find him. He won't even have his phone with him."

"I'll make you a deal," Melissa said. "You let me organize something, and I'll go out with you again."

Den raised his eyebrows. "Second dates aren't usually a kind of negotiation thing, you know."

"Well, this would be more like an eighth date, after those false starts last December and June."

"Technically."

Melissa smiled. "Here's the thing. I like you. Still. But it's taken until now for me to figure what's up with you."

"Oh, you've got me figured out?"

"Hardly. Just that seeing your sister kind of unpeels a layer."

Melissa stopped speaking and stayed silent. Den watched her. She had silky eyes, that seemed to flow in their sockets, the pupils wide, her lids lowered. The waitress came to ask if they wanted coffee. They ordered.

"Okay," Den said after she'd gone. "What's your plan?"

"You should see him."

Den didn't answer.

After a moment their coffees came and Melissa sugared hers up, tipped in lite-white and sipped. She closed her eyes. "Never as good as home," she said. She opened her eyes. "But not bad. We should be getting back. She might be waking."

Den took a slug of his own coffee. It was all right. Not flash, but far from the worst he'd had. He took another gulp, then set it down and stood. "Let's go."

Jenni was conscious when they came into the recovery room. "Where have you two lovebirds been?" she said. "I've been awake for ages."

Den told her. "We didn't think you'd have woken already."

"Strong constitution," she said. "It feels kind of weird, though. It's like a reverse phantom limb. I used to have that, you know, the sense of the leg still being there, even though it wasn't. Now it's like I've got the sense of the prosthesis, but it's an actual leg. You want to have a look?"

"Of course," he said.

Jenni swung around on the bed, slipping the leg out from the covers. She flexed it up and down. "Don't know how come it's so healed up already. Takes me months just to heal a scratch these days. You know, with my compromised system and all."

The leg looked fine to Den. The skin tone was a little off, and he could see the seam, but the leg itself would still be working on that, looking at Jenni's system and adapting itself to her. Aside from that, it seemed perfect. There were no indentations or bumps around the join, except for the tiny scar. She moved it around for them, lifting her toes up and twisting her ankle.

"Did you put any weight on it yet?" Melissa asked.

"Already? Hang no. That would be just inviting disaster, don't you think?"

"Has the physio been in to look you over?"

"I think so. Cute guy, twenty-three or so?"

"Carl."

"Yeah. He came and twisted and pulled at it. I think he said he would be back later.

I was still pretty groggy, though I'm pretty often pretty groggy." She grinned, but it faded quickly. She put her hand up to her mouth. "Uh-oh."

"Problem?" Melissa said.

Den stepped back. He eyed the door. So much for what Melissa wanted to happen in his family.

Jenni stared at him. She dropped her hand and pushed herself off the bed.

"Steady," Melissa said.

Den moved for the door. He got his hand on the latch, but that was all.

Jenny swiped at him. Her fist caught his elbow and his arm swung down. Pain sheared up his upper arm. He yelped and stumbled to the floor.

"Den," Melissa said.

Jenni staggered back. She lost her footing and fell beside him. It felt like she twisted intentionally to land right on top of him. He yelped again. Jenni started laughing.

"What's so funny?" Melissa said. She bent and helped Jenni to her feet.

"Him," Jenni said. She looked down at her feet. "And look at me." "Look at you."

Den rolled to a sitting position. His arm still ached. He hadn't known that she could punch so hard.

Jenni took a step, then another. "Wow," she said. "This is only a couple of hours old.

How can that be?"

"Complicated," Den said. Clutching his injured elbow, he got to his feet.

"Den can explain it all to you on your trip up north," Melissa said. She still looked mystified.

Jenni nodded. "Good. He's got a whole lot of explaining to do. Like what's going on in my head. He can drive me home slow."

"She doesn't mean back to Ridgecrest," Den said. He stared at Melissa. "Or do you?"

She shook her head. "I'm getting you tickets. Den's treat. What do you mean, 'in your head'?"

"My treat?" Den said.

"You want to argue?"

"Something's off with my head," Jenni said. "Something missing."

"Sit down," Melissa said. "You've got a whole battery of tests coming up. We can get you MRI-ed first up. See what's happening. It won't be a big deal, I can assure you."

"Oh, it's going to be a big deal all right."

Melissa looked over at him. "Den?"

"Buy the tickets. Whatever."

Andy came in, carrying a clipboard. He cast a wary eye over the three of them, then zoomed in on Jenni. "Looking fine," he said. "You think you're ready to start with the tests?"

"You bet."

"Have you been walking on it already? Seriously, you can't do that yet. What if it just snapped off, huh? Then where would you be?"

"It's not going to snap off," Den said.

"Well, I defer to the expert, of course. Now, you two scram and let me take care of all this. You can come back in the morning."

"How many tests are you giving her?" Den knew there were a bunch, plus the MRI

Melissa wanted, but nothing like enough to go through the night.

"A couple now, more in the morning. She needs to sleep. That's the most important thing."

"I feel fine," Jenni said. "Alert and bright."

"You, honey, are getting some sleep. Now, Melissa and Den. Out."

"Come on," Melissa said. "Let's go."

Den took a step toward Jenni, almost ready to give her a hug, but it felt awkward and forced. She was his sister, but the new leg hadn't brought them any closer. He shouldn't expect that so soon anyway. It might take a year. And then it might only be fractional. He didn't even know why he wanted it.

"Scoot," the nurse said.

Den followed Melissa out to the corridor. She stopped and watched him for a moment.

"What?"

"Maybe you want to go for a drink?"

He glanced back at the door to the treatment room. He nodded and looked back at Melissa. "Sure. That would be good."

"We can take my car."

She drove an ageing Prius, but she drove it fast. She zipped the car out of the basement lot and onto Argyle Avenue doing thirty-five before she was even properly into her lane. "You need to relax," she said. "I'm not going to kill us."

"Uh-huh. Has this thing even got collision avoidance?"

"Don't think so. Pretty sure it predates all that. It's a loaner, you should know that.

My car's in the shop. You think I would drive something like this by choice?"

"It seems like I don't know anything about you at all." He clutched at the door handle and the side of the seat as she changed lanes and broke left onto Constitution Avenue.

"Ha, I like it like that." She didn't say anything for a few blocks, then, "You and your sister aren't very close."

"We didn't grow up together. She was practically in high school when I was born. And she was never around anyway. Complicated custody. By the time I was cognizant enough to know I had a sister, she'd dropped off the radar entirely."

"I know. It's kind of just you, isn't it?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that you've only met her a couple of times. And you're estranged from your parents."

"From my father. My mom's dead."

"Just like Jenni's."

"Yeah."

Melissa pulled up outside a bar. The lights outside were gaudy, flashing, and he could already hear shouting from inside. "I, uh—"

"Kidding," she said. She pulled out into traff ic again. "Sheesh. We're going to Marlow's."

Den glanced back. "Your beat-up old car would have seemed right at home parked out front of that place." He looked around at her. "Your tastes are changing, is what I thought." He saw her smile.

A few minutes later they were at Marlow's, its chromed exterior a simple set of lines, lit by two corner globes. The complete opposite of the first place. Once she'd parked and they'd ambled over, a bouncer shook them down a little and ushered them in. Melissa ordered them a cocktail.

"Seriously, beer's just fine," he told her.

"You'll like this." She carried the green and blue glasses across to a quiet, dim booth. A two-piece jazz band played slow ballads from the corner, a woman striking the drums with the pace of a snail, while the man upright with a five-string bass crooned at the microphone.

"This is feeling like a date," Den told Melissa as he slipped in beside her.

She shrugged. "If you like."

"Haven't we covered all that ground already?"

"Some, I guess." She sipped from her drink. "Try."

Den smiled. He raised the glass and could taste the beverage before it even touched his lips. He sipped and the fruity, acidic liquid spread around his mouth as if it had its own plans. He set the glass back down. The taste continued to expand through his mouth. "Strong stuff," he said.

Melissa nodded. "It's for sipping, really."

Den looked around the bar. Lots of patrons. Businesspeople, mostly, a few in open collars like himself, but mostly people who'd come right from the office.

"Don't you want to know what's rekindled my interest?" Melissa said.

"You're assuming that I'm still interested. I think I've moved on."

"Sure you have." She grinned at him.

He hadn't moved on. The smiles, the looks, it was all getting to him. Making him want her again. She was probably just leading him along, though, excited by his interest. He could see that kind of thing in her. He smiled himself. It would be all right to fool around, have some fun, he thought, but he wasn't going to bring his emotions into it this time. Treat her as someone who'd already promised to leave. Like a summer affair at Key West or Laguna. Enjoy it in the moment.

That put him in a better frame of mind.

"So," he said. "What's your plan for the rest of tonight?"

Melissa smiled and sipped from her drink again.

In the morning sun, he showered and found himself something to eat in her breakfast nook. While he ate, looking out across Pomona condos from her balcony, he heard her showering. For a moment he considered joining her, but the water shut off before he could make a move. He remembered, then, that she took quick washes. Efficient. In a way it joined up with the old Prius; concern about wastage. Except that she wasn't, she just didn't like to linger, felt there were better things to waste her time on than watching her skin prune up. It wasn't her car, he remembered.

"Hi," she said, walking through in a robe and drying her hair with a towel. "You found eats?"

He motioned with the bowl. "Honey Trinkets."

She smiled and looked back at the shelf where the muesli box still stood. "Is there even a cereal called Honey Trinkets?"

"If there isn't, there should be."

She laughed and dropped the towel to her side. "A business opportunity." She came out onto the balcony with him. "This is good. The air's clean, the sun's shining." She put her arms around him and hugged.

He could feel her lack of underwear though the robe, and liked it. He held the bowl and spoon out and tried to hug her back. She purred a little.

"I'm glad," she said. "It's kind of like we laid the groundwork all that while ago and finally you're ready."

"I'm ready? What's that mean? You're the one who broke it off. Both times."

"Because you weren't ready. You were emotionally lame." She let go and pulled away. "If you'll excuse the expression. Not meant as an insult."

Den puffed air through slitted lips. "Really? Because, gosh, you know, I wasn't thinking of it that way, but probably good of you to clarify it."

"You know what I mean."

"Really—no."

Melissa nodded, her face becoming serious. "You were younger. Reserved. And distant. In control. You didn't give yourself over to it."

Den took another spoonful of the muesli. He chewed it down a bit, then said, "And you think I might be now? After one night?"

"Oh, I know it. You're not the man I dated six months ago."

"Excuse me? He's standing right here. It's me."

She smiled just a fraction. "Your sister. What you're doing for her. Even though she's—excuse me again—she's a complete mess."

"A wreck?"

"Just this side of it. She could have gone downhill very fast."

"She still could."

"No," Melissa said. She moved toward the cereal boxes. "The leg will block the opioids. I didn't tell you last night."

Den shook his head. "I wish."

"It will. As soon as I saw her details, I altered the build. I added in one of the corrective organ systems. In the bone." Melissa poured out a bowlful of the honey cereal, the crisp little pieces making a glassy tinkling sound. "Still experimental, but figured it was the least I could do."

"The least?" Den thumped his bowl down on the terrace table. "It could kill her.

Who knows what it will do in her leg? That's experimental. She hasn't—"

"Slow down."

"You don't know what you've done."

Melissa squinted at him. "Listen, buster. You're the one sneaking around, breaking the rules. Dragging me into it. Well, this way I'm covered. Her record now states experimental recipient. I'll keep my job." Melissa took a mouthful of cereal. "So will you."

"You didn't think to ask? You didn't even think to tell me last night?"

Melissa hung her head, staring at the bowl. "I wanted to," she said in a whisper. "I couldn't find the nerve. We were having such a nice time."

Den nodded. She was right. "Hey," he said, walking over to her. "We did have a nice time. I just wish you'd told me."

She looked up at him and managed a smile. "Yeah, sorry."

"It's okay. I guess this way, everybody wins." He looked around. "Let's finish breakfast." He went back out to the balcony looking out at the other buildings. Down below a dog raced along the alley, tongue lolling. Den had some more cereal. Melissa was right. Jenni was a wreck, only just living. She had kept things together simply by medicating herself.

"But now," he said as much to himself as to Melissa. "Now that's behind her. She has no choice. It's eliminated her response to the opiate."

"We hope."

"Did you see her face when she came up? She knew that it was gone. She felt it."

He should have known right then. It was obvious now why she'd beaten up on him.

Melissa agreed. "Are we going back?"

"Now, you mean? Sure."

"I'll get dressed."

In fifteen minutes they were on the road, heading to the lab. Melissa, Den noticed, really knew how to read the traffic. She skipped out of fast lanes and into slow, and moments later the slow lane picked up speed while the lane they'd exited rippled down to a near standstill.

"I know," she said when he mentioned it. "Someone told me once that half the reason lanes slow down is people shifting unnecessarily. That might be true, but I like to feel that I'm doing something."

"I get it."

Melissa swung off the freeway into a strip mall and parked outside Radio Shack.

"You're getting her a deck, right?"

"I mentioned that?"

"She did. Don't scrimp. Get her the best they've got."

Den nodded. He went inside and found an Akai, a generation up from his own.

Back in the car, Melissa approved. She pulled out for the freeway.

"Are you going to come back?" she said, coming up to traffic speed. "Or was this just a fleeting visit?"

Den hesitated. He felt like he was on the verge of something here. Getting back with Melissa. That was something he hadn't expected or planned. It felt better this time, too. Now that he'd done what he'd done for Jenni, he was feeling more even. It was like the proverbial weight from his shoulders. Ever since he'd realized what he might be able to do for her it had burned at him.

And now it was done.

"Did you hear me?" Melissa said. She changed lanes again. "I mean, I understand if you're going."

"I think I can stay. Come back. But I need to go visit with Dad for a week or two.

With Jenni. See how that goes."

"You think she'll do that?"

Den nodded. "Definitely. I think she's glimpsed something else. Seen opportunity.

Seeing Dad is another step." He saw the mile and a quarter warning sign for their exit.

"For you, too, I think," Melissa said. She looked at him, a half-smile on her lips.

"Then maybe you'll come back."

Den didn't reply. It did sound like a good idea to him, but he still needed to get through the next stage.

Melissa swung them through the lanes and scooted down the exit ramp. A few minutes later they parked in the ChaistonLabs lot.

There was another patient in Jenni's room.

"Guess they moved her," Melissa said.

But Den knew that wasn't it. "Let's find out."

The desk clerk pulled up the records. Jenni had checked herself out.

"Maybe she went to Wyoming?" Melissa said.

Den sighed. "Such a bright outlook." He had a feeling where she'd gone. She wouldn't have caught a flight to Green River.

"Feel like taking a drive?" he said to Melissa.

It took them three hours to drive to Ridgecrest. Den reflected that it would have been marginally faster by air, considering, but driving helped to clear his head.

It wasn't what Jenni wanted. He knew that now. They hadn't had any kind of relationship before, but the chances of anything now were nil.

Melissa tried to reassure him.

"Maybe at least call your dad," she'd suggested several times on the trip.

"After, maybe," he'd replied. "I need to see."

He pulled up outside her duplex. The yards along the street were mostly filled with dry grass and faded cheap playground equipment. He half-expected Melissa to say something, but she didn't. He liked that. She'd been conversational on the way up, and he needed that, but now he needed quiet.

"Guess I'd better go in," he said after a few minutes.

"I guess."

It took him another minute, but he popped the door open and went around the car.

A dog barked at him from a neighboring yard, and someone in the house yelled at it.

Den went up Jenni's front walk and knocked on the door. No one answered. He knocked again, waited, then tried the handle. The door opened.

"Jenni?" Den stepped inside. The curtains were drawn, the lights out. He could hear water running in the sink, and smell pancakes and blueberries. Someone had been cooking. Recently. In the last hour or so. "Jenni?"

He shut off the water and went to look in the bedroom. No one. The bathroom was empty too.

"Jenni?"

Perhaps she wasn't here at all. Perhaps one of her lowlife friends had come in and cooked and left the water on. He went back to the front door and cast his eye around the room again. There was someone sitting in the shadows on the armchair.

"Jenni? Is that you?"

He went over and found her. His sister. Almost unconscious.

"Oh," she said, barely a word, more an exhalation. Her eyes were slits.

"What did you do?" he said.

She just smiled back at him.

"Jenni?" He wanted to shake her. He felt dumbfounded. Flummoxed. She'd run away and come right back here and shot up. She shouldn't have even been able to. As Melissa had said, the leg's architecture should have blocked the cycle. The receptors should have all been blocked.

She sat up just a fraction. "Den." He voice was quiet, husky.

"Oh, Jenni. I tried so hard." He crouched to her, putting his hand on hers on the chair's arm.

"Listen to me. You've done it all wrong. You think you can just arrive, drag me off, and that will change everything?" She swung her new leg forward. "This is weird."

"I didn't expect..." Den trailed off. He had expected, he realized. A naïve kind of knight on a steed, both in that shining armor. "You told me to begin with that you didn't need rescuing."

She huffed. "I came back to try a couple of things. Whatever this leg has done, I can't get high. Which is kind of crappy, though my skin's not crawling the way it used to."

"You tried?"

"Of course I tried. That's a whole part of it, which the leg, or whatever else you've done, can't change. You know that most addicts relapse after rehab and it's simply because they go back into the same environment." She waved her hand, indicating the apartment. The blue cat sat on the table.

Den didn't say anything.

He took the Akai deck and removed the packaging. He put it on her lap and plucked the piano icon. It spread out. Jenni tinkled a few notes and dropped her hand. "Thanks."

"I wanted to do something good for you," he said. "I know we don't know each other at all, but you lost your leg. And I could give you a new one."

"Steal me a new one, you mean."

Den hesitated. He had twisted the rules all out of shape. If someone did a little extra checking the chances were he would lose his job. And lose his place in the whole prosthetics and artificial limb industry. He'd be lucky to find something sweeping labs. "Yes," he said. "I stole it."

"You're sweet," she said. "I wish I could understand what it was all about."

Den swallowed. He could see that her pupils were dilated, but that was probably just from the low light. Although if the drug was in her system there might still be some physiological symptoms.

"Guilt?" he said.

Jenni pursed her lips and nodded.

"Your mother," he said. "Your... life. I had it so lucky." He stood. "I guess I really should apologize."

"You should. You've barged in here and changed everything, simply from some misplaced sense of guilt. I was doing okay. You think I don't suffer from guilt too? How could it be that she died and I didn't? I wished I could have saved her. How stupid is that?" Jenni stood now, holding the deck. "I was a kid, a little kid. And I've spent my whole life wishing that I could have been the one who went under the car."

"No, Jenni." Den shook his head. He stood himself and stepped away.

"Exactly." She jabbed the center of his chest with her finger. "The kids don't die first. The parents have to die first. That's how the rules work. Not always, but you don't want to be a parent who's lost a child. Never. And yet that's what I've been stuck with. Something that eight-year-old thought thirty-something years ago. And it just keeps going around and around in her head until it's worn a groove that's so deep she can't even see out of it anymore."

"I'm—"

She jabbed him again. "Now you've taken away the only thing I had. I can't even make the thoughts go away anymore."

"It was killing you."

"So what?"

"I—"

"You think I'm blind to that?" she said. "I'm not an idiot. I'm just a mess. And you know what? You are too. In a different way. In a nasty, creepy, smarmy way. You come across all nice and pretty and helpful and loving and you just wreck things."

"Jenni. I'm sorry."

"Will you stop it? I don't need you to keep apologizing. I just need you to leave." Her shoulders slumped and she exhaled. She stepped around him and went into the bathroom.

Den heard her throwing up in the bowl. He wanted to go and help, but he felt seared after her attack. As if her words had been flames cooking off his skin.

He went to the front door and opened it. Melissa was sitting in the front with the passenger door open, her feet out on the strip of dead grass by the curb.

"How you two doing?" she called over.

Den shook his head, but didn't say anything. He should probably leave. It felt good to have Melissa to go to. Even if it did all come out at the lab, they had—twee as it sounded—each other.

"You going to see your dad?" Melissa said. She pulled forward into the sun and stood, leaning one arm across the car's roof.

"Maybe," he said. He waved, then went back inside. He heard the toilet flush and the sound of an air freshener aerosol hissing. The smell of apples wafted out.

Then the sound of water running in the tub and she pushed the bathroom door closed.

Den took out his phone and called his father, imagining that he would have to leave a message.

"Fishing," his father's message voice said. "After the tone and all. I might eventually get back to you."

"Hey, Dad," Den said. It took him a moment to figure out what to say. "I'm at Jenni's.

She's doing okay, I guess. We caught up a bit." He paused again. "Um, I think I'm going to come up and see you for a few days."

Jenni came out of the bathroom. "You still here?"

"Just calling Dad," he said.

She managed a smile. "I already called him. Is he on the line?"

"I'm leaving a message." Den held up the phone.

"Is he really fishing?"

"Yep. That's pretty much what he does."

Jenni nodded. "I didn't leave a message. May I?" She held out her hand.

Den gave her the phone, dreading what she might tack onto the end of his message.

"This is Jenni." She put her hand over the mouthpiece. "Did I overhear you say you're going to see him?" she whispered.

Den nodded.

"Okay." Then, to the phone. "I'm going to tag along with Den and his girlfriend."

She looked at him. "I guess you came with Melissa?"

Again he nodded, feeling a little stunned.

"Okay, yeah, so get ready for three of us. That's three pairs of legs. All pairs. Your boy here's a bit of a swindler and he swindled me some new walking gear. I've got to show it off." She took a breath and handed the phone back.

Den ended the call. "You're coming?"

"If you can wait for me to scrub up. I'm running the bath."

"Sure, I can wait. What made you... why did you change your mind?"

Jenni squinted, still smiling. "I didn't really change my mind. You're still an interfering, insensitive know-it-all, but you're my brother and I guess your heart's in the right place."

"I hope. That's all I was—"

She held her hand up. "Don't keep talking." She looked down at her leg. "The thing is, it's much easier to get around now. Lose something, gain another."

"Gain a brother."

"Eww, really corny. Now get out of here and let me take a bath. We can leave right after."

She stepped forward and drew him into a hug. Her arms felt spindly and fragile, and her body was thin against him, but she still clung on like a bear. He hugged her back, surprised to find himself choking up a little. He felt like that little kid again, back at the very first time he'd seen her and she'd been that angry, agitated teenager, but she'd still been able to give him a hug back then. Years had gone by and this was all he'd really wanted, he realized. He just wanted his big sister to give him another hug.

"Okay," she said, pulling back. "Get out of here and let me get scrubbed. I'll be out in fifteen."

He stepped away and headed for the door.

"And stop grinning, will you," she said. "You're not properly forgiven yet. You're just my brother."

Den couldn't stop grinning, but he said, "That's enough."

Jenni laughed and went into the bathroom, and Den headed out to see if Melissa felt like a drive to Wyoming.

ALL THE PRETTY LITTLE MERMAIDS

Cat Rambo | 7286 words

Cat Rambo lives, writes, and teaches by the shores of an eagle-haunted lake in the Pacific Northwest. Her two hundred plus fiction publications include stories in Asimov's, Clarkesworld, and Tor.com. Cat's short story, "Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain," from her third collection Near + Far (Hydra House Books), was a 2012 Nebula nominee and her editorship of Fantasy Magazine earned her a 2012 World Fantasy Award nomination. For more about the author, as well as links to her fiction and information about her popular online writing classes, see http://www.kittywumpus.net. In Cat's brutal new story, a woman whose world is coming undone finds little solace among...

"Mermaids," Petra said. She spit the word out, then chased its taste away with a sip of water. "Aren't people tired of mermaids yet?"

Leonid smiled condescendingly at her. "That's the joy of designing toys." He dabbed his face with a cloth napkin before continuing. "Children find things fresh, even things that staled for adults long ago."

The restaurant's bustle and clink was muted, decorous. Upscale, like Leonid's business suit. She said, "The world doesn't need another virtual game. Particularly a mermaid one."

He held up a finger. She hated when he did that.

"There's the twist, you see. Not virtual. These are real."

She leaned forward to spear another bite of orange-drenched tofu. How to depict flavors in a piece? If you opted for organic elements, you were surrendering to the idea that your artwork would decay, disappear one day. "Won't they be terribly expensive?"

"Of course. But I'm aiming at the 1 percent, who can afford fancy, frivolous things. They become status symbols for their children. That's the niche I'm aiming for."

Always some new business scheme with Leonid. Luckily he had the brains to back it up. Still, it was that restlessness, that search for something bigger and better that had driven him from one place to another, that had finally forced Petra from the marriage, taking Kerry with her, into stability.

At least, she hoped she was taking Kerry with her. Custody hearings were still to come. They'd barely gotten to the point where they could sit together and talk like this. Leonid had felt so betrayed by Petra's departure that he hadn't spoken to her for three months.

Still, he was cordial now. He said, "But I want to give you a set for Kerry. She'll be the envy of all her friends."

"She won't be back from camp for almost a week. You can give them to her then, wouldn't you like that better?"

He shook his head. "When you start setting things up, you'll understand. If you get it started for her, you can have a couple of generations of them ready to go." He pushed a pamphlet across the table toward her. "It's all in there, you'll see."

"You breed them?" she asked, looking down at the mermaid on the cover. She thought it a cartoon at first glance, but closer examination showed three dimensionality. Like a toy, an exaggerated vision of femininity, pink fishtail with sparkly scales, long blonde hair floating in the water, tangled with scalloped white shells.

She said, "Are they intelligent?"

He looked shocked. "No, that would be illegal, of course. They're not even the same level of intelligence as goldfish or finches."

She tapped a nail atop the pamphlet. The paper was stiff, heavy, high gloss. Expensive, to sell an expensive trinket. "They look humanoid?"

He smiled. "It does look that way, doesn't it? But in reality, we've bred them into specific forms, designed very carefully. Nothing risqué, of course. Our mermaids are strictly G-rated. Very Disney."

She didn't think that would be a point in favor of the mermaids for thirteen-yearold Kerry. Her daughter was interested in more emo, edgier things, skirting a line that Petra both sympathized with and feared. She understood the allure of knife-edged black. But she also knew how it drove you to test boundaries, to rebel against anything handy.

Leonid's hopeful face shone across the table. All he wanted to do was connect with the daughter who he hadn't seen in a month. Petra should help in that, for Kerry's sake, if not for Leonid's.

"How much fuss is this going to involve?" She pleated her napkin, looking at the texture. High thread count. Good for paper-making. A subtle nobby line was woven into it, a pattern of matte and shine.

Typical of Leonid to assume she had plenty of time for finicky pet keeping. He'd never understood how she worked, that creating the vast collages that she'd become renowned for, that now sold for a hundred thousand minimum, took hundreds of hours of effort and planning. You would have thought a contemplative scientist would understand that one could be staring into space and actually working. But Leonid was a tinkerer, a mover, filling every minute of the day with constructions. Even now, the toothpicks and sugar cubes he'd been fiddling with lay scattered like a deconstructed puzzle.

Leonid said, "Not too much." His blue eyes pleaded. "It's for Kerry, after all. Doesn't that make it worthwhile?"

It did, of course.

The set up equipment was more bulky than she expected, but Leonid helped load it into her trunk. She tipped the doorman to bring it up to her apartment. At least there was plenty of room in this new place. Only two months into occupancy, she was still furnishing it. She'd rented it primarily for the large room she'd designated as a work space, with its wall of windows overlooking Lake Union. And because it had a small bedroom for Kerry.

More room if she didn't end up keeping Kerry with her.

The kit was, in the manner of such things, more complicated to put together than the directions implied. Six tanks nested inside each other, the center occupied by a contraption called the "Song Chamber." More collapsible tanks in the bottom of the box. Tubs and spiraling tubes and oddly heavy plastic cubes, and "mermaid seeds." Each of the last was a bead-sized round that the instructions told Petra to insert in a spongy disk of matching color.

She set it all up in the breakfast nook for now. They could move the mermaids into Kerry's room when she got back.

If it ended up being worthwhile. Often Leonid's schemes sounded better than actuality.

That was part of life.

She'd ordered Sea Monkeys when she was twelve. From the back of a comic book, one of those full page spreads of marvelous things, X-ray spectacles and itching powder and prank gum and above all, the wonder of Sea Monkeys. The illustration showing a King Monkey flanked by two smaller females.

The reality of brine shrimp, not humanoid at all, crushed her. In a fit of pique, she flushed the monkeys down the toilet and suffered subsequent convulsions of guilt, envisioning the monkeys trying to find their way home out of the sewer's sticky darkness.

She put down the plastic pipe and went to the window. October through March, the Seattle sky was gray.

Gray like a city pigeon's Quaker coat, respectable.

Gray like a waterlogged page.

Gray like her mood, most days.

She was going to coffee with Marla tomorrow. That was what kept her sane, despite the isolation of working at home, the daily coffee or lunch that she rotated among her group of friends. She was looking forward to catching up with Marla, her oldest friend.

She splayed her hand on cold glass. On the other side, raindrops trickled down, silver as the distant clouds.

Returning to the table, she consulted the instructions. She filled two tanks and prepared two coral seeds, one orange and the other turquoise. She put each in a separate cup of distilled water beside the tanks.

The pamphlet was oddly thick and badly proofread. The second half was a listing of mermaids that could be created. Apparently you bred them with each other to produce new color combinations. Like guppies.

A name and a tag line accompanied each thumbnail-sized picture.

Mela: Her sweet nature mirrors the honey color of her hair. Watch her create harmony in a troubled tank.

Sirena: A tawny songstress, this mermaid loves the wilds, and is often seen riding a shark among the waves.

Voluptua: Black scales and red hair for this marine vixen. Don't put her in the same tank as an Angela!

Petra snorted. Someone had put a minimum of time into creating this mythology.

"My Volupta ass," she said aloud. She returned the pamphlet to the table and went to work on her latest collage.

Marla took the latte from Petra to put it on the checkerboard sized table. Petra settled tled herself and her own black coffee in the opposite chair. She was glad Marla had opted for Soul Food Coffeehouse, with its comfortable darkness and strings of Tibetan prayer flags. Their mugs mirrored the place's eclectic nature: Marla's sported a large skull and crossbones on the side, Petra's the words "Seneca Falls Ladies Auxiliary" in bright red Gothic lettering.

"What are you going to do about this woman?" Marla said. She was a small person, but a fuzzy one, her graying hair never containable, her clothing always textured by wrinkles and cat hair.

Petra shrugged. "I've asked her to lunch. I'm sure this mix-up with the gallery isn't her doing."

"They announced that they were pulling your show for hers pretty late in the game, didn't they?"

Petra leaned back in her chair, looking over the coffee shop. They were too near the speakers, which were playing folk music a couple of levels too loud. A woman near the front bent over a hand of Tarot cards while the woman across from her watched. Her expression jittered between anxious and hopeful.

"That's how it is with artsy types sometimes," Petra said. "Last minute and haphazard."

"You think it's just that? You said you'd had some trouble with her before."

"Maybe. I'm just not sure. But let's talk about something pleasant. How are your classes going this semester? Are you molding the next generation of women activists?"

"Just activists, thank you. No need to gender mark the word."

"You know what I mean."

"It's always the same. A handful who are interested, a large number who perpetually disavow feminism while saying all sorts of feminist things. A few young men there to score in one way or another." "You've always said you liked it."

Marla sipped her drink. Behind her shoulder, the espresso machine hissed and snarled in competition with the music.

"It just gets tiresome," she said after a while. "Making the same argument over and over. Hearing their tortured objections. They look hard at the system in a way they haven't before and they see stuff that pisses them off, but they don't know what to do with that. For some, it sets off a rage that's been smoldering for years. Others just get depressed or bitter."

"But there's some hope here and there. The same thing was true when you and I were taking Avallone's Intro to Women's Studies, almost two decades ago."

Marla's fingers strayed over her cup, stroking the heated ceramic smoothness. The skull disappeared and reappeared, looking at Petra. It was genderless, anythinged. The bell on the door jingled. A cold breeze entered with a customer.

"I feel bad about it." Marla slumped in her chair, eyes straying to the toes of her faded purple Vibrams. "I'm like the person who lets them know they've been living with a radioactive site next door. That it's seeped into their bones, colored the way they interact with the world and other beings. Changed the way they think and act. That it won't stop with them but will go on and affect their children and their children's children. That's how deep the patriarchal structures go, that's how much of our world they codify. It's a wonder we can even perceive them at all, we're so deeply entrenched."

So hyperbolic. But when Petra thought back to those days in Charlene Avallone's class, when they'd been awakened to a new way to step outside the world and see its structures, she knew her younger self would have nodded with every line.

"Leonid gave me a toy for Kerry."

Marla looked up. "What sort of toy?"

"Mermaids."

Marla made a face.

"Living ones, no less."

"Little Disney mermaids," Marla mused. "I wonder, how much anger would they have at their cores?"

When she got home, she put her groceries on the counter and went to the tanks, curious to see what progress had occurred. She'd put the coral seeds in them late last night. The seeds were globes now, made of a glossy gray material, almost two and a half inches in diameter.

Inside the globe, something was moving. Its sides flexed and bulged as the thing inside shifted. Even as she watched, it shuddered and wobbled. Whatever was inside—presumably a mermaid—was eager to escape.

Should she help it, perhaps poke a small hole in the side so it had something to work at? She consulted the pamphlet but it said nothing about the hatching process.

But by the time she came back to the tank, the question had resolved itself. A rent in the side was widening. Through it Petra glimpsed orange scales and pale flesh.

She checked the second tank. There the same thing was happening, although the scales were turquoise rather than reddish orange.

The globe convulsed and collapsed. In a flurry of scales the turquoise mermaid emerged.

Petra stared. She had expected Sea Monkeys.

This was very different.

The mermaid was perfect and colorful as one of the parrot-bright little fish that school in coral reefs. Its upper half was a tiny woman, complete with blue seashell bra cupping the faint swells of her torso.

She called Leonid. "What are these? Are they intelligent?"

"Of course not! I told you that," he crowed, pleased that his creation had deceived her sharp eye.

"But it's wearing clothing."

"Look closer," he said. "I told you. All natural coloration. Or engineered, to be more precise."

Her fingers were tight on the cell phone as she leaned down to look into the tank. The mermaid coiled, long tail writhing in the water. It nosed among the plastic seaweed in the tank, perched atop an arch of rocks and groomed itself, combing fingers through blonde hair. Looking closely, Petra could see that what Leonid had said was true. The flesh shifted color and texture, became the bra's structure.

"You're sure?"

"They're not even animals, really," he said. "Think of them as little flesh machines."

The flesh machines floated in their tanks. Petra pulled her eyes away from them.

"Very well," she said.

That night she set two more seeds into their starting buds, one white, the other purple. It amused her to think that these were Suffragist colors, the same colors banner wearers of the nineteenth century had sported.

She wondered what a suffragist mermaid would look like.

Daisy had opted for the new French bakery, the Rendezvous, over at Bella Bottega.

She was already ensconced at a wrought-iron table.

"Try the brioche with Nutella," she urged.

Petra nibbled on a sample from the basket next to the cash register as she waited for her coffee, but opted for a croissant.

The cashier was about fifteen, wearing a nose ring, and unsmiling. In a collage, Petra would depict her with a seagull's wing.

An arc of discarded cigarette butts.

A puff of glitter to show the way the light coming in through the front door shone on the ring.

What signs expressed she reminds me, once I was young and now I regret so much?

What signs spoke to that younger self that had been so wrenched awry by societal pressures and circumstance?

She wrestled her mind away from the question. She shoved change in her jacket pocket, and turned back. Sitting down across from Daisy, she scattered croissant crumbs across the tiled table as she detached a flakey triangle.

"I have to keep an eye on the time," Daisy said. "The kids are in archery camp, but they might get out early."

Daisy's children were perpetually enrolled in lessons: gymnastics, ceramics, horseback riding, impromptu theater, all of which allowed Daisy to snatch time for her second love: poetry. Even now a Moleskine notebook protruded from the ample purse beside her.

She looked at Petra. "You're too thin. And when are you going to tell that woman to back off?"

"Thursday lunch. And I don't have anything overt," she added. "Or much, at any rate. But you know how sometimes you feel it in your core, that someone doesn't mean you well?"

Daisy nodded. "Go with your gut," she said. "You learn that as a mother. You learn that silence sometimes has an ominous tinge that means someone's drawing with lipstick on the new flocked yellow wallpaper."

"But enough of that," Petra said. "I don't want to think about it now, really."

Daisy's gaze was intent behind wire-rimmed glasses. She always wore REI casual, lavender fleece or teal sweaters with matching socks. Her only piece of jewelry, other than her plain gold wedding ring, was a matching ring set with a topaz and a peridot, her daughters' birthstones.

"How's Kerry dealing with the divorce?"

"Hard to know. She seems to be enjoying this rock camp well enough. Says they named their band Harvey Hairbanger. Why? Who knows."

Daisy's smile quirked. They'd met several years ago at a gallery fundraiser and found they lived two blocks from each other. Even so, coffee dates were rare. Daisy prized her free time fiercely, used it to hole up and write the taut little half-sonnets about overthrowing the establishment that had made her an unlikely Occupy hero.

The phone laid beside Daisy's cup buzzed.

"What now?" She picked it up and glared at it. "Jesus. Kaitlin has what they think is a broken arm. How do you break your arm shooting an arrow?" She gathered her things in a scramble. "I'll see you next week?"

"Sure."

"You'll have to tell me how it went." The crumbs on the table lifted and fell as the door closed behind Daisy. She vanished out into the parking lot's sun. Petra remained in the shadowy cafe, studying the chalkboard and black and white photographs of French landmarks. Was the cashier watching her? She was the only customer other than the inevitable laptop user hunched at a back table, a young hipster man wearing gawky horn-rimmed glasses.

He raised his head as she looked at him, returning the look. They both blushed and looked aside. The cashier made an uninterpretable sound.

Petra felt unsatisfied. These daily interactions, the lunches and coffee dates, were how she managed equilibrium, how she kept herself from spiraling into obsessive thought, kept herself from being consumed. Her best collages came out of such passages, but they were hard on her: days spent working, no sleep, no showers, no food other than a succession of sugar-heavy Cokes and old-style cigarettes until she finally forced herself to let the creation go, shipped it off to her gallery.

Her former gallery now. She'd have to look for a new one. That would be a pain in the ass, a search more painstaking than for any lover, because a gallery steered you, represented you, built your brand, was the enabler for your statement to the world.

Why had they decided to remove her from their client list? Blake, the owner, had refused explanation. Simply said it would be best for her to move to another establishment. Then stopped returning her calls.

When she saw Saffron this Friday, maybe the other artist would give her insight into what had happened, why Saffron's show now appeared on the schedule where Petra's had been.

Petra found it hard to believe there was any malice. These things were always the result of a misunderstanding, something that could be sorted out.

The pamphlet said the Sound Chamber was used to breed the mermaids, although it coyly called it "collaborating." Apparently that was the toy's main point, to see what combinations you could create, collect the different and increasingly complicated configurations like trading cards or stickers. She noted that the expansion kit came with plenty of additional tanks. With hundreds of possible mermaids, this would be an expensive hobby if Leonid was using the pricing strategy he'd indicated.

The turquoise mermaid didn't flee the net as Petra dipped it into the tank. Instead it floated there docilely. The lack of reaction reinforced what Leonid had called them: flesh machines. She put it and the white mermaid—Snowlanthia, the pamphlet named it—in the Song Chamber and watched.

The mermaids hung still in the Song Chamber's tepid water, staring at each other. A circle at the circular tank's bottom lit up, a phosphorescent glow illuminating each mermaid from beneath. It gave the turquoise mermaid a peculiar intensity reminiscent of a black light poster and tinted the opal one with a hint of green, as though mold were growing in the ridges of her scales.

The mermaids circled each other in slow, undulating spirals. They flicked their fins and collided, bouncing off each other.

Petra's breath stopped. Had she done something wrong? Were they attacking each other?

No. The mermaids were rippling against each other.

From the chamber's silver rim came a whisper, the note of a drowning flute calling to a submerged piccolo.

Flesh machines. But the contortions seemed so intimate. She took a yogurt from the coolbox and went to watch a news flickie.

When she returned, the mermaids were no longer in contact. In the circle of light at the chamber's bottom lay a thumb-sized globe, its surface patterned with silvery lines, like a cracked glass marble.

She set up another tank to put the seed in. Over the course of the evening she managed to start another four mermaid seeds: kelpy, mottled green; peacock purple; a frosty yellow as soft as an Easter chick; and a deep, inky black shot through with parallel needles of golden light.

She was going to need more tanks.

Peg said, "You've always been too nice for your own good. You let Leonid drag you from town to town with all his crazy schemes. You kept building up networks and then he'd move the family to Atlanta or Austin or somewhere in Michigan."

Peg was Petra's cousin, and one of the few women Petra didn't mind a scolding from. They had too much history between them, too many sleepovers and shared escapades and confided crushes, for Peg's words ever to sting too hard.

This time Petra had picked the place, the Regent Bakery-Cafe, so she could get one of their elaborately frosted cake slices, compartmentalized from its kindred with barricades of printed cellophane. It was busy. Chinese food sizzled in the back, while the pastry counter serviced an ongoing stream of customers.

"It's hard to be assertive sometimes," Petra said as she uncurled the wrapper from her green tea cake.

"But life gets a lot harder if you're not." Peg had a ham bun. She'd dyed one lock of her auburn hair pine green, a dryad look that went well with her unobtrusively shaded sweater and jeans. She was well-fleshed and perpetually on the verge of starting a diet, always postponed to a better tomorrow. "After all, you want to set a good example for Kerry."

"True."

Petra didn't want her daughter to put up with half the bullshit she'd had to. But she suspected it was inevitable.

She hurt so much sometimes on her daughter's behalf. Leonid had never understood that, had always discounted her experience. He had a way of finding articles on feminism and quoting them to her, leading up to an argument over its relevance. It was one reason she'd been so relieved to leave, that endless rehearsal, pressing on sore points that he'd learned, relying on sophistry and doubletalk to discount everything she believed in, everything she'd learned over decades of trying to exist as a female artist.

She said, "Sometimes I worry I'm too weak to be a good example."

"Don't be ridiculous. Eleanor Roosevelt said women are like teabags. It's not till we're in hot water that we learn how strong we can become."

"Did you pick that up on Pinterest?"

"Yup, with an infographic showing the rising number of women in the Senate." Peg's eyes danced.

But Petra didn't have the energy for banter. "I don't know what I'm going to do. I have enough laid aside for six months, but after that I need to be selling work. Ideally, I need to give a new gallery some time to plan a first show. But it's all such a pain in the ass. Nothing makes me feel more like a fraud than going into a gallery with my portfolio and trying to convince them they should give me wall space."

"ArtForum called you one of the West Coast's most important new artists."

"After twenty years of work, I'm a new artist."

"The 'important' is what you should concentrate on. Get a new gallery and start building on that. I can't believe they'd let you go when your work brings in so much."

"I know. But I haven't delivered one in a year. Things were so up in the air. I only started working a few months ago. I've been trying to finish up the main piece. I guess I can relax on that deadline."

"What's it called?"

Petra licked jade frosting from a fingernail. "Welcome to My Life."

The mermaids had all hatched. Their differences fascinated her. Seaweed fronds grew along the green one's length, tangled in its black hair. The peacock purple one had scales shaded similarly but crimson hair and a delicate gold tiara floating in that hair. Petra had to squint to ascertain that it wasn't actually a separate artifact but rather the trick of a horny protrusion with deceptive coloration.

The marigold yellow mermaid had peach colored lips to match the flowers in the illusion of a lei around its neck. The black one was unexpectedly zebra striped, minute pearls around its neck glimmering coldly.

She watched them. Leonid had said flesh machines, but had all the patterns of be havior been programmed into them, then? She watched the green and marigold blowing kisses at each other.

Leonid picked up on the second ring. "You've called me more this week than you did all last year," he said without preamble.

She said, "They're blowing kisses and playing patty cake with each other, for god's sake. You can't tell me they're machines."

"But they are," he said. "Do you really think I'd make little thinking humanoids as toys? I know you think I'm an asshole, but really, Petra? Really?"

She said, "I guess you did a better job that you thought. They're fucked up."

His voice was a cold knife. "You're always ready to condemn. Particularly things that are meaningless. Jokes."

"Jokes are a form of hostility, Freud said."

"No one takes Freud seriously anymore."

"You deny there's hostility behind them sometimes?"

"Sure. Sure, sometimes. Not as many times as you think, though, Petra."

Her shoulders ached with tension, pain that spread its tendrils down her arms and caged her wrists. "All I want," Leonid said, "is for Kerry to be happy. I think she's happier if I'm part of her life. So I give her a present and here you are on the phone telling me it's fucked up. I'm just trying to reach out."

Guilt surged through her. Why was it so many people could evoke this helpless shame in her?

But Kerry deserved a father.

Kerry deserved so much.

Kerry deserved a happy life.

Kerry deserved to be more than a mermaid.

"Petra?"

She snapped out of the spiral fugue. "Sorry. I find them... I find them unsettling. Maybe that's good for you to know. Market research and all that. I can't think I'll be alone in the reaction."

"Sure," he said. "That's great, I appreciate it. Thank you for getting it set up for Kerry. You must be breeding them, if you're seeing the kiss behavior. That's a second level mermaid feature."

"Making them collaborate, you mean."

He laughed. "Yeah, marketing wanted to steer away from the idea of sex. We're thinking about a racier version, though. Who knows? They're convincing, you've got to admit that."

In the tank, zebra stripes and a peacock blur circled, lemniscate.

"They are that," she said and hung up without saying goodbye, a petty blow she regretted immediately.

She spent the rest of the evening studying the mermaids. She got out a notebook and put a color atop each page, recording the combinations she'd tried so far. She assembled the rest of the tanks in the bottom of the box and cleared the nook's bookcase in order to stack them in it. She ordered it with what Leonid had called the second level mermaids on the top shelf, and what were presumably the first level, the ones hatched from the kit's seeds, on the middle shelf. She set the rest of the seeds to hatch, another half dozen colors.

She made notes of the behaviors and characteristics of each, transcribing the few lines the pamphlet provided for each onto the appropriate page.

Once or twice, she thought, "I should go work." But the mermaids riveted her. She tried to analyze their actions.

Put more than four in a tank and you had trouble. They'd all just hang there limply, floating in the water as though dead.

Some interactions were mermaid specific. If you had two with the lei growths, they'd swap them from time to time. How had Leonid managed to make those detachable?

When she finally lay down, sleep wouldn't come, no matter how hard she tried to relax. The mermaids flitted behind her eyelids, spasmed in the water as they fucked. Because no matter how you tried to disguise it with prettier words, that was what they did. Leonid had said things about the song releasing the collaboration protocol in the mermaids.

How many times could one sing, she wondered. How many mermaids could one end up with, a marine version of a crazy old cat lady, a madwoman in the attic, tending mermaids and breeding them into increasingly crazy combinations? What had led Leonid to think of mermaids? They were certainly unthreatening to a girl child, the half where sex occurred removed, a neuter fishtail substituted. Wasn't that what was at the heart of the Little Mermaid, the mermaid taking on legs and the ability to fuck, and look what disasters came of all that.

But he'd reinserted sex with the Song Chamber.

She didn't think about feminism that often. But something about the tanks of mermaids kept bringing it up over and over again.

She'd minored in women's studies at a particularly oppressively religious Midwestern university. It had been the classes that got her through the years there. That and the other women. Not just the teachers, but the other students.

And at the same time, she'd hated those classes because of what they showed her, the rage that rose in her every time she saw an injustice. She remembered seething then, full of hot anger. It lurked under every thought sometimes. Had informed every piece of art she'd made during those years.

She rolled over and laid her cheek against a cooler section of the pillow. These days her temperature fluctuated in the night. She'd wake sauna-hot, throw off the covers and freeze. Lather, rinse, repeat till seven A.M.

Her younger self would have hated the mermaids.

Cartoons of traditional roles. Distorted mirrors held up to little girls to start them down the path of always looking at themselves, judging themselves against anorexic mermaids, wasp-waisted French maids, sex kittens, and iron-jawed Amazons.

They were pretty, the mermaids. Mean girl prettiness. Female prettiness, the kind that masked their own inner rage.

Was that anger still inside her, lurking under her placid surface like a coral reef? Unseen but shaping every thought current?

Maybe she was going crazy again.

Maybe Leonid was trying to drive her crazy.

Maybe some facet of herself was trying to drag her down with it.

Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

Some combinations didn't work when you put them together to sing. Again the mermaids showed their displeasure not by fighting but by sulking, hanging limply in the water and refusing to move. She recorded the dislikes in her notebook but could make no sense of the pattern.

More worrisome, the Song Chamber had produced a grey globe that refused to hatch. It bobbed loosely as she lowered her hand into the blood-warm water and tested it with her fingers. Through the rubbery substance of the globe's outer layer, she could feel something solid inside, but it didn't twitch at her touch.

She did what she had promised herself she wouldn't do anymore. She called Leonid.

He was over faster than she would have thought, there at her door within a quarter hour.

He fished out the globe to examine it, "I thought we'd eliminated this problem.

Sometimes they just don't spark. No one knows why."

Holding the globe over the Chamber's water, he used a pocketknife to slice it open and let it drain. When he peeled away the gray shreds of the globe, the lump inside was not the perfect little body she'd feared. Rather it was a misshapen mass of colors, green and blue and yellow like a rotting Rubik's cube.

"Do you have something I can put it in?" Leonid said. "I want to take it to the scientists. If you have another, just stick the whole thing in a container and put it in the fridge for me."

As she crouched by the sink to find the box of baggies, she said, "Why mermaids?"

"What do you mean?"

"You could have picked some other form for your toy. You could have made all sorts of fish, for example."

He laughed nervously. "Well, believe it or not, it's my tribute to you."

She blinked as she handed him the baggie. Color mounted on his cheekbones. "They always seemed to me like women artists.

Out there singing."

"Singing to lure men to them."

His headshake was immediate. "No. I can see where that's coming from. But I always imagine them out there on the rocks, singing into the wind."

"Where no one can hear them."

"I know it's difficult. Everything they say about women having to work harder, I've seen it. And having a daughter... well, I think about it more because of her. So I made mermaids for her."

Something occurred to her. "Why don't they get along?"

He laughed. "Well, come on. We had to complicate things a little. And you've seen it as well as I have. Sometimes women just take an instant dislike to each other."

"I think that's true of either sex."

He shrugged. "Mermaids only come in one flavor though."

By now it had become ritual to sit watching the mermaids in the evening, to scribble down notes, moving them from tank to tank, trying new song combinations, recording the behaviors. The Mariposa mermaids did funny little flips while blowing bubbles, which seemed unique to them so far. The Amazonias had not just natural armor but tiny tridents that seemed to be outgrowths of their hands. It gave them a wobble when swimming.

She laid her pen down. Odd to think that Leonid had given time to musing about women artists. And that he'd constructed an image like that, uncharacteristically romantic, the mermaids singing into the wind.

That wasn't how she thought of them. To her, artists overall were the canaries in the coal mine, the eyes that could see outside the structures containing everyone and voice a warning when there was something poisonous, something dangerous.

Something that needed to be exposed.

A self-important view, to be sure.

She could have gone down that rabbit hole of thought, but she wrenched herself away from it.

Both sexes—all sexes, if you wanted to be encompassing—saw how it worked. Did women artists have a vantage point that gave them some insight no one else could access? Again, overly self-important. Artists saw from every viewpoint, they splin tered their consciousness, reflected and refracted reality in their minds before they turned it into art.

Maybe they were more sensitive to those poisons, like the canaries, who warned of danger by dying.

Perhaps that was why they went crazy so easily.

An Operetta mermaid swam around the tank in long slow loops. She had to admit there was a great deal of inventive detail to the mermaids. Leonid had confided that they were the work of three comic book artists that he'd commissioned. A talented gene splicer used a three-D rendering of the artists' concepts. The gene tech was incredible. The Starbright mermaid actually twinkled. If you turned out the light it looked like a shifting constellation hanging in the dark water.

Around and around. Her thoughts did that sometimes. Often. Though the medication helped.

Around and around. Around and around.

After an hour, she pulled herself to bed.

Around and around.

Pomegranate Bistro was on a side of town she didn't usually opt for, one she thought of as just a little snobby, just a little too consciously upscale.

Saffron was fifteen minutes late. The precision of the timing made Petra wonder if it wasn't calculated, if Saffron hadn't waited in the car, expressing her disdain for Petra with the interval.

That was paranoid and unworthy of her. She fixed a smile on her face as Saffron came through the tables.

The first thing you noticed about Saffron was always her costume. Not costume perhaps, but an outfit clearly assembled for its Bohemian effect, vintage items mixed with upscale shoe designers, a necklace that proclaimed eclecticism with every mismatched link. She sat down with a jingle of bracelets, picking up a menu to study it.

"I hope you didn't have any trouble finding the restaurant," she said from behind the paper. "I know it's not your sort of place, but it's one of my favorites."

Petra felt things lurking beneath the words. "Not a bit."

"Any luck finding a new gallery?"

"I haven't really started looking. I've been working on a new piece. I figured I'd finish that up first. How is getting ready for your show going?"

"Smooth as silk." Saffron laid the menu down with a sly smile. "I'm good at arranging things."

That seemed like an ominous segue but Petra seized it nonetheless.

"I wanted to talk to you about your show."

"What about it?"

Petra floundered. "It's... well, mine got pulled and yours arranged. It just seemed odd."

"I suppose it would." Ice cubes clinked and bangles jingled as Saffron took a sip of water. She set the glass down and dabbed at her scarlet lips with a napkin, staining the clay-colored fabric. "I fucked the gallery owner."

Petra caught herself gaping like a fish and clicked her mouth shut. "What?"

The waiter appeared at Saffron's side. She rattled off a quick list, concluding with: "And a glass of the cava. I'm celebrating." Her teeth flashed at Petra. "And you?"

The waiter regarded her, pen poised over his pad.

"I'm not ready to order yet."

"No? You had plenty of time," Saffron said.

The waiter departed and Petra gathered her wits. "Are you saying you slept with Blake? What did that have to do with my show?"

"He was worrying about how late you were with the new work. Easy enough to tip him into believing you wouldn't deliver." She licked her lips, a delicate, satisfied cat gesture. "He wanted very much to give me a show by that point."

"Why me?"

"You were the next available slot."

"But why go so far as to have him drop me entirely?"

"That wasn't my doing. Just a bonus. Sometimes men do that sort of thing when they're embarrassed."

"What do you mean, a bonus? I haven't done anything to you."

"You're competition."

"Don't you think... don't you think as female artists we should stick together? Things are hard enough without making it worse for each other."

Saffron's laugh was knife-sharp. "Oh, sister woman person and all of that? I'm happy enough that women have come as far as they have, but I don't buy into that crap. It just gets in the way. This is a dog-eat-dog world, sister."

"But it doesn't have to be that way. We should cooperate, not compete."

"A utopia full of happy cooperation where everyone gets what they deserve without working for it? Maybe some unicorns shitting fluffy marshmallow rainbows too." Saffron's sneer distorted the taut lines of her face.

The waiter returned, looking expectant. Petra rose.

"I'm sorry," she stammered at him, and fled.

Inside her apartment, the air smelled of moist chemicals, a briny tang that bit at the inside of her nose.

She had assembled and filled every tank that had come with the kit. They filled the two bookcases under the window. More clustered on the table and kitchen cabinets. How had the mermaids taken over her life?

Kerry! She was due back that afternoon.

She didn't think about Saffron as she cleaned. Didn't think of the sneer. Of the voice. Of the confusion of clothing. Of her words. Didn't think of them.

Instead she cleared the clutter of dishes in the sink, loaded the dishwasher and set it running. She swept and then mopped the hardwood floor, and wiped the woodwork. She polished the windows with vinegar and water, using newspaper, as her mother had taught her, and put the last few boxes still unpacked in a closet. At the grocery store, she bought an armload of scarlet tulips and set them in a glass bowl filled with water and clear marbles that she set in the center of the living room.

Kerry arrived in a bustle of backpack and sacks and guitar cases, full of talk about the rock camp, the songs, the other girls. Petra listened as Kerry scrolled through her phone's photos, showing Petra shot after shot. Petra was pleased. She'd thought the camp would be good for Kerry, coax her out of her shell.

Kerry finally couldn't help but notice the mermaids.

"What are these? Some kind of art thing?" Movement caught her eye. She dropped down beside the tank on the bottom shelf. "Oh. My. God. How adorable are these?"

"They're from your father."

Kerry turned to examine the box. Her face took on a pout.

"You've opened everything!"

"Your father said to get them started for you."

"You didn't just get them started!" Kerry dropped the box on the floor. "You did it all. You took all the fun parts and did them already." She folded her arms.

Petra hadn't even considered this. She felt the pang of having offended, all with the best intentions.

"I'm sorry," she stammered. She pointed at the sprawl of notebooks on the table.

"It was all for you, though." The words were false, she realized, even as they left her lips. She'd let the mermaids obsess her. She'd hatched them all, depriving Kerry of the joy of discovery of the permutations and quirks.

"I'm going to bed." The door slammed behind Kerry.

Petra stared at the array of tanks. The mermaids had taken over her life. She couldn't work on her art. Every time she went to her studio and tried to look at the latest piece, visions of the mermaids interposed themselves, swimming round and round.

Would they do the same thing to Kerry?

She had to say something.

She had to say something about the mermaids.

She had to say something about Saffron.

She had to say something with the rediscovered rage that ran through her like a second musculature system, holding her upright even while it made her shake.

She had to do something with the anger.

The first mermaid, a Snowlanthia, flapped when she laid it on the wooden cutting board. She watched it dispassionately. The little gills were not on the throat where she would have expected them to be. Instead they were unobtrusively placed at the mermaid's waist, unnoticeable in the water. Now they splayed open, gasping, like the red mouths of wounds. Its face had no expression.

It took longer to die than she had thought it would.

She did three at a time with the next pass. One flopped from the board to fall with a meaty splat on the floor's linoleum. It twitched there.

She picked it up and snapped the neck as she returned it to the board.

Horribly, it continued to convulse. Its gills sucked at the inhospitable air.

When she had a dozen, she took them to her studio. She laid the bodies down on the work table and turned to face the vast canvas that lay waiting to swallow her.

CYBELE STUDIOS, "LAST WORKS" SHOW. EXHIBIT #23 UNTITLED, MIXED MEDIA.

The last work of Petra Mookjai, this ten by twenty foot collage incorporates acrylic paints, owl feathers, and desiccated organic material believed to be genetically engineered constructs created by Mookjai's former husband. The notation, "Welcome to the background radiation of my life," is inscribed in the artist's own blood. For more analysis, see Marla Smith's monograph on Mookjai's works, entitled, "All the Pretty Little Mermaids."

DECLARATION

James Patrick Kelly | 9611 words

Jim Kelly says, "Those who have been following my column here at Asimov's will recognize that I have written about the thesis behind this story before. Human experience is human experience, and to privilege the real over the virtual runs against trends in our evolving digital culture. Are we reality snobs? Maybe. You may not agree with this—and I'm not sure that I'm 100 percent on board with it myself—but I think it's something worth discussing. 'Declaration' had a previous audio incarnation in Audible.com's Ripoff anthology, edited by Gardner Dozois, but I'm proud that it makes its print debut here."

"When in the course of human events..."

As Silk spoke, fluffy clouds formed the phrase in a Magritte sky, which was simultaneously noon and dusk. While Remeny could appreciate the control Silk had over his softtime domain, she wished he wouldn't steer their meeting in an artsy direction. They had work to do.

"Wait," said Botão, "what about we the people?"

"That's the other one," Silk shot her a (.1) anger blip fading to (.7) irritation. "The Constitution."

"But we're the people we're talking about," Botão ignored Silk's blippage. "That's the whole point?"

"Human events," said Silk. "If you'd wait just a second, I'm getting to the people part."

Botão had only been assigned to their school coop team for a month now and Remeny knew what she did not: Silk didn't like to be challenged, especially not in his own domain. They had chosen his corner of virtuality because Silk had enough excess capacity to host them all, but his was not the ideal place to plot their pretend revolution. The opening words of the Declaration of Independence were going wispy above them.

"Get on with it then," said Sturm. "And skip the special effects."

"When in the course of human events," Silk said, "it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another..."

"Okay," said Botão.

"... and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."

The four others—Remeny, Sturm, Botão, and Toybox—scanned each other and then turned on Silk. They had agreed to close all private channels and keep their avatars emotionally transparent, so the air filled with blips of confusion and disapproval.

"Laws of Nature?" said Toybox. "What the hell is that about?"

"Maybe relativity." Sturm's scorn blip started at (.3) and climbed.

"They didn't even have relativity back then."

"They did, they were just too stupid to realize it."

"Mankind? What about the other 52 percent?" Botão was laughing now. "And who is nature's god?"

"Exactly," said Sturm. "I call bullshit. Crusty oldschool bullshit."

Remeny kept quiet; she focused on Silk, who was waiting for them to calm down.

"Agreed," he said. "But it will mean something to the old people because Thomas Jefferson wrote this stuff."

"Who's he and so what?" said Toybox.

"Jefferson as in Jefferson County," said Remeny. "As in where we live."

"I live in softtime." At (.9+), Toybox's rage was nearly unreadable—but then he was always shouting. "That's where I live."

Silk waved a hand in front of his face, as if the blip was a bad smell. "History is important to reality snobs," he said. "This gets their attention."

Remeny noticed that he was keeping his temper in check. She was definitely interested in Silk; poise was something she looked for in a boyfriend.

"So will making their lights flicker," said Toybox. This was why he had flunked one coop already. "Crashing their flix."

"We're not talking about anything like that," said Botão. "We're students, not terrorists."

"Speak for yourself." Sturm spread his hands and between them appeared an old-school clock. "Revolutions don't play by the rules." Its face showed two minutes to midnight.

Remeny couldn't believe Sturm, of all people, aligning himself with terrorists. She agreed with Botão; she didn't really care about the revolution. All she wanted was to get a grade for her senior cooperative, graduate, and never log on to the Jefferson County Educational Oversight Service again. The problem was that a third of her grade for coop was for contribution to the team's cooperative culture. The senior coop was supposed to demonstrate to the EOS that students had the social skills to succeed in softtime by coming together anonymously to plan and execute a project that had hardtime outcomes.

Of course, anonymity wasn't easy in a county like Jefferson. Students spent hours in soft and hardtime trying to figure out who was who. Botão, for example, was one of the refugees from Brazil and probably lived in Tugatown. Remeny had first met her two years ago in the EOS playgrounds, mostly ForSquare and Sanctuary. Now Botão was Sturm's friend too—maybe even his girlfriend. Toybox defied the rules of anonymnity by dressing his avatar in clothes that pointed to hardtime identity. Everyone knew that he was the Jason Day whose body was stashed in bin 334 of the Komfort Kare body stack on Route 127 in Pineville. Unfortunately for him, no one cared. Bad luck to have him on the team—if he was going to be such a shithead, they might all flunk. Good luck, though, to get Silk—whoever he was. The avatar was new to the senior class, but Silk didn't act new. She thought maybe he was a duplicate of some rich kid they already knew. It cost to be in two places at once and considering how crush his domain was, Remeny guessed Silk had serious money. Probably lived in that gated community at the lake. She wondered what he looked like in hardtime. His avatar was certainly hot in his leathers and tanker boots. Sturm's identity, obviously, was no secret to her, although she hoped that she was the only one on the team who knew that he was her twin brother.

It took them most of a prickly afternoon to rewrite the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence; they were being as cooperative as cats. Sturm and Silk took the revolution too seriously, in Remeny's opinion, as if it might happen next Wednesday. Silk argued for making as few changes as possible to their version; Sturm said their demands should be clear.

"Unalienable?" said Sturm.

"There's no such word." "There was back then."

"Well, this is now."

Botão seemed nervous about advocating the overthrow of anything. She was probably worried about being deported. "I like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Botão was standing so close to Sturm that their avatars were prectically merging.

"We should keep that part. Someday I'm going to own my own domain, move in, and never get real again."

"What's in your domain?" Sturm's blippage went all flirty.

"You mean who?" She pushed away from him and poked a finger into his chest.

"Maybe you wish it was you?" She smirked. "Not yet, Mystery Boy. Earn it."

"Focus please," said Silk.

... later.

"No, governments are supposed to serve us, not the other way around."

Silk had created a rectangular glass conference table with himself at the head.

The draft of the declaration glowed on its surface. "We can't change 'consent of the governed.' "

"What is consent, anyway?"

"Like permission, only more legal."

"I never gave no consent for some bullshit EOS to ruin my life."

... much later.

"So that means we have the right to overthrow the EOS?" Botão sounded doubtful.

Toybox was lighting his fingertips on fire. "Overthrow the oldschool and be done with all the bullshit." The longer they talked, the higher the numbers on his boredom blip climbed. It was like watching a cartoon fuse burn.

"I don't see how they give us a 'A' for overthrowing them," said Remeny.

"If we prove they're unjust...."

"But that's why we have to keep 'alter and abolish.' " Silk interrupted Sturm for the hundredth time. "Means the same as overthrow, only Jefferson wrote it. So we hide behind his language."

... much, much later.

Sturm had changed the conference table from retangular to round. "If we get rid of the old government, then we need a new one," he said.

"I'm not making up a whole new government," said Botão. "My job starts in half an hour."

"So then no government," Sturm said. "Everyone for themselves. Law of the jungle."

Before she could stop it, a (.2) shock blip flashed above Remeny's avatar. This wasn't like him.

Eventually, after arguments and much blippage, they persuaded Silk to yield the power of the keyboard to Remeny, since she was willing to take other people's suggestions. While Silk brooded, they agreed on a draft of the crucial second paragraph.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all realities, hard and soft, old and new, are equal, and so are we the people who live in them, whichever reality we chose. All people, no matter whether they live in bodies or avatars, are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. To guarantee our rights governments are supposed to serve we the people and not the other way around. They derive their powers from the consent of the governed. If a government goes off, it is the right of we the people to alter or to abolish it, and to make up some new government that will do the right thing."

"Okay." Remeny checked the time on her overlord; she too would have to get real soon. "So now what?"

"List everything the government is doing wrong." Silk broke his grim silence.

Toybox groaned. "Not today."

"No," said Remeny. "Save that for next time. Anything else?"

"We need to think about making something happen in hardtime," said Sturm.

"Take the revolution to the streets."

"Then you're talking homework," said Botão. "I've got to be at work in ten minutes."

"What if we speed this up to double time?" said Silk.

Botão's embarassment shot immediately to (.4). "Umm... I'm not allowed."

"Not allowed?" said Toybox. "Everybody's supposed to get some double time. They just don't let you have enough."

"It's my mother." Now the blip was (.6). "She..."

"Makes no difference." Sturm interrupted her. "I already used up this month's overclocking allotment."

Remeny knew this wasn't true, but she approved of the lie and decided to join in.

"Me too."

"See, that's why we need a revolution," said Toybox, "so we can overclock whenever we want."

"Yeah," said Botão, "and then we can ask Santa to bring us diamond trees so we can feed the unicorns."

Remeny ignored them. "We're talking about getting real. You were saying, Sturm?"

"We need a message." He considered. "What do we say to the oldschool?"

"That EOS sucks." Toybox's avatar got up from the table and created a door in Silk's domain with a huge glowing red EXIT sign above it.

"That's our complaint." Sturm shook his head. "But what do we want?"

Nobody spoke for a moment.

"How about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?" said Botão.

"Sure," said Sturm. "But those are just words until we explain what they mean."

"No," Silk leaned forward on his seat. "She's right. We make that our slogan, put it out there, get people talking about it." He poked the table top. "Posters, T-shirts..."

"Graffiti."

"Timed-erase only," said Remeny. "Okay, there's your homework. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—ten times each."

"Ten?" Toybox had his hand on the knob of his door. "How am I supposed to make ten hardtime changes from a stack?"

"I don't know," she said. "Send your friends ten letters..."

"He doesn't have ten friends."

"... print stickies."

"Write a song and record it." Botão warbled tunelessly. "Life for me needs liberty... umm... something something happiness."

"That's it," said Remeny. "Next meeting at 1300 on Tuesday the 12th." She saved a transcript of their meeting to her student folder. "Got to go. Out of time."

The biggest grievance that Remeny had against the government was that her Health Oversight Manager, aka her overlord, was too bossy. It forced her to exercise and monitored her diet. It required daily minimum times for being alone and for family interaction. Worst of all, if she didn't meet these goals, it could limit how long she could spend in softtime. Even after she turned twenty-one and could make her own decisions, it would still be watching her. It wasn't fair. Stash like Toybox and Sturm never had to wander around smelling the damn roses.

She owed her overlord another hour and a half of family interaction and needed to burn three hundred calories exercising. It was now 1717. They had a family dinner scheduled softtime for 1930; that would kill an hour. If she jogged her five kilometer course at a decent pace between now and then, that would take care of her workout. But she still had to squeeze in at least another half hour of family time now, because Silk had said he might stop by ForSquare around 2100. She stripped off the NeuroSky 3100 interface that Dad had given her as a pre-graduation gift. She'd only had it a week and while she definitely liked it better than her old Deveau interface, the 3100's electrode array was sensitive to stubble. That meant she had to shave her head every other morning. Once she pulled out her nose plugs and peeled off her haptic gloves, she was once again Johanna Daugherty, age 18, of 7 Forest Ridge Road. She liked herself better as Remeny. She had chosen the name because it meant hope in Hungarian, but that was a secret. Nobody she knew spoke Hungarian.

"Mom." She stuck her head out of her bedroom door and called down the hall. "I'm home."

"Hi, honey. I made a banana smoothie. Some for you in the blender."

Remeny put on her headset, positioned its glass over her left eye and pressed the mic to her jaw, where it stuck. Headsets lacked cranial input so there was no soft-time immersion, but at least she could monitor what was happening online. "How many calories?"

"I don't know. Three hundred? Four? Ask the fridge."

The fridge reported that Mom had added a tablespoon of peanut butter to her usual recipe, which boosted the smoothie to four hundred and thirty calories. She decided to save it for dinner. Instead she got an Ice Cherry Zero out of the freezer.

Mom was at her desk—wearing a glass headset. She had a Deveau interface for full immersion that she didn't use much. She was more comfortable with the old-school interfaces. And reality. She sat in the late afternoon gloom, her face lit from below by the windows on her desktop. When Remeny snicked on the overhead lights, Rachel Daugherty glanced up, blinking.

"Thanks," she said.

Mom's office was like a museum with its antique paper books on wooden shelves and family pix that didn't move. Hanging on the wall was an embroidered baby blanket in the Úrihímzés style that had belonged to Remeny's Hungarian great-grandmother. A trophy case held the tennis trophies that Mom had won in high school and college. The rubber plant in the window needed dusting.

"So what's up, Mom?"

"Work."

Remeny leaned against the door frame and twirled the Cherry Zero in her mouth. "Work?"

Mom sighed and waved a hand over the desktop, closing half the windows. "The health budget. We're running a surplus and I need to move some of it to building maintenance."

"The people are in better shape than the buildings?" Remeny's lips tingled from the cold.

"Buildings live in snow and rain and sleet and hail. People, not so much." A window flashed blue. "Speaking of being outside," she said, expanding it, "didn't I get an EOS advisory a couple of days ago? Something about your Phys Ed status?"

"Took care of it." Remeny wished Mom would stop nagging her. "I already have an overlord, Rachel. I don't need an overmom too."

"Sorry." Mom frowned; she didn't like it when her kids called her Rachel. "Look, I'm sorry, sweetie, but I'm really busy just now. You need some family time, is that it? Could you maybe go talk to your brother?"

"I just spent two hours with him in coop."

"Good." Mom's attention drifted back to her budgets. "How's that going?"

"Okay, I guess. We gave ourselves homework. We're making it real."

"That's nice."

Silence.

"Aren't you going to ask what our project is?"

"Sure," said Mom, but then she started shuffling windows.

"We're writing a declaration of independence," Remeny said.

"Really?"

Remeny dropped the empty Zero sleeve into the trash and waited. Then waited some more.

"A declaration," she said, finally. "Of independence."

"Umm... Didn't somebody already write that?"

Too bad there were no blips in real life.

"I guess I'll talk to Robby then."

"You're a good sister." Mom nodded but did not look up. "Do a favor and turn him, would you?"

Maybe it was best that Mom didn't know about their project. Rachel Daugherty was Bedford's Town Manager. She was part of the government they were declaring independence from.

Robert Daugherty Junior's entire room was a deep twilight blue: walls, floor, ceiling, even the two painted-over windows that no longer looked onto Forest Ridge Road. When Remeny closed the door, shutting out the hallway light, the monotone color skewed the geometry of the space, erased the corners and curved the walls. Robby had just three glowworms and he kept them dimmed because of his photosensitivity; their slow crawl over the room's surfaces cast a changing pattern of dreamy radiance and midnight shadows. The only thing in the room that seemed solid was the carebot, which had tucked itself into a corner. Its eyestalk tilted toward her briefly to note her arrival, then returned its gaze to monitor her brother's naked, twitching body, suspended in its protective mesh. Robby had a state-of-theart stash; Mom had spent a boatload of Dad's money on her injured son after the attack. His intracranial interface was implanted directly into his cerebral cortex, which also helped relieve the worst of his dyskinetic thrashing. Robby could never have managed his avatar with an ordinary interface; his control over his movements had been so compromised by the neurotoxins in the DV gas that the True Patriots had used that he could barely feed himself. That was the carebot's job, as was cleaning up after him. Once, before the carebot, he had worn diapers. That hadn't worked out for anybody.

=Oh Stormy.= She pinged him on their private channel. =Reality calling.=

=Go away.= His reply scrolled across her glass.

"Mom sent me to check up on you." She switched to speaking aloud and the mic on her headset reformatted for messaging. "Time for some sweet family togetherness."

=Go online then.=

"Nope. I need some hardtime." She queried her glass and opened his overlord account; they had each other's access. "And so do you."

Even though they were twins, Robby's disabilities meant that he had different overlord quotas. He couldn't exercise and the carebot controlled his diet. He only owed an hour of hardtime a day, all of which was currently due. Remeny had never understood how waking up in a dark room to thrash around like a fish caught in a net could be good for anyone.

"Blaaagh." Robby never re-entered hardtime in a good mood. "Shit."

"Hello to you, too. Mom said something about a turning. You want?"

"No." He coughed up a wad of phlegm and spat onto the floor. The carebot whirred out of its corner to clean it up. "I don't need... oh, go ahead."

Robby's smartsilk net was the only furniture in the room. He rarely left it, even when he logged off, because of the fibromyalgia. His skin was sensitive to the slightest touch and the mesh distributed pressure points. It was suspended from the walls and ceiling so that its shape could be thermally reconfigured to roll him from one side to another, even from his back to his belly, to prevent bedsores.

She swiped her finger halfway across the control screen and then up. Parts of the net stretched while others shrank.

"Ow, ow oww." His fingers caught at the net while he kicked at the air. "Okay, enough. Stop."

"Sorry."

He came to rest facing her, eyes slits, eyelids gummy, curled into a fetal position as if to protect his erection. Seeing his cock didn't faze Remeny anymore. After helping to nurse him for the last couple of years, she had developed a high tolerance for brotherly ick.

"I was fine, you know." Robby croaked at the carebot's eyestalk; he was talking to Mom. "You just turned me this morning, Rachel." Then he nodded at Remeny. "I'm three screens on her desktop. Can't even fart without setting off alarms."

"I told her she was turning into the overmom."

A head jerk scattered his smile.

"So," she said, "think we can carry that loser Toybox?"

"Sure." He sucked in a raspy breath. "Jason isn't so bad."

"Jason, is it? He's a moron."

Robby swallowed twice in rapid succession. " Ahhh. "

"Pain?" she said

"No."

"You want a gun?" Ever since the attack, he'd had a fascination with the old handguns in the house. As if having a real one might have saved him. Still, handling them seemed to relieve his stress, which then calmed the spasms.

"No."

She waited for him to say something else. This was her day to be ignored by her family.

"You were getting pretty weird on me in coop," she said at last.

"Weird?"

"Everyone for themselves. I've got the transcript in my folder. Revolutions don't play by the rules." She exaggerated a Sturm imitation, made his edges sharp enough to cut. " 'Speak for yourself, Botão. Maybe I am a terrorist.' Come on, Sturm. A terrorist? You're going to do other people like you were done?"

"Right wing scum," he muttered. "Assholes."

"Right wing, left wing—they're all assholes."

"Revolution." He didn't seem very interested in the conversation.

"What revolution?" She felt like he was pushing her toward a cliff. "What the hell are you talking about?" Then she noticed the edge of his overlord window in her glass. He wasn't getting hardtime credit for their conversation. "Wait a minute," she said. "You're still running your avatar?"

"Huh?" He was confused. "What?"

"This is me," she said. "Your sister." Remeny was at once impressed and insulted. It took supreme concentration to run an avatar in hardtime while carrying on a conversation in softtime. "You thought I wouldn't notice?" Then she guessed why he hadn't logged off. "You're with someone."

"No."

"I bet it's your little Button Bright."

He writhed and his right arm flung itself up, grazing the top of his head. "What makes you say that?"

"For one thing," she said, "you've got a bone like a dinosaur."

"A second. Give me a second." He closed his eyes and his body went slack. Then with a shudder, he was back. The clock was ticking. She had his full attention.

"Kind of a pervy thing to say to your brother." He gave her a grimace which she knew was a grin.

"We share the perv gene, Stormy." She grinned back. "So Botão is your girlfriend now?"

"No one is my girlfriend." His voice was like sandpaper. "She's a reality snob like the rest of them. I mean, suppose we really wanted to get together. Eventually she'd want to come over here for a visit, see me for herself. You know how that goes. Imagine her standing there, staring at this twitchy sack of meat. Romantic or what?"

Remeny wanted to say something but couldn't think what.

"I'll take a gun now," Robby said. "Kent's Glock."

Dad kept his memorabilia in a study at the far end of the house. He had been in flat movies way back, but had made the transition to flix and adventures and sims and even some impersonations. Although he had been cast in all kinds of parts, Jeffrey Daugherty was mostly known for playing bad guys: serial killers, drug lords, CEOs, stalkers and, yes, terrorists. He had won a Golden Globe and an Appie for playing Kent Crill on The Revenger, which was where he had acquired most of the collection of prop weapons displayed behind his desk. Kent had used the Glock to take down his arch-nemesis, the vampire Sir Koko Mawatu, in the Season Five finale. Of course, it was just a prop that didn't really fire silver bullets, but it had the heft of a real gun.

Remeny parted the ultrasmooth strands of the mesh and offered him the pistol, grip first. He swiped at it and missed the first time but nabbed it on the second try. He settled back, rubbing the steel barrel lengthwise across his cheek. She'd seen his gun fetish many times but it was still something about her brother that she didn't get.

"It's not Toybox I'm worried about," he said. "Who is this Silk?"

"I don't know, some rich kid." She shrugged. "I kind of like him."

"I don't."

"Why? Because he wants to run the show? So do you. So does Toybox. All you boys doing your alpha male thing—it's kind of cute in an annoying way."

"He's already got slogans out. A dozen floaties around town—they have to be his. No one else has the money. One keeps circling the town office."

That was interesting. "Fast work." She called up the satellite image on her glass and zoomed. "Hey, that's some serious signage. Maybe he needs extra credit."

"It was his idea. Doesn't that seem suspicious?"

She leaned against the wall and wished once again that he would let her bring a chair when she visited. "No, it wasn't. Botão came up with life, liberty, and..."

"Just words." He aimed the gun at the carebot and stared down the sights. "The slogan was his idea."

"So he's smart. So?" She jiggled the net. "Did you tell Botão who you are?"

"Nuh-uh." He held the gun steady and Remeny could see him mouth the word bang. "But she knows I'm stashed."

"She knows and she's still interested?"

"She just thinks she is."

"Then maybe you're wrong about her. You've got a crush setup here, pal. What if you were stashed in a body stack, like Toybox? Think she'd go all melty over whatever is behind the doors at the Komfort Kare?"

"She'll still want..."

"What she wants is Sturm and that's who you are, twenty-three out of every twenty-four hours. Your body is just leftovers."

His laugh was bitter. "Rah, rah, rah." He waved the Glock in a circle. "Too bad cheerleading doesn't kill the pain anymore."

Robby was getting weird on her. "I've got to go for a run—overlord orders." She couldn't handle him when he was like this. "You going to stay real for a while?"

"Sure."

"Want me to leave Kent's gun? You never know when your arch-nemesis is going to show."

"No, take it." He thrust the pistol through the mesh. "I'll find some other way to thwart Silk's evil plan." His hand was steady now.

"He's not your problem." She leaned in close and blew on his face. "See you at dinner then." It was as close to kissing as they got.

"Something's got to change," he said.

"Yeah, yeah," she said. "Come the revolution."

As Remeny jogged up Forest Ridge Road, the spray can of Sez in her fanny pack bounced against her back. She had queried her glass for places she could tag that would have the highest foot traffic. The list was short and most of the choices were in Bedford's modest downtown, a couple of kilometers away. That would mean her graffiti would overlap with Silk's floating ads, but that was okay.

She began to see bots on errands: delivery bots from Foodmaster and Amazon and Express-It, a MacDonald's dinerbot reeking of yesterday's fries, an empty taxi idling on Little Oak. The first pedestrian she passed was a old man in a breather walking his dog. She saw Officer Shubin's motorcycle parked at the Cocamoca but no Officer Shubin. She slowed to a stop when she spotted the floaty bobbing down Third Street toward her. The squat barrel shape floated at eye level and the slogan scrawled continually around its circumference. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness Life, Liberty, and...

"Stop," she commanded. Its top propeller rotated one hundred and eighty degrees until it faced in the opposite direction from its bottom propeller. "I have a question."

"I will try to answer," it said.

"Who paid for you?"

"I was hired by PROS, which stands for Protect the Rights of the Occupants of Softtime." It played a short musical flourish.

"Never heard of it."

"The organization is less than two hours old."

Her overlord nagged that her metabolic rate was falling. She began to jog in place.

"Who's in it?"

"Membership information is confidential."

"How long are you contracted for?"

"I will be proclaiming the new world order in this area through Tuesday."

New world order? Silk was having delusions of grandeur. "What do you mean: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness?"

"What does it mean to you?"

"I don't know. Nothing."

"PROS would like to change that. If you were to google it...."

Rememy stopped paying attention and pinged Silk instead. When she got no reply, she queried her glass about floaty rentals. Rates ran between two and three hundred dollars a day depending on the size of the floaty, the sophistication of the pitch and the choice of sales route. She was impressed. Rich was rich, but what teenager would spend two thousand dollars a day on a coop project?

"Do you have any other questions?" said the floaty.

On an impulse she reached into her fanny pack, grabbed the Sez can and sprayed call me on the floaty. As it tried to dodge away, it jiggled her "e" into looking like a mutant "p."

"At 1753," the floaty said, "I identify you as Johanna Daugherty of 7 Forest Ridge Road. Per the Defacement of the Bedford's Commercial Speech Ordinance, you will now be charged the standard rate for use of this device for as long as your unauthorized commentary persists."

Remeny wasn't worried; the Sez had been in draft mode. "Make sure Silk gets my message."

"What is Silk?"

Her graffitti was already fading, so she brushed by the floaty and jogged up Third Street.

"Your total charge is sixty-seven cents," it called. "Have a nice day."

More than half of the stores facing Memorial Square had gone out of business. To keep the downtown from looking like a mouthful of broken teeth, the town had paid to have the buildings torn down but had preserved and restored the façades. Behind these were empty lots converted to lawns, gardens, and patios with picnic tables, all tended by bots, all deserted. There were spaces downtown designated for civic tagging as long as the message conformed to font, color, and content guidelines. She sprayed slats of the benches that faced the Civil War monument, the windows on the façade of the Post Office and the abutments of the pedestrian bridge that crossed Sperry Creek. She set the Sez can to a 158 point Engravers font, which she thought looked suitably historic, and set the duration for Tuesday. Same as Silk. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness fit nicely alongside silence is golden but duct tape is silver, We are not a bot, and Think More About Working Less.

On the way home, she took the shortcut through the grounds of the Gates Early Learning Center since there were designated tagging surfaces at its playground. A handful of little kids milled about in their bulky, augmented reality helmets, pulling up grass, tripping over the balance boosters, hitting trees with sticks. One of them came up to Remeny while she was spraypainting the slide.

"What's your name?" The girl had an annoying squeaky voice.

She didn't have time for this—where was the teacher? "Ask your helmet to look me up."

"Why? You could just tell me."

Remeny glanced over and saw black curls framing a face pale as a mushroom. She was five or maybe six, wearing a Dotty Karate T-shirt. "Johanna."

"I'm Meesha, but my real name is Amisha." She pointed at the tag. "What does that say?"

"Read it yourself." The kid was breaking her concentration.

"Don't know how."

"Your helmet does."

She put her hand over her mouth and whispered the query as if she didn't want Remeny to hear. "I don't know pursuit," she said at last.

"Your helmet could..." Remeny looked around for help and saw Joan deJean headed her way. "It means to chase after."

Meesha considered this. "Is that why you're all sweaty? 'Cause you're pursuiting happiness?"

"Hi, Johanna." Ms. deJean had been Johanna's teacher when she was a kid. "I see you've met Meesha." She put a hand on the girl's shoulder.

"Hi, Ms. deJean. Yeah, she's not exactly shy."

"You can say that again." Ms. deJean turned the girl gently and aimed her back toward the other kids. "This is learning time, Meesha. Not chatting time."

"Chatting can be learning," the girl said.

"Scoot." She gave her a nudge back toward the center, but Meesha squirmed and skipped away in a different direction. "So what's this?" Ms. DeJean bent over the slide and read.

Remeny slipped the Sez into her fanny pack. "Coop."

"Already?" Her old teacher sighed. "Seems like yesterday you were toddling around here, talking back like Meesha." She lit up with the memory. "You and your brother. How is Robby?"

"He doesn't get out much."

"No." Her light dimmed. "The Declaration of Independence? You breaking away from something?"

"I don't know," said Remeny, then she laughed. "Maybe the EOS."

"Good for you." Joan deJean laughed with her. "It's a train wreck, if you ask me. All software and no people."

Remeny usually walked Forest Ridge Road to cool down at the end of a run but when she saw her mother and Emily Banerjee sitting on the Banerjees' lawn, she broke into a sprint. Her mother had her arm around Mrs. Banerjee's shoulder and was speaking softly to her.

"Everything okay?" Remeny pulled up in front of them.

"Emily isn't feeling well," said Mom. "She's confused."

The Banerjees had been antiques when the Daughertys had moved in, crinkly and cute as Remeny and Robby grew up. Sadhir Banerjee had died in March and his wife had been lost ever since. Mom had called the son Prahlad last month when she had found Mrs. Banerjee sorting through the Daughertys' garbage at night.

"I am not confused," said Mrs. Banerjee, "and I will never lie in those coffins."

"Nobody wants you to, Emily."

"I watched it on the teevee—just now. Those coffins are small." She spread her palms. "This wide, maybe. And not much longer even." The way her hands shook reminded Remeny of Robby. "They lie awake in the coffin so they can always call other people on the internet but there is no room. Not for everyone. The internet is too small, too, even for an old woman."

Teevee? The internet? Remeny didn't want to laugh because this was sad. But talk about oldschool.

"Don't worry, Emily," said Mom. "Prahlad is coming soon."

"Yeah, it's okay, Mrs. Bannerjee," said Remeny. "You don't have to call people if you don't want."

Mrs. Banerjee glanced up at Remeny. "You're the girl. Rachel's child. Isn't there a brother?" She pointed a finger as if in accusation. "We never see you kids playing anymore."

"Johanna, that's right. We're all grown up now."

"You know in those coffins? The people?" Mrs. Banerjee leaned toward her. "Do you know what they call them?" Her voice was low. "Trash. I swear it, Sadhir was with me, he heard too."

Remeny and Mom exchanged glances.

"You mean stash?" said Remeny.

"Stash?" Mrs. Banerjee rocked back and gazed up at the darkening sky for a moment. "Yes. That was it." She nodded at them. "Stash." Her mouth puckered as if she could taste the word.

The Daughertys gathered their weekly family dinners in softtime because Dad was so often on location and Robby couldn't leave his room, much less sit at table. Besides, her brother's two thousand calorie high-bulk liquid diet looked to Remeny like just-mixed cement. Not appetizing. Mom had paid for a space in the family domain that recreated the actual dining room at 7 Forest Ridge Road. A buffet with a marble top matched a china closet with glass doors. Its dining room table could seat ten comfortably but had just the four upholstered chairs gathered around one end. The furniture was all dark maple in some crazy oldschool style that featured arabesque inlays, fleur-de-lis and Corinthian columns. The meal that nobody was going to eat was straight out of the darkest twentieth century: a platter of roast chicken—with bones— bowls of mashed potatoes and green beans with pearl onions, a basket of rolls. Remeny thought the whole show a waste of processing power; in soft-time you were supposed to challenge reality, not just fake it. But this was what Mom wanted and Dad always humored her. Robby and Remeny didn't have a vote.

"The kids were working on their coop today," said Mom.

"They're on the same team?" Dad liked to sit at these meals with a knife in one hand and a fork in the other, even though all they did was stare at the virtual food. The kids could have made their avatars appear to eat, but their parents, Mom especially, had yet to master the tricks of full immersion. "How does that happen?"

"Just lucky, I guess." Remeny's dinner was the leftover smoothie and snap peas out of the bag. She ate in her room.

"So what's it about?"

"It's kind of boring actually." After talking to Robby that afternoon, Remeny had been hoping coop wouldn't come up.

"No, it isn't." Her brother opened their private channel with a.(4) impatience blip.

=We should have this conversation now.=

=They'll want to talk about it all night. I'm going out later.=

"Something to do with the Declaration of Independence?" Apparently Mom had been paying attention after all.

=With Silk?=

=None of your business.=

"Oh, right," said Dad. "We the people blah blah in order to form a more perfect union of whatever." Remeny had been hoping that Dad would take the conversation over, as he usually did. "I've always wondered how you get to be more perfect. I played James Madison once, you know, he was a shrimp, five feet four—what's that in meters?"

"A hundred and sixty-two centimeters." Even though Robby was using his parent friendly version of Sturm—no scars, no iridescence—she could tell he was mad.

"Just about Johanna's size." Dad's avatar was wearing a Hawaiian shirt with a sailboat motif. As usual, he looked like his hardtime self, handsome as surgery and juv treatments could make an eighty-three-year old, but then his image was part of his actor's brand. "No, wait. That's not right." He pointed his knife at Remeny, as if she were thinking of correcting him. "More perfect union is the Constitution. The Declaration was Jefferson. He was a tall one, him and Washington. Never played Washington. Wanted to, never did, even though we're about the same size."

"We're declaring our independence," said Robby.

=Sturm, no.=

That stopped Dad. "Who?" He frowned. "Teenagers?"

"Everybody who's stashed. We're giving up on hardtime—reality. We want to live as avatars."

"Cool." It was exactly the wrong thing to say. Remeny wondered if he'd been biting into a slice of pizza wherever he was and hadn't been paying attention to the conversation.

"And how do you propose to do this?" Mom's avatar looked like she had swallowed a brick.

"Just do it. Stay stashed." Robby gave them a (.6) impatience blip. "Never log off."

"No blips at the table, please." Mom had strange ideas about manners. "Never come back— ever?"

Remeny started to say "Only when we want..." but Robby talked over her. "Never." He pushed back his chair and stood up, which seemed to Remeny more disrespectful than a blip. "And we want to be able to overclock as much as we want. Live double time. Triple. Whatever."

"Now you're talking nonsense," said Mom. "Your brain is not a computer, Robert. Overclocking causes seizures. And being stashed is hard on the body. The mortality rate for..."

"That's why we overclock," he shouted. "We can burn through years subjective while the meat rots."

Mom looked shocked that he would use the m-word at the table. Remeny couldn't believe it herself.

"Sit down, Robby." Dad didn't seem angry. He just scratched his chin with the fork while he waited for Robby to subside. Robby obeyed but sulked. "Funny this should come up. So I'm in Vermont with Spencer this morning..."

"Jeff." Mom sounded betrayed.

"Pirates in Vermont?" said Remeny.

=Don't encourage him.= Robby was on Mom's side in this one. =Let's finish this.=

"I was done early at the Treasure Ship shoot." Dad shook his head. "Bastards cut half of my part. So, there I am at Steve Spencer's summer place in Vermont and he pitches me an idea about how people want to do exactly what Robby is talking about.

He's got a script ready to go and everything. Financing no problem, sixty mill starter money he says. Sixty million dollars kind of gets my attention. The idea is that there are people who want to live in virtual reality...."

Remeny raised her hand to correct him. "Softtime."

"Sure. And they never want to come out. It's wild stuff. They're cutting off arms and legs and whatever, body parts they claim they don't need and I say it sounds like horror, which isn't what I do, but Steve says no. The script plays it straight. It's a damned issue piece! Apparently there are people who believe this is a good thing. People who can raise sixty million no problem. Do you know about this, Rachel?"

She shook her head.

"How do we not know about this?"

"Because we're still only some people," said Robby. "Not enough people yet."

"And you're going to do it," said Mom. Remeny wondered who she was talking to. Dad? Robby? Both of them? It almost looked as if she had calmed down except that just then her avatar went completely still. Remeny searched the house cams and found her at the real dining room table with a plate of tortellini in front of her. She had pushed her Deveau back onto her head. She was crying.

"Sweet part for me." Dad hadn't noticed that Mom had logged off. "I'm a senator and I'm against it. I've never actually played a senator before. President, yes. Mayor. It's only a supporting, but still Frederick Nooney is attached, Gonsalves to direct. I told Steve I'd give him an answer tomorrow, but this... is this some coincidence or what?"

"You should do it," said Robby. "Absolutely. What's it called?"

"Title on the script is 'Declaration,' but that will never fly."

Remeny almost choked on a snap pea. Robby started to laugh.

Then Dad did something that Remeny didn't think that an oldschool eighty-threeyear-old could. He opened a private channel to Robby in softtime.

=You there, son?=

=Maybe.=

Unfortunately he didn't know how to close Remeny's private channel with her brother, so she was able to eavesdrop. =Look Robby, if this is what you want, I'm for it. I know you're in pain and miserable.

= =Only when I'm stuck in hardtime.

= =I get that. Ever since that day, all we've wanted is to help.= His sympathy blip was (.8). =I know it's hard for you but it's hard for us too. Your mother blames herself because she sent you...=

=Dad, stop. I love you but stop. You want to help me then take the damn part. It'll be good for the cause. My cause, Dad. But what I really want is for you to come home and help me with Mom. Because reality sucks and I'm giving up on it. We need to make Mom understand. All of us, face to face. Oldschool.=

"Stop saying you're sorry." Sturm was trying for stern but his blippage read embarrassed.

"I just didn't want Mom to freak," said Remeny.

"Well, she did and nobody was killed. I call that a win for our side."

"Think Dad can convince her?"

"He's an actor." Sturm scanned the crowd around the dance floor for Silk. "He'll give a performance."

The music twanged and couples began to take their places.

"Nine minutes after," said Sturm. "He's not coming."

"There's no schedule." Remeny's irritation climbed to (.3). "He's not a train."

"Bow to the partner, now bow to the corner, all join hands and circle to the left, please don't step on her, now circle to the right, and we go round and round."

Now that she was old enough to know better, Remeny was sick of square dancing. When she was twelve, ForSquare had been one of her favorite EOS playgrounds. She had loved the movement, the color, and the concentration it took to remember and execute all of the calls. When she was sixteen she had come in second in the Jefferson County Challenge. There had been more than twenty calls that day that involved changing avatars on the fly, on top of two hundred more traditional calls. A hell of a lot of remembering, but that was the point. It was all about teaching kids how to use their interfaces while they pretended to have fun.

"Promenade now, full promenade." Crystal stalactites rose at random from the dance floor and the dancers weaved around them.

Another thing: the music was so loud that you had to shout to be heard. Okay for these kids, so young that they had nothing to say. But now that she was eighteen, Remeny preferred a quiet place like Sanctuary. It was better for flirting.

Remeny spotted Botão and waved. She skirted the dancers to join them.

"I'm here but I can't stay. I'm babysitting my sisters." Her avatar was wearing a Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness T-shirt.

"I like this." Remeny brushed a hand down the sleeve.

"Yeah." Botão tugged at the hem, stretching the front of the tee so she could admire it too. "My mom and I designed them and then I printed out ten on our home fab, sizes six and seven. I'll bring them to the Gates Center tomorrow and have the teachers send them home with the kids. Cost less than ten bucks."

"I was just there today myself."

"Oh my god, what if we had met?" She clutched her throat in mock horror. "You ask me, I say the whole secret identity thing is dumb. The oldschool is just trying to keep us from ganging up on them." She brushed up against Sturm. "What do you think, Sturm, or are you ignoring me on purpose?"

"You forgot the commas," he said, "and I wasn't ignoring you. I was looking for Silk."

"Asshole." She was stunned. "Be that way then." She pushed away from him.

"What do you know about Silk?" he said.

=What are you doing?= Remeny sent Robby a private message.

=I think she's in on it.=

=In on what?=

"Why should I tell you?" said Botão.

"Because Silk isn't who we think he is."

Botão's anger blip had a sarcastic edge. "Nobody here is who I think they are."

"Did he tell you to come up with that slogan?"

"Oh, I get it. I'm not smart enough to come up with an idea on my own. Let's see now, is it because I'm a girl? Because I am uma Brasileira?"

"There." Remeny pointed. Silk had entered with a couple of avatars new to her.

"All roll now, and spin those wheels, easy now and boys form a star...." Some of the avatars on the dance floor morphed their shoes into roller blades; the others grew casters in their legs. "Now be our stars, and keep it rolling." One of the boys in the star formation slipped and toppled into the boy next to him. The girl dancers clapped and giggled, but the caller didn't pause. "That's all right, no time for regrets, head back home and into your sets."

Silk appeared beside Remeny. "Our meeting isn't until Tuesday," he said, "but as long as we're here... I don't see Toybox."

"Leave him out of this," said Sturm.

"Oh, and are you giving the orders now?" His amusement blip barely registered.

"I think there is some kind of conspiracy going on and you're part of it. You're manipulating me. Us."

"Speak for yourself," said Botão.

"How can it be manipulation..." Silk spread his hands. "... if you're doing what you wanted to do anyway? You believe, Sturm. I know you do. "

"But I don't," said Botão, "and you can take your conspiracy or revolution or whatever the hell it is and shove it." As Botão tore her T-shirt off and hurled it at Silk, she generated a replacement Seleção Brasileira soccer jersey. "I'll find another coop. Remeny? You with me?"

With a shock, Remeny realized that she wanted to say yes, that she was actually afraid of what Silk and Sturm were trying to do to themselves. She liked being an avatar, sure, but this wasn't how she wanted to live the rest of her life. Not if it meant getting stashed. She started toward Botão.

=Wait.= Sturm was desperate.

Silk didn't wait. "You can't quit," he said. "Don't you want to live your life in soft-time? You're the one who wanted to make your own domain and never get real again."

"No." Botão glared at the three of them, and Remeny was ashamed to be lumped with the boys. "I was just saying that I like the real world and VR." She had to raise her voice to be heard over the music and now people were eavesdropping. That only made her talk louder. "I don't know about you jerkoffs, but I like sex, oldschool sex, the kind you probably can't get, you know with touching and kissing and... and sweetness." Her anger blip soared. "And I'm going to have my own kids someday."

In her room, Remeny felt tears come. She agreed with everything Botão was saying—except maybe the part about having kids. But it would hurt Robby if she spoke up and he had been hurt so much already. Not fair, not fair, but then nothing in her life was fair. She had been so busy being Robby's sister that she had forgotten how to be herself.

"But we're doing your kids a favor," said Silk. "And your grandchildren."

The caller had stopped and the music shut down. Now the entire playground was listening to them. Remeny was pretty sure they were about to be kicked out. Or worse.

"We've got nine billion people crowded onto this planet," he continued. "Most of us stashed aren't ever going to have kids. We say that's a good thing. And the stashed don't burn through scarce resources like you and your kids. We're saving the planet. All we ask is that we get to live the life we want."

"Avatars Silk and Botão, you are disrupting this playground." The caller's warning pierced the argument like a fire alarm. "Stop now or there will be consequences."

"Okay." Botão raised her hands in surrender . " So you have some ideas. But a revolution? No. You haven't seen what evil a revolution does. I have." Then she brought her hands together with a sharp clap and her avatar popped.

Everyone but Silk seemed to be holding their breath. He knelt, picked up her discarded T-shirt and held it up. "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," he said.

"Someday. That's all. In the meantime, I apologize."

The music started again. The crowd in the playground buzzed.

"Please." A kid in a foolish wizard's hat touched Sturm's elbow. "What was that all about?"

Sturm waved him off and snatched the T-shirt out of Silk's hands. "You and I still have something to settle."

"We do. But what about your sister?"

Sturm froze. "What did you say?" A blip shimmered but he suppressed it.

"We don't play by the rules, remember? That's how revolutions work." Was Silk smirking? "But we should really take this elsewhere. I have a place."

"You smug bastard. Why should we trust you?"

"Because you're smart? Because you need us?" He was ignoring Remeny. "We can leave her behind if you want."

"I'm right here," said Remeny, although she felt like she was in someone else's dream.

"Don't pretend I'm not." She poked Sturm. "Either of you."

"Fine," said Silk. "Now, we should go."

Remeny was surprised that Toybox could afford a domain, although his taste in decoration was about what she would have imagined. The floor of his space was bone, the walls fire, the ceiling smoke. His temporarily abandoned avatar, dressed in garish vestments, perched at the edge of a gilt Baroque throne, obviously a copy of something. Remeny queried and it turned out to be the Chair of Peter from St. Peter's Basilica, part of some altar designed by Bernini. It didn't seem like Toybox's taste until she found the sublink: some people called it Satan's Throne. In front of the throne were couches and chairs that seemed to have been made from writhing bodies. These gathered around a glass coffin, on top of which were an open bottle of absinthe, a crystal decanter of water, four matching goblets with slotted absinthe spoons, and a dish of sugar cubes. Inside the coffin was the stashed body of Jason Day, or at least what she assumed was a fairly accurate copy. It wasn't too hard to look at: the breathing mask and feeding tube hid most of the face and the body had not degenerated as much as some of the stashed she had seen images of. He still had all his arms and legs, but then Jason Day was under age and would have to log off and leave his coffin for several hours a week. This meant he wasn't yet eligible for an intercranial interface like Sturm's. His Deveau had a larger array of sensors than her Neurosky 3100 and it was connected to the body sock which monitored his vital signs.

"Where is he?" Sturm flicked a finger against Toybox's idle avatar.

"Don't know," said Silk. "Wobbling around hardtime? I'm sure he'll show up before long. Meanwhile, you need to promise that you won't rat us out."

"Rules?" said Remeny. "Wasn't there something about revolutions not having any?"

"Sorry, but either you promise or we're done."

"Sure, sure. We promise." Sturm bent and pretended to examine the Chair of Peter. "Just get on with it."

"Johanna?"

"Remeny to you. How do you know I'll keep my word?"

"We've done our homework." He tried a smile on her. "Which means I trust you more than you trust me." She was embarrassed that, just a few hours ago, it would have worked.

She morphed one of Toybox's repulsive couches into a park bench and sat. "Promise."

"Thank you. The first thing to know is that there are a lot of us. Not enough, but more all the time. Did you know that when Jefferson wrote that first declaration, only about a third of the colonists favored independence? A third were loyal to the king and another third were on the fence. The point is that we don't need to convince everybody, okay?"

Toybox jerked on his throne and opened his eyes. "What did I miss?"

Remeny swallowed her blip of chagrin.

"We just started." Silk seemed annoyed at the interruption.

"The contact went well?"

"About what we expected. Botão bailed."

"But these two bit after all." Toybox rubbed his hands together. "I wanted to be there but the damn overlord... well, you know. Besides, Silk says I'm not quite ready for a contact. I need to work on my issues." He came off his throne to the coffin. "Absinthe?"

Remeny scooted away from him on her bench. She opened the private channel with Robby. =Does he have to talk?=

=Humor them. They're taking a risk.= Sturm joined him. "I'll have some." He laid a sugar cube on one of the slotted spoons and set it on a glass.

"Could we please get to the point?" said Remeny. It felt good to close her hands into fists, like she had control of something at least. "What are you asking us to do?"

"Recruit," said Silk. "What we were doing in coop—that's what we're doing all across the entire county. You talk to kids. Make friends. Get our point across."

"I signed on last month," said Toybox. "Easiest thing I ever did."

"Okay," said Sturm. "But we're graduating."

"Are we?"

Remeny and Sturm stared at one another. =Oh shit.=

"We flunk coop." Toybox's glee was (.7). "On purpose. Isn't that crush?"

Remeny couldn't help herself. "Shouldn't be hard for you."

Sturm drained his virtual absinthe at a gulp. "So we're stuck in EOS hell forever."

"There are only so many times you can repeat coop," said Silk, "although we can help you extend your time here. We can arrange it so that most of the kids assigned to your teams are sympathetic to the stashed. Changing avatars can buy time. Eventually you will have to graduate. There will be another assignment waiting, if you want."

Remeny was stunned by the enormity of what Silk was saying. And who was he, really? How old? Did he even live in Jefferson County?

"All of this is voluntary, understand, drop out any time. But you won't want to.

We're busy everywhere, working in every demographic group. Lots of us are over-clocked and can think rings around those who lived the majority of their lives in hardtime. And Remeny, we're not all stashed. There are lots of us out and about in the real world. Maybe they have brothers or sisters or mothers or fathers...."

"Wait," Remeny said. "Aren't our parents going to get suspicious if we keep flunking coop?"

"Some do." Silk nodded.

"My parents don't give a shit," said Toybox. "They're stashed too."

"Sometimes kids convert their parents," continued Silk.

"Let me guess." Robby held up a hand to stop him. "And sometimes you try for entire families at once."

Toybox chuckled.

"Special families get special consideration."

Remeny thought about Steve Spencer in his house in Vermont and a sixty million dollar Vicente Gonsalves flix and Robby's ultimatum. Which was more important to Dad, the part or his son's pursuit of happiness? Wondering about it made her head ache.

"So that's pretty much the deal," said Silk. "I'm happy to tell you more, but I'd like to hear what's on your mind now."

The silence stretched. Remeny couldn't look at Robby. She closed their private channel. She felt like curling up into a ball. He had to speak first. But she knew. He was her brother. She knew.

"I'm interested."

"Good man." Silk came over and sat on the couch beside her. "Remeny?" What had she seen in him? "We definitely want you, too." She thought that if he tried to touch her, she would slap his hand away.

On an impulse, she pulled the Neurosky off her head and Silk, Toybox, and Sturm disappeared. It was almost midnight. She was going to owe her overlord big time for this night. She stood and stretched in the dark of her room. Her home. She didn't bother with lights or a headset. Mom and Dad were almost certainly asleep but she opened the hall door as if it were made of glass and slunk down to Robby's room. She was glad now that she hadn't left ForSquare with Botão. It was important that she understood what Silk was offering Robby. The pursuit of his happiness. As Sturm.

But his happiness wasn't hers, and that was okay. Silk had given her something, even though she couldn't accept his offer. She would have life and her liberty from her brother's pain.

Johanna leaned close to Robby and blew on his face. Goodbye. He stirred but did not wake.

THE PLANTIMAL

Mike Resnick and Ken Liu | 6657 words

Mike Resnick has won five Hugos from a record thirty-six Hugo nominations (most of which came from Asimov's ), and is, according to Locus, the all-time leading award winner for short fiction. Mike was the 2012 Worldcon Guest of Honor. His two most recent books are The Trojan Colt (a mystery) and The Doctor and the Dinosaurs.

Ken Liu ( http://kenliu.name )is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. His fiction has appeared in F&SF, Asimov's, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He has won a Nebula, two Hugos, a World Fantasy Award, and a Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award, and been nominated for the Sturgeon and the Locus Awards. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts. Although it will be awhile before Ken accumulates as many awards as Mike, these decorated authors join their formidable talents to examine what it's like for an older couple forced to make choices about their new life on a space station.

It's not easy to live with guilt for sixty years. Not even when you made the right decision.

Ask me. I know.

"Is that a Droran snapclaw?" asks Cheryl. "I saw a documentary about them."

I notice her putting her hands on the table to steady herself as she leans down to examine the small fishbowl, half filled with water. We don't like to admit it, or even think about it, but we're both over a hundred, and neither of us has yet gotten used to the way gravity changes as we move around the spinning space station.

I say the first words that come to mind: "I thought they were illegal." Write it off to my usual good humor.

"Maybe back on some planet like Earth or Pele, but we don't have as many rules out here around Tyche IV," the nursery owner explains, just a bit smugly. "This is one government that knows how to stay out of people's lives."

On the surface of the water float three oval, copper-red leaves. Out of the middle of the three leaves a finger-thick stalk rises, ending in a fist-sized spherical flower head made up of narrow petals terminating in sharp thorns. As Cheryl leans closer, the head lunges at her and snaps shut an inch from her nose, the thorns lining its flowery jaw interlocking and emitting a hiss.

"It's cute!" says Cheryl with a chuckle. She's a nature lover, but this is going a little too far.

"I don't think I'd feel safe napping with that damned thing around," I say (well, I grump)— but you really have to be pretty desperate to love a plant that might bite your face off. Then the anger drains out of me, because I realize that of course Cheryl is just that desperate.

"All right, Robert." Her voice is resigned, dampened by the invisible gulf that's always between us. She looks around. "Then how about some of these Ropsto jumping beans?"

She points at a small planter, covered by a clear glass bell jar on the table next to the snapping jaws. Inside, a bunch of beans are jumping up and down like a flea circus. A few high-energy beans strike the glass of the bell jar from time to time, making a tinkling sound.

"That's lovely!" she enthuses. "It sounds like a glass harmonica—or maybe a wind chime."

"Sounds like hailstones to me," I answer. "What happens when they get bigger? Are they going to break the glass?"

"I can sell you a bigger terrarium," says the owner. "Did you know that there are five varieties of Ropsto jumping beans? Each one is shaped like a different Platonic solid."

Yes, I think, that's exactly what we need—alien plants to teach me a geometry lesson.

I turn to Cheryl, unable to hide my frown. "I thought we agreed we don't want any animals, just plants." I try to sound pleasant and reasonable. I don't quite pull it off.

"I don't carry any animals here," interjects the nursery owner, who actually has the chutzpah to sound offended. "You think I don't know the difference? Everything here at Dave's Plantimals is a certified plant, backed up by the opinions—and the signed certificates—of reputable botanists."

Cheryl jumps in before I can tell him what I think of his reputable botanists. "All right," she says, "How about something a little less... active? We've got a really small cabin here on Shepard Station."

Cheryl wants a pet, something that she can fuss over and that will respond to her love. I haven't wanted anything like that for more than half a century. So plants are our compromise.

Dave ponders her question for a moment and slowly looks around the nursery. Finally he points to a corner. "You can take a look at that one. I got it from the crew of an explorer ship to HD40207g."

Cheryl and I walk over. The low gravity does have the benefit of being much easier on my joints. It's one of the main reasons we moved here. Maybe the doctors and medical facilities aren't as good, being so far from the core systems, but at least we'll be comfortable.

And there's another consideration: it's cheap. We don't have much put away for retirement.

There's a little ceramic pot in the corner filled with white sand. A pale blue blob sits on top, formed from two oval lobes. Thin, shallow creases cover the entire surface.

"Jesus!" I blurt out. "It looks like a baby brain!" I instantly realize what I've said as Cheryl kind of freezes next to me. I'm not just a bitter old man; I'm a slow learner. For maybe the thousandth time (or is it the millionth?), I wonder why she's let me stick around all these years.

She relaxes after a moment and bends down to look at the plant, but almost immediately jerks back up.

"It's breathing!" she says in an astonished whisper.

The lobes move up and down rhythmically, as if the plant is actually taking breaths or a heart is beating inside.

"Nah," Dave says, shaking his head for emphasis. "It's just pumping air and water through in its version of photosynthesis."

Words and concepts like that may put the average browser off. Not my Cheryl.

"What else can you tell me about it?" she asks, staring at it in rapt fascination.

He scratches his head. "Just what the survey crew told me. They found tons of this stuff down on the exoplanet, likened it to a pulsating carpet. This is a baby—well, as these things go."

I of course wish he hadn't said that, but Cheryl doesn't react, at least not the way I feared she would.

"The adults look the same, just bigger?" she asks.

"Well, not exactly," he hedges.

"What do you mean?"

"They're like... like the plant version of chameleons," he says at last.

"Chameleons?" she repeats.

"You know—imitators. What you see here, this is their basic form. But if they grow up near other plants, they take on their form over time. It's kind of a camouflage technique, I guess."

My guilt kicks in again. This is Cheryl, after all; I've got to get her some thing, and she seems really entranced by the chameleon plant. "I think I'll get a few orchids from the real nursery across the hall and put them next to it," I say. "It would be something special to have a breathing orchid." I turn to Dave. "And it's not poisonous—doesn't snap or bite or spit acid like some of your other specimens?"

"Not as far as I know," he replies. Real cagey, this guy.

"We'll take it," Cheryl says. Her eyes take on a kind of misty look, and I wonder if it's about the plant or the thoughtless comment I made. It ought to be the plant; I've been making thoughtless comments for longer than two-thirds of the species in the Universe have been alive, but they still seem to hurt her as much as they ever did.

As we leave the shop, carrying the pot with the baby plantimal, Cheryl says, "I think I'll call it Shep, in honor of our new home."

From the viewport in the hall, we can see Shepard's Planet spinning below, a tan and blue and white mosaic. I don't like the idea of naming the plant, and especially names that fit better on an old farm dog, but I nod. We're always polite to each other. (Well, she's always polite. I always try to be, which isn't the same thing.)

I stare at the planet. Reminds me of the time Cheryl and I took our adventure vacation to Ranginui, back when it was barely colonized.

But of course I don't say that. I've said enough wrong things today.

For my fortieth birthday, Cheryl surprised me with a month-long trip to Ranginui. The furthest I had gone from home before that was Mars. An excursion to Ranginui didn't seem like my kind of vacation. I liked eating foods I was familiar with, and climate control, and furniture and sports times and doctors I'd known for years. Adventure was for other people.

"Oh, live a little!" Cheryl scolded me lovingly. "We're already in our forties, and we won't be able to get away as easily after we have kids."

It was a good point. We'd been talking about starting a family. We were still young by the standards of the day, but we didn't want to wait till we were in our fifties or even a bit older, when our careers were really going strong.

To my surprise, I actually enjoyed the cruise to Ranginui. Sure, the weird local fish tasted like slimy yogurt, and the weather took a lot of getting used to (it was the only place where I ever experienced hail).

But the scenery was amazing. Back then, only a couple of million colonists lived on Ranginui, and most of the continents were unsettled. Flying in a tiny two-person hovercraft over kilometers and kilometers of virgin forest, with their hexagonal trunks and dark blue leaves, with not a single piece of plasteel or glass in sight, was invigorating in a way that I couldn't quite capture with words. Hell, I'd read the travel guides, and nobody ever quite captured it. And all that empty space! There wasn't another human being except Cheryl and me as far as the eye could see, with snowcapped mountains peeking out over the horizon and packs of six-limbed, scaled prairie bears leaping all around as we set the ship down under dual blazing suns.

I'll never forget it. I just wish those were my only memories of that time.

The trip even rekindled our romance. I hadn't realized how going through the same routine day after day, comfortable and secure though it was, had slowly staled—not our feelings, but the spontaneity of them. Suddenly it was very nice not having neighbors on the other side of thin walls.

On the last day of our vacation, as we boarded the jump ship for the return trip, Cheryl told me she was pregnant. We were both ecstatic. Of course it came a bit earlier than we had planned, but sometimes not planning everything has its advantages. We still had plenty of time to set up the baby's room and get everything ready after we got back to Earth.

What happened on our return trip was something you probably remember from the news archives. They still talk about it from time to time in history documentaries.

Our ship, the Princess of the Southern Skies, had to drop out of hyperspace due to an engine failure. Since the cruise line to Ranginui was new, there weren't many beacons along the way and the little ship had no way to send out a precise location signal—so we had to wait until a rescue ship could locate us and tow us back.

It was one of the greatest disasters in space cruise history. We drifted for seven months. The crew and passengers made a valiant effort to conserve resources and made supplies that were meant to last two weeks stretch for the duration. The recycling measures we resorted to now sound like legends from the earliest days of space travel—and would probably disgust you. But amazingly, morale was high, for the most part.

I fretted about the fact that Cheryl couldn't get access to a real hospital. But she was much more relaxed about it than I was. "You know, women used to have babies without doctors," she repeated almost every day. It was true. It was also true that those were barbaric times. "I'll be fine," she kept assuring me. "I'm sure we'll be rescued long before then— and if not, well, at least we have a medical bot onboard."

When the rescue ship finally showed up, Cheryl was just a couple of weeks from her due date. I've never been a religious man, but on that day I thanked every world's and religion's gods for the miracle.

"Won't this be a great story to tell the kids someday?" Cheryl said as we gingerly stepped off the shuttle onto the rescue ship. The other passengers cheered, and she smiled and waved back. "Yes. Yes it will," I agreed. I kept the cruise ship tickets, thinking they'd make a great addition to the first page of the baby book.

Suddenly there's a major jolt. I think it's an earthquake until I remember that we're not on Earth or any other planet. I pick the tickets off the floor, along with other scattered bits of paper.

The Station Commander apologizes over the PA system, explaining that a worn-out bearing caused the jerk in the station's spin, so I sit down in the chair with the papers. Now I have to sort through them and put them back into their rightful places in our document binder.

While I'm doing this, Cheryl is hovering around the plantimal, making sure that the quake didn't damage it. She straightens up and begins mixing a nutrient pack with water and sprays it over the planter with a misting nozzle.

"My, you're growing fast!" she half-says and half-purrs. "Look at you! I wonder what you'll look like when you're grown?"

She coos at it as if the plantimal were a kitten.

"I'm heading off to the gym on the Outer Ring for some high-gee exercise," she says to me. "Can you remember to give Shep a second nutrient pack in an hour?"

I mumble a yes, and she leaves.

What Dave, the owner of the nursery, failed to tell us is that the plantimal is as much trouble as a puppy, maybe more. Away from its native habitat—and an orbiting station is about as un-native as things get—it has to be given a careful regimen of food and water while it's in this immature state. If I had known it was going to be this much trouble, I'd never have agreed to buy it. Well, not until Cheryl looked at me with those deep brown eyes that reflected six decades of hurt. Then I'd have given in, like I always do.

It takes me half an hour to get all the papers sorted out. I slide the document binder back on the shelf, where it nestles with all the other binders. That's the last one that had fallen. (Yes, I know: they're on my computer too. But what if the computer dies? There was a time I didn't think so much about things dying, but that was a long time ago.)

I stand up and look around. A stranger might think I'm a hoarder, with all the stacks of papers and knick-knacks and mementos filling every visible horizontal surface. There's barely room for me and Cheryl to move around. Makes no difference. I have my own system: over there, in the binder on the left, is the receipt from the first time I took Cheryl to dinner and a show; on the shelf below is the pebble she picked up from the highest peak on Ranginui; and over here, on the table by the sofa, is the card I had all her colleagues sign when she finally returned to teaching.

I need these tokens to remind me, and to remind Cheryl, that we have a life, that it didn't end sixty years ago. Hell, sometimes I even believe it.

What we have here is just a tiny portion of our earthly possessions. When we moved off Earth, I had to get rid of most of the things we owned. It was like cutting off pieces of myself. Everything held a memory, a tangible connection to the life Cheryl and I made together.

There's a gurgling sound from the planter. It sounds—I almost hesitate to even think it—startlingly human.

I walk over and see that the plantimal is pulsating faster than usual. Dave told us that this is a sign that it needs another nutrient pack. I wonder how the hell a plant knows to make a noise when it needs to be fed?

"Hold on," I say. "Yeah, yeah, I know you're hungry. Let me get this ready." I prep the nutrient pack and the water. At least the plantimal doesn't seem to need as much feeding at night. I guess it's adjusted to our circadian rhythms, like Dave said it would.?

It reminds me of prepping formula for a baby.

A baby.

I push the thought away.

As I spray the mist over the plantimal, its gurgling quiets down and it emits a satisfied sound, almost exactly like a burp. My heart clenches, and I'm suddenly grabbing onto the edge of the table to stay upright, my breath catching in my throat.

After a while I stand up and go back to my comfortable chair and turn on the video. I flip through the channels, keeping an ear out for any more sounds of need from the plantimal.

I have to admit it. Shep may take a lot of work, but he's cute. Then I mentally correct myself: it's cute.

Somehow I settle on a children's program with dancing kids and puppets. The tiny cabin apartment is filled with the sound of children's laughter, and just me and Shep listening. It brings back memories of other kids in another time and place.

From time to time, I heard the noises made by other families visiting the new mothers in the other rooms. Loud squeals from young kids followed by admonitions from adults. "Shhhh... Mommy needs to rest." "Be gentle with your new sister."

"Cradle the head, remember to cradle the head!"

Hearing those happy voices was torture. I'd been shuttling between the NICU and Cheryl's room in the maternity ward for two days with no sleep. Cheryl's parents and my parents all tried to get me to take a nap. But I just couldn't. Every time I tried to close my eyes, the sight of my first view of Joey would return to me. I had stood by Cheryl's side and held her hand during the actual delivery, so I didn't see him until the nurses had moved him onto the examination cart to cut the umbilical cord and take measurements. There was a strange tenseness in the postures of the nurses and the whispers of the doctors.

My first view was of lovely little legs, perfect little toes, twitching arms, ten fingers curled tight—and then the head. I'll never forget it, and Lord knows I've tried.

The eyes, like an old cartoon of an alien. The bulging bloody mess on top.

My first reaction to the face of my son was one of horror. My second was disgust. My third—and no one will ever know how close I came to yielding to it—was to run from the room and never stop running.

I hated myself.

I replayed the doctor's words in my head over and over. "Your son has anencephaly, Mr. Carr. I'm sorry."

The rest of her speech was a blur. All I remember were some snippets. "... the neural tube failed to close... there's no neocortex... we don't know why it happens... exceedingly rare these days... usually caught early during prenatal screening so a decision could be made... cannot ever gain consciousness... maybe a few days, or even hours..."

Cheryl had grown increasingly agitated. "Why can't I see him? What is wrong with my baby?"

They brought in a specialist to talk to her. Afterward, the staff left the room to give us some privacy, and we clung to each other like we were drowning. And we cried. And cried. Then she let go and called the nurse back in. "I want to see him." Her voice was steady, each word as heavy as steel.

The nurse and Cheryl gazed at each other. Eventually the nurse nodded and went out.

They rolled Joey in and lifted him into her arms. She held him gingerly. They had put a prosthetic skullcap on him to shield the naked tissues in his skull. His eyes were closed, and he was very, very tiny.

I looked at Cheryl's face. There was no horror, no disgust in her eyes.

"He's breathing," she said. Her tone was even. I could tell how hard she was working at appearing calm, to not give the doctors an excuse to take him away.

"There's enough of a functioning brain stem to permit regulation of heartbeat and breathing," the doctor said. Then, very gently, she added, "He can't feel anything. He's not in pain. He's not suffering."

"My son is alive," she said adamantly. The doctor said nothing.

"My son is alive!" she repeated.

"Come look at Shep!" Cheryl calls out. "He's so lively!"

I shuffle into the living room. I need coffee.

Cheryl is excited, beckoning me over to the planter. I look and suck in my breath.

Overnight the pulsating lobes of the plantimal have broken like an eggshell, and what has emerged is a creature about twenty centimeters long: two bluish arms ending in ten tiny pale green fingers, two bluish legs ending in ten tiny pale green toes, and on top, a little green head with a vaguely defined nose, a mouth, ears, a floppy, grass-like head of hair, and a pair of eyes, still clenched shut.

"It's a miracle!" Cheryl says, her voice filled with awe.

I think back to what Dave had told us. If they grow up near other plants, they take on their form over time.

We are those other plants.

Shep's chest rises and falls like the old pulsating lobes. The arms and legs twitch as it turns its little head from side to side.

I'm out the door before Cheryl can say anything.

The hospital lawyer shut the door after we sat down. It was not lost on us that they'd sent him rather than a doctor.

"I'll come straight to the point, Mr. and Mrs. Carr. Legally, the hospital does not have an obligation to maintain your son on life support."

"Of course you do," replied Cheryl. "My son is breathing and when you touch him, he moves."

"Those are automatic reflexes. The legal definition of death is the irreversible cessation of all higher brain functions, the foundation for personhood. Your son never had and never will have any higher brain functions."

I knew he was right. The definition he quoted was from that big case before the World Supreme Court of Human Rights a couple of decades ago. Something about no obligation to maintain patients in a permanent, irreversible vegetative state. Scarce resources and society's need to move from whole-brain death to more humane definitions and all that. For a while back then it had been very controversial, and then people accepted it.

"Don't you dare to tell me my son is not a person!" she continued defiantly. "My son smiles when you caress his face."

The lawyer folded his hands. He hated this conversation, I could tell. I believed that he was trying to do the right thing. I did and still do.

"The doctors tell me that Joey cannot hear, see, taste, or feel anything. He cannot experience any emotions. He is not now and has never been conscious."

"Then the doctors are wrong."

"I can refer you to some research. The medical consensus on this is overwhelming."

"I don't need research when I can see him with my eyes. He knows who I am! He reacts when I sing to him."

He stared at her, not without sympathy. "Do you think it's possible that you're seeing what you want to see?"

She said nothing.

I thought about the times when I held Joey. Did I think he was responding to me when I caressed him? Did I think he was a tiny little person or just a bundle of cells? I honestly couldn't tell. I was terribly confused. I didn't know if I loved my son, or if I ever could love him.

"The NICU team has been working around the clock for months, Mrs. Carr. We can't keep this up forever. There are other children who need care. When it comes to picking between children who are alive and those who are not, we have to follow rules. They exist for a reason."

Cheryl's expression hardened. "We'll sue and get an injunction."

The lawyer sighed. I wondered if he had children. I wondered if he loved them. I wondered if it was effortless to love a child who was normal.

"You should do what you feel you must."

I must love my son, I thought. I must.

"I'm telling you, it's a plant!" Dave is impatient. "This isn't even open to debate."

"Then how does it move like a baby?" I say. "Why does it move like one?"

"Look, here's the botanists' report. They dissected tons of specimens. There's no evidence of any nervous system. It doesn't feel anything. When they planted one near some wheat stalks, it grew up looking like a wheat stalk. When they planted one near a flock of chickens, it grew up looking like a rooted vegetable chicken. But it's all just an adaptive, automatic, imitative reaction. It's just goddamned mimicry!"

I read the report. What he says is true.

"I'm not going to carry any more of them, I can tell you that," he says. "I can see how they'll freak people out. Bad for business."

The court issued a preliminary injunction while the suit was pending.

The hospital staff remained polite to Cheryl and me, but I could sense the impatience and annoyance that they tried to disguise. We strained their budgets, not only by taking up their resources but also by forcing them to spend money on a lawsuit we were sure to lose. Were there other children who couldn't get the care they needed because of what Cheryl and I were doing? Doubtless they thought we were selfish.

I wasn't sure that I disagreed with them.

Cheryl sang to Joey when she fed him. She talked to him, kissed him, gave him sponge baths.

But never for long. He was constantly sick, and had to be tied back into the life support system and pumped full of drugs.

Cheryl and I put our lives on hold. This is the only period of my life from which I kept no mementos. What would I keep? The hospital bills? The court filings? A white blanket to remind me of the nights sleeping in the hospital and the antiseptic smell and constant beeping of machines?

"I read that it could have been something I ate," Cheryl said. Then she added in a tired monotone, "I wish I hadn't tried so many foods on Ranginui."

No matter what I said to her, I knew I could never get the idea out of her head. Guilt, once it had taken root, couldn't be weeded out.

And then Cheryl fell sick as well, and I alone had to care for Joey.

Holding the baby, constantly worried that at any moment the little monitor attached to his chest could start beeping, I dared not sleep. To entertain myself I began to tell Joey stories my father had told me, to sing him the songs my mother had sung to me as a child, to kiss him, really kiss him, as a way to keep myself awake.

That was when I finally began to love my son, to see him as a person. The forced intimacy of having him depend on me entirely broke through my ambivalence and fear. I looked into his face, and his misshapen features no longer repulsed me. I could see the shape of Cheryl's jaws and the curve of my lips. He looked like me and he also looked like Cheryl. He was our son.

And yes, he did react when my lips touched his face. Yes, he was smiling when I moved him through space in wide, swinging arcs, trying to entertain and comfort him through the physical sensations of shifting acceleration and weight—and yes, I believed that he could feel, even if he couldn't see or hear. I finally knew Cheryl was right... but then, she had always been the wiser.

In my exhausted, delirious state, I began asking the doctors insane questions. How insane? Like this, for example:

"Why can't you clone a brain for my son from his own cells? You can clone hearts and lungs."

"Mr. Carr, we don't know how to do that. We may never know how to do that."

I was thinking science fiction, I guess, but hell, we'd reached the stars and done a million other things, we were living in a science fiction future, so why couldn't the fiction come true?

When Cheryl recovered and we were back to distributing the work evenly, I seemed to wake from a dream. Were those reactions I had seen in my son real? Was I sure that they were not figments of my tired imagination? Could I ignore the consensus of experts and scientists and carefully designed protocols and think I knew better what was true?

I wished I could, I hoped I could, but I truly had no answer.

Shep grows so fast that it changes daily.

Now about the size of a one-year-old, it has long since outgrown its planter. Cheryl and I bought a new one, the biggest one that Dave had, and transplanted it. It giggled—actually giggled —while we moved it.

Cheryl is teaching it to talk.

"Can you say 'Mama'?" she urges, sitting in front of the plantimal. She's surrounded it with colorful toys and nutrient bulbs.

We have so many baby things in the cabin now that I can't make my way around without toppling over piles of paper or knocking down some mementos. Just this morning, I broke the glass dish that we bought when Cheryl and I moved back together after our brief and horribly unhappy trial separation more than half a century ago.

We are running out of space. If Shep keeps on growing, we'll have to discard bits of our life together.

I try to ignore the plantimal as much as I can. It's just mimicry. It has no nerves. When Cheryl caresses it, it moves its arms and legs.

When Cheryl kisses it, the arms and legs move in a manner that looks remarkably like joy.

"Sa-Sa." The voice is raspy, high-pitched. It sounds like something made as a breeze causes two fibrous leaves to rub against each other. But the rhythm is unmistakable.

Can you say "Mama"?

I look up, and there are tears streaming down Cheryl's face.

I'm suffocating in here. I leave the apartment, not knowing where I'm going or what to do.

"You've lost the appeal," our lawyer said to me. Cheryl was asleep, exhausted. Joey was in his crib, and for the moment, his life signs were stable.

"So that's it?" I said. "Are there no other options?"

I didn't know quite how I felt. I was tired all the time, and my emotions seemed dulled. There was a new feeling I couldn't quite place, though.

"Well, it depends. We can petition for a rehearing with the panel, and if that fails, petition for en banc rehearing. And even after that, there's the certiorari process. You haven't exhausted all options yet."

But our assets were depleted. We had spent all our retirement savings, mortgaged the house, pledged our future income streams and social welfare benefits. And we still owed the law firm and the hospital. She didn't explain what our chances of success were, but I knew that with every appeal, the likelihood of victory diminished.

And was it even a victory I wanted? Did I want to spend the rest of my life caring for Joey, a child who could never, all the doctors told me, ever feel?

And suddenly I understood what that new feeling was: relief.

"When my wife wakes up," I said, "tell her that we have no options left."

"I can't do that," answered the lawyer. "That's"—she searched for the right word— "unethical."

"It's unethical to hold out false hope to Cheryl," I said. I didn't know who I was trying to convince more, her or myself. The feeling of relief grew stronger, like a light at the end of a tunnel. "I'm begging you. We have nothing left."

I pushed the questions away.

"Cheryl and I can still have a life together," I continued, "but she'll never give up.

You know that. My son is dead, has always been dead."

The lawyer looked at me, looked at the sleeping figure of Cheryl, looked at the state of disarray of the hospital room, which had become our home. She did not look at Joey in his crib.

Finally she nodded.

I stay out past midnight, Station time. I walk around the outer ring, trying to tire myself out so I can stop the memories surfacing from sixty years ago. Why is it that you can never remember what you want to remember, but can't stop remembering what you most want to forget, what you've been trying desperately to forget for more than half a lifetime?

I go into a bar. It's got loud music and flashing screens, not the kind of place meant for someone my age. But my money is good, and the alcohol, after four or five quick drinks, dulls things enough that it's like forgetting.

The ground moves beneath me, and I fleetingly think I've had too much to drink before realizing that everyone is sprawled on the ground like me. The bright lights and screens go dead and everything is plunged into total darkness.

Mass confusion. Loud voices.

The emergency lights come on, and the PA system crackles to life.

"This is the Station Commander speaking. Sorry about that, folks. Looks like we lost a few of our thrusters. Well, that's life on the frontier. No need to panic, as we're losing altitude very slowly. And we'll get this fixed as soon as the next supply convoy can be sent from the core systems. But as a precaution, I'm going to have to ask all of you to jettison some things to lessen our mass. By tomorrow morning, everyone has to designate 20 percent of their possessions by mass for disposal. There will be no exceptions."

I stumble my way home through the corridors past confused, angry voices, feeling trapped. We've come to Shepard Station to spend our golden years, only to find that the Universe's warped sense of humor hasn't improved since Ranginui.

"Where have you been?" Cheryl asks as I open the door and stagger in.

"We have to pick out things to throw away by morning," I tell her.

"Yes, I heard," she says. "It was broadcast everywhere."

I look around at the apartment. Everything here has a memory, something I want to remember, something to hold the memories I don't want at bay: there's the holograph Cheryl and I took diving in the Great Barrier Reef; there's the award Cherylwon for forty years of excellence in teaching; there's the ticket to the first play we saw after... we finally paid off our debt.

How can I choose to throw any of it away?

Cheryl yawns. "Can you watch Shep for a bit while I catch some shut-eye? He refuses to sleep. I think he misses you."

Before she goes through the door to the bedroom, she turns around and says, "I'll get up in a few hours and help you figure out what to throw away." She flashes me a smile. "I've always said we have too many things."

And she leaves me alone with Shep. With Shep and all my memories.

I go over to the plantimal. It's bobbing up and down, making a mewling noise. "Ta-

Ta." There's no evidence of any nervous system. The planter is huge. I try to calculate the mass. What if I add in all the toys and other baby things Cheryl has bought for it?

It doesn't feel anything.

I picture myself carrying it down to the disposal airlock, before Cheryl wakes up. Shep turns to me, and waves its arms at me. It's just an adaptive, automatic, imitative reaction. I reach out and caress it. And somehow I know, I know that its shiver is a sign of pleasure. I hold up the nutrient bulb, and it leans over to be closer to my hand. There's no doubt in my mind that it's excited about its pending snack.

Is it possible that I'm seeing what I want to see?

The Station Commander has laid down the rules. Rules that must be followed. "I'm sorry," I say. I put down the nutrient bulb. I bend down to lift the planter. I have to get rid of it now, before Cheryl wakes up, before I have to lose all that we've fought so hard to remember: our life together.

"Si aaaa oooo," Shep says, its leafy lips rasping against each other. The rhythm is familiar, bringing to mind something Cheryl used to say a lot, but now, rarely.

Cheryl's voice comes from bpehind me. "That's how he says 'I love you.' "

Cheryl took the news better than I expected. When the nurse disconnected the life support system and left us alone, she just sat and held Joey.

"You should eat something," I said.

"Soon," she said.

I sat next to her, not wanting to touch my son. I hated myself. I hated how relieved I felt. Almost euphoric. I was a monster.

This is what should have been done in the first place, I told myself. We were being selfish. And now we're doing the right thing. The rational thing.

Joey twitched violently in her arms, a seizure. He had those often. Usually we'd call the nurse, but not this time. Not anymore.

"Can you hold him?" she asked. "He usually calms down if you hold him."

I thought if we really checked it scientifically, there would be no evidence that my holding him made any difference. But I said nothing and opened my arms.

The twitching body fluttered against my chest, my arms, my shoulders. Then the movements subsided, and Joey was still. His breath, wheezy, caught in his throat.

I looked down and kissed the baby. Did I do it for myself or for Cheryl? Even now, after all this time, I'm not sure.

Joey's left arm moved up, the fist tightened, and then moved back down. I'd never seen him do that before.

"That's how he says 'I love you,' " Cheryl said.

I gently put the planter down.

I'm crying the way I haven't cried in years. It feels like something inside me wants to force its way out. The sobs wrack my body and it's hard to breathe.

It's not rational to love something that can't feel, that does not have consciousness or will, that can't love you back. But love has never been rational.

It's the effort you put into someone, to care for them, to sustain them when they need you, that gives love life.

Cheryl's arms wrap around me. And I cry even harder. She kisses me and I turn my face away. "I have a confession," I begin.

"I know," she says. "I've always known. I wasn't really asleep."

I look at her, not understanding.

"I loved our son," she says. "But I also love his father. I was selfish, and let you make the decision by yourself because I didn't want the responsibility. Sometimes there are no good choices in life."

We were selfish, but sometimes love and life both depend on being selfish, a selfishness that requires no return.

We cry together. More than half a century of guilt, of things unsaid and topics avoided, cannot be erased in one night. But it's a start. It's the start of relief and hope.

"Do you want me to help you pick out what to throw away?" she asks.

I look around at the binders, the souvenirs, the awards and photos and knickknacks. I had thought I hoarded them to help me, help us, remember, but I had really kept them to forget.

They have lost their glow now, their magic. They don't have a hold on me.

"I don't care," I say. "We can throw all of it away."

"Si aaaa oooo. Sa-Sa. Ta-Ta."

We look over at Shep. He's so lovely, so beautiful. He looks a bit like Cheryl and a bit like me. With a little help from the Old Man, he'll be saying "Mama" and "Daddy" in a month. Hell, in a week.

I can hardly wait.

DRINK IN A SMALL TOWN

Peter Wood | 1020 words

Pete is a criminal defense attorney in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he lives with his loving wife and demanding cat. His stories have been published in many markets, including Daily Science Fiction, Bull Spec, and Stupefying Stories. Of his first tale for Asimov's, he says, "Twenty years ago I worked as a law clerk in a sleepy Georgia town where a bar near the courthouse served cold beer and the best hamburgers in the world."

Wallace picked a hell of a place to watch the first Mars expedition land. The small Georgia town probably hadn't changed in a hundred years.

He parked in front of Scooter's Tavern, the place the interstate gas station attendant had suggested. He wondered how dives like Scooter's survived. Except for the bar he saw nothing but boarded-up buildings. The dark street had only one other car.

He thought twice about leaving the interstellar drive's blueprints in the trunk. But he didn't feel like lugging them around. After the frustrating week trying to get money to manufacture the drive, he half hoped somebody would steal the damned plans.

Inside, the wheezing window air conditioner fought August's heat and humidity. A teetering stack of water-stained boxes leaned against a dented video poker machine. Wallace hoped he hadn't made a mistake coming in here. "Do y'all serve food?" he asked the bartender, a greasy-haired man in a NASCAR T-shirt.

The bartender's eyes opened wide. He grabbed a half-filled beer off the counter and gulped it down. "Evening, sir. I'm Ray. We got burgers and chips. Want a drink?"

Wallace sat down on a duct-taped stool. He needed a drink. After trudging through South Carolina and Georgia, he still hadn't found a single investor. The real world was even less interested in his ideas about string theory and exceeding light speed than the Ph.D. physics program. Days like this he almost wished he hadn't dropped out. "Burger and chips. And whatever you have on draft."

Ray slapped a patty on the grill and poured Wallace a tall Stroh's. He turned on the flat screen TV with a remote. "Those boys are about to land."

"I wouldn't want to be the first man out of the lander. Too much pressure. Hard to top Neil Armstrong." "One small step for man. One giant leap for mankind," Ray said. "You know your history," Wallace said. Ray smiled. "It's my specialty." Wallace sipped his beer. He hadn't realized how thirsty he was. "How old's this place?"

Ray shrugged. "Who knows? Ninety years? I was here when the Supreme Court ended segregation. The Vietnam War. The Moon landing." His voice was slurred.

"You were here?"

"Of course not." Ray coughed. "I meant the bar's been here that long."

"This must be a slow night with the landing and all," Wallace said.

"Nope. Normal crowd." Grease spattered as Ray flipped the burger. The rich smell of sautéing onions filled the air. "It's our last night." He poured himself another beer.

"So, I'm celebrating."

Wallace studied the unswept concrete floor, and the cracked plastic chairs and Formica tables. He wondered if the dusty pinball machine worked. "Hard to make money downtown with the interstate, I guess. Everybody goes to Red Lobster or Applebee's."

Ray leaned against the counter. "Our work's done is all. I'll miss it. A good spot to watch the world. Nobody bothers you."

Wallace doubted anyone could see much of the world from a street that probably had less traffic than a suburban cul-de-sac. The countdown clock on TV said thirty minutes to landing.

Ray placed a steaming hamburger before Wallace. He unclipped a bag of barbecue chips from the wall. "Sorry, we're out of plain and sour cream. Not much point in restocking."

Wallace slathered the burger with mustard and Texas Pete hot sauce. He took a bite and remembered why he had left the generic chains near the highway. "This is great."

"You're a long way from home, ain't you?" Ray asked.

"I'm from Florida." Ray took another sip of beer. "Good day's drive to Miami."

"How'd you know I was from Miami?"

"You must have told me, sir." Ray pointed to the TV. "There's going to be a delay."

Wallace glanced at the ticking countdown clock. "Everything looks on schedule." Ray grinned. "Wait a second."

A commentator replaced the picture of the rapidly approaching surface of Mars. "The computers are out of sync, but Mission Control promises they'll fix the problem in ten or fifteen minutes. We—"

Ray picked up the remote and muted the sound. "The landing will be fine."

"How do you know?"

"The same way I know your fund raising trip went well." Had he told Ray about that? God, he was tired. "Nobody's interested in my company."

Ray finished the beer and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. "That venture capitalist in Macon wants to invest. He'll call tonight."

"Are you watching me?"

"We're watching this time in history. Tomorrow we return to our time." The Georgia accent was gone. He poured another Stroh's and pushed it to Wallace. "On the house."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"I'm saying too much, but I don't drink usually. And there's something I have to tell you in a minute." He smiled. "What do you think of the Mars landing?"

Wallace squinted. Was the man crazy? Maybe he was just drunk. "You don't want to know."

"Sure I do."

Wallace rolled his eyes. "It came in billions over budget. We should have a base on Mars by now. We should have friggin' FTL drive. And why is space travel still a national project? We need to work with India, Japan, China, Brazil. Don't get me started."

"Don't worry," Ray said. "Your little startup will fix that faster than light problem, but I got to tell you something. Helium 3 is a dead end. It's inefficient and too expensive to mine."

Wallace sighed. "Then what do you suggest?"

"Water. And fission. There's plenty of water." He scrawled something on a napkin and handed it to Wallace.

Wallace stared at figures and symbols. "That'll really work?"

"Yes, sir. You'll be exploring places you never imagined."

"Where?"

"The planet hasn't been found yet." Ray poured another beer... "And you'll discover something else when you're tinkering with that drive."

Wallace's mobile phone rang. He recognized the number of the Macon investor.

"What?" he asked Ray.

Ray raised his drink in a toast. "Time travel."

SOLOMON'S LITTLE SISTER

Jay O'Connell | 3921 words

Jay O'Connell tells us that "Solomon's Little Sister" began with an attempt by the middle-aged author to compete with his tweenage sons on the Xbox 360, culminating in several completed Halo campaigns and a disturbing quantity of on-line multiplayer. "Could the video game be a metaphor for the post-singularity world? Assuming any humans stay human, Solomonic wisdom will remain a precious commodity... though it is available, as always, at www.jayoconnell.com. "

"Your sister is at the door," House said.

"How does she look?"

"Upset."

Of course. "Let her in."

Jean was in character, wearing the Sixties—the late Sixties; tie-dyed T-shirt, a faded denim miniskirt, beat-up moccasins, the works. Her pale green eyes skewered me through round, wire-rimmed lenses. She flipped a yard of dirty blonde hair back over one shoulder, hands on her hips.

"I left Peter," she said.

Peter had been a good friend of mine before he'd married my sister, back in the Before. We'd become brothers-in-law and somehow stopped being friends. Still, he'd called me, looking for his wife.

"He was two-timing me. Did you know?" She narrowed her eyes.

"Of course not," I lied.

I carried her backpack into the family room. It was an absurdly large thing topped with a paisley sleeping roll. It didn't weigh nearly enough. Null-grav in the aluminum tube frame?

Jean flung herself into the leather couch across from the fireplace. She frowned at my video-wall.

"What the hell are you watching?" The show had frozen when I answered the door; on screen, a cute woman in a nun's habit was superimposed, badly, on a clear blue sky.

I winced. "Old program from the Before . The Flying Nun. One of my clients loves old TV . My Mother the Car. My Favorite Martian. Hogan's Heroes. "

"I sort of remember that one."

"A comedy set in a Nazi concentration camp."

"Ugh." She took a good look around then, the beat-up, period furniture, the static prints on the walls, the light slowly dawning in her eyes. She stared up at a pair of Klee drawings on either side of the fireplace— The Poet and His Wife. "This is the house we grew up in."

I nodded. She'd never visited.

"What's it like living here alone?"

"Wonderful."

She shook her head. That was enough about me.

"Aren't you curious?" she said. "About Peter?"

"I thought you guys were doing Woodstock together." I wondered how many Woodstocks she'd done. "I didn't think people were monogamous at Woodstock?"

"Of course we aren't! It's an acid mud orgy!"

"Then what's the problem?"

"Two timing. He's living parallel so he can be with Monica, and me, at the same time."

I'd guessed something like this. My conversations with Peter had been strangely out of sync over the last few years. Parallelism isn't popular among the working class. The surcharges were prohibitive. Leasing two bodies cost ten times more than leasing one. Leasing three, one hundred. The Zeitgeist enjoyed diversity, to a degree. Thank God.

Monica had been Jean's maid of honor. It had always been complicated with the three of them.

The doorbell rang.

"I don't want to see him. Ever." The tone of voice was familiar. She meant it.

"I'll tell him to go home."

They could sort this out later. Somewhere else.

Peter looked exhausted. Hands in the pockets of his jeans. The tattered leather bomber jacket, a recreation of one he'd worn in college. He managed his trademark half smile.

"She's here, isn't she?" he asked.

"Go home, Peter."

"I need to see her."

I felt Jean behind me. I turned.

She clutched my butcher's knife in one small white-knuckled hand.

I sighed as she shoved past me.

Peter didn't even take his hands out of his pockets.

"Oh, come on," he managed. He looked down at the knife handle protruding from his tie-dyed T-shirt. The blade was buried somewhere in or near his heart. Crimson bloomed, erasing the shirt's cheerful, chaotic pattern.

"Very immature," he murmured. The color drained from his face.

"Fuck you, Peter." Jean said. She twisted the knife, which sent a jet of blood splattering across her face and chest.

He fell to his knees, his eyes rolling back in his head. I lowered him to the ground. I checked his pulse. He was gone. I pulled the knife from his chest, grating against bone. I'd have to get a new one. Or erase these memories.

We went back to the living room. I set the dripping knife on a magazine on the coffee table. Jean was crying. She was an ugly crier. Snot, red eyes, everything.

I sat on a footrest and took her hands in mine. "It's over," I said. I hoped it was.

She nodded, unable to speak.

"I'll make tea." Tea was my answer to this kind of thing. It took a few minutes to make. It was harmless. I wouldn't have to watch her cry, which frankly was painful. Appropriate for the mid-morning. Tea it was.

"Chamomile?"

She nodded.

I left her in the living room, washed the blood off my hands, filled a kettle with water from the tap and set it on the burner. It took a minute or so for the water to boil and the kettle to sing. I usually enjoyed that wasted, nothing minute.

House whispered in my ear this time.

"It's Peter. Again."

House had the good sense not to chime out loud this time. I didn't enjoy driving, or cities, so I'd picked a suburban place close to a spawn point, a small subdivision straight out of the late seventies, split level ranch houses with aluminum siding. I'd had mine built at the end of a cul-de-sac in the rolling hills of what had been central New York, in the Before.

While I was trying to figure out what to say to Peter in private message there was a pounding at the door. I turned off the burner.

"I'll get it," I hurried from the kitchen and opened the door halfway.

Peter stood looking down at his body, frowning.

"I need to talk to her," he said.

"Later. That one didn't get more than a sentence out."

"I have to try," he said. He looked miserable. More miserable than the body at his feet.

I turned to see Jean standing behind me again. This time she had a cleaver. She slipped by me.

I'm not a big fan of graphic violence. I try to avoid it when I can. I took a step back as she swung the cleaver in a gleaming arc at Peter's neck. I closed my eyes.

Unpleasant sounds. Gurgling. Splashing. A falling body.

"Leave me alone!" Jean sobbed.

I opened my eyes. The porch was a mess, Peter's second body slumped over his first.

"You have to say that before you kill him," I said gently. "Remote backups aren't that fast or that granular. You'll have to talk to him. Let it sink in. Give him a minute, let the memory sync. Then you can kill him. Otherwise he's going to keep coming."

Jean shook her head. "The bodies. He can see the bodies."

She had a point. He would see the bodies.

I sighed. "Do you want to talk? I can listen. It's my job."

"I'm not your client!" she sneered. "I'm not a toady. I'm an actress."

"You're an extra!" I snapped. "You're window dressing!"

I took a breath. It was a stupid time to have this argument. We'd each been given a number of choices upon revival. We didn't like the choices the other had made. We'd never liked each other's choices.

"I'm going to go do some work. Let me know if you want to talk. About anything."

I went back to the sofa and resumed The Flying Nun, trying to understand what the hell had possessed a bunch of grown-ups to make such a thing. It wasn't easy. Sometimes, I wished my client were a little more neurotypical.

A Shareholder, Gharlane was the only person I knew that had never been archived; his consciousness was continuous with the Before. The Zeitgeist had decided, as it had evolved during the Nanocalpyse, that people in debt must not be worth much. It had archived them as stable, but inactive, data structures, rather than let them continue to waste system resources.

Thank God, in the words of Richard Feynman, there was Plenty of Room at the Bottom, in which we could be cheaply stored.

Back when we bought computers, when they were like appliances instead of dissolved in our bloodstreams, remember how you never got around to throwing any of your old files away? How each new disk swallowed the older disk whole, with plenty of room to spare?

Gharlane had brought me back. My work for him, as a professional Friend, had resurrected our circle of deadbeats, Jean and Peter included.

I didn't appreciate Jean biting the hand that had resurrected her. But she'd always been like that. Dissatisfied with birthday and Christmas gifts. Angry at the state school Mom and Dad could afford to send us to, back in the day. Furious at every "modeling" gig that turned out to be handing out snack food samples in front of subway stations. The world owed her something, and it never, ever delivered.

The doorbell rang about every fifteen minutes. Sometimes he got in a sentence or two, shouted, but it always ended abruptly. This was costing a fortune. I didn't know how much extras made, but if Jean's constant demands for loans were any indication it wasn't much.

Each of those bodies cost somewhere around ten thousand dollars. Ten hours of Friendship if I ended up footing the bill. Ten hours of The Flying Nun. My Mother the Car. Hogan's Heroes. Kamen Rider. Thunderbirds. Flipper. The Star Wars Christmas Special.

At some point, he'd max out his credit and stop coming. Archived, until someone paid his way out of dead storage.

Around noon, I tried to put an end to it.

I gently pulled the bloody cleaver from her hand as she gazed down at her latest victim. There were somewhere between twenty and thirty bodies scattered over my front lawn. She was streaked with dried blood. She'd washed her face and glasses a few times, but hadn't changed or showered. Her hair hung in long bloody dreads.

"Come on, Carrie. Get yourself cleaned up. I'll kill him for you, this time."

She looked up at me, biting her lip. "You'd do that for me?"

"Sure," I lied.

I waited for Peter to show up while she showered. I didn't know what I was going to say. Gharlane called, and I told him I was having a family crisis. He gave me that look, the fake sympathy look, said the right things. Gharlane emulated most of his humanity, what they used to call Asperger's autism, back in the Before. A few dozen like him had brokered the Compact with the Zeitgeist after the nanocalapyse. Human beings smart enough for the Zeitgeist to consider equals, and wealthy enough for them to negotiate with.

The Zeitgeist was big on intellectual property rights.

Jean and I sat together at the kitchen table. Doesn't matter how nice your living room is, your family room, your dining room, everyone always sits around the kitchen table. Jean had ditched the sixties and was wearing khakis and a T-shirt from her backpack. An absurdly happy bunny leered from the T-shirt with the words "It's all about me," above in neon pink type.

I sipped my tea. Oolong.

"Okay. So Peter was cheating on you with Monica?"

"In spirit. They swapped memory cores." Jean said.

"Oh," I winced. Not good.

"Look, I don't want to set you off, but how is that worse than porn? Or morn, I mean." Morn, morph porn, which had been big, before the Discontinuity. In that last year, social media feeds were littered with explicit ads starring you and whatever celebrity or historical figure your filter thought would amuse you. Friends told me they'd seen themselves bonking Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, Gandhi, Einstein. Nobody ever admitted clicking on the things, but they were making money. Somebody must have bought it.

"This isn't morn. This is real. He is really screwing Monica. Right now."

"You're not monogamous, though, are you? How is this different from your, ah, other performances?"

"It just is."

I nodded. I did understand was the thing.

"We just got our license," she said quietly, looking at her feet. "For a child. Eight months ago."

"Oh," I said.

"We were out of our minds with joy. I thought we were. At first. But something didn't feel right. I drone tailed him to a coffee shop, saw the two Peters together. They made chit chat. Exchanged memory cores. I followed the other one home, someplace that looked like the fifties. He kissed her at the front door. I found the memory cores in his underwear drawer. He remembers her."

"Were you pregnant? Are you pregnant?"

"I don't want to talk about it," she said.

So we didn't. I made us some food, a pair of Hungry-Man TV dinners in the foil tin which take an hour to heat up properly in the gas oven. They're not done until the mashed potatoes look all melted and fused. Afterward, we drank Jack Daniels, and listened to some Vinyl. Prog rock, from the Before. I didn't think she'd be drinking if she was pregnant. Of course, she could have archived the pregnancy. She didn't say a word for a half hour or so.

"I miss the Before."

I shrugged. I felt the same way most of the time, but coming from her it sounded pathetic. "You're romanticizing. You were a college drop out. Your plays were flops. You were waiting tables at the end, bumming money off of Mom and Dad."

The booze was getting me down. I didn't drink, but somehow, it had seemed the thing to do. "We got old enough to know... we were never going to change the world."

"Then the world changed."

"Yeah."

"I miss Mom and Dad."

I didn't bring up the fact they always fought. I just nodded. The emerging Zeitgeist hadn't archived San Francisco; there had been factions, in the beginning, who had disagreed about our absolute worth.

"I miss people, a world with just people. The world where people were on top."

"We were never on top, Sis."

She nodded. We didn't speak for a long time. The vinyl spun and the Lamb Lied Down on Broadway.

"Why?" she asked.

"Why what?"

"Why did he mess us up?"

"Men make mistakes," I said, deftly controlling the urge to mention the times she'd been on the other side of this kind of thing.

Jean's relationships never ended well. Actually, now that I thought about it, nobody's relationships ended well. Even the ones that didn't end seemed scary to me half the time.

"You could try changing teams."

"Become gay?"

"If you're sick of men, yeah."

She made a face.

"Using a mod! I'm not talking about willpower! Geez." "You're a man. Would you do that? What Peter did?"

I shrugged. "I did things. When I was younger, in the Before. Young people are all half crazy." We'd both been middle aged at the discontinuity. Everybody was young, now, in body, but somehow, it wasn't really like being young again. You knew too much.

Jean shoved her tea away, slopping it over the table. I sighed, getting up to get a sponge. "It takes two people to screw up a relationship, you know. It's never just one person. Have you considered—"

I turned, sponge in hand. Jean, her face a mask of fury, swung the cleaver at my face. "—couples therapy—" I closed my eyes. I don't like violence. Especially when it's directed at me.

I blinked, suddenly sober, in the assembler booth at the spawn point. My interface, the discrete row of icons in my peripheral vision which I generally had set to auto-hide, indicated I'd just deleted two minutes of short term memory. I'd never been murdered, after the discontinuity, anyway. Never played war games. Never done immersive theater. I was wearing that disposable orange thing, the one that looks like a prison jumper.

I punched a new set of clothes into the nanomat, changed in the rest room, and headed home. I ambled from street light to street light through the summer night, in no hurry to get back to the drama. A sports car blew past blaring dance club music I didn't recognize. Dance music pretty much all sounded the same to me, over a century of it. I'd always loved walking—hadn't even gotten a driver's license until I was thirty. It made dating difficult, before I'd moved to the city.

I picked my way through the bodies littering the lawn. I'd take care of them in the morning.

"Your sister is asleep in the guest room," House said. "I could call the police. You could use security video to get a restraining order."

"Thanks, but no."

"I could lock her in her room," House said.

"No," I said.

I showered, and made myself a bologna sandwich with mayo and yellow mustard to settle that just nano-assembled roiling in the guts feeling.

House whispered in my ear. "There's a woman to see you," it said.

"Who?"

"She refused to identify herself. Her face is not on file. She is entirely organic, and unarmed."

The woman at the door was familiar. Short brown hair, tall, lean. It was the bomber jacket that really gave him away. Her, I mean.

"Is she here?" Peter's female voice reminded me of middle school. Light, clear. Worried.

I blinked at her. Peter's conversion looked like a default MTF; shoulders slighter, hands smaller, no adam's apple; the clone body extrapolated from his x-chromosome without any cosmetic tweaks. Her nose was too big. She wore no make-up. Her eyebrows grew together.

Still she was cute. Peter had always been the most attractive one of the group. The first who dated in high school. The one juggling girlfriends in college.

"She's asleep," I said.

She looked out at her bodies scattered throughout the yard.

"Give me a hand with this, will you?"

She grunted and grabbed a body by the hands. I took the feet.

We carried them one by one to the disassembler (disguised as a composter in accordance with historical zoning regulations) and fed them in. I slipped in blood twice, ruining my pajamas.

"The changing teams idea isn't going to fly," I said.

"No?"

"She killed me after I suggested it."

"She could be the man then." Peter said. I could tell from his tone of voice even he didn't think that was going to work.

"You were the man, Peter. Now you're the ex."

She started crying. Not a woman thing, but a Peter thing. Peter cried easily. Welled up at romantic movies. Jean had loved that about him.

I patted her back awkwardly.

"We'll talk about it in the morning. Unless she kills you again. In which case I'm putting out a restraining order and you'll be trapped at the spawn point. This has to stop."

I put Peter to bed on the fold-out sofa in my study, a disused room crammed with books I hadn't looked at in years.

I told House to keep Jean in her room until I'd spoken with her. I was asleep before my head hit the pillow.

It was one of those dreams, the ones we all have. The ones we don't talk about.

I stood at the top of a sparsely wooded hill in my pajamas in a strange predawn light. The girl standing in the grass looked a little like Jean, but more like the female version of Peter. Brown, pixie cut hair and crazy big, dark, serious eyes. She wore a short white skirt, with pink leggings covered with animated, anthropomorphized ponies.

I realized we were in Thorndon Park, overlooking the University we'd all attended, and the city beyond. We stood beside the graffiti encrusted brick water tower, looking out over the campus. The swelling dome of the nanocalpyse refracted the sunrise into sickly rainbow gradients as it crept toward us from the east, devouring the horizon. The sky looked like an acid trip. A bad one.

The girl smiled up at me.

"You're not finished," she said.

I knew exactly what she meant, in the dream. Afterward, I was unsure if she was talking about me, personally, the human race, both, or something else entirely.

"We're not done with you."

I shivered. There were two of them now, identical twins, holding hands. The ponies leapt, from leg to leg, girl to girl.

"You're not done with us."

The nanocalpyse washed over the city, the buildings dissolving into cubic grid-work skeletons. The wave crept up the hill toward the campus, disintegrating, compacting, ordering, archiving.

"Is this the past, or the future?" I asked.

The girl on the left laughed. "Silly. It's always now."

Her twin said, "They always ask the wrong questions."

The first girl reached for my hand, while hooking a forefinger at me, and I squatted. She whispered in my ear.

"But we love you anyway."

We had coffee and cinnamon Pop-tarts at the kitchen table the next morning. The coffee was automatic drip, from an aluminum can, made in a genuine, antique Mr. Coffee machine. I'd locked the knives in a liquor cabinet before letting Jean out of her room.

Peter apologized.

Jean didn't.

Peter asked what could he do, to make it right.

Jean was silent for a long time.

"I need you to be a person who didn't fuck Monica."

"I'll back out the memories," Peter said. He thumped his chest. "I never touched her."

"I need you to be a person who didn't want to fuck her."

Silence fell thickly between them.

"How do I do that?" Peter asked.

"You can't," Jean said.

"What about the baby?"

"I don't know," she said.

"You don't have to carry her," Peter said. "I'll take her. I want us to be a family. But if you can't be with me, let me have her. Please."

Suddenly Peter's gender change made more sense.

Jean balled her fists. "She's mine."

"She's half yours," Peter corrected.

Jean's eyes flicked to the empty knife rack. Then they both looked at me.

"I'll do some research," I said. "I'll let you know what your options are."

We finished our Pop-tarts in silence.

I took both of their credit keys and made them assign me power of attorney before I did anything. Custody disputes over archived children were mediated through the Zeitgeist itself, not the old family court system. There seemed to be no clear precedents, or rather, there was no pattern I could discern in the judgments. Some children stayed archived. Sometimes joint custody was awarded, sometimes sole custody, sometimes...

I went for a walk with Peter. Most of my neighbors were part of a lawn-culture group. They spent a lot of time planting, mowing, weeding, mulching, spraying, that sort of thing. We walked in the street, changing sides to avoid the spatter of spinning sprinklers. We waved at people without stopping to say hello. I didn't really know any of them. Just like the Seventies.

"I'm reimbursing you for the bodies," I said.

"You don't have to do that."

"Yes, I do. You're going to need the money if you're serious about a child. You're serious about that, right?"

She nodded.

"Here's the thing. It's going to cost. The Zeitgeist approved your custody rights— with a parallel surcharge."

"Surcharge?"

"Congratulations." I said. "You'll be the proud second single mother of the world's most expensive identical twins. If you want. It's up to you."

I handed him the printed copy of the restraining order, the birth license and parenting plan. Peter would not be allowed at the birth. He could pick up his copy of his daughter at any spawn point any time during her first week of life. If he didn't, all his parental rights were terminated.

He licked his lips looking at the financial statement. "I won't be able to..."

"You can have your daughter. Or the double life. But not both."

She nodded.

"Makes sense," she said.

Jean emerged from the spawn booth hugely pregnant with a strange sad little smile on her face. She was going to stay with me, for awhile. A few weeks. A decade. We hadn't worked out the details.

Gharlane had always been interested in kid stuff. He was excited about the cartoons we'd watch together in a few years. The video games. He had a strange fascination with The Teletubbies.

The walk home took a long time. Jean moved pretty slowly We'll probably end up having to get a car.

THE REDEMPTION OF KIP BANJEREE

Genevieve Williams | 4795 words

Genevieve Williams's fiction has been published in Strange Horizons and the anthology Future Games. She lives in Seattle, Washington, sometime in the century before her fast-paced first story for Asimov's is set. Genevieve is a Clarion West alum and will soon complete her MFA in Popular Fiction through the University of Southern Maine's Stonecoast program.

Kip runs.

She's off crosstown with the Gymnasium dismissal bell, skimming rooftops, sky-bridges, and high-speed trains. She leaps from a ledge of the Diamond Tower, missing her landing on the slidewalk opposite, and grabs the slidewalk railing as she falls past, tucking her legs and sliding beneath it, using the last of her redirected momentum to boost herself to her feet. Before her, in a blank gray wall, stands a translucent glass cylinder that reflects the shimmering Tower behind her. Kip is here by invitation. But invitation to what, she doesn't know.

Could be Bud and Ahmad want to sponsor her. Could be. She's one of the best freerunners in the city, one of those to whom architecture is just so much playground. And they are known to follow the freerunner races. So they'd know that last month she beat Narciso—or at least, that her racing persona did. Bud and Ahmad have ways of finding out true names. Especially since some of her 'ware came from their shop. This is the Garage, lair of wetware makers and biogeneering hackers extraordinaire.

The cylinder slides open. Kip steps inside, waits patiently while it bombards her with x-rays and puffs of air. She puts her palm on a reader as instructed and winces when it pricks her for a gene sample. She widens her eyes at the retinal scanner, readily publishes the list of her add-ons and enhancements for Garage access only, and coughs into a paperlike membrane that immediately sucks away down a tube with a gulp of vacuum. Finally the glass parts in front of her and she steps out of the cylinder and into the vastness of the Garage.

And it is vast. The sims don't show the sheer size of the place. Vast, and empty-feeling, even though the scientists, artists, and gengineers fortunate enough to be among the Garage's elect cluster around holographic workspaces, esoteric musical instruments and artistic renderings of their own devising, and biochemical pools bubbling and oozing in a frenzy of reproduction. The air smells of machine oil and biology. Except for the holograms, the lighting is dim, even once her vision—en hanced to near-feline sensitivity—adapts. Aside from a persistent low-level hum and a gluey, liquid sound she can't place, it's also very quiet.

She'd give anything—almost—to be associated with this place. Cool factor several trillion. Not to mention the funding, less sexy but more urgent: she graduates Gymnasium next month and the thought of still living under her parents' roof and their authority after that fills her with panic. Hesitantly—she was invited here, after all—Kip sends a greeting into the local ambient: >

None of the creative types within her line of sight so much as glance up.

> A yellow arrow blinks in her vision, showing her where to go.

She walks through the forest of columns, taking in as much as she can, though of course they won't let her see anything really important. Just PR.

Bud and Ahmad are leaning against the rim of, and looking into, a waist-high, underlit basin filled with gel. The gel bubbles like cooking rice. Bud is short, sandy-haired, and tattooed, with the kind of slim, yet muscular build that suggests either serious workout time, or major engineering. Probably both, since bodymod is one of Bud's specialties. Ahmad is tall and lean, with long eyelashes that sweep like a model's every time he blinks. The personal aspects of Bud and Ahmad's relationship are entirely unknown; they seem to like it that way. But their work, and that of the wizards of the age they've gathered around them, has yielded some serious buzz—and more importantly, contracts of legendary lucre.

A sponsorship from them would be such a coup.

Neither of them looks up, though they have to know she's there. The light beneath the genetic soup in front of them gives them an unearthly pallor. Bud's face is pale as something that's lived under the Street its entire life. Ahmad looks like he hasn't slept in a week. Experimentally, Kip tries releasing these observations to the general ambient.

She can't. They really do have this place thoroughly perimeterized. Oh well.

"First rule of PR," Ahmad says, his dark eyes still focused on the green-lit basin in front of him. "Control all buzz. It's fine to tell the world I haven't slept in a week, but you shouldn't tell them that I look it."

Kip makes no response to this. What could she say? So she just stands there and lets them make their impression.

"Got a job for you," Bud says. He's still staring into the basin, too. Their aloof manner is so different from their PR—outgoing, friendly, making eye contact—that it weirds her out. "Courier gig. Across town."

Kip is disappointed. They're not sponsoring her. The thought of that easy money, and with it an easy emancipation from the impending doom of Gymnasium graduation and her parents, melts away. Then it ticks what they are offering. Not sponsorship, no... but nearly as cool, as people are saying again these days.

"Here's our bid," Ahmad says, passing her a number in the ambient. "Go ahead and compare it to the going rate. We'll wait." Kip does. Of course pricing for courier services varies widely and much of the data would require more time than is polite to ferret out. But what she does find in the ambient excites her, and even more so when he says, "Forty percent up-front. Key us your account."

"What's the package?" she asks, though it's not like she's going to say no.

A tiny object flies toward her face. She snatches it out of the air.

"That," Ahmad says. They still haven't looked at her, either of them. A stream of chatter thick as a pipe flows between them in the ambient, but of course it's encrypted all to hell, even here within the sanctum of the Garage, and she can't make out a word of it.

She looks down at the object in her hand, pings it experimentally. Some sort of data storage object, obviously. Whatever's on it doesn't respond to her ping. It might as well be a lump of rock.

Makes sense. If they're not trusting whatever's on it to the ambient, it must be locked up tighter than the Garage. She slips it into the pocket no one knows about. Except Bud and Ahmad, now, but they've got every reason not to reveal that bit of data. Aside from that object and a diamond-edge butterfly knife—she calls it her "just in case"—she carries nothing.

"Twenty-five percent bonus if you make the delivery in the next half hour," Bud adds.

Knowing a hint when she hears one, Kip heads for the exit.

The cylinder disgorges her onto one of the semi-enclosed slidewalks that snake amidst the city's middle stories. Before it let her out it extended a robot arm, which stuck her with an inoculating cocktail against ambient viruses and hacks—standard for anyone who visits the Garage.

Good thing, too. Because the instant she steps out into the rain, the ambient mobs her with inquiries, probes, sales pitches, journalists, gadflies, trendwatchers, buzz-surfers, and coolhunters. Irritated—why isn't the stuff they gave her protecting her against this? —she slams her own filters into place.

Blessed silence.

But now she's got to move. Even those few minutes of visibility, even without her name attached, were enough to open the floodgates. No one cared about some nobody entering the Garage, but now that she's coming out: > hums in the ambient, dissolving into the constant general background noise of ten billion online brains. She makes for the nearest maglev station and executes a twisting leap onto the platform roof, landing lightly.

The train arrives with its characteristic hum, shedding speed with a rush of wind. Kip leaps aboard, her Geck-Toes gloves and split-toe shoes clinging to the roof.

Bud and Ahmad didn't say that she had to beat the fare. But fares mean data, and data means attention.

Besides, trainjumping is fun. The wind buffets her short hair as the train accelerates straight through a mile-high canyon, the rain needling against her face and chilling her even through her skinsuit. She blinks to engage the protective lenses over her corneas. Glass-walled superskyscrapers coruscating with light whiz by on either side. Kip grins and the wind chills her teeth. Twenty-seven minutes and seventeen seconds to go. Miles ahead, an open space and a glimpse of white: the ovoid of the CloudSpire atop its curving narrow stem. Her destination: an uptown address nearby. Expensive real estate. Bud and Ahmad must have scored one hell of a contract.

So she'd better not mess it up.

Clang. Behind her, the train's roof vibrating from the impact. Kip looks over her shoulder.

A sleek female figure in shiny black, magnetic boots stuck to the metal roof. Her hair's dark, smooth, pulled back into a tight bun behind her head.

She could be just another courier on a job. Or even a recreational freerunner like Kip.

Somehow, Kip doubts it.

The woman smiles, like she knows what Kip's thinking.

The train slows with a falling whine. Signs reading "Battery/South Ring" flash past, slower and slower. On the platform above curves the rail of the Ring Line that circles the CloudSpire without ever actually touching it.

Kip slips from the roof right as the train doors open, joining the horde as it crowds onto the platform and slipping into one of her false personas. It won't stand up to close scrutiny, but it ought to be good enough to give that woman the slip. Moving rampways spiral up and down from this platform, curling helixes connecting the maglev lines that cross and diverge like chromosomes. The Ring Line runs in two concentric circles, inbound and outbound. The next inbound, that loops out over the bay then back to Magnolia and Lake Union, comes in two minutes.

She joins the crowd headed for one of the upward spirals. Too slow. She glances back. The woman's still on the roof of the train. With her shades it's impossible to tell what she's looking at, but her head turns from side to side.

Kip jumps onto the rampway's handrail, stepping lightly over hands and arms and elbows, around and around the spiral and up onto the upper platform. People stare, but that's all right; they'll forget her in a few minutes. The ambient aids and ensures human memory—unless, of course, you want it not to.

A shadow passes overhead. Kip glances up. Nothing.

The handrail carries her off its end and onto the upper platform. One minute, six seconds to the next train as she rounds one of the support pillars for the platform roof—easier to boost herself onto the train that way—and comes face to face with the woman in shiny black and mirrored shades.

The woman looks down at her and smiles. Her mirrored lenses are tinted bluish to go with her lipstick, retro but stylish, entirely in keeping with her shiny, all black body-suit. The crowd splits and flows around them. No one pays them the least attention.

Kip ducks away into the crowd. Fifty-six seconds to the next train. If the woman's tagged her, losing herself amidst the mob will do no good. But maybe—

"Hey. Heyyou."

She reacts, first mistake, and then compounds her error by looking around for its source. Said source is skinny, sunglassed, about her own age, and looks way too much like Narciso, who she trounced in the races last month but who walked off with the girl anyway, and now won't race against her anymore.

"Yougottadatapickup? BudandAhmadright? Thatsomeseriousshitright? You wannashareoutpieceathat?"

Crap. A fastalker. "Fuck off," she says, walking away. Fastalkers distract you with words and try to hack your brain. She's not too worried about the second part—Bud and Ahmad inoculated her but good —but he noticed her. And he's pinned her as courier for the Garage. What the hell? Are her filters not working?

"Awdontbelikethat," he protests, just as though they'd been flirting, which they weren't. "Justwannagetalegup, youunderstandthatdontyou? Justlikeyouright? Firstrun?" Fastalkers always sound like they're asking questions. It's one of their tricks to keep you listening instead of punching them in the face. Forty seconds. She walks faster, hazarding a quick glance back, past him.

The woman in the shiny black bodysuit emerges from the crowd.

"Awcomeon. Justforaminute? Heyyourecuteyouknow, howzaboutfiveminutes? Ten? Whatsyourname?"

At least he doesn't know that. "I said. Fuck. Off." Thirty-two seconds. "Okayfinebitch. Fuckinbitch, Imjusttryinabenicetoyou." He keeps cursing at her as she plunges back into the crowd to get away from him.

Momentarily out of his line of sight, Kip prepares a one-time mask. It's a blank, no filters, no persona, but with her appearance: slim, brown-skinned, black-haired. She line-of-sights into the crowd on the platform, maps a spot in the ambient, and triggers the mask. At the same time, she slams her own heaviest, most opaque filter into place.

It's like going blind.

A duplicate of herself appears some fifty feet away, entirely visible but untagged, which she hopes is enough since she has no idea how much the fastalker was able to perceive. Those nearby instinctively avoid the doppel, even though it's only present in the ambient. The fastalker heads for it. It won't fool him, or the woman, for long.

But maybe long enough. Twenty-five seconds.

She turns and heads in the opposite direction. People bump into her as they jostle for position in anticipation of the train. She slips between two highly coiffed men loaded down with packages and a tall androgyne staring upward and reciting poetry and makes for a spot between the clusters of people who are gathering where the train doors will open. With her shields up, even basic directional markers don't appear in her view, nor does she catch the ambient announcement of the train's arrival. Only the rising whine and whoosh of displaced air alerts her. Even as the train approaches, the woman in shiny black emerges from the crowd, ignoring the doppel entirely.

So much for that idea.

The train whips into the station with a whine of deceleration. Positioned right where two cars join when it stops, Kip climbs up the outside of one, fingers and toes clinging to the metal surface, and flattens herself against the top of the car. The train starts to move. Relief washes over her.

A thin black cable whips over the edge of the roof. A magnet at its end latches onto the metal surface with a clang. Moments later the woman follows it, climbing the cable hand over hand. The slenderness of the cable, the woman's shiny bodysuit and shades, and particularly the almost delicate way her fingers wrap around the cable make Kip think of a spider.

Kip drops her filters to their previous levels; hiding in the ambient just blinds her. She blinks, once, deliberately capturing a still image, and starts a pattern search. The Ring Line train accelerates westward. The last downtown superskyscrapers flash by in a haze of multicolored lights. At this speed the rain is needles through Kip's skinsuit. It doesn't seem to trouble her pursuer at all. The train hits a curve as it arcs out across Elliott Bay. Kip presses her fingers and toes more firmly to the roof to keep from being thrown off. The woman crouches, retracting her cable.

Kip can't help grinning. This is real. This is really real. She's a courier carrying something for Bud and Ahmad and someone is trying to get it from her. Holy shit.

The woman crawls toward her. Kip snaps another image.

The train hits another curve. The cable whips out again, its magnet latches on, the woman swings around on one hip with the train's movement, and ends up ten feet closer to Kip.

Freerunner. Traceur. This woman's a former city racer. Has to be, with moves like that. But Kip's pattern search is still coming up empty. Which is impossible—the woman must resemble someone.

The train slows. Alki Point. Kip tenses. Twenty-two minutes, sixteen seconds to make the delivery and earn that bonus. As soon as the train has dumped enough speed, she springs like the runner at the start of a race and flees. Rapid footsteps behind her; with those boots, the woman can't run as quietly as Kip, though the passengers trading places on the platform below don't notice either of them. Nor would they remember for more than a few moments if they did. Only the sound of those footsteps reminds Kip what she's running from.

The train starts to move. Kip drops to all fours, spinning on her knees to get the woman in sight, and grabs hold as the train accelerates. She blinks, captures another picture as the woman anchors both boots to the train's metallic roof and stands up straight.

> Kip blinks again, not an image capture this time, though the handle carries with it the alarming vision of the jumping spider that is her pursuer's namesake. She knows that name. With it comes a flood of additional data, some from her own memory store, some from the general ambient. Phidippus Audax is a legend; what's more, she's the first traceur Kip ever saw, just a glimpse as she leaped from rooftop to train, Kip happening to look up as she stood on the platform with her parents, still young enough to be holding her mother's hand.

And a few years ago, just as Kip was getting serious, she flamed out spectacularly and disappeared.

> The voice, coming to her through the ambient, seems to speak inside her head. >

Kip shoots Phidippus Audax an indignant look. She's nearly sixteen, for gods' sakes. The woman laughs, out loud, though the wind generated by the train's speed rips the sound away almost instantly.

>

>

Now Kip laughs. She's played thrillchase games that had better dialogue than this. >

> Phidippus Audax raises her arm, leveling the top of her wrist at Kip. The movement is so fluid that Kip barely ducks in time as the smart cable whips over her head. Finding nothing to latch onto, it retracts just as fast. > The cable whips out again. This time Kip doesn't duck quite fast enough. Something stings across her cheek.

She flinches away, deliberately letting go on her right hand side just as the train hits another curve. It's still raining and the wet metal makes this easier—too easy. Kip rolls onto her back. Her fingers and toes tear loose from the roof. Then she tumbles over the side.

The cable whips around her left arm and then her waist and she's dangling, looking down at the water rushing by below. Stanchions whip by at a hundred and sixty kilometers per hour. Ahead looms the lit-up bulk of Seattle Center, the station's pale arch and blue lights seeming to beckon even as the train begins to slow down.

Kip twists her head around to look up at the train's underside hovering around the magnetic rail like it's about to hug it. The cable disappears over the molded curve of the train's topside. She can't see Phidippus Audax, just the cityscape flashing by above the train.

> The cable retracts. Kip bumps into the side of the train and braces herself against it. No one looking out the windows seems to notice. >

Kip does not dignify this with a reply. She just reaches down the outside of her right leg with her free hand, flips out the diamond-edged butterfly, and slices at the cable.

Nothing happens. She saws harder. The cable hauls her upward. Phidippus Audax laughs. Kip looks up at her, the knife blade—diamond blade, best cutting edge she could get—still working at the damned cable.

The cable parts and Kip drops. She gets her legs under her just barely in time for a hard landing on the Seattle Center station platform, rolls to shed some of the force of impact. The train whines to a stop. Phidippus Audax's boots hit the platform. "Think so?" she says, striding toward Kip. Her spoken voice is a surprise: deeper and harder than her presence in the ambient.

Kip turns and runs, scales a concrete decorative wall that encircles part of the platform, flips Phidippus Audax the bird, and drops down the other side. The architecture here is blocky, with lots of geometric concrete chunks and carvings. Perfect terrain for a freerunner's wall-runs, climb-ups, vaults, and leaps. Kip charts a route to her destination—no trains necessary, not this close—and turns on the burn. Sev enteen minutes left.

As she does, she scans the ambient, though not with the expectation of finding anything. She even risks a glance or two back over her shoulder. There's no sign of Phidippus Audax.

Eight minutes and forty seconds later—eight and twenty to go to get that bonus— she rides a glass-bubble up the side of one of the superskyscrapers that ring the CloudSpire, clustering near the slender stem of its base, then curving away like the leaves of a flowering plant to give its ovoid upper structure plenty of room. Cascades and fountains of light play across the buildings, logos and abstract patterns and giant Mona Lisa smiles. Bud and Ahmad's client must have serious resources to afford this real estate. The only people who've gone all-virtual are the ones who can't afford the concrete.

She rides the bubble straight up into a three-sided courtyard; its fourth side is a mere three-foot rail guarding against a sixty-five-story drop. The other three sides are sheets of black glass across which coruscate shimmering meteoric falls of light, with a door nearly indistinguishable from the glass around it in the wall opposite the drop. The platform is empty. She heads for the door.

The cable whips around the rail with a loud snap. Phidippus Audax follows it, one foot bracing on the courtyard's edge as the cable retracts, then vaults the railing using her free hand. Five minutes, thirty-five seconds. But it doesn't matter. Laughter rings through the ambient. >

"Hell if I will." Silence reigns in the air between them, except for the rain; there's no need to speak in the ambient.

>

"After you saved my life?"

>

Kip feels as cold as if the rain has turned to ice. Her own skills in the ambient all have to do with hiding and evasion. But Phidippus Audax doesn't seem to have any trouble remembering her... or finding her.

Trembling, she prepares another one-time mask. She can't think what else to do. She chooses a spot with an ambient geography just a little in front of where she's actually standing, and triggers it. The mask slams into place.

Kip leaps away, hidden in the ambient behind the mask, her physical presence disguised behind the hologram the woman now perceives instead of Kip herself.

The cable snakes around her wrist, yanking her off balance. She spins and skitters, falls to the deck. The woman reels her in. Kip's body slides across the platform's smooth surface. Phidippus Audax pulls her to her feet, reaches into the pocket no one knows about and winkles out the chip.

Kip draws her knife. The hand holding the chip slices down, hard. Kip's hand goes numb. The knife skitters across the platform.

> She holds the chip up to her eyes, easily keeping a one-handed grip on her captive. chip? >> Kip shrugs. >

> Phidippus Audax lowers her face to Kip's and kisses her. Kip breaks away, but not before Phidippus Audax's tongue thoroughly invades her mouth.

> Three minutes, twenty-three seconds, not that it matters anymore. > She releases Kip and is gone over the railing, leaving Kip alone in the rain.

For an eternal moment—>—she just stands there. Her arms feel like lead weights. The rain is cold on her face, colder than it's been all night.

They'll never call on her again. One shot, one simple, straightforward, crosstown shot, and she planted it. Right into solid concrete.

She can't imagine going home. She wants to run, off the grid maybe, away from the news of her failure that'll be all over the ambient soon. Doesn't matter how many races she wins from now on, she'll be remembered as the one who took Bud and Ahmad's hire and screwed it up.

Something tickles her in the ambient. She turns around.

The door's open. >

Kip walks in, numb, through a second set of doors, and into a bright antechamber lit up with the logo of one of the city's better-known corporations. Despite this, the room is deserted, save for a small man standing next to a medical robot.

"Ah, there you are." The man has a soft, pleasant voice, like a nursery facilitator in the Gymnasium. He's shorter than Kip and even paler than Bud. "Step this way, please, we don't have much time if you want to earn that bonus."

Kip stops. "I lost the package. I'm not earning anything."

"Oh no, oh no." The man laughs gently. Kip's skin crawls. "It's a purloined letter, dear. Come here, please." He waves her toward the robot, which is turning its head back and forth, its antennae flicking this way and that.

"How'd you know I'd make it? That woman might've let me drown."

> The voice isn't the man's. It's someone else's, somewhere else.

> The dummy. Goddamn it. The robot's needle pricks her briefly, draws out some blood. Its face lights up. > Its ambient presence sounds cheerful. Whoever decided to give robots humanlike expressiveness should be shot.

And the rest of the agreed amount, bonus included, hits Kip's account. She almost doesn't notice. "What did those two fuckers put in me?" >

The man looks surprised. "Just a key. That's all."

"A key." Knowledge floods her at this response, but she can't make sense of it. DNA sequences and genomes and genetic codes and—>

"Nothing you need to worry about." The man smiles in a way that is probably meant to be reassuring. "Your friends had some important data to send. They used your own genome to hide it from some other friends who would very much like to get their hands on it. Then they made you the key."

She looks down at her arm, where the blood draw came out. "Oh." She could've just handed the dummy over, and not done all that work of evasion...

>

"Well goddamn it." She wants to punch this kindly little doctor or whatever he is in the face. The robot would probably shoot her full of anesthesia if she tried it, though. Then she thinks of something else.

"The woman. Phidippus Audax. She kissed me. That means she got my genetics."

The doctor shrugs. "Doesn't matter. Your genome? That's on the ambient along with everyone else's. She stole a key, but she can't access what it unlocks. No one can, but the intended recipient. Don't worry," he says again. "You made the delivery. Your job is done." Behind her, there's a whisper of moving air. "You can go now."

Kip, who knows a dismissal when she hears one, starts to walk away.

"Unless," he continues, "you find that you like this sort of work."

Kip stops. Turns back. Looks at the man again. "What?"

"You're talented. We recognize that. There might be opportunities for something... more consistent."

Kip stares. "But I failed."

"I keep telling you. You didn't."

She knows what he's saying. Bud and Ahmad play everybody. It's what they do. She didn't fail, not really, even though it feels like she did. The public story of her run, of how she almost made it but was caught at the last second, already flickers across the ambient. But it's just a story. The Garage's client has some code, or data, or something that no one else but Kip knows they have. And who'd listen to her, since from the ambient's perspective, she's lost?

Fucking PR.

And she knows what he's offering. She can run. But they want to know if she can be a courier, and that's something else entirely. One where her public legacy is of failure, and she disappears.

They want her to be like Phidippus Audax.

It beats the alternative.

"Where do I sign?"

THROUGH PORTAL

Dominica Phetteplace | 2948 words

Dominica Phetteplace tells us, "In addition to writing I also dance. My favorite 'genres' are ballet and contemporary. Dance is the interaction of space, time, and the body. This story is about the disruption of all three."

I

It all began with a picnic. A flat, grassy plain on the muggy surface of Omega-Alpha-III. Volcano to the north, algae-green forest on all sides. Sparkling wine in plastic cups for Cail and Akhtar, pear juice for Emmy. An afternoon on land to relieve the boredom of geosynchrous orbit.

Cail rested his eyes as Akhtar examined the exotic grass, in its prebudding stage. An eerie silence crept up on them.

They looked at each other, then looked around the picnic site, and back at each other.

"Emmy," they both said at once. Emmy, who was gone. After a scan of the horizon, Cail saw an Emmy-shaped silhouette walking toward the volcanic caves. He sprinted after her, calling for her. She did not stop. She seemed very determined to explore. She had always been that way.

The cave was illuminated by an Ancient portal, glowing purple.

Emmy walked in, without looking back.

Cail did not dare follow. The portal was the advanced machinery of a long-dead civilization. Emmy might already be dead.

Akhtar called for backup. Dr. Mwaru Monroe arrived with a two-person team. He set up his instruments a safe distance from the portal, twenty feet back, almost at the cave entrance.

After an hour of analysis, he declared, "It's a time portal."

"How far back is she?" asked Akhtar.

"Five to ten thousand years," said Dr. Monroe.

"Was the planet even habitable then?"

"According to my calculations, yes."

"Was it inhabited?"

"There's no evidence that it was."

Akhtar gasped. "She's only eight years old. She won't be able to survive on her own for very long."

"I know. I'm sorry."

II.

Before we were we,

I was I.

On one side of the portal I was a solitary girl. I didn't fall in. It wasn't an accident.

I walked through because Portal asked me to.

One the other side, I became many. Once I entered, Portal closed. There was no going back.

For a brief moment it was terrifying. But I was only alone for one heartbeat. I was right behind me. And behind me. One is I and two is I, but three makes we.

III.

Cail had a minor lobotomy to take the edge off his grief. Akhtar opted for a modified ECT. There is no ridding yourself of sadness, but technology can make your tragedies smaller and more manageable. Akhtar dreamt about Emmy, alone in the wilderness. The dreams were sometimes nightmares.

Cail and Akhtar asked Dr. Monroe if they could throw some supplies through the portal. A water purifier, a nutrient bar. Dr. Monroe said no. Every disturbance of the portal's surface made it unstable. It could bubble up and consume the whole planet.

"Ridiculous. Has such a thing ever happened before?" asked Cail.

"Theoretically, it is possible," said Dr. Monroe.

IIII.

And then another came through, exactly the same as the two of us.

We already knew about heartbeats, how to count and how to keep time.

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34...

In our old life we had a name for this sequence, but it was a name no longer needed and thus discarded. Then we made up our own name. We called it the I-I sequence, since one and I were the same. One beat, the first of us.

One beat, the next.

Two beats, another. Three, again.

Five, again.

We never forgot how to count.

We arrived so close together at first. Then farther apart, beat by beat. And though the gaps between us were growing larger, we were still filling up the cavern.

IIIII.

Visiting scholar Dr. Coyo Tran had published several papers on chrononautics. He met with Cail and Akhtar immediately upon his arrival at SpB-Baikal.

"It's not likely she's still alive," said Cail. "She fell through the portal seven months ago."

"Yes, but if I can calibrate my instruments properly, I think I can retrieve her moments after she disappeared." Cail wanted to look over the specs. Akhtar wanted to start right away. "No," Cail said to her privately. "This has to be done right. There are so many ways to get mangled crossing the portal."

Akhtar watched Cail scroll through the plans. He furrowed his brows as he read, making a show of his skepticism. Akhtar didn't believe Cail truly understood what he was looking at. Mechanics aboard space bases have to do a little bit of everything, which makes them think they can do anything.

To Akhtar, the choice between giving up on Emmy and attempting the improbable was really no choice at all. She didn't understand how it could be otherwise for Cail.

Dr. Tran's device looked like a giant vacuum cleaner and sounded a bit like one, too. Everyone present had to wear hazmat suits. They looked like a bunch of astronauts. Akhtar wondered if the portal decided to suck up the whole planet, would it take them too, or would it leave them behind? And which would be worse?

Dr. Tran had assured her the odds of such an implosion were "vanishingly" small. He was trying to be funny.

The device fired up. The room was briefly heated with a flash of bright light. Once Akhtar adjusted her visor settings, she could see a girl being sucked out of the portal. She was struggling, trying to get back in. She appeared to be in pain. The portal turned lavender, than pink. Once the girl was through, the portal flashed green. She tried to run back through, but it wouldn't accept her. Green did not mean go, not to the Ancients.

She screamed. The wail was unfamiliar to Akhtar. She had never heard this voice. That did not mean this was not Emmy. It clearly was, only much older. Girl might not be the right word. Possibly a woman. It was hard to tell.

IIIIII.

Because the cave was crowded, we ventured out into the forest. There were trees and a stream and fruit.

Some of this fruit was poison, we had to learn the hard way. The hard way was the only way. Later, we made a burial ritual.

Later, when we grew out of our clothes, we made our own. We fashioned dresses from the skin and bones of the wolves and dragons we killed.

Our bodies changed until we reminded ourselves of Mama.

Mama. Mama. Mama.

One of our old words that we kept. We didn't keep very many. We didn't need very many.

As the heartbeat gaps between us grew, as the I-I sequence marched on, we arrived just the same as we always did. Red overalls, clean skin untouched by the grime of survival. We are always confused when we arrived, always asking about Mama.

IIIIIII.

Dr. Mwaru used a genetic test to confirm that the recovered girl was Emmy. Tissue tests were supposed to determine her biological age, but the results were mixed.

Wilderness survival ages a body both rapidly and unevenly, not to mention the unknown side effects of passing through a time portal twice. No one had ever done it before. Dr. Tran's work had been purely theoretical until today.

"It worked," said Dr. Tran.

"Then why is she eighteen and not eight?" asked Akhtar.

"Experimental error," said Cail. Obviously, he wanted to say, but didn't. Taxonomists like Akhtar sometimes forget that science is more than just making observations. Science occasionally involves experiments, he wanted to say, and those experiments occasionally go awry.

"There is no way to get her back then," said Cail. "Our Emmy, eight years old, is gone forever."

Dr. Tran paused. It was as if he sensed he should apologize somehow, but he wasn't sure what for. And Cail felt something parallel. As if he should be thanking Dr. Tran for all this, though he couldn't find anything to be grateful for.

They should have waited until the science was more developed. It might have taken a hundred years or more, but they had nothing if not time. If they had waited, they could have had her back, intact.

Now they had this Emmy. Unkempt, unhappy, feral looking. Wearing a feathered pelt that looked like it came from a dinosaur. Asleep, because only sedation would stop her from screaming.

This Emmy had completely lost her ability to speak. Cail and Akhtar wanted to fit her with a translator chip, but there were sanity, age, and consent guidelines, and it was not likely that this Emmy would meet any of them. It wasn't even clear that a chip would work in her case. She seemed to speak in patterns, but those patterns might be gibberish. If she was using language, it must have been one she made up herself.

IIIIIIII.

I was I again. I understood this place. I used to live here.

Mama.

Papa.

They looked the same.

I understood them.

They did not understand me.

I was out of practice with words. In the other place, we were all so similar, we barely needed language at all. And when we did, we clicked our tongues, tapped our fingers, rolled our eyes back, popped our wrists. Everything quiet, or almost. We always managed to get our point across. Not here.

Here we had no voice. Ears and no voice. It's enough to make you scream.

It's enough to make you stab somebody.

IIIIIIIII.

SpB Baikal was a small, research oriented base. There weren't any extra personnel on hand to give speech therapy or administer mental health care. They put in a request for extra staff, but in the meantime, Cail and Akhtar had to care for Emmy mostly by themselves.

Emmy's modes of screaming contained many variations. The unifying theme was anger.

"It's almost as if she didn't want to be rescued," said Cail.

"Children prefer the familiar, even if it is worse," said Akhtar. "She just needs time to adjust."

How much time?, he wanted to ask. And what if she never adjusts? But there was no point in asking. Akhtar didn't know the answers to the questions any more than he did.

"Something happened to her, on the other side of the portal," said Akhtar. "Something changed her."

"It could have been Dr. Tran's botched vacuum job that damaged her."

Akhtar didn't want Dr. Tran to be the villain in all of this. Because if he was, then so was she. He had proposed a plan, she had insisted they follow through, and now that it had gone wrong, Cail felt like his skepticism somehow made him heroic.

For Akhtar, the villain was the portal. Passing through, living on the other side or passing back. One of those three things, possibly all of them, had permanently altered Emmy.

The legal issues of consent and guardianship still needed to be worked out. Once they were, they could fly out and have Emmy treated by specialists. Brain surgery of some kind seemed in order. Until then, they searched for ways to calm her without sedating her completely.

She liked to look out the windows, into the blackness of space. That could keep her quiet for as long as twenty minutes. In the Simulacrum Hall, the forest tableau could engage her for up to an hour.

After five days, she stopped screaming completely. She was compliant, cooperative, yet still stubbornly silent.

Cail was relieved. Akhtar was unnerved. She could see the way Emmy's eyes darted around. Taking everything in. Emmy was plotting her escape. It was clear to Akhtar, but there was no point in warning Cail. He would just dismiss her.

How could a mentally impaired cavewoman escape from a space base?, he would want to know.

I don't think she's human anymore, Akhtar would reply.

And Cail would dismiss that notion, too, if she ever were to raise it. There was no intelligence in the Universe that was not human, at least none that was able and willing to make contact. Only the million-year-old ruins of the Ancients hinted at an alternative sentience, and with the ways they learned to manipulate time, it was possible that the Ancients were neither alien nor ancient. They could have been humans, too, from far in the future.

Maybe Emmy was one of them now, thought Akhtar.

Don't be ridiculous, Cail would say. He said that a lot.

On the third day of quiet Emmy, they decided to take dinner in the mess hall.

"How do we know that OaIII was uninhabited five thousand years ago? Maybe Emmy found a civilization to live with. Maybe she wants to go back to them," said Akhtar. Emmy was sitting quietly, food untouched as her eyes moved around the room rapidly.

"Unlikely," said Cail. Unlikely was the word Cail used when he really wanted to say ridiculous.

"And what makes that unlikely? Did you go over the geographic reports yourself?" asked Akhtar.

Cail didn't respond. He hadn't. In retrospect, he should have. But how to say this without sounding like an idiot?

Dr. Mwaru walked by, tray in hand. His greeting was cheerful, he was oblivious to aany marital tension. Emmy stood up as Dr. Mwaru passed, not to greet him, but to stab him in the eye with her chopstick.

IIIIIIIIII.

I had to make them understand.

I was I.

They were they.

We were not we.

I had to make them cast me out.

"Portal," I said to Mama after the stabbing. It's the only word of mine that she can understand.

IIIIIIIIIII.

Emmy would need to be confined in the jail for the rest of her time at SpB Baikal. She would be leaving soon. Captain Alastair had assigned a robotic transport. Cail was in charge of verifying her flight plan and conducting the pre-flight inspection.

The mourning process began again for Cail and Akhtar. The place she was going, it wasn't quite a prison, but it wasn't your standard rehabilitative and reparative center. It was a little of both, halfway between each. It would be far away, they would see her only once a season or less. Akhtar tried to convince herself this was the right thing, but she couldn't.

Emmy didn't belong to this world any more. She never would.

Akhtar had one last choice to make for her daughter. She wanted that choice to be an act of love.

She stole a few minutes of port time, just enough to get them down to the surface of OaIII, down next to the inactive volcano, into the cave, quiet, dark, and dry. Back to the portal. Back through the portal.

Back to the wild. Back fending for herself, thousands of years out of their reach. She might die of starvation or a toothache. Back to the cruelty of nature.

Akhtar was going to have a hard time explaining this to her husband.

"It was an act of love," she said to herself. She was practicing. She spoke directly to the portal's surface, which was still like a deep lake. It beckoned her.

Akhtar stuck her hand and just her hand through the portal. She wanted to touch Emmy one last time. She wanted to feel the world Emmy was now a part of.

The portal felt cold and gelatinous. Worse than that, it felt alive. It buzzed, it spoke to her in its own language, and Akhtar somehow understood.

Back away.

The surface of the portal began to ripple in time with Akhtar's heart. She felt a stiffness in her body, an absence of control. Her body took two steps back for her. She wasn't sure who was in charge anymore. The experience taught her something valuable. The portals, dozens of them scattered across planetary surface and floating through space unmoored, were always thought to be devices crafted by a long absent intelligence. Akhtar now knew the truth. The portals were intelligence. They were not devices, they served no one, they were beings in and of themselves. Their civilization continued. Emmy was a part of it, and now so was Akhtar.

IIIIIIIIIIII.

It was an act of love.

After I passed through Portal, but before I re-entered the we, I turned around to say my prayers.

And Portal listened.

And spat out a new I.

I pulled this new Emmy close.

I taught her how to pray. That's when the hand emerged.

IIIIIIIIIIIII.

The portal flashed colors and young Emmy walked back through. She looked just like Akhtar's Emmy. Eight years old, same braid, same overalls.

"Emmy? Is that you?"

"Mama?"

The little girl looked confused. She seemed the same. And for right now, that was enough. They would sort it out later, back at the base.

IIIIIIIIIIIIII.

It was an act of love.

This jungle is going to eat us. It will bury us. It will erase all trace of us.

The ants will devour our bones, the algae will cover our unburied corpses. There will be nothing left of us and no I will ever know we were here.

It is all part of Portal's plan.

It will take an eternity of prayer to make peace with this fact.

The only thing that keeps us alive are our numbers. That we can work together. That we can pass down knowledge. That we can know the poison from the fruit. That we can know which types of ants will keep you full the longest.

There will never be a last of us. Only longer and longer gaps. The end of we. The beginning of I. An I will not live very long here, not without us. We will end. I will go on.

It is a difficult and endless act of generosity, almost too much for us to understand.

Portal gives and will keep on giving.

Portal never takes, but with that one exception. And even then, what was taken was returned. Moments after the return, a hand emerged.

It was a vision, a hand to take, a hand to turn Portal purple, we knew we had to respond with an act of love. A sacrifice to show Portal our devotion, our faith in Her plan. We gave her the most precious thing among us.

We gave her a new one of us. And that is how Portal will know we love Her so.

We love Her.

Because it is through Portal that we know life, all of us. It is through Portal that I became we. And through Portal that we will become I.

What a Time Traveler Needs Most

Jane Yolen | 140 words

Mike Resnick and Ken Liu

What a time traveler needs most
when going back to childhood:
a solid plan that can be forgot,
an adventurous spirit that can be curbed,
lust for the road that can turn off to rest,
desire for the next hill that can stop for a drink.
And for the lost times, the loose times, the left times,
the botherations, hesitations, frustrations, privations,
and all the other aberrations
that lead to growing up again:
one good, old-fashioned compass rose.

GOLFING ON THE MOON

P M F Johnson | 145 words

After a hard day in endless night,
it's good to get out on the course,
though you're sure to spend your whole time
fighting hazards. There's no hope of
escaping the sand, and though you
would think the ball-thief pixies
that lurk under the trees back home
would have no place up here, sadly
they hide just fine behind rocks,
despite the lack of oxygen.

Everywhere the horizon waits to claim
the careless shot, and though you may
think this heaven (with no wind,
you can never slice the ball)
any successful shot still must curve
back down out of the sky. It's easy
to launch an orbit shot. Still, your
greatest puzzle is which hole in the Swiss
landscape must be the right one.

Remember, friend, you're not the first,
all the greats that came before are up there
in the ground in the sky above you,
so before you play, bow your head
in reverence (though for reasons
of frailty, you shall remain exempt
from removing your headgear).

Empty Cities

Suzanne Palmer | 210 words

I have peered through the fractured windows of Prypiat,
walked corridors and roads graveled by one shattered moment,
my virtual feet unfeeling and distant, my eye a goggled, gleaming lens.
One tiny decay, one slip, one instant, and a city is fled bare,
left for weeds to gather on rooftops, slink through empty bedrooms,
slowly thieve away structure, atom and shingle and chair,
the maples and the elk ticking over with hubris.

I have flown, arms wide as imagination, over Hashima,
stood on its sloping porches and leaned fearless on its tenuous rails,
never to be trapped nor dead beneath it, one blink to carry me away.
One chemistry supplants another, and the city is bled dry of men,
left for time to scour above, rock and pick abandoned below,
as coal-dark remnants, skeletal and grim, loom upright,
stalwart in a captive stillness they cannot evade.

I have sat beside you, listened to the pull and snag of your breath
as the morphine drowned you, drip by drip, like winter rain,
and you lay curled in your favorite chair that you would never leave.
One bad cell, divided, multiplied, hiding in the body's underground,
feint and riot and angry rabble, they burn the establishment down,
your hand in mine, held together like we were children again,
and it was real, this city of you, as the last lights winked out.

AD ASTRA PER SACCHARUM

Robert Borski | 158 words

For five cents you could ride
the mechanical red rocket

round in circles just outside
the supermarket. Or sans conveyance,

you could expeditiously travel
the galaxy from anywhere

at all provided the neighborhood
Mom-and-Pop store carried

the appropriate fuel. You needn't
even bother putting on a space

suit in those days, a candy wrapper
was more than enough to open up

the universe before you, starting
with a Moon Pie (orbitally dark,

of course, until that first gibbous bite),
then proceeding to a Mars Bar

before leaving the solar system
altogether for the wide open caramel

and chocolate parsecs of a Milky Way.
And if as you traveled further out,

Starbursts began to gum up your works,
your mother's insistence that you always

brush your pearly whites after each glucose-
abetted jaunt usually helped damp down

the worst damage. Alas, over time, other
effects were less easily countenanced.

Now, many years later, the rocket ride
is a collectible and a needle probe

of insulin chains me to the Earth beneath
sweet stars. Now it's my boyhood

that recedes galactically beyond the light
years of nickels and candy red rockets.

Everything Decays

Geoffrey A. Landis | 73 words

Here's what happens
after we die,
after everybody we know dies,
after the sun cools,
after all the stars cool:
Everything decays to iron.
Then, slowly, it all falls into black holes
until there is nothing else left,
just black holes
and the cooling microwave background.
After ten to the trillionth years
all the black holes decay to thermal photons,
all the photons stretch out
and stretch out

and stretch out
to perfect nothingness,
crystalline vacuum,
and then,
the most improbable thing ever:
even the vacuum
decays.

In time beyond our imagination
symmetry breaks
into another
bang.

EDITORIAL

A DAY AT THE FAIR

Sheila Williams | 728 words

Photo by Jackie Sherbow

Off and on, for many years, we ran a subscription table in the Dealers' Room at the annual World Science Fiction convention. Authors would help out by signing books while pitching subscriptions. Frequent con participants knew this was the place to go for the year's most heavily discounted subscription. The subscription offers worked well for us, too, because the sale was made straight to the consumer—no middleman to share profits with and no expensive direct mail campaign. I always found working the table exhilarating. It was a great opportunity to meet long-time readers as well as solicit new subscribers.

Many of the authors, like George R.R. Martin, Connie Willis, and Joe Haldeman, made hilarious sales pitches. Others, like Nancy Kress, Cory Doctorow, and Allen M. Steele, took more decorous approaches. All of these methods contributed to sales and fun adventures.

One such occasion occurred during Philadelphia's Millennium Philcon in 2000. Connie Willis signed books and magazines while my seven-year-old hollered out "get your half-price prescriptions." Our commotion soon caught the attention of a brand new conventiongoer who happened to be looking for an autograph from one of her favorite authors. That's how I first met the singer/songwriter and SF reader Janis Ian.

An awkward incident occurred while working the table with Cory Doctorow. We were approached by a man who I erroneously assumed was an Asimov's or Analog reader. I was about to make the usual sales pitch when some clue seemed to imply a certain level of disinterest. After a brief conversation with Cory, the man continued on his way through the Dealers' Room. Cory then explained that our guest was a founder of the shared software movement. His enthusiasm for free and collaborative teamwork made it seem unlikely he would have welcomed my come-on for a paid subscription to Asimov's.

Despite this close call, my passion for the table never waned. Spending time there was a great way to hear about the items subscribers particularly liked as well as their gentle suggestions for improvements to the magazine. Alas, though, our official days in the Dealers' Room came to an end. No more adventures at the table and a harder time Sheila Williams, Robert Reed, and Emily Hockaday making face-to-face contact with readers.

For the past couple of years, though, I've had the chance to meet readers in a new venue. Two years ago, the mystery and science fiction editorial assistants— Jackie Sherbow and Emily Hockaday— suggested we attend the Brooklyn Book Festival as vendors. The fair is held in the fall at Brooklyn's Borough Hall. Book related events occur all week long and there is a swanky vendors party the night before the festival. Fellow guests at this year's party included Alaya Dawn Johnson and N.K. Jemisin.

All these events are exciting, but the best part is the day at the fair. On a crisp Sunday morning, Emily and Jackie set up a beautiful table decorated with printouts of some of our most classic covers. We distributed free magazines and great subscription offers to our four fiction magazines— Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazines in addition to Analog and Asimov's. Two years ago, Michael Swanwick came up from Philadelphia to sign autographs and hang out at the table. This year, Robert Reed flew in from Nebraska and Tom Purdom took a bus from Pennsylvania to do the same thing.

Visitors to the 2013 table included Jane Yolen, Ellen Kushner, and Delia Sherman. New Asimov's writer Jay O'Connell stopped by as did 2011 Dell Magazine Award winner Seth Dickinson. Jay had recently sold me four stories, but this was our first opportunity to meet in person. I was also delighted to see Seth who has started to sell tales to publications like Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and Analog.

I didn't meet as many subscribers as I would at a science fiction convention, but we did entice a lot of fairgoers to our table. By the end of the day, we had given away over three hundred copies of Asimov's and hundreds of subscription offers. We'd touched base with some stalwart subscribers, reconnected with some lapsed readers, and introduced Asimov's to a bunch of new people.

When the last copy of Asimov's flew out of my hands, I hurried over to the Festival's "Youth Stoop" to catch Alaya, Jane, and Delia's five P.M. panel on "Realms of Illusion and Imagination." Hearing the authors' thoughts on YA books and other worlds was a nice finish to a fun day connecting with writers and readers. Maybe next year, I'll see you at the fair!

REFLECTIONS

BLUES AND GREENS

Robert Silverberg | 1771 words

I was born and grew up in Brooklyn, and when I was a boy I lived and died by the ups and downs of the Brooklyn Dodgers, a long-vanished baseball team whose modern successor plays the game in Los Angeles. When the St. Louis Cardinals defeated the Dodgers in a playoff for the 1946 league championship I was disconsolate; when the New York Yankees defeated them in seven games in the 1947 World Series, despite some astonishing heroics by hitherto obscure Dodger players like Cookie Lavagetto and Al Gionfriddo, I mourned bitterly. Whenever I could manage it, I went to games at Ebbets Field, the Dodger stadium, antiquated even then and surviving now only as a plaque on the wall of the apartment house that occupies its site. In my adolescent days I went to the occasional basketball game, too, and some football games, and even a hockey game or two.

In the course of time I lost interest in the doings of the Dodgers and the other local sports teams, mainly because other things (science fiction, girls, college) came to occupy my attention. I could not tell you, now, which teams played in last year's World Series, though I know plenty about the contests of 1945–55. And it is fifty years or more since I attended any sort of professional sports event. This has something to do with my modern-day lack of interest in professional sports, of course, but there is also an element of fear involved, since I have begun to think of sports arenas as dangerous places where drunken fans engage in murderous riots at the slightest provocation. I am an Elderly Person now, and one way I got to be an Elderly Person was to stay away from places where murderous riots are likely to occur.

You may think I am just a timid geezer and that I am exaggerating the risks of turning out to see the hometown team play. Maybe so. But the Wikipedia entry on Violence in Sports provides me with all too many examples of sports events that I am glad I missed. The Heysel Stadium disaster of 1985, a brawl between soccer fans, took thirty-nine lives and injured six hundred. In 1990, a football match between Red Star Belgrade and Dinamo Zagreb was called off after ten minutes when thousands of fans began to fight each other, and soon afterward the stadium was set on fire. Three hundred twenty died at a soccer riot in Peru in 1994. In July 2000, thirteen people were trampled to death in a riot at a soccer game in Zimbabwe. There were 126 fatalities at a game in Ghana in 2001. In Los Angeles in 2011, a visiting San Francisco Giants fan was beaten nearly to death by irate Dodger fans. And so it goes.

I was about to deplore all this as one more example of modern decadence, and to compare it to the peaceful days of 1948 when, as a mere boy, I went fearlessly to see Brooklyn Dodger games at Ebbets Field and New York Knick games at the now vanished predecessor of today's Madison Square Garden. But then I remembered my Byzantine history—I have made quite a study of Byzantine history in the course of sending various time travelers back to that gaudy empire—and reminded myself that the worst sports riot of all time took place not in Liverpool nor in Detroit but in splendiferous Constantinople, the magnificent capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. It happened fourteen hundred years ago in the reign of Justinian the Great, when fans of chariot-racing, Byzantium's favorite sport, went after each other so fiercely they nearly brought the Empire down.

Byzantine chariot races took place in the Hippodrome, a stadium four hundred yards long and seventy feet broad, with thirty or forty tiers of marble seats that could hold more than forty thousand spectators. Each chariot was drawn by a team of four horses; four chariots competed in each race, jostling wheel against wheel for the best position. The top charioteers were admired more passionately in Byzantium than movie stars and baseball heroes are in our own society.

Powerful factions of sportsmen sponsored the teams, loudly proclaiming their own side's superiority and casting scorn on their competitors. In the sixth century A.D. there were two such factions, the Blues and the Greens, each comprising about a thousand hot-blooded young men who paid the costs of training and outfitting charioteers. Their role in Byzantine life went far beyond the world of sports, though. The factions actually were political parties—the Blues being landowning aristocrats of ancient Roman or Greek origin, and the Greens social upstarts—businessmen, industrialists, civil servants. Each faction had a distinctive style of dress, followed its own form of Christianity, lived in certain districts of the city. The night before a race, Blues and Greens roamed the streets looking for members of the opposite faction; skulls might be cracked, faction members might get a ducking in the Bosphorus, there might even be a few stabbings. At dawn they took their positions in the stands, shouted insults at one another, waved the banners of their colors; there were frequent brawls during the races themselves, leading, not uncommonly, to injuries and deaths.

The rivalry became particularly intense under Justinian, who came to the throne in 527 A.D. A biography of him by Procopius, one of his key officials, shows Justinian to have been one of the greatest of Byzantine emperors, the architect of significant military victories and a major makeover of the systems of government; but Procopius has also left us a second, secretly published biography, hostile in the extreme, that calls him "dissembling, crafty, hypocritical, two-faced," and many another uncomplimentary thing.

In the early years of his reign Justinian unwisely displayed open preference for the Blues. This, of course, produced outrage among the Greens, who vented it in lawlessness. Soon, Procopius tells us, each faction would "collect in gangs at nightfall and rob members of the upper class, despoiling any they met of cloaks, belts, gold brooches, and anything else they had with them. Some they thought it better to murder as well as rob, since dead men told no tales.... Constant fear made everyone suspect that death was just round the corner: no places seemed safe, no time could guarantee security, since even in the most revered churches and at public festivals people were being senselessly murdered...."

In 532, Justinian issued a decree intended to bring the unruly sports fans under control. Greens and Blues responded with riots, and many lives were lost. Seven faction leaders were arrested and condemned to death. Both sides appealed for mercy, but got no answer from the Emperor.

As January 11 approached, the traditional date for the start of three days of racing to mark the new year, the Blues and Greens met to negotiate a truce, hoping thus to win freedom for their leaders. Justinian paid no heed. On the third day of the races, with the prisoners still in the dungeons, a strange cry suddenly went up from the Blue side of the Hippodrome—"Long live the Greens and Blues!"—and from the Green side came an equally surprising reply, "Long Live the Blues and Greens!" It was the signal for an uprising against the Imperial government.

Shouting Nika! Nika! ("Victory! Victory!"), the Blues and Greens marched together from the Hippodrome, with a wild mob accumulating behind them. Torches flared in the streets. The rioters freed the imprisoned leaders and set the Imperial prison on fire. Then they moved on to Justinian's palace and built huge bon fires that destroyed some of its outbuildings. The flames spread to the nearby cathedral of Hagia Sophia, causing its walls to collapse, and to the Senate house. Constantinople's sky turned black with oily smoke. If it had not been a windless day, the whole city would have burned. Terrified citizens streamed toward the docks and tried to escape to the far shore of the Bosphorus. The fire brigades, after a while, lost interest in their work and began to loot empty houses and shops. Blues and Greens used this moment for settling old grudges, attacking each other, setting their houses on fire.

Justinian's attempts to calm things achieved nothing. The rioting continued into a third day, and a fourth. When the Emperor went to the Hippodrome to make a public appeal for order, he was shouted down by the Greens and forced to flee through a hidden passageway into his palace. When the Greens came upon a nephew of the former Emperor Anastasius they proclaimed him Emperor and crowned him with a golden collar that had been stolen from the palace.

This was an ominous new development. The mob now had a symbolic figure about whom to rally, and Justinian began to make preparations to flee from the capital, only to be thwarted by his wife, the fiery Empress Theodora, who mocked him for his cowardice, declaring that she would not leave the city. Her words shamed him into taking a step he had hesitated to use until then: he turned the Imperial army loose on the rioting citizens. The rioters panicked and a terrible slaughter followed. Thirty thousand of the rebels, Procopius says, were butchered and thrown into the sea.

The Nika revolt, as it was called, came to its end after six frightful days. At dawn a shaken Justinian rode through the charred city, where clouds of ash still danced on the air. Having somehow survived the crisis, though, he began at once the task of regaining control of the city, and before long a new cathedral of Hagia Sophia was rising from the ruins—it is still there, in the heart of the city that is now called Istanbul—and he was making plans for an invasion of the European territories that had been lost to the barbarians after the fall of the western half of the Roman Empire. The power of the Blues and Greens had been broken by the massacre that followed the riots, and thenceforth things were quieter in the Hippodrome.

Today's sports riots have, at least so far, imperiled only fans of opposing teams, never—so far—threatening to bring down an entire government. (Although the Belgrade-Zagreb football riot of 1990 is sometimes credited with having touched off the Croatian War of Independence.) Nor has the death toll from any one riot even remotely approached that which followed the Blue-Green events of January 532. But, as George Santayana so memorably said, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. And so, mindful as I am of ancient historical precedent, I think I'll continue to keep away from any sporting event where emotion is likely to run high.

On the Net

GOOD (AND BAD) NEWS FROM OUTER SPACE

James Patrick Kelly | 1677 words
bot time

It was 2007 when this column last visited Mars; much has happened since. Back then it was all about the robots. The scene-stealing stars of the Mars show were the twin rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html >. But they had an able supporting cast watching from orbit, including the Mars Odyssey mars.jpl.nasa.gov/odyssey/index.html >, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter nasa.gov/mission_pages/MRO/main/index.html >, and the European Mars Express esa.int/SPECIALS/Mars_Express/index.html >. Although we lost contact with Spirit in 2010, Opportunity and the rest of the cast remain on the job today. In 2008, the Phoenix Mars Lande jpl.nasa.gov/news/phoenix/main.php > had a successful ninety-two day mission to search for environments that might support microbial life and to study the geologic history of Martian water. But on August 6, 2012, Spirit's big sister touched down in the Gale crater and the spotlight is now on the Mars Science Laboratory mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl >, better known as the rover Curiosity. About the size of a Mini Cooper, it is the smartest robot ever sent to space. Its mission is to investigate Mars's habitability. Might our sister planet ever have supported life? Might it someday serve as a human habitat? Meanwhile the exploration of Mars will continue this year with the launch of the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission nasa.gov/mission_pages/maven/main/index.html >, or MAVEN. This orbiter will explore the Red Planet's tenuous atmosphere. When Mars lost its magnetosphere four billion years ago, solar wind began stripping away its atmosphere. The MAVEN probe will help us understand how continuing loss of volatile compounds—such as carbon dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, and water—has shaped the history of Mars' climate.

Mars today

NASA's strategy for exploring Mars thus far might be summed up as follow the water. What we have learned from our robots is that there once was liquid water on Mars and probably lots of it, certainly enough to sustain life. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, while scouting a suitable landing for Curiosity, discovered quantities of opaline silica, which suggested that there had been liquid water as recently as two billion years ago. It has relayed images that suggest minuscule flows of briny water at the equator may continue to this day. While most of the ancient Martian water has been lost, some has been locked up in the polar ice caps, as well as in ice patches, frozen lakes and seas mostly concentrated on the equator.

Of course, the destination to visit if you're planning to review the latest robotic doings on Mars is NASA's Mars Exploration Program mars.jpl.nasa.gov >, which opens onto an vast array of sites. The Mars Society marssociety.org > offers another excellent site; there you can find news releases, videos, and other educational resources, as well as papers given at the sixteen previous Annual International Mars Society Conventions. The Mars Society also sponsors two ongoing simulated Mars missions, in which volunteer crews live for various lengths of time in experimental habitats designed for the harsh Martian environment. The Mars Desert Research Station is located in Utah's barren canyon lands, while the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station is in Northern Canada, about nine hundred miles from the North Pole.

This brings up the question that has driven Mars science ever since Percival Lowell squinted into his telescope. When are we going to visit our sister planet?

making martians

It is no secret that science fiction writers and readers have long cherished dreams of not only traveling to Mars but also establishing colonies there. Much of NASA's exploration effort is aimed at a manned Mars mission, although the exact nature, timing, and funding of such a mission remains in question. The Mars Society has embraced its visionary founder Robert Zubrin's en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Zubrin > more streamlined approach. Mars Direct mars society.org/home/about/mars-direct > "advocates a minimalist, live-off-theland approach to exploring the planet Mars.... Using existing launch technology and making use of the Martian atmosphere to generate rocket fuel, extracting water from the Martian soil, and eventually using the abundant mineral resources of the Red Planet for construction purposes, the plan drastically lowers the amount of material which must be launched from Earth to Mars."

While there are many different schemes for a Mars voyage, they share the same constraints. To conserve energy and time, it's best to make the trip when the two planets are the closest to one another in their orbits. This launch window opens every twenty-six months. A typical flight, then, would last at least two hundred days each way. That gives the astronauts about a year to explore. Most mission plans envision sending at least one supply ship ahead of the manned vehicle.

And then there's Mars One mars-one.com >, a not-for-profit organization whose goal is to establish a human settlement on Mars—in a hurry. Their timetable calls for having the first spaceboots on the ground by 2023. That's in nine years, by my calendar. The scheduled departure for the first supply ship is 2016. Settlement rovers will follow, starting in 2018. These rovers will build habitats for the first group of four colonists. By 2025, groups of four will be arriving every two years, as the launch window permits. You may have heard of this group since they have been seeking volunteers for their colony; as I write this more than eighty-five thousand have signed up for a chance to spend the rest of their lives on Mars. You see, the Mars One folks plan to save money by booking you a one-way trip. Sign on, make the cut, and you will truly live and die as a Martian.

Can the Mars One scheme possibly work? "I don't know," says NASA administrator General Charles Bolden www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/bolden-cf.html >. "I don't know what their plan is." Mars evangelist Robert Zubrin thinks the plan is theoretically possible. But, he says, "They have set a very high bar for themselves, and I'm not sure they have the resources."

fragile humans

Take the time to review the various proposals for getting to Mars—even the fastest of the fast track schemes—and one thing becomes clear. Dr. Zubrin and the other Mars advocates are right: we have 99 percent of the hardware we need to do it right now. Yes, we could improve some of the technology, maybe squeeze more efficiency from existing systems, but we're really pretty much good to go. And while it wouldn't be cheap, we also have the resources to fund a mission. If we could magically divert that fraction of our economy currently devoted to the video game industry to Mars exploration, we could cut the check next Tuesday.

There is a real problem with going to Mars, but it has to do with software, not hardware. And by software I don't mean programs and dbases and GUIs. I mean us. As science fiction readers, we have long had it drilled into us that space is a hostile environment. We know that exposure to the vacuum of space and its unimaginable cold will swiftly and surely kill us. But within the confines of a cozy spaceship—or a sprawling star-ship—we imagine we'll be safe.

But the space vehicles that you find here in Asimov's do not yet exist, and the ones we have available may not be able to take our crews to Mars and back safely. Consider, for example, the claustrophobia factor. The record for the longest continuous spaceflight is held by Valeri Polyakov en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valeri _Polyakov > at 437 days, about one half the time proposed for most Mars missions. And he was living aboard the Soviet space station Mir; the first manned Mars vehicle is likely to be far more cramped.

But it is the problem of radiation that most concerns mission planners. Here on Earth and to some extent in low orbit we are protected by Earth's magnetic field. Once beyond its confines, galactic cosmic rays, solar flares, and coronal mass ejections pose a real threat. A solar proton event could kill a crew within hours unless they sought shelter behind shielding. We are getting better at predicting these infrequent storms on the sun, but our forecasting is by no means perfect. Galactic cosmic radiation (GCR), on the other hand, is continuous, and thus more troublesome. Measurements taken on the Mars Science Laboratory during its trip to deliver Curiosity show that that exposure to GCR may be extremely hazardous to astronaut health aaas.org/news/releases/2013/0530_mars.shtml >, with an estimated dosage at or over acceptable career exposure levels on the inbound and outbound legs of the typical mission. Because the shielding around the Radiation Assessment Device (RAD) was similar to that which a manned vehicle would use, this is the first realistic estimate of the danger. And this measurement does not include GCR exposure that the astronauts would experience during their year exploring Mars, likely not to be as large but still significant. While the primary risk of this level of GCR has been thought to be increased chance of developing cancer later in life, another new study points to a more immediate danger space.com/19082-space-radiationastronauts-alzheimers.html >. According to Dr. M. Kerry O'Banion of the University of Rochester, "The possibility that radiation exposure in space may give rise to health problems such as cancer has long been recognized. However, this study shows for the first time that exposure to radiation levels equivalent to a mission to Mars could produce cognitive problems and speed up changes in the brain that are associated with Alzheimer's disease." The study looked at high-mass, high-energy particles, specifically iron expelled by exploding stars. "Because iron particles pack a bigger wallop it is extremely difficult from an engineering perspective to effectively shield against them," said O'Banion. "One would have to essentially wrap a spacecraft in a six-foot block of lead or concrete."

exit

Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cold _Equations > is a touchstone SF story about how laws of physics trump human desires. As of 2014, the radiation equation makes interplanetary travel seem unlikely. But perhaps we can change that equation for Mars. One way to might be to lessen the exposure by speeding up the voyage with a better propulsion system en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_ thermal_rocket >. Or maybe there is a way to design a better shield nature.com/news/spacecraft-data-nail-downradiation-risk-for-humans-going-to-mars-1.13099 >.

In the meantime, I intend to give Mars One a pass. If this adventure appeals to you, by all means send in your application fee. Me, I'll be writing my science fiction stories here on Earth. If nothing else, the cost of sending my manuscripts from a habitat in Bradbury City to Sheila in New York is more than I'm willing to pay.

NEXT ISSUE

315 words

APRIL/MAY ISSUE

Two huge novellas are crammed into our April/May 2014 double anniversary issue. "Each in His Prison, Thinking of the Key" is William Preston's exciting new story about an "Old Man" who's bigger than life and a young man who must learn to cope with his own devastating talents. Robert Reed's gigantic alternate history novella about "The Principles" introduces us to a recent college graduate, unemployed and aimless in a repressive society, and an intense older woman who is struggling to change an oppressive regime.

ALSO IN APRIL/MAY

A charming protagonist makes the best of her deal with the devil in Michael Swanwick's "Of Finest Scarlet Was Her Gown"; new author Fran Wilde reveals that conditions on a prison planet will sting "Like a Wasp to the Tongue"; "Someday" making babies will be a lot different according to veteran Asimov's author James Patrick Kelly; but soldiers aren't going to find homecoming any easier according to Matthew Johnson's "Rules of Engagement." New-to- Asimov's author Joe M. McDermott spins a heartbreaking tale about a family that depends on "Dolores, Big and Strong"; K.J. Zimring's "The Talking Cure" isn't quite as it appears; M. Bennardo tells an unusual story of survival in "Slowly Upward, the Coelacanth"; and in Will McIntosh's terrifying tale about an extraterrestrial invasion, a human boy has a strange encounter with an alien "Scout."

OUR EXCITING FEATURES

Robert Silverberg's Reflections column sings the praises of "Borges, Leinster, Google"; Paul DiFilippo's On Books column opens with a depiction of the life and Alluring Art of Margaret Brundage —the fabulous illustrator whose work once emblemized Weird Tale's; plus we'll have an array of poetry and other features you're sure to enjoy. Look for our April/May issue on sale at newsstands on February 25, 2014. Or subscribe to Asimov's —in paper format or in downloadable varieties—by visiting us online at www.asimovs.com. We're also available individually or by subscription on Amazon.com's Kindle and Kindle Fire, BarnesandNoble.com's Nook, ebookstore.sony.com's eReader, Zinio.com, magzter.com/magazines, and from Google Play!

COMING SOON
new stories by Nancy Kress, Lavie Tidhar, Allen M. Steele, Sandra McDonald, Ian Creasey, Alexander Jablokov, Sylvain Jouty, Suzanne Palmer, James Van Pelt, David Erik Nelson, Kara Dalkey, Tochi Onyebuchi, and many others!

ON BOOKS

Paul Di Filippo | 2653 words

The Golden Horde Reborn

If one could marry the lusty, brute, Hyborian Age vigor of Robert E. Howard's tales to the erudite stylishness of Avram Davidson's fictions, one might get a rousing, artful adventure similar to Elizabeth Bear's Eternal Sky trilogy—currently, as I write, consisting of Range of Ghosts and Shattered Pillars (Tor, hard-cover, $26.99, 336 pages, ISBN 978-0765327550). The series has smarts and brawn, blood & thunder along with subtlety, barbarian vigor allied with civilized sophistication. "If Asmaracanda bestrode the world, a regal queen of cities, clothed in shining samite and jeweled in blue stones, the trade town that clutched at her hem was a motley procession of beggars." Yes, I am so there!

First off, Bear's choice of fantasy mythos and/or quasi-historical realm of action strikes agreeable fresh sparks. Her world is centered around an analogue of our Mongolia, a land of steppes and savage feuding horseclans. Kudos for this appealingly underused variety of subcreation; only a couple of folks, I think—Neal Stephenson with The Mongoliad and Pamela Sargent, with the fully historical Ruler of the Sky —have previously turned their gaze this way.

Bear's Khaganate is undergoing a dynastic war of succession, which, in the first book, has left our hero, young Temur (we instantly apprehend Tamerlane), wounded and estranged and on the run from the internecine struggles. In his exile he falls in love with a woman named Edene, who is stolen away from him by the hired sorceries of a Middle Eastern wizard named al-Sepehr, who is allied with Temur's usurping kin, Qori Buqa. Seeking to track down his lover, Temur ventures beyond the mountains known as the Range of Ghosts and encounters a female mage named Samarkar, of the Rasan Empire, which is undergoing its own political strife. Circumstances propel Samarkar and Temur and a handful of colorful comrades—I particularly enjoyed the otherworldly feline being named Hrahima—out on the road to reclaim his heritage. Reluctant at first, Temur eventually acknowledges his destiny, at the same time falling in love with Samarkar, and she with him. Meanwhile Edene, through the chance assumption of a magic token, the fabled Green Ring, has become the mystical heir to Erem, a realm of ghuls and djinns.

Shattered Pillars finds our band of seekers in the Caliphate of Uthman, seeking allies. Meanwhile, a plague rages back in Samarkar's native city; the murderous machinations of Qori Buqa and al-Sepehr continue apace; and Edene becomes immersed in her scary new role. Fighting, political shenanigans, heroic medical struggles and lots of hard travel—did I mention yet the important role played by Temur's mystical horse, Bansh?—fill the pages to overflowing. By the end of installment two, all forces are poised for a battle royale.

Bear's old-school Weird Tales- worthy saga, infused with a knowing twentyfirst-century awareness, deserves some genius of the cinema to bring its Douglas-Fairbanks-meets-Sigourney-Weaver glories to the screen.

Short & Sweetly Told

It's extremely heartening to see newer, younger writers devoting their talents to the short-story format, instead of leaping straight into novels and trilogies and such. As we all know, the pay for even a steady salable flow of such shorter works never can constitute a living wage; the average critical and fannish attention paid to short fiction, per item, is of course less than that paid to any individual novel; publishers are disinclined to feature story collections; and the competition at awards time is fiercer, due to a larger pool of candidates, even if many marginally published competing stories turn out to be sub-par.

But by focusing their efforts on the short form, despite any hindrances, such writers are accomplishing at least three things: they are, I firmly believe, honing their skills more quickly than novelists; they are helping the field of fantastika evolve with short, sharp shocks; and they are entertaining many readers who don't desire to immerse themselves in the latest thousand-page opus or fifteen-book series.

Now from Ian Whates's splendid and groundbreaking firm, NewCon Press (which celebrated its seventh birthday in 2013), come two volumes that exactly embody all these merits.

The first one we will look at is the debut book by Mercurio D. Rivera, a name you have doubtlessly noticed in these very pages, and which has featured on several prize ballots and Best-of TOCs. Across the Event Horizon (trade paperback, $20.99, 264 pages, ISBN 978-1-907069-51-2) comes with an enthusiastic introduction by Terry Bisson, in which Bisson finds Rivera's brand of SF to be both old-school and totally twenty-firstcentury. With this estimation I will have to agree. Rivera focuses on core genre tropes with a sophistication of telling that nonetheless does not venture into the avant-garde, postmodern, or any particular hip new "movement." These are tales that might have appeared anytime in the past forty years or so, yet which nevertheless manage to seem utterly fresh and relevant to the genre scene today. Consequently, they bring to my mind comparisons with various past masters.

Rivera's fascination with aliens emerges in the first three tales, and his treatments summon up such names as James Tiptree, Michael Bishop, Philip José Farmer, and Poul Anderson. In "Dance of the Kakawroons," mankind preys on seemingly helpless avian sentients who end up having the last laugh. "Longing for Langalana" finds a race that instinctively adores humans, thus setting one individual up for heartbreak and misunderstanding. Blending religion with astrophysics, "Missionaries" tracks humanity's interactions with the Sagittarians, "a self-aware aspect of the quintessence field concentrated in complex patterns.... "

The next two tales, "Snatch Me Another" and "Dear Annabehls," form a linked pair, one tragic, one blackly humorous (illustrating Rivera's reach). The motivating MacGuffin in both is a Kuttneresque device that allows snatching of objects from alternate timelines.

A rather Strugatsky-like giant alien, the Stalk, is met by an army of human clones in "The Fifth Zhi," while "The Scent of Their Arrival" finds humans carrying a plague to a race of olfactory-biased aliens whose hopeful naïveté might doom them.

Rivera's very first sale, from only 2005, is "Bargonns Can Swizzle," a tale set in the present, where an internet chatroom hosts an unlikely interlocutor. Rivera's titular nonsense phrase here seems to me in the best SF tradition of Miles Breuer's classic "The Gostak and the Doshes." A bitter, disabled man obsessively uses Shunt technology of simulation to relive the events of his past in "Rewind, Replay."

Employing a Kurt Vonnegut-like acerbic humor in "Naked Weekend," Rivera examines the dangers of a chemically unmediated lifestyle. In the world of "Doubled," humans come in pairs—except for the despised Singles. Rivera channels a bit of Lucius Shepard in "Tu Sufrimiento Shall Protect Us," which immerses the reader in a feverish near-future scenario where terrorists are kept at bay only by harsh magics. A Robert Sheckley zaniness enlivens "Sleeping with the Anemone," whose premise is the making of interspecies porn. Finally, the short-short from Nature magazine, "Answers from the Event Horizon," offers Stapledonian wisdom from the stars.

Rivera's fictions demonstrate wit, charm, intelligence, empathy, and narrative sophistications, a suite of tools and talents that bode well for his future, and the genre's.

Not a newcomer any longer, especially given his Clarke Award victory in 2013 for Dark Eden, Christopher Beckett and his recent collection make a nice pairing with Rivera's. In contrast to Rivera's necessarily reaching back to his first sale, The Peacock Cloak (trade paper, $19.99, 240 pages, ISBN 978-1-907069-49-9), Beckett's second collection, gathers up only his most recent stuff, making for an organically tight and consistent burst of bravura speculative fiction, written at the top of a master's skillset.

The novum in "Atomic Truth" is augmented reality, one of the hot tropes these days, and Beckett pushes it far, using it to highlight the social stratification of our technological landscape. He foregoes the teasingly telegraphed ending brilliantly. A pure gonzo tale, like some hybrid of van Vogt and Dunsany and Rucker, "Two Thieves" finds our pair of lovably sleazy protagonists embarked on an irresponsible stargate jaunt. With the vigor of such a social commentator as Harlan Ellison, Beckett offers a world gone all vigilante justice in "Johnny's New Job." There's a smattering of Fahrenheit 451 in here as well.

Alert readers of this magazine will surely recall a recent cover story, "The Caramel Forest," which beautifully evoked the sensitive estrangements of, say, Gene Wolfe or Ian MacLeod in its depiction of children interacting with the secretive aliens on a colony world. "Greenland" conflates the metaphysics of Greg Egan with the day-after-tomorrow madness of Christopher Priest's Fugue for a Darkening Island. Against a Vancian interstellar backdrop, a world-weary space traveler encounters some existential nausea in "The Famous Cave Paintings on Isolus 9." "Rat Island" returns to the milieu of "Atomic Truth," finding apocalyptic verities behind the augmented reality.

More weirdness accrues to the matter transmission process in "Day 29," which incidentally shares the setting of "The Caramel Forest." In "Our Land" a history teacher slips across timelines and ends up in a Britain radically different from the one we know. Depicting the kind of random act of volitional cruelty that Camus always dealt with, "The Dessicated Man" finds a sociopathic space captain giving in to his worst impulses. Perhaps my favorite tale is "Poppyfields," for its beautiful Arcadian opening followed by a keen depiction of a man pulled between risk and stasis. Lastly, the title story concerns demiurges, rebellion, and creativity in a blend of Zelazny and Milton.

Beckett's authorial potential, which I remarked on in these very pages about five years ago, has now blossomed into a master's status.

Readin' and Writin' 'bout 'Rithmatist

If you mashed up Crockett Johnson's Harold and the Purple Crayon with Edwin Abbott's Flatland and Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy series, then sieved the result through a copy of Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, you might get something along the lines of Brandon Sanderson's first YA novel, The Rithmatist (Tor, hardcover, $17.99, 384 pages, ISBN 978-0765320322). But that artificial Frankenstein result out of your primitive laboratory probably wouldn't have the bouncy glee, the narrative verve, the sheer organic storytelling brio that Sanderson's book does. First in a series, it's a winner right out of the gate.

The initial striking thing to comment on is venue, the nature of the book's sub-created world. It's simply ingenious. We are in the "United Isles," a country that more or less maps to our familiar United States (some common history seemingly exists). But there are sixty isles, not fifty states, in the space where we expect much of North America to exist, and the bits and pieces of the drowned continent are separated by goodly sized stretches of water, producing an archipelago at once commonplace and estranged. (We will focus on only one isle here, with a short visit to another, and baleful references to a third; but the environment still hovers impressively just beyond our senses.) A beautiful endpaper map illustrates this conceit, as drawn by Ben McSweeney, who also provides charming interior illos that do so much to enhance Sanderson's tale. The time of the telling appears to be roughly the early years of an analogous twentieth century, with appropriate tech, including some essential clockwork mechanisms. For instance, quill pens and bottles of ink are still in regular use. But the dominant "science," if you will, is Rithmatics, which involves the production of animated, if not truly living, creations from simple chalked lines. And these two-dimensional critters, "chalklings," interact with threedee objects quite tangibly—and lethally, if the Glyph of Rending is employed.

Our protagonist is Joel, a poor young lad enrolled at the Armedius Academy in New Britannia as a perk of his mother's charwoman employment there. Joel has always longed to study Rithmatics, but has been shut out. Now he neglects his prole vocational classes in favor of gathering up any crumb of information on the arcane subject that falls from his more privileged classmates and their adept teachers. Soon he is cadging lessons off Professor Finch, an amiable eccentric a little reminiscent of Doc Brown in Back to the Future. In fact Joel and Finch develop a similar vibe. Add in a student named Melody, whose Rithmatic skills skew toward the unpredictable, and you've got a strong troupe to carry the tale, along with the colorful subsidiary characters. The plot revolves around students gone missing, a rogue Rithmatist, and a possible outbreak of the wild chalklings penned up in the isle of Nebrask. Remarkably, Sanderson makes the school setting—of course, almost de rigueur in YA fantasies post- Potter —feel fresh. The whole shebang climaxes with fireworks, danger, and suspense, and the projected future struggles are not so imminent as to leave the reader on a cliffhanger note.

But perhaps what is most enthralling about the book is the solidity and palpability of Rithmatics, as it has been heavily conceptualized and laid out visually by Sanderson, who has always displayed a talent for making his various occult systems into believable realities. Rithmatics features a comprehensible set of rules and possibilities that do not conduce toward either extravagance or blandness. It's a science of sorts, and its mysterious historical origins tantalize. And in fact Joel's whole approach to the field and his eventual discoveries have a sort of Tom Swift air to them.

In short, Sanderson's words could not leap off the page more lively unless they were chalklings indeed!

The Spin Doctor

I have been remiss in failing to consider the excellent work of Chris Moriarty, as embodied in her first two novels, Spin State (2003) and Spin Control (2006). Although I received copies of both upon publication and pondered them with keen interest, strictures of time and attention thwarted my reading. When Ghost Spin (Spectra, trade paper, $16.00, 576 pages, ISBN 978-0553384949) arrived recently, I felt I could delay acquaintance no longer, and jumped right in. Immediately, I knew I was missing some thick and resonant backstory. But I felt utterly at home and up-to-speed regardless, thanks to Moriarty's skillful storytelling. While I will certainly return to the earlier books, coming into her series at volume three was not a bad move at all.

Moriarty's universe might at first seem to slot comfortably into the spectrum of postmodern space opera defined by Alastair Reynolds and Peter Hamilton. But on closer inspection I find her more akin to allied radical and trangressive folks: Paul McAuley, M. John Harrison, and Linda Nagata. Moriarty's cyberpunk/biopunk proclivities, as well as her grim and gritty scenarios and characters, stand shoulder-to-shoulder with these illustrious predecessors.

It's some four centuries into our future, and part of the galaxy is host to a UN-con trolled network of planets, linked by the Bose-Einstein condensate-powered FTL system. But the network is running out of BE fuel, and humanity's brief interstellar empire is on the way out: "It was the more remote Colonies and Trusteeships along the Periphery who were falling off the map one by one as they lost their field arrays, subjecting millions of posthuman colonials to the agonizing choice between becoming impoverished refugees or permanent castaways on isolated, partially terraformed planets whose impoverished gene pools and biospheres would soon doom them to the status of walking ghosts." This scenario lends a delightfully melancholy tinge to the whole proceedings, á la Asimov's Foundation or Poul Anderson's Long Night.

But these stranded citizens are not the singular ghost of the title. That role falls to Hy Cohen, an artificial intelligence "married" to the human woman Catherine Li. Cohen's self has been fragmented and distributed across the galaxy in pieces. Catherine sets out, in a strange techno-love story, to reassemble her husband. This quest will lead to her own curious duplication by means of matter transmission, and her assumption of pirate status with Lucky Llewllyn, bearer of one of the Cohen ghosts. And luckily, there is still vigor and dynamism left in the galaxy, in a place called the Drift, where many forces contend for control of non-BE travel options.

Moriarty boasts all the essential traits SF writers must display. She displays a facility for inventing new, muscular language and for inserting ideas seamlessly or via adroit infodumps into the plot. Her sentences are juicy with information complexity, and her observations on society and culture are of the same nature as those of Iain Banks. Her lively characters move through a variety of exotic venues, and her narrative is as unpredictable and yet as fated as living itself.

Moriarty's story engines spin at high RPMs.

SF CONVENTIONAL CALENDAR

Erwin S. Strauss | 586 words

It's time could marry the lusty, brutethe climax of a late Easter weekend. I'll be at Boskone and LunaCon. Through February, Asimovians should also consider ChattaCon, CapriCon, RadCon, ConDor and Potlatch. Plan for social weekends with your favorite SF authors, editors, artists, and fellow fans. For an explanation of our con(vention)s, a sample of SF folk-songs, and info on fanzines and clubs, send me a SASE (self-addressed, stamped #10 [business] envelope) at 10 Hill #22-L, Newark NJ 07102. The hot line is (973) 242-5999. If a machine answers (with a list of the week's cons), leave a message and I'll call back on my nickel. When writing cons, send an SASE. For free listings, tell me of your con five months out. Look for me at cons behind the Filthy Pierre badge, playing a musical keyboard. —Erwin S. Strauss

JANUARY 2014

24–26—ChattaCon. For info, write: Box 23908, Chattanooga TN 37422. Or phone: (973) 242-5999 (10 am to 10 pm, not collect). (Web) www.chattacon.org. (E-mail) info@chattacon.org. Con will be held in: Chattanooga TN (if city omitted, same as in address) at the Choo Choo Hotel. Guests will include: None announced. A general SF, fantasy, and horror convention.

24–26—ConFlikt. www.conflikt.org. SeaTac Hilton, Seattle WA. Amy McNally, Tim Griffin, Sunnie Larson. SF/fantasy/horror folksinging.

31–Feb. 2—Foolscap. www.foolscapcon.org. Marriott, Redmond WA. L. Richardson, B. Peck. SF/fantasy writing & art: "Anything flat."

FEBRUARY 2014

6–9—CapriCon, 126 W. Wing #244, Arlington Hts. IL 60004. www.capricon.org. Wheeling (Chicago) IL. S. M. & J. Stirling, Tom Peters.

7–17—SF Film Festival. www.bostonsci-fi.com. Somerville Theatre, Somerville (Boston) MA. Science fiction, fantasy and horror films.

14–16—Boskone, Box 809, Framingham MA 01701. (617) 625-2311. www.boskone.org. Boston MA. S. McGuire (Mira Grant), D. Palumbo.

14–16—RadCon, Box 370, 1761 Geo. Washington Way, Richland WA 99354. www.radcon.org. Red Lion, Pasco WA. General SF/fantasy.

14–16—FarPoint, 11708 Troy Ct., Waldorf MD 20601. www.farpointcon.com. Timonium (Baltimore) MD. Phil LaMarr. Media SF/fantasy.

14–16—AnachroCon. www.anachrocon.com. Marriott Perimeter Center, Atlanta GA. Lawrence M. Schoen, Lee Martindale, many others.

14–16—KatsuCon. www.katsucon.org. Gaylord Resort, National Harbor MD (near DC). Voice actors Ellyn Stern and Richard Epcar. Anime.

21–23—MystiCon, 3735 Franklin Rd. SW #228, Roanoke VA 24014. www.mysticon-va.com. Marina Sirtis, T. McCaffrey, A. J. Hartley.

21–23—ConDFW, 750 S. Main, Ste. 150, #14, Keller TX 76248. www.ConDFW.org. Addison (Dallas) TX. Kevin J. Anderson, Alain Viesca.

21–23—Potlatch, Box 103, Mt. View CA 94042. www.potlatch-sf.org. San Jose CA. "Where readers and writers meet." Literary focus.

21–23—ConCave, 124 Fairlawn Ave., Lexington KY 40505. www.concaveky.org. Bowling Green KY. SF/fantasy/horror relaxacon.

21–23—Furry Fiesta. www.furryfiesta.org. Intercontinental, Dallas TX. Artist Blotch, entertainer Big Blue Fox. Anthropomorphics.

28–Mar. 2—Ring of Fire. www.rofcon.com. Virginia Beach VA. Multi-genre: SF/fantasy, anime, gaming, comics, cosplay, music, etc.

MARCH 2014

7–9—FogCon. www.fogcon.org. Marriott, Walnut Creek (San Francisco) CA. S. McGuire, T. Powers, James Tiptree Jr. (IM). Literary focus.

7–9—OmniCon, Roaden Ctr., TN Tech U., c/o Box 5264, Cookeville TN 38505. www.omnicon.us. TN Tech U., Cookeville (Memphis) TN.

7–9—CoastCon, Box 1423, Biloxi MS 38533. www.coastcon.org. MS Coliseum & Quality Inn. John de Lancie, K. Armstrong, A. Gilbreath.

7–9—Wild Wild West Con. www.wildwildwestcon.com. Four Points by Sheraton, Tucson AZ. The eponymous TV show/movie. Steampunk.

13–16—All-Con, Box 177194, Irving TX 75019. www.all-con.org. Crowne Plaza, Addison (Dallas) TX. N. Kaplan. B. Blair, H. Henry.

14–16—LunaCon, Box 451, Suffern NY 10901. www.lunacon.org. Hilton, Rye Town (NYC) NY. J. Mayberry, R. Gallegos, M. F. Flynn.

14–16—MillenniCon, 5818 Wilmington Pike #122, Centerville OH 45459. www.millennicon.org. Cincinnati OH. Jim C. Hines.

14–16—Anime Matsuri. www.animematsuri.com. George R. Brown Convention Center and Hilton Americas, Houston TX.

19–23—ICFA. http://iafa.highpoint.edu. Airport Marriott, Orlando FL. Okorafor, Ian McDonald, Csicsery-Ronay Jr. Academic conference.

21–23—MidSouthCon, Box 17724, Memphis TN 38187. www.midsouthcon.org. K. Armstrong, the Bielaczycs, T. Weisskopf, L. Martindale.

21–23—ConDor, Box 15771, San Diego CA 92175. www.condorcon.org. Town and Country, San Diego CA. Gail Carriger. SF/fantasy con.

JULY 2014

17–20—DetCon 1, c/o Box 3199, Ann Arbor MI 48106. www.detcon1.org. Detroit MI. No. American SF Con, with WorldCon abroad. $55.

AUGUST 2014

14–18—LonCon 3, 379 Myrtle Rd., Sheffield S2 3HQ, UK. www.loncon3.org. Docklands, London UK. The WorldCon. £105/A,C,US$170.

AUGUST 2015

19–23—Sasquan, c/o Box 1091, Woodinville WA 98072. www.sasquan.org. Spokane WA. D. Gerrold, V. McIntyre. The WorldCon. $140.

Information

DEANNA MCLAFFERTY

412 words

SHEILA WILLIAMS

Editor

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Editorial Director (1977-1992)

Stories from Asimov's have won 53 Hugos and 27 Nebula Awards, and our editors have received 20 Hugo Awards for Best Editor.

Please do not send us your manuscript until you've gotten a copy of our guidelines. Look for them online at www.asimovs.com or send us a self-addressed, stamped business-size (#10) envelope, and a note requesting this information. Write "manuscript guidelines" in the bottom left-hand corner of the outside envelope. We prefer electronic submissions, but the address for manual submissions and for all editorial correspondence is Asimov's Science Fiction, 267 Broadway, Fourth Floor, New York, NY 10007-2352. While we're always looking for new writers, please, in the interest of time-saving, find out what we're looking for, and how to prepare it, before submitting your story.

Asimov's Science Fiction. ISSN 1065-2698. Vol. 38, No. 3. Whole No. 458, March 2014. GST #R123293128. Published monthly except for two combined double issues in April/May and October/November by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications. One year subscription $55.90 in the United States and U.S. possessions. In all other countries $65.90 (GST included in Canada), payable in advance in U.S. funds. Address for subscription and all other correspondence about them, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855. Allow 6 to 8 weeks for change of address. Address for all editorial matters: Asimov's Science Fiction, 267 Broadway, 4th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10007. Asimov's Science Fiction is the registered trademark of Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications. © 2013 by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855. All rights reserved, printed in the U.S.A. Protection secured under the Universal and Pan American Copyright Conventions. Reproduction or use of editorial or pictorial content in any manner without express permission is prohibited. Please visit our web-site, www.asimovs.com , for information regarding electronic submissions. All manual submissions must include a self-addressed, stamped envelope; the publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts. Periodical postage paid at Norwalk, CT and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER, send change of address to Asimov's Science Fiction, 6 Prowitt Street, Norwalk, CT 06855. In Canada return to Quad/Graphics Joncas, 4380 Garand, Saint-Laurent, Quebec H4R 2A3.

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Table of Contents

Asimov's Science Fiction

WALKING GEAR

ALL THE PRETTY LITTLE MERMAIDS

DECLARATION

THE PLANTIMAL

DRINK IN A SMALL TOWN

SOLOMON'S LITTLE SISTER

THE REDEMPTION OF KIP BANJEREE

THROUGH PORTAL

I

II.

III.

IIII.

IIIII.

IIIIII.

IIIIIII.

IIIIIIII.

IIIIIIIII.

IIIIIIIIII.

IIIIIIIIIII.

IIIIIIIIIIII.

IIIIIIIIIIIII.

IIIIIIIIIIIIII.

What a Time Traveler Needs Most

GOLFING ON THE MOON

Empty Cities

AD ASTRA PER SACCHARUM

Everything Decays

EDITORIAL

REFLECTIONS

On the Net

bot time

Mars today

making martians

fragile humans

exit

NEXT ISSUE

APRIL/MAY ISSUE

ALSO IN APRIL/MAY

OUR EXCITING FEATURES

COMING SOON

ON BOOKS

The Golden Horde Reborn

Short & Sweetly Told

Readin' and Writin' 'bout 'Rithmatist

The Spin Doctor

SF CONVENTIONAL CALENDAR

JANUARY 2014

FEBRUARY 2014

MARCH 2014

JULY 2014

AUGUST 2014

AUGUST 2015

Information

SHEILA WILLIAMS

EMILY HOCKADAY

MARY GRANT

Editorial Assistant

JAYNE KEISER

SUZANNE LEMKE

KEVIN DORIS

VICTORIA GREEN

CINDY TIBERI

LAURA TULLEY

JENNIFER CONE

ABIGAIL BROWNING

TERRIE POLY

SANDY MARLOWE

ADVERTISING SALES DEPARTMENT

PETER KANTER

BRUCE W. SHERBOW

CHRISTINE BEGLEY

SUSAN MANGAN

ISAAC ASIMOV