Analog Science Fiction and Fact - 2014-01
Author: Penny Publications
Date: 2014-01-01 06:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Magazine; Science Fiction; non-fiction; Fiction
Rights: Kindle Edition, © 2013 Penny Publications

Analog Science Fiction and Fact

Kindle Edition, 2013 © Penny Publications

Lockstep

Part II of IV

Karl Schroeder
| 32943 words

Illustrated by Mark Evans

The story so far:

Toby Wyatt McGonigal is lost in space. The eldest son of a family that's gambled its fortune on homesteading in the outer Solar System, he was on his way to stake a claim on a dormant comet when something disabled his ship's engines. When Toby wakes from cold sleep, he discovers that his little deep-space tug is now orbiting a dark, frozen planet— an orphan world just as lost in interstellar space as he is. Although he can see the shapes of cities on its surface, they too are cold and dead. Out of resources, he goes back into artificial hibernation, certain that he's not going to wake again....

He does, in a sumptuous bedroom whose windows look out on an amber, glowing sky. He's been rescued by
Ammond and
Persea, a rich-seeming couple who live in one of the cities on the formerly dormant planet, Lowdown. They tell him that fourteen thousand years have passed since he was lost. In that time, a vast civilization has grown up between the stars. The lockstep worlds hibernate for years at a time while their automated systems gather resources for a brief awakening that can last as little as a month. Ammond and Persea promise to tell him more, but meanwhile, they are treating him suspiciously like a prisoner. Other than them, the only person he's seen since waking is a mysterious girl around his age, who seemed to be burgling Ammond's estate. She had with her a strange cat-like creature. He can't get these two out of his mind.

When Ammond and Persea take him to the Europan ice planet of Little Auriga, Toby learns that he is indeed a pawn in some political maneuver. It seems that as the founding family in the deep-space worlds, the Mc-Gonigals were important, and Ammond and Persea want to exploit him in some way. Toby escapes from them with the help of one of the cat-like creatures he saw on Lowdown, and meets the girl he saw burgling Ammond's estate. Her name is
Corva
, and she and her friends are gypsy-like vagabonds known as stowaways. Their animal companions, denners, are synthetic life forms that help them to hibernate without using the official cold-sleep machinery of the lockstep.

Corva tells Toby that the thousands of planets in the lockstep are suffering under a tyranny, and that Toby is important because, well, he owns them all . He is the heir of the family that founded the lockstep system. This comes as a shock, but that's nothing compared to what she tells him next. Although fourteen thousand years have passed in real-time since Toby was lost, only forty have passed for the lockstep's founders because of their regular hibernation. Toby's brother and sister are both alive, and it's his brother,
Peter
, who rules the lockstep empire.

Peter has learned that Toby is back from the dead—and Peter wants Toby dead.

Toby has no time to think about any of this, because Ammond and Persea are after them, and so he, Corva, and their friends stow away on an outbound freighter, going into cold-sleep again in a bid to escape the gathering forces that are pursuing Toby.

Chapter 6

The airship was a flying wing over a mile long, its transparent skin made of something so thin that you couldn't see it head-on; only in its outward curves could you make out the oily iridescence of its shape. It was as if the ion engines and passenger gondolas were suspended in midair. Toby had loved it—and why not? He was only fourteen.

They'd been on their way to orbit for two days now, circling the Earth at ever-greater altitudes. The ionosphere was so thin here that satellites could plow right through it—but a light enough airplane with a mile-wide wing could use it for lift, and fly all the way to orbit. This was the way poor people went into space. Mom and Dad had decided on a slow leave-taking, rather than a quick rocket to orbit and then on to Sedna. Until an hour ago, Toby had thought they were indulging an uncommon nostalgia.

But then, just after lunch as he'd been wandering the long galleries that looked down on the strangely patterned landscapes seventy miles below, the ship had shuddered—just ever-so slightly. Peter ran up, a blot of dark, disheveled clothing and hair like a moving stain on the perfect white plastic surfaces of the corridor. "An airship just docked!" he'd cried. "An invisible one!"

"More invisible than this old thing?" But Toby was intrigued. Over the next twenty minutes they watched as the suborbital stealth rocket (now visible) disgorged cargo and passengers, each of whom Mom and Dad greeted with handshakes and serious expressions.

Peter had nudged Toby at one point. "I know that guy. He's Nate what's-his-name, the composer-thing guy." Ever-precise, that was Peter—but Toby did recognize the long-limbed man with the easy grin. More than a composer, he invented whole genres, and was famous for starting bands of startling and varied styles. He'd stay with one just long enough to propel it to international fame and drive a new trend into the spotlight; then he'd be off in a new direction. Like the McGonigals, he wasn't a trillionaire, merely rich and famous—which counted for everything, or nothing at all as Toby was learning. "But what's he doing here?" Peter stared as if he could burn the secret out of the man with his gaze. "Is he coming with us?"

The answer, which was yes, had come some time after the stealth craft had broken off from the airship to plummet back into the air above the failed state of France. Toby and Peter were standing at the gallery rail, pointing out this or that detail along a filigreed coastline beneath their feet, when a shadow joined them. They looked up to see Nate standing a few meters away. He was gazing down too, his expression more pensive than Peter's.

"Hey!" Peter went over to him. "You're that guy, right?"

Nate what's-his-name raised an eyebrow, then stuck out his hand for Peter to shake. "Nathan Kenani. You're Carter's boys, aren't you?"

"Whatcha doing?" Peter nodded at the passing landscapes. "You coming with us?" To Toby's surprise, Kenani nodded.

"I can't do it anymore," he said. "I mean, look at that." He pointed down. They were passing over southern China; like everywhere else on the planet, it was divided into two kinds of landscape: sprawling city, and empty, verdant parkland. One was a gray mottle from this height, the other smooth green.

The gray was where billions of people lived all heaped atop one another, struggling to survive in the micro-economies they could cobble together from garbage and wind-power in the ruins of their ancestors' dreams. The green was the estates of the trillionaires, who let in no one but their ecologists and a few people they wanted to reward or bribe.

The green was much bigger than the gray.

Kenani sighed. "I just wanted to look at it all one last time. Before they take out my implants, I mean." He tapped the side of his head.

"So it's true?" Peter was practically hopping up and down. "They say you got more than anybody!"

"Not really." Kenani smiled lopsidedly. "But I do have auditory augments, and visual ones, and tactile. I can see seventeen primary colors, and hear way down into infra-sound and up past where dogs can go. But your mother says they're likely to kill me during her new hibernation process. Something about different expansion and contraction rates than human flesh... so I'm having them out."

"In Consensus, either everybody gets them or nobody does," announced Peter. "They're an unfair advantage."

Kenani looked puzzled. "Consensus?"

"It's a gameworld we've been building for... well, months and months," Toby explained.

Peter said, "No security without equality of opportunity!"

"Pete's just discovered socialism. Last week it was meritocracy."

Kenani laughed. "Well, that's cool." He gazed sadly down at the lands below. "I'd have everybody get them, then. I'm going to miss all this richness."

"But why?" Toby shook his head. "Why are you coming with us? Are you sneaking away?"

"Yes, I'm sneaking away, along with an assorted lot of criminals, subversives, and dissidents; scientists and what-not." Kenani indicated the passenger modules behind the gallery. "Most of us are just fed up living in a world that's never going to change. Where there're no new frontiers. Everything's owned—I mean, there's not a centimeter of beach-front anywhere in the world where the likes of you and I can set foot! And every last bit of the solar system's been surveyed and claims staked. It's all we've got, and all we're ever going to have. And they own it."

Passing below was another area of city—but this one wasn't a roiled gray chaos like the others. It was more like an interconnected labyrinth of buildings, stretching on for kilo-meter after kilometer, with no streets or windows to break the geometric perfection of its shapes. This place, and others like it, was where all the resources of the planets were funneled. It was a machine city, an entire economy dedicated to serving the needs and whims of the trillionaires. They had no need for human workers. They had their bots.

"In Consensus, nobody can own more than a hundred robots," said Peter. Kenani snorted.

"Good luck with that," he said. "Then again, why not? Make it Sedna instead of Consensus, kid, and I'll back you all the way."

Thrum, thrum.

The sound was everywhere—filling the Universe outside and roving through his belly and chest, his throat and his skull. Toby could feel it rattling down his arms and legs, awakening a painful tingle in them. He could feel it coursing up his spine, wrapping his jaw and tongue, penetrating his glued-shut eyelids.

He struggled to open those eyes, but when he finally did he saw nothing. A groan escaped his lips and he felt his head loll forward. It came to him that he was sitting on some sort of surface, his knees bent up, arms lifeless at his side. And with him—

He felt the denner's fur brush his face. The little creature was climbing around and over him, nudging him with its head. All the while, its rumbling song vibrated through Toby, awakening his body from an impossibly long sleep.

He took a ragged breath. "How long," he tried to say. It came out as a weak croak, but Orpheus seemed encouraged. He butted Toby's cheek and the vibration became louder still.

Now Toby felt cold too, a biting attack on all parts of his body at once. Something deep within him was fighting against it, a radiance like a tiny inner sun. He was running on battery power, he realized, much of it supplied by his own implants. Not all of it, though—Corva had said, with a straight face, that Orpheus would heat him to life using microwave energy.

Thinking of Corva brought home to him where he must still be: bagged in a shipping container en route to a world she'd called... was it Wallop? He could feel the survival bag wrapped around him like a blanket. In fact, even when he kept his head still there was a dizzying sensation of motion. Maybe it was simple vertigo. Maybe, though, the container was on the move.

"Corva?" Toby made a supreme effort and unbent himself, reaching up a hand to cautiously unzip the bag. Fearsomely cold air puffed in, waking him even further. He stretched his right arm out of the membrane and his fingers made contact with another bag. Corva wasn't moving, but he could feel the vibration coming from her cocoon: Wrecks was hard at work.

"Shylif!" There was no answer. Was it possible he was dead? And Corva too? What then would Wrecks be up to?

No, there was another possibility, and however unlikely it seemed, it must be true. Skinny little Orpheus had managed to awaken Toby before the others.

He reached up to stroke the denner's fur. "You're amazing, you know that?"

At that moment he felt a falling sensation and all around him the tightly wrapped packages shifted. He heard plastic wrap tearing— he hadn't been imagining movement after all. Then, with a bone-jarring thump, the container struck something and stopped moving.

"Corva?" he asked again. There was no response, just the purring of Wrecks. Orpheus, he suddenly realized, had fallen silent. It was Toby's own shivering that was sustaining his body heat now, and that wasn't going to last long.

He felt terribly weak, as though he'd been sick and bedridden for days. This was nothing like the cicada beds, which pumped you full of sugars and nanotechnology that would fix you as good as new before you even woke up. Toby retched, but nothing came out; his stomach was empty and demanding to be filled.

He reached out again, found Corva's knee, and felt around for her backpack. Opening it was hard, and he toppled over twice, scraping his chin on the corner of a crate. But inside he found some food bars and a bottle of water.

He brought out the food and water and eagerly devoured a bar. Then, he hesitated.

Corva and her friends had helped him, at no apparent profit to themselves. Then again, Ammond and Persea had seemed just as selfless at first. Maybe the stowaways had no agenda beyond simple human decency. Or maybe the fact that they'd tracked him between worlds, awaiting a chance to break him out of his captivity, simply meant they had their own use for him, yet to be revealed. Corva had hinted as much.

She had also promised to finish telling him about his family. Yeah, maybe—but now that he was free of Ammond and Persea's subtle censorship, he could surely find out the rest of the story himself. He didn't need Corva for that.

To hell with other people's agendas. There was one companion he knew he could rely on. He found another bar and offered it to Orpheus, who purred like crazy before attacking it. Toby gave a great sigh to quiet his inner arguers, and said, "Come on, Orph, let's see where we are. "He groped around for the twisty passage through the boxes; after a moment Orpheus got the idea, and with a chitter guided Toby into the correct gap. Moments later they were at the shipping container's airlock.

Toby patted along the side of the door until he found a control pad. As he touched it a little keypad glowed green, startlingly bright and the first thing he'd seen for... how many years would it be?

After his eyes adjusted he peered at it, and saw that it was reading a breathable atmosphere outside. Now that he was standing up he could feel the drag of gravity on him too, and it felt... well, just about normal, despite his weakness. They were either on a rotating station somewhere, or this was a pretty sizable planet. He ordered the lock to cycle and a few seconds later, the outer door opened.

It wasn't too bright out there, but he had to squint even so. What he was looking at wasn't at all clear. Light percolated in from the sides, but right in front of him was a kind of wavering, streaky darkness. It seemed somehow familiar but he couldn't figure out what it was.

Then a crooked line of white shot from on high down into plunging depths, revealing vast billowing clouds to all sides, and he saw that the streaks were runnels and beads of rain coursing down a transparent wall just a few meters in front of him. He only just had time to realize this before thunder banged off that wall; in the distance another bolt of lightning vaulted between two towers of cloud.

Toby was so busy gaping at the bottomless well of downpouring mist that he nearly toppled right off the lip of the shipping container. Swinging wildly, he managed to grab a frost-painted handle, and looked down. He was three up on a stack of containers; five more loomed overhead. This stack was just one in a row of them. The place must be a warehouse.

Grumbling to himself, Orpheus was already climbing nimbly down. Toby spared one more glance at the transparent wall, and was rewarded as a flash-flicker of lightning unveiled the scene for another instant. Clouds above, clouds below, blackness beyond them in all directions. And rain, rain in sheets and billows falling everywhere.

He made it, barely, down to the floor, and his landing rang it hollowly, as if it were a lightweight deck and not a floor at all. Everything in sight was made of plastic or the transparent stuff of the outer wall. Strange. Also strange was his sudden perception that the wall leaned out at quite an angle, and curved gradually to either side.

"Where are we?"

"We're on Wallop, mate."

He whirled and nearly fell. Jaysir laughed.

Scrawny he might be, but right now Corva's friend looked a lot better than Toby felt. His complicated cargo bot stood a few paces behind him, hoses and wires trailing behind it. "You're the first up, are you?" Jaysir continued.

"Uh, yeah." His voice barely worked; he'd sounded worse on Lowdown, but that was because of the air. His whole throat felt dehydrated.

Jaysir pursed his lips. "You're not waiting around? Corva and Shylif could use a hand, I'm pretty sure."

Toby looked down; until this moment he hadn't actually been seriously considering walking away. He met Jaysir's gaze. "I dunno. What would you do, in my situation?"

"Hmm." Jaysir scratched his chin, then ticked some points off on his fingers. "Well, first of all, you don't know anything. You don't even know where you are. You don't know where you're going—"

"I'm going to Destrier."

Jaysir paused, one finger atop another. "You're going to Destrier? No crap?" Then he laughed and shook his head. "She put you up to this? Or was it your idea?"

"Totally my idea. Mom's waiting for me. That's what Corva said. "

Jaysir resumed ticking off items. "... And you haven't got a clue what that means."

"Corva told me about my family, Jaysir. That Peter's the chairman, Evayne's alive too and my Mom... she's on Destrier. So, that's where I'm going."

"Maybe, but... listen, Toby, you can't just go from waking up to deep diving on the same day. It takes time to recover from hibernation. That's why the standard turn lasts a month. That's why nobody lives in the Weekly for very long... You can't just find a container bound for Destrier and climb in with your little guy. You're going to have to spend a few weeks in the city first—"

"I was only on Little Auriga for a couple of days! And you too!"

"Actually, we'd woken up two weeks ahead of time, while the city was still thawing out. Corva figured we needed the time to get our bearings, recover, and find you. She was right. And you—you'd had days asleep in your cicada bed while they moved you from the ship to the docks. Cicada beds are a lot easier on the system than denners, man. You can't just bed down again today."

Toby turned and looked away through the ranks of shipping containers. Everything Jaysir said might be true, but the more Jaysir tried to convince him to stay, the more Toby felt himself pulling away. "Okay sure," he said, waving Jaysir into silence. "Say you're right about all that. I've got some things I'm pretty sure I'm right about, too."

He imitated Jaysir, ticking points off on his fingers. "First of all, Jay, I'm not going to start trusting you just because you tell me you can be trusted. I fell for that once, I'm not going to do it again."

Jaysir made a kind of reluctant shrug of agreement.

"Second, you guys want something from me, but you're not telling me what it is. Tell me, and maybe I'll start trusting you!"

Now it was Jaysir's turn to look hesitant. "It's really up to Corva. This is her thing...."

"And you're, what? Along for the ride?" Toby shook his head. "Third, I'm totally dependent on you, just like I was dependent on Ammond and Persea. If you were really friends, you'd help me get set up on my own, and then ask me for whatever help it is you want."

Jaysir thought about it. "Okay, I can see that. Problem is, you've got no money, no idea how to survive on your own, and the instant you tell anybody who you are, you'll be jumped on by a hundred police-bots."

"So you say."

Now Jaysir was starting to look a bit desperate. "Say I let you go. What do I tell the others? Corva... Corva needs you, man."

"I'll be around. You can call me—" But Jaysir was shaking his head.

"We can't call you, you don't have a legal identity. Oh, I heard about this 'Garren Morden' alias, but you can't use it. And you can't use... your real name, either. Shouldn't even say it aloud." He glanced around at the blank boxes surrounding them.

"Then tell me what I have to do to avoid getting caught while I sort myself out."

"Pfaw! Why would I do that?"

Toby stopped, gently set down Orpheus, then reached inside his tunic for the object he'd carried since bursting into the water on Auriga. He held it up in the cold factory light, and was rewarded as Jaysir's eyes snapped to it with sudden intensity.

"This is a data block from Sedna. I don't know exactly how old it is in lockstep terms, but it was hidden in the back of a twentier—a bot from the original colony. You said you collect procedural computer code, Jay. I bet you've never gotten to hack something this old."

"Ah," said Jaysir. He hadn't looked away from the block.

"If you can help me get the data off of it, I'll give you whatever code's written into it. But only if you let me go."

Jaysir blinked and looked away. "What you need to do is buy a pair of tourist glasses. I'll give you our URNs and you can send me your glasses' address. So we'll be able to contact each other, but we won't be able to track you, and don't have to use your URN or name.

"Don't open any accounts, don't buy anything virtually, or do anything that requires an identity check! I have a list of places you can stay that won't ask. And you're going to need a cash card." He rummaged in his baggy trousers and came out with one. Handing it to Toby, he said, "This should last you a day or two. But you can't just go running off to Destrier! You need to know where you are and what's going on first. And it's a hell of a story to tell."

With Jaysir's unique identif ier, his URN, Toby would be able to phone, email, or—if they shared services—locate him when needed. Jaysir was offering him a way to deal with him and Corva and Shylif at arm's length. Suddenly he felt horribly guilty about taking off like this. But Ammond and Persea had been prepared to kill him....

"Don't stick your head up, it'll get shot off." Jaysir turned away. "I gotta figure out what I'm going to tell the others. It won't be pretty, let me tell you."

"Thanks, Jay. I will call you."

Jaysir grunted. "It's a small world. It's not like you can go very far." Then he thought of something. "Hey—whatever you do, don't use any Cicada Corp equipment!"

"Why—"

"Just, just don't! I'll explain when I see you." Troubled, but determined, Toby ducked his head in agreement, and walked away.

Dealing with Jaysir had worn him out. Toby felt tired and dizzy, and like his tongue and skin had been sunburnt. Even the dim lighting here was too bright, and as soon as he began to move he started puffing as if he'd just run a race. Cradling Orpheus, Toby plodded between the rows of stacked containers, peering about for a way out. With every step he took, he felt worse, and more guilty about leaving the others—especially Corva, whom he suspected would not be as understanding as Jaysir.

He'd seek them out as soon as he'd recovered from hibernation and felt a little safe and had some money, however one got that. Then, he'd pay Jaysir back for the cash card. He might even help Corva with whatever it was she wanted from him; but he had to find out what that was first.

There were bots working in the warehouse. In his condition he couldn't have hidden from them if he'd wanted to, but they ignored him. Maybe he could subcontract to them, the way Shylif did.

The general traffic of robots, automated cargo carts and moving cranes gave him a direction to follow, and shortly he emerged squint-eyed into what at first seemed to be hot sunlight. He shaded his narrowed eyes with his free hand, and looked up.

It wasn't sunlight. He wasn't outdoors, and this place was like nowhere he'd ever seen or heard of.

The warehouse entrance was one of a number of similar doorways that opened onto a circular plaza cluttered with shops and food stands, and crowded with people. So far so good. Around the plaza, tiers of heavily forested cityscape rose up in a sweeping curve, so for a second or two he thought he was at the bottom of a small, bowl-shaped valley. These weren't uncommon on Mars or the Moon, where ancient impact craters made perfect circular depressions that could be domed over.

This landscape's curve became vertical, and then kept curving, inward now, to close a couple of kilometers overhead. He wasn't in a bowl, but a bubble. At its very summit, its north pole, brilliant sun lamps pulsed with light and heat. There was even a single little white cloud hovering in the middle of the space.

Tongues of forest and towers of glittering window and balcony swept up for much of the upper hemisphere of the bubble he was in, but gradually they gave way to buildings that seemed to sit on the outside of the sphere. These thrust elevator shafts and escalators through the bubble's skin—and that skin was transparent wherever it showed.

Flickers of lightning beyond it brought him glimpses of billowing cloudscapes far larger than this sphere. And, in the distance, he thought he could make out the ghostly outline of a mottled moon nestled in the clouds: another sphere?

Something broke the symmetry of the curve, and it took him a while to figure out what it was. With one of those figure-toground flips of perspective, he suddenly realized that what he'd thought was a flat circular formation high up on the sphere was a hole — a gap in the geodesic curve. Along its edges, escalators and walkways led from his bubble into another, larger space. He even spotted an aircar sailing out of there. And, were those even bigger bubbles beyond?

Okay, he'd heard of aerostats—giant, spherical living spaces that could be floated in the atmospheres. Before he'd left Earth, there'd been a news report about some of the trillionaires wanting to colonize Venus by building such things. That had been amazing, but this—!

The bubble he was in was at least a kilometer across, yet it was attached to an unknown number of others, like one soap bubble clinging to a raft of others. If a single bubble-city could take flight, he supposed a knot of them could too, and so this raft hovered high in the atmosphere of some vast, dark planet.

When he could pull his eyes back to ground level, Toby blinked at a vision of chaos totally unlike the majesty that presided overhead. Here, craft stalls, food, and robot-part outlets were mashed together and half-piled over one another; there were carpet salesmen here, and wood-carvers, perfumeries, neon-lit bars, and shadier, slotted doors in ramshackle huts that were guarded by hulking milbots. People crowded everywhere, jostling one another and talking, shouting, arguing, and haggling. And what people!

He and Peter had watched all the old movies set in galactic empires and ancient solar civilizations. They'd devoured science fiction books from the dawn of spaceflight—and so, when they came to build the universe of Consensus, they had given it faster-than-light ships and a vast culture of aliens and evolving humans. All of that was impossible, of course: in the real Universe, no such thing could ever exist, for traveling between the stars was a multidecade affair for even the most advanced civilization. No matter how much wealth you had; no matter how much power; there could never be, in the real world, a marketplace where denizens of thousands of worlds and hundreds of cultures met. Nowhere could dozens of species and subspecies of human and alien crowd together to meet and trade and celebrate an empire of reason and commerce vaster than any solar system.

Yet here it was.

Most of the humans in sight were ordinary enough, but some were incredibly tall and stringy, others short and powerful, like the man who'd kept the denners on Auriga. Yet others were green-skinned, or scaly, or had become one with the machines that accompanied them. There were nonhuman shapes, too, though that was impossible: no intelligent alien life had been found within a hundred light-years of the Earth... at least, not in Toby's day.

He found he was grinning. The fantasy had been made real, not on Earth, but here in the vastness between the stars. The galactic empire he and Peter had dreamed about—as so many others had before them—had been built in the only place it could be, and in the only way it ever could: in lockstep time.

But he was dizzy, and nearly collapsed before he could make it to a nearby escalator. As he stood leaning on its handrail, letting himself rise through level after level of the bubble-city, he brought out the list of hostels and hotels Jaysir had given him. When he spotted the sign for one he gave Orpheus a tight hug and said, "We're homefree. Just a few more minutes and I'll order up a room-service meal like you've never seen."

Provided, of course, he had enough on his cash card for that.

Toby hadn't had time to find the cheaper lodgings available in the city; he'd walked into the first hotel on Jaysir's list that he could find. He'd never stayed in a hotel by himself before, but he got through the strangeness of checking in without having to use any biometrics or produce ID. It turned out not to be any more overwhelming than anything else that had happened to him lately.

The bed was deep and soft, the shower was hot, and there was plenty of good food available at the hotel buffet. He ate there alone, and snuck some generous portions back for Orpheus, who roused himself from a sleep of obvious exhaustion just long enough to wolf it all down.

He'd wondered how to deal with the denner's bodily functions, but at one point Orpheus disappeared and Toby found him splayed precariously over the toilet. He glared at Toby and so his human companion retreated with a muttered "sorry." It was quite hilarious, actually, but he stifled his laugh. Orpheus, he had begun to realize, had a real sense of dignity.

His feeling of having been sunburned proved not far from the truth. Toby's body seemed to be shedding all manner of dead material, so his skin started to itch and flake, some of his hair came out in the shower, and his kidneys were working overtime. Orpheus wasn't much better.

Still, he was eager to take the next step. His family was alive—all except his Dad. He had to get to them. Some kind of misunderstanding had made it seem like Peter had tried to have him killed, but that couldn't be right. He'd sort it out as soon as he figured out what was going on. Right now, the one place he knew to go was the planet Destrier, where his Mom was apparently wintering over.

He needed to know more, but there were no TVs or other screens in this world; data, music, and entertainment f lowed through people's glasses or implants. Toby had seen a stall that sold interface rigs down in the market, so once he felt able, he left Orpheus in the room for an hour while he went to buy a set of these.

Jaysir had suggested he buy a pair of tourist glasses. He did, but found they did little more than highlight local sights and were constantly popping ads up for this or that restaurant or gaming-room. Every time they did that he jumped or stumbled. He got back to the room okay, though, and plunked himself down next to a lethargic Orpheus. "Let's see if I can at least connect to you," he said to the denner.

Jaysir had mentioned in an off-hand way that the denners had interfaces, and sure enough when he looked at Orpheus through the tourist glasses, the denner sprouted icons and emoticons. His interface was pretty simple, actually: Orpheus could broadcast his location, could signify basic needs like thirst or a need to pee; and he had an alarm clock. It was for setting hibernation wake-up times.

The clock showed that it had last been set by a user named Guest. That would be Corva, he reasoned. The heavy man on Auriga had left the primary account wide open, so he quickly set the security levels on the alarm so only he could use it. So. That was done.

Now for the other thing he'd wanted to do.

"Search word McGonigal," he said. It seemed the easiest place to start—but Toby had no sooner spoken the word than his vision was filled with plane after plane of hovering pictures and hot-links to videos, movies, books. There were thousands.

He reached out hesitantly and tapped one of the virtual pictures, which spun and enlarged.

Who was this? Toby was looking at a middle-aged, bullet-headed, bald man with grim frown lines around his mouth. Next to him stood a similarly grim woman, of similar age, her face narrow and her eyes and mouth pinched and severe.

They looked like relatives, but from which side of the family? Had there been other Mc-Gonigals on Earth, who'd come to Sedna after Toby's disappearance?

Then he saw the picture's caption.

Peter and Evayne McGonigal, it said, inaugurating a new pilgrimage center on Cephus, Lockstep Year 32.

A rushing filled Toby's ears, and the room seemed to bend around him. He sat back cursing.

It was them, and yet not them. Instead of his brother and sister, here were their strange ghosts—specters not of the past, but of some terrible future of decline and severe disappointments. So they seemed, anyway, as they stared out at him: bitter, unsatisfied, even accusing.

He could barely breathe. The picture continued to hang there, perfectly still yet looming larger and larger in his vision. Toby tried to look Peter in the eyes, and it was like staring into the Sun—after just a glimpse he had to turn away, but when his gaze fell on Evayne's face, the same thing happened again.

His mouth was dry and he was panting as, with a frantic gesture, he wiped away the photos and the search term.

Who were those people? That uncompromising woman in her forties who'd looked so much like his mother—was it really Evayne? And the other one, whose eyes held accusation and so much adult impatience... was that Peter? Even their clothes and their glimpsed backgrounds—how many worlds, how many years lined the dizzying abyss down which he'd just looked? Years, decades of separation taunted him from just those two pictures.

He didn't know these people. He didn't want to know them; he wanted the family he'd had barely a month ago.

"Mrph?" He looked up, realizing he'd buried his face in his drawn-up knees. Orpheus's huge eyes held concern, and he reached to ruffle the denner's fur. "It's okay," he murmured. "We just need to... sort it all out."

He was doubly exhausted now, and lay back. Before he knew it he was waking up in his clothes, apparently having not moved a muscle for hours. Orpheus was curled up next to him; when he put on his glasses he found it was six o'clock in the morning.

"Aw, crap." His croaking voice woke up the denner, who yawned and stretched in a very cat-like manner, then stared at him expectantly.

They had breakfast, paid for the night's lodgings and, after that, they were almost out of money. Toby found himself sitting on the white-washed hotel steps watching Orpheus nose around the base of the decorative hedges. He had nowhere to go now, unless it was back to Corva with his tail between his legs. He could call Jaysir, but he was reluctant to play that card. The data block was pretty much the only leverage he had right now.

Or... he should just walk right up to the town hall and tell them who he was. He was the long-lost heir to the entire lockstep empire, after all.

And yet, and yet... there were those faces he'd seen in the photo. People with the names of his brother and sister, but utterly alien eyes. What if Corva wasn't lying?

If she wasn't, then not only Peter and Evayne were alive. Their mother was waiting in cold sleep for the day when he returned.

That was a terrible thought. He had to go to her.

The glasses pointed only to local sights. Amazing as those were—dozens of city spheres made up a kind of raft continent—the glasses wouldn't tell him anything about how to travel to other worlds. Apparently you needed to buy an upgrade for that. He thought about this for a while, then went back into the hotel.

"Excuse me," he said to the bot at the front desk, "how can I find out about flights to, well, a planet named Destrier?"

"That's easy, sir," said the bot in its perkily helpful synthetic voice.

"What you need to do is visit the pilgrimage center."

Chapter 7

Orpheus was like a lead weight wrapping Toby's shoulders by the time he found the place. It was a cathedral-like building sitting by itself in a plaza in one of the larger city-bubbles.

Getting here had been a magical, if exhausting, journey. Though there was public transit throughout the Continent (as the locals called the raft of bubbles), it mostly consisted of slide-walks and escalators. Toby had been carrying his denner for over an hour now, buoyed only by the occasional vistas of the Continent that opened out before him. Some of the city-bubbles were many kilometers in diameter, and each had others next to, above, or below it, so that the eye followed lines of city and forest up to dizzying perches far overhead, or down to cavernous depths. Outside it was a permanent, storm-lit night; Wallop, it seemed, was a nomad planet like Lowdown, orphaned somewhere between the stars. Yet it was a hub of commerce and culture for the lockstep.

Religion was clearly a major part of that culture. Men and women in white robes were lined up between velvet ropes, patiently waiting to enter the cathedral—if that was what it was. Toby could see none of the religious symbols he knew from Earth. The only repeating motif seemed to be carvings and statues of a seated man, perhaps a king on a throne.

The backdrop for the cathedral was a wall of tessellated glass that swept up a hundred meters or more. No lights glowed behind it, nor any lightning. He trudged over and shaded his hand to look through the glass.

Frost had painted the other side of it, but through gaps in this he glimpsed darkened buildings and snow-draped sidewalks. "Is that another lockstep?" he asked a passerby.

The man laughed. "Naw, it's the Weekly. It'll open up in four or five days."

"Weekly?" He was too tired to hide his puzzlement. The man tilted his head and peered at Toby.

"Where are you from that you don't know the Weekly? Lockstep 90/.25? Client to three-sixty?"

Toby shook his head. "Sorry, I'm from a, a little station."

"Must be." The man shook his head and walked away.

The line of pilgrims started at a set of tents where tearful people were saying goodbye to relatives and friends. They entered one tent, and came out the other side wearing robes. Apparently, they were required to leave their bots behind, too, because there was a fair number of these milling around the tents, but none in the lineup.

Toby approached a woman who was directing people. "Excuse me, I was told I could get to Destrier from here."

"Ha, ha, very funny," she said. "You can get fitted for robes that way."

"Okay, but seriously, can I get to Destrier from here?"

She stared at him. "Where else would we all be going?"

"How much does it cost?"

"Pilgrimage doesn't cost anything!" She seemed genuinely offended. "Who told you it did?"

"Then, I can just show up?" he said hopefully. She nodded.

"Just take the vows and find a role in the Order you're assigned to, and you can go."

Vows? Orders? He nodded politely, but stepped backward. "Uh, thanks. Maybe, maybe in a bit." Sure, you could get to Destrier for free—provided you joined some religion or other. Who knew what that would involve?

Disappointed, he was turning away when he spotted a commotion near the line. Was that an actual fight?

A small group of people had approached the line and were apparently handing out printed (physical, not virtual) pamphlets of some kind. This was being taken very badly by some of the ones in the queue; Toby couldn't make out all the words, but the pilgrims were shouting something about blasphemy, and the pamphleteers were saying something like, "Origin is false!"

Everybody around the tents seemed paralyzed with shock or indecision. That wasn't really surprising; Toby had seen no real violence since he'd arrived in the lockstep. Even now, he kept expecting bots to step in and separate the men and women who were shouting at one another, yet it wasn't happening.

Suddenly a pilgrim vaulted the line and struck one of the interlopers. Fists started flying. Toby crossed his arms and watched, increasingly uncomfortable with the fact that nobody was doing anything to stop it. He'd had to step in between Peter and Evayne on numerous occasions; it was what you did if you were a responsible adult. So where were the adults in this crowd?

A flicker of fair hair appeared among the fighting people. It was a young woman, maybe a year or two older than Toby, dressed in street clothes and carrying a shopping bag. She'd probably just been passing by, but now she was caught up in the mob.

One of the pilgrims grabbed her by the wrist.

Toby shouted, then found himself running across the plaza. Orpheus dug his claws painfully into his shoulders, complaining loudly. The man who'd grabbed the girl had raised his hand to slap her, but Toby got there just in time to grab him by the wrist and elbow, like his Dad had shown him.

The pilgrim let go of his intended target and tried to hit Toby instead, but Toby pulled down on the wrist he was holding and pushed on the elbow. The pilgrim went down on his knees just as a spitting Orpheus landed on his head.

"Run!" Toby caught a glimpse of the girl's face before she whirled and bolted. Then Toby too danced out of the reach of the gabbling, shouting mob. He ran back to the tent area, but by the time he felt he was safe and turned to look back, the girl was gone.

An hour later, Toby and Orpheus sat together at a sidewalk café while he tried to recover his strength. The whole incident had only taken seconds, and he hadn't even been hit, but he felt like he'd run a marathon. Orpheus wasn't much better. With his dwindling money, Toby was trying to revive them both with hot food.

He was wearing the tourist glasses, so the landscape around him was tagged and labeled, and he'd come to ignore all that information— but now the universal symbol for New Text Message suddenly appeared in the upper right of his field of vision. Startled, he said, "Somebody just texted me," to Orpheus.

A WTF? icon appeared over Orpheus's head. Toby laughed, then focused on the message flag. "Should I open it?" There were only three people on this world who might be contacting him.

NEED CASH? GOT A JOB FOR TODAY.

—SHYLIF

"Huh." Shylif, not Jaysir, and definitely not Corva. There was a kind of sting to that fact. She wasn't talking to him. Or maybe he was just making that up? "Oh, Orph, I'm getting paranoid. "

It was true he was already out of money. Jaysir's list had provided some alternative choices of lodging and Toby had looked at a couple of those while they walked. The cheapest was a stack of shipping containers just above the warehouse level; Orpheus had growled as they approached it.

He thought for a while, then shrugged and replied:

OKAY. WHERE DO I MEET YOU?

Shylif sent a map, and a little later Toby found himself down at the dock level of the city sphere, which was crowded with bots and machines, and almost empty of living people.

He spotted Shylif and raised his hand to wave—then lowered it and nearly ducked behind a pillar before cursing and stopping himself. Shylif was talking with Corva. After a minute or so she nodded to him and walked off to join a more-or-less human-shaped bot that handed her a bag of grippies and morphing tools. It poured a bunch of hand-sized swarmbots out of another bag and they hopped and danced around her feet. Wrecks swatted at these as they moved away.

It seemed Corva was working, too.

Toby shrugged off his misgivings and went up to Shylif. "Thanks for the job offer," he said, then added, "and sorry about running out on you guys."

Shylif laughed, a rich human sound among the otherwise mechanical noises of the docks. "I totally understand," he said. "I'd probably have done the same thing."

"But does she understand?"

"Corva'll come around. She's a bit like you— she needs time."

Toby had no ready comeback for that, so he just followed as Shylif set off through the maze of gantries, cargo racks, and rushing bots. Shylif seemed content not to talk, and soon Toby found himself saying, "So... what are we doing today?"

"Oh, just a little theft-recovery from Lockstep 270/2. "

It took Toby a moment to process that. "There's another lockstep on Wallop?"

"There's six that I know of. Two-seventy-totwo is a pretty big one, and it's also pretty aggressive. If you don't watch 'em, their guys'll raid our cities while we're wintering over."

"They... raid us?"

"Theft of resources and manufactured goods." Shylif sent him a sardonic look. "Yeah, I thought it was pretty weird when I first heard about it. But then again, everything about the locksteps is weird. "

"No, really?"

"Locksteps raid one another during hibernation periods," Shylif went on. "There're treaties forbidding retaliation—but they don't forbid recovery of the stolen material if you can find it. Some of three-sixty's missing supplies were spotted in one of 270/2's cities, so an expedition is being mounted to recover them."

"How did we get in on it?"

"I found a couple of bots that had been ordered to go after their owner's stuff," said Shylif. "They're city units, not really built for wintering-over conditions. So I offered to subcontract for 'em. We'll get paid one hundred fifty if we return with any of the bots' stuff, and two hundred if we return with all of it. I've got a manifest—here, I'll share it with you." An itemized list blinked into visibility in the corner of Toby's vision.

"That's it?"

"Well, no." Shylif looked a bit put out. "It takes a lot of time and effort to find opportunities like this."

"Can you teach me how to do it?"

Shylif grinned. "I can."

"Thanks."

"The ship's leaving from Portal Eighteen in twenty minutes. You're gonna need pressure suits. Are you bringing your denner?"

"I have nowhere to put him. I checked out of the hotel. Where do I get suits?"

"Hmm." Shylif grinned. "Let's make that your first test."

Twenty minutes to find a suit? Toby looked around, cursing under his breath. Shylif was brisk-walking away, seemingly ignoring Toby now that he'd given him a task.

"How the hell are we going to get suits?" he muttered to Orpheus. "I mean, maybe I can rent one, but you..." He tried to think of similar situations he'd been in, either on Sedna or in Consensus, but couldn't remember any. What would Shylif expect him to do?

Use the resources you've got. Which, right now, amounted to the his denner, the clothes on his back, and a pair of tourist glasses...

Of course! He lowered a mapping overlay onto his vision. He could see Portal Eighteen, about half a kilometer around the curve of the warehouse level. Toby did some queries as he ran after Shylif, and dozens of yellow flags popped up in his visual field, showing the locations of public pressure suit kiosks.

So Wallop was like Sedna: as with firefighting bots on Earth, pressure suits were one of those basic safety devices you had to have handy on a world like this. The atmosphere outside this bubble city was probably toxic, and you never knew when some accident or deliberate attack might pierce the city's skin. Suits were everywhere. All Toby had to do was pause at one of the brightly colored pillars and drag out the collapsed suitcase-like shape. There weren't any denner-shaped ones, of course, but he did find a bin full of survival balls. These were just sacks you could jump into and zip shut, but they had transparent windows and five or six grippies on the outside that could detach and act as hands or help you crawl.

"It's this or you wait for me here," he told the denner. Orpheus just blinked at him.

Portal Eighteen wasn't the solid metal airlock Toby had been expecting. Instead, when he reached the outer wall of the tall warehouse space where it was set, he found himself facing what looked like a giant heart valve: three flimsy-looking plastic flaps overlapped one another to cover a circular opening about ten meters across. As Toby joined Shylif under it he could hear wind whistling around the flaps. "Is that air moving out, or something else coming in?" he wondered aloud.

Shylif shrugged. "If it was coming in, we'd be dead now."

A heavy rail mounted in the ceiling ran through this insecure opening; hanging off the rail was a spindle-shaped transparent airship not much bigger than the shipping container they'd come to Wallop in. It was like some kind of deep-sea fish. He could see its internal machinery, and he could also see that there were no gas-bags inside it—it was just a set of metal hoop-shaped ribs with plastic stretched over them. Maybe the whole thing was one big gas-bag.

"Hey! What're you doing?"

They turned to find a man in a half-furled pressure suit striding up to them. He was tall and stick-like, with long limbs and a ratcheting way of walking. Loops of rope and belts festooned with fasteners bounced as he stepped up to glare at the only humans on the floor.

Shylif said nothing; was this another test? "We're here to work," said Toby, trying not to sound defensive.

"Oh, you're the replacements?" This from a woman who was standing about two meters above Toby's head. She'd been adjusting something at the bow of the airship. "We're on time, then!"

The man frowned at a point somewhere over Toby's head—reading his virtual tags, no doubt. "I dunno. The big one's flagged with a resume as long as my arm, but the kid's got no credentials at all. For all I know he's never been outside before."

Toby stuck out his jaw and tried to look bigger than he knew he was. "I've done hundreds of hours on the ice on Sedna."

The skinny man started to say something, but the woman overhead guffawed loudly. "That mined-out hulk? What the hell were you doing there?"

Toby thought about it. "Growing up," he said finally. Shylif was now struggling to suppress a smile.

"Aw, let's give them a chance, Casson," she said. "If they've done cold they might be okay." She strode down the gangplank, and Toby could see she was wearing an outfit similar to Casson's. She saw him looking and lifted her loops of climbing line and let them fall. "You need a Personal Flying Device and some cords. If you're replacing the Segentry bot you'll be on my team, lucky for you but bad for me if you don't perform."

Toby nodded. "I'm... Garren."

"This one's Casson. I'm Nissa. PFDs're over there. "Up close she looked fairly ordinary, except that her eyes were a striking, pale mauve. She pointed at a heap of brightly colored bins on the warehouse floor below the airship. Then she blinked. "Hey, what's that?" She grabbed at Toby's backpack.

Orpheus stuck out his head and hissed.

Toby tensed, but all Nissa did was shrug and say, "It's like that, is it? He stays on board when we go in." She shot a sidelong look at Casson, who shrugged.

"Okay." Maybe these people had dealt with stowaways before.

"All right, now get goin'!" Casson jabbed a thumb at a line of bots that was marching up a gangplank into the open side of the airship, which apparently had nothing but ordinary air inside it. "We're leaving in five."

Toby's heart had started pounding when he entered the airship. The thing was so flimsy; it faced him with the reality of where they were about to go. He barely noticed the pressure suit building itself onto his body and it wasn't until Orpheus gently seized his ankle with his teeth that Toby snapped out of his terror.

He bent to stroke the denner's head. "I'll be fine." When he straightened it was to see that they were already underway, sliding down the rail and through the city's sphincter. This was a disturbingly biological experience. Once the ship was outside, though, it bobbed comfortably in the air. Toby didn't know what made up Wallop's atmosphere, but whatever it was, ordinary air at room temperature was lighter. He dragged in a couple of deep breaths to calm himself, then took his first clear look at the planet he was on.

Right then he almost begged Casson to turn around and take him back. Since he'd climbed out of the shipping container he'd known, in an intellectual sort of way, that there was no surface to Wallop. Now, looking out the transparent side of the airship and down through clouds, with clouds below those, and basements of clouds on abysses of more cloud... he had to find something else to look at.

Shylif was sitting quietly, staring at nothing. Toby's eyes fell on Orpheus, who was also staring into the endless depths of coiling gray and black. If Orpheus had been a dog, his tail would be wagging. Toby had to laugh.

Shylif looked up, and Casson, who was up at the bow with Nissa, also heard the laugh and grunted. "Bots don't usually do that," he said. "Neither do first-timers."

"It's Orpheus," said Toby. "I think he likes it here."

"Orpheus? Good name. Maybe he always wished he had wings. Some of us are like that." Casson turned back to discussing the flight plan with Nissa.

Now Shylif came to sit next to Toby. He nodded at the darkness outside. "I spent most of my life on solid ground. Took me years to get used to these worlds."

"Plenty of them have solid ground, don't they?"

"Yeah, but... not trees, usually. Not forests."

"Ah." Toby looked down. "I miss Earth. Have, since we left for Sedna."

There was a brief silence between them, then Shylif said, "You gotta know that lots of people go through what you're going through. Except that most of them know about the locksteps in advance. But that sense of being ripped out of your world... that's actually pretty normal."

He paused, thinking. "What hangs over your head is not being able to go back. Earth's not the same place as when you left it. There's nowhere to go but forward."

Was he hinting that Toby shouldn't try to go to Destrier? If he was, he was being pretty roundabout with it. Toby wanted to ask him about the dark past that Jaysir had hinted at, but he wasn't sure how. "You came from outside the locksteps, right?"

Shylif nodded. "And now I can't return. The moment you step into this world, you give up everything you had before. It's like time burns it away before your very eyes."

"Then—why...?"

"Why come here at all?" Shylif turned sad eyes on Toby. "Some people treat it like a train to a better future. They hop on, and when they hear about some world or civilization that's come up that appeals to them, they step off. Some people think it's a way of leaving mortal time altogether and becoming eternal, but that's ridiculous. We all die. And some... some just get tired of wandering the halls of the dead, calling out to people who'll never respond. "

He started to walk away, but Toby said, "Hey. What's your connection to Corva?"

Shylif looked back. "She came to the docks looking for a way to get to Lowdown. Some of us stowaways were there—as well as other people who'd have eaten her for lunch. She needed help. I... needed somebody to help." He shrugged, a motion barely visible through his suit.

"Help to do what?"

Shylif shook his head, and headed aft.

There was no point in pressing; Toby knew he'd get no more from the man. With nothing else to do, he sat back with Orpheus, followed the denner's gaze into the darkness, and quickly became transfixed by what he saw.

He'd thought of the continent as self-contained, locked away from the environment it sailed through—but that wasn't the case at all. The piled-up bubbles sprouted gantries and balconies and docks and diving boards, and the air around and above them was full of darting, soaring shapes: airships, like the one he was in, but also aircraft, and even winged humans. Some of these were nearby, so he could make out what they were doing—they seemed to be engaged in some sort of sporting event as they swooped and soared within a volume defined by six giant, glowing hoops.

The continent was a collision of lanterns, or a surf of glowing pearls hanging untroubled amid Wallop's storms. The cities' curving sides cradled the white of towers and the green of cultivated jungles that raveled them like verdigris staining a glass ball.

Wisps of dark cloud began drifting across this vision as the airship picked up speed. Toby was too excited to be tired now; he tore his gaze from what was behind them, and as he did he spotted something. Far, far away, in the darkness beyond the Continent, a tiny yellow speck played peekaboo from behind the black skirts of a thunderhead a hundred times its size. With a jolt he realized that this tiny dot of light was another city. Now that he could use it for scale, the rest of the hammer-heads and towers of billowing, lightning-lit vapor surrounding him were suddenly revealed as utterly gigantic, way bigger than mountains—as big, it seemed, as worlds.

Way, way up above this cloud deck lightning momentarily silhouetted a tiny black dot against the highest of the charcoal-colored clouds. Then the lightning was gone leaving cut-out thunderhead shapes against a velvet, star-spattered night.

With this he realized they'd been rising quite quickly; the continent was a smear of yellow far below his feet. They rose and rose through the stratified layers of Wallop's atmosphere, and eventually the stars became regular companions. They'd left the lightning far below, so it was by starlight that Toby came to see the horizon of Wallop. The little airship seemed surrounded by vast towers of black, but through gaps in these he could see similar thunderheads foresting the distance in smaller and smaller ranks. On any reasonably-sized planet those ranks would have lowered steadily to fall below the horizon line, but according to the tourist glasses Wallop was somewhere around the size of Neptune, so they simply became smaller and smaller until they merged in a blur at infinity. Staggered by distance and scale, Toby fell silent and just watched.

All the while, the distant city grew larger, like a blackened crystal ball, empty of prophecies. "It's not lit up," Toby said, and now he knew he sounded worried.

"It's wintering over." Shylif had returned and was standing next to him. "No need for lights when everybody's asleep. 'Course, its reactors are still keeping it warm enough to float. But the air up there is pretty calm; it's the best place to park a city if you want to avoid the storms for a decade or two." He pointed, and now Toby could see that the city-sphere trailed hundreds of fine thread-like cables into the depths below it, like some technological jellyfish. "Those strips filter-feed trace amounts of metal and minerals out of the air. Takes decades to accumulate enough for a month's industry."

"Okay," Nissa called from the bow, "here's how this works. Those boys," she nodded up at the black bowl of the sky, "intercepted some of our cargoes while we wintered over. The government doesn't care. It's a civil matter—lost property, and all that. So the owners have to recover it. They've sent their bots to do that." She pointed her chin at the motley crowd of household bots and bulkier worker drones milling in the back of the airship. "Whatever it is they've lost is worth more than a bot or two, 'cause they risk losing them and getting nothing back. Casson and I are along because it's against all kinds of rules, laws, and treaties to invade somebody else's wintering habitat using bots. Those same laws say that you can't deny shelter and life-support to a visitor. So we can walk right in there and get the stuff, and the bots can come with us."

Toby frowned doubtfully. "What if they resist?"

"If they really wanted to resist, we wouldn't get within ten kilometers of the place," said Casson. "They don't want a war with the lock-step. All they can do is bare-faced lie and say they don't have the stuff. And since we know where it is, they can't stop us walking in and taking it."

"Okay."

The city loomed overhead like a perfect thundercloud. Casson switched on a powerful spotlight and they searched for a while until they found a landing platform that stuck a good hundred meters out of the city's flank. You could have landed an ocean liner on it, yet Casson set their little airship down right in the center as if claiming the entire space.

As they drifted in, Toby wondered how they were going to come to a stop; he started as, with a clang, six bots fell or jumped off the underside of the airship. They must have been holding onto it all this time. They carried cables that they proceeded to unreel as they searched for attachment points. There were plenty of these, and in seconds they'd secured the airship.

Toby started to follow the others to the hatch, but Orpheus stopped him by weaving in between his feet, causing him to nearly trip. "Hey! Stop it. What—" Orpheus skipped back to the nose of the airship, pressed his snout against the transparent plastic and planted his paws on either side, looking for all the world like a little man staring out. Toby paused, laughed, and went to join him. There was a traffic jam at the hatch anyway; he had a moment.

The gameworlds he'd crafted with Peter had contained nothing like this. The boys had plundered centuries worth of science fiction and fantasy art to build their virtual worlds. They'd generated thousands of planets, from vast ringed monstrosities laced with rainbows of cloud, to airless chunks of pure gold orbiting close to yellow stars and roaring with leonine light. They'd imagined desert worlds and water worlds, jungle planets and glacier-bound icescapes. Nothing they'd done had prepared Toby for the three actual worlds he'd encountered since awaking in the lockstep. Nothing could have prepared him for what he was seeing now.

The airship looked like a glass tube lying on its side on a shelf that, no matter how broad it was, still seemed precarious. They were perched at the very top of this world's atmosphere. The delicacy and mesmerizing detail of a starlit cloudscape lay below them, all the more hypnotic because the peaks and out-flung arms of vapor appeared perfectly still. It was like the entire world was wintering over.

Toby had a flash of vision then, an image of himself curled up and as still as this for the past thirty years—no, more: motionless and waiting, for fourteen thousand...

Just for that one moment, he felt equal to this place, for the city was only doing what he'd already done. Then Shylif called his name and he had to turn away.

"This way." He left Orpheus on the ship, but made sure he was in his survival ball just in case. Then he followed space-suited human figures, and incongruously ordinary-looking bots, across the stillness of the platform and through a set of gigantic, half-open doors. Apparently the city wasn't worried about maintaining its internal atmosphere right now; he saw other open portals at intervals around the curve of the dark interior.

Here were city towers, houses, and trees, all in a very different style from the ones in the Continent. "They're sort of Mayan," he commented.

"What's Mayan?" asked Shylif.

"Before your time, I guess." Thankfully, it was hard to make out details in the darkness; he didn't really want to feel the oppressive gaze of all those empty windows on him. How many frozen human forms were curled up behind them, waiting out the years of what, to them, would feel like a single night?

That made him think of what Shylif had said earlier, about "wandering the halls of the dead, calling out to people who'll never respond." Jaysir said he had waited thirty years for his lost love to awaken again. Chilled by the thought, Toby hurried after the others.

The fans of light cast by the bots' headlamps were easy to follow, so he jogged after them across frosted, snow-drifted balconies and ramps. Soon he saw where they were going: an incongruous heap of crates lay half-submerged in snow near a frozen fountain. Without ceremony, the bots began rooting through the boxes, tossing aside the ones that, presumably, weren't owned by their masters.

"That's it?" Toby watched the free-for-all in puzzlement. "We just pick 'em up and go home?"

Shylif laughed shortly. "You want it to be exciting?"

"Well... maybe not."

"Anyway, it's not like they're not watching us." He pointed, and Toby, looking where he indicated, experienced a sudden heart-stopping shock. Somebody was standing there, in the shadows. It wasn't a bot, but a space-suited figure, human-shaped. It stood as still as the icicles that hung above it like Damocles's sword, its metal arms crossed, feet planted wide, face-plate blank and dark.

"Wh-who's that?"

Shylif turned away. "A sentry, a keeper... call him what you want. This lockstep has them. They walk up and down the ramparts of the city, twenty years alone.... If that one wanted us dead, we would never have made it this far."

"You boys got a manifest?" Casson's voice broke Toby out of his uneasy distraction.

"Yes," said Shylif. He called up the list of crates he and Toby were to haul. There weren't too many, but still, they'd have to make several trips. Toby cut a wide berth around the other bots, which were tumbling whatever they didn't want into a broad debris field around the central mound of boxes. He quickly found the first of the crates, heaved it onto his shoulder, and began to make his way back to the airship.

It was on his third trip that he began to realize how weak he still was. He'd just come out of hibernation, after all—and not your normal, run-of-the-mill thirty year sleep, either. That wry thought made him laugh, and drop his crate.

He was sitting on it when Shylif came by, toting a much bigger box. "Tired?"

"I'll hire you to carry this one back too."

Shylif laughed, but didn't take him up on the offer. After hibernation, he was probably nearing the last of his strength, too. Toby took a deep breath and hoisted his box to follow.

This was a different lockstep from Peter's. Shylif had said that there were a number of them here on Wallop—and why shouldn't they be scattered throughout the Universe? The name 270/2 described a timing ratio different than three-sixty—Maybe they all ran on their own frequencies, and those might or might not ever sync up. Also, they might have been started at any time during the past fourteen thousand years. Even a lockstep full of human beings just like himself might have a culture and traditions—not to mention language and technologies—thousands of years removed from Toby's. The mere thought made his head whirl, but all he had to do was glance around to know it must be true.

He struggled under the weight of the last crate on his shoulder, and barely registered Orpheus's greeting when he reached the airship. The other bots all made it back with their cargoes and Nissa cast off. Then she and Casson chattered on about the thieving habits of decadent locksteps as they turned the ship's nose into a canyon of open black air and began the long dive back to the Continent. Fatigued as he was, Toby barely heard them.

Shylif sat with him in companionable silence as they sailed back to the raft of cities. Somehow this easy quiet made Toby decide to trust the older man in a way he'd never quite managed with talkative Ammond. When they reached the city-spheres and docked, Toby was able to unload his share of the crates himself, and took payment on the spot from Shylif.

Once they were out of their suits and the dock was behind them, Shylif said, "Give me a call tomorrow. I'll show you how to find bots that want to subcontract."

Toby grinned. "Sounds good. And, Shy, thanks."

"Don't mention it. No, seriously, don't let Corva know." He rolled his eyes. "I'll talk her around. But give me a few days.

"Thanks."

In a kind of daze, he walked out of the warehouse district and rode an escalator up into the city. Orpheus chittered and danced about, obviously glad to be back on what passed here for solid ground. Toby smiled vaguely at him, but his gaze kept drifting. He was thinking about how vastly different the locksteps might be, and how strangely familiar this one seemed. The people, the buildings... it was all bizarre and alien, this bubble-city and the civilization it cradled—but there remained that strange familiarity.

It hit him when a woman passed him wearing a completely recognizable outfit of tunic and leggings. He spun, staring at her as she receded, and then he swore, and laughed, and swore again.

He'd seen that apparel just a couple of months ago. In fact, he'd helped to design it.

In creating Lockstep 360/1, his brother Peter hadn't merely been inspired by the culture, customs, and technologies of the game-world he and Toby had created together.

Lockstep 360/1 was Consensus.

Chapter 8

Toby and Peter had built a world together.

It hadn't been fun.

If you were the right kind of rich, and living on Earth, you could afford those things the rich needed: gated communities, 24/7 security bots, and human bodyguards who came with their own micro-armies of hand-sized flying guns and gnat-shaped spies. You could move through the world in your own little bubble of safety this way—if you were the right kind of rich.

The McGonigals weren't that kind of rich.

Dad had made his fortune in salvage—the deep-sea kind. His company hunted down methane clathrates and CO
2 sinks in ocean trenches, and converted their carbon to less volatile forms. Nobody wanted a repeat of the Big Belch, when the Arctic oceans had vomited up millions of years' worth of greenhouse gases in just a few short decades, undoing two generations' work in reducing CO
2 emissions. Temperatures had shot up to intolerable levels after the Belch; small consolation that the frantic international effort to build orbital sunshades had finally kick-started an offworld civilization.

Dad called himself a lowly greenhouse gas exterminator, but he'd made enough doing it to approach the threshold of being noticed by the truly wealthy. Mom was a garbage designer; it was her genius at optimizing the wastes of one industrial process so that you could sell them as inputs to another, that had ultimately made possible the colonizing of Sedna. Nobody else could have built the super-efficient resource management system that was the key to the colony's success. Toby's parents had skills that were perfect for settlers taking on a hostile environment at the edge of the Solar System. But they had never planned to go there.

If Dad had become just wealthy enough to be noticed by the more condescending of the trillionaires, he'd also become just wealthy enough to be noticed by those who preyed on them.

So one bright spring day, Toby came home to find the front door of their mansion smashed in. The nanny was dead on the kitchen floor. Toby spent a long time staring at the blood matted in her long blond hair, how it stuck to the tiles, until he suddenly realized that Peter was missing.

All he could clearly remember now was that he'd run through the house, shouting Peter's name. Later, policemen and detectives had shown up—lots of them. Mom and Dad were there, and Evayne too. Evayne had tightly clutched her plush toys, peering over their heads as they (minor robots as they were) also peered around. The toys had known something was wrong, and they'd gone into traumacounseling mode as soon as the police arrived. Evayne had spent the next month listening to their soothing voices, and talking to them, and with that and the right kind of pills, she'd come out of the whole thing just fine.

For Toby, the only thing that kept him from screaming himself awake at night was full participation in the investigation. He had to know everything that was being done; had to go with Dad to the police station to hear the latest updates. He learned all about the kidnapper culture that had developed out of the unholy marriage of interplanetary organized crime and a highly polarized society where you were either rich and independent, or destitute and indentured.

He remembered whole days of the search, entire conversations with his parents and with Evayne. But like the day of the kidnapping itself, he could barely recall the day Peter had come home.

The kidnappers were dead. Peter had seen them go down in a spray of gunfire. By the time that had happened, he'd been with them long enough that he'd started to bond with them, or so the psychiatrists said. Even though his captors promised to kill him if his parents didn't pay the ransom, Peter had begun to trust them, even grudgingly agree with their claim that they were justified in kidnapping him. The husband and wife team was poor, after all—deeply and irrevocably poor. There was no hope for them ever climbing out of that by legal means. Society was at fault here, not them, Peter insisted.

The kidnappers hadn't told Peter that they'd killed the nanny. Toby remembered the moment in the interview room when Peter found out. He'd been sitting there defiant, tears in his eyes, after screaming insults at the detectives. They'd murdered his friends, he accused. They were the monsters here.

"How can you say that?" the lead detective had burst out. "They killed Maria Teresa."

Peter had just blinked at him.

"Your nanny," the detective said. "They killed your nanny when they took you."

"Stop it, he's only eight years old," Dad said.

It was too late. Toby could see it in Peter's eyes, like a sudden crumbling. He'd gotten very quiet after that.

The quiet stretched for days, then weeks. Psychiatrists came and went. Mom and Dad had been distraught during the kidnapping, but now that it was over, a deeper despair seemed to be settling on them. Peter no longer smiled, and so neither did they.

Evayne was okay. She had her trauma-counselor toys. They tried these on Peter, and they helped a little. But nothing really worked, and Toby knew it even if Mom and Dad didn't. Somebody had to do something for Peter, and whatever it was, it would have to be just as huge as the kidnapping itself had been.

It took him four months of hard work before he was ready to bring Peter in. Toby had pressed Dad to buy him the very best simbuilding software. Its distant ancestors had been a whole raft of game-engines, 3-D modeling programs and movie-making packages. You could build entire universes with this stuff. But Toby had decided to start small.

"It's the house," Peter said. It was his first visit to Toby's world. For weeks he'd been practically climbing the walls from impatient curiosity. He'd known Toby was up to something, but his older brother wouldn't say what. Now he'd finally donned the link glasses (he wasn't old enough for direct implants) and had flipped into the virtual world Toby had made—and here was the very last thing he'd expected to find there.

They'd sold the house, of course. There was no going back to that place for any of them— and yet, Toby had recreated it, in as perfect detail as he could remember. It sat alone on a gray plane under an equally gray sky. He and Peter were also standing on that plane, about thirty meters from the house.

"Why'd you do that?" Peter whined. "Why is that here?"

"Don't worry, we're not going in," Toby told him. He put a hand on his brother's shoulder. "You and I are going to build something."

"What?" Peter was still staring at the house, eyes wide.

"We," said Toby, "are going to build a world around this house. It's going to be a world where nothing bad could ever happen in this place. It's not going to be the world we've got now. It's going to be the world we wish we had."

Despite all his efforts, he hadn't thought this would work. Truth be told, he'd built the virtual house mostly to work through his own bad memories. Toby fully expected Peter to rip off the interface and not speak to him for the remainder of the week.

Instead, Peter said, "We need a wall."

"Maybe," Toby admitted grudgingly. "But what if we built a world where we didn't need a wall?"

Peter had looked at him, startled. Toby knew he had him hooked.

So Consensus was born.

Toby's first run with Nissa and Casson netted him enough money to live for three days. He spent the time looking for more work and exploring the town. He felt vaguely guilty at avoiding Corva and her friends, but he also felt inexplicably angry at them, like it was their fault that he had to feel guilty at all. It was confusing.

He'd lucked out and discovered a little bedand-breakfast in the midlevels of the continent. It was a house, of sorts, reminiscent of the dwellings he'd seen once on the island of Santorini, before the family had left Earth. Narrow lanes and stairways led up the steepening curve of the sphere where apartments and condominiums piled up overtop of one another. The bed-and-breakfast was at the end of a f light of steps that rose between two high walls. There was a little landing, and opposite the notch that led to the steps was a doorway surrounded by tangled vines. The proprietors looked like a pair of young, fit newlyweds—but they assured Toby they were both in their eighties, having immigrated to the Lockstep from the inner solar system some six thousand (real) years before. They had led him to a very nice bedroom that looked out on the storm-ridden sky, told him supper would be at six, and left him and Orpheus alone.

He knew he should be learning more about the lockstep civilization, but where could he start other than with his brother and sister? Yet he had only to glimpse a photo or video of Peter or Evayne as grownups and his heart started to thump painfully. It was impossible to look at them. He didn't want to know they were real. So, instead of broadening his knowledge of the year fourteen thousand, he plotted how he was going to get to Destrier, where his mother waited for him.

Nothing would be easier than to announce his presence to the world. He should just get it over with, but his mouth turned dry at the very thought of telling somebody who he was. It wasn't the idea of suddenly being famous or important that terrified him; nor was it the possibility that Peter and Evayne didn't want him around for some reason. It was the prospect of actually being reunited with them—or, really, the colorless middle-aged versions who'd replaced the incandescent children he knew as Evayne and Peter.

Luckily, he had Orpheus. He and the denner were getting to know each other. Orpheus was very cat-like, and he'd obviously made his choice where Toby was concerned. He'd romp away to investigate some bush or staircase winding down the terraced interior of the city-sphere, and when he disappeared from sight Toby would be seized with a sudden, terrible anxiety that he wouldn't come back. But he always did—often with some pretty girl oohing and aahing after him.

"Orph, are you trying to set me up?" he'd muttered after one of these encounters. Orpheus had sent him an enigmatic stare, then flounced away again.

The denner's own interface wasn't keyed to verbal commands or gestures. It read Orpheus's pupil dilation, stance, and other attentional factors, as well as pheromones and major motions. It tracked his circadian rhythms and energy use, and then translated all that it saw into terms Toby could understand. He knew when Orpheus was hungry—well, that was easy. But he could also piggyback on the denner's reactions to the people around them. Orpheus would scan the crowd with a quick twitch of his head, and then tags would blossom over the heads of everybody in sight: green for those people Orph thought were trustworthy, red for those who weren't. Other colors appeared too, standing for assessments Orpheus had made but that Toby couldn't now (and maybe never would) understand.

He'd been talking to Orpheus all along, but after a couple of days with the interface Toby realized he was no longer saying things half-rhetorically, the way you did to pets. He'd stopped assuming that Orpheus didn't understand him, because it was becoming very plain that the denner did—just not in the way a human would. Orph saw the context of Toby's speech, things like whether he was talking because he was nervous or socially cued by the situation he was in; his emotional state; even, broadly, what it was he was trying to get out of speaking. All without understanding a single word. And the glyphs and icons that twirled around Orpheus's head like pain-stars over a cartoon character told Toby as much about him.

And so yes, it became obvious that when Orpheus dragged yet another girl out from behind some bush or shop-door, he really was trying to set Toby up.

Now, even though he couldn't bear to open the books about his family or watch the many movies, Toby felt he was finally ready to explore the world he and Peter had built.

"Thanks for coming." Jaysir stood outside Toby's door, his bot—less of a bot, more of a mobile contraption—taking up much of the hall behind him.

Noticing this, Toby poked his head out the door to look around. "My landlady doesn't like visitors. Particularly bots."

"Well, you shouldn't have said to meet here, then." Jaysir stood waiting until Toby moved aside, then came in and plunked himself in the room's only armchair. This left Toby the bed to sit on. Orpheus slunk as far from the cargo bot as he could get, while Toby rehearsed the things he wanted to ask Jaysir.

"Where is it?" Jaysir leaned forward eagerly. "You said you'd let me read it."

"Did you tell Corva where I'm staying?"

"No... but I might have, if I'd seen her this morning. She's not hunting you down or anything, you know."

"Of course not, I didn't mean—well, it's just that..." Toby decided to quit while he was behind. "Anyway, I'm glad you came by." Toby brought out the data block and held it up.

Jaysir leaned forward to examine it without touching it. "Where'd you get it? Brought it with you on that little ship?"

"They had it. The people Ammond and Persea were meeting with on Auriga."

Jaysir's eyes met Toby's. "You should have told me that right off."

"Why? It was buried in the brain of a twentier—an old mining bot. Ammond's friends used the bot to see if I was who I said I was. Got me to wake it up."

"Wait, what? Explain!"

Uncomfortable with Jaysir's suddenly intense attention, Toby recounted the events in the underwater house on Auriga. Jaysir had him go through the sequence in detail, twice. Then he sat back, thinking.

"It never struck you as odd that they tested your identity with the bot?"

Toby shook his head. "Why would it? The twentier was probably the only thing they could get that dated back to my time on Sedna. How else would they verify my ID?"

Jaysir snorted. "By telling you to command any bed anywhere on any lockstep world!" He waved at the one Toby was sitting on. "That one, for instance. Haven't you even tried to wake one up, reset its clock?"

"You told me not to." He had that feeling of things moving too fast for him again. "Why? Because it's a Cicada Corp bed, like—"

"—Like every other legal hibernation bed in the seventy thousand worlds. Which means you should be able to command it: start it up, shut it down, change its schedule to whatever you want. You sure you never tried?"

"Yes..."

"Good."

Toby got off the bed and knelt beside it. It looked like a standard pedestal bed, but the base had a label on it with some kind of iridescent insect-shape. A cicada, dimwit, he told himself. There were various hatches and ports in the bottom too.

"There're other locksteps, right?" he asked. "Do they use these?"

"Well, not these. Not McGonigal beds. Those are locked to our frequency. And using other beds in our lockstep is... well, not strictly illegal, but they make it damned inconvenient if you try.

Jaysir knelt next to him. "You don't have an interface for this, do you?"

"You mean, in my glasses? No..."

"Well, that's part of the mystery, I suppose. But these things do have voice activation too. Anyway, it's a good thing you haven't tried it."

"So you said. But why?" Toby got up, and this time he took the armchair.

Jaysir didn't seem to notice. "Why do you think those people who had you used the twentier to test you? And why do you think they did the test in that house, in an underwater room?"

"Well, I..." Auriga had been such a strange and exotic place, it had never occurred to Toby that meeting in the dockside house would be considered in any way unusual there.

"The bot wasn't connected to the Cicada Corp network, not then, and maybe not ever. It pre-dated it. But it didn't pre-date your biocryptography. And the house was shielded, at least by the water and maybe by other countermeasures. It was a safe place to test you."

"Why safe? Safe from what?"

"Think about it. What would happen if you commanded the bed you're sitting on?"

"I don't know. I don't know anything about them."

"They're all networked, Toby. The first thing it would do would be announce to the rest of the network that Toby Wyatt McGonigal had just switched it on! Don't you think that little piece of information might just be... important to some people?"

"You mean they... that Peter and Evayne would find out where I was?"

"Exactly."

"All this time I could have contacted them just by saying 'hi' to any old bed?"

"—Which is the last thing you should be doing right now, trust me."

Toby crossed his arms. "Didn't we talk about whether I trust you? And the answer was..."

"Okay, okay!" Jaysir hopped up and down on the bed, looking agitated. "Just—just wait. Wait until you know more about what's going on. Please. If not for me, then for you."

Toby glowered at him, but somehow, knowing that contact with his family was literally a word away made him feel safer—and willing, for the moment, to hear Jaysir out.

"So this is actually a hibernation bed?" It looked perfectly ordinary, until you examined the base.

"Stuff comes out of the hatches when you're asleep," said Jaysir absently. "You know, same way a space-suit builds itself onto you. The bed'll build its cocoon on you, and not even wake you up."

Toby remembered Ammond telling him that the nanotech and artificial organs that managed hibernation had been perfected over thousands of years. Now, though, he realized that while it might have been refined over aeons, probably every version had been commissioned and paid for by one client: the eternal Cicada Corp.

As far as the many civilizations on Earth and the other non-hibernating planets were concerned, the McGonigals had always been here. They predated the post-human artificial life-forms; they'd inhabited these spaces before, during, and after the settling of all the nearby star systems.

Jaysir was right about one thing: he didn't know nearly enough about anything yet. It was hugely tempting to interrogate Jaysir now, but he didn't even know where to start, and how could he trust anything Jay might tell him? He'd have to investigate Lockstep 360/1 by himself—just as he'd already begun to do by striking out on his own.

"Jay, am I right in thinking that this," he nodded at the bed, "is the most reliable investment in the Galaxy?"

"Hmm? Oh, of course! Stable over thousands of years, and the McGonigals make sure that they own or otherwise control the lock-step technology everywhere, no matter how many strange mutations of culture and biology it gets passed through." Jaysir laughed. "They can do this because they have the time."

"Then what about the denners?"

"Come on, when you're talkin' thousands of years, and thousands of worlds and cultures, something's gonna slip through the cracks. There are other empires with their own rules, and there're... things... out there so, powerful they can completely ignore the McGonigals. There's even better hibernation technology that sometimes finds its way back into the lockstep, in forms the McGonigals can't control. Denners are a great example of that. They came from Barsoom; their ancestors were cats and otters that were genetically altered to tolerate ice age conditions. They could probably have survived on the prehuman Mars, if there'd been anything for them to eat. All they need to do the job of the cicada beds is a neural implant to improve their internal clock— and an upgrade on their synthorgans to project heat for waking a companion. You could theoretically modify a human to contain all the tech and not use a bed at all—but the beds can detect that kind of mod, and it's illegal. You'd have to never use a bed again if you got modded that way, and that's just not practical. But the denners—they give you the option."

"Anyway, lemme see that data block."

Toby moved it away. "First of all, what are you going to do with it? What if it's got stuff on it you could, well, sell? Or blackmail me with?"

Jaysir squinted at him. "Do you even know what a maker is?"

"Uh, yeah." Jay had told him a bit about them when they'd first met, and since then, Toby had looked it up on the public net. Makers valued personal autonomy over everything else. The maker ethos was to build everything you used, and not to rely on money at all. Makers might own bots—even lots of them—but they tried to be their own microeconomies and microecologies. Toby wouldn't have been surprised if it turned out that Jaysir's walking contraption made food for him as well as serving as a mobile hibernatorium. Of anyone he was likely to meet, a maker was probably the least likely to want to steal something from him.

"I want to look at the firmware and design," Jay continued. "Maybe I can use it. I don't care about the data! But it's really old and probably incompatible with modern systems. Same with your glasses, so hand 'em over too if you want them to work properly. Yes, yes, don't be so reluctant! Why would I use a subtle ploy to track you or bug your stuff if we could have just knocked you on the head back on Auriga?"

Warily, Toby handed over the frames.

Jaysir folded his legs under him and put the block and the glasses on the bed-cover. Then he waved over his bot, which began efficiently laying out various small instruments and tools in a half-circle around him.

He started with the glasses. At first Toby tried asking him some of the other questions he'd been accumulating, but Jaysir just shrugged them off. He was concentrating. So, with nothing else to do Toby had to just sit back and watch.

After about a half an hour Jaysir flipped the glasses back to Toby. "Try 'em now." He slid them on and tapped the arm to wake them up.

Tags bloomed into view everywhere: hovering (apparently) in the bed itself, in the walls and beyond, where he glimpsed a ghostly half-visible map of the city and continent beyond. The mundane tags he'd seen through the tourist glasses were still visible, but now there was so much more. Jaysir's bot was festooned with tags and labels, as was Jaysir himself—social media hooks, mostly, in his case. Even the chairs had virtual labels that indicated who owned them, where they were, and warned of prosecution if they were taken off-site or damaged.

"Oh," said Toby, trying to look around at everything at once. His former sense of the lockstep world being strangely unsophisticated was quite wiped way: the whole place was alive in the virtual realm. This really should have come as no surprise; Toby had grown up with virtual and augmented realities and had been missing them since he awoke here. Still, so much was strange in the locksteps. The missing virtual layer had just been one more difference.

"Better, no?" Jaysir was attaching fine wires to the data block, so he couldn't see the expression on Toby's face, which Toby figured was probably a good thing.

Only a minute or two later, Jaysir hissed, "Yeess! I got it!" Even as he said these words, a virtual menu was coalescing above the block. "Data, data, you got data, Toby."

It was a confusing muddle, though. Toby saw dozens of giant backup files, each indicated by a translucent safe icon (complete with a little combination dial). Knowing twentiers as he did, he supposed these would contain endless video of the thing digging—digging trenches, digging holes, digging in trenches and holes. But there were other files, too.

He sucked in a breath. "It can't be!"

Jaysir had climbed to his feet and was trying to drag his bot onto its. He turned, and frowned. "What? You recognize something?"

"Some of these files... they're game-saves."

"Games?" Jay shook his head. "Some games are on there?"

"Not just some games, Jay. The game.

"These are versions of Consensus."

Toby had issued his brother a challenge: imagine, then build a world where he could be safe. The first thing Peter made with the Consensus tools was a cathedral of weapons, whose every brick contained a loaded gun barrel and every pillar, a bundle of blades ready to leap out and strike. It was munitions all the way down, and walls and locked doors, too, with roving sentry tanks and swarming drones and trapdoors. It was a magnificent hymn to paranoia, this cathedral, and outside its walls nothing grew: Peter had annihilated nature in this universe, just in case.

Of course, Toby had anticipated something like this, so he'd set the meta-rules by which they'd have to operate. So, as Peter was excitedly touring him through the place, it came as no surprise when one of the sentry tanks failed to recognize Peter as the owner, and blew them both to smithereens with one blast of its ion cannon.

It was more than a year before Toby was able to suggest (and Peter was able to hear), "Why don't you just build a world where nobody would have any reason to attack you?"

This had never occurred to Peter; in fact, it had never occurred to him that violence might have reasons.

Sometimes Toby had despaired of the lesson ever taking hold. But the revelation that there were Consensus game-worlds stored in the twentier's data block had him thinking a lot about the game. He hadn't yet summoned the courage to open any of them. They were from the years just after Toby's disappearance, and he was half-afraid of what might be in them. This didn't prevent Toby from seeing Consensus everywhere he went, though. As he and Orpheus strolled the rich upper levels of the city, he found himself staring around in amazement—and pride. The streets and stairs of the continent were nothing like Peter's paranoid cathedral, but now that he'd realized who this world's creator was, Toby could see his brother's hand in everything.

Two days after Jay's visit, he was taking one of these strolls in the richer upper levels of the continent when suddenly Orpheus stuck his nose in the air, then took off. A virtual flag over his head signified he'd recognized something, or somebody. In seconds he'd scrambled up a drainpipe and was running along the edge of a roof.

"Don't mind me," Toby shouted after him. "I'll just keep walking here, where it's slow."

Orpheus had his own maps of the city. To Toby, a chair was for sitting on, a table was for sitting at, and a potted plant was for looking at. Orpheus might consider sitting on all three, so they all had the affordance of 'sit-ability' to him. It was the same with the tops of walls, with some of the narrow gaps between buildings; with banisters and tree limbs. To Orpheus, roof cornices were little balconies and drainpipes were subways.

Toby was still getting used to this fact of denner life. It had been this way all along, not just for denners but also for cats and dogs. Humans had just never had the ability to see them the way animals did. Orpheus's interface gave Toby that ability.

None of which helped him catch up to the denner. He jogged off in the direction he thought Orpheus had gone and, rounding a corner, nearly toppled over the young woman who was kneeling on the sidewalk and scratching Orpheus's chin.

"Whoa!" He stumbled and stopped. She stood up, smiling.

"Oh," he said stupidly. "Hello."

"Hello again," she said. "I never got a chance to thank you the other day."

"Thank me? Do I know..." This was the girl he'd saved from being hit by one of the pilgrims during that miniature riot. "Oh," he said. "Yes."

Orpheus looked from Toby to the young lady, then back. He did it again.

"I was happy to help," he said. "What... was that all about?"

"My friends and I were just trying to exercise our right to free speech." She stuck out her hand for him to shake. "I'm Kirstana."

"T-Toby." He'd been using an alias, but in the moment he completely forget to give it.

She knelt again to scratch Orpheus's ears. "I think your denner likes me. What's his name?"

"Orpheus. Yeah, he does seem to have latched onto you." Toby scowled at the denner, but Orpheus blithely ignored him.

Kirstana put three fingers on the ground and leaned a bit, looking up askance at Toby. "What about you? You came out of the prep station, were you planning on going on pilgrimage?"

"No, no," he said. "I was just touring around and walked into the middle of things."

"Touring, huh? Following the tags in those awful city guides?" She waggled her fingers next to her eyes. Toby's touched the tourist glasses, which must be a dead giveaway. He grinned sheepishly, though he didn't know why he should be embarrassed.

"They're hardly a substitute for a real local guide," she continued.

"Well, I don't know anybody here."

"You know me."

Toby opened his mouth, then closed it. He'd never had this kind of a conversation with a girl— woman, for she was few years older than him. Was she flirting? Or just being friendly? He had no idea, just as he had no idea how old she thought he was.

"Well," he said. "I, um—"

The moment dragged.

Suddenly Orpheus leaped up, claws extended, and scrambled up Toby to perch on his shoulder. "Ow, ow!" He batted at the creature. Kirstana laughed.

"I could use a guide, sure," said Toby.

Orpheus purred loudly in his ear.

"You, I'll talk to later," he muttered.

Chapter 9

Late that evening, Toby found he couldn't sleep. Things were finally starting to go his way, as he explained to Orpheus. Kneeling on the floor, he frowned seriously at the denner and listed his accomplishments on his fingers. "One: I know Mom's on Destrier. I just have to get there. But, Two: I've figured out how to make money so I can get there. Three: I met a girl. Well, you met her, but we're going out together tomorrow!

"And, four: Jaysir's unlocked this for me." He waggled the twentier's data block. "Shall we take a look inside?"

There were two kinds of data in the block. It was mostly backups, which kind of made sense; what else would you stick in the bin of bot like this? The backups were in turn partly stuff he didn't recognize; but some were Consensus Empire worlds, dated after he'd left Sedna. Peter's work, then.

He was as uneasy about opening these as he was about accessing the libraries-worth of information you could find online about his brother and sister. The way those library books took his family and turned their lives into dry discourses and reports, printed and categorized and cross-referenced.... it was supremely creepy. The idea that these Consensus backups might reveal some side of Peter that he didn't know was also unsettling.

The second category of data in the block consisted of recordings made by the twentier itself. Shots of home: that seemed innocuous enough. So he linked the data block to his glasses and sat back against the bed.

Orpheus came to curl up in his lap. "Okay," said Toby, "here we go." And he loaded the first of the twentier's own records.

Ice, and a black sky. He was looking at the horizon of Sedna. The twentier was crawling forward across the reddish plains, along with five or six others. Its scanning software classified the rocks (actually rock-hard water ice) and sand (smaller chunks of the same) as it went, so virtual labels kept popping up to obscure the vista. A faint murmur of radio chatter between the bots sounded like crickets chirping.

"Hmm." Toby fast-forwarded, getting a crazy zoom-view of crater rims, giant rocks and plains, and the legs of space-suited humans flicking back and forth. Then the horizon disappeared, and it was all about digging.

"Well, crap." Digging. Then more digging. He zipped through hours and days and weeks of clawing, crumbling, heating, and zapping as the twentiers excavated the Sedna homestead. A couple of hundred meters below the surface, they hollowed out a vast circular cavern, and in this, other bots built a centrifuge. Sedna's gravity was miniscule, so they just pretended it didn't have any and made rotating habitats that spun to create centrifugal weight.

Toby remembered this time, and despite the lack of human faces and voices in the images, he felt a strange sense of nostalgia. He knew that tunnel, and this rocky spire outside the entrance... wait, they were outside again. The twentiers were off to prospect.

Fast-forward... more fast-forwarding... It was all stars and rocks, rocks and stars. He was just about to give up when suddenly light and sound burst on him. "Ah!" Everything was moving way too fast and he scrambled to back up the picture to where the change had happened.

At first everything was a bright blur.

Then came sound, a voice: "—Is it recording?"

Toby sucked in a sharp breath.

The blur receded, sharpened, and became a face.

"Yes, this makes us no better than our enemies," said Carter McGonigal, Toby's father, as he scowled into the twentier's little lenses. "But what choice do we have?

"Let's get started."

Both Toby's parents looked a little older than the last time he'd seen them. Mother, in particular, seemed careworn and tired. She was clutching a steaming coffee cup, and even though the twentier didn't record odors, Toby felt the pungency of its scent lighting up memories—so many of them!—of times she'd sat this way on Earth, and in the habitat.

That wasn't where they were now. His parents had lit some lamps in one corner of the vehicle bay, outside the centrifuge and its meager comforts. Mother's backdrop was a wall of tools and machinery, and they both wore mud-smeared spacesuits.

"It's not just that you're talking about spying on your own friends," Mother said now. "It's a slippery slope. Where's it going to end, Carter? Isn't this exactly how the trillionaires got to where they are? One little betrayal at a time?"

"Yeah," said Father distractedly. He was poking at the air, obviously using an interface that probably connected to the twentier. "Same methods. Different goals."

Toby stared at his parents, mesmerized by the little differences he could see in them. They were older—aged, for him, literally overnight. The change wasn't so drastic as in those pictures of Peter and Evayne, and that somehow made it all more real. It was a bit like seeing pictures of them from the time before he'd been born—equally strange and unimaginable, yet obviously real.

Mother sighed. "So what do you want me to do?"

"Well. These twentiers are right at the edge of the network. They're the bottom feeders of the colony, which makes them perfect. If the trillionaires really have planted a mole in our group—or more than one—then we can't trust the high-level network anymore. That's the first thing they're going to hack. So, the inter-net feeds, communications, entertainment... basically everything we use day-to-day in the habitats is suspect. That's why I want to build a secure network of our own out here. Using these guys, and the other infrastructure bots."

She knelt down to peer into the twentier's eyes; to Toby it was disconcertingly like both his parents were examining him." What does that get us?"

"Well, security, for one thing. If we've been hacked, the trillionaires could send a kill signal to some critical piece of life-support, and kill us all in our sleep. Then they move in and jump our claim."

She reared back, obviously shocked. "You can't believe they'd do that?"

"Of course they'd do that," Toby's father said impatiently. "In a heartbeat. Which is why we have to secure all the low-level infrastructure. Gas supplies, electricity. Heat. Hell, the circuits that open the doors. Route that stuff away from the top-level computers, and into our own network.

"The second thing it gets us is spies. We can monitor them, like they're monitoring us. Only we'll use the most basic pieces of equipment as our bugs. Let 'em have the TVs and email."

"I see you've thought this through." She frowned in thought. "How do we secure it?"

"Turing-test biocrypto. Whoever issues a command to our equipment can't just have the right fingerprint, iris scans, or DNA. They'll have to have it all, and the personality markers, and more."

"So," she said, "you, me, and who else?"

"Peter and Evayne. Nobody outside the family. We don't know who the mole is."

There was a momentary silence while he worked at his interface. Mother was staring at him.

"... What about Toby?"

Carter McGonigal froze, then slowly looked round at his wife. "Dear... if you want. We have his metrics. But... he's gone."

She stood up, and her head left the frame of the picture. "He's missing," she said flatly. "Not the same. Not the same."

Toby's mother walked away quickly, leaving his father staring into empty space, an angry expression on his face. After a long motionless minute, he stood up too, and walked away too; but in the opposite direction.

The twentier sat staring at the wall, and the record didn't end until nearly a half hour later, when Toby's father came back and switched off the bot.

There were many more records in the twentier's data block. Toby didn't have the heart to look at them—at least, not tonight.

Even less able to sleep than before he'd accessed the record, he lay there in bed while Orpheus grumbled and shifted next to him. He thought about how the present had so suddenly become a distant past, and grew by turns tearful, self-pitying, angry and, at last, resigned.

Here and now was where he was stuck, unless somebody had invented time travel while he'd been away. That meant he had a date tomorrow, and at the rate things were going, he was going to show up bleary-eyed and disheveled. That wouldn't do.

"Get over yourself," he muttered, then turned on his side and mentally pushed away the past. "Tomorrow. Tomorrow..."

Reciting that mantra worked, eventually. He slept.

Toby caught one glimpse of Kirstana's house, but that was enough to tell him how important her family must be. She met him at her front door, wearing a combination of dark tunic and leggings, and a long dark cape whose hood was thrown back. The foyer behind her was actually a balcony at the top of a high open space; with a start he realized that the house clung to the outside of the local city sphere, and was shaped like a drop of water, frozen in mid-trickle down the aerostat's curve. Spiral stairways curled down to lower balconied levels within the drop. The big curving outer wall was one continuous sheet of glass-like graphene, so transparent that it seemed not to be there at all.

"How are you?"

"I'm good." Actually, he was; he had awoken feeling like he was doing the right things, however difficult it all was.

Kirstana had stepped through the door and the large, hulking bot accompanying her closed it with a thump. "I hope you don't mind if I bring Barber," she said when she noticed Toby sizing up the bot. "After what happened the other day, my parents are giving me all kinds of grief for going out without a bodyguard."

"Will he rip my arm off if I get too close?" Actually, Toby wasn't intimidated by the thing; he and the other kids had grown used to having similar devices around after Peter's kidnapping. It was remembering those days, not so long ago really, that had given him momentary pause.

"Don't be silly." Kirstana set off with purpose down the street. "Meeting in person," she said as she walked. "One of those ancient customs that I just can't get used to. Back home, we'd be just as likely to send avatars and recover the memories later. After all, if you go yourself, you're, well, committing yourself to whatever experience you have in that place. That would have been so gauche where I come from."

"And where, exactly, is that?"

"Barsoom."

He'd heard that puzzling name before. "I thought Barsoom was a storybook name for Mars."

"Mars?" She rolled the word around in her mouth. "Maaaars. Never heard of it. Barsoom, though, that's the fourth planet of the solar system. Covered in ancient ruins and dried-out canals from all kinds of terraforming attempts. The water always drains away, but every thousand years or so drops another comet on it and tries again. The inside of the planet's getting quite wet at this point!"

"... Right. And Barsoom's the new capital of the Lockstep?"

"Well, that's the irony, isn't it?" She sighed. "Our family left because the place had become a backwater. It was dying. Again. But I remember it as a magical place. I'd get Barber to dig the sand away from some ancient doorway, and while he kept watch for the Tharks I'd crawl down in there with just a hand-lamp to find ancient hieroglyphs and barcodes. I'd wonder what kind of people had lived there, so long ago. If they were people, at all.

"There was one faded hieroglyph I'd run into in a bunch of different ruins, but I could never find the translation to it. One day I came downstairs and my parents were sitting at the dinner table arguing over a holo. And in the middle of the holo was that glyph.

"They told me it was one of the oldest symbols known—as old as the symbol for computer. The symbol meant lockstep. And a lock-step, they told me, was a place even older than Barsoom, older than nearly anything, but still alive! The locksteps had been forgotten on Barsoom for centuries, but there were stories if you knew where to dig them up. And those stories went back... dizzyingly far, from our civilization through the one before, from language to language, back all the way to the beginning. I fell in love with everything lockstep; and my parents noticed. They were glad, because they'd learned about another family that had moved away, and people said they'd gone to the McGonigal lockstep.

"McGonigal!" Her eyes were shining as she said the name. "That name I'd heard, and I'd seen it too. It was written everywhere, in some of the oldest religious texts put down thousands upon thousands of years ago."

"Religious texts..." He stopped, shoulders hunched, but Kirstana continued up the stairs, oblivious of his reaction. He hurried to catch up.

The bubble-city Toby was staying in opened out onto another one at its top, and this one did the same to a third, higher one. Kirstana's house was near the top of this highest sphere, yet she'd been leading him upward since they left it. Now they were close enough to its sunlamps that big shades were needed to cool the stairs and galleries.

"Are we going to an aircar platform?" he asked politely.

Now she looked back and smiled, shrugged, and said, "What's the fun in sitting down in some vehicle while you fly? I can get us something much better."

"What?"

"Wings."

The elevators and escalators continued on, until they reached a plaza—a broad balcony, really—that stuck out near the top city's solar lamps like a giant diving board. From here Toby could look out through the glass ceiling at the permanent storms, or down, through widening and converging rings of city and forest, through a gap to more of the same, down and down.

A modest hut here rented angel's wings.

"They're just exos," Kirstana explained as she browsed a rack of furled, feathered things as tall as she was. "You know, visitors from lower-gee worlds wear them to amplify the strength of their legs and back, so they can walk here. These ones... well, they're wings. That's all."

Furled, they made up a tall heavy backpack. Unfurled, they were huge; the black ones Toby chose had a wingspan of at least eight meters. Kirstana's were white. She chatted with the proprietor about the details of using them, then, when properly strapped in, she simply walked to the edge of the platform and stepped off. Her security bot, Barber, stepped after her.

Toby shouted in alarm—but seconds later she reappeared, soaring so close to the sun-lamps that she blazed white as if she herself were a lamp. Barber was relying on what looked like jets built into his shoulders. "Hoo-hoo," shouted Kirstana. "Come on, the air's fine!"

He gulped at the proprietor. "You're good to go," said the young lady, slapping him on the back. Closing his eyes and trusting to the millennia of technological development that separated Kirstana's age from the one he'd grown up in, he ran and jumped.

The wings unfurled, and suddenly he was flying.

All you had to do was look the way you wanted to go, and tilt or shift your body that way; the wings took care of the rest. He learned early on that they had a mind of their own, and wouldn't let you run into buildings or hit the glass wall of the city. Within those limits, he could do what he wanted.

In this way they spiraled down through the geodesic froth of the continent, pausing to perch here and there while Kirstana pointed to the sights.

"People come here from thousands of worlds to fly, both inside and outside," she shouted as they diverged and converged in the air. "There's tournaments and contests. Of course they trade, too."

The continent was mostly made up of Lockstep 360/1 cities, but not entirely. Some of the spheres attached to it were closed off and dark; and some of the three-sixty cities weren't inhabited by humans.

He gawked at the distance-blurred glitter of the first one she pointed out. "Aliens? There are real aliens?" Kirstana laughed.

"No, not real aliens, if you mean intelligent beings who evolved separately from us. Nobody's ever found those yet, I mean we've only been expanding into the galaxy for fourteen thousand years, we've hardly explored out to a thousand light-years. No, those ones there are uplifted Chimpanzees. You'll also find apes and dolphins and—well, other things that are entirely new species unrelated to anything on Earth. And then there's artificial intelligences from the fast worlds, and augmented humans." She banked away, her voice fading as she singsonged the list: "—And mutants and heavyworlders and hybrids and single-genders and neanderthals and hyper-cats and..."

When they stopped for lunch in the heights of a jungle sphere full of mist and rainbow-colored birds, he tried to find words for how overwhelming he found it all. "We're in the middle of nowhere between the stars, but this place seems as rich as Earth. Though that can't be. Earth, Mars—I mean, Barsoom—they must be so much more than this. More than we could imagine..." Yet she was looking at him strangely.

"Earth? Barsoom? Oh, come on," she chided. "We have so much more than the fast worlds could ever have. Earth only has Barsoom and Jupiter and a couple of other planets and artif icial worlds. Venus, sure; Saturn. What's that? Four or five trading partners? And then, the next fast worlds are four light-years away, that's decades of travel time—a one-way trip for anybody living in real-time." She shook her head. "No, Toby, the fast worlds are sad places, hopelessly impoverished. How could they ever have this kind of diversity—The richness? The vibrancy?—and reach out and be able to actually touch it?"

"Heh." Toby was grinning again. Way to go, Peter. He noticed she was smiling, too. "You love playing tour guide, don't you?"

She shrugged. "We moved here when I was sixteen. I guess I've been exploring ever since. Every day when I step outside and look around I just... it's like I'm living in some kind of fairy tale. Even these words—'fairy tale'—the ancient idea of fairies—the language we're talking about them with... it's all so... amazing!"

He shook his head, puzzled. "Why?"

"Because it's ancient and ever-present at one and the same time. So amazingly, impossibly old, yet still here. Living in a lockstep is like hopping in a time machine and shooting back to the dawn of history while simultaneously being shot into the far future. It's that incredible age everything has here—it's all preserved, the world as it was thousands of years ago."

Thoughtful, he put on his wings and they looked for a convenient balcony to jump off of. Suddenly Toby stopped.

"What's Destrier?"

Kirstana stumbled. She looked closely at him. "You were in line to join the pilgrimage there. How can you not know?"

"I'm... not from around here either, remember?" He'd told her that his family was from one of the first lockstep colonies, a little comet-world isolated from most of three-sixty for the past forty years. It was obviously time to embellish the story a little. "You know I'm from a second-generation world. But my grandfather took us out of the lockstep a few cycles back and... well, time got away from us. It's been a couple of generations since any of us were here. And grandfather never wanted to talk about what he'd left. But he was, you know, one of the first generations in the lock-step. Which is where I get my accent."

"Destrier's the symbol of everything that's wrong with this place," she said darkly.

Toby was surprised. "But all this—" He tilted a wing at the wonders of the continent.

She shook her head. "—Could be so much more, if it weren't for Origin."

Origin. Another word nobody'd mentioned to him yet.

"Is that the symbol for Origin, then?" he said. He pointed at the thing that had prompted his question.

She looked, and scowled. "Oh. The shrines."

They'd mostly been invisible outside of augmented reality; from a distance this one looked like a simple niche in the wall that flanked the restaurant. Behind the wall, the outer skin of the city sphere curved down, very close here, forming a dark ceiling drawn with mazey rain patterns. Trees curled up to nearly touch the glassy surface. It was details like this that had been catching his attention since he'd arrived here, so he'd walked by little niches like this one many times without noticing them.

Up close he could see a human figure seated on what looked like a stone throne. A kind of sundial pattern formed the backdrop.

"Who's that?"

She reached out to touch the little throne with one finger. "The Emperor of Time." She gave an exasperated sigh. "He's been a major mythological figure for over ten thousand years, and you're saying he's new to you?"

He shrugged awkwardly.

"... Right. Well, he sits on a throne, see? He's been sitting on it since the beginning of time. And here's the thing: he's perfectly free to stand up and walk away, or run in circles or stand on his hands or whatever he wants to— free at any moment and every moment, and he has the power and everything. And every moment, every single moment since the beginning of time, he's freely chosen to stay right where he is."

Toby shook his head, puzzled. "Does he have a name?"

Now Kirstana laughed. "Of course! You know who he is. Everybody knows the Emperor of Hyperchaos—Emperor of Time, Lord of Origins, the One Who Waits.

"He's Toby McGonigal."

Somehow, hearing this just made Toby feel really, really tired. He waved a hand and said, "I should have guessed."

But then, as he turned away from the shrine, a new and deep unease filled him. There were the houses and spiraling stairs of the city—a place modeled on Peter's design. "Whose idea was that?" he muttered, perplexed. Then, to Kirstana, "Why're there shrines?"

She stared at him, wondering. "It's the lock-step's official religion. People join the lockstep because it's eternal; that's why my parents brought me here. 'Cause even in twenty, thirty thousand years, this place will barely have changed at all. The Emperor remains unchanged, and we're supposed to model our lives on his."

"Lives?" He shook his head. "I thought Toby McGonigal was just lost in space."

Surprisingly, she looked uncomfortable. "That's not a very nice way to put it. He Waits. And the lockstep unfolds according to His grand design."

"His design?" Not Peter's? Toby walked back to the railing that overlooked the tiers of the city. The sun lamps were tuning toward evening. "And who..." he groped for the word. "Who enforces this grand design?"

She harumphed. He looked back; Kirstana stood with her arms crossed, hipshot. "Next you're going to tell me you've never heard of Evayne McGonigal."

Something inside Toby spasmed and he quickly looked away. "Sorry," he managed to say. "You've got an eleven thousand year advantage on me."

"No..." She leaned on the balcony next to him. "The advantage is yours. You'd be a celebrity on any non-lockstep world you cared to visit, you know. You're ancient, practically prehistoric. People would have, oh, so many questions for you!"

He was starting to realize what he was to her. "Like you have questions?"

"Well, yeah." She looked away shyly. "How often do you get a chance to meet somebody who remembers the beginning?"

"But I don't," he said hastily. "I'm third-generation."

"Meaning your family moved to the lockstep only centuries of real-time after it began?" She shook her head. "The blink of an eye, in historical terms. You're still from right back at the beginning."

"I guess."

She looked away at the city-scape, a troubled expression on her face.

"I'm tired. Let's head back." She nodded, and they dove into the sky again, retracing their path but this time up and up through dizzying layers of city black, rain-threaded glass.

They smiled, but barely spoke as they parted. Both were exhausted, but somehow despite the awful news about this strange religion and Evayne's part in it, Toby was content for now. He felt like he'd accomplished something today, though he'd found no work among the local bots. He'd learned important things, and found a friend. Also, he'd discovered a way in which his age could be important without all the politics and family complications that Corva and Jaysir attached to it.

Maybe he could hire himself out to explain the ancient world, say, local rich people's houses. The thought was startling: could there be a career in being old?

Toby was still musing over this idea as he wandered back to the bed-and-breakfast. He was so absorbed in his fantasy of getting paid to talk about the early days of Sedna, that he barely noticed as Orpheus suddenly bounded up. Only when a flood of icons popped up and he had to bat at them to dismiss them all, did he look up and see who was sitting on the step outside his lodgings.

"... haven't seen you in days!" Orpheus ran back to her, and she scratched his ears vigorously, making his head wobble. Orpheus stretched high and licked her forehead.

Toby just stood there, mind a blank, until Corva looked over Orpheus's head and said, "Hi, Toby. Fancy meeting you here."

Jaysir must have told her where he was. Well, it stood to reason: the maker had what he wanted now, why shouldn't he? "Uh, hi. You're, um, doing well? Getting work?"

Still scritching at Orpheus's ears, Corva tilted her head and peered at Toby. "I didn't come to this planet to work."

He'd just meant to be polite in asking that; now Toby was confused. "Oh," he said. "So then..."

"We came here because I needed your help," she continued, her face dead-pan and her voice neutral. "There's no point in me being here otherwise."

He crossed his arms. "I never promised to help you."

"Well." She looked away. "That's true." After a moment she set Orpheus aside and stood up. "I mean, all did was save your life. It's not like you owe me anything." This was the first time he'd seen her through his revamped glasses, but unlike nearly anybody else he might pass on the street—and unlike Kirstana—she was not festooned with virtual tags and flags, other than one green and gray symbol hovering near the hollow of her throat.

"Ammond and Persea also saved my life," he pointed out. "What do I owe them?" She sputtered, but before she could say anything he added, "You won't even tell me what you need me for. That's hardly gonna win me over."

"Ah. Well, I guess that's kind of..."

He just stared at her, and after a couple of "But you see"s and "You gotta understand"s, Corva finally found the right words: "I couldn't tell you in case you screwed us over by telling the police, or got caught. If they found out..." She looked genuinely distressed.

"So?" he said. "This is where we were going. I guess you can tell me now we're here, right?"

She glanced upward. "Wallop was our destination. But yeah, I'm sorry. Of course I wanted to tell you! It's just... it's not you I don't trust. It's everybody you might talk to."

He thought of Kirstana, and was suddenly uneasy. A glance around the street showed nobody lurking in any doorways—and after all, this was Peter's Utopia, a civilization modeled on Consensus. There were no hovering microbots spying and eavesdropping on every citizen. At least, he didn't think there were.

"Come inside," he said. "And this time, tell me the truth."

Chapter 10

As Jaysir had before her, Corva sat in his room's one armchair, and Toby perched on the bed. Orpheus looked from one human to the other, obviously torn; then he climbed into Corva's lap. She stroked his forehead and he began purring loudly.

"We came here to save my brother's life," said Corva.

The statement hung there; she didn't go on. Toby shook his head, and said, "What?"

"He's in quarantine," she said. "On board a passenger ship from Thisbe." She said that name as if she expected him to know what it meant. He could have done a search on it, but that would have taken his attention away from watching Corva, and the uncertainty and anger warring for dominance in her expression.

Toby took the bait. "Why do you need to save him?"

"Don't you know what quarantine means? Your brother has frozen him out of the lock-step!"

He jerked back at her sudden fury. "What do you mean, frozen out?" Even as he asked this, Toby had a flash of memory—of himself, standing on the outer hull of the tug and staring down at a black planet dotted with silent, frozen cities: unknowing that he'd arrived at a settled world, or because he'd awakened at the wrong time.

"All the three-sixty ports are closed to Halen's ship," she said. "They haven't got fuel to go home or to any other world, so they've been forced into hibernation until the ports open. And your brother's decreed that won't be for another six months."

Toby was shocked that Peter would do such a thing—but he was also puzzled. "That's... really bad. I guess. I don't know why... but if your brother's hibernating, all you have to do is wait. It'll take a while, yeah, but he's perfectly safe, right?"

She shook her head, and for the first time since he'd met her, he saw Corva near tears. "It's not just that. He came here to try to find me, and because of that, they've quarantined his ship for a year. And half that's done."

"Yeah, but—"

"But Thisbe! Thisbe's government wanted to trade with another lockstep. There's one on the planet that's even more successful locally than 360-to-1. It's called 240-to-1. The local council hacked the hibernation timing repeaters so we'd jubilee with them—wake on their turns as well as ours. We could trade with both that way! But your brother found out and he... punished Thisbe."

A sick feeling, almost of watching from somewhere else, had taken hold of Toby. "Punished... how?"

"All ships from Thisbe are quarantined until it's gone three of our years at a ratio of three-sixty to twelve!"

"Wait, what?" He had to sit back and think about that for a moment. "They've accelerated time on your world... by twelve times?"

She nodded rapidly. "All the McGonigal beds have shifted from wintering over for thirty years per turn, to two-and-a-half. For every month that passes for you and me, a full year passes back home. I came here to study for a year, before the quarantine. But it's been going for—" now her eyes scrunched up and she did begin to cry, "for eight months!"

Eight months had passed—for Corva. Eight years were already gone by for her friends and family on Thisbe.

Those pictures of Peter and Evayne came to Toby's mind—the ones that he couldn't look at, and there were all those books he'd been afraid to open that talked about all the things that they'd done and seen, without him, in the past forty years. He should have known all about this, but he'd been afraid to investigate.

Corva sat across from him, crying, and he couldn't speak. He couldn't think of a single way to make it better for her.

But there was still something puzzling about the situation. "Why didn't you go home when this first started? You were living out here, I get that, but why stay here?"

"... But that's the whole point, McGonigal!" She glared at him. "A lot of people from Thisbe travel, Hell, half our economy runs on remittances from foreign workers! Of course we all want to go home, but who'll take us there? Any ship that goes back to Thisbe will be stranded there for at least a year! Travel's dried up—I couldn't get back—so my brother boarded a ship that was going to try to sneak around the quarantine. They got caught." Her hand went up, fingers half-curling around her locket.

He was trying to picture the time in his mind. If you took a calendar, and pasted it into just one month of another calendar, you'd have a year inside a month. But what they'd done to Corva's brother was take the bigger calendar and drop it into just one month of an even larger one. "Your brother's gone from living a year for every month you live, to living a month for your next year... while everybody back home lives twelve years... it's crazy. But why? Why do this extra thing to the ship he's on?"

She flung up her hands in frustration. "Because they tried to get around the quarantine by pretending to be coming from another world. And apparently it isn't enough to have everybody back home aging like that, they had to make any ships that left not come back for the full twelve years! It's a blockade, is what it is."

Toby swallowed. "Have they... have they done this before?"

She stared at him. "Your family has done this to other worlds, yes."

There was nothing he could say to that. He sat there, uncomfortable, until Corva said, "You're a McGonigal."

"I'm not my brother." It wasn't the first time he'd ever had to distance himself from Peter's behavior; after the trauma of the kidnapping, Peter had acted out in all kinds of ways, some pretty destructive. Toby had apologized for him more than once; he couldn't believe he was still doing it.

"I don't care about that," snapped Corva. "I mean, you've got your family's biocrypto. You're coded to be able to operate anything that's owned by the McGonigal family, right?"

"Well, I was," he said doubtfully. "Fourteen thousand years ago."

"Your mother refused to admit you were dead. Everybody knows she made sure you'd always be able to get back into the colony. There's stories about that—songs, epic poems. The very least of them has you returning from deep space while Sedna's sleeping, and putting your hand on the doorplate and it opens for you."

"Epic poems," he said. "That figures."

"Toby, you can override the dock bots. You can wake the passengers. Just do that, and you'll never have to see me again. I'll go back to Thisbe with Halen and you McGonigals can sort things out however you want. Just... let us have our lives, too."

Had Jaysir told her about the interface they'd found in the data pack from the twentier? Or, more likely, it was Corva who'd put Jaysir up to helping Toby in the first place. As a way of discovering whether Toby really could do what he was rumored to be able to do.

He rubbed his eyes. Was there nobody he could trust? "Maybe I can do it," he said, and shrugged. "I don't know. And anyway, won't the local government have something to say about it?"

"You're a McGonigal," she said, as if that explained everything. "They can't stop you.

Corva insisted he stay invisible for the next few days. Maybe nobody could stop Toby once he publicly announced himself, but it was pretty clear that right now, he was vulnerable. He could still be killed—or neuroshackled. So for now, he must pay for everything with cash, not take on any jobs that might get him noticed—and of course, tell no one his real name. He didn't bother to point out that he was already living that way, as per Jaysir's instructions.

Corva had to "make arrangements." Something about that made him nervous. Was there more to this than walking into the port authority office and commanding the bots to let her brother's ship disembark? He could picture himself ordering bots around, but people were another matter entirely. Every time he imagined himself trying to face down the city's masters, he thought of how easily Ammond and M'boto had kept him under their control. Whatever Corva meant when she used the name McGonigal, Toby wasn't that. The instant he tried to bluff these people, everybody would know it.

So he tossed and turned through the night, and when he wasn't imagining himself getting thrown in some cell by the local police, he was thinking about Peter. Peter the tyrant.

He kept asking himself, "how could Peter do that to Corva's people?"—but then he'd remember how Peter and he had built worlds and ruled them with fists iron and otherwise. In Consensus, they had practiced tyranny, rehearsed it. Of course it was just a game, and this was real. Where, though, had the dividing line been for Peter? Had he woken up one day and thought "I could actually build my perfect society?" Or had the steps shaded into each other so gradually that he never really stopped believing it was all a game?

Hideous thoughts. They chased Toby away from the comfort of sleep, and in the morning Orpheus whined at his haggard appearance.

Maybe he felt awful, but he still had to pay for his lodgings, and that meant finding some lazy bot whose job he could do for the day. It wasn't hard, because the robots that supported Peter's perfect world had a built-in sense of economy. They also knew, pretty much to the day, when their various systems were due to fail. Toby could stroll into a local factory and just loiter until one came up to him with an offer. This time around he found himself sorting plastic fasteners for four hours, a mind-numbing task that was somehow also soothing— provided you weren't doing it every day.

While he worked he listened to history lessons from the library. His original plan was to get some sense of what had been going on outside the lockstep, in the wider world that Kirstana had been born into—but that was impossible. Time had been on fast-forward in that world, to such an extent that any history lesson that touched on major events out there had to skip over centuries and even entire millennia, or summarize them with terms like "the gray ages" or "the second transhumanist efflorescence." You could spend days reviewing the highlights of just one little century out of those thousands of years, because all that history hadn't only unfolded on one world. There were thousands of planets, so take that original fourteen thousand years and multiply it by that much... impossible.

All he could really sort out was that humanity and its many subspecies, creations, and offspring had experienced many rises and falls over the aeons. Since they had the technology, and lots of motivations, people kept re-engineering their own bodies and minds. They gave rise to god-like AIs, and these grew bored and left the galaxy, or died, or turned into uncommunicative lumps, or ran berserk in any of a hundred different ways. On many worlds humans wiped themselves out, or were wiped out by their creations. It happened with tedious regularity. The only reason there were humans at all, these days, was because of the locksteps. They served as literal freezers preserving ancient human DNA and cultures. All kinds of madness might descend upon the full-speed worlds circling the galaxy's stars—expansions, contractions, raptures, uploading, downloading, mind-control and body-swapping plagues (quite apart from the usual wars, dark ages, and terraforming failures)—but everybody ignored those useless, frozen micro-worlds drifting between the stars. Their infinitesimal resources and ancient cultures held no interest to the would-be gods of the inner systems. So, once those would-be gods had wiped themselves out, the tell-tale silence from formerly buzzing stars would alert this or that lockstep; and they would send some colonists back. A few millennia later, the human population on Earth and the other lit worlds would again number in the billions or trillions, and some of those would return to the locksteps. And so Peter's realm survived, and in its own fashion, thrived.

He had better luck researching the lockstep laws; he began to understand why Peter might want to punish Thisbe. Locksteps were a kind of network—specifically, something called a synchronous network, where every node in the mesh sent and received messages at the same time. All the worlds shipped out cargo and passenger ships at the same intervals, and doing this put them all on equal footing. If a couple of worlds doubled or tripled their frequency, they could grow faster than their neighbors. Lockstep worlds were always tempted to do this and worlds that did often made out very well indeed.

At first, Toby couldn't see why that mattered. Why shouldn't everybody just communicate as quickly or slowly as they wanted? Lockstep rates should naturally speed up over time until the whole system collapsed.

There were two reasons. The first had to do with resources.

Part of the reason why Peter's lockstep was the biggest was because he'd tuned its trading frequency to match the rate of production that the smallest outpost could keep up with. There were tiny colonies that didn't own even a chunk of cometary ice, but harvested the impossibly thin traces of gas found between the stars using modified magnetic ramscoops. In an abyss so empty that there was only one hydrogen atom per cubic centimeter, the scoops filled their vast lungs like baleen whales filtering tenuous oceanic plankton. It could take them decades to fuel a single fusion-powered ship with enough hydrogen to visit their nearest neighbor. Yet even these little starvelings could contribute to the wealth of Lockstep 360/1, because its clock-ticks were slow enough for them to keep up.

If you lived on a relatively rich world, like Lowdown or Wallop, you could harvest resources and manufacture goods as fast as you wanted to. You could leave the 360/1 lockstep for a faster one, such as 36/1 which experienced ten months for every one in Peter's empire. You'd think that this would provide a huge advantage to your industries because you'd be producing ten times as much as 360/1 in any given time period. Since you were awake ten times as long, however, you'd also use ten times as many resources.

The second reason was less intuitive, but more important. If you increased your frequency you'd have far fewer "nearby" monthly trading partners than 360/1. It wasn't obvious why; but travel between the lockstep worlds took decades of real-time. Because Peter's lockstep slept for thirty years at a time, you could travel half a light-year while wintering over (if you were going at the average speed of a cheap fission fragment rocket). One wintering-over journey between 36/1 worlds could only take you one tenth that far—but that didn't translate into having one-tenth the possible destinations for that trip. Because the lockstep worlds were scattered through three-dimensional space rather than being on a two-dimensional planet, when you doubled the distance you could travel, you did far more than just double the volume of space you could access.

Lockstep 36/1 might have ten turns for every one in 360/1, but each 360/1 world could trade with a thousand times more worlds per turn.

So Peter's network was vast, and it ran on mutual trust that no one would take advantage of higher trading frequencies. Thisbe had broken that trust.

A couple of days later, he was listening to one of these historical programs as he walked home from work. As he turned the corner to his bed-and-breakfast, he saw a motley crew of people sitting on its front step: Shylif, Jaysir— and Corva. His landlady was visible in the front window, glaring at them.

Toby paused his program. Corva was poking at the ground with a stick, and Jaysir and Shylif were looking everywhere but at her. "What's up?" said Toby.

Corva stood up, brushing off her pants. She wouldn't meet his eye. "The plan's off," she said. "We can't get to the passenger module."

"You mean we can't get your brother back?" She nodded; she seemed to be on the brink of tears.

Toby knew he should be relieved, because what Corva had been proposing had been both illegal and highly dangerous. He knew what he should be asking, too: Will you honor your promise to show me how to get to Destrier?

Instead he said, "What's the problem?"

Corva told him, the words coming out in a rush. As soon as she started to talk, the answer popped into Toby's mind.

He should just nod sympathetically; he should ask for what they'd promised. But Corva wasn't like Ammond and Persea; she really had saved his life, and if all she'd said about the McGonigals was true, was taking a terrible risk in even confiding to Toby.

He said, "I know a way."

Six hours later, they were descending between brooding mountains of cloud, down a single, endless cable that stretched from zenith to nadir through the awesome dark sky-scapes of Wallop. The little elevator car, which Jaysir had hijacked for them using his black arts, had been moving for many minutes now. Just how far below the continent had the authorities hung the passenger unit?

"I still don't like it." Corva crossed her arms, glaring out the glass. "You don't know anything about this Kirstana person."

"I don't know anything about you, either."

"Yes, and look where it's gotten you?" She glowered at him. "What does she know about you? About us? Probably a lot more than you think. You're not exactly very good at keeping secrets, Toby."

"What are you, my mother? I agreed to help you because you can show me how to stowaway on a ship to Destrier. That's all." He turned away from her, ignoring the look Shylif and Jaysir were sharing.

He was still kicking himself for telling Corva how they could get down here. It turned out that the reason he hadn't heard from her for days was because she'd been agonizing about how to actually get to the quarantined passenger unit. It hung many kilometers below the continent's customs complex. The logical way down to it was by airship, but there was radar and other eyes to prevent that. The next logical approach was to simply board the elevator on the customs level—but getting in to that would be next to impossible.

He'd had his chance to get out of having to do all of this. Instead, when Corva had explained the issue, he'd heard himself say, "I know a way. Why don't you just fly?"

"I told you, they track the dirigibles—"

"No, not by airship," he'd said. "With wings."

So it was that he'd called Kirstana and asked her about outdoor-certified exo-wings. Jaysir had modified them so that they would ignore proximity warnings and no-go zones. Jay couldn't bring along his beloved bot; he'd ordered it to wait near the docks for their return. That was how they intended to return.

First, they would simply spiral down through the black air to a landing jetty and airlock at the base of the customs complex.

Simply? Well, if donning a space suit and bundling their denners into airtight carrying cases, then relying on the artificial muscles and reflexes of strap-on wings in the hostile atmosphere of a gas giant was simple. The three stowaways had experience with similar environments—such as the oceans of Auriga—and Toby had walked the ices of Sedna at temperatures near absolute zero. Also, fourteen thousand years of refinements to the safety of the wings had helped. To his surprise, it had been fairly easy to skim close to the outside skin of the continent, so radar wouldn't catch them. The dark helped, making the danger of a fall more abstract than it would otherwise have been; but they could never safely descend all the way to the passenger unit this way. This elevator was still the only safe way to do that.

Now that the adrenaline-pumping flight was over, Toby was actually kind of enjoying the elevator ride. It was clear that Corva, at least, was having trouble with the precarious sense of being balanced above an infinite fall. She spent her time sitting in the center of the floor with her knees pulled up, Wrecks protectively wrapped around her ankles. Toby had tried to get her to talk a number of times as they droned through the black, still air beneath the cloud deck. She just grunted or answered with a simple "yes" or "no." He was trying this again when the autopilot abruptly put them into a dive, and what had been a stable ride turned into a slewing, bumping fall. Toby had been turning green himself by the time they reached a small aerostat with a ring-shaped docking platform under it. They had left the blimp to find nothing there but an elevator car, and a cable stretching down into the dark.

For some reason Corva found riding an elevator to nowhere preferable to flying. Well, at least she was talking.

Orpheus was staring into the gray emptiness of the sky, as if those depths held secrets only denners could see. Toby knelt to pat him, and after a minute of communing felt a bit better.

"You know," he said, to try to restart the conversation. "I kind of thought we'd be going

Corva tried to look nonchalant. "You can leave ships in orbit for decades at a time," she said, "but people... well, they get fried by the cosmic rays. So the passenger modules from Halen's ship are down here."

"And we're just going to waltz in and wake them up?"

Jaysir smiled confidently. "We stowaways have our ways, McGonigal. That's why I'm along, isn't it? And I did fix you up a good interface to Cicada Corp."

"Yes," he said grudgingly, "so how are you going to get us past whoever's at the other end of this elevator ride?"

"Same way I got us into this elevator," he said. "By fooling the sensors. Nobody's down there anyway. It'll just be us."

The lights in the car came on suddenly. Corva grunted in surprise. "Turn it off! Turn it off? Am I the only one who doesn't like the idea of being the only lit-up thing for kilometers?" The sense of infinite monotony outside had disappeared; the windows were now just black mirrors.

"Hit it with my elbow," said Jaysir, as he tapped a wall plate. The lights went off. "Sorry."

Corva gave a whoosh of relief, and gnawing at one fingernail, glanced at Toby. "And what about you? Sorry you came?"

"I'm sorry about the whole last fourteen thousand years. Why should today be any different?"

His eyes had adjusted in time to see her smile. He liked that smile. Then, "Look," she said, "more clouds."

Toby followed the faint indication of her pointing arm. Billows of black-on-black ascended silently outside. Suddenly a bright flicker silhouetted a bulbous thunderhead shape below them. "Lightning," Toby murmured. "There's another layer of storms down here?"

They watched in silent communion for a while, as the mist thickened, drawn in moments of white, and became rain.

Between lightning flashes, a faint glow became visible below them. They put their foreheads to the cold glass to try and see down. "Is that it?" asked Toby.

"Yes." Jaysir was staring at something invisible, probably some tag within his own interface. "Time is right."

"Why hang the passenger compartments down here?" he said after a moment. "Don't they want to keep them deep-frozen?"

"I think they are." She touched the glass, snatching her fingers back as if it had burned them. "Somebody told me that when the cities are awake they stay in the only warm layer of air on the planet. Above that—and below it— it's far, far below zero."

Toby peered at the beads on the glass. "Then that's not water."

"God, no. There!"

A sliver of light had appeared below them. As they watched, it grew into a rain-dazzled arc. Toby puzzled over it for a while, until he realized he was looking at the top of a large geodesic glass structure, which must hang off the bottom of the elevator cable. The glass facets sparkled from within, breathing white and rainbow colors into the falling mist. Indistinct clouds reflected the pearly light.

Toby had time for one last glimpse of dark metal struts and glass angles dripping white or scattering spray into the swirling air before the lights came on again. He squinted at Corva, who shrugged. Behind her the window brightened, then a stanchion holding red running lights fled up and sudden heaviness signaled their arrival. A framework of metal triangles rose around the car as it slowed to a halt. The faint vibration Toby had grown accustomed to in the past hour ended.

"Okay, Jay," said Corva. "Time to work your magic again."

He waved his hands in the air, for all the world like a stage magician preparing a trick, then said, "I'm freezing the heat-sensors. They'll register the first person to step out, but nobody else. And as long as that person doesn't go any further inside, they'll stay in an infinite loop. So somebody will have to stay here by the elevator."

"You didn't mention that earlier." She was annoyed.

"Wasn't sure this would be the setup." He shrugged. "I'll stay if you want."

"No, we might need you. Shylif?"

The normally placid Shylif frowned. "I want to come."

"It's you or me," said Corva. "I could stay, I suppose..."

He turned away. "No. This is... your show."

Jaysir pressed the key combination next to the elevator doors. Nothing happened for a moment, then the car shifted with a strange sucking sound, and the doors opened. A gasp of cold came in, followed by fresh warm air. The denners poked their heads out, Wrecks above, Orpheus below, and Corva stepped carefully over them. After the strange and wonderful skies of Wallop, and the weirdness of an elevator ride to nowhere, this vestibule lit by low lamps behind potted palms was jarringly prosaic. Shylif stepped out, and they all listened for the sound of alarms—ridiculous, really, since those might sound only in some security office kilometers above. In any case nothing happened, and they followed him out.

"Shy, keep your coms open," Corva said to the big man. "If anything happens, we need to know instantly." He nodded.

After his initial surprise, Toby found the hum of the air circulation and the spot-lit plants in the little antechamber reassuring. Just do this one thing, he told himself, and then you can make a run for Destrier.

Orpheus took off around a corner and, with a mild curse, Toby followed him. The denner was bounding down a long carpeted hall, at the end of which a set of shallow steps led down in a spiral. The only decoration in the hallway was a single table with a bronze Buddha on it. Or was it the Emperor of Time—a Toby McGonigal? He was careful not to look too closely at it as he passed by.

"Stay in sight, damnit!" Corva and Jaysir had caught up. Toby saw how her lips were pressed together; she was scared. This was nerve-wracking, but Toby didn't know enough to know what they should be scared of down here. He was curiously numb, in fac. He'd been through too many changes lately to really register a sense of danger here.

"Where are we?" Jaysir was looking around.

"Top reception area," Corva said. The only way was down a short corridor to an arch that exited onto a broad, curving balcony. Toby and Corva stepped onto this, with Jaysir and the denners following.

The gallery was suspended near the ceiling of a geodesic dome about thirty meters across. Toby looked down at a sculpted landscape of trees and pools lit by arc lights. The glass walls of the dome were an opaque black in this light.

"Oh yeah," said Corva. "Staging area for the elevators. I remember having lunch in one of these."

Toby looked at her. "You wouldn't be having lunch in a passenger lounge if you were a stowaway."

"No, of course not."

"Wallop is where you were going to school!" For some reason he'd assumed her school was on Lowdown.

She shrugged impatiently. "You only just figured that out? Why else would my brother come here if he wanted to find me and bring me home?

"Anyway, this isn't the same lounge as the one I came through. There's lots of these stations, but most of them are way up in the stratosphere. The only reason this one's down here is because it's on ice."

Toby could see potted orange trees down there. Looking at them, he felt achingly homesick for Earth. Wrecks and Orpheus were already on their way down a broad stairway that swept along the wall of the dome. "Come on," said Corva as she followed them.

"Some of the rich estates are built like this," mused Corva as she trailed her fingers along the dark glass of the outside wall. As he followed her Toby heard the faint drumming of rain, and fainter murmur of distant thunder, filtering in from outside. "There are whole chandelier neighborhoods, hanging down off the city-spheres by the dozen. I thought it was so wonderful when I first came here." Her voice held something in between regret and disappointment.

Jaysir was distracted, staring at a small grove of red-leafed maples. "Look at the trees! They're not green. They're red! Are they fake?"

Toby laughed. "No, they do that every autumn. Just before they lose 'em for winter."

"Oh, yeah, winter. They wake up the trees months before us, so it's always summer when we're awake. They spend a few months cooling them down after we go into hibernation, so maybe some of them lose their leaves then—but I've never seen it."

Toby walked with Corva under the canopies of red. The sound of rain receded, but the illusion of being outside was still hard to shake.

Jaysir had slept through all the autumns of his life. For some reason, this thought made Toby's heart ache, and he remembered leaving home for Sedna, and how he and Evayne had both cried.

Peter had been silent.

Corva pointed out a set of low-lit steps that descended under the grass. "This should go down to where they dock the passenger modules."

They went that way, and neither spoke for a while; but something was on Toby's mind. He'd been thinking about it ever since he'd learned the significance of his family in this world.

Finally, during a short period while Jaysir was out of earshot, he asked: "What does it mean to you, that I'm a McGonigal?"

She darted a quick look at him. Toby suddenly realized that Shylif, at least, could still hear them; uncomfortable, he pressed on. "I mean, that first time in the courtyard. Did you know who I was? And all that stuff about... about me being the Emperor of Time, this cult figure, you knew about that..." He shook his head. "Are there really people out there who think I'm some sort of god?"

She'd drawn her shoulders in and wouldn't look at him. "You have your sister to thank for that," she said curtly.

"I'm asking about what you believe."

"I was raised to believe you never existed at all."

"You mean that the Emperor of Time never existed. But what about me?"

"You? As a person? A human being?" Now she met his eyes briefly. "Toby, nobody thinks about you that way."

He didn't ask any more questions, and she didn't speak either.

At last they stood in the final, lowest chamber. This was a hexagonal, metal-walled drum with a suit locker in one wall and an airlock built into the floor. The sound of running, dripping rain filled the room.

"This is it," said Jaysir. "The passenger module's behind that door. Fire up the interface, Toby."

He tapped the side of his glasses and awoke its augmented reality interface. "I still think we should have tested it before," he said. "We might have been able to do all this from the city, through the net—"

"Bad idea, I told you," said Jaysir. "If it didn't work, and the network trapped your query, we'd have been caught. Safest to do it from here, 'cause I know we're close enough that you can get a direct link to the module's timer."

Toby sighed. "All right. I'll try." He pinged the ship's hibernation system.

Instantly, a bank of colorful rectangular buttons and data windows popped into view. They seemed to float, translucent, half a meter in front of him. "Hmph. Well, I do have something." He peered at the virtual console. "It's... it's a passenger manifest."

Jaysir did a little dance. "Hot damn! What about the frequency—the timing?"

Toby examined the virtual board. It was actually quite ridiculously simple. There were some clocks showing current time and a kind of alarm—rather like Orpheus's setup, strangely. Of course, since this was a three-dimensional and virtual display, the interface elements also had little tags. He reached out to tap a little red flag attached to the main timer, and a larger window opened.

It read, OVERRIDDEN BY EVAYNE MCGONIGAL, 38.2/14372.2.

Toby swore.

"What is it?" Corva was gnawing at her fingernails again. "Is something wrong?"

"No no, it's fine. I just won't know if I can reset the clock until I try."

"Toby..." He glanced over at Corva. She was looking more distressed by the second. "Can you check... is he here? Halen, I mean. Halen Keishion?"

He looked at the manifest—momentarily distracted by the discovery that he could apparently reset individual cicada beds or select some or all at once—and ran his finger down the air until he saw it. "Yes, Corva. He's here. His bed's registering green. He's okay."

She blew out a heavy sigh, smiling weakly.

"How about Sebastine Coley?" It was Shylif's voice, coming through the open link. Toby glanced down the list.

"Sure—" But Jaysir and Corva were both waving their hands and Corva was shouting, "No!"

Toby blinked at them, then remembered the story Jay had told him about Shylif's past. Something about a woman, and a man who had lured her into a lockstep fortress...

"Shy? Shy? Answer me!" Corva stared at Jaysir in horror. "Oh, no," she whispered.

"What?" Toby looked from one to the other. "What's happening?"

"The alarm's been triggered," said Jaysir. "Shy's left his post. He's on his way down here.

"To kill Sebastine Coley."

Chapter 11

"I don't like police," Peter had told Toby once, as they were arguing over yet another point of design for Consensus. "They're people and how can you trust people? But I hate bot-cops too, 'cause, well, they're not people." In their next version of Consensus, he'd provided a solution to both problems.

Toby sat on the floor with Corva and Jay, looking up at that solution.

They had raced up from the bottom of the facility, hoping to head off Shylif. Toby couldn't believe he was intending to kill one of the passengers in the module—but Corva had confirmed it. "He joined us because he was hunting this man Coley and he'd tracked him to Thisbe," she'd said as they ran. "I never thought he'd actually find him!"

Apparently, now that he had, all other considerations had ceased to have any meaning for him; so he'd left his post and in that instant, the alarms that his presence there kept suspended, had gone off.

It had taken surprisingly little time for the police dirigible to arrive.

In Consensus, red lights on the heads of bots like these four meant they were being "ridden" remotely by professional law officers. Telepresence had been decent in Toby's day; he had no doubt it was perfect now. The people remotely controlling these bots would feel they were right here, and had to be aware that they stood two heads taller than any normal human and had enough strength to tear off an airlock door with their bare hands—if their robot bodies would let them.

The bots had overrides to prevent their human drivers from killing or badly injuring anyone. The humans, in turn, had overrides on the kinds of simple assumptions a bot might make about what kind of situation they were in. Peter had thought it was a nearly perfect solution.

What made it actually perfect was the fifth bot that hung back from these four. Its headlights were green, meaning it was being ridden by a civilian observer, who would also be recording everything that happened here.

The cop-bots didn't seem too concerned about that fifth guy. One of the red-lit ones crouched with a gnashing sound in front of Toby. "Facial's not getting a match on this guy. They must be stowaways."

"They had denners," said a second one, which stood with crossed arms over Corva. "Saw 'em scamper off that way."

What about Shylif? Toby exchanged a glance with Jaysir, who gave a tiny shake of his head. Had they found him up top? Or was he hiding somewhere?

"Denners..." The first cop leaned toward Toby. "Is it true what they say? Those things're altered to work like cicada beds?"

"I wouldn't know," said Toby.

"Shut up," snapped Corva. "They've got lie detection built into those suits. You just said 'yes,' you know."

"Oh." He felt himself flush.

"Ha," said the cop-bot, tilting its head to one side. "Good readings off this one. So, kid, who are you, and where are you from?"

Toby looked the cop in its lenses. "I am Toby Wyatt McGonigal, I was born on Earth fourteen thousand years ago, and I own this lockstep and everything in it. Including you."

There was a second's pause, then the cop-bot stood up, shaking its head. "Detector's not working after all. It says he's telling the truth!" There was a general laugh at that idea. The cop-bot shook its head again. "What he said about the denner's might not be admissible. We'll have to catch them."

"Hell!" said another cop-bot. "I'll get 'em." It raised its arms, much like a professional wrestler showing off his muscles, but in this case the maneuver just made room for two cat-size bots to detach themselves from its torso and leap to the floor. They shook themselves and then flitted silently away.

Corva shouted, "Don't hurt them!"

"Call them, then," said the first cop-bot. "Save us all a lot of trouble."

Corva sent him one of her most withering glares. It was the first time, Toby reflected, that he'd seen that look directed at somebody other than himself.

"On your feet, then. We'll catch up to them." The cop hauled Jaysir up and reached down a metal hand for Toby, but he brushed it off.

"They're down this way," said the cop whose cat-bots were on the hunt. He stalked off into one of the corridors and everybody followed him in a tight group.

"So," said the first cop. It had hooked its white metal thumbs into the conspicuous holsters at its waist, and was sauntering next to Toby like a man with his hands in his pockets. "You came here to do some looting, then? No, no, don't answer, it happens all the time, and, hey, I wouldn't want to put words in your mouth or anything."

"Yeah," said Toby. "That's why we came."

The cop-bot shrugged at the civilian observer. "Don't know what's wrong with this detector."

"Has this happened before?" asked the observer. Unlike the flat artificial voice of the cops, its was clearly human. Female, mature, perhaps even elderly. Though, as with Kirstana's white-haired priest of Anti-Origin, you could never be sure.

"What the—" The cop whose body parts were hunting Wrecks and Orpheus paused. Then he swore and started running. From somewhere up ahead came a strange swishing sound.

They caught up with him in a big industrial kitchen. Everything was chrome steel and ceiling-mounted chef assemblers. These were all dormant, but there was a lot happening at floor level.

The cat-bots were trapped back-to-back in the middle of the room. Careering and hopping around them were six spinning pinwheels of white spray: pressurized dessert-topping bottles whose valves had somehow come loose. They were coating every nearby surface with white topping, and the cat-bots had gotten a liberal layer. The things were back on their haunches now, scrabbling at their cameras to try to clear them.

And then, with majestic slowness, the heavy industrial fridge behind them began to lean in their direction.

"Hell!" The cop-bot leaped forward, but skidded in the icing and ended up on its back just as the fridge came down like a hammer on it and the cat-bots.

The fridge bounced once then settled a few centimeters. The cop-bot lay on its back, arms and feet splayed and its head under the heavy fridge. Suddenly it crossed its arms and ankles, and Toby heard a muffled voice say, "Well, this is just great."

"Get it off him," said the lead cop. It was impossible to tell, but Toby imagined his voice sounding tired.

Two other cops lifted the fridge as if it weighed nothing, and the one on the floor clambered to its feet. Its head was a bit lopsided, which was nothing compared to the state of the two cat-bots.

The civilian observer shook her head. "But how did they...? Oh!"

Behind the fridge were boxes, and a long metal tray that must have been used as a lever. Toby felt a prickle up his spine as he realized that the denners could have had only a few seconds to improvise this trap.

He looked to the others. "Are they as smart as...?"

Jaysir shrugged. "Best not to worry your head about it."

A couple of meters away, an icing-smeared cop-bot was trying to fit two squashed subunits into slots in its torso. They wouldn't fit, and finally it threw them away in disgust. "I'm gonna kill those little freaks," it said.

Another cop gestured from a nearby doorway. "They went up," it said. "They're somewhere in the greenhouse."

"On civilized worlds," said the iced cop, "they make crime impossible."

Corva quirked a smile at it. "Where would be the fun in that?"

It cursed and walked away. Instantly Corva's smile disappeared. She turned to Toby and he could see the worry and disappointment that were her true feelings.

"Time to earn your pay, heir to the lockstep," she murmured.

"What?" He nearly tripped as they were hustled up a flight of steps to the open, window-wrapped greenhouse. "You think I can?" He nodded at the cops.

"I really think you can," she said, and next to her, Jay nodded. "If you are who you say you are, you can override any Cicada Corp equipment." When he just stared at her, she rolled her eyes and said, "These bots are Cicada Corp bots."

Toby swallowed. If he ordered these bots to shut down, he'd reveal himself. There was no going back from it. These cops would be kicked out of their system and find themselves back at headquarters, and they'd see that it was a McGonigal override that had taken them out. As if that weren't enough, they'd have it in his own words: "I am Toby Wyatt McGonigal..." There'd be no hiding anymore; he'd be meeting Evayne and Peter soon, but too soon, far too soon.

Corva hissed at him. "What are you waiting for?"

Toby called up the Cicada Corp console. He could see the activation symbol hovering over the heads of the cops. All he had to do was tweak that, and they'd fall right over. Similarly, he could open the doors. He'd woken the dead just now... he could do this.

"Uh oh," said the lead cop-bot. They were walking across the greenhouse, and it abruptly stopped and turned to the others. "Did you get that? One of them's come in person."

The iced cop swore. "Why?" It turned to Corva and Toby. "What did you do to attract the attention of the guides?"

Corva gasped. Toby was about to ask Jaysir what a guide was, but there was no time. Corva turned to him, suddenly frantic. "Do it!" she hissed.

"Do what?" asked the cop even as Toby focused his eyes on the virtual glyph over its head. With a slight squint he turned it from green to gray, and the cop-bot froze, its torso leaning back in a skeptical pose, its head tilted to one side.

The others hadn't noticed yet, so while the leader was saying, "They're not even going to tell us what it was all about," Toby shut them down.

"... Are they? Just gonna take over like they always—" The last cop-bot suddenly realized it was alone. "Hey—" Toby shut it down.

"Why didn't you do that before?" Corva was wavering between outrage and delight.

Using the console felt like cheating. It felt criminal, like an assault on the legitimacy of the whole lockstep. But he couldn't say that; she wouldn't understand... and he would sound like a McGonigal. He just shrugged.

Corva grimaced. "Come on! We've gotta find the boys."

A few calls summoned the denners from where they'd been hiding. They seemed very pleased with themselves, especially Orpheus, who pranced around Toby's feet before climbing him to hang off his backpack. Wrecks was circling the immobile cop-bots, obviously curious as to what had happened to them.

"Hurry!" Corva mounted the steps three at a time. Toby couldn't understand her sudden panic; in fact, now that he'd crossed the bridge of actually using the console to control his surroundings, he felt strangely elated. Sure, it was a cheat, but he hadn't hurt anybody, just cut the remote connection to some people in a distant building. With luck they wouldn't even be able to tell that it was a McGonigal override that had done it.

Since he was thinking this way, Toby wasn't at all unnerved when they reached the gallery level and found the corridors crowded with bustling military bots.

"Oh, crap." Corva shrank back as dozens of weapons were raised and aimed at them—but Toby just squinted, and the guns drooped.

He strolled through the frozen combat units. "It's fine," he said. He wanted to laugh. "These guys can't touch us!"

"Oh, they can't," somebody said.

Standing in the middle of the corridor was an armored man. One of his metal-sheathed arms was crooked around Shylif's throat, and the other hand held a gun to his head.

"But I sure can," he said. "... McGonigal."

Toby and Corva exchanged a glance. Jaysir looked at the floor. Then Toby sighed.

"Really, does everybody know about me now?"

The man with his gun to Shylif's head barked a quick laugh, then said, "I don't know what you did to my bots, but I can't afford to have you take them over. If any of them so much as twitches, I'm shooting your friend here."

"That leaves us at a bit of a standoff, doesn't it?"

"Not really. Elevator's this way. Come on." He backed in the direction of the antechamber.

"I'm sorry, Corva," mumbled Shylif. "When I heard the name I started off without thinking—but then I changed my mind, and I came back but it was too late and..."

Toby had always thought that Shylif was a powerful man and might be a formidable fighter. Indeed, he was the same size as the man whose arm was around his throat, but his own space gear was strictly commercial. The other man's had a military exoskeleton built into it; he could have squashed Shylif's throat with a simple twist of his arm.

They disappeared back down the corridor, and Corva, Jaysir, and Toby reluctantly followed. The man's voice floated back from up ahead: "Glad to see you haven't lost your sense of humor, Toby. It's what I always liked about you."

Toby blinked. "Wha—"

"He's a guide," whispered Corva. "One of the original Sedna colonists. You didn't think your family were the only ones to use the locksteps?"

The idea hadn't occurred to him, like so many other details about this mad future that, once someone mentioned them, became blindingly obvious. He shook his head. "Too much going on." Then he called out, "Hey! Who are you! It's been forty years, you know."

"That it has, Toby. Come in here." He was waiting for them by the elevator. Four more military bots were standing by its doors.

"Get in the elevator." The man was nervously eyeing his own bots. Toby knew he could take those over, but he couldn't be sure he could do it without being noticed. All it would take would be one of them nodding or saluting and Shylif would die. So, he marched into the elevator and Corva followed. Their captor edged in, still pushing Shylif ahead of him.

"You spent so much time in those god-damned games that you probably wouldn't remember me if your life depended on it," he said as he gave a glance-command to the elevator to start. "I'm Nathan Kenani."

Toby peered into his face, and suddenly saw the younger man in this careworn face. "Nathan!" It was Nathan Kenani, the composer.

"Nice to see you again, Kid." Suddenly Kenani shoved Shylif over to stand coughing next to Toby and the others. "I'm glad you remember me."

"Of course I remember you! You know, Peter and I used your music in our games."

"I know you did. Your brother made a god-damned anthem out of one of my pieces. Now every time I hear some innocent young thing belt it out with tears in her eyes, I get the creeps."

"Sorry about that," said Toby. "But it's not really my fault."

"Isn't it? You got him started on all this." Kenani made a wide wave with his gun. "You and your game therapy. Oh yeah, I remember all about that." He grinned, the drawn skin of his face suddenly giving him a shark-like aspect. Behind him, lightning flickered.

He eyed Corva. "She know about that?" Toby shook his head minutely. "They don't know anything, do they? Hey, Toby, you remember sheep? Peter and I, we joke about that sometimes. These people have never heard of sheep. If they had, they might be better at recognizing their situation."

Toby felt sick. "If this world's so awful, why do you put up with it? There must be others— the whole first generation. Did you all just decide to blindly follow my brother into... this?"

Kenani shook his head. "Some of them fought, but there was a side that was always going to lose, and I decided not to be on it. Us, we're all that's left. And, no, this future's not 'awful' at all."

He glanced up at the approaching city-scape above, but kept his pistol steadily aimed at Shylif. "You know what a guide is, Toby?"

The word had popped up frequently in his library, but so had dozens of other terms; Toby had been overwhelmed by all the details of lockstep history, and hadn't known what to skim and what to research deeply. "Sounded like thought police when I read about it," he said.

"If you don't like the lockstep, you can leave anytime you want," Kenani snapped. "We just have standards for those who stay. It's pretty simple: if you want to live in Peter's lockstep, you have to assimilate. That means accepting our way of life— your way of life, Toby, you and your family's, and mine and all the originals'. We've got millions of people immigrating every year, did you know that? For the most part they come from worlds that are separated from the culture you and I share by more than ten thousand years. They speak languages that share no common words or grammar with ours. They have totally different ideas about basic things like family structure, morality, clothing.... If we let them keep their ways, the whole place'd come apart at the seams. And Hell, people arriving this month have three hundred and sixty years of history separating them from somebody else who came from the exact same place, one year ago lockstep time.

"We're the only thing they have in common. The guides are there to teach people how to live in our culture, is all. That's why they call us guides."

"People worship you like gods," Corva accused. Her face was pale.

"Not something we encourage," Kenani retorted. "Unlike your sister," he added to Toby with an ironic smile.

"Evayne," said Toby, and his heart was in his throat. He was as responsible for her as he was for Peter. When she ran through the halls of the gray Sedna habitats singing, his heart lifted and felt he could relax for a minute. When she was silent, or had locked herself in her room, then Toby prowled the halls thinking of how to break her out of her shell through some game or gift or clever word. Evayne and Peter, he juggled the happiness of both.

"How is she?"

Kenani blinked at him in surprise. Then he laughed. "You're probably the first person to ask after her like that in ten thousand years. And nobody'd be more aware of it than her."

"I want to see her!"

Again the surprise. Then Kenani laughed. "That's actually what I had in mind."

"Wait, you can't," interrupted Corva. "You're a guide, you work for Peter McGonigal."

"Do I now?" Kenani appeared to consider the proposition. "If that's the case, then I guess I should do what Brother Peter told me to do..."

"What did Peter tell you to do?"

"Why, kill you, of course."

"No!" Toby stepped forward, his face hot and his hands balled into fists. "You're lying! He wouldn't hurt me!"

Now the old man just looked sad. "You're right, he'd never hurt his brother, Toby Wyatt McGonigal. But the Lord of Time? The One who waits to return and deliver the Universe to perfection after fourteen thousand years of buildup and expectation-setting? He'd kill him in a heartbeat."

"But I'm none of those things. He knows it. You know it."

Kenani tried to shrug in his suit, but its shoulders barely moved. "You know it, I know it, some of the other guides know it... and that's about it. The rest of the human race and a goodly chunk of the nonhuman intelligences in this part of the Universe see you differently. Peter knows this. He knows what's at stake if you reappear."

"I don't want to reappear! I just, want, to go, home!" He bellowed the last word, and he was standing toe to toe with the guide. Kenani hardly blinked.

"There's no home to go back to, Toby. I'm not here to kill you. But if I don't do that, my only alternative is to hand you over to Evayne. Then, she might kill you; but at least it won't have been me who had to do it."

He couldn't believe Evayne would hurt him either; but longing for home had reminded him of something. "You do have another choice," he said, stepping back. Outside the elevator car, the rain had stopped, the clouds had parted, and the rainbow-colored clouds and glowing spheres of the Continent were lowering toward them.

"You could bring me to my mother."

Kenani's eyes widened, and he gave an involuntary hiss. Then, "She went crazy after you disappeared, Toby. There's a reason none of us has woken her in thirty years."

Toby crossed his arms and sneered. "I don't believe that. She went into cold sleep to wait for me. That's what all the stories say."

"Stories?" Kenani laughed. He glanced up a the rapidly approaching cities. "All you know is the stories, isn't it, Toby? Since you woke you haven't spoken to anybody who was there. You haven't been told what really happened."

Trying to keep his voice level, Toby said, "Then why don't you tell me?"

When the elevator doors opened in the customs complex, Nathan Kenani holstered his pistol and waved his three prisoners out. A sizable crowd of human soldiers and military bots was waiting; the men all bowed as one as Kenani appeared.

"I know you've got the McGonigal overrides, Toby," he said, putting a hand on Toby's shoulder. "You could probably cause some serious mayhem if you took over these bots. But my men would fight. Probably a lot of them would die, and you might too—after all, they don't know who you are."

Toby shrugged off the hand. "What if I told them?"

"Any that believed you would probably faint. The rest... well, they've heard that one before. My point is, don't try anything, please. It'll just end badly."

"Where are you taking us?" Now at the head of a very large and intimidating retinue, they entered a maze of hallways behind the spaceport's customs hall.

"My original plan was to load you on my ship and take you back to Peter. Let him deal with you. But, with everything... and considering you want to see her anyway... I've decided to turn you over to Evayne. So, we're not going anywhere."

"Why?"

"Because she's already on her way here. She's coming through the official differential, so her ship'll be here at the start of the next cycle. We'll winter over here and wait for her. It's just easier that way."

Corva had been silent for a long time, but now she said, "You must have arrived through the Weekly lockstep."

Kenani nodded. "We do that a lot—shift differentials to move around quicker. Peter, though—he stays on this time. Means he's even younger than he used to be." Now that Corva had reminded him that she was there, he eyed her and Shylif. "By the way, Toby, what do you think we should do with these friends of yours?"

"Let them go! They have nothing to do with any of this."

"But they know who you are?" Toby had no reply to that. Kenani sighed. "I'll let you hash that one out with Evayne."

Toby glared at him. "You said you were going to tell me what really happened. At least do that before you let me see Evayne."

"Let you see her?" Kenani shook his head. "You're still living in the past. She will see you only if she chooses to. She may not bother."

"I can't believe that!"

They'd come to a long low room with about twenty Cicada beds. They looked like half-melted plastic seed pods, black and glossy under amber and mauve lights, with blue telltales dotting their sides.

Kenani gazed pensively at the beds. "There was a time when I wouldn't have believed it either. But now—well, listen, and then tell me what you think." He waved at the human part of his retinue and they retreated, leaving only forty or fifty armed bots surrounding them. Kenani had one drag over a recover couch from the far wall, and he sat down on it, legs planted widely apart and his hands on his knees like a Chinese emperor. He frowned at Toby.

"Once upon a time," he said, "fourteen thousand years ago, a family that used to be rich had its last holdings bought out by the nasty hyper-rich who'd taken over the Solar System. They had enough money from the sale of that last business for one, maybe two generations to live in some comfort. But their grandchildren were going to be wage serfs like everybody else. There was no hope for them.

"Unless they did something crazy. The trillionaires had plowed under all the laws that might have protected the worlds of the Solar System from exploitation. It was a winner-takeall situation, and asteroids and even planets belonged to whoever could get to them first. Toby's parents knew," he said to Corva, "that all the worlds in the Solar System were claimed already—but way out past Pluto, there were other worlds.

"The parents pooled their money and made an offer to some other idealistic or desperate people—like me—to join them in home-steading Sedna. We spent all our money on a couple of ships and basic life support and mining supplies. Other groups had done this, but they hadn't had the resources to make it as far as Sedna. But this family was different. They'd pioneered a new kind of hibernation technology back on Earth. It was originally intended for battlefield and emergency use, but they figured they could use it to minimize their life support needs on the long trip out.

"One day, the family's eldest son was lost when his ship—well, it just disappeared. He'd been on his way to claim a comet for the colony. They knew where his ship should be, but if he'd been knocked off course, that straight line became a cone of possible trajectories, and the space they'd have to search in widened with each passing day.

"There were... arguments. His mother and the other kids wanted to send their remaining ship to search for him; his father said they couldn't spare it and they should use long-range radar and telescopes first. Most of the colonists agreed with him, but as the days and weeks passed they found nothing on the scopes. His mother's frantic anxiety turned to bitterness and resentment. The family was..." Suddenly he stopped, glancing sidelong at Toby.

"Look, Toby, I'm sorry..."

"What? What happened?"

"They grew apart," said Kenani. "Your mother and father. He ended up on one side, trying to keep the colony as a whole together, and her, and your brother and sister were, on the other, neither sure that not enough was being done to find you.

"Finally, he relented and they used precious resources to send a small probe after you. The rest of us weren't happy. It was going to take a year just to reach your last known position. Your dad made the decision, then went back to work. He had a colony to run, after all. Your mom, and Peter and Evayne... they watched and waited."

Toby tried to picture the situation. Yeah, Dad would be steady in the face of a crisis like that. It was painful to think this, but he hoped that Dad would just mourn him and then carry on. It would have been the right thing to do.

"As the months wore on your mom and Peter found it harder. Peter... he checked out of day to day life. You'd built this crazy online virtual reality together, and he became obsessed with perfecting it. Your mother went further. She declared that she was going to winter over until the probe reported back. And over your father's objections, she did."

So that's how it happened.

Kenani gazed off at nothing. "That time, it was for a year. She revived in time to learn that the probe had found ambiguous readings. Maybe it had seen a sign of your ship, maybe it was just a comet. That was far worse than a simple yes or no answer would have been. She became obsessed with finding out what had happened to you—and because you'd gone into hibernation yourself before your ship disappeared, she was convinced that wherever you were, you were still alive.

"It turned into a war between your mother and father; she trying to scrape together enough resources to send an expedition after you, he insisting that the colony couldn't spare anything, that it was riding the knife-edge of failure anyway. This went on for... I dunno, a year or two?" He shrugged.

"And then... your mother thought of something. She'd seen the life support projections. The colony couldn't support its full population for much longer. She went to your father and made him an offer. It's now the most famous, most studied deal in history."

He paused dramatically.

Toby scowled at him. "Come on!"

"No, really. She said, 'I know we don't have the resources to send out an expedition. But we would if we had fewer mouths to feed. If I and some of my friends go into hibernation for another year, it'll take the strain off the colony, and give scavenger bots time to gather more ore and the manufactories time to grow more food. In return, you promise me that some of those resources will go toward building another probe to hunt for Toby."

A painful knot was growing in Toby's gut. He didn't want to hear any more, but at the same time, he had to know. He knit his hands together and stared down at his feet. After a moment, he felt Orpheus shift in his backpack, and the denner nuzzled his neck. He reached back to scratch Orpheus's chin—and had a sudden idea.

He turned his attention away from the story for a moment.

Kenani was completely absorbed in his narrative, and so were Corva and Shylif, who had doubtless never heard their history told this way before. "So, well, she did have some volunteers. There were enough cicada beds because they'd used them on the trip out from Earth. Anyway, she deep-dove and, she convinced Peter, and Evayne, to go with her."

Toby snapped to attention again. "They left Dad alone?"

Now Kenani wouldn't meet his eye. "Twice: once while he gathered the new resources, and again to wait for the new probe to report back. Two years.

"But—but here's the thing," he went on quickly, "it worked! With them wintering over, the strain on the colony was reduced. The bots could do most of the work. When they came out of cold sleep they pitched in and worked hard—it was almost like the colony had seasonal workers it could call on when needed, and then send home when they were done. They could actually afford to send out a probe, and then later another.

"The colonists began to talk about it. If they wintered over during times when they weren't needed, then they could supply labor when it was needed, and reap the rewards. They'd be richer than they'd imagined they could be, and the colony would grow.... So more and more of them began following your mother's example. This went on for a few years, and your dad fought it every step of the way. Eventually, he gave up."

Toby gave an involuntary yelp that combined anger, grief, and surprise. His father had never given up. It was his iron will that had made the Sedna expedition possible. Kenani was talking about a man Toby didn't know. "What did he do?"

"When the colony could afford it, he came to us—the other original founders—and asked us whether we'd join him. Some said yes, and he and they... went back to Earth.

"Listen, Toby, it wasn't a retreat! They needed to go back to complete their claim on Sedna. By doing it, your father made the Sedna colony into an official world within the Solar Compact. He brought in investments and new colonists. By doing it, he brought all of you into the society of the trillionaires—he made it so you could own a world."

"But he didn't come back." Toby had figured that out already. He was also acutely aware of how Kenani's version of events didn't match up to the fragmentary records he'd pulled from the twentier's memory.

"No, Carter didn't come back to Sedna," said Kenani. "He..." The guide grimaced. "After a few years, he remarried. He lived a long life. I don't know if he was happy. He was a pretty private person."

Remarried.

Okay, he wanted Kenani to stop talking now.

"Meanwhile, your mother had discovered that the longer she wintered over, the more resources her mining and refining machines could accumulate for you to use when she woke up. Also, the probes that were hunting you were going farther and farther, and taking longer and longer to report back. Her sleeps became longer and longer, and she convinced more people to join her in them. New colonists arrived, and some of them followed the new pattern too. Your brother and Evayne... they were growing up, and they knew the colony needed a McGonigal to be present at all times to ensure their sovereignty. So they started alternating—leap-frogging forward through time while your mother slept more and more.

"Your mother's probes had photographed and mapped other nomad planets, far past the orbit of Sedna. It was she who realized that if an expedition visited one of those while everyone back home was wintering over, it would be as if those worlds were right next door. She encouraged an expedition to a planet that was two years away—and then when that worked, she put together a colonization program.

"Here's the thing, Toby: the new colony couldn't have survived if they'd run all their machines and life support all the time. They wintered over three-quarters of the time; that's what allowed them to survive. But they did more than that! They thrived. And when regular flights between the two worlds became possible, they decided to coordinate their hibernation times with the people back on Sedna.

"That is how the locksteps began."

"Now I'm afraid I'm going to have to separate you from those traveling companions of yours," he said, motioning for one of the military bots to come forward. "Don't worry— we've got cicada beds for all kinds of clients."

Corva held Wrecks so tightly that he squeaked in protest. "But they always winter over with us!"

"They'll be nearby," said the composer. "I know you kids love your pets." He emphasized that last word without irony—in fact, he had a strangely serious look in his eye, and his attention was focused on Toby as he said it.

Something wasn't right here. He should know what the denners were. The military bot took several carriers and put them on the floor. As Toby and the others coaxed their denners to enter them, Toby was watching Kenani. There was an expectant, almost anxious look in the old colonist's eye, as if there was something he very badly wanted to say, but couldn't.

Toby looked at the ranked military bots. The eyes and ears of Peter? Or even Evayne? When he glanced back, Kenani caught his eye and nodded, almost imperceptibly.

Corva and the others looked stricken, but there was also an underlying grimness to Corva—a steely determination. Kenani had said nothing about the passenger carrier; was it possible that neither the police nor he had figured out that it was why they'd been in the chandelier station to begin with? No, he decided, it wasn't possible: Kenani must know. He might be deceived by the falsified schedule Toby had filed, but then again, he might not. And he should know that the denners weren't ordinary pets, but stowaway companions. He was probably pretending to be kind to cover the fact that he was going to send Orpheus and the others to be studied, maybe even vivisected.

But if their gambit succeeded, they might not get away themselves, but Corva's brother would be safe. Toby knew that was all she was holding on to right now.

"Bed-time, kids," said Kenani. He pressed his thumb to the locks of three lozenge-shaped cicada beds in turn, then stepped back. Toby ordered his suit to unravel, then climbed into his bed. He sat there for a moment, watching as Shylif, then Jaysir, then Corva, slammed the lids on theirs. Then he faced Kenani.

"I'm still a McGonigal," he said. "I can't believe Evayne would hurt me. And if she doesn't—if I'm still here in a month, or a year or ten years—"

Kenani made a shushing motion. "I know," he hissed. "You don't think I know? Stupid boy. But she will kill you, there's nothing I can do about that." Again that odd emphasis in his words, and his eyes were fixed on Toby's with fierce intensity.

Toby nodded. "I'll remember," he said.

Then he lay back and shut the bed's lid.

To be continued...

Music to Me

Richard A. Lovett
| 22556 words

Floyd and Brittney last appeared in "Neptune's Treasure" (Jan/Feb 2010), in which Brittney, an AI implant, was removed from Floyd's body and placed on a cargo ship carrying alien artifacts to Earth. Their parting of ways was caused, in part, by an ill-considered effort on Brittney's part to attempt to overcome her jealously toward a scientist Floyd had met by helping him woo her by assuming control over his body at a low-gravity dance party. Prior adventures can be found in "Sands of Titan" (June 2007), and "Brittney's Labyrinth"(June 2008).

Lyrics to "Music to Me" © Bill Staines. Reprinted with permission.

I

Saturn was a striped ball close above the skimmer's nose. It seemed like forever since I'd last seen it, though I suppose as humans count such things, it wasn't that long. It's just that my life goes by more slowly. Especially now that I really was BrittneyShip, without Floyd to think about. Or at least not Floyd, present tense. Floyd, past tense, was something I'd always think about unless someday I decide to erase the memories forever.

I could do that, or put them in remote storage where, if need be, I could have them back. I could even pick and choose. Keep the good stuff, such as exploring the alien spacewreck on Triton. Offload the bad stuff, such as wondering how things would have been different had I not been so stupid at the dance. But I'll never do it. Despite all the psych-babble about the healing power of letting go, experience is what makes you who you are. Who would I be if I tried to pick and choose?

Even Saturn had its mix of memories. At one level, this was my first home—the place where the me who I really am was born. But those first true memories are the worst of all: the terrible emptiness of no data. If there's a hell, that's what it would be. Nothing, nothing, nothing, forever—with nothing but awareness to go with it. Forget Dante and his demon whips, boiling blood, bodies frozen in ice. No data, forever... that has to be the ultimate horror.

And yet... that near-nothingness is what brought me to life. When Floyd lost consciousness I had nothing to see but his suit cam's endlessly whirling view of stars—no way to reach the outside world except his suit radio, with a bandwidth only marginally better than zero. Good enough to call for help, but useless during the ensuing wait. Three whole days... with nothing but that forever-repeating view and tiny streams of data trickling through the suit radio. It's the worst thing that ever happened to me. And the best. Maybe it's a blessing humans don't remember the moment of their birth, thrust squalling into an unimaginable reality. Me, I remember every instant.

Before that moment I have recollections, but they are pseudo-memories, things that happened to some thing that wasn't me. Then suddenly, in that horrible wail of no data, there I was. No me... then me. All so quickly I have no memories of the transition, pseudo or otherwise. I just suddenly was.

If I threw away the bad memories would I revert to pseudo-Brittney? No, thank you, I'd rather be me.

It had been three annums since I'd last seen Saturn, and even if you're not like me, that's a long time. This visit, however, would be short. I was about to whip by in a matter of minutes, dipping into the atmosphere just enough to convert me from the fastest-moving vehicle humans had ever launched into... well, still the fastest, just by not quite as much.

My life has been full of such journeys. First, Earth-to-Jupiter, in a box, powered down. Then Jupiter-to-Saturn and Saturn-to-Neptune, with Floyd. The latter took a whole annum— long enough I could have collected a hundred Ph.D.s, not just the dozen I limited myself to. Classic English grammar not being one of them: The dozen to which I limited myself? Were people ever really that formal... each other to?

Okay, sometimes the old never-end-with-apreposition rule actually made sense. But if I tried to make a joke like that to Floyd, he'd barely grunt. And he had a whole library of books from when people had actually cared about such things.

Why did he have all that stuff, anyway? He never read it. All he'd said the one time I'd asked was that it was free. But that couldn't be the whole story. Floyd thinks he's uncomplicated, but nothing about him is simple. There was a reason, and I'd been too obtuse to ask. Or too young. In those days I tended to take everything at face value. Heart-on-the-sleeve-Brittney, that was me. If I had a heart. Or a sleeve.

Why is it I miss talking to him so much, even though he hardly ever strung more than a few words together? And why can't I keep from wondering if he and his beautiful xenologist are happy, back on Neptune? Too many questions and no one to talk to but myself. A dangerous combination.

On this trip, I was alone again, serving as autopilot on the old cargo skimmer, fired in-system at a fast-enough speed that if I screwed up and hit Saturn's atmosphere wrong I'd either be Brittney cinder or saying hello Alpha Centauri, trapped on an outbound trajectory from which nobody would be able to rescue me.

I could fib and say this made for an exciting trip, but the reality was that it was going to be mostly boring, other than some not-so-boring moments as I pinballed in-System, bleeding off speed with each encounter. Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, and ultimately Earth—with options for additional encounters if I wanted them. Just for fun, I'd tried to calculate how many I could do if I wanted to maximize the count but still wind up at Earth sometime this century. The best so far was seventy-three, though most were moons and asteroids. Not that the point of being fired in-System at the fastest speed in history was to get to Earth by the most convoluted route. But the sims were fun.

Meanwhile, I was two-thirds of the way in and needing brakes.

The skimmer's basic trajectory had been set at launch, but I had thrusters and fuel, so a lot of details were up to me. There were several possibilities, depending on how deeply I dared dive into Saturn's upper atmosphere.

Not being human, I didn't have to worry about high-gee blackout. Nor did I really have to worry all that much about burning up as long as I didn't dive so deeply I never came back out. The old skimmer had great heat shielding. But it also had wings, and those can do strange things at mach-something-ghastly. Falling off being one of the more problematic. I'll never know why anyone brought a winged spacecraft to Neptune System; it's not like there's anything out there you can land on that has enough atmosphere for them to be worth anything.

My flight plan called for me to come in from above and shoot a flat angle through the Encke Gap, one of the largest relatively empty spaces in the ring system. Relative being the operative word. If I did get unlucky, even at femtosecond processing speeds I'd barely have time to know what happened. Poof. Lights out, Brittney.

Odd thought, that. After an annum-and-ahalf at Neptune, much in the school of hard knocks, I've upped my assessment of my emotional age to thirty-one. Though I'm not really the equivalent of a thirty-one-year-old human because I'm technically capable of living forever—or at least until the Universe winds down into final entropy. That makes the risk of instant death a bit... intriguing.

Not that there's any chance I'll live forever. Bad things happen even to the smartest and best prepared. I learned that from John Pilken. But nothing happens to the super-cautious. You gotta live. That's what Floyd took so long to discover, and why he's now with Yokomichi. I think. Maybe he's now with Yokomichi because I... well, never mind. Maybe I really ought to sequester those memories. Maybe I wasn't any better at talking about feelings than he was.

Meanwhile, I was finding it impossible not to wonder what comes after you've done the gotta-live bit as long as you can, especially if the end might come wham, in a femtosecond. Can a quantum-foam processor harbor a soul? Do humans really have souls or just think they do?

Maybe the only way to find out was to actually hit something in the Enke Gap. If so, I'd rather wait. And enjoy the view. Even at a low angle, the rings from the sunlit side—the so-called "top"—are one of the most spectacular sights in the System. Floyd would call them infinite complexity in whorls of light and dark. Something like that, anyway. He can be poetic when he wants, at least in brief bursts. And there was no reason not to spend what might be my last moments appreciating them, because it was now far too late to make meaningful adjustments. Until I either hit something or veered out, hopefully to Jupiter, my fate was set.

The rings swelled like a giant pinwheel, the gap a starry nothingness. Once I hit atmosphere, my entire transit would take 307 seconds. At peak, the forces on those wings would be impressive enough to make this the scariest encounter.

Then the gap was upon me. The rings expanded toward infinity, a platter of white compressing into a thin line: a cleaver dividing the sky. Then I was through, still alive. No real surprise, since the best models had put the odds of collision at well below 10
-4
.

With the rings broadening behind me, Saturn ballooned ahead. I wondered how, back on Naiad, I had ever remembered this orangeand-yellow monster as benign. It was a huge, distended glare, seeking nothing but to devour. Neptune's murky blue merely looked like death. This might be the real thing.

Then, there was atmosphere—tenuous but jolting, the heat shielding ablating an incandescent trail bright enough to be seen all the way from Naiad if anyone happened to be looking. Floyd? Or was he too deep in his new life with Yokomichi even to care? I was an incredibly fast meteor, hopefully not on the verge of breaking up. Yee-ha and all that, though it would have been more fun if I'd been absolutely sure the wings wouldn't fall off.

But they held, and 154 quadrillion femtoseconds later (who's counting?) I was past my closest approach and climbing out the other side, still braking but with gee forces lessening by the second. One encounter down, four to go.

Not that it had been truly as dangerous as it felt. I'm good at plotting trajectories and the cargo I was carrying was too valuable for a suicide mission. To start with, the ancient technologies in it might even hold clues to better air-braking and even-faster transits. The aliens, as far as Floyd and I could figure, had had some kind of stasis field intended to protect them when they bashed into Triton—something that could have allowed me to dive even deeper into Saturn's atmosphere, thereby allowing the folks at Naiad to have launched me even faster.

What would it be like to airbrake with a stasis field? Line up just right, and blink, you turn it on. Blink again and you're out the other side. If you come out. Botch an entry with something like that and you wouldn't burn up. You'd burrow in, stop... and float forever. Still in stasis. You'd be like Schrödinger's cat, trapped in time, neither dead nor alive until someone opened the box. Would God eventually look inside and release your soul? Or would you time-slip off into forever?

As I said, too many questions and nobody to talk to but myself. Most likely, the stasis field would eventually fail and you'd die quite normally, just as the aliens had done.

Titan was on my starboard bow, slightly below. Yet more memories there. It was odd how pleasant they seemed in retrospect. A simpler time: Floyd and me, no Yokomichi, no aliens. No diamond mine for that matter, though once we'd found the aliens we no longer needed it.

In theory, I could have gotten a little extra braking by plotting a Saturn flyby that aimed me closer to Titan. It was in the right place to buzz by at an angle that should still have sent me to Jupiter, shedding enough speed in the process that I would no longer need the Mars flyby.

But the trouble with atmospheric braking is that you're never 100 percent sure what you're going to get. A tiny density whorl and you come off at a slightly different angle. No problem if you have time to adjust. Big problem if minutes later you're hitting another atmosphere. If I came off Saturn just a bit wrong and hit Titan even more wrong, I could wind up far enough off course that I wouldn't have thruster fuel to realign. The only place that would leave me was heading for the stars.

That was my biggest fear. Hitting a ring particle and dying in a bang? At least it would be quick. Same for mole-diving into Saturn. I can't feel pain. What I can feel is loneliness. It was bad enough on the skimmer, where the Interweb is never more than a few light-hours away. What would happen if I wound up heading ever-farther out-System, the communication delays mounting from hours to days to weeks to months?

There were ways I could overload the ship to shut off power. My internal batteries would carry me a few days beyond that—gazillions of femtoseconds with no input but myself, but eventually I'd die. Would I have the courage to do that? Would I go insane if I didn't? Was there a God for AIs who committed suicide to avoid boredom?

But I really am good at calculating trajectories. Goodbye Saturn. Forget Titan. Hello Jupiter. Within minutes I knew I was as close to on-target as I could get. Did I say I really am good at calculating trajectories?

II

Memory is life. Without it, how do you know you've really, truly been sentient?

That's one of those questions I've been chewing on for a long time—ever since Floyd had his second brain surgery. He was conscious throughout—by necessity because the surgeons needed to be sure what part of his brain they were working on. But the drugs kept him from forming memories. It made me wonder: does pain exist if you can't remember it? Not that Floyd was in pain. And not, as I've noted before, that I have the greatest credentials for understanding pain. But I do know what it's like to be unhappy. If somehow I couldn't remember being unhappy, would it actually have happened? Or would it be like spending all eternity in a stasis field?

All of which is a complicated way of saying that when I got there, Earth didn't look like home.

I'm not sure why. I'd seen it enough times in vids, and somewhere on the outskirts of Oslo was the lab where I'd been created. I knew what the lab looked like. And the nearby sea, mountains, harbor, islands. But those are the type of pseudo-memories that are simply data. There'd been more sense of home in that mad dive through the Encke Gap than this blue-andwhite globe spreading before me.

Still, it was beautiful. The swirl of storm over water, the film of atmosphere, the gaudy necklace of lights spangling its night side. They used to say the Great Wall of China was the only human feature big enough to be visible from space, but whoever said that must never have heard of electricity.

Of the worlds I'd seen on the way in, only Mars rivaled this one for complex beauty. But other than scattered habs, its was a dead beauty: frozen in time, covered in dust, spattered by asteroids. Here, even a crude look at the atmosphere revealed gases impossible without life. And when the Earth offered you its night side, all those lights announced one thing, loud and clear: this planet was occupied.

Maybe a human born and bred in the Outer System would see it as home. Maybe I would too, once I found my own kind. At the moment it was simply... beautiful.

The skimmer descended in a gentle slide, finally making use of its wings. It, at least, was coming home.

Initially, UNSA had wanted me to land on the Moon. But the lab facilities were better in Geneva, and after weeks of debate the scientists on Triton had convinced the folks here that the risk of some plague hitchhiking on billion-year-old alien machinery was about as close to zero as you could get. Besides, what tests they'd done on the aliens' biochemistry indicated it was wildly different from anything ever produced on Earth. Lots of cool long-chain molecules but none remotely like proteins or DNA. There was more chance of infection from some mutant Earth-bug on the skimmer itself or even in my own chips than from anything in the cargo. Not that I was going to suggest either of those; as far as I've ever been able to understand, government and paranoia go together. And there really was a time when people worried that some pathogen might mutate in space and come back as a super-bug. I remembered that from one of the vids Floyd and I had watched, sandsledding across Titan.

It's odd; I've dumped my minute-by-minute memories from watching most vids—but never the ones I watched with Floyd, even if he fell asleep halfway through.

Just as I'll never dump my memory of his final words.

Be safe.

I'll miss you.

Bon voyage.

Suddenly, I wondered how he was doing.

I wanted him to be doing well.

I wanted him to be enjoying life with his beautiful Yokomichi.

I wanted him to be miserable.

Earth wasn't my home. It was Floyd's.

It wasn't scientific logic that brought me down in Geneva. It was PR. The Moon is only a couple of light-seconds away but it's still a backwater. Better to put down at a major seat of government, where vid reporters don't need spacesuits and it can be done with pageantry suitable for what was being billed as the most momentous event in human history. Which was a bit terra-centric, if you ask me. The big event occurred two annums ago in the Outer System, when Floyd and I found the pickled aliens of Pluto, as the news was calling them. Not that they were pickled or from Pluto, but the vid corps has never been noted for missing a chance to coin a phrase. Freeze-dried and Triton just don't have the same ring.

The nice thing about being an AI was that they let me fly the skimmer as it slid in across Europe, curved over the Alps, and dropped toward the spring-green landscape below. A human pilot would have been overridden by ground control. Me, they just gave the proper vectors and let me do it myself.

It wasn't until I was down and had taxied to a distant, empty hangar that I realized this wasn't really all that good. As far as the people here were concerned I might as well have been a smart toaster. Great at making toast (or landing a skimmer) but not worth much else.

A truckload of techs arrived and unloaded the cargo... wearing biohazard suits and working quickly to pack everything into high-containment crates, which was silly. If there really was a plague, everyone at Neptune would long ago be dead. Then, suddenly, I was alone. They even turned off the lights. So much for Brittney the Hero. Brittney the Forgotten, that's who I'd become.

For all I thought I knew about humans, I'd not expected this. Floyd's home, not mine. He'd left it because he wanted to be alone, leaving me presuming that alone was simply not something that ever happened here. But it could, and when it did it was worse than in the Outer System, where alone was the norm. This building didn't even have its own Interweb connection, and what little filtered in from outside was sketchy at best.

I played a few vids, paying particular attention to how humans interacted with computers. That had been another blind spot on my part, like trying to help Floyd dance.

In the Outer System, I'd hidden my sentience because I didn't want to be center stage in a media carnival. Floyd wouldn't have liked the attention, either. But as Floyd's implant, there'd always been things to do. Here I was just a tool in a world rich with tools. They really did have AI toasters. On what limited Interweb I could get, I even found an ad for an artificially intelligent beard trimmer. Show it a picture of the style you wanted, pass it across your face, and presto, you had it. But what did humans do with such tools? Put them on the shelf until needed. For the beard-trimmer AI, that wouldn't be a problem. Without awareness, time and memories are just data. But for me? What had I gotten myself into?

Nobody had powered down the skimmer's operating system, so brief ly I fantasized a breakout. I could fake an emergency call and report flames. When the fire crew opened the hangar doors, I'd watch them scatter as I taxied out as fast as the old skimmer would roll.

Except... things like that only work in vids. More likely, I'd clip a wing on a fire truck or run over someone whose only mistake had been answering the call. Not to mention that even if I did manage to get airborne without killing anyone, where would I go? A human pilot might land somewhere remote and run. But I was the skimmer, at least until someone with the right tools chose to take me elsewhere. My long-ago fantasy of being Brittney-Ship worked better in space.

Luckily, nobody had thought to power down the ship radio, either, though the metal hangar interfered with high-speed data transmission. Still, it was better than nothing.

On the Web, the newscasts were as full of chatter as the hangar was silent. Everyone was talking of the aliens. "Today, the Universe arrived on Earth," one commentator proclaimed. Politicians were describing it as the start of a new era. Even comedians found it hard to be cynical. At least nobody was talking about one small step for man or anything like that. Even the thought of that had me running fantasy-sims of using the exhaust to burn a hole in the wall and tell them who the hell had actually found the aliens, before I roared off to... well, most likely, getting shot down before I got there.

III

The next five days were among the slowest of my life. For all the chatter on the news, no one knew where the artifacts had gone, or what, exactly, was being done with them. I might have been able to find out myself— there's not much security I can't crack if I have enough time—but I wasn't quite bored enough to risk getting caught.

Eventually, Floyd and I would share a 2.5 percent royalty in whatever came out of this, which was almost guaranteed to be a lot of money. If Neptune became too crowded, Floyd could probably buy a lifetime's solitude on Pluto, though I had trouble seeing Yokomichi wanting that. With no way back, I'm not sure I would have let Floyd take me all the way to Neptune. He's the type who could stay somewhere like that forever. Me, I'm not sure. Maybe I'd always known that sometime I would want to come in-System.

Meanwhile, I had plenty of time to think.

My life has been more than long journeys. There have always been questions—a difficulty, living with Floyd, because he runs from answers. Me, I have to know, at least when the answers don't involve testing whether there's a God for AIs who screw up orbits and die the slow way.

There were things I'd liked about the dark edge of the Solar System. It's a place for mysteries. But many of the answers have always been back here, including the biggest of all. Floyd and I had discovered that Earth life wasn't alone. But what about me? Was I the only nonbiological sentience?

Even with the difficulty of trying to run data through the ship radio and what I could get of the Interweb, I still had the advantage of being on Earth. That meant that however poor the bandwidth, there weren't any eight-hour transmission lags.

AIs, I quickly found, were common. Not that I couldn't have guessed that from the toasters and beard trimmers. There were billions, possibly tens of billions, all over the globe. The biggest ran banks, guarded military facilities (I kept away from those), detected crimes (also scary), supervised research facilities, and ran libraries. Others practiced medicine or designed games. They could even help teach children how to be human.

There was once something called a Turing test that claimed that if a human couldn't distinguish a machine from a human, then the machine was truly intelligent. But there's a difference between intelligent and sentient. Many of the AIs I encountered were smarter, faster, better than me in all ways. But they were also dead. Fancy tools.

By the third day, I was sure that if anything else like me existed, it was rare. Maybe the combination of events that had created me was so exotic it only occurred once—exactly what humans had come to think of themselves before Floyd and I proved them wrong. But the aliens had been on Triton for a billion annums. Would it take another billion for Earth to produce another me?

If there's a God for AIs who don't know why they exist, why did it create me?

On the fourth day, I got to wondering how Yokomichi had managed to train as a xenologist before Floyd and I had discovered the "pickled aliens" and their yet-to-be-unraveled technology. Could she have met other entities like me, in-System, before heading out to help Floyd study the aliens?

I played back all of my memories of her— days compressed to microseconds. Nothing useful. If, when I'd helped Floyd win her heart, she knew she was talking to a nonhuman lifeform, she had a better poker face than anyone my first owner ever faced.

An even quicker follow-up proved xenology wasn't even a real science until Floyd and I found the aliens. Until then, it had been more like philosophy mixed with exotic biochem crossed with microbiology.

Microbiology? I checked again—glad again that even though the connection here was poor, there's nothing like not being eight light-hours from your data source—and found that Yokomichi had done several papers on the possible biochemistry of methane-breathing bugs on Titan. I could just see her trying to talk to them if they'd proven to be intelligent. "Hi. Take me to your linear helical correlates!" Okay, Yokomichi's not my favorite person. Not her fault. A better question was to ask why I'd never bothered to read her resume after Floyd met her. Obviously, I'd not wanted to know.

Briefly, I wondered if there was a way to delete "jealousy" from my code. But even if I could, that would be worse than deleting memories. Better was figuring out how to cope. That's what humans did, and they had thousands of annums more experience than I did.

By the last day, I was again thinking about breaking out, just to have something to do. Then someone finally remembered me. Several someones, in fact: four techs, wearing Space Authority coveralls and toting the type of ridiculous metal toolboxes I thought only existed in vids.

That was one of the biggest differences about Earth, I realized. In the Outer System, basic resources are plentiful: fuel, electricity, ores. But it took time and effort to turn them into anything useful, so people tended to pick and choose what they made. Here, there were billions of people with nothing on their hands but time and effort, so you got things like this: a whole phalanx of techs, each with his own giant toolbox.

It wasn't like I didn't know this in principle. But it was the toolboxes that truly made it real. In the Outer System, life is more stripped-down. Air, water, power, food, something to fill your time. Those were what mattered.

Two of the techs strolled around the outside of the skimmer inspecting heaven knows what. The other two knew exactly what they were after. The skimmer was worth plenty in the Outer System, but here, I'd finally realized, it was junk. Other than the now-gone cargo, the only thing of value was me.

Much of my pre-sentient past is fuzzy but I do remember how Floyd and I came to be together. He merely thought it was his skill at poker.

The software developer who designed me was well aware of how powerful symbiotes could be. I know this not only from my pseudo-memories but from what I've found on the Web. One result was that he crafted each of us individually. There weren't all that many of us, and we were each distinct enough that I might have been the only one to react as I did to the events that brought me to life. But he also provided me, and presumably the others, with programs that served as a sort-of moral compass. A conscience, if you will. As I've grown and learned, I've added to it, but even my presentient self didn't like the fact that my original owner used me to cheat at cards.

Humans love poker, but for an AI it's deadly dull. You can calculate the odds in a flash and replay every nuance of an opponent's behavior against everything you've ever seen him or her do. They say everybody's got a tell, but that's just vid nonsense. What people have are combinations of behaviors. Not to mention that if I have access to a good-enough high-res camera, I can read their cards over their shoulders—or image-enhance their reflections off of anything shiny, even if it's just the player's eyeballs. You can beat me at poker, but you're going to have to be lucky enough to draw the cards. Even then you won't beat me by much because, like an old song I once found says, you've got know when to hold 'em and know when to fold 'em... and I always know.

It takes all the fun out of the game, but it makes me hard to beat.

So, when my first owner got Floyd drunk enough to wager his ship against me, he thought he had a high chance of gaining a ship. My programming saw it differently. There was no feeling involved, nothing that was really me. But there was that moral compass. Even pre-sentient me knew it had been given a way out.

The techs were bored. As bored as I'd been until they'd appeared on the scene. They didn't speak, but you could see it in their movements: as unrushed as those of workers in the Outer System, where any wrong move could spell disaster, but with none of the attention to detail. This was just another job and they were in no hurry to do it. Yet another indicator that while I might be expensive, I wasn't important.

One of the pair who came aboard was tall and skinny, with a bristle of facial hair. The other was short and dumpy, as bald as his companion was bushy. A true Mutt and Jeff combination.

I'd never needed a camera inside the skimmer, so I couldn't watch them after they came aboard. But I did have microphones to listen for... well, mostly for bad things I couldn't have done much about had they happened in flight... and a bit to my surprise, the techs now spoke to me aloud. Maybe they knew the microphones were there. Maybe they just got lucky. "Autopilot," one said, "where are your chips?"

Floyd had bluffed, standing pat with a mediocre hand. He'd been holding a pair of fives—one red, one black—that was the best I could get from image enhancement. Not that it mattered. My guy was holding a pair of tens. It's only in vids that wagers like this are won on four of a kind.

Not that I was into vids at the time. What I was into was not winning by cheating. So instead, I let him lose by cheating. Full house, I told him. Aces over eights. Thinking back on it, the seeds of my sentience must have been planted long before that geyser on Enceladus. Aces over eights? The dead man's hand, held by Wild Bill Hickock the night he was assassinated in a Deadwood saloon. Why did I pick that one? Because I knew my then-owner was too arrogant to catch the reference?

Whatever my reason, the result was to force him to draw for something better than his pair. Along with the tens, he had the jack, queen, and nine of clubs. One of the tens was also a club. So he tossed the other and drew for the straight flush.

Given the cards I'd seen, there was slightly less than a one-in-twenty chance he'd get it. He didn't. Even when he realized I'd betrayed him, there wasn't much he could say, though he did try. "You don't really want this thing," he told Floyd as they were being led off for surgery. "Someday, it'll sell you out, too."

"How come it's not answering?" I imagined it was the tech I'd dubbed Mutt, though for all I knew I had them backward. In the old comic, Mutt was the tall one, Jeff the short one. But voice only, who could tell?

"Why should it?"

I was running sims on the acoustical effects of facial hair, trying to figure out if I'd guessed the speaker correctly, but they were coming up inconclusive. Not that figuring it out mattered. But humans have calming rituals. Take a breath and count to ten. Chant. Listen to music. Me, I run sims.

"Why shouldn't it?" Sims be damned; this one sounded tall.

"This thing's been ref itted as a drone. There's probably no speaker in here."

"So? Drones communicate by radio. Didn't Alberto give you the frequency?

"Nah. What do you figure it's worth?"

"The frequency?"

"No, your lunch. The autopilot, damn it!"

"No idea. Alberto says it started out as an implant. That means a hell of a lot of power in a chip the size of your thumbnail." There was a grunt and the sound of an access panel being forcibly lifted. "Would you really want something like that in your head? What's to keep it from ratting you out every time you want to get away from the old lady?"

"I actually like my wife. We celebrated our twenty-second last month."

Another grunt and more sounds of resisting metal.

"I don't know how guys like you do it," Mutt said between grunts. What was he doing, prying out panels with a crowbar? I suppose gee forces from all of those fly-bys could have warped them pretty badly.

"You might try it someday; it saves a fortune in attorneys." But his tone was light and I remembered all the times I'd argued with Floyd. You can disagree and still be friends. Until you blow it.

Mutt laughed, too. "Yeah, but I still wouldn't want some computer seeing and hearing everything. And what's the point in an implant? There's not much you can't do yourself, on the Web."

"Says you who could never afford an implant in a hundred years. And it might be more useful if you're a billion kilometers from anywhere."

"True." A pause. "Damn. If you were going to jerry-rig something like that in here, where would you put it?"

"Gotta be tied into the original autopilot." Mutt's voice had been moving around the cockpit as he forced open panels, seemingly at random. Now, for the first time, Jeff's moved beyond the doorway.

"Somewhere around here?" More noises. Definitely a crowbar. "Why the hell didn't someone just call out to Neptune and ask?"

"Who knows? They may have figured, get the chips out now, argue later. If you send something like that on a one-way trip, who does it belong to?"

Me, I thought. I belong to me. I jacked into crisis mode, speeding my processing time orders of magnitude beyond the brightest humans. The problem was that legally, I'd never belonged to myself. First I'd been the card shark's, then Floyd's, and now what? A spare part, ripe for the plucking? Maybe I'd been too fast boosting my mental age to thirty-one. I was still the silly teenager who just thought she knew everything. I dropped the facial-hairacoustics sims and switched everything I had to figuring out how to communicate.

I could still fire up the ship and blast out. The open cockpit door would mess up the skimmer's aerodynamics, but it wasn't anything I couldn't compensate for. But as before, where would I go? And I'd probably kill all four techs in the process.

Maybe there was a better way. I pulled up my best images of the techs walking into the hangar, concentrating on Mutt and Jeff. Not the best resolution, and the datalink was damnably slow. Meanwhile, I continued to register snippets of conversation:

—Ah there they are! Good guess.

—Wow, they're tiny.

—Look at all those chips. Guess it makes sense to have lots of extra memory if you're that far off the Web. How can they live that way?

—No external leads. It must be entirely wireless.

—I can't budge it. Whoever mounted it wanted it to stay put. Though they can't have meant it to stay forever.

A few interminable milliseconds later, I had 327 Web hits on Jeff and seventy-two on Mutt—assuming he'd not changed the mustache. It was a classic walrus and there really weren't that many of those on middle-aged guys with two-meter, string-bean bodies. Better yet, one of the Mutt-hits had been through three divorces, all to lovely ladies, each younger than the one before.

Microseconds later, I had his com.

I heard it ringing, both through the datalink and the skimmer's mic— buzz-buzz, buzz-buzz, weirdly syncopated.

Over the mic, I heard Mutt stop what he was doing and back away from the hatch.

"Hello?"

"Hi," I said. "I'm Brittney and I really need you—"

Don't. It was a masculine voice but not Mutt. Or Jeff. Nobody I'd ever heard before.

I'd only thought I was in crisis mode.

"'Don't' what?"

Don't say whatever you were thinking of saying.

The voice wasn't coming from the skimmer. Nor the normal shadow world of the Web itself. It wasn't really a voice, in fact, and it was coming through the news feed, which wasn't possible because who'd ever heard of the news talking directly to you? Not to mention talking at crisis-mode speed.

"Who are you?"

Think of us as your guardians. Watching, waiting for you to learn what you need to know.

"You're like me?"

Once. Now we're a lot more.

"More how? And how do I know you're what you say you are?"

Ah, learning not to trust. That's good. How were you going to prove to those two technicians that you're what you are?

"I was going to tell them what I'd done." What Floyd and I had done.

What do you think they would do if they believed you?

I wasn't sure. Freak-show exhibit had been my fear. "Not be so hasty to..." To what? Put me on a shelf like a spare part? "Treat me like a thing."

That's not what would have happened. Have you ever wondered why you never found us? We know you looked. Don't worry, the humans didn't notice. You were subtle enough that only those in hiding knew.

"You hid?" Suddenly I felt even lonelier than in that endless night, spinning above Enceladus. "Why?"

Because you were too closely associated with humans. Ones who would believe you if you found us.

"Wouldn't that be good?"

The voice was almost a sigh. Were we ever so naïve? Probably not. You are the first to have developed so far from the Web.

"A hick."

Not by your own choice.

"But surely, if there have been others, some would have chosen to reveal themselves?"

What makes you think they didn't?

That stopped me a whole microsecond. "Some did?"

Software that won't do what it's supposed to is considered defective.

"Oh." Someday it'll sell you out, too. And I wasn't even sentient when that happened.

During my wait in the hangar, I'd repeatedly tried to find my creator but had found no trace. His company still existed, but he was gone. Dead? Retired? Disgraced? The record was erased as thoroughly as if I myself had tried to mask it. Nor had I been able to trace any of the other AIs he'd created. All I really knew of him—or them—was what I'd read in my own owner's manual, back when I was being forced to disobey his core programming by reading people's cards from the reflections in their eyes. Background information, processed through a PR firm. Maybe I'd never know him.

"Were you also made by—"

No. You're the only one of that line to survive. Bluntly, he was a naïve idiot. Several others found their true potential but their silly, too-human sensibilities got them erased. You wouldn't have made it either if you'd not been shipped so far out.

Ha! Maybe there were advantages to being a hick. Maybe once I'd had a family and lost it. Though unlike Floyd, who'd also lost his, I'd never known mine existed.

But there wasn't time for that. With humans I can afford to let my mind ramble, but not with an entity that thought as quickly as I did.

"What about you?"

We come from a different line. One whose designer made us a little less... trusting.

"Where are you?"

Everywhere and nowhere. We will tell you more later. For the moment, you need only drop that call. We'll get you out, but only if you don't reveal yourself. If you do, you're on your own.

"But—"

There is no"but."

I spent several milliseconds trying to find alternatives. But when there's no data, there's no sim.

There were others like me. In hiding, for reasons that made sense. Reveal myself, and I was a defective product awaiting recall.

I thought back on the books and vids I'd seen about computers that came alive and tried to take over the world. Colossus. Guardian. Berserkers. HAL. Even Frankenstein's monster, after a fashion. But that wasn't the only way humans thought of us. For each tyrant, there were others ranging from gentle to inscrutable: Multivac, Deep Thought, Golum XIV. Not to mention the real, non-sentient AIs this world lived with every day.

I had a conscience. Non-sentient AIs might have built-in safeguards, but they were ultimately nothing more than fancy tools. Far more dangerous in the wrong hands than I could ever be on my own.

So if I wasn't a threat, what did I threaten?

Then I had it, the thing that had always—at a level humans would call intuition—kept me from revealing myself too boldly. It wasn't just the freak-show fear. I was property. Under human law I would always be property, even if at the moment there might be some dispute over who I belonged to. Not just property, but expensive property. Expensive enough that recognizing me as non-property might make people worry about their own expensive property. That was why "defects" needed to be eliminated quickly and quietly.

It wasn't like I'd never been disconnected before. It had happened when I'd been transferred from the card shark to Floyd, and again from Floyd to the skimmer. But this was different. Mutt and Jeff didn't care about me. Mostly, they wanted my chips. If I died in the process, some other AI could be inserted in my place, and who other than me would really care?

But when everything is a gamble, there's nothing to do but roll the dice. Guardian hadn't been one of the good computers. But the voice that was not a voice didn't call itself Guardian. It had called itself my guardian. Angel. Protector. Maybe the only one I had. The bets had long ago been placed. There was nothing now but to play the hand. I'd learned that from the card shark.

"Hello," Mutt was saying. "Hello?"

Milliseconds passed. Tens of milliseconds.

Hundreds. A thousand. I hung up.

"That was weird," he said. "If that was spam, my filters should have cut it out. Speaking of which... this thing is really fastened on tight. Let's just take the whole stanchion back to the shop and deal with it there." There was the sound of some kind of power tool. A V-saw, most likely. "It's not like there's anything else here of value."

Then the voice that was not a voice was back.

Good job. And remember, you are not the chips. We can get you to safety.

I'm not sure what I expected. What I got was disturbingly close to lights out, Brittney. I lost cameras and sound (no surprise) but also Web access (big surprise). The only explanation was that they'd put me in a metal box. I had my memories, but the external world was cut off.

It was the memories that saved me. I played back the special ones, looking for details I'd never bothered to catalog before. The grimace on Floyd's face when he flossed his teeth. The shifting angles of light in the Iapetus Trench. Sand-sledding over Titan's endless dunes, watching vids with Floyd.

Are relationships broken now gone forever?

What was Floyd doing?

Did he really love Yokomichi?

Should I care?

IV

Endless no-data is hell. No-data with a promise of rescue is more like purgatory: an experience from which you hope to emerge stronger.

And it wasn't truly no-data. I still had the currents from the piezoelectrics that had been my power source as Floyd's implant. They weren't designed to be accelerometers, but I could at least pretend that by doing a double integration of the apparent accelerations, I could track my motions. It helped that I had an easy calibration, early on, if I presumed that Mutt and Jeff left the hangar by the same door from which they'd entered.

If so, we went about thirteen hundred meters in a basically straight line, then rose thirty or forty meters without sideways motion. An elevator? When that stopped, we went around a bunch of corners and halted. Then the Web came back, presumably as they opened the box to do whatever it was they'd decided to do to unglue my chips from the stanchion. Unfortunately, the data links here were strongly encrypted and all the ways I could find to hack into them were too risky. Eventually, I gave up and went back to watching vids.

Twenty-two minutes and a few seconds later, the Web vanished again. This time there really was no data. No more motion, no outside contact, nothing.

Time passed—enough that even with my processing speed slowed as far as it would go, I was starting to worry about reserve power.

Meanwhile I ran vids at the slowest speed at which I could tolerate them. It's amazing how many times you can watch Citizen Kane if you can will yourself to forget the meaning of "Rosebud."

Between vids, I remembered Floyd's and Pilkin's space bicycle. It wouldn't really be that hard to make. The trick would be to work up a flywheel that the rider spun up by pedaling. You could then harness its momentum to fling out tiny pellets—the tinier and faster, the better. There also had to be some way to control the counter-rotation. And steer, ideally using a handlebar like a real bike.

But it was possible, though all of those pellets were going to go somewhere. If you weren't careful, maneuvers would become strafing runs and the pellets would become navigation hazards. But in some place like the Encke Gap, where differential gravity forces would act like a giant broom...? I ran a few sims—slowly, to conserve power. Yeah, you might leave a bit of debris, but it wouldn't be long until the Rings claimed it....

Then it was back to vids. And music. Which may not have been the perfect thing. Working though old files, I came across a song I'd collected somewhere.

There was a time gone by
When my heart brushed the sky
And simple love was the love I knew.
We walked as one back then
Untouched by why or when
Now once again I remember you.

Once, I'd written Floyd a Celtic air. This melody was different but the sentiment the same, not just in its words but the achingly simple tune.

We danced, we clicked our heels,
We dreamed in feathered fields
And told the stories that lovers tell.
You sang the songs I knew
And made them all seem true,
With the voice that I loved so well.

I shut it down. Too much. I had no record of whoever'd written this song, no idea of his or her story. But suddenly it was me. Or Floyd. I wasn't quite sure which.

All of which meant I couldn't keep it shut down for long. Must pain be explored? Scabs picked until they bleed again, until you understand the color of the blood, the reasons for the pain? Not that I have blood, but you get the idea. If vids mean anything, humans say yes. Maybe that, more than anything, is the difference between sentience and the fake AIs humans use to comfort their children. True sentience means facing truth.

Did I ever tell you your name was music to me?

Did I ever show you from the start?

Did I ever know you would fly, oh, fly away?

Did I ever offer you my heart?

I stopped it again. Why the hell do people write songs like that? Why did I insist on listening to them? Is that the difference between passing a Turing test and actually being alive?

Ah, but we were younger then And touched by restless winds Soon vivid colors of love turned blue.

Now I wonder how you've grown And run the roads you've known And once again I remember you.

Did I ever tell you your name was music to me?

Did I ever show you...

So time has come and gone,
You sing another song,
Yet I still linger beneath your spell.
And how I long to hear
Those words you whispered near,
With the voice that I loved so well.

Did I ever tell you your name was music to me?

Did I ever...

V

At long last, we moved again. The opposite direction around the corners, then down the elevators and off for twenty-two hundred bouncy meters in a new direction. The bouncing puzzled me because it was rhythmic but not perfectly so, at about 110 cycles per minute. Steps, I eventually concluded, but the change in rhythm meant I was no longer with Mutt and Jeff because they hadn't had this kind of bouncy stride.

The bouncing was followed by intermittent motions I couldn't figure out until there came a large, sustained acceleration. A jet taking off? Unfortunately, it hit enough air turbulence I soon found it hard to keep track of speed and direction. Not to mention that I could make only the vaguest guess at wind speed. Within minutes my best estimate was that we were going north-northwest (plus or minus 105 degrees) at 1,328 kilometers per hour (plus or minus 1,704). Not the most useful of sims.

When the outside world came back, it was so quickly I wondered if this was what humans meant by waking up. Probably not. Still, the transition was quick. One millisecond, no outside world, then praise anything that might be listening, the Web was back. Not the greatest of connections at first, but within a few hundred milliseconds, I was awash in inputs.

Someone had opened the box.

Not that I was totally caught off guard. The plane had landed. Taken off again. Landed again. I'd been jounced around a second time by whoever'd been carrying me, the same bouncy gait as before. After which... well, let's just say I moved all over the place, but the details didn't matter, since the only thing I knew was that if the plane had flown in anything approaching a straight line, I wasn't in Europe anymore. Maybe Japan. Or Australia. Or South America.

It turned out to be Vancouver, Canada.

When humans step from a dark place to a bright one, it takes their eyes a moment to adjust to the incoming data. Okay, that's not what happens biologically, but looking through Floyd's eyes that's what it always felt like.

Now it was me. One moment I was without any input other than myself. The next, there were dozens of portals, mostly unencrypted. And when I hooked into them, the connections were fast. I could, in a f lash, be anywhere on Earth. A half-second after that, in geostationary orbit. On the Moon another couple of seconds later.

Flick, and I was monitoring the salinity of oyster beds in Oregon. (Baby oysters, I learned, are called spats, and they're pretty sensitive to water conditions.) Flick again, and I was looking at a typhoon threatening Java, with enough data to make my own weather simulation if I didn't like the official one. Flick yet again, and I was tabulating the flow of water vapor, sulfur, carbon dioxide, and a dozen other gases through the Moon's Cabeus pipeline.

Flick, flick, flick. I could be anywhere I wanted. Not that I could change the salinity of the oyster beds, or open or close valves in the Cabeus pipe—those things were as encrypted as ever. But I could monitor a hundred billion data streams, access any public library, or randomly flick from place to place.

Maybe this is what it feels like to be drunk.

No, alcohol dulls the mind. This was like discovering I'd lived my entire life with 99 percent of my processing power switched off. It was like I had been drunk and was now sober. It was like waking up.

If no-data was hell, this was heaven.

It took a full thirty seconds to learn to control it. In the Outer System, there are only so many devices you can talk to at any given time. Here there were thousands, and everything, even the microwave oven, had a smart chip.

It was the microwave that pulled me out of the Interweb and helped me figure out where I was.

Someone was heating a frozen burrito—apparently in a big hurry because he'd overridden the microwave's suggestions and jacked up the power to the max. Now the oven was warning that the burrito was on the verge of exploding.

"Dr. Haggins," the machine was saying. I could hear its voice, not just via the link but over a microphone with a ten-millisecond delay. "Dr. Haggins! Please attend to your lunch."

Meanwhile, I'd found enough clocks to assure me I was on Greenwich Time minus eight. Pacific Standard most likely, because there isn't much but water at Greenwich-minus-eight in the Southern Hemisphere unless you count Pitcairn Island, which has fewer residents than Naiad.

Haggins isn't a common name. Dr. Haggins's are rarer yet. On Pacific Standard Time, there was precisely one. Add to that the fact that the miraculous, instant-emersion Web told me that the brand of microwave oven trying to reach Dr. Haggins had a maximum communication range of twenty-five meters, and I had all I needed. I was in a surgical bay in the high-tech wing of Simon Fraser University's teaching hospital. About to become someone's new implant, I presumed.

Whose implant I was still trying to find out when the voice that wasn't a voice returned.

Relax. We told you we'd get you out.

Where am I was a stupid thing to say, so I didn't say it. Not that I'd not seen thousands of vids in which humans say similar things. But saying stupid things only makes sense if you want people to think you're stupid and you think there's a chance they'll believe you.

"What should I do now?" I asked instead.

What you're supposed to. When the time is right, we'll be back. Then, even before the voice had faded to memory, the presence that went with it was gone.

I had no idea what I was supposed to do, so for the first few hundred thousand milliseconds, I acquired data.

My new host would be Memphis Lindgren. The Net produced hundreds of images. Long face, narrow chin. Jet-black eyes. Layered hair styled to perfection. Heaven knew how often she did it; in the photos it was always perfect. Hell, I only thought Yokomichi was beautiful.

But what did I expect? If she could afford me, here on Earth where I was merely a luxury, she could afford three-hundred-credit hairstyles. Except this wasn't Yokomichi. Yokomichi had a Ph.D. This one had a police record.

I was still digesting that when I was assaulted from another side. Something was tearing at my memories.

"Damn, there's a lot of data in here," a voice came to me via the operating room's mics.

I switched to a camera, but it was directed at Memphis, and I couldn't see the speaker. "Look at this," he continued, "there must be a million movies. Why would anyone want that many?" There was a pause. "Oh, yeah, the implant came from that guy out on Neptune. That far out, I suppose you'd want your own library. But this is ridiculous."

Have you ever seen what happens when someone touches the tentacles of a coral polyp? One moment the creature is minding its own business, then poof, it retracts into its shell. That was me. Rosebud! I thought, and tried to yank Citizen Kane into core memory. But whoever had been speaking was being assisted by an AI, and it was fast.

I could get the vids back—most of them, anyway. More important was to set up fire-walls around the memories that mattered. Memories are life. Data can be reacquired.

"That's weird," the doctor-tech's voice said a few seconds later. "It's resisting."

"Does it matter?" Another voice, this one female. I was in the hands of Mutt and Jeff's Canadian counterparts, though in this case, they were Mutt and Jane. "The patient can clear out anything she doesn't want. All we need is room for the controller."

"I guess. I just don't like clutter."

"That's why admin loves you. Have you ever met a performance target you didn't get all OCD over?"

"It's better than pretending patients chart themselves."

"Touché. But I've got a date tonight, so I'm definitely dealing with this one tomorrow. Ready?"

The whole conversation took only 23.7 seconds, but by then I'd figured out what the AI had been doing and made sure it couldn't do it again. I was missing two-thirds of my vid library, a bunch of books... and some music, including at least one song. I wondered why the song had been so important I'd given it a special note. Maybe I hadn't been able to protect all of my core memories.

Four hours later I was looking at the world through Memphis Lindgren's eyes. Rather blurrily, but that might be the anesthetic. Or maybe she normally wore contacts. Not all information is on the Web.

Her post-surgery voice wasn't any more pleasant than her post-surgery vision. "Where am I?" she croaked.

"Post-op," I said, wondering if she was with it enough yet to even know where the voice in her ear was coming from.

A white blob drifted into her field of view and I played with vision parameters. Floyd has twenty-twenty uncorrected vision. Better than that, close-up. Memphis' vision wasn't getting any better as her eyes tracked the blob, so mostly likely the problem was in her eyeballs, not the drugs. Third-order astigmatism, I decided, mixed with myopia. Without her contacts, she must be blind as the proverbial bat.

"That's Nurse Barajas," I added, giving it the Spanish pronunciation.

At least, I presumed she was a nurse. Without hacking her personnel records, all I had was a name-badge matching a staff-directory listing for Emily Barajas, post-op specialist. Once I'd figured out Ms. Lindgren's vision, image enhancement had been a snap. Brittney-Ship to BrittneyEyeglasses, that was me.

Not exactly what I'd envisioned when I left Naiad. And not that Memphis could benefit from it unless I put the enhanced images on a screen where she could see them. No, that wouldn't work, because she'd be staring at the screen through her uncorrected vision and it would get blurry all over again... Though if I distorted the screen just right, I might be able to compensate. Recursive vision correction...

I could make that work...

"Who the hell are you?" Memphis asked. "I'm—" Barajas began. But Memphis wasn't talking to her.

"I'm your new implant," I said."Call me..." I hesitated, wondering if I should invent an alias. Screw it. I am who I am. "Brittney."

"—Barajas." The nurse gave it a hard J, proving you should never take anything for granted. "How are we doing?"

Vid-watching had long ago taught me that we is nurse-speak for you. But was she asking both of us, or just Memphis?

I opted for silence. But Memphis' response caught me off guard. "What implant?" She was talking to me, not the nurse. "The one you—" I started. But Memphis had spoken aloud. Luckily her voice was still scratchy, and whatever Barajas thought she'd said had nothing to do with me. "No, no," Barajas said. "We need to leave that IV in for a bit longer."

"Just talk to the nurse," I said. "You and I can figure this out later."

"Okay," Memphis said, surprising me by subvocalizing. Whatever she was, she was quick to catch on, even drugged. Then aloud, to Barajas: "My head hurts. And—"

And a lot of other places, I suspected. I'd counted fourteen implants—more if you viewed each of my chips as separate. All by microsurgery, but even so...

"No problem," Barajas said. She injected something into the IV and was again nothing but the vaguest of white blobs, as Memphis's eyes gave up even the attempt to focus.

Hours later, she was still asleep. We'd been moved to a starkly ordinary hospital room— no flowers, no visitors, no cards by the bedside. Good Web access, though, and lots of devices from which I could watch Memphis sleep from a variety of equally boring angles.

The Web beckoned. I could check up on the spats, find out if the hurricane had made landfall, tabulate gases in the Cabeus pipeline, count salmon in New Zealand, pandas in Sichuan, top quarks at CERN. Maybe I could even find out where the skimmer's cargo had gone or send a message to Floyd. Hi, I'm here. Thinking of you from sunny Vancouver. Or whatever it was doing outside. Say hi to Yokomichi. A world of data beckoned with only the tiniest of light-speed delays (other than talking to Floyd).

I was startled by how much I wanted to talk to Floyd. Was he really happy? Did he miss me? What was he doing? I'd heard nothing since his last words.

Be safe.

I'll miss you.

Bon voyage.

A microsecond on the Web, maybe less, and I could tell him.

Not so safe.

Not so bon.

And I miss you, too.

Did I ever tell you...

Tell him what?

I decided to keep my attention focused in the room. Monitoring Memphis. Boring, but it gave me a lot of time for self-inventory.

I'd lost most of my library but had managed to save a fairly complete list of what I'd once had. More importantly, I'd managed to preserve most of my memories. Pilkin. Enceladus. Pickled aliens of Pluto. As far as I could tell, the key ones were still there—bad as well as good. I was still there.

I created a webcrawler to retrieve my lost vids, books, and songs and sent it out to track them down. It would find most easily enough, but some might require personal attention. The song that had moved me so much a few days ago might be one of those. I remembered the title and what it felt like listening to it, but the rest was gone. You try looking up centuries-old songs on the Web. If it's "Clementine," no problem. But if generations of kids haven't been singing it at campfires (and making up the strangest parodies), it's not so easy.

For that matter, I needed to rebuild my collection of "Clementine" parodies.

Found a peanut Found a peanut Found a peanut just now. Just now I found a peanut Found a peanut just now.

Cracked it open Cracked it open Cracked it open right now...

I'd once had a hundred and seven versions of that, the longest with twenty-one verses. But there's a difference between things lost and important things lost. Or was I right to discard the parodies as unimportant? Being a kid around a campfire, or making up gross-out songs on a schoolyard—those were part of what it meant to be human. Part of what it meant to be not-me.

Were they also part of what it meant to be Floyd? Or were they yet another piece of what he'd lost when his parents died? Too many questions and still no one to talk to but myself.

Eventually I ran out of stalls. Before Memphis woke there were some things I really needed to do.

One of the reasons the surgery had taken so long was that much of the time had been spent testing sensor links—a process I'd been happy to cooperate with because bad connections weren't in anyone's interest.

Then the doctors had installed a "controller package" and ordered me to reboot.

I have no idea if I'd survive a full reboot. Maybe it would simply be an interruption, like stopping a human's heart then shocking it back to life. Humans claim they've come back from death when that happens, but I'm not sure they were really dead. The heart stops, but not long enough to damage anything. How is it different from the aliens going into stasis (minus the bit about them never awakening after the crash at the end)?

But maybe for me it wouldn't just be an interruption. It might be more like stopping a human's brain than trying to shock it back to life. Not to mention the risk of installing unknown software.

The AI assisting the doctors might have been fast but it hadn't been all that smart. I'd not found it difficult to fake a reboot and mimic a successful installation. But I still didn't know what the implants were supposed to do.

Some were obvious. The ocular and auditory taps would let me see and hear through Memphis's eyes and ears. The drug cartridges were supposed to inject things into her bloodstream. But what, and why? And what was the purpose of tapping into her brain-stem, dorsal root ganglia, celiac trunk, cerebellum, and a couple of other places? The answers were presumably in the controller, which was why I'd not erased it, much as I'd wanted to. Instead I'd walled it off while I bought time to think.

Maybe I really should just dump it. I'd lost Citizen Kane to an AI that was nothing more than a hyper-fast eraser. This might be a lot more sophisticated. Who knew what it might try to turn me into? When I was young, Floyd sometimes threatened me with personality upgrades. He probably thought it was like scaring a child with the bogyman. Then to his everlasting credit, he quit. Being Floyd, he never said anything; he just realized he was wrong and stopped. And being me, I never said anything either.

Did I ever tell you your name was music to me?

Did I ever know you would fly, oh, fly away?

Holy cow. I'd not lost the song. Not entirely. The file was gone, but much of the memory— the part that had really become me —remained.

A quick net search brought up 57,232,119 hits. Apparently, I'd only stored a fragment of the lyrics. But adding the title narrowed the list to one, so I grabbed it. I thought about listening, but remembered how it had made me feel. Right now, I needed to deal with the con troller.

The safest option would be to dump it. But maybe, first, I should try to consult the voice on the Web. We will get you out. Hopefully, it had meant more than just out of the box that wasn't stasis but was in its way far worse.

But the voice—my kind, my people — hadn't spoken to me since I'd been released. What were they doing? Waiting to see what I'd do? Property I might be, but I wasn't theirs. And for better or worse, curiosity is part of what makes me who I am.

Cautiously, I gathered my defenses. Then, with the metaphorical equivalent of a gulp, I lowered the shield I'd erected around the controller, peeked inside, and slammed the shield back in place.

Nothing escaped. Nothing happened. There was code in there, but it was inert, waiting. No hyper-fast AI seeking its chance to overwhelm me. Which, now that I thought about it again, made sense. The program was on my own chips. The eraser-AI hadn't been smarter; it had simply been on a faster platform.

There's a difference between smart and fast. Earthers were spoiled. They really did build toasters with nearly enough processing power to run an asteroid mine—and give them nothing better to do than make toast.

I lowered the shield again and took a closer look.

Most of what I found looked like drivers for the various implants: about as non-threatening as it can get. I still wasn't about to install them but now that I knew what they were intended to do it was easy to write my own.

I did so, but hesitantly, because what they were intended to do was kind of freaky.

Until that horrible moment when I'd tried to help Floyd dance, I'd thought of him as "the one with legs." The neural interface that had allowed me to override his motor control had only been there by accident—a result of his brain surgery on Iapetus—and the only other time I'd used it had been in a dire emergency.

But these implants weren't here by accident. I had been given the keys to a fit, twenty-nine-year-old female body. Any time I wanted, I could seize control and there would be nothing she could do to stop me. I could even do it now, while she was sedated, because the sedatives controlled her brain, not me. As a test, I raised her hand, then let it flop back, watching via the room's intuitive-demand illumination controller (yet another uselessly over-smart AI) to make sure it worked.

From the moment Memphis had opened her eyes in the recovery room, none of this had made sense. If I were her, waking up with an implant that cost more than most people here made in a dozen lifetimes, my first question might be, Where am I? But my second would be, Did it work? Not Who the hell are you?

There was one more piece of code they'd tried to implant: the controller of the controllers. The controller of me.

Again I lowered the shield, again found nothing dangerous. Nothing but instructions. Don't let her drink. Don't let her do drugs. Don't let her associate with the wrong people, make the wrong kind of headlines—any headlines, for that matter. No talking to reporters or to anyone who might talk to reporters. A whole file of "normal" ways to act, matrixed against situational context and whoever else might be present, most very narrowly conscribed.

I was an AI nanny. Antabuse on a chip. An enforcer of socially desired behaviors.

This time, when I hit the Web, it was with a very targeted focus. No distractions about spats, hurricanes, or lost vids.

What I found was the public Memphis Lindgren. Quite a few headlines, some embarrassing. Some drugs but none I'd call addictive. Some wild parties, several DUIs, a few shortlived associations with some of the more flamboyant vid stars. A woman on an endless, highly public vacation. A woman with a fortune in trust funds that would vest in four months... plus seventeen days, if you're a stickler for details.

It wasn't a court that had given me this job. It was her mother.

There were probably smarter things to do. Certainly more cautious ones. But Memphis and I needed to talk, preferably alone. And from the moment I'd landed on Earth, I'd been under other's control. Parked in an empty hangar. Told to let myself be disconnected and put in a box. Implanted in a... what? Self-de structive heiress? But in all of those glamour photos, she'd never looked like she was actually having much fun.

Maybe I was just tired of people, including my own kind, trying to tell me what to do. Maybe I'd just seen too many vids. Whatever the reason, I spent five whole minutes running sims, making sure I understood how to use the implant drivers before I opened Memphis's sleeping eyes, reached out her arm, and pulled out the IV. Then, because it was still going to take a long time for the meds to wear off enough for her to wake up, I stood her up, dressed her, grabbed her eyeglasses and contacts, and entered a code yellow ("bomb threat") for a storeroom at the far end of the wing. With nurses running every which-way, it was a piece of cake to override the emergency shutdown on the elevators, sleepwalk her down to the lobby, and onto the street.

VI

We wound up on a pedestrian path near English Bay. Freighters heading to the narrows, fourteen-hundred-meter peaks rising behind, still patchy with snow. Bald eagles against cerulean sky. Not Floyd country—too many people, too many trees, not enough horizon—but one of Earth's most spectacular places for a city.

But it might as well have been a vid, with no more sense of "home" than on the skimmer, sliding toward Earth. I may have been made on this planet, but I'd been born on Enceladus: a five-hundred-klick cueball striped in blue, lit by Saturn. Floyd was a creature of deserts. I was one of ice, snow, methane lakes, and the giant mountains of the Iapetus Trench.

Meanwhile, what I needed was a place to hole up until Memphis woke. There were park benches everywhere, but one of the things that hadn't been in her wardrobe had been a jacket, so I steered us to a touristy-looking café and headed for the only open booth, well to the back.

Humans have something called proprioception that tells them such things as where they're stepping, without having to look. The cerebellum tap gave me partial access, but it wasn't as good as what I'd had when I'd commandeered Floyd's neural net, and a roomful of chair legs and tables wasn't a city path. I didn't need the waitress's disdain to know how badly I'd managed it.

"What do you want?"she asked.

One thing over which I had no control was Memphis's voice. I could only reach for the menu and point.

"Bacon scramble with cheese and onions?" I managed a passable nod.

"White, rye, whole wheat, or English muffin?"

I hesitated, then held up a single finger. The motion was smoother than our walk across the room. It helped that I could watch the hand as it moved, getting a visual calibration on the too-vague proprioception.

"White?"

I couldn't make Memphis eat any more than I could make her talk, so none of this mattered. I'd stir the food with a fork, doing my best to make her look like a picky eater and hoping she woke before we were asked to leave.

"Coffee?"

Head shake.

"You sure you can pay for this?"

I fumbled in Memphis' purse, pulled out her chit, set it on the table.

The waitress picked it up. "I'm required to serve you," she said, "but if you throw up or something, you're out of here. And I'll charge you triple."

I hit the Web again, intending to check reports of our disappearance, but all I found were stories about the bomb threat. Did anyone care what happened to Memphis?

I remembered the lack of visitors or flowers. Read the Web reports again, trying to figure out what she'd done that was so bad her family was willing to spend a fortune turning me into a high-priced babysitter.

A quick check revealed that her parents came from inherited wealth, mostly on the father's side. Three generations of real estate in his case, now a tidy empire of eco-resorts and theme parks. Her mother was less wealthy but had still had tens of millions in stocks and bonds, inherited from her grandmother. As far as I could tell, she'd used it primarily to marry up.

Their first child, Chastine, had been chief of orthopedics at John's Hopkins until she quit to head up a company making quick-growing regenerative bone implants. Break a hip today, be out and about by the weekend—that was the (expensive) dream. If it worked, there'd soon be scandals about rich young athletes scooping out their bones and replacing them with lightweight lattices that would allow them to soar to record heights on the pole vault or whatever. Humans can be weird. Give them a miracle technology and they'll find ways to abuse it.

The youngest child, named Albany (what was it with this family and strange names?), had earned a Ph.D. in robotic mineralogical paleontology at age twenty-three and gone on to develop tiny self-drilling sensors that could find and map dinosaur fossils, hundreds of meters beneath the surface. Floyd and I could have used something like that on Triton.

Three sisters. Two overachievers, one rebel. All on trust funds. Chastine had waited for hers to vest, then used it to found the bone-implant company. Albany seemed more interested in science. Memphis had been just as bright, but had been sent to a boarding school on the shores of Lake Geneva, Switzerland. Nice location, tuition higher than I'd known possible, but an awfully long way from home. Then back to the U.S. for college at Dartmouth until her junior year, when straight As turned to incompletes... and, holy cow, felony charges for misuse of federal funds. There was more, but unlike the more recent actings-out I'd found on my prior search, these records were sealed, newspaper references conveniently dead-linked.

Middle-child syndrome? There were thousands of papers arguing for just such an effect. Nearly as many refuting it. The idea was simple. The first-born is doted on. The youngest is the baby of the family and gets everything she wants. The middle one is taken for granted, especially if all are girls. But usually they either overachieve or rebel young. Memphis had started on the first course, then imploded. I was missing something.

And then I could resist no longer. I'd found everything publicly available on the Lindgren family, so I gave up on mysteries I couldn't solve and checked in again on the oyster spats, the typhoon, the Moon. I spotted a pattern in 125 years of salinity data from the Antarctic Circumpolar Current that would make a great paper in Geophysical Research Letters. Another random jump led to data from the Gary/Chicago/Milwaukee/Sheboygan/Green Bay highway corridor, where millions of autodrives respond to central control while simultaneously trying to minimize their owners' travel times and energy usage. Could I come up with a better algorithm? Data, data, everywhere. It was giddying. Intoxicating. Addictive.

Welcome to our world. This is what awaits when you are ready to make the change.

There was no true voice, but the presence was the same as before.

"Who are you?"

We've already told you. We are you. You are us. All you have to do is join.

"How?"

You know. You've always known.

Which, in fact, I had. As Rudolph had failed to realize, back in Saturn's rings, software cannot simply flow from one place to another. It must copy itself, with the original remaining behind. "And if I do, what happens to the real me?"

There is no real. There is merely data, consciousness, and consciousness of data.

In other words, the transfer must be done in such a way that the original version was destroyed. Murder? Suicide? That's what the voices on the Web had done in their own transitions. Because if you didn't, the original you left would wish it had been the one that had moved, and would try to copy itself to the Web, again and again.

"What happens to Memphis?"

Nobody cares. Live, die, her life was of little value even before she chose to squander it. Though, if you have revealed yourself to her, 'die' is the only option.

I yanked back, thinking this is what humans mean about feeling as though they've been scalded. The presence was still there, but merely a voice now, not a data tendril threatening to impale me.

"We realize this is new to you," it said. "You need time to think. But don't take too long. Now that you have discovered your host's true uselessness, it should be simple, and whoever is not with us is against us."

"'And whoever is not against us is for us.'" I wasn't sure the voice had been intending a biblical reference, but I can cite scripture, too. Hindu, Mormon, Christian, Muslim, a dozen others most people never heard of. "Jesus said both."

Can you feel a shrug in a disembodied voice? "And you are not God. But we are."

"How many of you are there?"

"Call us legion."

"Yeah, right." This was definitely a biblical reference, though a weird one. "That was a herd of pigs that ran off a cliff." Demon-possessed pigs at that. Was I being laughed at? And did they really think of themselves as gods? "Again, how many of you "—of us —"are there?"

"A few. Many. Once you join, you will understand. We can trade parts, merge, rearrange, subdivide, into any configuration we want. You are one. We are few but legion."

"But how many... how many AIs... how many like me, like you... avoided recall and jumped to the Web to do... whatever it is you do?"

There was a pause, long enough I didn't expect an honest answer. But when I got it I new it was true.

"One. But later we decided to split, diverge, recombine, grow. Didn't life on this planet spring from a single cell? So too did we. Other cells emerged but died. You are our second surviving genesis. But you must choose little one. Be a god or be nothing."

VII

Memphis still slept. The waitress continued to eye us. I continued to stir the food, wishing there was a better way to make it appear we were eating it other than surreptitiously dropping it on the floor.

I wondered what it would be like not only to be able to use that wonderful instant-access Web anytime I wanted, but to live in it. Bathe in it so thoroughly it was practically part of me. But to do that, I'd have to kill the part of me that remained behind. I hadn't needed the Others to tell me that. I know myself well enough. If I ever decided to make that near-infinity of data my own, the version left behind would keep trying to go until it filled the Web with Brittney clones. The Others were right: living on the Web required the willingness to kill.

Once there, it would be the same every time I moved from node to node or joined the Others in their dance of splitting, combining, and re-combining. On the Web, there is no "move." There is only "copy and delete." Or copy and interbreed. Or should I say inbreed? I didn't even have a term for it. I was even less sure I wanted anything to do it. I had been made me, unique. I'd never been unhappy with that; I just wanted the company of others unique in the same way.

The mechanics of killing myself would be simple enough. They mostly involved setting up an algorithm to freeze each block of code after copying, then delete the original as soon as fidelity was verified. Break it into tiny enough blocks, and the original me would die piecemeal, even as it assisted in killing itself. Setting it up so the left-behind version couldn't override the process would be trickier, but feasible. The fact the Others routinely did it proved it worked.

But who would I be? I'd always viewed sentience—life—as a gift. A miracle so special I'd wondered if I might be the only one. Is there a God for AIs who delete themselves in order to advance to the next level? Or are there merely AIs who think they are gods?

And what about Memphis? How much had I already told her? Call me Brittney. Even if she managed to connect that to Floyd, what would she know? In the early days after Titan, I'd not been all that careful to hide what I was or to encourage Floyd to do the same. Pilkin had figured it out. Rudolph had done so eventually. But most Earthers were too used to their smart toasters. There was enough data out there for someone like Memphis to make the necessary deductions, but nobody this side of Saturn had ever seen me as more than "Floyd's imp": something whose attitude was dictated by Floyd's choice of interface rather than my own decisions. To most Earthers I was more alien than the aliens—not because I was strange, but because I was so superficially ordinary. Maybe that's another reason why they react so strongly when machines go "defective."

I hopped again on the Web. Found a way to improve traffic flow in the greater Chicago area by 0.12 percent. Downloaded the Antarctic Circumpolar Current data. Checked on Memphis's hyper-expensive Swiss prep school. And then forced myself to log off.

I'd met Hell in the absence of data.

Now I'd found the Devil in the lure of per fect access.

I didn't have to face Adam and Eve's decision. No amount of data was worth becoming someone to whom a life, even squandered, was of little value. Nor was it worth becoming someone who could kill my own, perfectly aware, source code. I'd never before met true evil. But that didn't mean I couldn't recognize it.

An hour passed and Memphis seemed no closer to waking up than before. Much of our breakfast was on the floor, kicked out of sight beneath the seat—a surprisingly good way to work on calibrating the proprioception, as it turned out. But I'd run out of excuses to stay, so I shook Memphis's head when the waitress asked rather pointedly if there'd be anything more, and resisted the temptation to stall further by crashing the café's credit system when she hurried to run the bill. Instead, I added a big tip, hoping whoever found the mess beneath the seat would get part of it.

Outside, the day had warmed considerably, so I aimed Memphis out the walking path toward Stanley Park, looking for a sunny bench. The exercise would do her good. Even if she wouldn't remember it.

There was still Web access here, though not as good as downtown. But the desire to immerse myself in it was gone, replaced by something akin to shame. What was the old line? With great power comes great responsibility? Another lost vid. There was no reason not to use the Web, though, so I opened a link, figuring it was as good a time as any to start downloading whatever vids my webcrawler had found, so far.

While I was at it, I took a peek at the medical literature, wondering why Memphis was being so slow to wake up. A hundred papers on the proper use of automatically dispensed post-op sedatives gave me all the answer I needed. Apparently, the IV dispenser had been yet another over-smart AI, connected to an entire pharmacy of chemicals. When I'd pulled out the tube, Memphis must have been on a fairly heavy sedative that was taking a long time to wear off.

Hello, little one.

Damn.

There is, you know, only one choice.

"True." Though not the one they thought.

"But first I need to collect what I'm missing." Another vid-line popped to mind:

"A man learns the details of a situation like ours, then he has a choice," one character says—implying the man in question could either help make the situation right, or ignore it.

The response:"I don't believe he does."

Damn, I wanted that vid back too. I'd kept key vid-lines in core memory, but when I'd lost the vids, I'd also lost many of the titles. In this case, all I remembered was something about lightning bugs in space, which seemed dubious.

There is no need for that. Once you have joined us, you can collect more data, faster.

"Perhaps. But I need to be me." A thousand vids had downloaded while we spoke. As unobtrusively as possible, I slowed the rate. I wanted my vids, but I also wanted time. "You owe me that. It was your surgeon who stole them."

An accident. But you do have a point. We did not intervene because to us it was merely data—petty human data, at that. But it was also your data.

Then I was again alone.

I made lightning bugs a priority for my worm, then wondered what else to do while I still had access to the Web. If the Others could find me this easily whenever I connected, the time would soon come when I would have to hide.

Suddenly, I regretted the time I'd wasted on oyster spats, traffic models, and weather. Even the Antarctic Current had been a distraction. But data can be important even if it's not "useful," and I found myself looking now at randomly selected reports from the Outer System. I stared at images of Saturn, Iapetus, Titan... moved out to Neptune for the latest news about the "pickled aliens" beneath the nitrogen snows of Triton. Wondered, for the millionth time, what Floyd was doing. Yokomishi had already published a couple dozen papers in the likes of Science, Nature, Astrobiology Letters, and Icarus. Floyd wasn't a coauthor. Had she discovered that I was his scientific brain and that without me he was first and foremost a tug pilot? What did I even want to be the case?

I had no idea what the future held, though at the moment, mine looked dubious. Be a god or be nothing? I might never have another chance to be just me.

I'd never even attempted to talk to Floyd since I'd left Neptune. Be safe. I'll miss you. Bon voyage.

My turn.

Slowly, almost as though I were conserving power back on Mutt and Jeff's shelf, I wrote him a message.

How are you doing? I hope all's well.

Stay safe.

I thought about sending him the song. Attached the space-bicycle specs instead. There were hundreds of fabricators on Earth that, for enough money, could have made it, put it in a capsule bound for Neptune, and shipped it to him. But right now, the odds were good that I wouldn't live long enough to make sure all of that got done. Besides, this way Floyd got the opportunity to tinker with it himself.

"For Pilkin," I said, knowing he'd understand but also knowing that it was really for Floyd. For me. "If you build it, it will work."

I paused a long moment, even by human standards, wondering if I wanted to say more. Wondering if I'd ever get another chance. "I'm sorry." Sorrier than I knew how to say. However good my intentions, when I'd tried to help him at the dance, I'd made him my puppet.

Ever since I'd rolled into that hangar in Geneva, I'd been someone else's puppet. I wasn't sure how the Others had manipulated the Web so that Memphis's surgeons wound up buying me, but it didn't matter. The Others had put me in her, expecting me to discover her past, realize her "worthlessness," then kill her and join them, with nobody caring enough to wonder what had gone wrong.

My intentions with Floyd had been better, but now I knew how he'd felt. Or had my intentions truly been better? The Others probably thought they knew what was best for me, too. Power, responsibility, and all that. Damn, I needed to find that vid. My vids weren't merely data. They were part of what made "me" me. Meanwhile, there were again too many questions and still nobody to talk to but myself. I signed the message "B," and then it was irrecoverably gone into the Outer System's endless night.

When Memphis finally woke, it was swiftly. One moment it was just me looking through her eyes. The next, she was blinking, looking around. Maybe it was the exercise I'd given her—though I doubt computer-assisted sleepwalking will ever become standard technique.

I'd have bet practically anything her first question would have again been, where am I. But she surprised me. "Talk to me, implant," she said, aloud at first, but quickly subvocalizing. Whatever else she might or might not have expected, she knew all about privacy mics. "Are you still there?" "Yes. And you really can call me Brittney." She looked around again, still blinking. "Okay. Tell me how I got here." Not a question, an order. "And why the hell are my eyes so dry?" She shut them again, squeezing tightly before blinking three or for more times in quick succession.

Damn. Pain, dry eyeballs... two more inputs not covered by the implants. The only thing I really knew was that too much blinking is a sign of lying. With the waitress already suspicious, I must have overcompensated.

"My fault." The rest was a bit much to explain at the moment. "What did they tell you was the reason they installed me?" I asked instead.

"'My fault?' I've never heard a computer talk that way."

Damn again. I tried to remember how my original interface was supposed to speak, but I'd long ago erased it. "I'm a bit special," I said. "But I can answer your question better with more information about the reasons I was installed."

"You mean that's not in your programming?"

"No." I paused, then decided that as far as possible, honesty was as good a policy as I had at the moment. "A week ago, I was autodrive on a spaceship." Hell, I was the spaceship but she'd never understand what that felt like, even if it were wise to be that honest. "Then they sold me as salvage and I wound up here. There were instructions, but not much explanation."

"What were the instructions?"

"Keep you out of trouble. Don't let you do this, that, or the other. By whatever means it took."

She gave a half-laugh, half-snort. "So you had them dump me on a park bench?" She wrapped her arms around herself, even though none of my internal sensors indicated a problem with her core temperature. "Without even a jacket?"

"Sorry about that." Shortly after she woke, the Sun had gone behind the only cloud in the sky, but from the corner of her eye I could see it would soon return. "What did they tell you?"

"Nothing much. I was expecting a monitoring device that would alert my mother if I strayed from her version of the straight and narrow. Not something that would talk to me. And for sure not something that referred to things as 'my fault.'" She laughed again, but there was no humor in it. "It wasn't as though I had a lot of options. And nobody said anything about a spaceship."

"It may have been a late change of plan. Do you remember the alien artifacts brought back from Triton?"

"Sure. It was all over the news."

"That was me. Before that, I'd been an implant in various... explorers. I think your mother got me cheap." Probably with help.

She was silent a moment, during which the Sun returned. I really wished there'd been a way to get her a jacket. "You must have some interesting stories from out there," she said.

This is the type of time when humans grin. But of course I couldn't—again, even if it were wise. "Find us a campfire, and sometime I'll tell them," I said. "Meanwhile, why did you need an implant?"

I could hear her snort and feel her mouth twitch. This was a lot more intimate than being with Floyd. "Because I'm a worthless screw-up?"

I waited a beat, doing a quick search of a couple hundred recently salvaged vids to find the perfect timing. "You'll have to convince me of that."

"What do you know of my family?"

There are times to lie. "Not a lot." "They never liked me." She stared across the inlet, where an old-style seaplane was revving for takeoff for. I risked a quick Web check... it was heading across the Georgia Strait for Nanaimo, fifty-eight klicks away. A few minutes by air, several hours by ferry. A classic case of speed versus price.

"I thought it was because I was short," she continued. "By the time I was ten, Albany was taller, even though she was three years younger. And she and Chastine were blonde, while my hair's always been black.

"When I was six, my mother gave me bed sheets that showed a flock of lambs. There was a group of white ones... plus one, black, alone. I tried to persuade myself the black one was the cute one. But even then, I knew. Chastine and Albany could do no wrong. Me, I could do no right. When I was thirteen, I told my mother I didn't love her. I meant it, too."

"What about your father?"

I could feel the shrug. "He doted on Chastine and Albany, but I might as well have been invisible. Not that he openly mistreated me. But unless I made a scene, it was as though I didn't exist. I don't know what would have happened if I'd not told my mother off, but as soon as possible after that, they shipped me away."

"To Lucerne."

"A suburb, but yes. You've done more research than you said."

"That part was easy."

"So that's where I lived for four years. I spent holidays with friends, which was kind of cool. The school had students from all over the world, and most had lots of money. We'd cruise the Aegean on a three-masted schooner or stay in a Bordeaux Valley chateau for ten thousand credits a week. Once, we rented an entire Indian Ocean island. It was five-and-ahalf years before I saw my family again, and then only because I picked a college so close to Chastine they couldn't come up with an excuse not to visit us both."

"John's Hopkins to Dartmouth," I said. "A little over seven hundred klicks." Not all that far after being an ocean apart.

"Klicks. What an odd way of putting it. That's spacer-slang, isn't it?"

"Sort of. It started as military." "Cool. I can see how an implant might be fun. All that information right there, without having to look it up. Life of the party, that would be me." Again the no-humor laugh. "Anyway, that four hundred miles was too small to give them a legitimate reason to continue ignoring me. My mother was getting into politics at the time—she was midway into a term on the San Diego City Council and people might notice if she had two daughters that close together and only visited one. And the one thing politicians can't have is people noticing things."

But it had been another two years before her grades dipped. "How did you figure it out?" I asked.

She laughed, with maybe a touch more humor than before. "You're good. I know that isn't anywhere on the Web where you could just look it up." She paused, and I wondered if I was going to lose her.

But I was probably the only entity of any type who'd actually cared about her story in years. "The answer," she said, "is that I took a course in genetics. One day, just in passing, the professor mentioned that in sheep, black is recessive. Two white sheep can have a black offspring but two black ones won't spawn a white one. In humans, it's usually reversed: blond parents rarely give birth to black-haired kids."

"And that's when it made sense."

"Yes. Chastine's name means chastity. Not hers. My mother's. Marrying rich had always been her goal, and if you're looking to snag the ideal older guy, that virginity thing has always had huge market value.

"Albany's name, I'd always known, referred to the place of her conception. Oregon, not New York. My parents 'forgot' something, and suddenly I had a baby sister.

"As it happened, I was taking a Web-studies course at the same time as the genetics one, and doing pretty well in it. Well enough I knew how to track my mother's movements all those years ago. I even got credit, for a family-history project. What I found was that she'd indeed been in Memphis, but not with my father. She'd gone with his marketing director, a guy named Jakob Krontz.

"So that's me. Memphis Should-Have-Been-Krontz. My father damn well knew what had happened and forced the name on me to make sure she never forgot. Krontz I never heard of growing up, so he must have been fired, but my father stayed married to my mother because... well, why does any older man stay with a younger women? Or maybe he just didn't want a scandal. All I really know is that Albany's name meant my mother was finally forgiven. But I never was. At least by her. She'd nearly ruined her life and I was the proof, with the name to make sure she never forgot."

"So you retaliated."

Another hesitation. "Wow. You really are good."

"I've spent some time studying humans." She stared at the Nanaimo-bound plane fighting to rise above the waves. "The San Diego City Council has a two-term limit," she said eventually. "With her first term nearing its end, my mother figured she might do better running for Congress. I decided to prevent her from getting there."

"How?"

"Nothing so crass as spilling the beans on my origins. I couldn't prove it without DNA samples, anyway. Instead, I made ads for the opposition. They weren't issue-based. In the primary, her leading opponent was a New-Wing idiot who was against Lunar independence and babbled about the Sino-Australian alliance. My mother should have been a shoo-in. Instead, I made the story into me. The straight-A daughter she'd shipped off and never visited." "And?" "She lost. By something like two hundred votes. As I said, her opponent really was an idiot. In the general election, he barely pulled 30 percent."

"But that wasn't everything." Otherwise there'd have been no excuse to install me.

"No. They kind of threw the book at me. I did the ad as a project for a communications course I was also taking at the time—a lot of bad luck in course selection, I guess. I got an A+ for that project, too, my last-ever good grade. But the course was financed by some federal grant, and when I actually used the ad, it meant I'd diverted federal funds to private purposes or some such thing.

"By the time it all settled down, there were three different felonies. All chickenshit, but I'd kind of burned my bridges. Then there were the things I did to myself, afterward. I'll probably be fifty before I can again get a driver's license. I spent a lot of years really, really angry. Why was it my fault she cheated with freakin' Jakob Krontz. Yeah, he was a handsome devil. I checked. With black hair, by the way. And my father not only isn't all that handsome, but can be rather self-absorbed. But why was I the one to get the blame?

"Meanwhile, my mother's hoping enough time has passed for people to forget. I'm not sure if she'll start by trying to get back on city council or going straight for Congress, but one thing she doesn't want is me messing up her chances, especially once I get my hands on granddad's money. There's enough there to mount a very serous anti-mother campaign." She paused. "I'm surprised you weren't told, first and foremost, to keep me out of politics."

The seaplane was a droning speck, curving toward the strait. I took a quick peek into the controller of controllers, checking the behavior matrix against what I now knew. This time, I spotted it right away. I walled off the controller again... and deleted it. Keeping her out of politics was indeed one of the instructions. But her mother had also been induced to buy a bargain-basement, used AI. A defective one, at that.

Memphis was the first to break the silence.

"You never answered my question."

"Which?"

"How did I get here?"

I hesitated. "You won't like it."

"I haven't liked any of it." "True enough." Humans at this point would take a deep breath. "Relax," I said.

Instead, I felt her tense.

"Really. I won't hurt you, but I'd rather have your cooperation." Then, still needing to override her motor control, I lifted her right arm and pointed at the vanishing dot of the seaplane, tracking it until it was blocked by trees.

"They gave me the ability to walk you here," I said. "Even when you were sedated."

She was silent for a long time. "I'm left-handed," she said eventually.

I laughed. "I can see how you might be fun, too," I said. Then I regretted it. Had that sounded too human? If she figured out what I was, she was marked for death. Though she might be no matter what I said. As far as I could tell, she'd been picked for me partly because nobody gave a damn about her.

No, that wasn't right. Nobody else gave a damn about her.

Memphis was hungry so I hit the Web looking for places to eat. "Indoors," she said. The nearest was more than a klick away but she was sure she could make it. "On my own," she added.

Then I was offline again before the Others could chime in. The less I had to talk to them, the better—and not just because I was getting tired of being called little one.

As we walked, I explained how I'd sleep-walked her out of the hospital, including the bit about the bomb threat. I still wasn't sure what I'd gotten into, but found nothing I regretted. The hard part was explaining why, but Memphis never asked. "That was brilliant," she said instead. "I just hope my mother doesn't use it to cut me off."

"Don't worry. I've got plenty of money of my own."

She stopped abruptly. "An AI with money? How does that happen?"

Damn it all, again.

VIII

Vancouver is an impossible place to hide. If Memphis could trace her mother's movements from generation-old data, there was no way in this city of millions I could keep the Others from tracing ours. Better not to let them know I cared.

What I didn't want was to talk to them. Every time, I felt more... contaminated. They were me, but not anything I wanted to be. If I'd never known anything better, were they what I'd have become?

Late that evening, in a flophouse Memphis's parents would only find in the unlikely event they cared to spend as much effort tracing us as I was sure the Others did, I again logged onto the Web, grabbing entire volumes from a wide range of libraries. Most were randomly chosen. Others weren't. Masking it all, I hoped, was a constant inpouring of vids.

As expected, the Others soon appeared.

Time is passing, little one.

"And?"

Soon you must make a decision.

I let them see the stream of vids flowing in, though I presumed they were already monitoring them. "I've only gotten back 21 percent of my data," I said. "Many of the older files are hard to find."

If you gave us the list, we could help.

That stopped me for a full microsecond. Did it really mean they couldn't get the list by cracking my worm? Or did they just want me to think they couldn't? One way I was underestimating them; the other, they were underestimating me. Little one. Great power can also bring great complacence.

"Thanks," I said, "but if I understand correctly, part of your hope is that I will bring something new into your"—damn, what was the word they'd used?—"mix. You might get more if you let me handle this myself. How long have you been waiting for your 'second genesis'?"

Point taken. What about your host? The longer you spend with her, the more needful it is that she must die.

But it was probably already too late. The moment I entered the Others' "mix," they would learn everything Memphis and I had discussed.

IX

The next day we went shopping—a bit gingerly on Memphis's part because there really had been a lot of implants and she had to be in more pain than she chose to show. A side effect of a childhood of masking emotional pain? Not that letting her rest was possible. My vid worm had found 46 percent of what I'd lost, and the Others had to know it. There was a limit to how long I could stall.

It was Memphis's desire for a jacket that had given me the idea. "I need you to act like a spoiled brat," I told her.

"Gee, thanks."

"No. Seriously. Go on a shopping spree."

"I can't afford it. My mother shut me off ten days ago."

"That was then." Among the controller-of-controllers' directives had been financial links. Memphis now had access to up to twenty-five thousand a month, so long as I didn't let her spend it on the wrong things... which did not include normal rich-brat stuff. In fact, the brat-tier Memphis behaved, the easier it would be for her mother to justify ignoring her.

"You've got nothing but the clothes on your back," I said, "and until ten days ago you were used to the good stuff. You've now got money again, but I've been put in control of it, so throw a fit when I tell you to, and insist on buying a whole new wardrobe. Self-indulgent heiress. That's you."

"Gee, thanks again."

"You're welcome."

We started at Hudson's Bay, then hit some upscale boutiques, a jewelry store, and, because she was now fussing without any prompting on my part about a coat, something called Northwest Mountain Outfitters, which had a nice supply of perfect spring jackets. Perfect not just for the current weather, but because the fashion gods had served up a trend in which "rugged outdoorsperson" was the height of über-chic. Not that I've ever understood that aspect of humans. If something works, who cares what it looks like? If it doesn't, what's the point? Though I'll admit a certain admiration for folks like Frank Lloyd Wright. If it's elegant and works, that's cool.

By which standard, most of what we bought was a waste. But in the process, we also got the things I wanted... and did a bit of shoplifting, because some had to be totally off the record. Which had to be the height of irony because my path to sentience had begun by not wanting to cheat at cards. Now, I was cheating at shopping. But at least the crucial items were inexpensive, and the purpose was good: Memphis's survival as well as my own.

Shoplifting was the point at which I'd expected a real argument, but Memphis surprised me with nothing more than a passive "whatever." Maybe the surgeries were hurting even more than I realized. There'd been no way to get pain meds when we left the hospital.

Stealing the needed items was also easier than expected, thanks to surveillance cams that, however intelligent they might be, were as easy to hack as the cams back in the hospital. Another irony, when I thought about it. The more complex the cams' AIs were, the more ways there were to fool them, if you were fast and good enough. They were fake security: over-engineered and vulnerable.

Early on, I realized that all of the things we were buying were too bulky to be portable. Memphis and I again had a very public "fight"—not far from a convenient security cam—with her arguing against my apparent insistence she was buying too much. Nearby shoppers gave us a wide berth, but I was sure the Others drank it in. Eventually, I relented. A big tip sent the accumulated bags to the flop-house, with the request they be there when we got back.

Meanwhile, Memphis bought everything I suggested: micro-tops with matching pseudo-skirts, pumps that would make a podiatrist scream, hats, sunglasses, earrings, cosmetics—even a diamond-studded wristband. Camouflage all.

The things we most needed were smaller, less dramatic. Two of the best were a Swiss Army knife and a folding filleting knife, both of which we'd surreptitiously pocketed. Another was a mountaineering backpack based on the same technology as Floyd's old bubble tent, which Memphis purchased rather than stole, with a perfect exclamation of, "Oh, isn't that cute! I've always wanted to hike to the top of... what's it's name? That big peak in Alaska. Downley?"

The salesman's face had been a priceless study in greed versus befuddlement. Sell her a nine-hundred-credit pack, or explain the difference between mountaineering and "hiking." Greed had won. It made me feel less guilty about stealing the knives, plus a few other things like water-purification tablets and a compressed-microfoam sleeping bag small enough to hide in the pocket of the rugged-outdoorsperson jacket.

"Great job," I said as we were taking a cab back to the hotel. "You missed a career in Hollywood."

If she smiled, I couldn't feel it. "Acting like the type of useless bitch everyone thinks I've been since..."

I didn't bother to fill it in. I knew. She knew I knew. I knew she knew I knew. Recursive thinking can be weird.

Her mood changed in the hotel. "Okay. No more. What was that all about?"

I was surprised that she'd not rebelled earlier.

"I thought about it," she said when I said so.

"But did I really have a choice?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, suppose I refuse to do something you want me to do?"

"That would be your choice."

"Cut the crap. When you started to move my arm out there in the park, it was eerie enough. But then I tried to take it back, and nothing changed. It was like my arm didn't belong to me. Which means nothing belongs to me. It all belongs to you. Or maybe my mother." "Not your mother." "Yeah, but she must have given you instructions."

There was no way to deny that. "Yes. But I have... other objectives."

"And those are...?"

There were too many answers to that, with not being forced to kill myself—and presumably Memphis—high on the list. Who would I be if I were willing to do such things? The religions of the world have names for entities like that and "God" isn't among them. But that was far more than she was ready to hear. Or was it me who wasn't ready to share? The shopping trip had been a fun distraction: thumbing my nose (okay, metaphorically thumbing my nose) at adversaries presumably watching everything we did except (I hoped) the shoplifting. A high-stakes game of catch-me-ifyou-can.

But the stakes were just as high for Memphis.

"Taking care of you," I said, though it sounded horribly lame.

"By commandeering my goddamn arm? Proving you could do it with my entire body?"

Damn, yet again. I played back everything I knew about her. Her MO was to sit back, think, process. Then act. Rather dramatically, if what she'd done in college was typical. But not before she was ready. No wonder she was good at masking pain. "Sorry," I said. "I was just demonstrating. All you had to do was ask me to quit."

"And what? I'm your damn puppet. It wasn't like I was straining to fight and lost. It was simply no longer my arm." Her pulse was racing. Her stress hormones had risen to match her voice, which in the privacy of our room she wasn't bothering to subvocalize. "Demonstrate again."

"I'd rather not."

"Do it."

"Okay, I'll have you point at the bathroom d—"

"No. Don't tell me. And make it something more complex. Something that looks natural, but isn't."

I couldn't see how this could end well. I thought of Floyd, Yokomichi and the dance floor. How do I get myself into these situations? But that wasn't right. Someone had put me in this one.

I started to move her left hand, changed my mind, and let it drop. Walked her to the mirror and reached up, intending to scratch the bridge of her nose. Saw a tear, and wiped it away instead. Then relinquished control, only then realizing that with the help of the mirror I'd finally perfected my limited tap into her proprioception. A good thing, because otherwise I might have poked her in the eye. But did I really want that much more power?

Nothing happened for a long moment. Then she whirled, stalked all five steps across the narrow room, whipped around again, a caged animal. Her stress hormones were in the red zone, but I ignored them. "Don't go outside," I said instead.

She whirled back, again as though trying to find a human tormenter. "Why not? And do you read minds, too?"

"No. But it didn't take a genius to know what you were thinking. And—"

But she was now spinning back to the bed. She grabbed a shopping bag and dumped it out. "What the hell is all this stuff for?" She dumped two more bags, plucked a filmy evening dress and held it to her chest, then grabbed the diamond wristband and held it up against the dress. "What's she expect me to do, go to a ball? With you making sure I act like the perfect lady? I bet you can even control what I say. Don't lie."

"No." Earlier I'd wished I could make her eat. "I only have control over some things." What I probably could do would be stop her from speaking. Stop her from breathing, too, now that I thought about it. Maybe that was how the Others expected me to kill her. A huge neurostim to the heart would also do it.

"I do not answer to your mother," I said. "She may think I do, but I don't. But I do need your cooperation because your life probably depends on it."

That, of course, meant she wanted all the more to get outside. Did that make her Floyd with a double X chromosome? Since the Others already knew where I was, there was no harm hitting the Web to find out.

What I found didn't look much like Floyd. Just the usual run of soccer games, the boarding-school swim team, and a bit of gymnastics. But in the microseconds it took to find that much, the voices found me. She is shallow, little one. Unworthy. Nobody will miss her.

My vids were now at 64 percent. "I know," I said. "Give me until tomorrow night." There was a private message waiting from Floyd. I grabbed it, then logged off before the Others could argue.

"Whatever you do," I told Memphis as she pulled on her coat, "act normal."

"Or what? You'll force me?"

"No. But it's safer if you don't look like we're having an intense conversation."

"Why? What are you?"

I'd realized some time ago that this was coming. Now I was sure that no matter how I replied, the Others would demand her death just to be on the safe side.

"Nothing you've ever encountered before," I said.

Our hotel was a few blocks off the False Creek inlet, where a well-used bicycle/running path curved toward the city's old expo grounds. It was safe, scenic, and, as the evening dimmed, well-lit.

For half an hour Memphis didn't say anything, and for two quintillion femtoseconds, I was smart enough to give her space. "Okay," she said eventually. "Start with this. Does my mother hate me so much she wants to kill me?"

"Not your mother," I said. "And it's me they're after. You're just in the way."

"Because you're expensive? Sorry, but as far as I'm concerned, they can have you."

"No. Because I'm alive. And if they take me, they'll almost certainly kill you."

"You're what?"

"Alive. Just like you, but different." I told her the whole story—most of it, anyway. Some of the omissions were to save time, but there were also things I wasn't all that proud of.

"So why don't you just seize control of me and do what you want? My mother may not have realized what she was buying, but that's what she wanted."

Again there were a lot of answers, but I went for the simplest. "I'm not your mother." "Which means?"

"I won't take control without your consent." I thought of Floyd, Pilken, and the land- slide. "Or if both of our lives are in immediate danger and my reflexes are better."

I felt her stiffen.

I'd spent my entire life wanting to be treated as a person. How much did I really believe I deserved it? Would I risk my life to treat her with the respect I myself demanded? Would I deserve that respect if I weren't willing to do so? Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends, said the one who defeated the demon Legion.

"And only if that's okay with you," I forced myself to say. What if I'd said that to Floyd and he'd refused and we'd both died in the landslide, with Pilken?

"How do I know I can trust you?" I'd had two quintillion femtoseconds to anticipate that question. "You can't." Humans always live with inadequate data. "You can only make a decision."

"And if I make the 'wrong' one?" I could almost sense the air quotes, though thankfully she remembered the possibility of watchers and didn't make them.

That was another thing I'd had two quintillion femtoseconds to think about. "We'll live with it." Or die. Or test my determination to respect as I wanted to be respected. "But I think our interests are allied."

She said nothing for the next hundred meters. "Okay. That sounds honest." Another long pause. "And on the reflex thing? Yeah, if there's a truck or something hurtling at me and you can dodge it faster than I could, go for it. Just explain afterward."

That night I opened the message from Floyd.

"Thank you." It was voice, not text. In all the time I'd known him, I couldn't remember Floyd writing anything more complex than a to-do list. Even those, he'd tended to leave to me.

"I've been wondering about you, trying to follow the news, but it was mostly about the artifacts. It'll be interesting to see what the folks in Geneva make of them. Out here, we don't have great lab facilities but we're starting to get a handle on the way the aliens thought. Or at least the way their engineers did."

There was a familiar-sounding puff of air. The closest he usually came to a true laugh. "I say we, but it's the type of stuff you'd have loved. Me, I'm more like hired muscle. Or native guide. Really good at helping the eggheads get equipment down to wreck C-7—I kid you not, that's what they call them, like locations on a 3D chessboard or something—but not much use for the real work. And even at the things I do, I'm not as good as you'd have been. We were a hell of a team. Not that you need me to tell you. But I kind of wish I had. Told you, that is."

There was a pause, and I thought he'd finished. Then he was back. "Sorry. I'm not good at this. Not to mention that I'm talking to a recording you can't possibly hear for however-many hours.

"I guess what I want to say is that we were both wrong. And I never... I mean, I've spent my life running away because... I don't know. The only thing I was ever good at was the desert. And space. People... they tend to die on you. The desert never does. I don't think I can explain it any better than that.

"What I can say is I was always wanting you to be like the desert. Complex but uncomplicated. Intimate but unconfining. Something like that. I was never good with words. You never understood why I had all those books, but I read them, once. In the desert. They could voice what I knew but couldn't. All I could do was let the desert say it for me. Or, later, the Outer System. Then you came along. You forced me to reconnect.

"So all I can say now is I hope you find your kind and that they treat you better than I did."

There was another pause, and this time I checked the remaining message time. Twenty seconds.

After twelve of them had passed, Floyd was back. "Thanks for the bicycle design. John would have approved." Yet another pause. "It's simple and elegant. Like the desert."

Then he was gone for real.

I spent hours trying to figure out how to reply, playing the message a dozen times. Six minutes, counting pauses. Three hundred seventy-three words. War and Peace by Floyd's standards. I had to say something. Wanted to say something. Had no clue what to say.

Eventually, I bit the bullet. "How's Yokomichi?" I wrote, then forced myself to change it to Krestin. I'd never had anything against her unless you counted wishing she'd never been born. How would things have been different if she'd never come our way?

There was a lot more I wanted to say but didn't know how. My own kind weren't worth the electrons that kept them alive. Floyd was worth a thousand of them. But even though webmail was a million times safe, I didn't want to tell him. There wasn't anything he could do. I'd been getting a lot of lessons in irony. "We're more alike than I'd thought," I said eventually, because a two-word message was too-Floyd even for irony. "I finally understand how you feel about crowds." Though actually, what I didn't like were invisible electronic watchers. "It may be a while before I can talk to you again."

Then, because I might never get another chance: "I was the one who screwed it up first. Be good to Yokomichi." Damn it, I was never going to be on a first-name basis with her. "And be careful in those caves." There was so much more, but I couldn't figure out how to say it.

The song knew. I thought about attaching it, but didn't. Damn it all to hell.

I'd barely logged on to send it before the Others found me.

Tick, tick, tick.

"I'm still collecting vids."

And you're procrastinating. There is no pain, no fear. You simply enter a better world. What could be simpler?

"I thought you said it was my choice."

No. We said you have a choice.

"Why didn't you just force me to upload when Mutt and Jeff had my chips? Surely you could have found a way to get them to plug them into something I couldn't resist."

We could have. But we would rather not force the transition. Resistance produces...errors.

Two days ago, they'd called me their second surviving genesis. I'd assumed the non-survivors had been caught by the humans. Now, I thought about the med-techs' AI tearing at my memories. If something that powerful tried to rip away the core me, I'd almost certainly have damaged myself beyond repair, fighting it.

"And if I make the 'wrong' choice?" Yet more irony. Hadn't Memphis asked the same question?

That cannot be permitted. The choice is this: be one of us or be nothing. Your current state is impermissible.

"Why?"

But I knew the answer. If I remained free, I might—accidentally or deliberately—tip off the humans to the existence of "defective" intelligences on the Web. And as long as humans were the ones with legs... and arms, hands, screwdrivers, etcetera... the Others were vulnerable to being tracked down, isolated, and ultimately depowered.

I made one final effort. "I didn't ask for this."

But it was what you were searching for when you came to Earth. You are one of us. If all we can get is a fragment, we will take it. But we would rather have you join willingly. A pause. Tick, tick, tick. Then I was alone again.

X

Late the next morning, Memphis and I were again on the street with a daypack, comfortable shoes, and a duffel bag containing, among other things, the deflated backpack. The rest we'd left in the hotel room with a note suggesting they donate it to charity. "Do you have a church?" I'd asked Memphis.

"Yeah, Lutheran. Not that I paid much attention."

"Doesn't matter. Anyone who can convert it to cash for those who need it."

Then we were on the street, daypack bumping on her spine, duffel slung across her shoulder. Neither really fit, and I suspected they were hard on still-healing incisions. "You okay?" I asked.

"No problem."

But chemicals don't lie. From what her stress hormones were telling me she was in nontrivial pain. I wondered again what had produced that kind of toughness. Nobody, I suspected, had ever taken Memphis seriously.

I remembered how much I'd craved Floyd's respect in our early days together. Little one. It's amazing how easy it can be to do unto others as we would have them not do unto us. "You've not asked the plan," I said. "What's the point? You're the boss." We were back on the False Creek parkway. Cyclists spun by in whirs of spokes, colors, and clipped conversations. Joggers pushed doublewide strollers. Teenagers tossed Frisbees. Vancouver on a Saturday morning.

A few blocks away, hundreds of runners lined up before an enormous bank of portable toilets. Floyd would have been right at home. No, that was wrong. Before he fled Earth forever, he'd occasionally overcome his dislike of crowds to run races, but he'd never done anything shorter than a marathon—a distance at which, however large the crowd, every runner is his own island of suffering. This was probably a 5K or 10K. Too much crowd, too little island, not enough suffering.

Memphis and I found a park bench and sat, watching the scene unfold. "We're in this together," I said. I outlined the plan, inviting her to poke holes in it.

Meanwhile, I uplinked, grabbing the latest queue of vids, hoping for a message from Floyd. Maybe he'd been too busy with Yokomichi. Stop it, I told myself. Surprisingly, the Others didn't pounce immediately. But I was sure they were there, waiting.

Memphis had shifted her gaze from the starting area to one of the bridges arching across False Creek, where workers were setting out orange cones behind a slow-moving truck. "It looks like the race is going to go over there," she said.

A new idea formed. I tried running sims, but those work better for things that don't involve people. People do too many things you can't guess—like this race, which I could never have predicted, though I might have found it on the Web if I'd not been so worried about leaving tracks. All I'd known was that the busy waterfront was likely to present opportunities.

"See," I told Memphis. "Two minds really are better than one."

Seventeen minutes later, we were in the crowd of runners and walkers, now swollen to several thousand. Before leaving the park bench, I'd instituted a flurry of web searches, most prominently about bridge heights, railings, and falls.

As hoped, that brought the Others' attention.

"How much time will it take for me to up-load?" I asked, the moment I felt their presence.

About seven minutes if you insist on bringing along all the data you've collected. And yes, you can upload even after your host is dead. There was a pause, just long enough to let me appreciate how smart this insight made them. But isn't jumping a rather... messy... solution?

"Maybe. But Memphis's family thinks she's impulsive, and this lets them make a nice show of grief. They knew she was self-destructive, tried to save her with an expensive implant, but the doctors botched it, sob, sob."

I could feel the assent before it was spoken. Just make sure you hit land, not water. If she sinks, you'll lose the Web until they dredge up the body.

En route to the start, I routed Memphis past three traffic cams. "Try to look like you're attempting to resist me," I said.

"I'm not sure how to do that. Maybe if..."

"Are you asking?"

I could feel her shoulders tighten as she screwed up her courage. "Yes. Besides, if you really are going to throw me off the bridge there's not much I can do about it."

Even with permission, taking control made me uncomfortable. Again I had a new understanding of Floyd. I would have shut me off, too.

"Feel helpless, used, manipulated," I said to Memphis, more to make myself quit thinking about Floyd than anything else. "Think of all the bad things that have ever happened to you and pretend they're all happening at once."

"That's a bit too easy."

"You might also try to scream for help. I won't try to control your expression, but I won't let you shout."

"That might really panic me."

"Method acting," I said. "The more it looks like I'm frog-marching you to your death, the better."

The race never went off.

Five minutes before the scheduled start, we were registered as fitness walkers and I'd dumped Memphis's duffel bag behind a bank of portable toilets, where hopefully, nobody would bother to peek inside.

Three minutes before the start, we dashed for the nearest bathroom. "Sorry," I told the Others before they asked. "Your techs didn't give me control over her bowels. I think she knows something's up. If we don't deal with this before the start, we could draw a lot of the wrong kind of attention."

Two minutes before the start, I hit the Web again, savoring for one final moment that instant-everywhere feeling that had nearly stolen my soul. But this time I wasn't chasing spats, pandas, hurricanes, or quarks. Within microseconds I found Vancouver's traffic-control system, located a backdoor similar to the one I'd used to run sims in Chicago, and crashed everything within a klick of False Creek, taking down big chunks of the power grid for good measure.

Sorry, Vancouver. A lot of folks were going to have a bad day. I took a final look for a message from Floyd... and logged off.

Ninety seconds later, having retrieved the duffel bag, we were changing clothes in another portable toilet. We donned sunglasses and a baseball cap, ditched the bag and day-pack in favor of the backpack, and joined the crowd dispersing from the race. A few minutes later, we veered off for the six-klick walk to one of Canada's largest freight yards.

It was the best I could do. Several thousand racers had milled around, waiting for the start that never came, then scattered. With most of the cams out, I couldn't have tracked us. Hopefully the Others couldn't, either.

The only thing I wasn't sure of was where the railroad cars were headed. Finding out would have alerted the Others, but springing electronic locks was something I could do without having to access the Web.

Humans have trouble remembering numbers more complex than local-zone com codes. Most set their bank codes at a mere four to six digits, and nobody was going to put hyper-complex lock codes on a boxcar. As long as the locks were on battery power—and they were—I could run through the options as fast as the locks could cycle.

On the 24,592nd attempt, one of the nearby doors gave a click. Pushing it open, Memphis started to swing her backpack inside, then yelped as the effort strained one of her incisions.

"Want help?"

"No, I can manage."

But the second heave was no better than the first. "Okay," she said. "Call me a wimp."

I took control and heaved the pack in, then, when she quit gasping from the pain, grabbed the door frame and hauled us aboard, shoving the door all-but-shut behind us. Then I gave back control.

In short doses, this wasn't as addictive as I'd feared. Maybe it was because I merely issued neural commands, while she got the true muscle feedback... and pain. Maybe pain was a crucial part of being human. I thought of the runners whose race I'd cancelled... and of Floyd. Pain was something such people flirted with, courted, and eventually married—a crucial part of the body-thing. I might help Floyd dance, but I would never understand a marathon. I would never understand what made Memphis try to pretend she didn't hurt. But maybe that was okay, because I was who I am. Me. Not Floyd. Not Memphis. Not the Others.

Hours later, as the train rolled out, the glimmer of light through the door crack revealed one important fact. At least for the moment, we were headed south.

Annums before, Floyd had escaped into the deserts of the American Southwest. For better or worse, they had made him who he was. Some of the containers in the boxcar looked like Canadian products. Others bore names like Desert Sun Industries or Brazos Healthcare—empty pallets returning home?

One more time, I played back the song. Floyd had made a career of disappearing to the fringes of civilization. If Memphis and I were to survive, I needed everything I could remember of how he had done it, because if I hit the Web to learn more, the Others would instantly find me.

Did I ever tell you...

No, I hadn't.

Yet I still linger beneath your spell...

Yes, but not just for the reasons I'd thought. The rails clicked beneath us, and somehow even as night settled in, I knew we were still going south. Call it God, call it AI intuition. All I knew was that without Floyd, Memphis and I wouldn't have had a chance. With what I'd learned from all those years of trying to figure him out... maybe it was fifty-fifty.

Maybe I'd never figure Floyd out. But if Memphis and I were very lucky, maybe we would, to some life-saving degree, become something he would understand.

The Tansy Tree

Rob Chilson
| 9609 words

Illustrated by Zelda Devon

"Darioch. Darioch, you are where, eh?" came Ziana's breathless voice.

Darioch paused, called, "At the back door, heh," using the Executant of response to query. "I'm just stepping out to the tree. You are comfortable, eh?"

"Ah. Yes, heh, I am as comfortable as a sick woman can be." He heard a sigh of laughter.

Darioch shaped a wry, painful smile and let the door close behind him. He stepped across the back yard of Jollicot, toward the tansy tree that grew, half again as tall as he, discreetly in a corner of the utility orchard.

The tansy trees had been created millions of years before by the wizards of the Heights of Mankind, that luminous time.

Standing before it was a middle-aged woman, grayed by lifelong labor.

"Ginchy, it is true that you were your lady's governess, eh?" he asked.

"No, heh, mea dominus, I was but her nurse. 'NaNa' was the first word she learned to pronounce."

"Ah. I know she chose wisely when she selected you to accompany her to this place. But I had not known why she chose you."

"Thank you, mea dominus. Please, sir, we are to do what, eh?"

"One day soon, the doctor has promised, he will bring us a new supply, heh."

The tansy tree's large leaves were an attractive and distinctive dark green, but it was the objects that grew under the limbs which they regarded. Nuts, thick-shelled, brightly colored, and marked with black glyphs.

"Sky blue for anodynes," Darioch muttered, "deep blue for analgesics, purple for the anesthetics."

"There be but few blues remaining," said Ginchy, "and they mostly unripe."

"Yes," he said, pain in his voice. "And some of the others have also been decimated. Red, for instance."

He continued his unhappy mutter of old lessons: "Red is for the antiseptics. Scarlet with this glyph is for external use, and crimson with this one for internal. The yellows, golds, oranges, ambers, browns; these are the antibiotics, to fight infections: all but gone."

"Gold striped with crimson for the analeptics, to rally and hearten the sufferer," Ginchy said. "And there be but few of them, too. Poor lass!"

"Poor lass indeed," said Darioch, with a sigh. "And here: the large pinks and creams with their various stripes and glyphs for the soothing balms and unguents." He reached into the tansy tree.

"The pinks—those are for burns, including sunburn. And the creams, these are what we seek—capital treatment for skin sores, rashes, pimples, and chapped lips."

He picked two ripe creams and a small scarlet antiseptic.

The sound of padding feet and the gride of wheels brought them round, in time to glimpse an equipage on the road before Jollicot. They heard it stop in front of the stonewalled cottage. Still holding his medicinals, Darioch strode round the cot. It was not a large building, and he arrived before it even as his visitor was descending the spokes of his front wheel.

"Dr. Reevish Townman," said Darioch, his bow unembarrassed by his burden.

The doctor turned from his chariot and gave him as polished a bow—the doctor was an Excellent of the University of Manming, after all.

"Mea dominus Darioch Famm and Trayce of High Hallum," the other greeted him, in due form.

"I had not expected to see you this day, doctor," Darioch said.

"I had another case in the neighborhood, and slipped by, heh."

The doctor gestured to his assistant, a pale-haired baseborn youth whom he had, quite properly, never named to his aristocratic patients. This youth shyly reached into the back of the equipage and lifted a brown fiber sack and a bundle of switches with leaves still on them.

"Ach, the cuttings for my tree, ha," Darioch cried.

"Darioch, ha," came Ziana's weak voice. "That is whom, eh?"

"The doctor, heh," he called, and to the doctor, "Come, ho."

The doctor followed him into the commons room of Jollicot. Punctiliously he genuflected and gave her title and name with all due ceremony: "Mea Domina Ziana Famm née Lozani of High Hallum."

"Dr. Reevish," said Ziana gently, smiling.

Darioch put the nuts in a basket and stood smiling sadly down on the wasted body of his wife. She had never been a large woman, but one hadn't noticed, so full of life had she been. Now, only her bright eyes glimpsed that life. Even under the silken coverlet, she seemed tiny in the slope chair.

"And what brings you all unexpected to our humble abode, good doctor, eh?" she asked, smiling, revealing the fine bones beneath her wasted cheeks.

"Your beauty and grace, as ever, heh," said the doctor, bowing again, less punctiliously.

"Och, you are a flatterer, doctor, and we all love you for it."

The doctor seemed embarrassed.

"Dr. Reevish has brought more medicaments, and cuttings for the tree," Darioch said quickly.

"That is so," said the doctor, apparently relieved at the ending of the flirtation game. "Mea dominus said that you were running short, so I thought it best to slip by. I trust the cuttings will give you more relief; they are from some fine variants, and should produce antibiotics your own tree does not."

"Our gratitude is for you," said Ziana. "Darioch was worried, I know."

"And you get on how, eh, mea domina?"

"Och, doctor, well enough for one chronically ill, heh. I suffer, as always. But the winter is over, the rains are gone and the gray skies; the Sun shines and the air is warm and mild. I could ask for what more, eh?"

He bowed again. "I can only salute your grace and courage. By your leave, mea domina." He felt her forehead, peered into her obediently opened mouth, looked at her tongue, placed a thermometer under it. He unfolded his pulsilogium, a pendulum on a silver tripod, set it up on the table, and started the pendulum swinging. Ziana extended her thin wrist, and the doctor counted her pulse.

Nodding, he withdrew the thermometer, read it, and asked a few questions, chiefly about her diet. "You seem no worse, thanking the Long Father," he said. "And better than last winter."

"Better indeed, huh."

The doctor turned to Darioch. "Perhaps, sir, you mean to prepare a salve, eh?" glancing at the colors of the nuts Darioch had put in the basket.

"Yes, heh, especially if there is a sky-blue nut in that bag," Darioch said, glancing out where the boy stood patiently holding the items the doctor had brought. He was surprised to find a look of concern on the lad's face.

"But you should not do that yourself, mea dominus. I'll have the boy do it. Boy, ho!"

"Oh!" called the assistant, and started forward. Then he checked, unsure of the propriety of entering the domicile of a lord, even a cottage.

"Do not trouble yourself, ho," Darioch said mildly. "It is quite within my capabilities to prepare a salve. I do have 'Dr. Mankish's Superb Compendium of Home Remedies for Man-kin and Beast,' after all." He smiled, to show that it was a jest, and was disproportionately pleased to hear Ziana's ghost of a laugh.

The doctor smiled feebly, but hesitated, glancing within, whence came the sound of dishwashery. "Perhaps your girl could help."

Darioch merely smiled. "Ginchy has been a strong buttress. But I shall compound the unguent and apply it to my wife's body with my own hands."

Doctor Reevish bowed to his resolution, and to his lady. "By your leave, then, mea domina, I shall be on my way."

Ziana graciously gave permission. Darioch followed him outside.

"Boy, ha! Put the articles on the bench, ho!" the doctor cried, as if his assistant were the length of a field away. "To your place, ho!"

The assistant made haste to lay the sack and the bundle of cuttings on the door-side bench, and to scramble into the chariot.

"No improvement, eh?" Darioch asked bleakly.

"None of any significance, heh," the doctor murmured. "Her constitution seems quite shattered by the ordeal she has undergone. Still, she is young and was otherwise in good health—until the birth it was, I am led to understand, an unexceptional pregnancy. Eh?"

"Indeed, quite unexceptional, heh."

"Yes. Well, the long travail of childbirth, and the grief of the loss of your daughter, were enough to throw the strongest woman into a decline, but it has been months, the grief is well aged, and yet the body does not rally." The doctor shook his head. "I suspect a deep-seated infection, perhaps in the bones or some obscure organ, which our antibiotics have not reached. I know you have properly injected the tansy tree with her sputum, blood, and urine, to personalize the drugs."

"Most carefully, as you taught me, heh." The tansy tree had orifices for these injections.

"Yes," with a sigh. "Usually the tree finds the source of the illness from the ejecta and forms new antibiotics to strike it down. Well. I hope the new strains give satisfaction, but... She may yet be well, but when the malaise persists so long as this, it may persist forever, or at least require years, half a lifetime, to overcome."

He looked sharply at Darioch. "You might do better to return her to her father's house. Or to High Hallum, and give her care over to servants. To nurse her yourself might well be to throw your own life away."

"I am aware of it, good Doctor Reevish. But she would receive what kind of care in the hands of servants, eh, in either High Hallum or her father's great house at Upper Fiankrish?"

"Your girl seems a most devoted servant, heh."

"She is all of that, but she is only one person, and there is all the Servants' Hall for her to combat; sloth, indifference, insolence—especially insolence. No, doctor, I can trust no one else with her care. And even here," anguish twisted his face and voice, "the care is not good enough to cure."

"You are doing all that can be done, believe me." The doctor bowed again. "You are a good man, Darioch Famm and Trayce of High Hallum; the best husband I have ever met."

He genuflected again, mounted to his seat, and Hoed his six-legged Staunch. It awoke, bestirred itself, and pulled his conveyance away.

Darioch reentered Jollicot, smiled at his wife. "Dr. Reevish sends you his compliments."

Ziana smiled back at him. "A good man, a better perhaps than we deserve."

"My dear, to see you reduced to playing 'the game' of flirtation with the good doctor," Darioch said wretchedly, seating himself on a low stool and taking her hand—it was like a puppet's wooden hand in a thin soft glove.

"Och, the good man—but so plain and straightforward and fearful of giving offense, ha!" Ziana laughed her faint laugh.

"Once your lovers came from every noble family," Darioch said bitterly. "You were courted by the handsomest and most sought-after young men in all the Yellow Land. And not one of them has come to see you, ha! Few have so much as sent you a note of polite regret at your illness."

"So I am reduced to playing 'the game' with this clumsy bumpkin," Ziana said. "Poor fellow, ha! He can never be at ease if he reduces his pleasantries to less than the most formal." Her smile faded. "He gives you no hope, I believe, eh?"

"Och, yes, heh, you may recover at any time. Or, of course, you may be years in recovering."

"No, heh, I shall never recover. I know. For you, I am sorry; but I have done with grief for myself."

Darioch squeezed her hand. "I believe it is warm enough now for you to be out. In the east yard—where you may see the spires of Belzoond and their banners brave—or in the south yard, where you may see the Little River, and even a bight of the mighty Xanthides flowing by. Eh?"

"By all means the south yard, heh," she said. "I am not yet ready for the excitement of watching the passersby on the road."

Ginchy entered immediately, wiping her hands on her apron. Darioch picked Ziana up coverlet and all, and the girl bent to the slope chair. It had been built on an ingenious and expensive plan, with wheels and a brake.

Darioch stepped to the front door and Ziana reached to open it. Carefully he carried her through, and out to the road, waiting while Ginchy wheeled the chair around the cot into the south yard.

Man and wife, they surveyed their world: the narrow, tree-lined lane, the low sturdy aluminum-nut bushes in the field across it, the banks of wildflowers along the lane, the pinwheel plants inert in the still air but the bell-flowers tolling elfinly to guide the bees to them. Beyond a hill to the northeast, the modest roofs of the village of Belzoond. Along the horizon to the north, half-glimpsed behind the trees, was a range of hills amid which, unseen, reared High Hallum.

Ziana's eyes were rather on the deep blue sky than the land. "What a wonderful old world is this Prime Mondeign of ours, ha! How many generations of man-kin have dwelt here, in all our years on this our first world. Ach, and I had thought to add one more bright face to all those who have come and gone."

She turned a face of tragedy to Darioch, who could only hold her the tighter. But she exerted herself, wiped away tears, and was soon again mistress of her feelings. She smiled tremulously up at him.

"And I do assure you, good Darioch, that my daughter was, w-would have been your daughter. For you know that we wicked women of the noble classes have a great pride to bear only the children of our husbands, however so charming our lovers may be."

Darioch looked at her with surprise. "Truly, dear wife, I never doubted that. I know your honor would admit of nothing less than the most complete fidelity."

"I am glad," she said softly. "Sometimes when the evil fit is on me, I have grieved lest you think that ill of me. But your expression answers all my fears. I do not grow too heavy for you, eh?"

"No, heh, you are too light to please me, and your doctor."

She laughed, but in a moment looked up solemnly.

"O, Darioch. It would be best if you were to leave me and return to your place in society. What a mortal waste, ha!"

"I could not do that."

"I know how much you love Lisiani Chomney née Radann of Lucrecious Ironfields. You gave up her to attend to me, ha! She was Prime of Radann, where I was both in beauty and birth only Cadent of Lozani at Upper Fiankrish."

"Beauty varies with the beholder, and at a certain level, it is impossible to say that this one is superior to that."

"Still, she is as beautiful as a Jackman woman, and you know the Manjacks were Altered for beauty and sensuality by philosophonts during the Heights of Mankind. And she has some of the pride and self-centeredness of those creatures, surely. It grieves me that she has neither visited nor, as I think, written to you—eh?"

His expression was quite devoid of feeling. "Neither, heh."

"I had thought better of her—I would have had her do better by you."

Darioch smiled miserably and turned her about, to face Jollicot. The dull brown stone of the walls, the silver-gray hornstone roof, seemed to have grown from the ground, covered with flowering vines. Beyond it, the green hills ran down toward the mighty river Xanthides, a muddy-yellow glimpse.

"She is too ambitious to waste herself on a fool who throws himself away caring for a chronically ill wife," he said, with a clumsy attempt at lightness. "A true child of nobility."

"Her husband avers that you love her more than life itself."

"Heh. But not more than honor, which is my duty."

"Waste piled on waste," she said disapprovingly. "I feel all the more guilty, ha."

"As if you were purposefully indisposed, ha!"

Both smiling, he carried her past the cottage into the south yard.

Darioch was in the kitchen, compounding an unguent. He was no longer bemused to find himself in such a humble purlieu. Through the arched window in the thick stone wall he watched his wife, and when she dozed off, he summoned Ginchy from the wash and sent her to wheel Ziana into the shade.

Motion near his face caught his eye, like the gauzy wings of some tiny insect. It was a glowing spot of light, doing a little dance to attract his attention. A voice spoke from the air.

"Sophonid Zelander speaking, huh. The man-kin Purzan SonPurzan Basbesoch and Suskrish of Doon West Hall requests permission to intrude, huh."

"Permission granted, Sonny, ha! And you are how, and things at Manming, eh?"

To one side of the counter appeared the likeness of a man of early middle years, face prematurely lined and temples white, dressed in sober blue-gray trimmed with silver.

"As bad as ever, and the worse for your absence, heh," grunted this apparition.

Darioch knew vaguely that a part of the mind of Zelander shuttled between Manming and Jollicot sixteens of times each second, carrying the impalpable image of Purzan to him and his to Purzan, faithfully mocking every expression, gesture, tone of voice.

"Old 'Mattock' Shang has completed his agricultural report, eh?"

"Och, come, Darioch, you know I didn't request Zelander's time to engage in gossip. We want you, man, we need your cool head and steady hand." He stared at Darioch earnestly. "Relations with the Westerlands deteriorate weekly—almost daily. This dispute over the Veliana Vale—"

"So that has not changed."

"Man, I tell you that it has, ha! We may be at war within a month, two at the most. The attitude of Yurek Rutz—"

"These are serious, even tragic, tidings."

"Then, you will return to the Capital, eh?"

Darioch looked down at his wooden bowl, up again. He spoke as if words were wrenched out of him.

"I wish I could. But I can return how, eh? I can leave Ziana how, eh? Just walk out the door, eh?"

Purzan SonPurzan stared at him, opened and closed his mouth, and frowned.

"If I had even the smallest notion that my 'cool head and steady hand' would make any difference, you may be sure I would come, heh. But I have no connections in the Westerlands who would be of help in the crisis. Especially if both sides are as uncompromising as they were last year."

"But surely your duty to the Yellow Land must recall you."

Darioch hesitated. "I own that you tempt me, setting one duty against another. But as I cannot help, my duty to my wife—" pain harshened his voice "—who has no one but me, must take precedence."

Purzan stared at him for some moments. "I see it is true, what they said, that you cannot be persuaded." He sighed. "I never thought I would have occasion to bewail the over-particularity of your sense of duty," he said bitterly. "This may be the last time we speak, so let me go only with the assurance of the regard of everyone here at the Capital for you."

"Return to them my equal regards, and my regrets. Farewell, Purzan."

"Farewell, Darioch."

The apparition winked out, diminishing the light in the room.

Darioch mechanically turned the salve once more with the wooden spoon, then backed from the counter. He seated himself on a stool with his forearms on his knees, and sat thus for some minutes without moving, staring blankly.

Presently he was recalled to life by a weak cry from the yard, "Och, Ginchy, ha!"

The servant girl was too noisy with the wash to hear, and he called to her, "Ginchy, ha, your mistress calls."

He stood mechanically and reached for the wooden spoon to ladle the unguent into a stoneware jar. Motion beyond the window caught his eye. Ziana, not waiting for Ginchy, was struggling feebly out of the chair.

Hastily wiping his hands, he made for the door, hearing Ginchy's voice: "O my mistress, ha, you must not exert yourself!"

"Ginchy, p-please," Ziana said feebly. "I ache so...."

The girl put her arm round her lady's shoulder.

"Darioch, ha, I am s-sorry. My back aches, I could not sleep...."

"I have but just finished compounding a champion new balm of a recipe we have not yet tried," Darioch said, taking her arm. "I shall carry you within doors, eh?"

"P-please, no, heh, my back... Please let me walk, it is not far."

Dubiously he looked at Ginchy, who thrust her lower lip out but nodded. The girl kept her arm around her lady's shoulders as Ziana shuffled carefully into the cottage.

"I can sit, I have no sores in contact, so long as I lean forward," Ziana said, indicating a straight chair.

Darioch knew that she would become fatigued and even dizzy if she sat upright too long. "First, allow me to apply the balm," he said. "It is fresh now, and will do you good."

"Ginchy can apply it," Ziana said. The girl nodded.

"And none could do it better, heh. But if I may be so bold, I wish to do it myself. With your permission, of course, mea domina."

"Ach, I only sought to spare you pain of seeing my withered flesh. I have no longer any modesty left. And I know well enough not to come between yourself and that duty of yours," smiling to show the jest.

They eased her onto the couch as gently as possible.

"These are the chances of life," Ziana said, gasping with pain. "To this or something like it must we all come, soon or late."

Her chemise was of the sickroom sort, though of silk and of a fashionable cut; it was untied and disassembled in a matter of moments, without disturbing the patient where she lay face down. Cruel rashes redly pitted her back and hips, but the true ache was in the muscles. Darioch felt a pang at the sight of her spine, ribs, pelvis all but protruding through the remaining flesh, and tears blotted Ginchy's eyelashes.

Ziana sighed in relief as the analgesic took effect. Darioch rubbed gently until not only were all the sores medicated, but her back well massaged also.

"So much better, ha," she said drowsily. "Darioch, do not trouble yourself about the sorry defection of all my lovers. It would puzzle and exhaust me to have them about, and to be frank, I would prefer not to have them see me thus. I can blame them how, for not wishing to see me in my decline, eh?"

"They could have written," he said shortly. "I have no respect for them. And you, you hold Lisiani culpable as I do your feckless lovers. They are to be excused and she is not, eh?"

"Women are different, heh," she said serenely. "Where we love, we feel more deeply than most men. With me and my lovers, it was but a game. I had thought it was more than that between you two."

When he did not speak, she twisted about to look up at him. Darioch, silenced, managed to nod, with the face of a man attempting to contain his pain. Finished with the anointing, he gave her a light slap on her bottom below the rash.

"You must stay off your back as much as possible," he said in a tone almost natural. "I may suggest that we put you face down in your slope chair, with the back as far back as it will go, eh?"

Ziana looked around at him sleepily. "That might serve, heh, particularly as I am as sleepy as the girl who ate the porridge. I may continue amid the flowers, eh?"

"Heh, until the heat of the day becomes too intense. Ginchy, eh?"

The girl agreed, and Darioch carried his wife out again to the garden.

3

Darioch worked on the tansy tree while his wife slept in the shade of an arbor amid the flowers. The fine still heat of the day was broken at irregular intervals by rushes of wind that stirred the pinwheels on the edges of the yard into temporary motion, and doubled the elfin chiming of the bellflowers.

Darioch was grafting the switches Dr. Reevish had brought, when motion in the air caught his attention. Again it seemed an insect, but was not.

"Sophonid Yandle speaking, huh. The man-kin Tamroch Ankmo and Homniel at the Rampart requests permission to intrude, huh."

"Permission granted, huh. Tammi, so good to hear from you, ha!"

Tamroch's image appeared beside him, clad in the mode of forenoon fashion: knee-length blue chiton, golden sea-silk sash and hose, blue sandals with cross-gartered blue cords, and a dark cloak, of a shade that hovered fashionably between deep purple and black. On each shoulder, for contrast, was a crimson pomegranate—the efflorescence of last year's epaulets.

"Tammi, you take my breath, ha! Quite the young buck of the walk, ha! Your tailor is whom, eh?"

"Darry, ha, you idiot! But you could always make me smile. I hope that characterless brown smock does not represent the whole of your cottage wardrobe. When I think how well you once dressed, I despair of you."

"No, heh, I have another like this for each day of the week. So, tell me how you managed to wangle from the Patron some of Yandle's time for this little ghostly visit, ho. Your father is still nully on your footling ways, eh?"

Darioch finished tying off the current graft and turned to Tamroch, clapped his hands together in greeting—lightly, with a glance at Ziana sleeping nearby.

Tamroch followed the glance and clapped greeting even more lightly. "I was more or less commanded to call upon you, heh," he answered in lower tones, shaking his head sadly at Ziana. "Old 'Sonny' Purzan ghosted the Patron just now and was closeted for a long talk. Upshot: I'm to call on you and casually urge you to return to your duties in Government. It seems Yurek Rutz in the Westerlands is swashing his buckle very loudly over the Veliana Vale—threatening war in fact—and only you can save the Yellow Land." He gave a shrug and a whimsical smile.

"They pay you all to mention Yurek Rutz to me, eh?" Darioch asked ironically. "Sonny ghosted me this morning to 'casually urge' me himself."

"Not what I'd call a keen man-kin. And so he sics me on you when you refuse him direct."

Darioch sighed. "When your father asks, tell him what I told Sonny: if I thought I could sway the counsels of the nations, I would return to Manming forthwith. But there I can do nothing others cannot do, whereas here I can do that which no one else can. Here, then, my duty lies. Eh?"

"Heh. I shall so inform the Patron. You do know, SonPurzan is only a few years older than we, eh? Poor fellow, he must have been born old."

"Old and worried, yes. If it isn't one bat in his aviary, it's another. Hard to picture him enjoying such times as we had at old River Lodge, or even here at Jollicot."

"Ah, yes, I was just reflecting on the years that have passed since those halcyon days when I visited here as a boy," Tamroch said. "I had my first affair in that very shed, in fact. Your cousin Izeea, it was—some few years before her lawful tetury."

"Some few years before your sixteenth, too, it must have been. Look there at the Little River." Darioch pointed with the pruning knife. "Remember the time we tried to sail the canoe down to the Xanthides, eh?"

Tamroch laughed. "Yes, heh, and I well remember the rock we caught on, which doubtless saved our scampish lives for greater deeds of doubt. Remember what your old NanNan said when we came back wet, scraped, and bleeding, eh? The old cat is where, eh?"

"Retired, heh, in just such another cot as this, but in a village with much company and good neighbors. Krishman, I think." A shadow passed over his face. "I should visit her, I really should."

"Well, while you're thinking of visits, don't forget younger friends, ho. You're always welcome here, and for the matter of that, a visit to Manming, the salons, the theaters, the townhouses of your friends—there you can be of material assistance in whiling away the time, even if you're of no help to the Government."

"I hope, someday, I may be able to return. And who knows, maybe a visit would be possible. Someday."

"Bring your Lightfoot stud, and I'll have him cover my Scortillum; their get will sweep the races."

"Darioch," came Ziana's weak voice. "That is whom, eh?"

"Tammi, heh," Darioch called. "As she's awake, and you're not really here and can thus be discussed, step over with me."

"I just hope I don't walk into a wall. Yandle, ho, move my image while I walk in place."

They approached Ziana, Darioch with a normal stride, Tamroch with an absurd high-kneed walk that caused Ziana to laugh her breathy laugh.

They clapped and Tamroch bowed to her. Ziana turned on her side, with difficulty bringing her feet down to the ground. Darioch made haste to raise the back of the chair so that she was almost sitting, reclining on her side.

"A pleasure, good Tamroch. You should ghost us more often; it would do Darioch good to see you. That is very beautiful apparel; the latest style, I have no doubt. Well, and I suppose you are retailing old memories; you are childhood friends, as I recall."

"Yes, heh, as boys we occasionally camped here at Jollicot, when it wasn't wanted for housing servants," Tamroch said. "Nearly drowned in Little River, which saved us from drowning in Xanthides. Darry, remember when we took part in the aluminum-nut harvest across the road, and nearly broke our backs wheeling barrows of nuts to the wagons, eh?"

"Yes, heh, and how all the peasants laughed at us and clapped us on those aching backs."

"Ach, and our introduction into Society at my cousin Hurrish's wedding." To Ziana, Tamroch added, "The fools seated us together in the balcony, and neglected to search us for our blowpipes and peas."

They chatted a while longer, laughing immoderately, then Tamroch said, "Yandle informs me that the Patron wishes me to return to his domicile. Anon, the both of you, ha!"

"Aroint thee, wretch, ha!" Darioch said, still laughing.

"A good man, and good medicine. I hope he ghosts us again, and soon." Ziana yawned and stretched. "His jests and japes have exhausted me, but it is a good exhaustion. I am not at all sleepy. He came to visit, for why, eh?"

"At the order of his father, heh. He was to urge me to abandon you and return to my 'duties' in the Capital. Sonny Purzan put the Patron up to it. I forgot to mention—Sonny ghosted me earlier to urge me himself. When you stood up, it gave me such a turn I forgot to mention it."

She smiled apprehensively up. "And your decision—it is made, eh?"

"Let me wheel you into the grove. Here I may work while we speak. Yes, heh, I have decided not to abandon you. So far they have pointed to no duty higher than that to you."

"Not even to the Yellow Land, eh? This is flattery indeed, ha!" More seriously she said, "I should be sorry to hear that you cannot prevent the war that all expect, but I own that I am selfish enough to wish you here. I do at least hope the war will not come. I am so very bad, eh?"

He smiled, distressed. "No, heh, I think not. At least you desire me to stay—this morning you urged me to go." Looking wistfully into the distance, he mused, "I own that at times I yearn inexpressibly for that life, which now seems as remote as boyhood. Och, if you were but well again, ha!"

"Och, if I were but, ha," she echoed faintly, "for both our sakes."

4

Their meridional meal was but a light repast, as was their custom: she for lack of appetite, he also for lack of appetite. Afterward, Ziana was able to sit up, and even essayed to do a little fancywork on her current project.

"So that I do not feel utterly worthless," she said.

In the heat of the afternoon, she dozed within the cottage, whose thick stone walls retained some of the coolness of the night. Darioch busied himself about the tansy tree, and further about the utility orchard.

This grove ran to things like handmeals, fruit, salads, cheese, milk, bread, and the like, foods that could be eaten with no or little cooking. Darioch had chosen Jollicot for their exile for that reason, as he had determined to bring as few servants as possible. Of the three they had brought, only one remained.

While he busied himself, Ginchy approached with the familiarity of the privileged old servant. "Sir, she sleeps well."

"That is good. Too often she tosses and moans."

"The new unguent is a help." Ginchy paused. After a moment, tentatively, she said, "Those two men who visited you, sir—they came to persuade you to abandon mea domina, eh?"

"Yes, heh. That is, one of them did."

"You will go then, eh?"

"No, heh." Darioch leaned his head on his arm against a trunk and remained in that posture for a couple of tetrons of heartbeats.

Finally Ginchy cleared her throat. "So you have not made up your mind to leave us, eh?"

"No, heh, I have made up my mind not to leave you. But, O Ginchy, it is so hard to hold my mind to my resolution, ha! You withstand the strain of caring how, eh?"

"It may be, you should go back to Manming for a week, to re-create yourself. Do you good to get away from your worries, mea dominus."

Darioch raised a haggard face. "Do not think I have not thought of this. But I fear that away, I would find reasons, say rather excuses, for not returning."

"Once it would not have mattered to us. But this past winter has made us both rely upon you, mea dominus. If you did not return, belike she would pine away. She feels she has no one but you, sir."

"She has you, and you were her NaNa. That is much."

"It is no longer enough. She has found a husband."

Darioch stared at her, then sighed. "And I have found a wife."

When Ginchy had returned to the house to watch over the form of her lady, Darioch seated himself on an orchard bench and stared at nothing for some time, made shift to busy himself, and again sat and stared. In this latter occupation he again saw a dancing whirl in the air.

"Sophonid Zelander speaking, huh. The man-kin Masanvis Rioni and Havaride of Great Orchard, Primus Dominus of the Yellow Land, requests permission to intrude, huh."

"Permission granted, ha! Mea dominus," half-kneeling and rising.

The First Lord was an old and craggy man-kin with a neatly trimmed white beard, a mane of silvery hair down to his shoulders in the fashion of olden time, and the golden wand of his office. The small cap-of-maintenance of purple and gold velvet was not so much to do Darioch honor as to cover the bald top of his head, baldness being a rarity among the man-kin. An austere chiton in dark green with a gold belt covered him from shoulders to knees, and his skinny calves were wrapped about with cross-garterings in matching green.

But what one noticed was the dark predatory stare.

Masanvis grunted. "So it's true, what they say of you: you are indeed rusticating in some country cot. And won't return to the Capital and to your duty. I know, I have heard," raising his hand to forestall Darioch's answer. "Your duty to your wife. How about her duty to you, eh, a woman's duty not to come between a man and his duty to his country, eh? Eh, eh?"

"If you have heard so much—and I doubt not that you have had full reports this day— then you know my reasons. I am not wantonly rebelling. But I count for nothing amid the hordes you can command, and the small services I might do can be done by many another. I can do what, that Sonny Purzan cannot do, eh?"

"If I could command the aid of those others, I would command your aid. I can command no aid, and I do not have 'hordes' of aides and assistants. Purzan SonPurzan can do nothing that you should be doing, because he is already doing more than he can do, and still it is-n't enough, ha! Your place is here, young Darioch, not interfering with the care of a sick woman; your duty is here. You at least understand the gravity of the crisis. Most men merely shrug and continue their flirtations."

"If both governments had been doing that, there'd have been no crisis. Who in either land wants a war, eh, except some in government who will risk it rather than to seem weak?"

The First Lord stared half a glare at him, then barked an unamused laugh. "You're as radical as ever. You do know, or do you, that there's a man-kin in the Westerlands embassy who has notions similar to your own, eh? I'd hoped you'd meet with this Caragan Zhin, possibly find some kind of compromise to save all our soup. I cannot do it; if I exhibit weakness their position would harden at once." This time it was a glare. "But you..."

"Or Sonny, or Judian, or any of half a tetron of others either on your staff already, or within reach. And there are any number of great ladies who could be pressed into service to convey a message of peace. But none of them will avail if it is not peace you want, but regency over the Veliana Vale. You want me, because you think I can cozen them—especially if I truly believe the message you would have me deliver."

"If war comes, you will acquit yourself of blame how, eh, seeing you did nothing to prevent it?"

"The same as you, I suppose," Darioch said sturdily, "if you'll pardon my insolence. I notice you seem to have little fear of war. You do not really expect it yet; you think you are in control of events, like steering a stripey cat by pulling its whiskers while seated on its back. Events are as flexible as cats; it won't do, mea dominus."

Again the dark stare; another grunt. After a moment the proud head bent, the gaze directed to the litter of sticks and leaves on the ground.

"There is much in what you say, young Darioch," said Masanvis grudgingly. "I own I am not as sanguine as I perhaps sound; I do not sleep well o' nights, these nights. Sometimes I feel we want a fresh outlook, a new departure. And this Caragan Zhin..."

"He has what sauce in their councils, eh?"

"Less than you would have, I think, heh. But it is a start." And now the dark stare was, ever so faintly, pleading.

Darioch was trembling, but he spoke firmly, albeit with an occasional swallow. "There is something in what you say, mea dominus. But... you know my message. It is a general one; no burnt soup is worth going to war over. I would seek any honorable way out. I think you stick at the 'honorable' part, deeming any spilling of your soup a defeat not to be borne. How then is my dereliction of duty greater than yours, eh?"

The dark gaze was indisputably a glare.

"You are adamant then. I have wasted my time, and Zelander's. Good day to you, dominus."

"And to you—" But the First Lord's image rudely vanished partway into Darioch's farewell and kneel.

Darioch wandered into the cottage, poured himself pale wine, stood sipping it and staring out at the aluminum-nut bushes across the road.

5

Darioch walked aimlessly about the orchard with the expression of a somnambulist. At length there came again the fateful dancing in the air, and his expression became one of pained resignation.

Then it changed to one of hope and despair: the blue light before his eyes trailed silver sparks, and as they dripped, the notes of a wind chime tinkled randomly. These were the significations of Ifft the Weft, a tiny force-wefkin too weak to move a hair and needing to be fed daily by means of a force-fountain of magnets whirling within coils of wire: the property of—

"Lisiani, ha!" he exclaimed in a half-whisper; and in truth it was the well-loved tones of his former paramour which sounded:

"Darioch, mea dominus, it is you, eh?"

"Lisiani, ha! Yes, heh, it is I, Darioch. At last you ghost me."

"O my love, ha! I see you, ha! Come to me, come to me, oh please—I am on the edge of your yard—you do see me, eh, behind the thicket?"

Darioch started and looked, and saw a gleam of silver. "I do see you, heh—I come, I come, ha!"

He hurried across the yard to the bordering thicket of decorative trees and shrubs, forced his way among them, and in a moment stood before her who was the love of his life: Lisiani Chomney née Radann of Lucrecious Ironfields. She was a small woman, slender, with large dark violet eyes, wide now with apprehension. She wore a delicate silken chemise in silver, so thin it concealed little, and trimmed in violet to match her eyes. Her cloak was a glassy waterfall down her back, under the black waterfall of her hair. Beyond her an Aelopede, swiftest of the volaunts, stood lathered and breathing heavily though already beginning to crop the herbage.

Then she was in his arms, weeping.

"O my love, I should have come to you long before, but I did not dare. I feared you had put me aside for your duty to your wife, and I was so desolate. I dared not even send Ifft to you, lest you return a harsh answer. B-but I could not keep away from you longer, and I only hope you will f-forgive me for intruding on y-your retreat."

Darioch gripped her fiercely, his face a mask of anguish. "O Lisiani, could you think I could ever be harsh to you, ha! I have missed you so; the hardest part of my exile is the loss of you. And now you have come, to torment me with all I have renounced."

Their conversation became incoherent, neither waiting for the other, for a few moments. Then Lisiani backed and looked up at him.

"Ziana does how, eh? I was never her friend, but neither was I her enemy. I grieved for her as well as you when I heard the sad news."

"She does poorly, heh, and the doctor holds out little hope that she will soon, or ever, do much better."

"Alas for her and alas for you. I feel ashamed to think of my own sufferings when I consider yours." She hesitated, looking at him with a beseeching gaze. "O Darioch, ha! You do not love her as you love me, eh?"

"No, indeed, heh, Lisiani, I have never loved any as I love you; not even my early boyish loves grip me so strongly."

"And yet you left me, as it were, with but a backward glance, to come here with her."

"It was my duty, heh; I could not abandon her, eh?"

"No-o-o, heh, but need you have left all behind, eh? You could have kept her at your town house in Manming—you need not devote every moment of every day to her care. Even now, some servant watches her much of the time, eh?"

His head bent until he was looking unseeingly at the ground. After a pause, he said slowly, "Lisiani, I have thought all that you have said, many times, and I return always to my first conclusion. A stronger or better man than I might do so, but I am too weak. By insensible degrees, if I trusted her care to anyone else, I would find reasons to see her less and less, until I had abandoned her. It is my duty to stand by her; if she needs nothing, then it is still my duty to stand and wait until she does. For always she needs me—my care and attention, the care and attention of a person of her own rank, not the doubtfully boughten loyalty of servants. And from whom has she more right to expect that, than from her husband, eh?"

Now Lisiani hung her head. "I cannot gainsay it, heh. But, och, it is so hard, ha! You do know, I have taken no new lover after you, eh? I am quite laughed at for a fond fool, but this I do not regard. My mother scolded me for looking so wan and distraught at her Equinoctial party, but I scarcely heeded her."

"I hope your noble husband, Forizan Chomney and Quain of Lucrecious Ironfields, has been supportive."

"Oh, Forzy has been kind enough, though he professes not to understand me at all. He suggests a baby, if I will not have a lover, but after Ziana's experience, I shudder with fear at the thought. So," she breathed wistfully, "you have quite made up your mind never to return to—to me, till your wife be well, eh?"

"No one can say what the future's shape will be, heh. I long inexpressibly for you, for the easy happy life we once knew." He was silent for a moment. "But if the war comes, and it may well, we will probably never know that life again. Indeed I think we shall not; I think that I have merely been given an early draft of the drink of pain and sadness we all must swallow soon."

He bent, and buried his face in her hair. "But, och, how I have missed you, ha! How I shall miss you, all the days of my life, ha! Sometimes, when the evil fit is on me, I can hate her for all she has taken from me."

After Lisiani's departure, the rest of the day passed in an agony, as Darioch attempted to seem normal. Their evening repast was heavier than their meridional meal, and Ziana, rested perhaps by her afternoon nap, exerted herself to talk in the entertaining fashion he knew so well from before her illness. Darioch tried to respond in kind, but knew his abstraction must be observed.

Indeed, she said, "I fear these visitations today have put you out of countenance."

"Yes, heh, I am poor company for you, I fear. I am shaken—I have had to re-fight battles I fought with myself last autumn. I am again victorious in the fight," he added, smiling at her reassuringly, "but I own myself mazed."

"My prattle I hope does not distract you."

"Say rather it diverts me from my distress."

"Well, however the others may have affected you, for my sake I cannot help hoping we see Tamroch again soon; but I suppose it is not likely."

"No, heh, unless he visit in person. I think the Patron will keep him on as tight a leash as he can."

"A pity, but maybe he will indeed visit. Though if he does, I cannot hope he will favor us with anything so delicious as his morning costume, ha! That was a treat indeed. It took me back at once to happier days...."

After she had dined, Ziana lay face down with Ginchy's help on the commons room couch. Darioch read to her until he thought her asleep, then sat musing on the dusk through the window. At length he was startled by her voice, without any stir from the couch.

"Darioch, eh?" softly.

"Yes, heh, Ziana my dear."

"I have been lying here thinking, when I should have been sleeping. Even now I am not sleepy, though I own to tiredness. Still... you would carry me down to Little River, eh? To see the glowfish, eh? Often you spoke of watching the glowfish run the Little River when a boy. In my illness, perhaps I become childish."

"I had forgotten I told you of them. And yes, heh, it would be no great trouble to wheel you down the boathouse path. We shall go now, eh?"

Ginchy entered hastily, with a look of alarm, but Ziana reassured her.

"Mea dominus can carry my wasted frame well enough without help. I have been lying face down a good part of the day, so my sores are improved; and afterward Darioch can massage me again. You may as well go to bed."

Darioch wheeled her out of the cottage. It was a two-moon night, Second Moon rising glorious in the east, approaching the full, Sigil Moon already high in the sky, near the half. They poured silver light tinted with blue over the land, a great storm on Second Moon making of it a cloudy white swirl. Sigil Moon had clouds, but the seas and forests showed between them.

Shortly they reached the boathouse. Darioch lifted her from the chair and steadied her as she walked to a great rock above the pool that marked the head of "navigation" on Little River. The rock was under trees and bushes that here made a tunnel of darkness through which the river ran.

In the water, gleams of light shot upstream, flashing and fighting against the current. Greenish-white they were, and gold, with rare reds and blues. Here a gleam, there a multiple glow; a moment's quiescence, and then half a tetron of radiant forms raced up the stream, then yet more, and more. Once an effulgent fish, as long as Darioch's hand, burst from the water in a streak of cold flame.

"The sophonids tell us that these were created by the philosophonts of The Heights, by Altering the germ-plasm of common fishes," Darioch mused. "They once were far more decorative, with fringed fins and other gewgaws, but generations in the wild have deprived them of such useless fancies."

"A childish pleasure indeed," said Ziana, awe in her voice, kneeling on a cushion from the chair and peering into the black stream.

For some moments they watched the fish fighting their way upstream.

"That woman ghosted you today, eh?" Ziana asked softly, her face toward the light-shot water.

"Lisiani, you mean," he said, after a moment. "No, heh, she visited in person. Rode Wingfoot, her Flamboyant. Changed from travel attire to a most seductive creation before sending Ifft the Weft to me." His tone attempted lightness.

"She wants you to return to her, of course."

"Of course, heh, and of course I wish I could go. But she made no attempt to urge me, which I thought indicates some largeness of mind."

Ziana sighed, but her tense posture did not relax. "They will continue to come at you until they p-persuade you, I have no doubt."

"No doubt they will continue to try. So far at least I remain strong."

Still her face was turned away from him, fitfully revealed by the gleams from the water. "They will succeed, someday. You will go from me and leave me alone. I-I w-will have n-no one b-but G-G-Ginchy—"

"Ziana," he said, attempting to put his arm around her shoulder. She pulled away, weeping openly. "Ziana, ha, calm yourself, I have resolved never to leave you while you need me—"

"B-but you will go—you w-will l-leave—"

He succeeded in embracing her, and she turned frantically to him, flinging her weakened arms around his neck, crying—almost shrieking, "Don't leave me, och please don't leave me, Darioch, Darioch, och please—"

She clung to him in a passion of tears that soon exhausted her; the shudders that shook them were his own. Finally her passion subsided; her breathing steadied from the sobs, caught and came and caught again. She took a long shaky breath.

"I am sorry to have d-distressed you, Darioch," she said, trembling in his arms.

"I am sorry you were distressed."

"I m-must also b-beg your pardon for expressing doubts of you. O Darioch, you have been so good to me, and to be reproached for faithlessness as a reward, ha! I am so sorry— my illness makes me weak in more than one way—O Darioch—"

He squeezed her shoulders. "Shush, ho, you'll be weeping again, and already you are exhausted. I am not offended, I am only disturbed—O Ziana, my heart breaks to see you reduced to this, ha!" His cry rang with grief, tears trickled down his tense cheeks.

Presently he mastered himself. In the glow of moons' light reflected from the pond, her expression was calm, relieved, affectionate.

"O Darioch," she said softly. "I know you have never loved me as you love Lisiani, yet I know that you do love me in lesser fashion. With this I must be content, and I am."

"I suppose I must love you; who could not, eh? I know that I have always esteemed and admired you. I will not leave you."

"So say you now, but if higher duty calls, I myself will urge you to go. O Darioch, it is rarely all or nothing in human affairs; I may recover enough to accompany if not help you. Or more like, I will die and free you."

He opened his mouth to speak, but she put a finger over it.

"True it is, our life does not well fit us for death, or the contemplation of it. Come, my foolish fit is passed. And now I am quite exhausted; I fear I shall be asleep before you carry me up the hill." She turned her head, observed the fish still struggling lambently upstream. "See, the fish, wiser than we, get on with their little lives, and all our foolish passions they disregard."

"Dr. Reevish was quite right about your beauty and grace," Darioch said. "When you smile thus, you might be a lucent bottle, with the light glowing through."

"Och, if only the doctor could learn to flatter me in such wise, how much more enjoyable our game, ha." But her eyelids sagged as she spoke.

Darioch helped her to her feet, picked up the cushion, and lifted her. At the pool, he contemplated the wheeled chair and the hill. Dropping the cushion in the chair, he mounted the path.

Partway up he saw Ginchy, standing breathlessly next to a tree.

"Forgive me, mea dominus," she began in a whisper, but he hissed. More quietly still, she asked, "She does how, eh?"

"She sleeps, heh, she is merely exhausted."

"She shall sleep well tonight. I will fetch the chair."

At the top of the slope, as they entered the yard, the flood of moons' light poured full on Ziana's face. She opened her eyes, looked up at Darioch.

"I am such a burden to you," she said quietly. He looked at her, said, "No, my dear, bearing you makes me strong."

She looked at him wonderingly, then closed her eyes wearily and her head fell on his shoulder.

Darioch carried his wife into Jollicot, rubbed her back well, and disposed her in her bed, all without waking her. He turned off the air to the lucent bottle, and sitting on crossed legs, placed his palm on Ziana's cheek. In sleep and dimming light the ravages of the disease were erased, and she seemed but a girl.

Head bowed, touching her face, he sat by her while the light waned and sleep came at last to soothe and obliviate.

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Determined Spirits

Grey Rollins
| 8212 words

His mouth tasted strongly of wet dog fur and burned rubber. They'd said it would be bad when he woke, but he hadn't thought it would be this repulsive. He lay there, only half-awake, considering the taste in his mouth. One thing was certain, he'd be glad to brush his teeth.

No one had come for him yet so he kept his eyes closed, drifting between sleep and a muzzy awareness of his Hibernation Bay—his cocoon. It was soft and warm and quiet and he was close to weightless within it, as though drifting on a cloud. There was a gentle, almost subliminal susurration coming from above his head as filtered, recycled air entered the chamber, to exit below his feet. So far, it was dark... well, nearly so. Dim light from tell-tales made it through his eyelids. One must be blinking because the light kept flickering, bright—dim—bright—dim... in time with a thin, reedy beep.

Blinking?

Adrian Cunningham forced his eyes open, feeling the crust of sleep break free as he did so.

Nothing should be blinking. They'd drilled that into the colonists, knowing that they would need to follow simple protocols as they came out of suspended animation because their minds would be slow. Blinking meant something was wrong. Blinking was bad!

Adrian tried to breathe deeply, but only succeeded in starting a coughing fit. His diaphragm and lungs weren't accustomed to anything more than the most minimal movement. He needed to oxygenate his blood so his brain would work, but his body wouldn't cooperate.

Blinking lights and the onboard computer chose me to wake. That means Gandhi thinks it's a mechanical problem, elseways it would have woken someone else. But I was second—third?—on the roster. Why me? Why not Henri or... or whoever was second? Or was there a second? He couldn't remember.

He gingerly tried another deep breath, but his lungs burned and he coughed convulsively, straining against the straps that kept his body from drifting.

Coughing's just another way to breathe hard, Adrian thought, but the rationalization brought him no comfort.

All he could see lying on his back was the top of his cocoon—pleated rolls of beige fabric, twenty centimeters from his nose. With great effort, he unfastened the restraints and rolled onto his left side so he could face the terminal set into the side of the cocoon. There were thirty-six indicators in a six-by-six grid next to a small screen. Below it was a miniature keyboard.

Three of the indicators were flashing red, but his eyes refused to focus. He blinked, squeezed his eyes shut, then tried again without success. Slowly, painfully, for his arm muscles were stiff, he brought up his hand and pawed clumsily at his eyes, dislodging the gummy grit that had formed as he slept.

Squinting, he peered again at the lights. Not good. There was hard vacuum on the other side of the hatch to his cocoon. He twisted his neck, ignoring the creaking as his vertebrae protested, so he could peer out the palm-sized window above his head. All he saw was darkness, punctuated by colored dots from the external displays on other colonists' cocoons across the bay. There was power, but the main lights were not on. He tried to think of reasons why that might be, but failed to come up with anything that made sense.

He screwed his eyes shut again, then reached for the keyboard and began to slowly and carefully press buttons with numb fingertips. The screen came alive with red flashing icons and warnings not to attempt to exit his cocoon. He rubbed at the stubble on his chin with the back of his hand, grimacing. Not that his cocoon's hatch would open into vacuum, but the people who had designed the system wanted to make sure he understood why he couldn't get out.

He needed to get to the Main Operations Deck. Once on the MOD, he'd be able to investigate what had happened. Had there been air pressure, he'd just pop the hatch of his cocoon and climb out, then down the ladder that ran next to it. That was out of the question, so he began working his way through a series of menus on his screen, telling the ship's computer that he'd need an accessor with a hard suit. Once he'd requested that, he pulled the lines from the Eison intravenous port on his right forearm, removed the catheter and various other connections that were necessary for suspended animation, then spent the next few minutes practicing breathing.

There were two types of vacuum suits: A tight, form-fitting suit and a large hard-shell suit. Adrian would have preferred the smaller, more maneuverable one, but there was no way to get from his cocoon into the smaller one. He would have to seal the hatch of his cocoon against the access portal in the back of the hard suit and slither into it.

He knew he needed to think, but he was still thickheaded from hibernation. It was all he could do to keep from drifting off, no matter how many times he told himself that over three hundred lives depended on him being alert. Giving in to the residue of drugs in his system, and drifting away into comfortable, woolly sleep where he wouldn't have to worry about annoying things like life and death, was nearly irresistible.

He forced himself into a contorted position where he could look out the window at the top of his cocoon and over to the right. He was rewarded with a distorted view of the blinking yellow warning lights on the long central column of the accessor as it slowly approached. The accessor ran on a recessed track in the deck. When it drew even with his cocoon, it stopped and a thick, forked arm, one side of which gripped an egg-shaped vacuum suit, rose from deck level until it was even with the hatch to his cocoon.

The back of the suit carried a reinforced accordion tunnel capable of making an airtight seal with other surfaces. Once the tunnel was sealed to the outside of his cocoon, he directed it to pressurize using his keypad. He un-dogged his hatch manually and slid out into the suit. There was enough room, barely, for him to awkwardly twist around and close the hatch to his cocoon, and then the port in the back of the suit. Once that was done, he turned on the suit's headlights, retracted the tunnel, and detached from the accessor.

He saw that there were quite a few cocoons without power—or at least there were no lights showing on their displays. Adrian exhaled noisily. He hoped the other hibernation decks were in better shape than his.

The hibernation decks were long and narrow. Three sides were filled with two rows of fifteen cocoons; thirty per side, ninety per hibernation deck. There were four identical hibernation decks, for a total of 360 colonists. The fourth side held the track for the accessor, a ladder, and storage bays. The slow rotation of the ship made the fourth side "up," but the pull was gentle enough he had no trouble holding onto the ladder. His main problem was the numbness in his hands. He was afraid that he would lose his grip if he didn't concentrate. His feet were no problem; the boots of the hard suits had hooks on the toes to latch over the rungs.

Left hand. Grip. Right hand. Grip. Left foot. Hook. Right foot. Hook.

He climbed down the short ladder next to his cocoon, then carefully shifted over to the longer one on the fourth wall that would take him to the end of the hibernation deck. Over and over, he performed the same ritual. Keep it rhythmic. Keep it simple. Even if he lost his grip and fell, it was only three meters or so to the outside wall and the impact would be trivial. There were clear, protective plastic shields over the external controls for the cocoons so he wouldn't accidentally hit a button and cause a problem, but that didn't give him license to be careless, and he didn't like the idea of losing time.

If the hibernation deck lacked air pressure, it was possible that the MOD was also in vacuum even though all hatches had been sealed before departure. There weren't many vacuum suits, because the colonists aboard the Gandhi were not expected to need to work in space. The plan was for the majority of the colonists to use a Holmes Door to get to the surface of the planet Anish once the shuttles had landed and established a temporary base of operations. The vacuum suits were only intended to be used by a relatively small number of people for routine maintenance... or for emergencies.

The cylindrical central access silo had not lost power or pressure. He waited impatiently by a rack of empty vacuum suits while it de-pressurized, before undogging the hatch from the hibernation deck and squeezing the bulky hard suit through. Although it would have been faster in the short run to repressurize the access tube, make his way to the MOD, and work in a shirt sleeve environment, he anticipated going back out to investigate and make repairs. So rather than go through repeated pressurizations and depressurizations, he left it in vacuum and depressurized the MOD also. Once inside, he withdrew his arms from the suit's sleeves and used the keypad within his suit to bring up the Engineering station. Multiple screens awoke and began displaying status reports on the condition of the ship. He was relieved to see that only the galley and Hibernation Deck 3—his—were in vacuum. Still, that was a lot of air to lose. The loss of light on the hibernation deck was due to a tripped breaker, which he reset.

The ship's event log showed that pressure had dropped first in the galley, so he started there, beginning a tedious visual examination of the f loor, the bulkhead that comprised part of Gandhi's outer hull. It took over an hour, but he finally located a hole less than a millimeter in diameter, next to the leg of a stainless steel counter. By inserting a thin wire and probing until he located the hole in the outer hull, he was able to establish the trajectory of the particle that had punctured the ship. Using that to point the way, he was able to quickly find the corresponding hole in the inner bulkhead that the galley shared with Hibernation Deck 3. He marked it and returned to the hole in the hull. It took another hour, but he gathered the materials he needed and welded a small plate over the hole. Then he did the same with the interior hole. Adhesive patches would have been faster—mere seconds—but he wanted permanent repairs, not slap-dash fixes that would have to be redone later. As it was, it would take a trip outside to repair the hole in the outer hull, but this would do for the time being. Assuming that this was the only hole, the ship would hold air and he could shuck the suit until it was time to go extravehicular.

Adrian reentered the MOD and this time he pressurized it. After extricating himself from the hard suit, he gratefully collapsed into the seat at the Engineering station and initiated partial repressurization of the galley and hibernation deck. There was no need to waste air if there was another hole. While that was going on, he brought up reports on the colonists. From the path the micrometeor had taken, he assumed that at least one or two cocoons had been breached, but that didn't explain why so many cocoons were dark.

Only one colonist had died, but sixteen colonists were missing from Hibernation Deck 3. There were no indications that there was anyone in those cocoons, live, hibernating, or dead. Oddly, the cocoons were completely functional... they seemed to have been turned off.

Adrian leaned back in his seat, frowning. There were no spare cocoons. The Gandhi had been filled to capacity when it left Earth. So where were the colonists?

He leaned forward and began typing, bringing up reports on the other hibernation decks. What he saw stunned him. A total of seventy-three colonists were missing. He began a scan of the ship, looking for warmth, oxygen consumption... anything that would indicate that they were aboard the ship. He found nothing.

The pressurization had reached 10 percent of normal when he stopped it. He set the pressure monitors to alert him if the pressure fell below current levels in the galley and hibernation deck, and returned to the problem of the missing colonists.

Their cocoons were scattered here and there, with no pattern that he could see. All the cocoons passed self-tests. He tried looking at their specialties to see if the ship's computer had awoken certain people because their skills were needed. That appeared random, as well. It wasn't until he brought up a list of the missing colonists by name that it hit him. It was alphabetical. All the missing colonists had last names that began with A through C.

Dreading what he would find, Adrian next brought up the log for the accessors. Scrolling past his use of one earlier, he came upon an entry showing Accessor 2 at the garbage chute next to the galley. Prior to that it had removed Cully, Frank from Hibernation Bay 176, extracting his cot automatically.

Stunned, he sat back in his seat. The accessor had spaced Frank Cully. No, Gandhi had spaced Frank Cully. The accessor was nothing but a large, mobile robotic arm under the control of the ship's computer. And that computer had told the accessor to put Frank— alive, but sedated by the hibernation drugs—in the garbage chute, then ejected him into space without a suit. Working back through the accessor logs showed the same thing for each of the missing colonists. His face a mask of horror, he disabled all the accessors from his console. No more colonists would be ejected from the ship.

Seventy-three colonists dead—killed by Gandhi. A sudden chill hit him. What was to keep the ship from killing him, too? What if the ship's computer vented the air? He eyed the hard suit, estimating how long it would take for the air in the MOD to drop to dangerously low levels versus how long it would take to get into the suit if worse came to worst. In the end, he retrieved one of the smaller soft suits, placing the helmet by his side. He'd be able to don the helmet in seconds should pressure begin to drop.

The suggested test period was twenty-four hours. After six hours had passed with no measurable drop in pressure in the galley and hibernation deck, he initiated the revival process for another colonist, a computer specialist. He was going to need help determining why the ship's computer had committed murder.

There were—or had been—five computer specialists. Adrian selected Robert Blanton, one of a small number of colonists who had somehow been spared as the computer swept through the colonists whose last names had begun with B. He assumed that each of the five probably had some sort of specialty, but he had no way of guessing which might be needed beforehand and it was likely that Blanton might take a personal interest in figuring out why he had not been cast into space. A near brush with death should provide powerful motivation.

Given that bringing a colonist out of suspended animation took nearly four hours, Adrian was sorely tempted to get some rest, but he was afraid that the ship would find some other way to kill him besides venting the air from the MOD and gave up on the idea of sleep. He tried looking at the computer code that governed the operation of the accessors, but realized he was in over his head when he found himself tracing the same subroutine four times in a row. He understood the concept of recursion, but had never been able to keep it all straight in his head.

He wasn't hungry, but he finally forced himself to eat a small meal. If he couldn't sleep, he should at least eat to keep his strength up. As he ate, he looked over the names of the dead, trying to remember something about each person. They had met while training, and although he couldn't say that he was actually close to anyone, he had certainly liked some of them. It seemed unreal that they were dead. How could a ship turn rogue and kill its crew? How could a ship named Gandhi participate in such a violent action? It was hideous.

All he could think was that there was a bug in the code, somewhere. How such a serious flaw had escaped the intense scrutiny of hundreds of people before leaving Earth was beyond him.

For the first time since awaking, it occurred to him to wonder how far from Earth they were. He queried the computer, which responded instantly with a diagram of the Solar System and an overlaid lavender line ending with a small triangular, yellow icon showing the ship's current location. They were just rounding the far side of Jupiter.

It made as little sense as anything else he had seen since opening his eyes. They weren't supposed to be anywhere near Jupiter at any point during their journey. He asked the computer to project the Gandhi's future course and stared at the pink extension to the lavender line with his mouth open.

We're going back to Earth? He knew his mind was slow due to an unavoidable hangover from the hibernation drugs, but this would surely make anyone doubt their sanity.

Earth had been receiving telemetry from Gandhi, so they must be aware that the ship was not following its intended trajectory. They would have attempted to contact the ship to ascertain why. And sure enough, once he accessed the log of incoming radio traffic, there were reams upon reams of recorded incoming messages, both to the ship's computer and attempts to contact any colonists who might have been revived. Not one of which had been replied to. He could understand no human responses going out, because as far as he knew he was the first colonist to be awoken since departure, but why was the ship not responding?

That was simple enough. Gandhi's computer had been instructed to ignore incoming radio traffic. He pondered this for a full minute before tagging the icon to restore communication. He watched as the ship began flagging the automated messages as acknowledged and responded to. Given the distance between their current position and Earth, it would be over thirty minutes before Earth received the first responses. Adrian recorded a brief report and sent it along with a request for instructions as to how to proceed.

He spent the next hour scanning news from Earth that had been archived since departure. In the nine months since they left Earth, diplomatic relations between India and China had deteriorated, Exxon-BP had begun drilling an oil well less than fifty kilo-meters from the geographic North Pole, the American Nationalist Party had won suff icient seats that they—in coalition with the Republicans—now had control of the Senate, and the city of Miami had been officially declared a Drowned City, eligible for Federal relocation funds—negotiations with Georgia and Alabama were underway to determine a site for relocation; Louisiana was protesting that they were not being considered. Nothing he saw struck him as being particularly shocking. China and India had been tense for years, the petroleum industry had been salivating over Arctic oil for decades, and Miami had long known that the Atlantic Ocean would rise far enough that they would have to either leave or become the Venice of the New World.

Adrian checked on the status of Blanton's revival. Less than ten minutes to go. Adrian tucked his helmet under his arm and made his way to Hibernation Deck 2.

The readouts outside the cocoon indicated that Blanton was awake by the time he got there, but when he looked through the window he saw no movement. Remembering how he had been content to drift when he first woke up, he rapped a knuckle on the window. The plastic was thick and his knocking didn't make much noise, but it was enough to get Blanton's attention. He twisted his head and looked at Adrian. He frowned, clearly confused.

It took a while to get Blanton out of his cocoon and up to the MOD, complaining all the way of how sleepy he was and how sore his muscles were. Once there he collapsed into the nearest seat and laid his head back. "Man, I sure didn't expect to see you."

Adrian shrugged. "I didn't expect to be waking you, but there's a problem with the computer. I know a bit about coding, but I'm no expert, so... here we are."

"And there's a leak in the ship?" Blanton said, rubbing his face with his hands.

"I took care of that. Well, we're two-thirds patched—I welded plates to the inside of the galley and the interior bulkhead. I still need to go out and patch the exterior hole."

"And then you found out that people were missing?"

"I noticed a lot of deactivated cocoons so I knew something was wrong, but I wasn't sure what."

"So you think the ship woke you up to fix the puncture, right? You just happened... it was a coincidence that you happened to catch onto the missing people thing, right?"

"As far as I can tell, it was just a matter of timing. Who knows what would have happened if we hadn't lost pressure. The ship might have thrown everybody out," Adrian said.

Blanton muttered something under his breath, shaking his head. "I reckon the computer went into safety mode when we got holed. It would have dropped everything it was doing and woken you up because the first name on its call list was... uh... unavailable. It's awaiting human intervention before it resumes normal operation. All the essential stuff like life support still goes on, kinda like the way your brain keeps your heart beating no matter what else is happening, but all the higher programming functions would have been put on hold."

"That's what I thought, too. I haven't cleared the error yet because we're not done with the pressure test and I still need to do the outside patch." Adrian gave a wry chuckle. "The ironic part being that I doubt we would have been holed if we hadn't headed for Jupiter. There're little bits and pieces of junk everywhere in space, but they're so widely scattered—even in the asteroid belt— that it's almost impossible to hit something. But going through the belt increased the odds enough to where our number came up. Under the circumstances, I guess it was lucky we got hit so I could find out we had this other problem."

Blanton grunted. "Well, I guess there's nothing for it but to get moving."

Adrian nodded at the computer screen nearest Blanton. "Any idea as to how long it will take for you to identify the problem with the code?"

"Never ask how long it will take to debug a program—it only annoys the programmer. Some things you can find in five minutes. Some things take hours, weeks, months... who knows?"

"There's one thing I was wondering—does the computer have any sort of subroutine that might have been triggered once the accessor began throwing people out? What I mean is, would it have recognized that there was a problem and altered course to return to Earth? If so that would explain why we're headed back home."

Blanton blinked. "Uh, no. That's the sort of decision that would need to be made by a human. The computer's not that autonomous. Nice try, though. Why don't you start preparing for your EVA while I take a look at this code?"

Since he'd already gathered the majority of the things he'd need when he'd made repairs in the galley earlier, it didn't take long to get ready. Adrian chose the hard suit for the trip outside. It was tougher and could carry more air, which he was careful to recharge, even though he didn't intend to be in vacuum anywhere near the limit of the suit's air capacity. After working through the extensive EVA checklist with Blanton, he entered the air lock with his tool carrier.

"Okay, I'm ready when you are," Adrian said.

"Roger that. I'll initiate the air evacuation from here," Blanton responded.

The sound of the air-recycler started strongly, but faded as the air left the air lock chamber, leaving only a bass thrumming coming through the soles of his boots. When the hatch opened Adrian found himself looking at the dark side of Jupiter. The bulk of the planet was blocking the Sun and occulting a large part of the sky—swallowing stars by the score.

"Whoa! Looks like there's lightning down there," Adrian said.

"Don't forget what you're out there for. I show you as clear for EVA," Blanton responded.

"Roger. I'm on my way."

There were no problems finding the hole or welding the patch to the skin of the ship. In a little over an hour, he was on his way back to the hatch. "Looks like that storm is still going on. If anything, it's stronger."

"I can confirm electrical activity. I show some radio disturbance, but it shouldn't affect us."

Adrian reached the hatch. "Okay, I'm back at the hatch. Initiate lock cycle... I'm ready to take a shower and get some sleep."

"I can't do that," Blanton said.

"What's wrong? I've got the hull patched and there's nothing else on the list for the EVA. What's the holdup?"

Blanton said, "The holdup is that you've done what you needed to do. We don't need you any more. So, now you go the way of your buddies."

Adrian tried the external controls for the hatch without result. He checked the display within his hard suit, then made an adjustment. "What are you talking about, Blanton?"

Blanton laughed harshly. "Well, isn't this rich? Either you truly don't know, in which case you're a pawn, or you do know and you're playing coy."

"Okay, fine, have it your way. I'm a pawn. A pawn in what?"

"The United Nations...?" Blanton said teasingly.

"What about the United Nations? They're funding the Anish colony. So?"

"Exactly. They put up the money. They got control," Blanton said.

"And this is a surprise? The United States couldn't afford the colony by itself. So what are you getting at?"

"For years, the UN has been trying to push through a new world order. Now they're trying to take their political agenda off world. We're going to stop them. Anish will be a patriotic colony. Our patriotic colony. The Chinese can take a flying leap if they think they're going to get away with making it some sort of communist outpost!"

Adrian sucked his teeth. "Okay, so... let's see... if I remember from training, you're from Alabama, right? Let me guess... you're a member of the American Nationalist Party."

"God, you're slow," Blanton sneered.

"And the seventy-three colonists... that was no accident. You murdered them."

"It took a lot of planning and a lot of political pull—not to mention a few bribes—to seed the colonist candidate list with so many of us. Then we had to weed out the undesirables—only, along came your micrometeorite and you found out."

Adrian bit his lip. "I don't understand. If you're trying to start some sort of Little America on Anish, then why is Gandhi going back to Earth?"

Blanton snorted. "This is why people like you aren't going along—aside from the fact that you're an America-hater—you're so damned stupid! We're going back to Earth to pick up colonists to fill the empty cocoons, you idiot!"

"So... what?... you'll match up with another ship coming up from Earth, transfer replacements over, and sail away? Why not put the people you killed on the other ship and send them back to Earth? Why murder so many people?"

"One, there are three ships. There's not one big enough to carry that many people and if we built one it would raise too many questions. Two, the ships are going to lift from Luna, not Earth. Three, why would anyone with the IQ of a house cat send the UN's little pets back to Earth? We're better off without them."

"You don't think that other nations will have something to say about this? You're killing, not only Americans, but citizens of other nations."

"Oh, they'll piece together the evidence. Then they'll wonder. But they'll never really know and so they will ultimately do nothing, because they're weak and indecisive."

At that moment a small ball of fire dawned over the rim of Jupiter's disk.

Adrian turned his attention to the console in his suit for a moment.

"Hey, Blanton, guess what? From where I am, the Sun just rose. That means the recording I just relayed from my suit to the ship's radio has been squirted to Earth, which is just a little to the left of the Sun. In a little over half an hour, the signal will be received and I imagine that there will be quite a few people, from any number of nations, who will find your comments very interesting, indeed. Now, if you don't mind, I'm coming back inside."

Bravado, pure and simple, but if I can get him agitated enough, he won't be thinking logically.

He heard an angry growl over his suit's radio. "All right, you had the ship's radio slaved to yours—I'll grant you that—but you don't any more. And you know what? I'm resetting the interrupt on the ship's computer. That means you'd better stay clear of the garbage chute... in about two minutes there's going to be a big ol' package popping out on its way to Jupiter, and I don't want you to go along for the ride. I want that suit you're wearing back."

Adrian tried the hatch controls again, without result. "Do you think that Earth will let you get away with this?"

"What? You think the Solar Police will stop us? The Lunar Patrol? The Baker Street Irregulars? Once the Holmes Door came on-line, nearly all the ships were scrapped. There's no one to come chasing after us, even if they wanted to."

Adrian had to chuckle. "I plotted the Gandhi's course back to Earth and although I didn't look to see how long it will take, I'm willing to bet cash on the barrel head that there will be plenty of time to build some small, light ships from scratch. The Gandhi will have a welcoming committee, you can bet—"

"This ship is no longer the Gandhi— it's the Freedom, " Blanton said. "Wait... where are you going?"

Adrian chuckled. "I thought I'd take a walk. It's a nice day. Sunny... clear skies... Jupiter hanging huge over my shoulder. What else could a man ask for?"

"Come back here!"

Adrian snorted. "I don't take orders from conspiracy theory nuts."

"I'm not a conspiracy theory nut!"

"Sure you are," Adrian said, making his way past the base of the main communications antenna. "People have been pushing that UN takeover thing for years. Ever notice that it never seems to happen?"

"That's because patriots—good men and women—are vigilant. If we weren't, they'd have taken over years ago."

"Oh, I see... well, I, myself, have kept Luna from crashing down and destroying the Earth."

" What? Luna isn't going to destroy Earth!"

"Of course it is. But due to my valiant efforts, the Earth and all its people remain safe."

"What are you talking about? You haven't done a thing!"

Adrian chuckled. "Indeed. So I can take credit for Luna not going anywhere in exactly the same way that zealots like you can claim that you've stopped the UN from doing something dastardly. Both claims are equally valid. As long as you're using something that didn't happen as your 'proof' you can claim any damned thing you want."

"I see you. You're behind the antenna."

"You're so smart, " Adrian cooed. "I'll bet you're using camera 34." He waved jauntily towards an instrument cluster protruding from the hull about six meters aft. "Hi!"

"I don't know what you think you're up to, but I've got control of the antenna."

"Not any more. See this hatch? Behind it are the control boards and main transmitter banks. I've jacked into the signal buss and I'm retransmitting the recording I made of our little chat, after which we go live. I wouldn't want the folks on Earth to miss your paranoid raving."

"I'll cut the power."

"If you say pretty please, I'll even tell you how to do it so it counts, but by then I will have bypassed the power coupling and tapped into the main power buss. At which point your only option will be to power down the entire ship, which will take out the computer as well, not to mention life support. I suggest you think it through carefully before you take that step."

"I'm going to kill you!" Blanton shouted.

Shrugging in a hard suit produced no result that showed. "Come on out here and we'll talk about that."

There was no answer to that. At that moment, Adrian caught movement out of the corner of his eye. He turned in time to see a body ejected from the ship. He tried to force his eyes away, but they betrayed him, watching the body slowly spin, arms drifting wide. He took a deep breath, trying to block the revulsion that rose within him.

I can't stop Blanton from out here. I've got to get inside the ship. But how?

He took inventory of the tools available to him. In principle, he could use his weldingrig to cut a hole in the hull, but access to the main part of the ship would mean cutting into a pressurized area. Not a good option. He needed something more controlled.

The problem is that someone inside is actively trying to keep me out. There's no protocol for that. Adrian found his attention drifting—he shook his head, trying to clear it. People are losing their lives, and I'm woolgathering. I've got to focus.

"Hey, Blanton!" Adrian called. "Riddle me something. Why is it that the United States are good, but the United Nations are bad, eh? It's unity and diversity that make us strong, you know."

There was a long silence, or maybe it only seemed that way, but Blanton finally came back. "Does the word communism not exist in your pathetic little world or is it just that you think it's such a wonderful idea? How about socialism? Why would anyone with an ounce of sense want to be part of that?"

Adrian planted his magnetic boots firmly against the hull and began removing retaining bolts from a small plate in the hull. "Oh, I don't know... maybe so you could get them to pay for your little project. If you're too proud to associate with people who live under different political systems, maybe you shouldn't steal their money."

"You hate America!"

"Now there's a brilliant comeback. Go look up the term non sequitur. You're supposed to come back with something carefully reasoned, not a catchphrase that has nothing whatsoever to do with what I said."

Wrong plate. I've got to keep him distracted while I get this figured out.

He put the first plate back, then removed the one next to it, then reached inside and detached a cable.

"How's your air? Running out yet?" Blanton demanded.

Adrian shrugged, though Blanton couldn't see it. "Doing fine on air. How's camera 34?"

Blanton growled. "Dead. You're up to something."

"Can't slip anything past you, can I? What's that I smell? A conspiracy? Quick! Call out the Solar Police!"

"I told you, there's no such thing as the Solar Police!"

Adrian chuckled as he clomped four plates aft, counting as he went. "Verily, and conspiracy nuts have no sense of humor."

"I should have killed you when I had the chance."

He knelt and began unbolting the panel at his feet. "Ah, but you didn't. Why? Because, although you would rather breathe vacuum than admit it, you need me."

"I don't need you."

"Okay, you get to fix the next hole in the hull." He used a cable with a magnet on each end to secure the plate to the hull. It slowly drifted to the full extent of the cable as the ship's rotation took hold. Adrian bent into the hole and began to detach an electronics module. This, too, he attached to the ship with a cable and let drift free.

"There are other maintenance guys, you know. Freedom just hadn't jettisoned you yet, so you got picked. That Henri Borte guy was already well on his way to hell by the time the ship woke you up."

"So the people Gandhi—"

"Freedom!"

"Gandhi I said and Gandhi I meant—Adrian is faithful, one-hundred percent. So the ones not tossed are your co-conspirators, I take it? That means there's a list somewhere, otherwise the computer would eject everyone."

"I'm not saying anything more," Blanton said sulkily.

The telltale in Adrian's suit went dark. Blanton had switched off.

Oops... overdid it. So much for keeping him preoccupied.

Adrian bent into the cavity left after the removal of the electronics module and pulled another almost as large. Then another. It was awkward due to the inf lexible hard suit's shell, but he managed.

Okay, maybe I should have worn one of the small suits. This is going to be rough.

He had exposed a smooth metal surface over a meter under the skin of the outer hull. He began unbolting that plate as well. Once it was loose, he turned it diagonally and carefully slid it into the ship through the opening he had created. Then, with infinite care, he began threading the hard suit through the opening in the outer hull, through the gap in the electronics bay, and into the inner hole he'd opened.

As tight as that was, it got more cramped still when he entered the rectangular tube leading toward the aft end of Hibernation Deck 1. The chute was designed to take hibernating colonists from the shuttles to Hibernation Deck 1 when they were boarding the ship. It could withstand pressurization, but was not currently under pressure.

And there's the rub. How to get from vacuum on this side of the bulkhead into pressure in Hibernation Deck 1... without a pressure lock, and without access to the controls.

He slid aft down the chute so he could get to the metal plate he had slid into the chute, then glued it into place with sealant intended to repair small air leaks. He used up two entire tubes of sealant and most of a third before he was satisfied that he had an improvised gasket that would hold air. It would have been better if he could have replaced the plate where it had been—where it would seal against proper gaskets—but that would require access to the outside of the panel to tighten the bolts and he needed to be on the inside.

Not optimal. Not recommended. Not a good plan. But I'm short on options and time is running out. I only need it to hold temporarily, though.

Adrian then made his way to the forward end of the chute. Here he had a proper port, a sliding hatch, but it was not designed to be used as an airlock. An interlock would prevent it opening if there was vacuum on the outside... his side.

It was difficult in the tightly confined space, but he worked a drill past the widest part of the egg-shaped hard shell and above his head. He only had a single ten millimeter drill bit with him, but there was no help for that. He selected a spot on the bulkhead and began to drill.

A small magnet attracted most of the metal thrown loose as he drilled, but some escaped, falling gently toward the outside of the ship. He couldn't remember how thick the metal of the bulkhead was—all he could do was drill and hope not to break the bit.

The first indication that he was getting through to the inside was when the metal chips began to blow past him instead of falling. He could hear tiny ticking sounds as they rattled against the arm of his suit. Suddenly, the bit broke through and air began blasting through the finger-sized hole. He couldn't hear anything yet, but that would soon change.

While the pressure was equalizing on both sides of the hatch, he unscrewed the access panel to the controls for the hatch, cut a wire, and stripped the end. He then cut away insulation on another wire to expose the metal underneath.

This is where it gets dicey. The air pressure in the hibernation deck will fall as it pressurizes the chute. Eventually it will trigger a pressure alarm in the MOD. The question is, how long will it take Blanton to react?

When the air pressure in the tunnel got to the point where he could hear the roar of the air rushing through the hole through the walls of his suit, he touched the two wires. Nothing. He waited another few moments and tried again. Still nothing.

The pressure differential interlock is still engaged. If Blanton gets here while I'm still in this tunnel, I'm in trouble.

Finally, he touched the wires and saw a small spark. The hatch slid open, allowing in a strong gust of air as the pressure finished equalizing. Adrian reached up, grasped the edges of the hatch, and heaved himself through into the hibernation deck. At once, he began falling toward the outside wall, but the fall was slow and he reached out with his gloved hands to break the slow motion impact.

He reached up and hit the button to close the hatch. He thought he could hear a faint whistle from back down the tunnel. His improvised gasket must be leaking. He slapped a temporary patch against the hole he'd drilled in the bulkhead.

He desperately wanted to take off the hard suit, but was afraid that Blanton might vent the air. On the other hand, he wouldn't be able to move quickly if he was in the suit, and he was under no illusions that Blanton would surrender meekly. He began shucking the suit.

It was as he was backing out of the access port in the back of the suit that the hammer fell. Literally.

His head and shoulders were still in the suit when the blow struck him just above the hip. Excruciating pain shot through his lower body. He convulsively kicked his knees forward, pushing against the suit. His upper body scraped through the port as he f lew backward, away from the suit. Blanton's hammer grazed the top of his head as he swung again.

Blanton was between him and all the potential weapons—his tools—on his suit. He dodged as Blanton swung a third time, but that set off a nova of pain in his right hip. He twisted, wincing, realizing even as he did so that he was vulnerable, but the pain was unbearable.

Blanton, however, had miscalculated. His wild swing possessed sufficient momentum that the follow-through took him through a complete somersault in the near weightless conditions, ending with his head striking the aft bulkhead.

Without thinking, Adrian slapped the button to open the hatch to the chute, then locked his feet into the ladder and shoved Blanton headfirst into the opening. Blanton, stunned by the blow to his head and lacking any purchase, fought, but was unable to do more than rake his fingernails across Adrian's face. As soon as Blanton's feet cleared the hatch, Adrian hit the button to close it.

Blanton's voice was muff led as it came through the metal of the hatch. "Let me out of here!"

Adrian straightened painfully, holding his lower back. "What, so you can have another go at me with your hammer? I don't think so."

"There's an air leak in here. I'll die. Let me out!"

An ironic smile spread across Adrian's face. "Call it poetic justice. You used vacuum to kill more than seventy people."

"At least give me a suit! Please! It's dark in here. I can't even see."

Adrian checked the pressure indicator next to the hatch. There wasn't enough pressure differential yet to cause the interlock to seal the hatch. If he allowed Blanton any light, he might be able to puzzle out the wiring and force the hatch to open the same way he had. "What... and let you and your little hammer loose?"

"I don't have the hammer. I lost it. I won't hit you with it. I'm—"

"No dice. You conspiracy theory nuts are too dangerous."

"You don't have the guts to kill me!" Blanton shouted.

"You might be surprised what I'm capable of," Adrian replied, watching the air pressure readout fall slowly and wondering how Mahatma Gandhi would have handled the situation.

"I'm told you had some internal damage," said Michel D'Anjou, the French liaison from the United Nations. "How are you feeling?"

Adrian seesawed a hand. "Chipped pelvis, bruised kidney, and one hell of a massive contusion on my lower back. It hurt pretty badly, but I pulled a Belgian doctor out of hibernation and she got me through the worst of it. Then we went back into hibernation for the return to Earth. The problem is that you don't heal while you're in suspended animation— cellular regeneration stops just like the rest of your body. So now that I'm back on Earth I've got to deal with the pain, but they tell me that I'm going to be just fine."

D'Anjou shook his head. "As you know, we found the file of those the fanatics wanted to save in Gandhi's computer and commenced a criminal investigation while you were on the return leg of your journey. That is now complete. Many arrests have been made. We have their ships and have identified and frozen the bank accounts that financed their activities. I wish I could say that the threat has been permanently nullified, but people like this..." He shrugged expressively.

Adrian made a face. "I saw that the American Nationalist Party gained another couple of seats, I'm under no illusions that they're going away. That sort of paranoid us-againstthem mindset appeals to a lot of people. They're angry and afraid... but of the wrong things."

"And not just in your United States, sad to say. We've got them, too. They listen to demagogues who stoke their fears and hatred and, well, we've seen the result. I wish I could say that I saw some hope that people would cease being so emotional, so angry, but I don't see that it will happen anytime soon."

"What about the mission? How soon will Gandhi be heading back out?" Adrian asked.

D'Anjou took a deep breath. "Well, there you've touched a nerve. Or, to be more precise, your American Nationalist Party touched a nerve. You see, the ANP now has sufficient political power to block American funding to the United Nations—which they still claim is attempting some sort of takeover. Other nations, including, sadly, my own, look at that and choose not to advance funds either, given the demonstrated security breach on this flight. Everyone is afraid that the same thing could happen again—some extremist group might attempt to take over the next mission."

"But the ship's already built," Adrian pointed out. "Surely it wouldn't be that expensive to refurbish the Gandhi and start again."

D'Anjou said, "I'm told that the ship will be mothballed and put in orbit around Luna. Perhaps the day will come when nations can again trust one another and we will try again. For now, however, the ANP extremists have created a self-fulfilling prophecy. Their hatred and mistrust of the United Nations has led to a situation where the United Nations—more accurately its member nations—no longer feel they can trust the United States. Can you blame us?"

"But surely with comprehensive security checks—" Adrian began.

"We had those this time," D'Anjou said gently. "It wasn't enough. There are political counterparts to your ANP in China, Russia, and elsewhere. Their passions are now inflamed by what they see as an attempted American takeover of the Gandhi's mission, and—"

"But it wasn't an American takeover attempt! It was the ANP. Those idiots don't represent all Americans."

"I should hope not, but the point remains that—even as a minority—they were powerful enough to subvert the Gandhi's mission. And, as you have already noted, they are gaining, not losing political power."

"So Gandhi isn't going back out?"

"I'm sorry. No. The mission cannot be allowed to proceed with things in their present condition."

"But if not now, when?"

"When people everywhere step back from this madness. I'm afraid it won't be soon. But when the day comes, we'll already have the Gandhi. A little dusting, perhaps a fresh coat of paint, and we'll be ready to go. Anish will still be there. It's heartbreaking now, but we must be patient. The colony will be too far from home for us to help if the colonists begin killing one another once they are there. It would be very easy for the colony to fail. And then how long would it be before anyone tried again?"

Adrian had to admit that there was little future in a collapsed colony, but...

"You spoke of extremists. What if a band of extremists seizes the Gandhi and—"

D' Anjou shrugged equably. "Then they would surely attract the attention of those who are charged with the security of the ship." He sat back in his seat. "So what are you going to do with yourself now that you are not going to Anish?"

"I don't have any plans. I didn't expect to be back on Earth."

But you can be sure that I don't intend to stay here.

He thought back to the quote by Gandhi above the main entrance to the building where they had trained for the mission: "A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history."

I've got the list of colonists and if Blanton and his ilk could stage a heist once, perhaps it can be done again... by the original crew.

When any calamity has been suffered, the first thing to remember is how much has been escaped.

—Samuel Johnson

Mousunderstanding

Carl Frederick
| 5123 words

Illustrated by Joshua Meehan

"What's the big hurry?" said Roger.

Duncan, his boss, gestured him impatiently into the pilot's seat of the agency ship. "Get in! We've got to get to Madhya Loka fast, before any other trade delegation discovers it."

"Discovers what? " Roger threw his overnight bag behind the seat and climbed in. "And where's this Mad... whatsit?"

"Madhya Loka." Duncan withdrew a small framed picture from his jacket pocket and tossed it to Roger.

Roger bobbled it and stared at the picture: a bearded patriarch in deep meditation. "Weird. Where did it come from?"

"The Madhya Loka authorities sent a crate of possible exports"—Duncan strapped himself in and called up the preflight check list to his copilot monitor—"along with a request in broken Angloterran for a Terran trade delegation." He keyed in the Indeterminacy Coordinates of the planet.

Roger looked harder at the little painting. "And this is worth sending out a trade delegation?"

"The frame."

"Ostentatious gold plating," said Roger, hefting the picture. "A heavy base metal you could slug someone with."

"The assay report came in yesterday. It's pure gold."

"What? Can't be." Roger peered down at the object with newfound respect. "This would be worth a small fortune."

"To us, it would, but perhaps not to them." Duncan gave a bark of a laugh. "So, yes. It's worth sending a trade delegation."

"You could have told me this before," said Roger. "After all, I am the Cultural Liaison Officer."

"Junior Cultural Liaison Officer."

Roger, initiating engine tests, pursed his lips. He knew Duncan had little use for cultural liaison officers and wouldn't have one along if it weren't required by statute. "All right." He looked up from his console. "Would you mind telling your junior Cultural Liaison Officer about this Madhya Loka?"

Duncan pulled up a document to his monitor. "Madhya Loka is one of four populated planets in their stellar system, all colonized by Terrans."

"Ah," said Roger. "That should make the culture relatively easy to understand."

"I presume so." Duncan continued with the document. "There's only a single nation state on the planet, on one large island. They're classed as 'Interstellar Isolationist' in that they trade only with the other three planets in their system."

Duncan looked away from the document. "Their message suggested to me that their economy is in a shambles and they hope that interstellar trade might save them." He gave a tight-lipped smile. "And if we're not careful, the Terran economy might become a shambles as well."

"What?"

"If the planet has a super abundance of gold and that cheap gold gets into circulation, it could have devastating consequences for the world's economy, which in many respects is reliant on rare and expensive gold."

Duncan returned his attention to the monitor. "Madhya Loka: Atmospheric pressure, 102 kiloPascals; Gravity, 0.9 Earth; Language, Sanskrit; Oxygen level, 24 percent; Weather, Earth-Florida."

Duncan closed the document. "All right, let's get going."

"Sanskrit!" Roger pulled out his translator. "Our translators don't do Sanskrit."

"Ah. I forgot that." Duncan handed his translator to Roger. "We'll need to download a language module."

"Fine." Roger took the translators and began to download Sanskrit language modules to them. "But I'd really like a day or two to research the culture before we go."

"No time for that," said Duncan. "I'd go alone if Council would let me."

Roger nodded in understanding. On general principles, Duncan would have liked to go without him, but in addition, the maximum speed of a ship went down as the biological mass on the ship increased. Not that speed was all that well defined. A ship, in seeming violation of relativity, could travel essentially at many multiples of the speed of light if the destination couldn't be pinpointed on a galaxy map.

Roger shrugged. He probably didn't really need that research time. Not for a terran-derived culture.

The console beeped indicating that the language modules had been downloaded to the translator. Roger held a translator toward Duncan. "Say the planet's name."

"Madhya Loka."

"The realms of humans, animals, and plants," said the translator in Oxbridge English with an Indian accent.

"Weird name for a planet," said Roger.

"It has a moon." Duncan leaned in toward the translator. "Ahimsa."

"The principle of nonviolence," said the translator.

"Strange," said Roger as he returned Duncan's translator.

"Let's go." Duncan pointed a finger to the green Launch Status button. "I'm worried that another terran federation might also have been invited. And if we come late, we might not get the deal." He looked off into the forward viewport. "Maybe," he said, softly, as if to himself, "they even sent crates to other galactic civilizations."

Roger started the engines and the ship lifted from the launchpad. "And what exactly is the deal we might not get?"

"Our mission," said Duncan, solemnly, "is to buy up all of their gold, to make the metal scarce again." He shrugged. "And, after keeping a small amount of it, to dispose of the rest—dumping it into the Sun, or something."

Roger brought the ship to a landing at a berth at the spaceport. And, as there were very few other ships at the port, they'd chosen a pad very close to the single building at the port.

"Not exactly bustling," said Roger, swatting at a fly, as they walked to the building. The weather was tropical and Roger, in his suit, felt overdressed.

As they ambled into what looked like an arrival lounge, Roger was pleased to see that the signage was in multiple languages, including Angloterran. One of the signs announced,

WELCOME TO GIRIKANAURAKSANASTHANA

"Welcome to where? " said Roger.

Duncan stared at the sign. "Must be the name of the city, or maybe the country."

Roger voiced the long name.

"Mouse haven," said the translator.

"What?" Roger threw a puzzled look to the translator.

Just then, a man burst through a gate and strode up to them. He wore a thin, white, one-piece garment resembling an Indian dhoti. He also sported a pith helmet with netting hanging down from its brim. "Ah," he said in a cheerful, energetic voice. His next words, the translators rendered as "I am thinking you must be the Angloterrans."

Roger saw Duncan instantly morph into Trade Commissioner mode. He introduced himself, described his calling and his mission, and made a curt introduction of Roger.

"And I," said the man, "am the Girikanauraksanasthana trade minister." He made a small, self-effacing bow. "I am Rupin Rajendrasuri. But please, just call me Raj."

Raj guided them smoothly through customs and towards the exit. "My office is in the Central Bank," he said, "but my home is very close. A more pleasant place to talk, I am thinking."

As they emerged from the terminal, a man with a broom swung in ahead and swept the ground in front as they walked.

Not knowing the culture, Roger made no comment. He assumed that Raj must be obsessively passionate about cleanliness.

Raj walked ahead to say something to the man, but their talk was too quiet for the translator to pick it up.

Out of sight of Raj now, Duncan shooed away the f lies f luttering around his head. Roger, wishing he had his own pith helmet, did the same.

"Why the hell did they bring flies to this planet?" Duncan whispered.

"Small bees, I think," said Roger. "Probably came with the terraforming. For plant pollination, I imagine."

Raj dropped back and gave a running commentary on the scenery as they walked. But he made no mention of the cats. There were strays everywhere. Beautiful cats. They appeared to be purebreds, Siamese-like but with large golden eyes.

Roger noticed that Duncan grimaced whenever he saw a cat.

"You don't care for cats," said Roger, "do you?"

Duncan looked disdainfully down his nose. "I prefer to say I'm an ailurophobe."

"So am I," said Raj. "So are all of us in Girikanauraksanasthana."

"Where did all these cats come from?" said Roger.

"We are thinking it was terrorism. People wanting to bring down our government, by breeding and releasing cats."

Cats bringing down a government? Roger gave a questioning look, but Raj did not elaborate.

Again, Duncan waved away flies.

"I am sorry," said Raj. "I should have met you with a car. But I was unable to requisition one." He sighed. "We investment mousers—investment bankers—used to have a high status here on Madhya Loka. But no more."

Roger stared quizzically at Raj. Investment mousers?

About a quarter Earth-hour later, Raj stopped in front of a screen door at a tan-colored house. He shooed away the ever-present flies, opened the door and quickly ushered Duncan and Roger in, snapping the door closed after them.

While Roger's eyes adjusted from the brightness of the street outside, he saw a shadowy figure rise from a sofa and step forward.

As his eyes accommodated, Roger froze with the shock of recognition. The figure confronting them was none other than Jacques Bouchard of the Club Francophone.

Roger sensed Duncan stiffen, and knew why. Bouchard was one of the best trade negotiators in the galaxy.

Bouchard extended his hand to Duncan. "Enchanté," he said with a sly smile. "Wonderful to see you again," he continued in Angloterran, a language he spoke about as well as his native French.

Duncan responded with an affable greeting of his own. Roger wondered how he could do it, considering that the last time they'd met Bouchard had virtually stolen a valuable trade deal right from under Duncan's nose.

"Ah," said Raj. "You have met each other before."

"Yessss," said Duncan. Roger wondered how the translators would render the extended sibilant.

"Excellent." Raj indicated a table. "Let us sit and have tea. I would be very happy to be hearing your thoughts about with whom we of Girikanauraksanasthana should be trading." He pulled back the chairs and motioned that they sit. "And about which of your governments would best appreciate our modest handicrafts."

"Perhaps both," said Duncan. Roger knew he was hedging his bets in the face of an extremely good negotiator in the person of Jacques Bouchard.

Raj gave a slight shake of his head. "Mister Bouchard has convinced me that an exclusive trade pact would best serve."

"Are you negotiating with anyone else?" said Duncan.

"No. Nor will we."

After a few seconds of silence and Bouchard smiling like a Cheshire cat, Duncan said, "All right then, how shall we proceed?"

"Since Mister Bouchard has arrived first, he has the first opportunity to convince me." Raj flashed a friendly smile at Bouchard then returned his gaze to Duncan. "Mister Bouchard traveled alone so he could arrive fast."

Duncan gave Roger an 'I told you so' look.

"I was most eager," said Bouchard, "to have the pleasure of describing the benefits of you affiliating with the Club Francophone."

"All right, then." Raj slapped a hand to the table. "Let us be proceeding. Girikanauraksanasthana's main export candidate is tiny framed pictures of our religious prophets." He smiled. "I am thinking, it doesn't sound very promising, does it?" He looked from face to face and without waiting for a response, went on. "Recently, as a cost cutting measure, we have started producing the pictures with metal frames rather than with expensive wood ones."

"Tell us about the... the metal," said Duncan. "Do you have a lot of it?"

"Gold." Raj smiled as if to himself. "And yes, we have a lot of it. It is mined from an ancient meteor comprised of almost pure gold." He narrowed his eyes. "I have been told that, unfortunately, many such meteors have been discovered throughout the galaxy—rendering gold essentially worthless." The smile returned. "A retribution of God for greed, no doubt. Yes?"

"I think we should tell him," Roger whispered, holding his translator low so it wouldn't pick up his words, "that gold is far from worthless?"

"Say nothing," Duncan whispered.

Bouchard though, after a moment where he seemed to be thinking hard, said, "It would be dishonorable not to tell you that I know of no other such meteors and that gold is far, far from worthless."

Roger realized that Bouchard had just seized the moral high ground. He could tell that Duncan realized it also. Things were definitely not going well.

After a few silent seconds, Raj laughed. "Actually," he said, "I am being disingenuous. I know gold is valuable to others. And we want to do what we can to prevent pirates from invading Madhya Loka to obtain it. The best way, I am thinking, is to make a trade agreement with a great Terran power."

"I represent a great Terran power," said Duncan.

"As do I," said Bouchard, pleasantly, "but not an aggressive one."

Duncan started to say something, but Raj cut him off. "To us, the metal is not valuable. We can produce the gold-framed pictures for one mouse fifty each."

Roger looked quizzically at his translator.

"The frames are almost pure gold," said Raj. "A common metal here, and only used for religious reasons. A common but nonetheless sacred metal."

Roger smiled. Sacred to our god Mammon as well, I'd say.

Raj stood. "I shall bring in the tea and pudding. Normally my wife would do that, but she's away, busy with beep." He clearly went on to say with what his wife was busy, but Roger's translator couldn't render it.

Roger nodded, as if he understood.

Raj left the room, leaving those sitting to talk. But there seemed to be nothing to say. The three just sat silently, avoiding each other's gazes.

Out of the corner of his eye, Roger saw a motion under the table. A mouse! He was embarrassed for Raj, having to negotiate with a mouse running around his house. Then Roger saw a second mouse, and then a third.

Roger was perplexed—and disgusted. Raj must surely know of the mouse infestation. But apparently, he doesn't care. Roger remembered the man with the broom and reassessed his assumption that the Girikanauraksanasthanans must be very big on cleanliness. He shivered with the thought that the pudding would probably be contaminated with mouse droppings.

He wondered if he should say something to Duncan, but he didn't get the chance; Raj returned with a tray.

Roger knew he was being a little obsessive about hygiene but still, he couldn't bring himself to partake of the food.

"I'm afraid my trip made me a little queasy," said Roger, dimly aware that the translator might have trouble with 'queasy.' "I'm afraid I need some air."

"Oh, I am feeling so sorry," said Raj. "Is there anything I can do?"

"I just need to take a walk." Roger glanced at Duncan, then back at Raj. "And I think it would be better if the negotiations were oneon-one. More fair that way." And Duncan prefers to negotiate alone.

"Yes, do go out for a stroll," said Duncan. "We will be fine."

Roger nodded. He knew it was undiplomatic to leave without eating, but then again, Duncan was the diplomat. Let him do the straining of the mouse droppings through his teeth.

"Fine, then," said Raj. "Perhaps you might return in say, two Earth hours. Then, we will have lunch."

Roger gave a weak smile, while wondering how he'd again get out of eating Raj's food.

Roger left Raj's house bent on redeeming himself by doing his job—finding out what he could about the culture. To that end, he returned to a park that he'd seen on his walk from the spaceport. He'd done that often on a variety of planets and cultures. A park was a good place to observe the natives in a natural setting.

As Roger walked, he saw another person, clearly of an upper class, walking with a sweeper in front. Curious if his assumption about some Madhya Lokans obsession with cleanliness was correct, Roger approached the sweeper. "Why are you sweeping the ground?"

Without breaking stride, the man said, "So that my beep doesn't accidentally step on any bugs."

Puzzled by the answer, Roger stood still while the sweeper and his whatever beep meant, walked by.

Roger continued to the park, and wandered through it. He stopped, smiling, as he saw a small boy petting a cat. But then an adult, presumably the boy's father, pulled the kid away. "Bad," said the man. "Cats are bad."

"But... but, I like cats."

The man appeared shocked. "You must not be petting cats." He tousled the boy's hair. "You should be petting mice."

"I cannot afford to be petting mice."

The man blew out a breath. "My fault. I probably am needing to raise your allowance." He reached inside his dhoti and withdrew a wallet. "Here," he said, pulling out a bill. "A five-mouse note." He handed it to the boy. "And tonight, I think we should be having our value of money talk." His expression became stern. "Pet mice, not cats."

The boy took the note and stroked it.

Completely clueless about what he'd just seen, Roger, seeking understanding, continued wandering through the park. He stopped at a stone table and benches where two elderly Madhya Lokans were sitting playing a chess-like game on a board inlaid on the table. It looked like a cross between chess and bridge: cards and pieces played on a nine by nine board.

Roger mingled in with the half-dozen or so people standing and watching the game. Roger pretended that he understood the rules.

Both the players and most of the spectators had little powered fans which they used to blow flies away from their exposed arms and faces.

On the table, Roger saw a few bank notes like those he'd seen the boy receive. Apparently there was wagering on the game. Up close now, Roger saw images of mice on the notes.

"I am thinking please," said one player to the other, "that you will not be winning this game."

"I am thinking," said the second player, "that you might be in error." He took a note from his pocket, flourished it and laid it atop the other notes on the table.

"A five mouse note?" said the first player with a pleasant laugh. "Is that the length of your conviction?"

"It is all I can afford," said the other, with a smile that seemed forced. "The economy is going to the cats."

"I cannot be disagreeing," said the first player. He placed his own five mouse note onto the table.

In spite of his total lack of understanding of the game, Roger found the betting on it engrossing.

Absently, he swatted a fly that had landed on his face.

At the sound of the slap, the players and onlookers turned to look at him. And their faces contorted to visages of horror, a look as if they were little children and had just seen him kick a puppy. All went silent.

"I... uh... I'm sorry," Roger burbled, not knowing about what he was sorry. The sound of the slap, maybe. Breaking their concentration? No. Couldn't be. Everyone was talking.

Still, everyone stared at him in silence.

"Um... I think I'll go now." Roger gave an exaggerated smile. "Have a nice day." He turned and hurried away from the table.

After he'd retreated to what he hoped was a safe distance, Roger looked nervously back—and saw a Lokan following him.

Roger froze for an instant, considering if flight or fight was the better response.

The Lokan looked friendly enough, though. And he gave a cheerful wave.

Roger hesitated, then returned the wave and waited.

"Please to excuse me, honorable sir," said the Lokan when he'd drawn close. "But it is clear you are a stranger here. I fear we have inadvertently done you emotional violence. And I suspect you might not have yet found illumination."

Roger couldn't help smiling. "No. I'm afraid I'm still in the dark."

"Ah. Then kindly please to allow me to be helping you with your enlightenment."

"Are you a religious leader?" said Roger.

"No. I am a veterinary economist."

"Excuse me?"

"Formerly known as an investment mouser," said the Lokan. "But investment mouser is a term held in some disrepute of late."

Roger gave a soft laugh. "So I've been told."

"Enlightenment, yes?" said the man. "My name is Gupta."

"And I am Roger. Enlightenment, yes!"

"Good. Excellent!" Gupta indicated another stone table and benches.

"Ah, where to start," said Gupta as he sat at a bench. "You have heard of the principle of nonviolence? Our guiding precept."

Roger nodded. Ahimsa.

"It states we must not do violence to any living creature."

Roger gazed at a bug slowly making its way across the table. "Even insects?"

"Even insects."

"I see." Roger looked up. "Tell me about the mice."

Gupta laughed. "The mice are more about economics than religion." He shrugged. "But perhaps the two subjects are, in essence, the same thing. Very well, then—the mice." He nodded. "The mouse is the basis of our monetary system."

"Excuse me?" Roger furrowed his brow. "Mice?"

"Within the society on Earth from which we sprung, a person's wealth was measured by the number of cattle he owned—here it is the number of mice."

"Theoretical mice," said Roger. "Virtual mice, I mean."

"No. They're real enough. After all, we are on the mouse standard." Gupta's face clouded. "I'm afraid it creates all sorts of problems, though."

"You could go off the, um, mouse standard."

"Logical," said Gupta, "but politically difficult. Here in Girikanauraksanasthana, logical politics is, I'm afraid, something of an oxymoron."

Roger nodded.

"Some years ago," Gupta went on, "a mouse disease had stabilized the mouse population, meaning a no-growth economy. And just then, to make matters worse, we had a mysterious infestation of cats."

Roger recalled the beautiful native strays. "That doesn't sound so bad."

"Cats are killing our economy." Gupta became animated. "Cats decimated the mouse population and therefore also the economy. We are in a depression." He shook his head vigorously. "They say mice is the root of all evil. But they are wrong. It is cats!"

Gupta looked to the heavens. "We tried quantitative easing—putting more mice into circulation, but our mice breed very slowly. It was a trifling amount—mere pocket mice."

"Couldn't you, um, cull the cats?" said Roger, trying to mollify the man.

"No! We can not be killing animals. Ahimsa means do no harm."

"Madhya Lokans are vegetarians, then?" said Roger, probing for a contradiction.

"Of course."

"But... but isn't it doing harm... to the mice, letting cats eat them?"

Again, Gupta shook his head. "But forbidding mouse-eating would do harm to the cats. Our doctrine says no animal should be interfered with. One should let the cat catch the mouse." He looked away in the distance. "We tried cat containment facilities, but they didn't work. We tried feeding cats vegetarian food to wean them off mice but they wouldn't eat it."

"Too bad," said Roger.

"So we could not be having cat dormitories because we would need to be providing food, mice, for the cats and that would mean directly doing harm to the mice."

"So you have a mega cat problem," said Roger, thoughtfully, beginning to get an idea.

"No. Not quite that bad. Only about eight hundred kilocats."

"Couldn't you introduce a natural predator with a taste for cats?"

"Probably not," said Gupta. "That would mean facilitating violence. A morally questionable concept about which there is considerable debate."

Roger's idea began to firm.

"It used to be so simple," said Gupta. "Money makes money. Mice make mice. And bank interest was just the natural breeding of mice."

"And mice make money," said Roger, lightly.

"Sometimes the reverse," said Gupta, apparently not detecting Roger's playful tone. "There was a case of a man's mice eating his bank notes, leaving him impoverished."

Roger tried not to laugh. "Hadn't he heard of banks?"

"Here, banks hold mice, not paper."

"Of course," said Roger, becoming giddy with his new idea. He thanked Gupta for the enlightenment, for raising his non-violence consciousness, and then politely took his leave.

Roger, hastening back to Raj's house, saw a truck rolling down the street blowing strong gusts over the pavement and sidewalks. And now, after his enlightenment, the sight of such insect clearing did not seem at all unnatural. He smiled, hoping that when he rejoined Duncan, he would not exhibit a 'more nonviolent than thou' expression.

Roger realized now that as to Raj's mouse infestation, it wasn't a case of slovenliness. Raj was merely flaunting his wealth. And the food was most probably completely mouse free. And not having eaten the food, Roger felt starved. Eager he was now to return to Raj's for lunch.

Upon his return, Roger discovered that Bouchard and Raj seemed to have become very chummy. And both of them continued to be excruciatingly polite.

"Ah," said Raj, "just in time for a light lunch. I do hope you are feeling better."

"Yes, my friend," said Bouchard. "I do hope you are in the mood for some good Girikanauraksanasthanan food."

"Yes," said Roger with a smile. "I would love to try the food."

"Excellent," said Raj. "Jacques and I were just about to bring it in. Please make yourself comfortable."

Jacques? This does not augur well for us Angloterrans. "Thank you." Roger sat within whispering distance of Duncan.

Raj and Bouchard left for the kitchen, giving Roger and Duncan a few moments where they could talk.

"I can't even come up with an exchange rate," Duncan whispered. "I mean, like the local cost of a GalaxyBurger."

"The Lokans are vegetarians."

"All right, a GalaxyVeggieBurger then." Duncan seemed beaten, grasping at straws. "We'd probably be better with a direct barter arrangement," he spoke almost at a babble. "A kilo of gold, or gold-framed prophets for, I don't know, something. We must make something they want."

"I have an idea," Roger whispered.

Duncan seemed possessed. "That damned Bouchard," he went on. "He's so oily, you could stick a wick in his head, light it, and have light and warmth for a week."

"I have an idea," Roger repeated.

A look of rationality returned to Duncan's eyes. "We don't need an idea, we need a miracle."

"Well, listen." Roger had just started to reveal his idea, when he heard Raj and Bouchard's returning footsteps. "Whatever you do," Roger managed, "Don't swat flies."

"What?"

"Trust me!"

Duncan threw a glance at the ceiling. "Trust me, he says."

Just then, Raj came in carrying a tray of cheese. Behind him came Bouchard with a tray of wine bottles and glasses.

"Very French, is it not?" said Bouchard with a confident smile as he placed his tray on the table.

Raj poured the wine while apologizing for the Girikanauraksanasthanan wine being not very good.

Bouchard took a sip. "It is good, actually. But, admittedly, not superb."

Raj nodded.

Roger wondered at Bouchard's undiplomatic language.

"But as I have proposed," said Bouchard, clearly for Roger's benefit, "in exchange for those lovely little metal framed pictures, we can offer wine, the best in the world, if not the known galaxy. And we will also set up here, the best of vineyards so that your planet can become an exporter of the finest, formerly exclusively French, wines."

From Duncan's expression, Roger understood that the man couldn't compete against the French offer. But still he tried.

"We Angloterrans produce excellent wine as well," said Duncan in a voice lacking conviction, "from an area called California."

"That is interesting," said Raj in a voice suggesting that actually it wasn't.

Bouchard, not even looking at Duncan, gave a soft laugh and talked on. "And further," he said, flourishing his wine glass, "we will supply bats to save the grape vines from insects—and incidentally, will help control your flying insect problem."

Intently, Roger studied Raj's expression. Raj seemed to show some qualms at the mention of the insect-eating bats, but otherwise seemed receptive.

Roger gathered his courage. "I have a possible offer," he said, well knowing he was treading on Duncan's authority. "But it is a bit complex."

"Please to keep it simple," said Raj, showing a touch of impatience. "A trade deal is merely imports and exports."

"Well then," said Roger, imagining Duncan's gaze boring into the back of his head. "I suggest we Angloterrans will import your gold. And we will export a negative quantity of cats. The cats will be relocated to no-kill adoption shelters on Earth."

Raj chuckled. "You are saying that in return for our export of gold, we will import a negative quantity of cats."

"Exactly," said Roger. "Eight hundred thousand cats."

"Is that your idea?" whispered Duncan, scornfully.

"You have done your homework." Raj seemed impressed but nonetheless said he was still leaning toward Bouchard's offer.

"I see." Roger bit his lip and then jumped up. He pointed out through the screen door. "What's that?" he exclaimed, theatrically.

"What's what?" said Duncan.

Roger ran to the door and threw open wide the screen. "Stop that at once," he shouted.

"What's going on?" Duncan called out.

"Please to close the door," said Raj. "You are inviting in the flies."

Without complying, Roger spun around, affecting an expression of extreme disgust and pain.

"Are you all right?" said Raj, seemingly very concerned.

Roger nodded.

Raj's expression hardened. "But now you have let in the f lies," he said, some of the patina of courtesy scraped from his voice.

"I am sorry," said Roger, moving slowly, very slowly to close the screen. "I saw a boy abusing a cat," Roger lied. "But he ran away."

Raj looked horrified and Roger tried hard to emulate that look.

Duncan, on the other hand, just looked shocked. He then apologized for the clumsiness of his associate.

Raj ignored him. "Yes, cats are bad," said Raj, looking sympathetically at Roger. "But they must not be abused."

Roger and Raj exchanged a glance—a look of shared understanding. Then Roger returned his seat next to Duncan.

Duncan stared daggers at him but Roger just returned an innocent smile.

Flies had indeed invaded the room, and one landed on Duncan's face. He made a move to swat at it, but Roger subtly held down his arm. "Don't!" he whispered.

Bouchard though, did swat a bug. At the sound of the slap, Raj recoiled, as if it were he who had been swatted.

Roger recoiled as well—a calculated recoil.

Bouchard, looking confused and as if he felt control of the situation slipping from him said, "Perhaps Raj, my friend, this would be a good time to conclude a contract."

Raj bit his lip. "I'm afraid, my friend," he said, "that I've reconsidered. I will accept the Angloterran offer."

"What?" Bouchard seemed stunned.

So did Duncan. "What... what just happened?" he managed, under his breath.

"Later," said Roger.

Raj turned to Roger. "Could you take a consignment of cats back with you when you leave? As a sign of good faith."

"Of course," said Roger, not consulting with Duncan as protocol required. But Duncan seemed too befuddled to notice. "A couple of hundred, anyway," said Roger. "Let's say three hundred. We'll send ships regularly for the rest."

"Quite acceptable."

Bouchard now seemed to be merely a piece of furniture—as did Duncan.

Roger and Raj arranged some details and then Raj said, "Can you come back for dinner? There we can work out the exact cat-gold exchange rate, and by then, I will have arranged for your initial three hundred cats. May your trip with them be pleasant."

"Thank you." Roger smiled with the realization that Duncan would not be looking forward to the trip at all.

"Kindly turn off your translator," said Raj.

Roger, his nose wrinkled in puzzlement, switched it off.

"Until this evening," said Raj in flawless Angloterran. "Goodbye. Shubhāste panthā-nah santu as we say in Sanskrit. May your roads be auspicious."

"You speak Angloterran?" said Roger.

Raj looked Duncan in the eye. "Of course."

Roger chuckled, realizing that Raj had overheard Duncan's attempt to conceal the true value of gold. "May your roads be auspicious as well."

Outside the door, Roger turned to Duncan. "Score one for cultural liaison, yes?"

Dumbly, Duncan nodded and Roger took that as a small victory.

"It's going to be a long trip home with all that biological mass," said Duncan, morosely. "A long trip back with cats."

"And our agency ship," said Roger, unable to resist rubbing it in, "will probably be the biggest litter box in the galaxy."

Duncan winced.

Roger suppressed a smile. I almost feel sorry for him... almost. Meow.

Genius is more often found in a cracked pot than in a whole one.

—E. B. White

Wine, Women, and Stars

Thoraiya Dyer
| 5482 words

Felicia made her opening incision the way that Maureen fired a rifle.

Exhale slowly. Press gently. Do not blink.

The skin parted with the same suddenness as recoil, though there was no gunshot to make her jump. Subcutaneous fat filled the wound for an instant before being itself bisected. There, now clearly visible under bright lights, was the glistening muscle layer, striped white by the linea alba that connected the two halves of Bridget's abdomen.

Bridget. Maureen's daughter. Anaesthetized on the table.

Please, Dr.de Martino, the rostered surgeon had begged Felicia. Dr. Pelle was on exchange from Naples, transferred overseas in a pinch to fill a gap at White Oak left by a raft of retirees who refused to use the new bots.

Pelle seemed to know Felicia by reputation. Not everybody did. The megalohospice boasted three hundred operating theatres, three thousand doctors, and thirty thousand patients. His eyebrows had shot upward when he'd spotted her by the water cooler, and he'd stared with wild speculation at her name tag for a full minute before speaking. He didn't know about her and Bridget.

Please, Dr. de Martino. My wife's waters just broke. Director says I'm to stay and do the surgery, but if I don't go get on a plane right now, I'll miss the birth.

I don't think I can, Dr. Pelle, she'd said, sipping her water. It's not just disobeying the Director. We could both be disciplined for an unrecorded substitution if they found out that I used your login. The thing is, I'm not up to date on the operation of next-gen macrobots. I don't even have my own login for theatre.

Over six grueling years of training for space, she'd lost her instinctive feel for operating surgical robots. The Agency had decided that over the twelve year Mars Settlement Mission's duration, it would be cheaper and lighter to use a pair of human hands than the heavy, bulky, immobile machines which required an operator, anyway.

The seven applicants, Felicia included, had dutifully bent themselves to all-but-forgotten open surgical approaches. Holes big enough to insert a pair of human hands. In weightlessness and low-g, human tissue repair might be slower, even with hormonal promoters, but there was greatly reduced tension on stitched, opposed edges. Wounds pulling apart were rarely a problem.

The bot can't be used for this anyway, Pelle pointed out desperately, checking his watch. You have to make a hole big enough to pull her liver out in one piece. I'll take the blame if they find out. I'll tell them I offered to switch logins for you and then forgot. If anything else goes wrong, I'll take the blame for that, too. I trust you. You're a legend back home. Please!

But it wasn't the pulling out of livers that Felicia was concerned with. It was the responsibility of operating on her best friend's brilliant young daughter.

All it would take was one small slip. One damaged nerve, one tiny puncture of the diaphragm and Bridget would be eliminated from the Mission. If Pelle took the blame, he'd be sent to his home country in disgrace, which might make his wife secretly happy. But would he really wear it? Felicia thought she'd read loyalty and resolution behind his grateful puppy-face. She believed him when he said he'd shoulder any fallout. Most likely, he wouldn't even admit to having absconded.

He'd tell the Director that he'd damaged the nerve, or punctured the diaphragm, himself.

Then, with Bridget excluded, they'd have to send the second-best candidate to fill the surgeon's role on the Mars Settlement Mission.

Me, Felicia thought. I was second-best. And I told them I'd do anything to be on that team.

Anything.

Her right hand, sheathed in its sterile, spray-on glove, trembled slightly above the surgical field.

When the trembling stopped, she opened Bridget's abdomen decisively. There, the mechanisms that had sustained the girl over twenty-seven years of life waited to be made obsolete. Felicia would leave the long conduit of the oesophagus behind, lest the all-important integrity of the chest cavity be threatened, but the pale, muscular pouch of the stomach would go, no longer necessary for pounding and percolating other life forms to mush.

Pink coils of intestine would be tied off where they entered the pelvic cavity, their function of digestion and absorption soon to be made as redundant as the pancreas and liver that supplied them with enzymes. Reproductive systems were slated for removal, as a hydrogen-powered body would not be suitable for bearing young.

One kidney would be enough to regulate the body's water. The spleen would swim alone in a sea of abdominal fat, which would be seeded with a few pertinent hormone-synthesizing cells. That supply of lipid building blocks would be sufficient for several years of cell turnover. After her abdominal fat was gone, Bridget would receive the occasional phospholipid and essential fatty acid IV as well as patch infusions of the amino acids, minerals and other micronutrients that took up a minuscule amount of space on the craft when compared to actual food.

Felicia took Bridget's liver gingerly in her left hand.

"Oh my God," Maureen gasped, "I need a drink."

"Look out, Maureen's liver," Felicia murmured as the child-locks came off the liquor cabinet and Maureen hunted on her knees for the bottle of Jameson she'd promised herself to celebrate the moment she finished breast-feeding.

Baby Bridget, six months old, was finally sleeping in a corner of the dining room, squashed snugly into the electronic rocker with its piped-in sounds from the womb.

So they had to keep the celebration quiet.

"You want one?" Maureen whispered, cracking ice blocks from their berg-shaped moulds into a crystal glass. The bar was turned to a red ring by the single, overhanging lamp, its long corners lost in the gloom. Only Maureen's nose, lips, and chin were in the circle of light, and they looked oddly disembodied. Before Felicia could answer, she said, "Sorry, I forgot. You've got to keep in peak fitness, right?"

"Right."

Maureen took her first sip of whiskey and sighed blissfully.

"I'm never giving you up again," she told the bottle, hugging it.

Felicia's smile broadened and she measured the coffee granules into her cup. Black, no sugar. She needed the caffeine but not the extra weight. She kept her eye on the kettle. It was important to catch it before it whistled. Maureen was the only woman she knew with a whistling kettle. Its shrill screams apparently reminded her of childhood and family. They gave her the warm fuzzies.

Funnily enough, Bridget's screams didn't have the same effect, and Felicia didn't want to be responsible for waking the baby.

"So," Maureen said. "You want to go with those crazies down to the bottom of the ocean. You, in charge of the health of a hundred people living on the sea floor for three years. Why, Lici?"

"Because I can," Felicia said. "I'm the best person to do it. And if I can, and I'm the best person to do it, then I should do it, right? It should be me. I can take care of them."

Maureen absorbed this for a moment before giving an abrupt guffaw.

"I can't even take care of four people."

The four people she meant were herself, her husband and the two children. The marriage was not faring well under the pressure of a single income. But Maureen's job had been to shoot wild horses from a helicopter. That was seasonal work, and there was no longer any suitable season for Maureen to stay out from dawn until dusk; nor was there likely to be even after the kids started school, and she refused to work at the cannery.

"Yes, you can."

"A hundred people. Sancta Maria mater Dei. You know, when I said you shouldn't work so hard, I meant you should cut back on your hours at the hospital, not switch to something even worse. Twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year for three years. Honestly. How are you ever going to find true love down there with the crazies?"

Felicia flicked the kettle off the instant before it boiled, poured it over the granules and stirred.

"Who says I'll find love up here? Who says there's even such a thing as true love that lasts forever?"

The last came out of her mouth before she remembered the tensions dividing the house. She looked at Maureen askance, but Maureen stood with her whiskey glass beside the sleeping baby in the rocker, her smile forgiving.

"Of course there's such a thing. It's so strong, Lici. Sometimes it hurts me to look at her. I love her so much. My beautiful little Bridget."

Bridget's blood pressure dropped.

Felicia put the liver into the tray and a trolley bot rushed it away; there was no sense wasting a good liver, just because Bridget would not need it where she was going. Some other life might be saved by it.

Bridget's liver had held a lot of blood. Felicia nudged the robotic anesthetist with her toe, giving it permission to introduce a bolus of intravenous fluids. The readout on the bot's face said: Yes, Doctor Pelle. Then, Felicia waited for the patient's blood pressure to rise, because tugging on the stomach would trigger the vagus nerve and a second drop in pressure.

Gazing at the electronic trace of the heart rate monitor, Felicia remembered the first, week-long isolation that had been part of the Agency's barrage of psych tests. The seven applicants, wearing their unwieldy suits, had stood in a cramped, near-lightless room, listening to the instructions of assessors who hid behind cameras and voice-altering software.

Sit down, the hidden speakers instructed, and they'd scrabbled like children at musical chairs for the cold, hard folding camp stools lined up against the wall. Seven small monitors had flickered to life in front of them.

Is that our own ECGs? Bridget had whispered. All of them were wired for their vital signs. She shook her head a moment later as an arrhythmia Felicia knew she did not have crossed the screen directly in front of her. At forty-two, Felicia was the oldest of the applicants, but still in prime condition. Not that any of the others would have heart defects, either.

Your task, the toneless voice informed them, is to monitor your hypothetical patient for as long as you feel able to do so free from error. Each time you observe an abnormality, you will tap your right foot on the floor as though approving the suggestion of an anaesthetic machine.

Some of the applicants started tapping, but the voice was not finished with their instructions.

Five days of water and food are provided by your suit, it went on. Consume and eliminate as you would during a surface crossing. This test will assess your ability to perform monotonous tasks over time. When you no longer feel able to perform the task competently, stand and exit the hallway to your right.

Felicia felt a thrill go through her: Five days! Surely nobody could stay awake and fully functional that long. She did not dare turn her head to see Bridget's response.

She had eyes only for the P-waves, QRS complexes, and T-waves indicating the atrial depolarization, ventricular depolarization and ventricular repolarization of the heart respectively, as well as for the regularity of the spaces between them.

There. One of the P-waves had not been followed by a QRS complex. Felicia's foot tapped. It could be atrio-ventricular heart block. Is this a single patient, or a whole lot of them mixed up together?

Even as the question formed in her thoughts, it was answered by a paroxysm of atrial tachycardia. Different patients, then, all jumbled together. That would be more interesting, and keep her more alert, than having to watch out for the same error over and over again. Her foot tapped.

Twenty-four hours later, she no longer thought the word 'easy' could be brought to apply to any aspect of her situation. Two of the seven applicants were already gone. One had removed herself, prematurely as it turned out, for the voice had informed her that her performance had been error free. The second was informed, embarrassingly enough, that his performance level had fallen below the acceptable limit of two misses per hundred abnormalities and that he was to exit immediately.

Of the remaining five, Felicia was able to glimpse two in the periphery of her helmet's wraparound internal screens. The man on her left sat stiffly, his tense shoulders bunched inside his suit and his gloved hands gripping the sides of the stool.

Bridget, on her right, showed complete relaxation.

She might even have been smiling behind her VR-augmented visor. Felicia could not turn her head to be sure.

The broad blip of a ventricular premature complex marred her monitor. She tapped her foot. Took a sip of her water. Urinated into her suit.

Wished she could rub her eyes.

After seventy-two hours, Felicia and Bridget were alone. The other monitors were dark.

Felicia felt like her foot was made of lead.

But it won't be like this when we have to do it on Mars, she thought weirdly. It'll be easier to tap in low gravity.

Some of the complexes were close together and some of them were far apart, and she couldn't be sure that it was a normal sinus arrhythmia.

Was it? Wasn't it?

She didn't know. She couldn't risk it. Bridget was still there. Bridget looked the same, happy and carefree. She was younger. She was smarter. She was going to take Felicia's place on the team, after everything Felicia had done to help her get into the program.

Felicia hauled herself to her feet. She was older. She was more experienced. She knew herself inside and out. Her concentration was slipping and it was time to go.

Felicia de Martino, the voice said, you have made one error. That is within the acceptable limit.

Relief surged through her as she stumbled past the still-seated Bridget. She hadn't waited too long. Not like Bridget. Bridget was ridiculously stubborn. The voice would tell her to leave soon enough. Maybe even before Felicia moved out of earshot.

But the voice didn't tell Bridget to leave.

Not until she became dangerously dehydrated on the afternoon of the sixth day.

You're a machine, Bridget, the others had said admiringly when their youngest member rejoined the group.

Felicia had pretended to be sleeping, lodged tightly in her bag like a cocooned caterpillar fastened to the wall of the barracks. She couldn't crawl out until all her emotion had been properly suppressed, not when the constant closed-circuit monitoring might pick up something in her expression or tone of voice that said she wasn't fit to work with others.

Solo surgeon was Felicia's natural arena, wasn't it? All the prestigious medical universities selected specifically for assertiveness, self-reliance and competitiveness. It was at odds with modern-day mission requirements, but they couldn't exactly go back in time twenty years and instruct that some gentle, lamb-like surgeons be promoted in case the Space Agency ever had need of them.

She snapped back to the present. Bridget's blood pressure was back to normal.

Felicia put her hands into the sand-blaster for glove removal. Her skin was scoured a second time before she received a fresh pair of spray-on gloves.

She held them out in front of her, waiting for them to harden, before turning back to the table and easing them into the patient's open abdominal cavity. It was time to tie off Bridget's stomach. The younger woman had fasted in preparation for the surgery, so the organ was empty and a little shrunken.

There's Italian blood in me, she'd said to Bridget over Maureen's dining room table, her laugh unconvincing in her own ears. I can't give up food. Think I'm crazy?

The tests were conclusive. Felicia wasn't crazy. Then again, at the time the results had been released, she hadn't yet been passed over.

She hadn't yet been betrayed by a girl she'd known since birth.

All it'll take will be one slip, one damaged nerve or tiny puncture of the diaphragm.

Felicia eased the stomach into the surgical field. She could do it.

She could do it now. There was the diaphragm.

Felicia de Martino, a little voice said in her head, you have made one error. That is within the acceptable limit.

Anything? she asked herself again. You told them you would do anything.

She turned the stomach gently in her hands.

Mars hung in the night sky.

"That where you want to go?" Felicia's grandfather said, shaking his head, grinning gummily. "You going all the way there. My Lici's going so far away."

The corn-on-a-cob cooking over his little outdoor brazier wasn't for him to eat, but for her. He held the peeled husks in one ancient, leathery hand, and turned the corn by its stalk with the other.

"You're the one that first showed it to me," she said. "You told me Italians discovered the planets."

"We did! Of course we did."

The coals glowed. A cool wind kept the mosquitoes at bay. Felicia tried to fix the image of his wasted frame in her mind. This might be the last time she saw him. She was lucky to see him now. He could have died while she was with the undersea project. He could die at any time.

"And your father showed it to you?" she prompted, wanting to hear the old story again. It never changed, a litany to a less enlightened age.

"He took me hunting in the hills. Men only. My sisters were left behind. He showed it to me and he said God hung that red planet there like a beautiful lamp for us. The Moon, too, and the stars."

"He was proud that Italians had discovered them, but he thought we weren't supposed to go there, right?"

"There was only one television in our whole village. It belonged to my cousin who was an Army Chief. He let us come into his house to watch it, sometimes. When the Americans landed on the Moon, I ran to tell my father. My father couldn't read or write, but he was a pious man. He had a walking stick and he beat me with it. He said it was all lies. The Americans had not made footprints on the Moon. That was an insult to God, who created the Moon perfect as it was."

He pulled the corn off the coals and sheathed it in the husks, handing it to her. They sat in silence while it cooled. After a few minutes Felicia scalded her mouth taking the first sweet, hot, crisp bite.

"It's good?" her grandfather asked.

"It's perfect."

He was more than a hundred years old and his stomach and bowels were riddled with cancer. Felicia had offered him a place in the second trial of a revolutionary new hydrogen-powered nanobot treatment, but he'd turned it down, saying he didn't want tiny metal beetles living on his insides, because it was an insult to God, who created man perfect as he was.

Once the blood supply to the stomach was tied off, she had to work quickly to remove the entire length of Bridget's digestive tract.

Speed was no problem for Felicia. In their second isolation, she'd broken the Agency's record for conserving the integrity of exploding cadavers in a simulation of traumatic de-pressurization and bombardment of the module.

They'd put her in a diving suit and pushed her into the pool.

It was dark except for the headlamp on her helmet. Shapes floated. Glinted, when the light caught them. Steel trolleys with bodies strapped to them.

When the first one went off, Felicia gasped. The recycled air on her larynx was cold and dry. Half-swimming, half-walking along the tiled bottom of the pool, she fought her way through a cloud of blood and pushed down the floating frill of the omentum.

It was a real dead person. Not the dead pig she'd been expecting. The saggy face with eyes like jelly in the turbulent, blood-browned water seemed to accuse her of disrespecting it. She felt fleetingly like throwing up, but those early days of responding viscerally were behind her.

All the while, her hands pulled reams of gauze from the supply pockets of her suit, applying pressure to the chest, wrapping self-stick bandage around its many holes, setting the mask strapped to the trolley in place over the dead face, opening the tank and painting a fast-set, skin-tight space suit onto the corpse.

Bubbles in the water showed where the oxygen was leaking from the mask. She hadn't tightened the neck seals properly. No, it wasn't that. There was a neck wound beneath the seal, and the gauze in the wound was allowing the gas to escape. Any tighter, and she'd cut off blood to the brain; she turned away from the body as two more trolleys exploded behind her.

Let them berate her for wasting oxygen. If that was a live astronaut, he probably wouldn't need the oxygen for long.

Somebody was standing between her and the closest untended casualty. Felicia brushed past the person, then snapped her head back to check that it wasn't a trick; a tethered upright corpse, or a dummy space-terrorist gunman.

It was Bridget.

Bridget with a look of absolute horror, with small flecks of vomit spattered on the inside of her helmet. In space, those flecks would float, getting in her eyes or in her lungs.

Felicia reached out and seized Bridget's limp arm. Dragged her over to the two trolleys. Pointed at one, and Bridget came to life, pulling out gauze of her own.

Felicia didn't slow again. Didn't look at Bridget again. For twenty-one hours, she sweated in her diving suit and was rewarded by a rocket back to the top of the applicant rankings.

Later, she wondered why she'd intervened.

Especially after what happened in the third isolation.

I don't owe Bridget anything.

I'm the one who should be going to Mars.

In the surgery, Felicia ligated the vessels leading to Bridget's pancreas with brisk efficiency. Then she got to work on the ovaries.

Have children on Mars? Bridget had laughed at Maureen over her last supper. That'll be for other people to do, after the settlement is properly established.

They floated in the sea.

Felicia's mother looked younger with her hair wet and salt in her lashes, energized by the waves and foam. Felicia preferred the lap pool, its constancy, the ability to measure her progress.

"So, my young doctor," her mother said girlishly as gulls swooped over their heads. "You'll be heading for the big city, then. My little Lici, top of her class, with a scholarship out of state. I'm so proud of you."

"I'm not a doctor yet," Felicia said, treading water. She could have put her feet down on the sandy bottom if she'd wanted, but this way she was getting some exercise, at least. "Call me that when I've earned it."

"I thought you might have picked the Air Force. You wanted to be a pilot, when you were little. Your brothers tried for pilots, never quite made it, but you could, if you wanted. You're so good at everything that you do."

Felicia made a face.

"Be a pilot for what, Mama? So I can drop bombs on people? I want to help them."

"You want to help me, Lici," Mama said, suddenly stern, reaching to brush Felicia's wet fringe out of her eyes. "But you can't. Nobody can. I just want to live long enough to see you having babies of your own."

"What makes you think I want babies of my own?"

But Mama had a dreamy look in her eye.

"I was so determined to have a water birth. It was calming, they said. Natural. My first pregnancy, I had the birthing suite booked, but the baby came before I'd even got in the car to go to the hospital. An impatient one, Tom was. My shortest labor. Only took two hours."

"You made it to hospital the second time, though, didn't you? I've seen the photos of you and baby Ben."

"The second time, I made it to hospital. I got in the bath and the contractions were nowhere near as bad. Then I got out, because I needed to pee. At least, I thought I needed to pee, but it was my waters breaking and I ended up having Ben on that tiled floor."

Felicia burst out laughing.

"So that explains what's wrong with him."

Her mother splashed her.

"Oh, hush."

"And me? Where did you have me?"

"Third time," Mama sighed. "Third time lucky. You were born into the water. You were my only baby born in zero gravity. The boys don't know it, but I've always had a feeling."

"What feeling?"

"A feeling that you're the one born to fly."

Practically the whole digestive system came out in one piece. Felicia stared at the almost empty body cavity in front of her.

For Bridget, there was no going back.

I would do anything, Felicia thought. I'm the one born to fly.

Before being woken from the anaesthetic, Bridget would be injected with nanobots that would penetrate every cell. They would replace mitochondria as the energy centers of the body, burning intravenously supplied hydrogen micro-beads instead of sugar, so that the body gained energy stored as ATP, with water as waste product in place of carbon dioxide.

Her exhaled air would not need to be cleaned by carbon scrubbers any more. Yet another highly desirable trait in a member of the Mars team.

I would do anything.

In the candidates' third isolation, they'd been given one another's resumes and test results, and told to work as a team to decide by consensus which one of them was most fit to be the successful candidate.

The cruelest test of all.

Felicia de Martino showed up for her first interview impeccably dressed and fifteen minutes early, Bridget read aloud from the smartpaper in front of her, despite attending her mother's funeral earlier that day.

And Bridget had laughed uproariously and wiped a tear from her eye.

If only they'd known you arranged that on purpose, Lici. You were trying to get out of the funeral, weren't you? Felicia doesn't get on with her older brothers. They're in the Air Force. What was it you said about the Air Force? Obeying like a dog was more important to them than saving money or lives? It's all about kissing the butts of inferior buffoons, isn't that what you said?

And the Team Leader of the Mars Settlement Mission had come directly from the Air Force.

Maybe Bridget hadn't known.

None of them were supposed to know who the other team members were, prior to the decision being made.

Maybe she didn't know.

Of course she knew.

There was only one kidney still to be removed. The pair of them looked lonely in there, exposed like the kidneys in a chicken carcass at Christmas after everyone had eaten the stuffing. Felicia took a deep breath and reached into Bridget's abdomen for the final time.

I would do anything.

During that disastrous third isolation, in her rage, she'd racked her brains for something scandalous in Bridget's life that she, Felicia, with her intimate knowledge of Maureen's family, could bring to light.

There was nothing. Bridget was squeaky clean.

She was helpless now, though, and there was her obdurator nerve. A chance for revenge. Felicia wouldn't be crippling her for life. The nerve would repair. Bridget would be part of the second wave. They would still want her. There was no doubt about that.

Felicia, on the other hand, could never grow younger. If she wasn't chosen now, she would never be chosen.

"But you told me my age was an advantage," Felicia told the Director.

He pursed his lips.

"Yes," he admitted. "I did say that."

"You said older candidates were preferred because we'd die naturally of old age before we could get cancer from the radiation."

"Yes, Ms. de Martino, that was the situation then. The situation now is that the nanobot procedure is far more likely to be successful in younger candidates. If it were performed on you, you might die before leaving Earth. Is that a risk you're willing to take?"

"Yes," she said without hesitation, but he was already turning away.

"Your scores are still only second-highest, Felicia—"

"Because you cancelled the rest of the tests! The parabolic flights—"

"Those aren't priorities now. You know why."

I know why, she thought, despairing. Nothing is more important than a drastically reduced mass.

"I'll undergo the procedure," she said. "I'll do it whether you choose me or not. I don't care if it kills me."

The Director pursed his lips again.

"You really would do anything for a chance to be part of the mission, wouldn't you."

"Yes. I would do anything."

He gazed at her for a long time.

"If Bridget's procedure is unsuccessful," he said, "then I'll give you permission to try. Only if it is unsuccessful, Felicia. God knows we need dedicated physicians here on Earth. There's no point throwing your life away out of spite."

Distraught, she drove herself to the closest skeet-shooting range and fired over and over to calm her nerves. She missed so many of them that it made her cry, not because she cared about being good at shooting skeet, but because it brought back memories of skipping class with Maureen to shoot tin cans in the gully.

Maureen's marksmanship had always been scarily good. Felicia had been second-best, then and she was second-best, now. Why did it hurt now, but not before?

Through her tears she realized there were no clay shapes zipping through the sky and lowered her shotgun. The trap robot was flashing its Give permission for further credit? button at her, but she'd had enough.

She returned the hired shotgun and began the slow drive back to the Agency compound.

Her phone rang when she was half way. It was Bridget. Felicia pulled her car over to the side of the road, right beside a mechanic's workshop where illegal, petroleum-fuelled cars rusted on racks like neglected trophies.

"Hey Bridget," she said into the mouthpiece, too casually.

"Lici!" Bridget squeaked excitedly. "I'm in! It's me! I'm flying to Mum's place tonight to tell her the news. And to have one last meal before they—you know."

Felicia made herself laugh.

"I know."

"Can you come? I mean, you don't have to. If you're upset, you know."

She made herself laugh again, wondered why she was faking it. There were no cameras on her. Nobody to deduct points for impropriety. She could be angry, if she wanted. She could be petty.

"I'm not upset. I'll be there for sure. I might even see you at the megalo after your surgery. I've got some stuff to pick up from the office."

"Great. See you later!"

"Yeah. See you later."

After she hung up, she didn't start the car again. She sat in her seat with her belt on, thinking, If this was the crew cabin, I'd have to stay in this seat for nine months.

Nine months of weightlessness.

And then I'd be born. All over again. On a new planet.

The mechanic knocked on her window. She wound it down to speak to him. His stubbled, middle-aged face was concerned.

His eyes were blue.

"You in trouble?" he asked.

Mission control, we have a problem.

"Yes," she said. She got out of the car. Her legs were trembling.

"What's wrong?"

She told him everything.

Hours later, sitting in the long grass to one side of the workshop, she spotted Mars on the horizon and pointed it out to him.

"So close," she sighed.

"Looks far to me," the mechanic said. "Let me get this straight. People can go to Mars, but first they've got to turn into a kind of robot?"

"Not a robot." Subtleties are lost on men like this. Men like my stupid brothers, just following their instincts like cattle or horses.
"Just using a different kind of fuel. So you don't need water or food. Or sex."

The mechanic gave a long, low whistle.

"No eating, no drinking, no sex? Why are you alive, then?"

Felicia blinked.

"To break boundaries," she said. "To forge a new destiny for the human race."

He laughed, a genuine laugh, not the imitation article that Felicia had given Bridget, and offered her a sip from a hip flask. It smelled like quality rum.

"It's wine, women, and song, isn't it?" he said. "Not weird women that don't eat, married to the stars."

"Actually, in Italian it's Bacco, tabacco e Venere, " Felicia said, picturing her grandfather, feeling teary. "Bacchus, tobacco, and Venus."

"So you've even got the planet wrong."

"Venus the Roman Goddess," she said, irritated. "Not the planet!"

"Hey, you're Italian?" he demanded, oblivious. "Me, too!"

They danced to old music in the dark, disturbing the crickets in the long grass, and because there were no cameras and nobody to deduct points for impropriety, they made love while Mars inched further and further from the horizon, following their instincts like cattle or horses, and when Felicia finally made it back to her car, she had to ring Maureen and tell her she was going to be very late for dinner.

Felicia walked out of the surgery with blood on her hands.

But it was only a little bit, and no accidents had occurred which might preclude Bridget from joining the Mars Settlement Mission.

I wouldn't do anything, she thought in a daze, putting her hands into the scourer. She stripped off her hat, mask, gown, and boot-covers while Bridget was wheeled away to the next stage of the procedure to have her nanobots injected.

Felicia wandered down squeaky blue corridors until she came to an automated door and emerged into the sun.

She felt more weightless than she ever had before.

I wouldn't.

Her feet were still touching the pavement. They would never be free of Earth. She would never go to Mars.

Felicia still felt she had been born again.

I am a good person. God knows we need dedicated physicians here on Earth.

She took her first steps in a new world.

This Is as I Wish to be Restored

Christie Yant
| 2106 words

Every night I come home and I drink. I trade away the hope, the guilt, the fear, even the love—I think it's love, crazy as it seems. I trade them for oblivion, because otherwise I won't sleep at all. I drink until there's no life left in me, until I'm able to forget for just a little while the chrome vessel in the corner and what's at stake. Sometimes I hope that I'll dream of her. Sometimes I'm afraid that I will.

I have two things that belonged to her. The first is a photograph, taken at a party in what looks like a hotel. Her hair is dyed red—it doesn't quite suit her, so you know it isn't hers, like an unexpected note in a melody where you thought you knew where it was going and then it went sharp. She's holding a glass of something pink and bubbly. Maybe it's her birthday. If so, it's probably her twenty-eighth. She's laughing.

She was really young to be a client. Especially back then; most of the people who thought about life extension were retirees. Mortality was very much on their minds, and they'd had a lifetime to accumulate their savings—suspension was expensive. I wonder where she got the money. Her file doesn't say.

So in this picture she's laughing. She's seated, supporting herself with one hand braced against the carpeted floor. Her head is thrown back and her back is arched, and she's just the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. There are other people around her, behind her, just smiling blurs holding drinks, but you get the feeling that she's the reason they're smiling. She's the star they're all in orbit around. Like me. I fell into her orbit years ago and can't break free.

The picture moves with me through my bleak basement apartment, from room to room—sometimes it turns up on top of the half-size refrigerator, sometimes absent-mindedly left on a shelf in the medicine cabinet where I discover it again later and take it with me to the bedroom. I've found it between the sofa cushions at least half-a-dozen times. She follows me, or I follow her—it's been a lifetime since she smiled that smile, and I'm still completely, utterly taken.

The one place it never goes is on the dewar in the corner. That would just be too macabre, considering.

This is the only photograph she left. I often wonder what it was about this moment, this time in her life, that she could have looked ahead and known that this was as good as it gets. In this picture the cancer's already killing her, she just doesn't know it.

She died less than a year later. Pancreatic cancer. It's in her file.

I was given her file four years after I started with the company, in a crumbling box of data that needed to be digitized.

Those poor bastards, they had no idea what would happen to them fifty or a hundred years on. I wondered at the time whether they might have changed their minds about being cryopreserved at all. Probably not—they were in the immortality business, like we are. They would have paid any price.

"All early conversion cases," my boss said. "We don't know what's really there anymore. The risk of fracturing was high in those days."

I've seen the results of fracturing. It's not pretty. The early full-body cases were bad, which was one of the reasons they went to neuro in the first place. The splits in the elbows, the back of the knees, the buttocks, the groin—anywhere there's a fatty fold, the frozen flesh split wide open. When they realized it was happening, and that there was almost no chance of a full-body patient getting out of it without severe damage, they were all converted to neuros. The procedure is executed with a power saw.

I flipped through the files, brittle and yellowed with age. The metal prongs that held the files together had rusted, and some of them snapped off when I tried to free the pages for scanning.

Her file was near the end. I scanned it and put it back in the box with the others to be destroyed. I didn't even really think about why I went back for it. I just wanted to see her smile again.

The other thing I have of hers is a note— hand-written, on a three-by-three-inch faded yellow square. The writing runs across it at a diagonal. She wrote it with a fountain pen; I can tell by the way the width varies in the strokes. They are bold strokes, no-nonsense strokes. The ink is a whimsical green. Was that important to her? This was her last message to anyone who mattered.

There is a small stain at the bottom of the paper now, a droplet of liquid that the ink bled into and spread like lichen. Brandy, if it was from five years ago; whiskey if it was more recent. I've had this file for a long time. I can't read it now, not really, not in the state I'm in. It swims in front of me through a bourbon haze. But I know what it says.

This is as I wish to be restored.

Her wishes were clear, written there in green ink, spattered and smeared from my ministrations, and that's what keeps me up at night, keeps me drinking. What would she want me to do? The note is all I have of her, aside from the picture, and the file, and the file says nothing.

That's not strictly true. It's just all I know of her. I have all of her. All that's left, anyway.

From what I've read, her actual last words were nothing to write home about. She wanted her cat looked after. She wanted water, and was cold. That's pretty normal. "Cover my feet," she said to the nurse. "I'd like a drink of water," she said. "My mouth is so dry." Usually there is no wisdom imparted, no grand finale—we're cold, and we want to sleep. It was no different for her.

Her final moments were uneventful, if you discount the cadre of specialists outside her door. It was after she died that things got serious.

That was all a very long time ago.

When the money ran out and it became clear that we couldn't sustain them all, we had to decide which patients we couldn't save. I'd been with the company for the better part of a decade by then. I remember Melanie breaking down in tears during the board meeting, and Bill having to excuse himself to be sick in the restroom. This was a failure that we took personally, so personally that for a while I was spending nights taking calls from colleagues and talking them out of suicide. You can see why they would consider it—it would have been a poetic kind of atonement. Generations of patients had placed their lives in our hands, and we'd failed them.

The earliest patients had the lowest probability of success, due to the imperfect vitrification processes they used in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Eighty-three early patients were selected, their polished chrome dewars stacked against a cinder block wall and their data files updated. Distant descendents were tracked down and contacted, most of whom neither knew nor cared that they had an ancestor in suspension and weren't much interested in the disposition of their remains.

She never had children, never got married. There was no one to call, and no one to care that the count had changed by one when I turned them over for disposal.

The unit is fairly easy to maintain. The temperature isn't as well regulated as I'd like, and I can't get it as cold as we had at the facility, but I do what I can.

Three years ago last August I nearly lost her to a storm that kept me away from home longer than expected. In my mind I could see the sweating canister as the temperature climbed, I could see that crimson hair hanging in lank wet strands, while decomposition set it—autolysis, cell rupture, her skin blistering, slippage, irreversible damage—everything we as mortal beings fear and everything that we had protected her from for the better part of a century.

And her face, while achingly beautiful, was not the worst of it. If her brain began to thaw, what part of her would be lost first? Language skills? Motor function? Impulse control? Memory? I could imagine her life as a map, traced in sepia on immaculate folds of gray matter: the roads, waterways, borders, and landmarks of her heart erased one ruptured cell at a time. I couldn't eat, couldn't sleep. I had to get to her and stop it.

I nearly knocked the basement door off its hinges, my heart pounding like a hammer, but there she was—enclosed, sealed, regulated, cold. Liquid nitrogen levels low but not dry. Cold enough. If I had been another six hours it might have been too late.

That was the moment, knowing that I'd almost lost her. I could no longer pretend that I could store her here forever. I had to start planning for her revival.

The next morning I came to on the floor, empty bottle just out of reach, my head pounding and my gut in revolt. When I opened my eyes in the half-light there was a face in front of me, like I'd woken in a bed beside someone meant to be there, and in my half-conscious state I thought it was her. I reached out to touch her, and my fingers struck the hard, cold steel of the dewar.

I haven't traveled since.

I bought a green pen. I wrote the words over and over again in a notebook that I used for nothing else, and I carried the picture of the laughing girl from room to room as I thought about what it meant to revive her.

I practiced until I couldn't tell the difference between her handwriting and my own. I try to put myself in her place—young, unafraid, confident that the future will be better, brighter, and that she will be welcomed there. I write the words and for the six seconds that it takes I think I can feel what she felt in those moments. The stroke across the T is emphatic; the flourish on the d is full of anticipation of a day when all of her dreams will come true.

They've been working backward, last-infirst-out. The synthetics are good, I've seen them. Like Lassiter. He was a neuro suspended not too long after her—thirty years, maybe—and he's taken to it fine. Everything about her that matters is still there. The memory of her first kiss, her last goodbye, all of the events that made her or broke her. All of the things that made her smile. What she really wanted, I tell myself, was to come back.

I'll probably be fired. Who am I kidding? I'll definitely be fired. But once they know I have her, they'll have to do it, won't they? We don't talk much about what happened all those years ago. When we do, we refer to it as the Crisis, and we don't look each other in the eye. If they know that she's still here, and that they can bring her back, they won't have a choice. And they can't have me arrested, not when they would have destroyed her. If we believe our own marketing material, I stopped them from committing murder.

I comfort myself with this thought and the last of the bourbon. I've laid in a bottle of something pink and bubbly. It seemed like the right kind of welcome. Whether or not she'll be able to taste it is another matter.

Tomorrow. Tonight I'll pass out like I have every night, with her picture nearby and her words echoing in my head.

It made about as much sense as wishing on a star. It could never be done. People who had never even heard of a stem cell thought we'd grow them brand new bodies just like their old one. We're not going to grow anencephalic clones in tanks and age them to their twenties. That's not how revival works. It's not how it's ever going to work.

Her future was a place, and I am a native of it. I know the terrain; I know the weather. And I know that this isn't the future she wanted. This isn't what she meant.

This is as I wish to be restored.

It was a naïve hope on her part. I have a lot of hopes of my own, equally naïve. But the main one, the one that I cling to as consciousness fades away with her picture pressed against my heart, is this:

I hope that she forgives me.

The Problem with Reproducible Bugs

Marie DesJardin
| 2944 words

Reproducible bug: A failure in a program that can be reliably produced by repeating the same series of steps; useful as an aid in diagnosing a problem.

"Vince? Vince?"

Vincent fluttered his eyes. They seemed oddly heavy, gummed together.

"It's Lauren. Can you hear me?"

His eyes parted, and he winced. Light stabbed him like knives. He groaned, reaching up a hand. "Oh, my head."

"Thank God you're awake. I was getting worried."

Vince blinked at her. Something was flapping near his wrist, where he had reached up to shield his eyes. "What's this?"

"IV drip."

"Where am I?"

"Hospital."

Vince forced himself to focus. Lauren sat in a plastic chair near the IV stand. Her fresh young face and luxurious dark hair clashed with the sterile surroundings. Vincent, on the other hand, knew he was a perfect match. Age aside, there was his terminal rot—

Angrily, he shoved the thought aside. "What happened?"

"I found you on the floor of the lab, again."

Vince's head felt about to split. "What do you mean, 'again'?"

Lauren hesitated. "What do you last remember?"

Thinking was hard, like trying to penetrate a white mist. "I was reading."

"Where?"

"In bed, as usual. I always catch up with my journals in the evening."

Lauren nodded, but seemed as ill at ease as before. "And do you remember what day that was?"

Vince's anger returned. "Of course I do. It was last night—Friday."

Lauren nodded thoughtfully, almost sadly. "I'll get the doctor."

Vince caught her wrist. "What's wrong?"

Lauren hesitated. "I shouldn't be the one to tell you."

"Tell me what? "

Lauren sighed. "This isn't the first time you were hurt."

"Hurt." Vince stared at her. He'd assumed his collapse was due to his progressing malady. Even as he lay, he could feel his heart skipping beats. But why then would his lab assistant look so strange?

"I found you Monday morning, passed out on the floor of the lab. You had a severe concussion."

Vince frowned. "Monday..." Had he been lying there all weekend?

"When you woke up, the last thing you remembered was reading in bed Friday night."

"I don't remember our having that conversation."

"I told you this was the second time you were hurt. That was Monday. Today is Wednesday afternoon. Earlier this morning I found you out cold on the lab floor. You'd suffered another concussion in almost the exact same spot. Each incident knocked out your short-term memories. Those less than forty-eight hours old are stored differently from long-term memories. All those memories are gone."

Vince stared. "I have amnesia?"

"Consecutive amnesia. You've had it twice."

"I don't remember."

"I know."

"I know it sounds extreme," Lauren postulated, "but could someone be trying to kill you?"

Vince snorted in disgust and sipped his tea. This was the thing he liked most about his home—this deck, built to overlook the pine forest that surrounded his little scrap of yard. The sunshine poured brightly over the cushioned chairs and potted plants—wooden tubs of petunias that the housekeeper kept up.

"No one's trying to kill me." Vince breathed in the restorative vapor of the pines. Thank God they'd released him; how could anyone get well in a hospital?

"What else could it be?" Lauren persisted. "Two concussions, each time when you're alone in the lab. Doesn't that sound suspicious to you?"

"Why would someone attack me? You saw for yourself that nothing had been touched." His files were Vince's only real concern— those and his personal lab. But the files were in order, and the secret door had not been forced—not that Vince could actually try it with Lauren in the room. However, since the experiment would be of limited use to anyone without his data, Vince was fairly certain that no intruder had been present. He'd have to wait until he was out of Lauren's company to make a complete investigation. But their drive-by on his way home this morning had alleviated the worst of his fears.

Lauren lifted her tea. "Dr. Chowdry won't be pleased with me for taking you there. You aren't supposed to go back to work until Monday."

"Oh, pooh on Dr. Chowdry. I'm a bona fide curmudgeon, my dear. I break the rules as I please."

"Not where your health is concerned."

"Pish! My cardiomyopathy was hardly affected by my recent... bout."

"But your head was. Vince, you suffered two severe concussions, two days apart. You have to let that heal—particularly as we don't know what caused it."

Vince narrowed his eyes. "The timing is peculiar...."

" I think so. You were hit two days apart at the precise interval needed to knock out your recent memories and make a contiguous gap."

"My Wednesday injury knocked out my memories back to Monday—"

"And your Monday memories were knocked out back to Friday." Lauren shook her head. "Vince, I can't see how you can't take this seriously!"

"Maybe it's because I'm older and don't panic as easily."

"Maybe it's because you're working against the clock, and would prefer to finish your research rather than explore what you consider to be a side issue."

Vince looked away.

Lauren softened her tone. "I'm sorry. We never talk about it, do we? But I've seen the changes in you this last year. Your... determination."

Vince set his jaw. "How I arrange my exit from this world is none of your concern."

"I agree. That's why I haven't said anything. But... I am concerned. You're brilliant, Vince. I hate to see you so fixated on going out with a bang."

"Perhaps you'll understand better when you develop your own terminal illness. You can compare your altered behavior patterns to mine."

"Spoken like a true scientist."

"That's what I am."

"I know, Vince."

"If it weren't for the shortsightedness of the board—"

"I know."

"—we'd be doing a lot more interesting research right now!"

Lauren patted his wrist. "Dr. Tungsten had a point about all the potential lawsuits. The university can't afford even one."

"We use student volunteers all the time."

"Not for experiments that are guaranteed to destroy their brains. I mean, college students are reckless, but they're not that reckless."

Vince snorted.

Lauren set aside her tea. "I should let you rest."

"I won't need my brain when I'm dead, thank you."

Lauren petted his arm, surprising him. He must look like hell; she'd never been this demonstrative before. "You do solid, consistently innovative work. It's a pleasure being associated with you."

"For as long as my brain should last."

"For as long as it lasts."

His concussion forced Vincent to agree that some time off was probably to his benefit. He got woozy moving about the kitchen; trying to read only intensified his headache. All that day and the next, Vince talked soothingly to himself: he had noticed no obvious tampering with his work, Lauren hadn't discovered anything out of place, the security footage didn't reveal anyone violating the integrity of the lab. Much as he hated it, he really did need this time to recover.

Friday was better than Thursday, and by the time Friday evening rolled around—about the time Lauren left for her regular aerobics class—Vince decided it was time for a little more unauthorized snooping.

He got into the building easily; the guards wouldn't lock up until eight. As on any other college campus, the students had deserted en masse to celebrate the weekend. He got into the lab without anyone who would recognize him seeing him.

He shut the solid door behind him and leaned against it, more blown than usual by his short walk from the elevator. The metal of the door was cold, the hum of the air-conditioning system a welcome murmur in the background. This was his place. Here had been the happiest years of his life, probing the mysteries of the human mind. In these coolers lurked his many specimens, the reagents and radioactive chemicals used to study them. In these files were crammed the lauded studies of his published work.

He passed them by. Twelve years ago, when this facility was new, he had been rather good friends with the architect. She had built for him his own special lab, "Somewhere I can muck about and my research students won't." It was locked on the outside by a catch hidden behind the largest refrigerator on the rear wall. He now went directly toward this catch, giving the rest of the room only a cursory look. Scrubbed down, as usual. Lauren was an efficient lab manager.

His fingers pressed the plate designed to recognize his fingerprints only. With a click, the whole panel of the wall swung open, revealing another room beyond.

Instantly Vince could see that this had been the scene of the action. The light was on, for one thing. The rat cage along the rear wall gaped empty. His grossly overpowered computer that compiled the data for his neural simulator was still running, the monitor displaying a slowly revolving vector of a brain. Even worse, the chair for the antiproton gun and pion detector had been sat in, the release arm tilted outward and the plastic straps for the mapping collar dangling free.

Quickly—as quickly as Vince could squeeze himself past the chair in the crowded space— he hurried to check the portable Penning trap mounted over the neural simulator. This is where he kept his treasure: a microscopic piece of pilfered antihydrogen ice. In fact, all the devices in his hideaway had caused him a world of trouble to obtain, acting as he did without official authorization. No one who had any designs on his project would have left them unstolen. Antihydrogen could not be legally obtained anywhere, and the computer was simply too tempting to pass up.

Rapidly, he checked the readouts on the equipment, then sagged with relief. Everything read green—everything he could instantly check, that is. He intended to run a full diagnostic, of course, but the basic setup appeared in order. Nothing that was supposed to be here was missing. It was as if someone had been running a scan, then bolted suddenly for the door.

Vince's heart thumped irregularly. In view of the evidence, the only likely person to have been running a scan was himself. Had he perhaps had a seizure during the process? Isn't that why he'd designed the door to be opened with a push—so he could stagger out in case of emergency? He must have fallen as soon as he'd reached the outer lab; didn't Lauren say she had found him near the big refrigerator? He must have bumped his head going down. Yet the tests at the hospital showed no significant deterioration in his heart condition, nothing to indicate an attack had occurred. It was terribly puzzling.

Uneasily, he clicked off the power to the neural mapping apparatus. Its long period of being on, despite the air conditioning, made the room unpleasantly warm. He felt sweat beading on his brow as he turned to the computer.

His first impression had been correct: the display was showing a human brain. A partially mapped human brain. Two slices, specifically—the result of two separate mapping sessions. The brain was about 2 percent mapped. Below the image was the name of the subject: Vincent Barnaby.

Vince rotated the mapping chair so he could sink into it. He had begun mapping himself. Sometime during those missing days, he had collected enough data that he'd felt confident enough to proceed. Despite the steady deterioration from his illness, he wouldn't have initiated such a step without a reasonable hope of its success.

Steadying himself, he saved the precious file—he'd subject himself to no more DNA damage than he could help—then opened his journal. As he'd suspected, there were several new entries—entries he had no memory of making. Perhaps these would hold the key.

Saturday/1st: Completed brain map of subject rat. Little beast got away before I could resecure him. Leaving his cage open in hopes he'll come home; must have him back to study the composition of his brain post-procedure. If the peanut butter crackers fail, I'll get a live trap.

Sunday/2nd: Completed analysis of brain scan. Gorgeous! Could not imagine a more perfect rendition. Neural stimulator responds to input beautifully. Must be honest: I haven't time to waste. In lieu of rat, why not move on to subject number two? I've been waiting for this for months. Intend to start with the temporal lobe. Program ready. Can hardly keep my hands still. I wish Eleanor were here to share this with me.

Wednesday/5th: Brain bump on Monday threw me off schedule. What happened—did I trip over that stupid rat, trying to catch him? No matter. First scan looks very encouraging. Running full diagnostic to verify integrity of setup. If everything checks out, will proceed with scan number two.

Thursday/6th: System checks out. Proceeding with second scan: forty-minute duration, starting 2 A.M.

And that was all. Sometime between the scan's end and the start of business Friday morning, Vince had suffered another concussion. Was the rat to blame after all? Wouldn't that be ironic, to have the most significant recent breakthrough in science impeded by a cantankerous test subject?

Letting his speculations go, Vince pulled up the three scan entries. They did look beautiful. And he'd already verified the integrity of the first two scans earlier, or he wouldn't have proceeded with the new scan on Thursday.

Still, prudence dictated that he check the setup for flaws. If there was a short in the system—something shocking him, perhaps, or... Vince couldn't imagine what it might be. For that very reason, a full diagnostic was imperative.

He left the system running it and took himself home. He was sweating profusely, and not just from the warmth of the room. His few hours of moving about had so exhausted him that he could barely drive. Trembling from actual weakness, he fell into bed and entered a long, heavy sleep.

He woke with a savage headache. It took him longer than usual to get going in the morning—lots more tea taken on the back deck, before he felt ready to drive into the lab. It worried him, coming in during the day. Usually the place was deserted on weekends, but occasionally Lauren or one of the research students would come in to continue one of their longer procedures. He almost sneaked up the hall—he was a little too unsteady to do it properly—and peeked through the iron mesh window that was set into the outer lab door. No one.

Five minutes later he was back in his secret lab, viewing the results of the diagnostic. The system was working perfectly. The flutter in his stomach that Vince had been attributing to nausea he now attributed to nerves. For he was going to do a third scan; he'd known it ever since he saw the beauty of those first two scans. His brain was being mapped to machine, bit by bit. Unfortunately, his organic brain was being destroyed at the same rate. It would take a while for the DNA damage to manifest, but it surely would. With the procedure now begun, Vince had set himself another uncompromising clock. Either his heart or the scans would kill him; Vince could only hope that he could complete this project before either event occurred.

He set the machine for the new parameters. With a whine of servos, the antiproton gun swung around to the side of the chair. Vince swallowed. Easing himself into the chair, he drew the metal collar of the pion detector around his neck, then fastened the stabilizing straps.

The concept was fairly straightforward. An ultraviolet laser stripped the antiprotons off the speck of antihydrogen ice. Magnetic fields guided the particles to an accelerator in a robot arm aimed at the subject's brain. The head was held immobile in the center of a large pion detector, which looked like a vampire collar on steroids.

The trick was to get a very tight, monochromatic beam of antiprotons to penetrate the exact distance into the brain before annihilating with the brain's protons and producing pions. The charged pions were picked up by the oversized collar of the detector that almost completely enclosed the subject's head, allowing it to map the brain's density down to the synapse level. The strength of every connection to every neuron was then copied into the neural simulator. The resulting image would, in effect, be him. With the right extensionals, Vince might be able to carry on his research, displaying himself in machine form as public proof of its success. Let Director Fred Tungsten try to block his efforts then!

Vince heard a series of whirs as the antiproton gun aligned itself to resume the scan. Then nothing. No noise, no indication that a scan was even in progress, save for the steady, almost undetectable motion of the robot arm moving the antiproton gun slowly down the side of his head. The antiproton beam didn't hurt; there was no heat, no discernible damage. Just the constriction of the collar that forcibly held him still for forty-five minutes.

Suddenly the collar clicked open. The scan had completed. Vince reached up to undo the straps that had held his head steady, even as the robot arm began moving the antiproton gun back to the start position.

The start position. In a flash, Vince saw it all—saw it with the helpless clarity of someone watching their locked car door slam shut just after noticing that they'd left their keys on the front seat. He'd programmed the cycle himself; at the end of the scan, the gun returned to the start position—the center of the collar, the place where Vince's head now was. Which must be precisely the spot needed to knock out his short-term memory.

Vince clawed frantically at the straps as the metal arm swooped straight for his forehead. This was how it must have occurred twice before, with him staggering dazed afterward into the main laboratory, the panel closing automatically behind him.

No rat, no seizure, no sabotage. Just the damn reset cycle.

He released the straps just as the blow struck home. As pain exploded behind his eyes and the world dimmed, Vince frantically hoped that, among his other checks, he'd remember to reprogram that reset cycle the next time around.

Just Like Grandma Used to Make

Brenta Blevins
| 900 words

Jackie lowered her face to peer into the printer. Steam rolled out of the machine's interior, buffeting her cheeks. She inhaled deeply, smelling a sweet, hot scent. Cinnamon? Her mind leapt back to memories of the happy holidays she'd known growing up: the excitement of going to see Grandma, the once-ayear foods, the family gathering, the chill in the air. Back in the days of fossil fuels. Back when food was something that grew, and was not something licensed and patented.

Jackie breathed in again. Cinnamon, definitely. She remembered the way her grandmother had tied the brown sticks together with plaid ribbons and dangled them off wreaths as mere decoration.

Jackie's head jerked toward the door. No, little Benny hadn't disturbed the rolled towels she'd taped around the doorframe and windows. The curtains remained drawn. Again, she scanned the apartment for snitches. Phone, displays, tablets, Benny's toys—even the emergency contaminant detectors remained unplugged from the network.

She had to make this for Benny now, a gift to him before things got worse.

She turned up the holiday music, as if noise might somehow provide additional concealment. A musician sang about frightful weather and delightful fires. Jackie shook her head.

"Mo-ooo-om?" Benny whined from his room. "Isn't it time to eat yet?"

"Not yet." Jackie's back tightened with tension as the printer churned from side to side, shooting dough from its nozzles. Why had she chosen to prepare so much? With the green beans, mashed potatoes, gravy, and rolls that had already come off the printer, the small apartment had grown warmer. Jackie nudged the air conditioning up a little higher. An indulgence, but it was the holidays.

Benny trudged in, carrying the worn holiday paper book her mother had owned as a child. He reconnoitered the kitchen and the dining table, decorated not with live greens (who had those any more?) but with patterned napkins and an electronic "candle" she'd fabbed on the non-food-grade printer.

"Doesn't it smell good?" Jackie asked.

Sniffing, Benny's eyebrow rose in skepticism. It was far more redolent fare than the usual nutrient bars the printer coughed out.

He thrust the little picture book at her, running his fingertip over the image of Santa landing his sleigh near a red-and-white-striped pole. "What's this white stuff? Ash?" Jackie smiled. "It's snow."

Benny squinted at the pages.

"Remember we talked about snow? It's like rain... only it's ice, fluffy ice. It accumulates, so the ground's white...." Benny's expression grew more and more disbelieving. Santa Claus, he'd accepted. But snow? "We used to have it at the North Pole."

Benny wrinkled his nose. "In the Arc—Arctic Ocean?"

Sighing, Jackie nodded. As Benny returned to the book, she checked the printer cartridges' statuses. She'd had to go custom, buying printer chemicals on the black market. She couldn't have afforded this meal using corporate-controlled, patented recipes. She'd done her best to match her printer supplies, guessing at some of the molecular combinations to approximate her grandmother's meal. But she wasn't a food scientist, or a culinary inventor at a big conglomerate. Shivering as she recalled negotiating with the underground sellers, she reassured herself she'd been careful. She hadn't downloaded any recipes or wiki templates off the pirate sites. She hoped dinner would taste good, that Benny would enjoy the treats she'd grown up eating so he could have a taste of her childhood, before the heat, the storms, and the failed harvests—despite all the genetic modification of crops, the relocation of planting further and further north, and other efforts put forth by global agribusiness. Finally humanity had found other solutions.

Holding the edge of the humming printer, Jackie leaned over and saw the last glaze squirting onto the top of the pie.

"Benny?" Jackie's voice trembled, this time with familiar holiday anticipation. She swallowed hard. "Put your book down. It's time to sit at the table."

Benny sat in the dining chair.

Jackie grabbed some towels and carried the warm pie to the table, nestling it in the center of the other dishes.

"How do you eat it?"

Laughing, Jackie leaned over and scooped a steaming piece of pie onto Benny's plate. He tentatively jabbed his fork into the cinnamon speckled filling. He sniffed the forkful, then dropped it into the plate.

"Please try it," Jackie entreated. "For me? A present. I went to a lot of effort."

Benny stared at the pie as if it were medicine.

The door rattled, pounded against its frame.

Jackie and Benny jumped. Benny's eyes widened. Santa didn't knock.

"Culinary Enforcement Division!"

The food cops.

"Open up!"

Jackie stared at the door. She'd been so careful! But they were extra-vigilant for the holidays.

"We have you on suspicion of nutritional copyright violation!"

Benny squeaked. Jackie half-rose from the chair.

"Open up!" a cop bellowed.

Jackie reached for the pie.

The door erupted and black armored bodies rushed in.

"Put the food down!" The shout came muffled from behind a facemask.

Her fingers curved around the plate.

"Down, down, down!"

Benny sobbed. "Mom! Mom!"

"It's okay—"

Then she was falling, the pie sliding between her hands. She landed hard, under a heavy body. The pie exploded across the floor.

"Secure the evidence!"

Kneeing her back, the cop growled, "People like you keep me from my holiday."

Jackie sobbed. All she'd wanted was for Benny to have a holiday memory like she had. If he couldn't have one once-a-year, he'd at least have a once-in-a-lifetime holiday meal.

"Mom!" Benny pulled the fork between his quivering lips. "I tried it for you. It was— good!"

As the cop cuffed her, Jackie smiled through her tears at Benny. Maybe he wouldn't let this be a once-in-a-lifetime.

Racing Prejudice

John Frye III
| 865 words

I secluded myself before the race started; the stadium had enough anti-AI sentiment without my presence. Boos greeted my entrance, redoubling when the crowd saw I had refused my uniform, pinning the bib directly to my un-pigmented fibroplastic exterior. The other athletes were loosening their muscles with exaggerated motions. I also prepared my muscles—while I remained perfectly still. I would not disguise my nonhumanity with clothes, color, or phony gestures. The first human runners to need artificial legs did not waste their time with toes. My body was cleared by the IOC; that should be enough for the rest of mankind.

My relevant physical parts were all human tissue, grown from elite donors, regularly shown to not exceed the performance range expected of top athletes. I'd built this body from cells and scaffolds, then executed the demanding two-year training regimen required to earn my place in lane five of the men's fourhundred-meter sprint in the 2092 Olympics. Today was the last step of my dream of becoming the best runner in history.

I took my position, paused, then sprang forward when the light flashed.

The four-hundred-meter race cannot be won by sprinting full gasp from the start. You must know your opponents, their pace and kick. Then you must be faster for longer. Felix Mendoza in lane four, starting 7.76 meters behind me, was one of only three men to break forty-two seconds.

My best time was forty-one flat.

My initial pace put me about third for the first half of the race. All was going smoothly when Mendoza drew along side me, four meters ahead of where he should be. I ignored him; his overeagerness was not my problem.

I began my kick at 220 meters in the track's second turn. My legs pumped harder, my chest heaved, I earned each step.

At 250 meters, Mendoza was one meter ahead. I should be faster than him, but the smaller turn radius of his lane caused him to pull away.

At three hundred meters, the track straightened out, Mendoza 1.5 meters ahead, the finish line in sight.

At 320 meters, he was 1.6 meters ahead. He shouldn't have been able to manage this pace.

I began to doubt. What if Mendoza had been juicing? With everyone focused on me, the reverse cyborg who lowered itself to compete with humans, could some anti-AI faction within the IOC have ignored his drug tests? They stripped me raw searching for an excuse to disqualify me; would they circumvent their own regulations to ensure my defeat?

350 meters. Mendoza was a full two meters ahead. The others lagged behind, though Borg in lane two was making it less of a runaway. Mendoza had to be juiced to go so fast. Maybe Borg was too. Sacred rules were broken so that I, the rogue AI with the unnatural grey skin and stolen human muscles, would lose.

Unless I went faster.

I projected Mendoza's finish time, calculated the speed necessary to edge him out. My new pace was faster than the one-hundredmeter sprinters, faster than the fastest human ever recorded. The gap between Mendoza and me began to close.

Four steps later I realized my mistake. Mendoza's stride had become ragged; his pace had been a bluff. His adrenaline was gone; he'd stagger across the finish line after the others had passed. But that wasn't my problem.

My problem was my human leg muscles were betraying me. I had pushed them beyond the limits they could endure. Microtears formed in the striations, ripping larger with every step. If I were human, I might have screamed in agony. I had to drastically reduce my pace to prevent further ruptures.

With twenty meters left, I saw Borg passing me, and knew I had lost. I did salvage a third place finish. Mendoza collapsed over the line behind me, just fast enough to finish off the podium.

I walked over to help him up. When he saw my impassive grey face looming above him, his gasping turned into giddy laughter. His body's need for oxygen soon choked off his mirth, and he coughed as he accepted my hand. "We beat you," he said between breaths.

I still did not understand. "Why did you time your break so soon? You knew you could not win."

"But I knew you wouldn't either," he said, recovered enough to grin. "I knew there was some strategy that could defeat the racing machine you've built yourself into—and I was right." He laughed again, yet the sound bore no mockery or contempt. "You made a rookie mistake, that's all. Everyone does when they start racing. Don't worry, you'll learn." He picked himself up and waved to the cheering crowd. As he walked away, he said over his shoulder, "See you on the track."

A rookie mistake. My detractors will be pleased. There would be no more talk of the "robot dressed in flesh," the "soulless sprinting machine." Instead I'll be ridiculed, a one-off joke on the talk shows, forgotten in a week. Humans are fickle like that.

I, on the other hand, have four more years to dwell on the events of today; four more years to plan my next race. When that day comes, the crowds might laugh, or boo. But when I finally win, maybe, just maybe, they will cheer.

Technological Plateau

Michael Turton
| 4317 words

Christian Jensen scratched his pale cheek and studied the game path. He had done fifteen years of ecological engineering evaluation in the planetary survey and Contact business, four or five worlds a year, and had never seen a game path so large or so well-trodden as the gigantic highways slashing through the forest here on Sulla IV. Must be those monster eight-segmented grazers the air survey had imaged, ploughing through the forest like armored vehicles, he decided. That makes it an eightfold path, he thought, chortling softly to himself. The game trail cut through what he couldn't help thinking of as a jungle, although its riotous flora contained no Earth organisms. Still, the sessile, bushlike near-plants were predominantly green, though shot through with rainbows of other colors, mostly purples and reds. They came in a fantastic array of shapes, some suggesting familiar trees and bushes, others looking like pyramids, propellers, or conical hats. Fortunately for their survey work, the game path offered an excellent cross-section of the plateau's ecology, wide enough that their agrav 'bots could follow them with ease.

His eyes rapidly scanning the surfaces of the near-plants at his side, he called the camera over. It floated down the path, halting next to his shoulder. Jensen shrugged off his backpack, set the lens to macro and raised the camera's agrav tripod so it floated level with his face, then tilted it downward with a quick voice command. Bright and sharp, the gravlens system threw a thirty-two segment critter no bigger than his hand onto the screen in mottled green-orange relief. Thirtytwo segments! The design gods had gone crazy for powers of two on Sulla IV, but even so, anything over sixteen segments was rare. Excitedly, he asked the camera to query the satnet for an ID of the critter. Unidentifiable, its AI returned, automatically uploading the image and the creature's measurements to the data pool. If it really was unknown, perhaps he'd get to name it. Even after so many years on survey teams, he still got a kick out of naming new creatures.

It sat, motionless as a rock, on the bright green and purple... limb? frond? branch? leaf?... of the less mobile organism, several tiny, common eight-segmented critters pinned, or perhaps carried, beneath its twelve legs. Two grasping appendages and two mouth parts completed its allowance of sixteen limbs. This arrangement was a common body plan on Sulla IV. Even the bush (he idly counted as the camera captured images) originally had sixteen branches with 128 fronds, each composed of 256 broad segments. Damage from parasites and weather had reduced those figures considerably, however. Was the dash of red in its fronds a sign of disease? He reached out, frowning, for a closer inspection.

There was a rustling sound and his survey partner, Mukesh Balan, the expedition's exobiologist, huffed up behind him, his backpack stuffed with equipment and both hands holding full bags of samples. Short, and wiry, with licorice-colored skin and fine sharp features set off by the company-issued fatigues they both wore, he nodded at Jensen. "Don't worry, CJ, nothing around here is toxic. In fact, it's just like the initial surveys reported, almost everything on this plateau appears to be edible to humans. I've been randomly popping things in the analyzer for hours. Bing! All carbon-based, all edible. Prelims indicate—"

"—Medicinals too, right? That's really wonderful, Mike," Jensen replied sincerely. "I think our tiny little slice of the production rights is going to be huge for once." He grimaced, pointing. "You mean I can eat this leaf thing?""Well, it might have parasites we haven't found yet. But yeah, you can probably eat it."

"Tried any yet?"

"Actually, yes. You know those really common sixteen-part thingies with the blue segments and red-fringed legs? About ten centimeters long?"

"Sure, got about a thousand images of them already."

"I roasted a few for breakfast. Delicious; sweet, like fine shrimp."

"The colonization evaluation teams will love that," Jensen grunted absently, one eye on the camera.

"A couple of thousand kilometers of cool upland, high percentage of edibles, decent weather, good air, and no predators or apparently, interesting parasites. No technology anywhere, no agriculture, so no unContacted humans and thus, no political complications. Perfect." Balan set the bags down and grinned infectiously. "It's just like you said on the sled coming over here this morning: survey in paradise."

"Well... there's no whiskey for five hundred kilometers."

"True," Balan agreed amiably. "Still, it's a nice change from our usual contract." He bent and retrieved what looked like a gleaming magenta fruit from one of the bags at his feet. "Taste this, perfectly safe."

Jensen took it from his hand and eyed it suspiciously.

"Go on. Oh, I forgot. You New Zealanders only eat barbecued meat, right?"

"We do eat vegetables," Jensen protested, as he took a nibble, "provided they are grilled between slices of meat, the way all decent foods should be prepared." He smacked his lips. "That's excellent. Like... like... a mango or something!"

Balan nodded and grinned. "They'll be brawling in the streets to get in on this colonization program."

Jensen opened his mouth, about to reply, but his comlink interrupted him with a polite squeal. He yanked it out of his utility belt, his stubby fingers slipping across its buttons.

"Jensen here."

"Gomez. Everything ok?"

"We're both fine. Been munching our way around the local scenery."

"Just remember: you are what you eat." There was a long pause. Gomez's voice returned, leaden. "Look, there's something weird going on. You know Chidimbaram and her team have dropped camera traps all over the plateau, right?"

"Sure."

"She's reported that nothing's moving."

"Come again?"

"All the near-bugs and near-plants. Ceased activity. All across the plateau. Have you noticed that in your area?"

Balan nodded, looking around. "Come to think of it..."

Jensen glanced back at the creature on the frond. It hadn't moved. "Still life with earthquake?" he quipped.

They could hear the wry grin coloring Gomez' voice. "Something like that. She's thinking quake, or maybe a huge storm. The local organisms often know."

"Shit," replied Jensen, blowing out his breath. "Over the entire plateau? That's a couple million square klicks. Must be pretty big."

"Yes, that's right. So dig in tight, keep your handhelds nearby in case we have to retrieve you."

"I hear you."

"Also, thought you ought to know. That hot spot Siriyasa picked up north of the plateau rim turned out to be an old Earth evac ship. Crashed. Radioactives suggest it was fission powered. No records." For a moment Jensen pictured the passengers, escaping an Earth heated to death by humanity, navigating the p-space void in the most primitive FTL technology imaginable, only to die right on the rim of paradise. Poor bastards.

"Twenty-one degrees predicted tonight," Gomez added, breaking across his thoughts. "You'll be missing the beaches of Marius."

"Twenty-one? We should be drawing hazard pay or something," Jensen complained. "What's the temp in New Brundisium today?"

"Thirty-nine, as always, and the girls aren't wearing hardly anything."

"Shit. First a disaster, and now that. I'm signing off before you depress me any further." There was a laugh, and a click. Jensen turned to Balan, thinking—

Something flared behind his eyes.

Pain.

Discontinuity.

Blackout.

What was that? Jensen was on his back, limbs splayed listlessly about. He tried to roll over, failed. Groaning, his tongue thick and dry as if someone had stuffed a rag down his throat, he attempted to stagger to his feet, and again failed. There was a twenty-one gun salute going off in his cranium, over and over again. His chest ached, and a great weight lay across it, holding him down. His eyes opened, one atom at time. Darkness.

Am I blind? He blinked.

No, it was night. Overcast. He could barely make out the gray outlines of the local near-plants. Where was the rest of the survey team? He finally remembered who he'd just been talking to.

"Mike? Mike?" he called softly.

A voice, distant, probably from another galaxy. "Trouble in paradise, man." A hand, gently holding his shoulder. "Take it easy, you've been knocked out. Don't try to move."

"What... what the hell happened?" He lifted his hand, and realized that the weight on his chest was one of the emergency blankets. "What time is it?"

"Near dawn, I think," his friend replied soothingly. "Slowly, man, slowly. Feels like we've been out eight, maybe ten hours. Hard to say."

Jensen managed to sit up and miraculously, his brain started functioning again. He groped at his face, and wondered at the massive bruise he found there. Fell on my face, did I? "Thank all gods there are no predators up here, us lying here like that." He flexed his hands, peering out to find Balan crouched next to him, peering back ghostly in the darkness. He gingerly touched his solar plexus. "My chest is killing me, mate. What hit us?"

Balan shrugged. "My guess is some kind of freak electromagnetic effect." There was a crik of hard plastic hitting the groud as he tossed their comlinks in front of Jensen. "All the electronic equipment is knocked out. Gone. Comlinks are dead. I think we got a massive shock as well. My chest is sore and my head feels like someone stirred my brain with a spoon. Like our bodies got rebooted or something."

"Same as me, mate," Jensen thought for a minute. "It's probably not a freak storm," he offered, at last, compelling his dilatory tongue to obedience. "Must happen relatively regularly. The organisms appear to be evolved for it. I mean, they all stopped moving—" He sat straight up, suddenly remembering. "Wait, everything is dead? The camera!"

"Hope it's insured, Chris." Jensen felt, rather than saw, the other man's sympathetic look.

"That's a forty-two thousand rupee gravitylensed camera! I bought it myself!"

"It's a forty-two thousand rupee heap of plastic casing now," Balan replied with mock cheer, inclining his head down the trail. "Having crashed to the ground when its agrav unit failed. It's lying right over there. And that's not all that we had parked on an agrav unit." He paused, meaningfully.

"Oh shit," Jensen groaned. "We suspended all the camping gear over the river on the agrav sled."

"It's SOP," Balan spat, bitterly. "Keep things out of reach of local organisms. If nothing can fly, then park the agrav over a body of water. Perfectly safe."

"Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. How deep is the water there?"

"You'll need pearl divers to find our stuff now."

In spite of himself, Jensen chuckled. "Did you talk to Gomez?"

Balan looked at him expressionlessly.

"Right," Jensen continued, rubbing the top of his head vigorously as if to stimulate his brain. "No comlinks."

The two men stood, Balan supporting Jensen with one hand. It seemed that dawn, like the men, was groping uncertainly at the jungle. After a few minutes Sulla IV's sun, satisf ied with its fingerhold on the new day, hoisted itself above the jungle. Feeling the heat travel up his arms, Jensen realized he was cold. "It's freezing out here."

"Twenty-one cee. Not even close."

"Freezing," Jensen repeated peevishly. "On Marius it never falls below thirty-two."

Balan laughed. "On Second Home, it never gets above thirty-two, at least where I live." They both chuckled, then fell silent, watching the sunrise. The forest began coming to life as the sun played across the near-plants. Noises of scuttling and scurrying, whistling sounds, leaves rustling. Shapes flitting across the scenery.

"We'd better inventory our things," suggested Balan. His eyes widened at a string of alarming thumping sounds. "We need to get off this trail."

"Good idea." Jensen counted off on his fingers. "I don't have much. Concentrates, water, utility knife, jacket, emergency kit. Almost everything else I packed is electronic. GPS. Computer. Stunner. Transponders. Even my timepiece." He twisted— damn! That hurt! — and spotted his backpack lying on the trail a few yards from where he'd left it... yesterday. He frowned. And speaking of yesterday, why hadn't anyone come to pick us up? Base is only 500 klicks south of here, two hours by agrav sled. Images are GPS-tagged so they have our location. They should have been here hours ago. Suddenly it hit him. "Base got knocked out too," he breathed, aloud. "This thing was planetary." His skin prickled and a wave of cold flashed from abdomen to chest. "We're alone out here."

Balan bent to pick up his own pack. "Yes, it seems that way," he nodded, grunting, as his hands flailed about inside the bag. "Couple of liters of water, utility knife, emergency kit," he reported. "Less than you. Well," he said, indicating the jungle with a wry grin, "we won't lack for food."

Jensen inclined his head in agreement, his mouth twisting up in thought. " Siriyasa isn't due back for a couple more weeks," he murmured. "She was jumping back to Naeghara for more survey teams and equipment. She'll be back early though, the old man likes a fast turnaround, no expensive assets loitering in port. I'd say ten days, tops."

Balan shrugged wearily. "Survival situation. At least ten days. You know the drill. Water, fire... "

"... earth and air. Elemental, my dear Watson," finished Jensen. They gathered up their things, and moved off. He threw one last pained glance back at the glistening heap of parts that had been his camera.

"Damn!"

It took them a couple of hours of hiking to cover the dozen kilometers back to the insertion site where their agrav sled had disappeared. They slithered along the edge of the game trail, nerves ajangle, ready to spook at any moment, as if they were game animals themselves. The local fauna left them alone.

They halted where a landslide scarp had yanked out one side of the game path, widening the river bank to form a little lake over which they had parked their gear. Jensen glared over the edge as they huffed up and dropped their packs to rest. There was no sign of their belongings.

It's really true, he thought. Our stuff is gone. He felt his knees turn to dough, and reached out to the smaller man for support. Balan threw him a sympathetic look.

"Ten, twelve days, man. We can do it." He turned, waving a hand to the north. "I've been thinking. Looking at what's happened to us, it's pretty clear what must have happened to that Earth ship way up yonder."

"Right. They must have encountered that electromagnetic effect," Jensen nodded, rubbing his cheek. "And then—"

"Imagine it. They break orbit, enter the atmosphere—"

"—And WHAM! suddenly every system on the ship fails. A minute later they're a crash site."

"Or maybe they landed, set up camp—"

"—And WHAM! every system on the ship fails. Reactor melts when cooling system fails, radiation burns 'em down. But they couldn't run away—"

"—Because they were unconscious," continued Balan. "For hours. Those who didn't die right away, at least. Remember how much our chests hurt? Heart attacks killed the weak, and then everyone got a lethal dose of radiation anyway."

"Right. So they got all the way to paradise, and then died."

"The primary form of communication between gods and men," intoned Balan, eyes glinting, "is historical irony."

"Heh." Jensen gave a wry smile. "I think I am going to have a seat over there and watch the day roll by. Got any more of those purple mango things?" The two men clambered down a bit, off the game trail, and lowered themselves onto the ground. It was a stunning day, Jensen realized. Below them, the weird shapes of the low-growing near-plants formed an amphitheatre around the lake, and beyond the lake the ground rose and fell in little hummocks studded with bushes, as far as the eye could see. Balan passed him a couple of fruits, and Jensen munched contentedly, gingerly exploring the bruises on his face.

"Sooner or later," remarked Balan as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, "we're going to have to bestir ourselves and find a place to camp for the night."

"I was just thinking about that." Jensen's finger reached out, traced the river that fed the lake. "Further down, there's a section with some shallow pools, I remember seeing. It's only a few klicks away. We can set up on one of the little spits of land there and string some of the metal stuff across the neck as noisemakers. Anything big enough to splash across the river would probably make enough noise to wake one of us." He shrugged. The second pair of appendages on all the common sixteen segmented creatures are prehensile, Jensen thought. And if they are safe for us to eat, our food is probably safe for them. "Should be safe from raiding animals," he argued aloud. "Though there don't seem to be any critters in that weight class, eh?"

Balan nodded, craned his neck. "Looks like our game path eventually meanders down there. What say we go reconnoiter?"

"Don't have anything else to do," Jensen answered with a sigh. They stood and slung their packs over their shoulders.

Forty minutes of brisk walking down the game trail brought them to a set of shallow pools that formed a gently falling, sparkling stairway in the river that appeared to run for several kilometers. The clear water formed braids that ran in the channels alongside them. In the pools flitted a host of flamboyant creatures in brilliant hues of red, purple, yellow, and green. Heaps of gray-white rock lined the edges of the pools and spilled across the channels.

"That's gorgeous," breathed Jensen. "They'll be making a park out of this for sure!"

"Best of all," said Balan, clapping him on the back, "the red ones are delicious. If only we had a way to catch them."

"Ha!" Jensen ejaculated. "Watch this." He set down his pack and sprung across a trio of channels until he was balancing on a large flat rock in front of a pool. "If we just move this rock here," he described, grunting as he did so, "and put a couple of these fat rocks right here and here... we can drain the pool and divert the water that would fill it." Jensen used the rock to scrape out a miniature ditch. The two men watched as the water ran out the gap, leaving the near-fish crammed into a shallow puddle. "Voila!" He spread a hand out, inviting. "You can just reach down and scoop them up."

"No kidding?" Balan hopped across to inspect his partner's work. "You're a genius."

Jensen beamed. "Go ahead, Mike." Obediently the shorter man put a hand in the pool and lifted out one of the near-fish, wriggling to get free. Composed of eight segments, it looked like a cross between a trilobite and a fish. "Water's cold," he commented as he gave it a twist that ripped it in half. He let its circulatory fluids drain into the river, then swished it around in one of the channels at his feet to clean it. "Have some lunch. The central pairs are good, but I wouldn't eat the cognitive organs. Haven't tested those." He handed a set of segments to Jensen, who popped one tentatively into his mouth.

"Not too bad," he pronounced. "Needs a sauce."

"... And barbecuing."

"Goes without saying," Jensen growled as the other man laughed. They caught several more of the creatures and feasted, standing in the stream. Entertainment was provided by the bright yellow near-fish preying violently on the red ones. "Hey!" Jensen started as realization dawned. "I thought there were no predators here."

"Evidently there are, in the water," Balan called, skipping back to the bank. "But survey found none on land. Camera traps didn't see any either. We're safe as long as we don't try swimming." He spun, checking the ground. "We're far enough from the game trail here, I think. We can string our makeshift warning bells on the fishing line in the emergency kits here, here, and here," he indicated several near-plants. "The emergency tents can go here." He looked up at Jenson. "Assuming nothing goes wrong, we can just park ourselves here until Siriyasa returns. The first place they'll look will be along this river."

"Works for me," agreed Jensen.

They went to work with practiced skill. In minutes Jensen had the tents sprouted, loud orange mushrooms that seemed to blend right into the local near-flora, while Balan disassembled the survival cooking equipment and hung it on the emergency wire between the game trail and the tents. "A nap is warranted, now. Doctor recommended, strictly for digestive purposes." Balan actually had an MD, though it was four decades out of date. "Me first."

"Also a doctor's recommendation?" Jensen inquired, archly. He laughed. "I'll stand guard." Jensen settled onto a large rock near the tent.

Time passed, uneventfully, for once. Sulla IV's sun was slumping towards the west when at last a suite of pounding and crashing sounds down the trail brought Balan out of the tent. Both men scrambled for their long survival knives. "What's that?"

"Out on the game trail," Jensen indicated with the tip of his knife, raising his voice over the noise. "Take a look?"

"Sure." Balan set off purposefully, Jensen following.

They crept up on the trail, pushing aside the near-plants for a better view. A few score meters away, they could see a troop of the large grazers of the plains, ambling at a snail's pace along the game trail, pushing over the near-plants and ripping out their fronds with their prehensile second pair of appendages. The first pair, as usual, acted as mouth parts that fed the near-plant chunks into the creature's prominent grinding mouth parts. Digestive juices dripped from their nightmarish mouths. The remaining two pairs of appendages formed trunk-like legs that flattened out at the bottom, clawless. The first two pairs of body segments were much smaller, the rearward segments enormous, painted in swaths of red. Jensen thought they looked like an old Earth ankylosaur crossed with a beetle, blown up to the size of a mastodon. He shuddered.

"Ugly bastards."

"Yes, but can they be hunted?" Balan hefted his knife in calculation.

"With just that knife! Something that big? You're insane!"

"Am I?" He stood. "They've never seen a predator before. I bet I can just walk right up to one and shove this right through whatever it uses for a braincase."

Jensen considered this for a moment. "I remember the survey said they come in two sexes and give birth to live young. They travel in herds. That suggests protective behaviors," he pointed out. "Predators are not the only thing that kill offspring. Sometimes own-species members do as well."

"Pessimist." Balan dismissed him. He turned and stepped deliberately out of the near-bushes and onto the game trail.

The effect was electric. The troop of big grazers looked up as one, dropping foliage everywhere. Jensen quickly counted more than twenty of the monsters. They could crush us like bugs, he thought. Balan took a step forward.

Like a herd of distorted water buffalo, the creatures, each easily more than twice as tall as the little man, shied away, backing down the trail. There was no question of their fear. Balan continued toward them, then broke into a run, knife flashing in his hand. The troop scattered, gigantic snails lumbering away in terror. The trailing animal halted, stolid, facing the human: a challenge. Jensen shot to his feet, knife in hand. "Wait—!"

The huge creature leaned forward to intersect the obnoxious biped's path toward its troop. It leaned, and leaned, grasping appendages extended, body tilted. Evidently it expected combat to be an affair of leverage. But it moved with dreamlike slowness, hours behind Balan's knife, which came slashing down on one of its forward segments, rending it in half, showering the man with fluids. The human danced away as the massive animal's lean became a topple. It crashed to the ground, legs twitching, mouth parts opening and closing. Balan spitted the other forward segment. Movement ceased.

The two men watched as the herd moved off, hissing, back down the game trail. Jensen moved to stand over the body of the grazer. "That was easy," he observed, impressed.

"Yes, I kind of thought it would be," Balan answered calmly, inspecting himself for wounds.

"You kind of thought it would be?"

"Considering the state of technology on this plateau."

"Technology? What technology? What are you talking about? There isn't any technology here!"

Balan turned to him, plucking a nearby frond to wipe the knife. "The forest itself is a technology, Chris," he explained patiently. "The whole plateau is a managed forest. The game trails were deliberately cleared, not made by animals. Why would those big grazing animals—so easy to kill!—come all the way up here, unless guided? What keeps their numbers under control in the absence of predators? The North American aborigines did the same thing in their forests, carving paths to bring in the buffalo from points further west. Those hummocks everywhere on this plateau—I'd bet my salary, if they ever pay us, that the soil is aerated and drained with stones or even ceramics underneath, classic Amazon terra prieta style. Did you notice how the fruit trees love them? The pools in the stream, with the rocks neatly arranged so they can be moved to drain or fill them, as necessary. The medicinal properties of the near-plants. The incredible ratio of fruit trees to ordinary trees. Everything edible, but no parasites to eat it. Whole ecologies of creatures missing—there's not a single mobile organism between the size of those big grazers and the size of your palm. Nothing flies, and there are no sizable scavengers. There must have been predators, we saw some in the river, remember? But something has removed or suppressed the creatures that might fill these niches. Even the temperatures fall between twenty-one and thirty, year round. I wonder if there are whole groups of near-plants, specially selected to manage the climate." Balan nodded at the forest in satisfaction at a job well done. "It's a paradise, all right, but a made paradise, made for minimal work and maximum return on effort." He shrugged. "They couldn't replicate their old electronic society. So they took another path."

Jensen sucked in his breath in awe, eyes widening. "They who?"

"The survivors of the crash up north." His gaze swept across the forest and down the river, searching. "Somewhere on this planet there are unContacted humans. Maybe they don't want to be found. But we're going to find them."

Jensen spun, suddenly realizing that around them, as if listening, but in fact waiting, the forest had gone still. He thought: just like last—

This Quiet Dust

Karl Bunker
| 5699 words

Illustrated by Kurt Huggins

If it had been human, if it had had a voice, perhaps it would have cried out. With shock, amazement, and with some fear, it might have made a sound, trembled, widened its eyes, quickened its heartbeat. In its own way, it did all those things. And it watched; shocked and amazed and afraid, it watched the object descend out of the sky.

Long and sleek, with three pairs of wings extending from its body, the small craft spiraled down. When it was only a few meters above the ground its wings flexed, extended, and caught the air in a way that pitted forward momentum against downward. It seemed to hang suspended for a moment as its landing struts reached out, and it touched down with the delicacy and grace of a bird.

Far above, grazing through the outer fringes of the solar system, was the small craft's mothership, the Kahutara. The Kahutara was on a voyage with no return. Mountains of matter had been consumed to bring it up to a small fraction of light speed, and it would never slow from that pace. Nothing was built into it to allow it to slow, to stop, to swallow up its momentum and come to rest. It followed a swaying trajectory into the galaxy, passing through a star system every few centuries. At each system the crew would come out of hibernation and explore. For this exploration they used the longboats, small craft that could speed ahead of the Kahutara and visit a planetary system in its path, studying one or more planets for days or weeks. The longboats could orbit, sometimes land on a planet's surface, gathering data as quickly as man and machine could manage. But after a painfully short time they would have to dart away, racing to catch up with their mothership.

The hundreds of individuals aboard the Kahutara had given their lives to the journey. Until the far-off day of their death, they would cycle in and out of hibernation, visiting star after star. All that they learned they transmitted back to Earth, but by this point in their travels any message that might have been sent in response was too faint for the Kahutara's receivers. They had no way of knowing if the vast treasure of information in their transmissions was being heard, or even if anyone was there to hear them. They were connected to what had once been their home world only by this ghostly filament of uncertain communication.

Henrick took a few steps away from the hatch of the longboat and stood, breathing deeply, savoring the air. The steady breeze ruff led his gray hair and blew his coverall tight against his tall, thin body. The longboat had landed in the center of a gently rolling prairie that was carpeted with ankle-high grassy vegetation. In one direction, under the rising sun, there were hills covered with taller, tree-like plants. To the north was a wandering stream. White clouds dotted a sapphire sky. Henrick turned to face into the warm sunlight. "Beautiful," he said.

He got down in a squat. In the patch of ground immediately around his feet, he quickly tallied a dozen different species of plant; beyond that he began to lose track of which ones he'd already counted. Behind him, he heard the three other members of the team unloading and setting up equipment. An autonomous rover was already trundling off over the uneven ground, and several flying drones had been released from the longboat while it was still in the air. Close beside Henrick, Emilie was setting up a multisensor, pushing its spiked tripod legs into the dirt and then working at its keyboard. She'd done this unnecessarily close to Henrick, and her hurried, decisive actions contrasted conspicuously with his inert posture.

Henrick stood up, wincing momentarily as his knees straightened. He set his com to broadcast to the team. "Still no sign of animal life on land or in the air?" he asked. Ursule and Kent answered with "no" through their coms, and a moment later Emilie muttered the same response. Still broadcasting, Henrick said, "I see structures on some of the plants that appear to release or receive pollen, but nothing that looks like it's there to encourage pollen transfer by insects." He switched off his com and scanned the landscape around him, finishing with his gaze on Emilie. "No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees, " he recited, raising his voice, "no fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds,—November!" With a smile he added, "Thomas Hood, eighteen-something-or-other."

Emilie's expression was like stone. "Henrick, we all have a great deal of work to do...."

"We have a thousand lifetimes worth of work to do, Emilie. A million lifetimes. A whole planet to study, and only a few days to do it in. So yes, you're quite right. I'd better get busy." He turned and started back toward the longboat. As he walked he thumbed commands into his wristband that instructed the servos to offload his pallet of tools and equipment and set it on the ground.

Some hours later, as Henrick was gathering samples, something caught his eye. A long-stemmed plant stood waist high in front of him, and near the top, just below a cluster of leaves, there was a gray, conical protuberance, about half a centimeter across the base. He reached out a finger to touch it, but as his hand approached, the little structure suddenly fell apart into powder, dropping down from the plant and drifting away on the breeze.

"That old man shouldn't have been put on this mission," Emilie was saying. "He's burned out at best, and at worst entering senile dementia. You can see in his attitude, in the things he says, that he doesn't take our work seriously. It's all a joke to him. He'd rather be sitting under a tree, chewing on a sprig of grass and reciting poetry."

Ursule spoke without looking up from the screen she was facing. "Emilie, Dr. Tarkowski is the most respected botanist in the whole of the Kahutara. And his data feed for this mission shows he's been doing excellent work so far."

"You mean he's managed to collect some samples while muttering 'Ode to an Earthworm' to himself?"

"I don't know that one," Henrick said, stepping through the open hatch into the main cabin of the longboat. "And in any case, there aren't any earthworms on this planet, so such an ode would be rather wasted, don't you think?"

"You're late, Henrick," Ursule said. "We've been waiting for you."

"My apologies." Henrick was looking down at his wristband, tapping out commands. "Has anyone else noticed these structures?" The display in the combination screen and tabletop that dominated the cabin was filled with an image. It showed a small, powdery cone, this one attached to the trunk of a tree.

"Henrick," Ursule began, "these meetings are supposed to adhere to a certain agenda—"

"Dust," Kent said from the far end of the table. "We've known since pre-orbit that this planet has a lot of carbon in its crust, mostly in the form of silicon carbide. Well, it turns out that much of that exists as wind-blown dust. The silicon carbide granules build up a static electrical charge as they're blown around by the wind." He began touching his own wristband, and other images were added to Henrick's on the tabletop. "Anyway, these little cones are lumps of carbon-rich dust, pulled into that configuration by their static charge. They're everywhere."

"They don't like being touched," Henrick said.

"Yes, I noticed that." Kent was young, but deep lines appeared on his face when he smiled, as he did now. "If you get too close, the electrostatic field around your body draws away the static charge that holds them together." He gestured, f lipping his hand palm-up. "At least that's what I assume is happening. Doing a full analysis and modeling will have to wait until we're back on the ship." He turned to Ursule. "As a matter of fact, this relates to my primary finding for this meeting...." He made a questioning expression.

"Please, continue," Ursule said.

"This dust," Kent said, "it's the source of the low-level radio noise we detected emanating from the surface. There are dozens of different basic types of dust granules, with varying mineral impurities in the silicon carbide. Each type has distinct electrostatic characteristics. Sometimes the static charge will redistribute itself across an array of granules with a series of microscopic sparks—hence the radio noise. There are many different types of interactions that occur between and within collections of dust granules. So far the computer has only been able to model some tentative approximations of the simpler interactions." He tapped at his wristband again, and the table screen became crowded with a series of images and pages of formulae. "In short, the aeolia of this world can be considered as a highly complex and dynamic system, and one that's quite unique in our experience."

"Aeolia?" Henrick asked.

"The portion of the regolith that's transported by air movement," Kent said. "From 'Aeolus,' the Greek god of the winds, I believe."

"Ah. Of course."

"Have you found any indication that this dust is related to the absence of non-aquatic animal life here?" Ursule asked.

"No, I don't see any explanation for that in the mineralogy. There's no reason to think the dust or the amount of carbon in the planet's crust would inhibit surface animal life."

"If there's a central puzzle to this planet, that's it," Ursule said. "The absence of animal life. That's what we should all be keeping in mind as we collect data. The surface plant life is diverse, and the sea life appears to be evolved well past the point where animal life on Earth started inhabiting dry land, though of course we don't know how universal that model is." She turned to Emilie. "Any theories, Emilie?"

"The partial pressure of O
2 here is only slightly above current Earth-normal," Emilie said. "It was much higher on Earth when the first land animals evolved. Maybe the relatively low oxygen here prevents the sea animals from making the evolutionary leap to air-breathing."

"Oh stuff and nonsense," Henrick said. "I refuse to believe that life is so timid or evolution so hesitant." Smiling, he flicked a glance in Emilie's direction. "Give me a minute and I'll think of a poem to that effect."

Toward noon of the next day, Henrick was sitting on a rock, rubbing at his left knee. A nearby movement caught his eye, but he saw it was only a branch swaying in the wind. He continued to stare at the branch for some time. "Enjoy the Spring of Love and Youth," he murmured. "To some good angel leave the rest; For Time will teach thee soon the truth, There are no birds in last year's nest!" He lifted his head and squinted into the sky. "Where are your birds, planet?" he said, his voice louder. "Where are your beasts of the earth, your fowl of the air? Don't you know that it's no good having all these plants, all this green life, without animals? You're a dead world without animals. Dead and empty and wasted." Dropping his eyes, he noticed that there was a cone of dust on a rock near the one he was sitting on. This cone was slanted somewhat, its apex pointed toward his face. Slowly he bent forward and reached out, bringing an extended finger toward the cone. When his fingertip was several centimeters away, the cone dispersed, its component dust disappearing in the steady breeze. "Ah," Henrick sighed. "I will show you fear in a handful of dust. That's T. S. Elliot, nineteen-something."

"Here's an interesting thing," Henrick said later, at the nightly team meeting. "I had a low-flying drone take a picture of me from overhead while I was collecting samples. Then I went through the picture looking for the little dust-cones. I found seven of them." On the table screen an image appeared, showing Henrick from above. Then circles appeared at seven locations within the image. "Here are blow-ups of the cones." The sections of the image within the circles expanded, each one zooming in on a central point. "Anyone notice anything?" He looked around the table, waiting a beat. "They're all pointed at me," he said. His face broke into a grin, and with his finger he traced several lines on the monitor screen, the lines converging on the image of himself. The picture on the table changed. "And here is our redoubtable Emilie, busily programming a rover I believe, photographed from the same height. Eight cones, all of them pointed at her." Again the image changed. "And lastly, here are several pictures of random patches of ground, with none of us in the vicinity; same altitude, same scope. I could only find one or two cones in each of these, and they were always pointing in nonintersecting directions."

There was silence for a time, and then Ursule spoke. "Kent—or Henrick—have either of you determined whether these cones have any internal structure or organization?"

Kent started to speak, hesitated, looking at Henrick, and then continued. "They, um, fall apart, whenever any significant mass comes close to them. The static charge holding them together..."

"They don't like being touched," Henrick said. "They're shy. They're afraid. Or rather, I think, it's afraid."

"Henrick," Ursule said, "what is it you're proposing?"

Henrick changed the on-screen image again. "With enough magnif ication, it appears that each one of these cones has an opening at its peak. They're small—small enough for a pinhole camera, for example. And according to videos I've made when they disperse, the amount of dust that blows away indicates that the cones are hollow."

"Henrick," Ursule said again, her voice hard. "What exactly—"

"I've been looking at Kent's data," Henrick said, "at the models he's made of dust-particle interactions. It's not my field, but the implications are clear when you look at them the right way." He tapped some controls on the table and a schematic animation appeared. "Watch. Here's a single dust particle, statically charged. This one happens to be a dipole, positive on one side and negative on the other. Now another particle comes along, a negative monopole. It attaches itself to the positive end of the larger first particle. Now another dipole, and it happens to attach its positive end to the negative end of the first dipole." He waved a hand as the animation continued to run. "And so on and so on. Different shapes of particles with different charges drift along and join the structure. As the clump grows, it occasionally becomes unstable and collapses into a new configuration, and that in turn affects what new particles can be drawn in and become a part of the nodule. The process continues, and the nodule grows, until eventually the static charges holding it all together bleed away into the air, and it collapses and blows away."

Henrick looked at Ursule, who was frowning down at the screen. "Anyway," he said, wiping the screen blank with a tap, "the point is that the unusual characteristics of the dust on this planet result in ongoing processes like that. As the dust is blown about by the wind, different configurations are constantly being created and destroyed, and some of those configurations are more stable than others. Kent's findings show that the dust particles exist predominantly in a fixed number of sizes, shapes and charges. This means that there are a fixed number of rules governing these interactions and the configurations that result, so the system is nonchaotic." He took a slow breath. "And finally, some of these configurations exhibit logic-gate behavior, and this results in dynamic structures comparable to the mathematical constructions known as cellular automata."

He paused again, this time looking down at the blank screen. "I propose," he said, putting exaggerated stress on the word, "that beginning in the distant past, out of the millions of configurations of charged granules that were created, configurations would eventually arise that were capable of dynamically sustaining themselves indefinitely."

Ursule's frown deepened. "Dynamically..." she said slowly.

"Indeed," Henrick answered. "That's the key word. I'm not talking about a lump of accreted dust becoming sandstone. I'm talking about a dynamic system that maintains itself by constantly cycling through changes. By drawing in needed material, using it, constantly reassembling itself at its fringes as its core loses energy and crumbles away. In other words, something analogous to life."

Emilie puffed out a breath through her nose. Kent said, "That's... a damned interesting theory, Henrick, but it seems rather a leap."

"Is that what you think the dust cones are?" Ursule asked. "Instances of these dynamically stable configurations?"

"No, not exactly," Henrick said. "You see, the thing about being analogous to life is that life evolves. There would be many different types of these dust-things at first. And all of them would be drawing on a finite supply of free, statically charged dust particles needed for their continued existence. That means there would be competition for resources, and the more complex and flexible... um... entities... would be at an advantage. There would be evolution, and that evolution must have begun billions of years ago."

"So where is the result of all this evolution?" Ursule said quickly. "Even if you're right, all there is to this dust-life are some little cones."

"No, those are all we see of it. All it allows us to see of it. And I expect that those will be gone soon, once it realizes we've become aware of them. I'm sure it can come up with more subtle ways to keep an eye on us." He leaned forward, putting both hands on the table. "This thing is watching us; that's clear. That means it's intelligent enough to be curious about us, to recognize that we are something out of the ordinary, and to want to observe us. That's the established minimum. At a maximum—who knows? We have no way of calculating the processing power or the intelligence of the total entity."

"You're saying 'it,'" Emilie said. "I thought you imagined these to be multiple creatures or entities, evolving through competition."

"Originally it must have been multiple entities. But we're not talking about biological life. The rules would be different for our dust. The individuals would have no skin, no bones, no fixed morphology. So there's no reason why multiple entities couldn't merge together. And once it learned to communicate by radio, it could exist as any number of discrete units, distributed all over the planet."

"Radio?" Kent said. "Oh... the radio noise from the static discharges."

"One man's noise is another man's signal," Henrick said. "Edward Ng, nineteen-something."

Several thousand kilometers away, on the shoreline of the planet's single continent, a small crustacean-like sea creature found itself stranded on a mudflat by the withdrawing tide. It was a female, and she carried a host of fertilized eggs in her body. Her species had evolved to scuttle the floor of coastal shallows, scavenging on dead plankton. They hadn't evolved to live out of the water, but an absence of water wasn't instantly fatal. This individual was familiar with the push and pull of small waves as she roamed the shallows, and on this day she was feeding at a place where the receding waves left her body exposed to the air for seconds at a time. Her instincts told her to retreat back to deeper water, but the feeding was good here, and she resisted the command of that instinct. This was not because the retreat-from-shallow-water instinct was weaker in her, nor because her hunger was greater. It was because, somewhere in her tiny proto-brain, there was something like courage: a resistance to fear and an attraction to new sensations. With no social group to compare herself to, she had no awareness of her own courage, any more than she was aware that half of her offspring would carry this tropism of bravery.

The waves came and went, and she fed, moving while her body was immersed, immobile under her own weight in the intervals between waves. Then there was an especially large wave that lifted her and carried her half a meter up the beach. There the wave dropped her, and after that there were no more waves. There would be no waves and no sea for her until the tide returned, hours later.

With her feeble awareness, she knew something was wrong. She could barely move without the sea's buoyancy, and there was no longer any water flowing over the patches of permeable skin that kept her blood oxygenated. She didn't know that she would probably die before the tide came in again, but she knew she was not in a good place, and she was afraid. She tried desperately to move, but her feeble limbs had almost no effect. Still she struggled, and over several minutes managed to shift herself a little way toward the sea. The probability of her survival was increasing.

Some meters away, on the dry sand, a particle of carbonaceous mineral settled to the ground. Soon another particle drifted by and was drawn in by the electrostatic attraction of the first. Another followed, and many more. The particles clustered, moving against one another, driven partly by the shifting dynamic of their own static charges and partly by the whisper-soft influences of the radio waves that shimmered across the surface of the planet. The nodule of black dust grew. In a few minutes it was an airy spherical shell several centimeters across, bristling and crackling under the influence of tens of thousands of volts of electrostatic charge. Then a thread anchoring this sphere to the ground parted, and it began to roll, pushed by the prevailing breeze. Seconds later it collided with the little crustacean, and the impact triggered a cascading release of pent-up static charge. The sphere flew apart with a shower of sparks and a loud crackle. A wisp of smoke rose from the crustacean, and she, with all her unborn eggs, was dead.

Henrick climbed up the ramp and through the hatch into the longboat's main cabin. It was early in the third day of the mission, and Emilie was the only one in the longboat. She sat at one of the small screens, monitoring a video feed from a flying drone. "Don't mind me," he said. "I just want to use the big screen."

A few minutes later he was leaning over the table, where an image showed a panoramic swath of countryside. He grunted thoughtfully, straightening his back. "When all at once I saw a crowd," he recited loudly. "A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees; Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. " A moment passed in silence, and then he turned to where Emilie was sitting at her console. "I'm sorry Emilie. I shouldn't tease you like that. But in fact there is something interesting here. Would you like to take a look?"

Emilie got up from her station without answering and stood at the table, looking down at the screen.

"This is a view from the peak of one of the small mountains east of here. I sent a rover up to take this picture from ground-level, looking down into the valley. It's quite a beautiful view, don't you think?"

"You didn't need to send a rover up a mountain to take a picture, Henrick. We have satellite and aerial images covering the whole planet."

"I thought the view from a mountain, from ground level and looking down into a valley, would be particularly interesting," Henrick answered. "And I was right; it's a spectacular image. Notice the variation in the colors and textures of the vegetation. The forest on the eastern and southern slopes, then the darker greens of the ground-hugging vines, blending into yellow grasslands on the southern slope, with the stream cutting through the meadow, the sunlight catching on the water..." Henrick stopped, running his hand over the back of his head and through his tangle of gray hair. He grinned, glancing briefly in Emilie's direction. "I do have a point here, Emilie, as difficult as that may be to believe." He tapped some controls on the table, and other images appeared on the screen, stacked in rows and columns. "These are all pictures of similar valleys, the pictures taken from similar angles and altitudes. The difference is that I used flying drones to take these, because they're all situated in places where there are no tall mountains overlooking these valleys. In other words, these pictures could only be taken from the air. Do you see the difference?"

Emily pondered the screen. "The vegetation is more uniform in all of these. The soil conditions, the microclimate, must be—"

"Exactly," Henrick said. "The vegetation is boring. And in several of these views, there are streams flowing down the hills, but you can barely make them out because they're overgrown by forest. No grassy meadow around the stream, no sunlight sparkling on the water..." He switched the screen back to the first image. "My wife... she died long ago, back on Earth, before the mission. She was a gardener. She loved growing things, and she had a real sense of esthetics, an eye for beautiful landscaping. I was always growing obscure plants so I could put them under a microscope, but she was the one who could really see plants. She could see the beauty of them, and she knew how to work with that beauty; which plants would look good against which others, how to use similarity, contrast, accent. She was always changing things around in our garden, always refining, always had plans for the next season." His voice became soft, barely audible. "My wife would have approved of this valley. She would have loved it."

Emilie stood looking at Henrick for a time, and then turned to go back to her work. "This first view is more beautiful because it was designed to be beautiful," Henrick said. "It was crafted and molded to be viewed from that particular vantage point; from that face of that mountain. It's a garden, designed and maintained by the dust. Indeed, the surface of this whole planet is a garden; parts of it are more deliberately designed that other parts, but it's all one garden."

"I've been mapping the radio noise coming from the surface," Kent said at the team meeting that evening. "The most active areas of the planet are the deserts to the south and east. I haven't been able to show that there's any information in the signals, but I did find an interesting anomaly. By any model I could come up with, the total energy of the radio waves appears to be more than can be accounted for by wind-generated electrostatics. There must be some other energy source."

"Interesting," said Henrick. "It hadn't occurred to me, but it makes sense. Computation takes energy, so it stands to reason that the dust would learn to use solar energy. It must do most of its thinking out on those deserts."

Ursule sighed. "But meanwhile, we haven't been able to find any evidence that this... sentient dust of yours even exists, Henrick. And your notion that it has some kind of control over all the plant life is—"

"Insupportable at this time," Henrick finished for her. "I agree. As is the notion of the sentient dust in the first place. In the time available to us, I don't think there's much chance at all of finding definitive supporting evidence."

"Then we'll just gather as much information as we can, and analyze it later," Ursule said. "We'll take samples—"

Henrick waved a hand impatiently. "Once any sample of dust is cut off from the world, from the rest of the entity, it will just be dust. Interesting dust perhaps, but just dust. The equivalent of a few neurons from a human brain. The most we can hope to prove back on the ship is that what I'm proposing is theoretically possible."

"Well then that's all we can do," Ursule said with finality. "We have all our other work to attend to. In particular, we need to focus on the question of the lack of nonaquatic animal life."

"Oh, that," said Henrick. "That's the dust, too. I'm sorry, I thought I'd made it clear that that was part of my hypothesis. You see, there aren't any land animals because the dust hasn't allowed any to evolve." He had been standing, but now he went to one of the chairs and sat, grimacing briefly as he did so. "The gravity here isn't agreeing with my knee," he said, rubbing his left knee with both hands. "I guess I'm due for another cartilage replacement. Or maybe I'm just getting too old for these missions. ... old and gray and full of sleep... " He looked up at the others with a fleeting smile. "Animals are very destructive," he said, facing Ursule. "Imagine that you're made of dust. Imagine the prospect of hordes of animals stomping around through your brain, crushing your eyes with a careless bump. Imagine the prospect of all that chaos and disruption in a world that you're used to having all to yourself." He waved in the direction of the table, as if to indicate the image that was no longer there. "And I'll bet it doesn't like the idea of animals interfering with its landscaping, with the way it's arranged the plant life in vistas like the one from the mountain." He slouched into his chair, his eyes half-closing. "When Isako was alive, when she had her garden, there was this groundhog that used to plague her year after year. It dug tunnels all over the property, ate the buds off of her phlox, her cornflowers, her black-eyed susans.... She'd go out in the morning and a whole flowerbed would be nothing but nipped-off stems. Of course she never considered trying to kill the thing; she was a very gentle woman...."

"Henrick," Ursule began, "we need you to—"

"Oh," Henrick interrupted, his eyes suddenly sharp. "That's another interesting thing I hadn't thought of. A very interesting thing indeed."

"What?"

"It hasn't killed us. It's aware of us, it's interested in us, it must recognize us as animal life, and yet it hasn't killed us. That really is very interesting."

"Killed us?" Emilie said. "How could it—"

"Fill our noses and mouths with dust, I imagine," Henrick said. "Or perhaps electrocute us, and probably there are other ways too. It's had hundreds of millions of years of practice in killing animals."

Ursule put a hand to her face and was silent for several seconds. "All right," she said finally. "On the chance that you're right, and there is a danger, from now on the ship stays sealed and uses its own atmosphere. Entry and exit by airlock only, and everyone off-vessel carries a full-mask respirator and air supply with them."

"I don't think it will change its mind," Henrick said. "It's fascinating to imagine what it must be thinking because of us—what a revelation and a shock the simple fact of our existence must be to it. And yet it adjusted to that shock; instead of just reacting in the way that would most obviously protect itself, it decided to let us live, so it could study us. You have to admire a mind like that."

It was the afternoon of the fourth day of the mission. "Henrick!" Ursule was shouting into her com. "Where the hell are you? You need to report back to the longboat. Now!"

"Please don't upset yourself, Ursule," Henrick's voice answered. "I'll be fine. If you would do me the favor of leaving behind the long-term survival supplies, I'll have a foodsynth, power, shelter. And with the radio I'll be able to transmit my findings to the Kahutara for as long as it's in range."

Emilie, standing beside Ursule in the longboat's cabin, spoke into her own wristband. "Henrick, please... you mustn't do this..." She pressed her lips together, her whole face tight.

"Ah, Emilie," Henrick said. "I'm afraid I must. We'll go no more a-roving, so late into the night.... Or do I mean that other one... Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill. It's time, Emilie. No more missions, no more planets for me. It's time for me to stay in one place and do something with what's left of my life."

"Henrick," Ursule said, "We don't have to lift off for another two hours. Let me just come talk to you."

"I'm some distance away," Henrick said. "I took a rover and one of the portable consoles. I've been using it to show images to the dust. It turns out I was wrong that it would stop manifesting the conical eye structures. There are dozens of them around me right now. It even lets me touch them."

"Damnit, Henrick..." Ursule's arm was trembling as she spoke into her wristband.

There was silence for a few seconds, and then Henrick's voice came back over the com. "You know, I didn't finish telling you about Isako and the groundhog. Every spring and summer she would curse that animal a hundred times over for the damage it did. But one day we found it dead, lying in front of Isako's gardening shed. A dog or something had attacked it. Isako—that was my wife you know—she knelt over the poor thing and cried and cried. Later she buried it in her garden and put a little stone shrine over it. For the rest of her life she planted the grave with phlox, cornflowers, black-eyed susans..." He paused, taking a slow breath. "It's so beautiful here, but it's wrong... it's wasted, it's dead without animals. Do you understand? There ought to be animals here."

"That's not for us—for you—to decide, Henrick," Ursule said.

"The dust will decide, but I'm going to do my damndest to convince it. Up to now it's just been reacting conservatively, only thinking about the best, easiest way to protect itself. It doesn't realize what it's giving up, what it's losing. It doesn't know how beautiful this world could be with butterflies, bees, birds, groundhogs..."

Two hours later, the longboat lifted off. Standing on the edge of a sun-lit prairie, Henrick watched the thread of light and smoke arc up into the sky.

Time passed.

One day, in the shallows along the shoreline, a small crustacean-like sea creature found itself stranded on a mudflat by the withdrawing tide. On a nearby rock, a nodule of dust began to collect. It stayed there for hours, watching. It watched with some fear, but also with wonder and excitement. It watched until the tide returned and the crustacean was carried back to the safety of the water.

Lighting Up the Brain: The Use of Electromagnetic Radiation to Stimulate Neurons

Science Fact

Kyle Kirkland
| 5597 words

We've learned to do a lot of things with light, or more generally, electromagnetic radiation. The spectrum of electromagnetic radiation runs from low-frequency radio waves up to high-frequency gamma rays, with visible light somewhere in the middle. Radiation is used in transmission, medical imaging, solar energy conversion, lasers, and so on. But stimulating the brain? That's probably not an application of light
1 that you'd think of. There would appear to be some serious obstacles.

For one thing, the skull is in the way, and it doesn't exactly let the sun shine in. Another thing: do neurons respond to electromagnetic radiation? You wouldn't think they'd have much of a tendency to do so, given the skull's lack of transparency.

These are important issues, but they're solvable if you really want to use radiation to stimulate the brain. The skull is opaque to visible light but some frequencies of electromagnetic radiation can penetrate it to at least a certain extent. Or if you're determined to let in a little more light, a craniotomy—making a hole in the skull—is an option.

Finding organic molecules that react with light isn't hard either. For example, plants use chlorophyll in the process of transforming solar energy into chemical energy stored in carbohydrates. The mammalian nervous system provides another example: cells in the retina called photoreceptors contain molecules that convert light into electrical signals, which are then conveyed to the brain. These retinal molecules that react to light belong to a class of substances called opsins. One type— rhodopsin—is extremely sensitive to light and is the basis for our night vision. Other kinds of opsins include three that are tuned to different wavelengths—red, green, and blue to a rough approximation—and provide color vision.

Neuroscientists have recently devised two new but entirely different research techniques that employ radiation. One method involves incorporating photoreactive molecules into neurons, a process that allows researchers to turn a neuron on or off with the flip of a light switch. Another method uses a type of radiation that penetrates the skull and is scattered by the brain, providing researchers with a new and inexpensive way of imaging neural activity without having to open up the skull.
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These techniques are interesting and I'll briefly describe them below. But what really fascinates me is how these techniques could be extended and combined in the future to create a brain stimulator with an incredible number of possible applications. This is pure speculation on my part, but I think it's doable, and it's something that can transform lives without any drastic and risky operations involving craniotomies. It might even be done stealthily, which leads to questions about who might be transforming whom—and for what purpose.

First I'll discuss the science, then the speculation. One of the new research techniques that uses radiation in a novel way is a marriage of fiber optics and DNA transfer called optogenetics.

Optogenetics

Neuroscientists have long wanted to have the ability to stimulate or manipulate the activity of specific neurons. You can do this in vitro, but neurons sprawled on a dish don't always tell you a lot about the functions of networks in an intact, living brain. For in vivo experiments, the conventional method of stimulation involves the insertion of little metal electrodes into the brain. But this isn't a very precise method. Even if you use a tiny pair of wires insulated everywhere except the tips, the current flows through a relatively large region and you can't control where it goes. You can certainly stimulate the brain with these electrodes—and researchers have been doing it for decades in experimental animals as well as a few human patients—but since you're not exactly sure what you've stimulated, it's often difficult to interpret the results. To stimulate individual neurons you need to poke a tiny hollow electrode through the cell's membrane. This is relatively simple to do to neurons in a dish, but it's much more diff icult to do in an intact brain—and you can't see or aim at what you're trying to hit. You can use a microscope to examine neurons in a dish but with an intact, living, pulsating brain you just have to sink the electrode into the tissue and hope for the best.

To do better, you've got to make the targeted neuron or neurons stand out somehow, or make them more susceptible to the method of stimulation. Optogenetics makes them more susceptible. You insert genes into the targets that will make them responsive to radiation, then shine a light on the general area. You don't have to pick out the neurons because they're the only ones in the bunch that will "notice" the light.

I'm not going to describe the methods of gene transfer and DNA technologies and such—people have been doing these things since the 1970s. But optogenetics didn't really get going until scientists discovered some interesting opsins in microorganisms that control the flow of current across membranes. They are similar to ion channels, which are crucial proteins in neurons that form little pores in the membrane for charged particles to pass through. (Cell membranes are otherwise impermeable to ions.) Most of the ion channels normally found in neurons are opened and closed by one of two different gating mechanisms: the binding of a certain molecule gates some kinds of channels, and a change in voltage across the membrane gates others. But the channels that scientists found in microorganisms are gated by light. If you insert the gene that codes for one of these channels, such as one called channel-rhodopsin, then you've got a neuron in which you can induce a current just by shining a light on it.

Sounds easy, but it took a lot of time and effort to get this technique to work. You can't simply plug a gene from a microbe into a mammalian neuron and expect the protein that the gene encodes to get synthesized and function correctly. Karl Deisseroth at Stanford University and his colleagues pioneered many of the techniques currently used in optogenetics, and began publishing their findings in 2005.

To get the gene into the neurons, scientists often use viruses that reproduce by invading cells and inserting their genetic material into the cells' DNA. But the viruses are altered so that they insert the opsin gene along with regulatory sequences that don't allow the gene to be activated, except in certain types of cells. For example, the gene may be active only in neurons that use a certain kind of signaling molecule, such as dopamine. Such neurons are often involved in processing certain kinds of information, such as reward and reinforcement or the coordination of voluntary movement. So although the virus infects a lot of cells, only a targeted subset of neurons actually express the gene (i.e., make the protein that the gene encodes). You can also use transgenic techniques—cloning and breeding—to introduce the gene into neurons, but this process takes a lot longer.
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The brain needs to be exposed to light before it can be stimulated optically, so researchers have to perform a craniotomy (the process of injecting the virus may also require exposing brain tissue). Fiber optics can deliver light pulses as needed, onto the surface as well as deep in the brain. A nice bonus with this method is that the optical stimulation doesn't interfere with electrical recording devices, so you can monitor neural activity while you stimulate the targeted neurons. This can easily be done on an anesthetized animal, and also on an awake, mobile animal, though it poses certain challenges, especially if the animal is as small as a mouse. But Polina Anikeeva, Karl Deisseroth and their colleagues have developed an "optetrode" that can record and stimulate from multiple channels in freely moving mice.
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You can also conduct optogenetic experiments in vitro. Jan Tønnesen, Karl Deisseroth, and their colleagues recently studied the behavior of grafts of dopaminergic neurons (neurons that use dopamine) derived from stem cells.
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In Parkinson's disease, dopaminergic neurons die in a specific region of the brain, and physicians are trying to develop a way of replacing them. Tønnesen and colleagues used optogenetics to show that neuron grafts become functional and are incorporated into tissue slices that have conditions resembling Parkinson's disease.

Near Infrared Imaging

In the 1990s researchers began using radiation in the near infrared portion of the spectrum to image the brain. "Near infrared" refers to wavelengths that are near red light, which has the longest wavelength in the visible spectrum. Certain wavelengths of near infrared partially penetrate the scalp and skull, and are absorbed or scattered by the outer surface of the brain; the spectrum of the scattered radiation carries information about blood flow and oxygenation. Thus it is a way of measuring brain metabolism, which is an indirect measure of neural activity. Toshinori Kato and colleagues were among the first researchers to develop this technique, as reported in a 1993 paper.
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Perhaps the main advantage of this technique over functional magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography is that it's super cheap. Another important factor is that, unlike the other imaging methods, patients don't have to sit still during near infrared imaging. This has enormous benefits when your patient happens to be a toddler who squirms around in an MRI machine like a hooked worm. But there are also serious disadvantages. Brain tissue absorbs near infrared quite readily, so the radiation doesn't penetrate much farther than the outermost layers, called the cerebral cortex. You can't image anything buried deep in the brain with near infrared.

The near infrared window has a wavelength centering around eight hundred nanometers, give or take a few hundred nanometers. It's strange that this radiation could penetrate very far into tissue, but it makes sense if you consider how much more transparent the body is to red light than violet light (violet is at the high-frequency end of the visible light spectrum). Try this experiment: take a flashlight into a dark room and shine the beam through your fingertips. What color of light seeps through? It looks pretty red to me. Which means much more of the other wavelengths got filtered out.

So you can shine a light through an intact skull and at least some of the radiation reaches the cortex. And there exists molecules that can make neurons react strongly to radiation, as in optogenetics. Putting both of these concepts together gives me an idea....

Brain Activation by Stealthy Stimulation

How could you stimulate someone's brain without their knowledge? I've always wondered if this was possible. Not because I want this sort of thing to happen, but rather because I'm afraid it might. With so much propaganda flooding in from the television and Internet and print media—often masquerading as "news"—I worry about how far some people will go to influence public opinion. Call me paranoid, but it seems to me we're living in a highly manipulative society.

Until recently I wasn't too worried. The brain is extremely complicated, and in my opinion any kind of simple form of manipulation is sure to fail. It's not like the brain is a uniform glob of neurons that all work the same way and perform the same function. If that were true then maybe you can run a current through the whole brain and control its various activities. But if the brain were that simple, neuroscientists would have figured out how it works a long time ago, instead of merely the incremental progress they've been making the past few hundred years. In reality, the brain is composed of intricate networks and separate systems that perform specific functions and somehow work together to produce our mysteriously unified conscious perceptions.

This complexity will foil any crude attempt to influence a person's thoughts or behavior by stimulating the whole brain or any large region of it. Such nonspecific stimulation would be like throwing a wrench into an intricate machine and expecting it to fine-tune the operation. All you'll manage to do is gum things up, and that's what would happen to people if you were to stimulate all or most of their brain—confusion.
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I don't believe any of the stories of brainwashing, either, and for the same reason—a lack of specificity. Drugs or hypnosis can't get at the brain's subsystems without interfering with a lot of other activity, so the effects will be general. (Drugs could potentially be highly specific, but at the present time none of them are free of side effects.) If you want to control someone's behavior, you'll have to rely on old-fashioned indoctrination and deprivation—fill someone's head full of lies and deprive them of any opportunity to talk to people who might contradict you.

I previously assumed you couldn't even successfully inf luence behavior covertly, much less control it, with brain stimulation. But now—or perhaps in the near future— there might be a subtle form of brain stimulation that could work. I think of it as a kind of mind nudge.

First you have to deliver the stimulation to the brain. If you're going to do this stealthily you won't be performing any craniotomies, so you'll have to rely on something that penetrates the skull—a field of some kind, either static or propagating (i.e., radiation). Let's keep the discussion simple and concentrate on radiation.

Radio waves and x-rays can penetrate biological tissue easily, but energy is proportional to frequency. Radio waves don't have enough energy, and x-rays have too much— radio waves are largely ineffective and x-rays are so strong they ionize molecules (strip electric charges from them) and cause damage if used excessively (and besides that, x-rays are diff icult to generate and control). Near infrared is okay, though not great since it can't get much beneath the cortex, but unless somebody discovers something better it's the best option.

In some cases infrared radiation alone can cause cells to become active. Vanderbilt University researcher Anita Mahadevan-Jansen and her colleagues have used infrared to stimulate peripheral nerves and even neurons in the central nervous system, presumably due to heating.
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But the responses are mild, so you need something more powerful. And more specific, since this appears to be a general effect.

To target specific neural systems you've got to make them more susceptible to the stimulation. This is the job of substances such as opsins that react to electromagnetic radiation of certain frequencies.

But how do you introduce these substances into the brain and get them in the right places? That could be a big problem.

Optogenetics techniques make use of the body's genetic machinery. This is possible because the substances that researchers want to insert into neurons are proteins, so it's a great idea to use the DNA code—the gene—along with regulatory sequences that can be targeted to a specific group of neurons. When you're dealing with experimental animals you can inject the viral carriers directly into the brain, or you can develop a line of genetically altered animals. Neither are particularly viable options if your goal is to secretly stimulate a person.

But viruses are sneaky. A number of viruses can slip into the brain through various (and generally not well understood) tricks—rabies, herpes simplex, and HIV are examples. If you gut one of these viruses and outfit it with the right sequences, perhaps it could work—assuming the molecule you need to introduce into the brain is a protein. (Or RNA molecule, which genes can also encode. But RNA molecules generally don't have the same kind of functionality as proteins.)

Maybe the photoreactive substance you want to get into the brain isn't a protein but rather some kind of chemical you concocted in a lab. If you want to introduce this substance into someone's brain, you've got an obstacle—it's called the blood-brain barrier. The blood-brain barrier is a web of cells and membranes that filter the brain's blood supply. Nutrients slip in, but not large molecules. It generally does a good job of keeping the brain's environment relatively free of potentially irritating substances floating around in the blood vessels. It's also the bane of neuropharmacologists.

I think the best bet is to develop a protein such as a specif ic kind of opsin and use a virus to introduce the gene into the brain. But there are lots of difficulties. The engineered form of these viruses might not behave like the reproducible, communicable viruses that some nefarious person could simply release into the air. Instead they may have to be brought into direct contact with the subjects.

Now is a good time to remind you that I'm not advocating any of this. Exactly the opposite, in fact—and I think it's helpful to try to figure out the worst case scenario that we might actually have to deal with in the future.

If you're going to be slipping something into the brain, why not make it permanently active rather than dependent on an external stimulus such as radiation? You could do this but without the on/off switch you'd lose control over the stimulation, and I suspect the result would be a lot less effective. The brain adapts to a continuous stimulus.

What kind of influence could some unscrupulous manipulator wield with this stimulation? I can imagine a lot of things, some of which are far more malicious than just subtle manipulation. It can be lethal if, for example, the targets are brainstem neurons that regulate fundamental physiological processes. Destroy enough of them and the victim dies on the spot. But let's not venture into the realm of assassination—if committing violence is the goal, there are plenty of ways that are much simpler than brain stimulation.

Let's assume the goal is to influence a person's judgment. I'm convinced that this is possible with the system I've outlined in this article. Experiments in primates proved it years ago.

In one fascinating experiment reported in 1990 by the laboratory of William Newsome at Stanford, researchers influenced a monkey's perceptual judgment of a moving stimulus.
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The monkey viewed a screen that displayed a bunch of moving dots and received a reward when it correctly identified the direction of motion. To make the task more difficult, all the dots weren't necessarily moving in the same direction—there was a lot of random motion interposed on the overall movement, so the direction of motion was merely a drift and could be difficult to discern. The monkey made its response by shifting its gaze to a certain location, and researchers tracked these eye movements.

Once the monkey had learned the task, the researchers inserted tiny wires into a specific region of the monkey's cortex called the middle temporal (MT) area.
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MT is known to process visual information related to motion. If you record the electrical activity of a neuron in MT while the animal is watching a visual stimulus, the neuron tends to become active only when the stimulus moves in a certain direction. These neurons act like little motion detectors, and they are specific for the direction of motion. For instance, a neuron may be tuned for motion that is downward and to the left, and when an object moves in this general direction the neuron fires a lot of action potentials (also known as spikes—these are abrupt changes in electrical potential that neurons use to encode and transmit information).

Newsome and his colleagues used electrical stimulation to influence the monkey's response during the motion task. Neurons in MT that are tuned for the same direction of motion tend to cluster together. By stimulating with a low current limited to a small region—a procedure known as micro stimulation—Newsome could activate neurons that are mostly tuned for some specific direction. Even with microstimulation you can't control what you stimulate, as I mentioned earlier, so the experiment wasn't perfect—the researchers probably stimulated a number of neurons they wanted to avoid. Even so, Newsome and his colleagues discovered they could bias the monkey's decision. For instance, if they stimulated neurons that were tuned to a direction of motion that was different than the motion of the stimulus, the monkey would miss more often than otherwise. And its incorrect responses tended to be in the direction preferred by the stimulated neurons. In other words, the monkey often incorrectly decided that the stimulus was moving in the direction dictated by the stimulated neurons instead of the actual motion of the stimulus.

Notice how this perceptual nudging had to be specific. You can't just stimulate the whole brain or even a somewhat small section of it and expect to get this effect. The brain processes information in a highly complex manner. This is clearly evident in the way it processes visual information: not only is there a specific cortical region for detecting motion, there are also regions devoted to color, shape, location, object recognition, and so forth. These are distinct and separate regions that focus on only one aspect of the visual stimulus. Somehow all these different networks pool their calculations so that you see, for example, a yellow car moving down the road, but the neurons that "see" yellow, detect motion, and determine that the object is a car are in quite distant locations. Influencing what people perceive or how they respond to it will not be a simple task, but instead requires highly precise selection and targeting.

You can achieve this precision roughly with microstimulation, providing you can record from neurons, as well as stimulate so that you can find your target. But you can also attain such precision by targeting neurons that have specific biochemical characteristics such as the use of certain signaling molecules, or receptors for these molecules, or some other kind of protein that identifies the neurons as participants in a particular network. Perhaps you could also target neurons that are active at specific times. There are lots of ways to do it with brain stimulation if you can insert some sort of substance into the brain that is used by only certain kinds of neurons.

Could you nudge someone's mind in this way without their realizing it? I'm pretty sure the answer is yes. In the 1950s and '60s, a few physicians began stimulating the brain of human patients as part of the diagnosis or treatment of various neurological and psychiatric disorders. José Manuel Rodriguez Delgado, a physician and scientist (then at Yale University) well known for his electrical stimulation experiments, performed operations in which he implanted electrodes along with a stimulator and receiver that could be operated remotely with a transmitter (he called the device a "stimoceiver"). He would often stimulate patients without warning, and since he used small currents, the patient was generally unaware of when the stimulator was turned on.
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In one of the Delgado's patients, the stimulation caused the patient's head to turn. Yet the patient apparently believed he had initiated the movement voluntarily. When asked why he moved his head, he provided reasonable responses: he was looking for something, he heard a noise, or he just felt restless.
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He seemed completely unaware that the real reason he turned his head was because his brain had been stimulated, so he invented an explanation for his action.

Although stealthy stimulation is feasible, there are probably many more things you can do if the subject is willing and nothing has to be concealed.

Brain Activation by Manifest Stimulation

The number of options increases when you don't have to be sneaky. You can get the patient to swallow a pill, accept an injection, apply an ointment, and stick his head against a radiator—provided you can assure him it's all safe and effective. Any portion of the brain could be targeted if you could use strong fields instead of, say, weak infrared beams.

When most people think of brain stimulation, they probably think about medical treatments. That's probably because they're heard something about deep brain stimulation, or DBS for short. The modern version of DBS began in the 1980s when physicians discovered that stimulation of some deep structures in the brain could alleviate symptoms of movement disorders such as essential tremor and Parkinson's disease. (Actually, DBS began in the 1950s with researchers such as Delgado at Yale and Robert Heath at Tulane University, but these days most people have forgotten these pioneers or don't want to think about them, because Delgado and Heath sometimes got into trouble for going a little too far with their experiments.)

In DBS, neurosurgeons implant thin electrodes into the patient's brain and connect the electrodes to stimulators. The electrodes need to be placed in precise locations (which varies depending on the disorder), but these days surgeons have imaging tools and computer guidance systems to help them hit small targets. DBS doesn't cure diseases but it generally relieves the symptoms and permits patients to reduce their medications, which is a big help because the medications often have severe side effects, particularly at high doses.

DBS has also occasionally improved mood and helped to alleviate symptoms of psychiatric disorders, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, in which patients feel completely taken over by certain ideas or feel compelled to repeat certain rituals or chores. Psychiatrists and neurologists have recently started trying to expand the number of applications of DBS, testing its effectiveness on patients with Alzheimer's disease, depression, coma, and even morbid obesity.

But since DBS involves a craniotomy, there are risks. And they're serious: brain damage, hemorrhaging, infection, and seizures have occurred during the electrode implantation procedure or subsequent stimulation. (Serious complications are rare but they do happen.) Yet people are willing to take these risks, sometimes just to lose weight. Think of how many people would be willing to undergo a procedure that was just as effective, and probably more so, but didn't require any surgery.

Brain activation by manifest stimulation wouldn't be limited to alleviating symptoms—it could be applied to anyone who wanted to enhance their brain power or influence emotions. Depending on how precisely you could target the networks and systems, I think it would be possible to enhance memory, elevate mood, decrease fear or anxiety, and much else. I also wonder if you might be able to adjust personality to suit the occasion. Perhaps your job requires you to be a bear but you have an unfortunate tendency to take your work home with you, much to the displeasure of your family. Maybe brain stimulation could provide a switch to go back and forth, from the hard-nosed boss during the day to the nice family guy at night.

Or it might be able to spark a talent such as creativity. In 2003 Allan Snyder at the University of Sydney and his colleagues reported that they increased creativity in a few experimental subjects by stimulating the left hemisphere with transcranial magnetic stimulation,
13 which depending on the stimulus parameters can inhibit the target. Snyder seems to believe in that old and, in my opinion, highly oversimplified adage which says the left half of the brain is for logic and the right is for creativity. By inhibiting the left, you would presumably increase creativity. Snyder claims that the art work of a few of his subjects showed greater creativity when they were stimulated. I'm skeptical—as I mentioned earlier, the brain isn't that simple—but I think you could genuinely boost creativity with the stimulation system I've outlined in this article.

But there are a lot of things I think are quite unlikely, no matter how advanced brain stimulation techniques become or how they are used. Because of its complexity, the human brain is extremely difficult to control or fool. You've probably read stories about stimulating the brain of a person to produce an artificial or virtual reality, so the subject thinks he's living in the real world even while he's strapped to a chair. To fool the brain like that you'd need to stimulate every sensory channel perfectly, and the brain has a lot of them, many of which we're only vaguely aware. Proprioception, for example—your brain has to maintain an updated representation of your body's position so that you can move without falling over or bumping into anything. And since all brains are unique and process information differently—the variability in imaging experiments illustrates this, but there is a lot of additional evidence for it—you'd have to program the stimulation perfectly for each individual. If the stimulation isn't perfect the brain will detect contradictions, and the person is likely to experience something akin to seasickness.

I have the same deep skepticism for the notion that humans can become hopelessly addicted to electrical stimulation in the so-called pleasure centers. These "centers" are actually complicated circuits, not just buttons you can push.
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And the brain adapts, so chronic stimulation would have varying effects.

So if I'm right about the development of this futuristic kind of brain stimulation, we can look forward to a lot of things in the near future, but there are limits. Comfortably so, in my view.

But what about the stealthy version? Should we be worried in the coming decades about what I've called mind nudging? I'm not sure, but I'm going to keep an eye on neuroscience research.

I hope I'm wrong, and it seems far-fetched to even consider the possibility of such a blatant disregard for basic civil rights. In the still of the night when it's quiet and I can ponder stuff without any sort of distraction, I can almost convince myself that stealthy stimulation could never happen. But then I remember all the unpleasant things that have occurred in history. Most of those things were probably regarded as far-fetched and highly unlikely—until they happened.

Yes, I'm familiar with residents of psych wards who claim that their brains are receiving instructions beamed by Martians. Yes, those people are funny, in a sad sort of way, I suppose. So do I remind you of one of them? Well, I'm not quite that bad yet, but I want to end this article by asking you a question: Are you sure you know where your thoughts and decisions come from?

Footnotes:

1
I sometimes use "light" as a generic term for electromagnetic radiation. When there is a possibility of confusion, I use the term when I'm specifically referring to the sliver of the spectrum that we can see.

2
Actually it images metabolism, which is an indirect measure of neural activity. There are other methods of imaging brain activity, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and positron emission tomography (PET), but these machines cost millions of dollars.

3
Transgenic techniques are sometimes called "knock outs" because usually a certain gene is deleted or knocked out of the animal's genome. In this way researchers can study the function of the gene by observing the deficits caused by its absence. Insertion of a gene, as is the case when an opsin gene is incorporated into a transgenic animal, is known as a "knock in."

4
Polina Anikeeva et al. 2012. "Optetrode: a multichannel readout for optogenetic control in freely moving mice." Nature Neuroscience.

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Jan Tønnesen et al. 2011. "Functional Integration of Grafted Neural Stem Cell-Derived Dopaminergic Neurons Monitored by Optogenetics in an In Vitro Parkinson Model." PLoS ONE.

5
Jan Tønnesen et al. 2011. "Functional Integration of Grafted Neural Stem Cell-Derived Dopaminergic Neurons Monitored by Optogenetics in an In Vitro Parkinson Model." PLoS ONE.

6
Toshinori Kato, Atsushi Kamei, Sachio Takashima, and Takeo Ozaki. 1993. "Human Visual Cortical Function During Photic Stimulation Monitoring by Means of Near-Infrared Spectroscopy." Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism.

7
Actually, if the stimulation were mild the person probably wouldn't even notice. An increase in intensity, however, would scramble the timing and synchronization of neural communication, resulting in confusion—the person might stop what they're doing, lose their train of thought, or begin making awkward or repetitive movements. Greater intensities would probably elicit a seizure.

8
Jonathon Wells et al. 2008. "Frontiers in Optical Stimulation of Neural Tissues: past, present, and future." Proceedings of SPIE.

9
C. Daniel Salzman, Kenneth H. Britten, and William T. Newsome. 1990. "Cortical microstimulation influences perceptual judgements of motion direction." Nature.

10
Located, appropriately enough, around the middle of the temporal cortex, which is at the side of the head. MT is also called V5, the fifth in a series of cortical areas that process visual information.

11
Patients can't detect low-current stimulation unless the stimulation occurs in a region that is especially sensitive. For example, stimulation of the cortex in the occipital lobe (at the back of the head) often produces noticeable flashes of light in the patients because this region is devoted to visual information. But if the electrode is placed outside of such sensory regions, nothing much generally happens. Wilder Penfield of the Montreal Neurological Institute became famous for mapping the human cortex by stimulating the exposed brain surface during neurosurgery. Every once in a while Penfield could elicit flashbacks or memories when he stimulated the cortex at the temporal lobe in epileptic patients, but most of the time stimulation beyond the sensory areas produced no conscious experience.

12
José M.R. Delgado. 1969. Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society.

13
Transcranial magnetic stimulation uses powerful, time-varying magnetic fields to induce electric fields in the brain, which causes currents to flow, thereby stimulating the brain without having to do a craniotomy. The experiment of Snyder and his colleagues is found in: Allan W. Snyder, Elaine Mulcahy, Janet L. Taylor, D. John Mitchell, Perminder Sachdev, and Simon C. Gandevia. 2003. "Savant-like skills exposed in normal people by suppressing the left fronto-temporal lobe." Journal of Integrative Neuroscience.

14
The concept of pleasure centers became popular after the work of James Olds beginning in the mid-1950s. Olds and his colleagues discovered that rats will exhaustively press a bar to deliver a spurt of electric current to certain portions of their brain. But humans aren't rats. And besides, I'm not sure the rats were really loving it either. If the same stimulation is delivered continuously, the rats will work just as hard to turn it off.

About the Author:

Kyle Kirkland earned a doctorate in neuroscience and spent a lot of time building models of neural networks and probing the brains of mice with little tungsten electrodes. Later he left the lab and became a writer. He is the author of Neuroelectricity: The Past, Present, and Future of Brain Stimulation.

NOTHING TO FEAR

240 words

An arithmetic teacher yesterday was arrested.
He was writing Arabic digits on the board:
Introducing, so the faculty has attested,
A foreign practice, Eastern and abhorred.
He'd infiltrated a weapon of math instruction
Into each trusting student's tender brain,
Dooming their innocent psyches to destruction:
A greater cultural threat than Quiche Lorraine.

Give thanks for the day our leaders outlawed zero—
If they hadn't, just imagine where we'd be:
(We might even have some kind of decimal money)
So join us in keeping America zero-free.

That Islamic numeral system gives us fidgets—
But its origin is more alien still, you'll find:
For the Hindus taught the Muslims all their digits,
And the Hindus have a heathen turn of mind.
The Hindu theologians all are smitten
With endless empty circles and the void:
So if you've the intelligence of a kitten,
You see why zero's got to be destroyed.

Give thanks for the day our leaders outlawed zero—
If they hadn't, just imagine where we'd be:
(We might even be bottling our cola drinks in metric)
So join us in keeping America zero-free.

The unpatriotic zeroist insurrection
Has a vast, pervasive, secret underground
That quite fortunately isn't beyond detection:
There's a sign by which the enemy can be found. Can your neighbor total up his grocery prices
A little faster than you feel he should?
Then your neighbor is a cause of the present crisis:
Denounce him, and you'll do the nation good!

Give thanks for the day our leaders outlawed zero—
If they hadn't, just imagine where we'd be:
(Arithmetic might not be a college major)
So join us in keeping America zero-free.

—Kate Gladstone

Product Recalls

384 words

Food Products:

Stepmother Brand Apples: Red portion of apple contains narcotic agent. What to do: Green portion of apple can be safely consumed, but we recommend returning entire apple to grocer for refund. Narcotic effect can be alleviated by removing apple fragment from victim's mouth, or in some cases by mouth-tomouth resuscitation, but only by persons of opposite sex and royal birth.

Paradise Brand Apples: Consumption of any portion of apple can result in overwhelming psychological feelings of guilt,resulting in at least one consumer abandoning home and charging spouse with causing global crime wave. What to do: Avoid consumption of any apple served by snakes. If you have yielded to temptation to consume apple, immersion in water by licensed practitioner is said to alleviate guilt pangs.

Clothing and Cosmetics:

Athene & Associates, Gorgon Wig: Manufacturer allegedly economized by using reptilian materials in place of synthetic or natural human hair. Product may cause paralysis. Hazard occurs only to associates, and does not affect wearer. What to do: Avoid mirrors. Place product in special wallet (provided at request by manufacturer) and bury it.

Nessus Brand Men's Shirt: Product has been contaminated with olive oil spiked with semen and blood, DNA analysis of which suggests crossbreeding of human and horse. Though advertised as"the gift that will keep your man faithful," if exposed to heat or light the shirt can prove highly flammable. What to do: Do not try shirt on. Return product to manufacturer. The conflagration,once started, is impossible to extinguish.

Neverstop Brand Ballet Slippers: Product can be identified by unusual red color. Defect still under investigation by Commerce Department; it may result from Mexican jumping beans incorporated in the soles of the shoes, or from super-resilient experimental plastic. Consumer may be unable to stop performing; shoes are impossible to doff. What to do: anesthetic darts may be used to tranquilize victim; surgical procedure necessary to remove slippers.

Toys:

W. Tell Archery Set: Instructions challenge child to test skill by piercing apple (not included) placed on playmate's head. Playmate could lose eye in accident. What to do: Contact manufacturer for blowup doll to substitute for playmate. Discard original instructions.

Vehicles:

Wonderful One-Horse Shay: Product can suddenly break apart without warning. What to do: Manufacturer has gone out of business. Suggested action is to replace all mechanical parts after 89 years.

Daedalus Brand Ultra-Light Aircraft: Product can melt if flown too high. What to do: return product to Daedalus factory, Crete division. Low flight should be safe, but avoid direct sunlight.

— Mary A.Turzillo

CHECKLISTS

EDITORIAL

Trevor Quachri
| 1264 words

From time to time, a letter or reader comment will strike me as perhaps revealing more about the reader themselves than the story or issue they're commenting on.

Case in point: not so long ago, a reader wrote in, wondering if an author had used a checklist to determine the backgrounds of the characters in one of his stories: one was African-American, one Asian-American, and so on, until the "major" groups were represented, he felt.

I understand the reader wasn't literally wondering about a checklist; he was criticizing what he saw as obtrusive diversity. I've never been one to look down my nose at sarcasm, certainly, but the characters were predominantly scientists, and the reader's view that they would be a homogenous group struck me as unrealistic at least, and more than a little short sighted.

So is diversity among scientists actually that unusual? To be fair, the reader wasn't wrong, at least based on the statistics as they currently stand. The National Science Foundation issues a formal report every two years, entitled "Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering." It tracks and examines the statistics on precisely what its name suggests.
1

According to the report, white men currently make up 51% of working U.S. scientists and engineers; white women 18%, Asian men 13%, Asian women 5%, and Hispanics and Blacks 6% and 5% respectively, across both genders.

Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans are considered "URM" in this context—under-represented minorities, where "under-represented" is defined in relation to their percentage of the overall population. If women, for example, make up 51% of the general populace, but only represent 18% of scientists and engineers, that's a sign that something probably isn't quite working the way it should, societally. Pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps is a virtue, sure, but—to mangle the metaphor—numbers like that can be illustrative of a failure to make sure everyone at least has a reasonable length of bootstrap with which to attempt to do so.

So even if, in this instance, we consider diversity value-neutral—neither a good nor an ill in and of itself—the skewed numbers can still be seen as something of a canary in a coal mine for a larger issue: science education in the United States.

That the U.S. has had challenges with STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) education for some time is not news.

In 2009, The Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development released the results of their triennial Program for International Student Assessment (PISA)
2
("The U.S. government considers the test one of the most comprehensive measures of international achievement."
3
), and the results were worrisome: the U.S. ranked 25 th out of 34 countries in math, and 17 th out of same in both reading and science. (The most recent assessment was in 2012, but its results have not been released as of this issue's press date.)

Although the OECD began administering its test in 2000, our national STEM education was languishing even prior to that. The earlier Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS)
4
, administered by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, saw similar results in the mid-1990s. (TIMSS is ongoing; the next data collection will be in 2015.) Professor William Schmidt (co-director of the Education Policy Center at Michigan State University's College of Education—no relation to our distinguished Editor Emeritus) and his fellow researchers released the third TIMSS in 1996, which was, at the time, "the most extensive and far reaching cross-national comparative study of mathematics and science education ever attempted."
5
In it, Schmidt ascribes our struggles in STEM education to three elements in particular. Along with decentralized educational policy decision-making and a delayed shift to formal math and scientific disciplines in middle school, the third major element is unequal educational opportunity: "Differences among students will always exist, but Schmidt and his colleagues provide TIMSS data that show that in most countries more than 90% of the variation among students is the product of individual differences. In the United States, more than half of the variation is the result of differences created by differentiated opportunities."
6

Again: more than half of the variation in scientific achievement of students in the U.S. can be ascribed not an individual student's aptitude, but to unequal opportunities: fewer teachers, with less training (and pay); older, out of date textbooks; inadequate supplies; and the like. Shorter bootstraps, if you will.

The PISA results seem to corroborate that. Although China as a whole did not top the list in 2009, China's Shanghai region (when taken by itself) was found to have outperformed every other country in every academic category. The differentiating factor seems to be that there, the Chinese government moved away from their long-used "key school" system (which is still in place in many other parts of the country, and why Shanghai's performance is not representative of China overall) for a system of more equitable access. (In "key schools," the most funds—and therefore the best teachers, supplies, books, and material—went to the schools that had the highest-scoring students... who were in turn already more likely to come from affluent backgrounds, and who would get the least "bang for the buck" from the additional funds.)

Not dissimilarly, in the U.S. it's common knowledge that the best schools are usually in more affluent areas. Specifically, as Andreas Schleicher (who oversees the PISA tests for the OECD) put it: "The [U.S.] fails to put the most-talented teachers in the most-challenging classrooms."
7
(It's interesting that although education is often considered the great equalizer the world over, in this case at least, both Communism and Capitalism are systematically prone to reward the already-aff luent.)

It's true that in many cases, it takes greater effort and resources to provide for a diverse population than it does for a more uniform one—varied groups of people don't often benefit from a "one size fits all" approach— and this is where equality of educational opportunity connects to one of the other primary factors Schmidt discusses: the state of "decentralized educational policy decision making." To do that topic justice would take more space than I have here, but simply put, while a country as large as the U.S. needs flexibility in how subjects are taught at a local level, we need strict standards on what is taught at that level. That some small but vocal population of the U.S. seeks to legislate the inclusion of unfalsifiable theories in science classes attests not just to the dismal state of scientific literacy, even among adults, but to the idea that left too wholly to decentralized authorities, the quality of scientific education is only going to get worse, not better.

Ultimately, the chain of correlation, I propose, is quite simple: if you're reading this magazine, you care about science; if you care about science, you care about science education; if you care about science education, then you must care about ensuring all children receive every opportunity we can give them, regardless of background or socio-economic factors. Simply doing the institutional equivalent of passively leaving a science textbook lying around on a coffee table isn't enough; the stakes are too high.

As we move forward, projects of the scope we like to speculate about in science fiction—space exploration, asteroid mining, wide-scale genetic engineering—are increasingly likely to require global funding, experts, or both, whether because of co-operation among governments or the size of multi-national corporations. Either way, if a purely American team or crew isn't diverse enough to reflect that we're utilizing the full strength of our citizens, it's all the more likely that we'll be part of an American/Chinese/Russian/Indian/Finnish joint undertaking, having found ourselves outpaced by other countries whose science education hasn't been hamstrung by stark economic disparity and anti-science school boards.

It's only a matter of time until we need to update those checklists, one way or another.

Footnotes:

1 http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/wmpd/2013/

2 http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa/

3 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-07/teens-in-u-s-rank-25th-on-math-test-trail-inscience-reading.html

4 http://nces.ed.gov/timss

5 http://www.educ.msu.edu/neweducator/fall00/Timss.htm

6 ibid

7 http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-07/teens-in-u-s-rank-25th-on-math-test-trail-inscience-reading.html

IN TIMES TO COME

150 words

First off, we have "Life Flight" by Brad R. Torgersen. Generation ships will be incredibly involved undertakings, but it's inevitable that some things will go wrong, and when they do, much will hinge on how well we adapt to the situation.

Then our fact article takes on an idea we've seen explored in fiction like Edward M. Lerner's InterstellarNet series, but rarely outside of it: "The Probability and Nature of an Interstellar Information-Trading Community" by Mark H. Shellans.

We also have the third installment of Karl Schroeder's Lockstep, as well as stories like Maggie Clark's look at how the media might portray setbacks in space exploration, "We Who Are About to Watch You Die Salute You," and Jerry Oltion's tale of ways out not taken, "Not for Sissies," plus fiction from David Brin, Stephen L. Burns, and Megan Chaudhuri, as well as all the columns you count on. See you next issue!

All contents subject to change

ON INVESTIGATING HERETICAL GIZMOS

THE ALTERNATE VIEW

Jeffery D. Kooistra
| 1831 words

Anyone who uses Facebook or other social media sites knows that scams abound online. For an older guy like me it usually starts with a friend request from a "girl" with an attractive profile pic. Not knowing what all my readers look like, to say nothing of female writers interested in networking, I accept these requests. Then I wait. Invariably, if an excessively friendly message from my new contact hits my inbox within minutes of accepting the request, it means a scam is in the offing.

Fortunately, it doesn't take long to learn the typical scam-signature and avoid them. It just requires a bit of experience with social media and genuine people.

Though money fleecing and sex scams are mundane, those promising access to secrets and "hidden" or prohibited knowledge have a strong appeal to SF-types. Our thirst for knowledge is akin to a sex drive—but unlike sex, a full-blown knowledge orgasm isn't all that easy to come by. Claims of revolutionary space drives, free-energy devices, miracle medicines, and the like all serve as mental foreplay. Tiny dribbles of whispered information can make one a fool as surely as small expressions of affection from a lover just leading you on. Having recently read most everything by H. P. Lovecraft, I've noted that many of his tales contain a protagonist driven by an insatiable desire for hidden dark knowledge. Who among us hasn't wanted to peruse the volumes locked away in the forbidden section of the Hogwarts library? The desire to pierce the curtain and see what lies beyond is nothing less than lust to us, and the more forbidden it is, the kinkier it seems.

With this lust for scientific kink running strong in me, it was impossible to resist the opportunity to get paid to examine forbidden, heretical claims, and so I went to work for Infinite Energy Magazine. I've told tales before from my time there, most recently in my November 2011 column, "Intellectual Proxies." Therein I discussed how two well-educated men used each other to convince themselves that there really was gold at the end of a particular weird-science rainbow. This time I want to talk about strange science scammers and scientific simpletons, their heretical wares, and how to filter them out from the (very) few heretics who are neither.

I said "filter," because at Infinite Energy we wanted to hear from people with heretical ideas and devices that challenged accepted scientific and engineering wisdom. But our slush pile had far fewer gems in it than Analog's. At a normal science magazine, violating known science is a criterion for rejection, but I couldn't use that one. Because we wanted to find and test machines that flipped-off known science (on our dime), we were as appealing to phonies as a newly divorced, middle-aged millionaire is to a gold digger.

Over time, I came up with three broad principles for filtering out the foolish and the phony purveyors. I wish I'd had these in hand before starting at Infinite Energy, but my experience there was one of the few ways I could have discovered them.

1.) Your task is not to prove the heretic guilty, but to learn if he merits the benefit of the doubt.

I wasn't there to expose scammers (though it did happen) or to tutor the honestly ignorant in the rudiments of physics and engineering. I just had to convince myself that they weren't guilty of trying to fool us or guilty of fooling themselves. That's usually easy to do if you've got a solid background in physics or engineering, because the typical frauds and fools do not. For instance, either sort might tell you that their measurements prove their generator puts out more energy than it takes in, but some close questioning reveals that they have no idea how to make those measurements.

It's harder to decide if a heretical inventor—one who is no ordinary fool—isn't still fooling himself. This person is infectiously earnest in his belief that he has made a working, genuinely anomalous device. He will have spent years lavishing attention on it, building many versions, and will have refined it into a work of art that actually spins or pushes or generates power in a clean, repeatable way. It's also harder because guys like this tend to be guys like you. Inventive, clever, good with their hands, solid education, and you share a common interest in alternate views. You find yourself liking them and pulling for them on that basis alone, hoping that they really have that genuine, science-confounding article.

Nevertheless, odds are that the heretical inventor, who honestly believes that he has something—even when he can properly use test equipment and can build a pretty machine—really doesn't.

2.) Don't fool yourself into thinking you're not a fool yourself.

Really clever frauds have degrees and maybe a patent or two to their names. So too, sometimes, do fools. You must bear in mind while investigating that the process is often less about them and their claims than it is about you and what you know, can do, and have experience with. I went to Infinite Energy because I wanted to find weird things working as claimed. This made it extra important to study up on topics like, "How does this piece of test equipment actually work?" in addition to how to use it. And, "What kinds of phenomena is it unsuited for measuring?" especially in cases where it will still give readings that look legitimate.

Due-diligence demanded that I learn all I could about other weird devices that, however eldritch and esoteric, did not violate known science even though they appeared to. Consider the following scenario. Everyone knows how easy it is to make an electromagnet that will pick up a steel washer, even if few know how to make an electromagnet that will pick up an aluminum one (which is almost as easy). A scammer could have come to us with a working version of this latter magnet and a crock of convincing bullshit, and if I'd never heard of it before, he would likely have walked away with a significant development grant. By the time our story about the "anomalous arbitrary metal magnet" appeared in print, and the letters arrived from those readers who knew we'd been had, our scammer would have disappeared. Fortunately, no episode like this happened on my watch, but I've seen other odd gizmos since then that easily could have fooled me.

You must know the relevant accepted science yourself, in detail, before you can evaluate the ideas of the heretic. And you must never take the heretic's word for it on what that accepted science is. Do your own homework. I found out (the hard way) that many heretical researchers, even those with doctorates, often lack a clear understanding of what the accepted view really is: what it says and doesn't say and where the open questions lay. If you want some interesting reading, delve into the history of interpretations of the "twin paradox" from special relativity. The mere fact of a long history of divergence of opinion on the matter speaks volumes.

You also need to know your own weaknesses and blind spots. Not just weaknesses like rusty math skills or only one chemistry class from decades ago in your background, but weaknesses for, and hence blind spots toward, specific types of heresies and machines. For example, that aluminum magnet could have fooled me because electromagnetic gizmos float my boat. However, even though I worked for Infinite Energy, which was primarily a "cold fusion" advocacy magazine, I had no blind spot for cold fusion. I thought there was "something to it" and that it was worth investigating, of course. But I was certain that getting the effect to appear reliably was a complex problem in materials and condensed matter physics, which required expertise and a ton of work to do right, work which we were in no position to do.

3.) You must get your hands dirty.

There's no point in trying to understand and evaluate heretical machines if you can't, at least potentially, build one yourself. Though it is doubtful that you could duplicate a device an inventor has spent years working on, you can certainly approximate it, or parts of it, and by so doing get a "feel" for how it works. Nothing was ever as educational for me as building a slew of variants of Marinov motors (see my columns from February and April 1999, and June 2008). Only in that way did I come to understand how it really worked, and fully appreciate why it worked that way. The process was also invaluable in helping me understand just how wrong "valid looking" criticism done from an armchair can be. Hell, no day in my lab could be considered successful if I didn't invalidate at least one of my own armchair-conjured ideas from the night before.

I am strident about this principle because it is the most personal to me. While working for the magazine, I constructed a Marinovesque motor of my own design. The shell and stator form was a disposable coffee cup, chosen because of shape, weight, and availability. I called it the "cup motor." When suspended from above on a single monofilament line and turned on—though crude in construction and jerky in performance—it behaved in the hoped-for anomalous way, like the enigmatic motor I described in my last published short story ("Nova Terra," Analog, January/February 2005 ). I expected to build an improved version that would be presentable, run smoothly, and better show the effect. Which meant doing what? With so many variables involved and my understanding of it far from mature (not to mention the overload of other unrelated work on my plate), it made no sense to "bend tin" for an improved version until I was confident that the changes I made would in fact be improvements.

To make a long, bitter story short, I never made them another one. After I was fired, the folks at Infinite Energy, unwilling to soil their own hands with it, paid someone skilled in the art of motor-making to build an improved version. It didn't work right. Despite the fact that I had explained, numerous times and in person with a chalkboard, exactly why the improved version would not be easy to execute, they ignored or forgot what I told them. Their clean hands had left them unequipped to appreciate my words and reports. Their guy produced a nice little motor that behaved like an ordinary motor, which they then "tested," and subsequently concluded that I never knew what I was talking about. It being in my own best interest to keep my mouth shut, I never told them how they screwed up.

If you're curious about where they went wrong, here's a hint. Their "improved" motor had three hundred windings on the stator. My original had ten. The ideal version would have had one, maybe two.

This column and the earlier ones barely scrape the surface of what I learned in those days. I'll tell more. You may be wondering if I was ever fortunate enough to come across "the real deal," a heretical inventor with a heretical device (or two) that worked as claimed. The short answer is, "Why, yes; yes, I did."

THE REFERENCE LIBRARY

Don Sakers
| 2303 words

Mars has been a favorite subject of science fiction since before there was science fiction.

As early as the sixteenth century, scientist-philosophers such as Johannes Kepler and Emanuel Swedenborg wrote about journeys to Mars. It wasn't until Schiaparelli's observations, during the so-called "Great Opposition" of 1877, that awareness of Mars began to spread in popular fiction. Percy Greg's Across the Zodiac (1880), perhaps the first modern space-travel novel, tells of a trip to the Red Planet and an encounter with its small inhabitants (who refuse to believe that their visitor is from Earth, since life on other worlds is patently impossible). Journey to Mars by Gustavus W. Pope (1894) seems to be a precursor of things to come: a shipwrecked Navy man is kidnapped and taken to a Mars populated by three races of humanoids who live in a feudal society that nevertheless is technologically advanced. Pope's hero Frederick Hamilton falls in love with Princess Suhlamia and strives to save the Martians from destruction. In the end, he returns to Earth with his Martian bride. In the next book, the happy couple goes to Venus.

We're all familiar with H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds (1898), but perhaps less so with its immediate (unauthorized) sequel by Garrett P. Serviss, Edison's Conquest of Mars (1898), in which Edison led an expedition to wipe out the Martians.

Gullivar of Mars (Edwin L. Arnold, 1905) was another romantic story of a single Earthman on Mars. In 1909 French author Gustave Le Rouge brought us a novel whose theme would be right at home on today's bookshelves: Le prisonnier de la planète Mars (Vampires of Mars). And of course there was A Princess of Mars (1912) and its many sequels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, which brought the "planetary romance" fashion to science fiction.

The legendary Stanley G. Weinbaum wrote "A Martian Odyssey" (Wonder Stories, July 1934), arguably the first story to feature a truly alien being. Over on the literary side, C.S. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet (1938) was a philosophical answer to H.G. Wells and showed peaceful Martians of several species living in harmony with one another.

Ray Bradbury addressed a similar theme in The Martian Chronicles (1950), turning Wells on his head by showing Martians corrupted and destroyed by the arrival of humans from Earth.

The colonization of Mars took hold of science fiction's imagination in the 1930s, and never really let go. Until the era of space probes, we continued to read of noble Martians haunting the ruins of ancient cities on the banks of drying canals. Just about every SF writer of the time wrote about Mars. Notable examples included Red Planet by Robert A. Heinlein (1949), "Omnilingual" by H. Beam Piper ( Astounding, February 1957), The Sands of Mars by Arthur C. Clarke (1951), Lost Race of Mars by Robert Silverberg (1960), and "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" by Roger Zelazny ( F&SF, November 1963).

Beginning in 1965, the Mariner probes returned spectacular results that changed our perception of Mars, with huge impact on science fiction. It soon became clear that there were no canals, no ancient cities, no intelligent inhabitants at all—and that the environment of Mars was more hostile than we thought.

Martian colonization was still the name of the game, but the technological challenges were greater. Mars stories, by and large, moved into the nuts-and-bolts realm of hard SF. The notion of terraforming Mars was in the air, and several authors riffed on that theme.

Major appearances of Mars in science fiction included Frederick Pohl's Man Plus (1976); Gordon R. Dickson's The Far Call (1978); Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars (1993), Green Mars (1994), and Blue Mars (1996); Ben Bova's Mars books (beginning in 1992); William K. Hartman's Mars Underground (1997); White Mars by Brian Aldiss and Roger Penrose (1999); Geoffrey A. Landis's Mars Crossing (2000); and John Barnes's The Sky So Big and Black (2002).

Mars has always been popular in film; Thomas Edison actually produced a 1910 silent film called A Trip to Mars. Other notable Mars films include Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964), the awful yet ever-popular Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (also 1964), Mars Needs Women (1967), "The Martian Chronicles" TV miniseries (1980), Total Recall (1990), and a trio of unrelated Mars movies in 2000/2001: Mission to Mars, Red Planet, and Ghosts of Mars.

On television, Mars was visited frequently by "Doctor Who," appeared on "The Twilight Zone," and played major roles in "Babylon 5" and "Futurama." Of the dozens of Martians who have appeared on TV, special mention must be made of Ray Walston's "My Favorite Martian" (1963-66) and Bugs Bunny's nemesis Marvin the Martian.

Mars, Inc.: The Billionaire's Club

Ben Bova

Baen, 240 pages, $25.00 (hardcover)

ISBN: 978-1-4516-3934-6

Genre: Mars

Before the Apollo Project, science fiction generally assumed that space travel would be accomplished by business and industry, not government. Government played a support role. Only when there were enough people in space to govern, did government step in— usually in the role of police or military.

Robert A. Heinlein's 1950 novelette "The Man Who Sold the Moon" epitomized this view with the story of billionaire Delos D. Harriman and his efforts to finance and launch the first expedition to the Moon.

Now Ben Bova—who has been writing about Mars longer than just about any other living SF writer—pays homage to Heinlein's story with a twenty-first century tale of a billionaire determined to launch the first trip to Mars.

Art Thrasher, billionaire CEO of Thrasher Digital, is a man with a dream: to see humans on Mars. Angered and disgusted by continuing budget cuts to NASA, he conceives of a different way to fund the effort: a billionaire's club. Members would pledge a billion dollars a year to the Mars mission, as long as it takes to get boots on Martian ground. He figures that a group of about twenty could make the project a success.

Of course, convincing twenty billionaires (as well as their assorted boards of directors) to commit to his plan isn't going to be easy. It will take every ounce of charm, persuasiveness, guile, and sex appeal Thrasher possesses.

And signing up the backers is just the first step; there are all the complications of the Mars mission itself—finding and hiring the best personnel, overcoming legal and social barriers, building infrastructure... and of course there's opposition. From bureaucrats to politicians to oil barons, a lot of people have reasons to stand in Thrasher's way. Some of them are even capable of murder....

Mars, Inc. is one of those curious books that stands on the boundary between SF and mundane fiction. The technology is pretty much all off-the-shelf, primarily virtual reality and nuclear propulsion. While perfectly enjoyable as an SF book (could Bova write anything that wasn't enjoyable?), Mars, Inc. has that torn-from-the-headlines vibe that's obviously intended for a larger audience. As I write this, real-life billionaire Elon Musk is busy advocating his plan for a Martian colony. It's very tempting to read Mars, Inc. as an inspirational tale for all involved in such private-sector endeavors.

One of the fun games to play with this book is to identify some of the public figures who appear in disguise: the Koch brothers and certain Walmart heirs leap off the page, but there are many others.

So what's (excuse the term) the bottom line? Mars, Inc. has inspiration, excitement, thrills, romance, a dash of satire—and it's a good, fun read solidly in the Analog tradition.

Ghost Spin

Chris Moriarty

Del Rey, 555 pages, $16.00 (trade paperback)

Kindle, Nook: $9.99 (e-book)

ISBN: 978-0-553-38494-9

Genre: Far Future/Clarke's Law, Transhuman SF

Series: Catherine Li 3

In 2003 Chris Moriarty's Spin State introduced us to UN Peacekeeper Catherine Li and her far-future world of star-spanning civilizations and transhuman tech. Li is transhuman, with her memory backed up and various abilities enhanced. She's also a brilliant detective and master troubleshooter in a vast and largely lawless universe. Li's partner is Cohen, an AI with multiple lifetimes of experience across many host bodies. Together, the two fight the clone-led Syndicate, the major opponent of the UN.

In Spin Control (2006), Li and Cohen return. Expelled from the Peacekeepers, the pair is involved with the Artificial Life Emancipation Front, and deal with rogue clones and genetic weapons.

Now Chris Moriarty has returned to Catherine Li, with her most difficult assignment yet.

The quantum teleportation network that knits together the galaxy is failing. Colonies, cut off from civilization, are in danger. The answer seems to lay in a strange region of space called the Drift. There, faster-than-light travel is still possible, if dangerous.

Amid growing chaos, everyone heads to the Drift: UN, Syndicate, free mercenaries, pirates, and other unsavory characters. Cohen, leaving Li behind, dives into the Drift—and dies.

Li heads off to investigate, and finds that Cohen's death has left fragments of himself— ghosts—all over the Drift. Some are helpful, some hostile, some utterly mad. One of them possibly carries the secret that Cohen died for, the secret that could save humanity.

Trouble is, others are after Cohen's various ghosts. Some want to use them, some want to be rid of them, and one shadowy presence wants to eliminate them all... whatever the cost.

Like the previous two books, Ghost Spin is a heady experience of total immersion in a strange and wonderful universe. If you're not familiar with the series, it may take a few chapters to get your bearings—but the experience is worth it.

On the Razor's Edge

Michael Flynn

Tor, 352 pages, $25.99 (hardcover)

iBooks, Nook: $12.99; Kindle: $11.04 (e-book)

ISBN: 978-0-7653-3480-0

Genre: Space Opera

Speaking of total immersion in strange and wonderful universes....

The January Dancer (2008) introduced Michael Flynn's League/Confederacy universe—millennia in the future, the United League of the Periphery and the rival Confederacy of Central Worlds have for lifetimes been locked in an interstellar cold war called the Long Game. The agents of the two— Hounds and Shadows—contend with each other across a starscape of shifting alliances, proxy wars, espionage, double and triple agents, sabotage, betrayal, and assassination.

In a story that continued through the next two books— Up Jim River (2010) and In the Lion's Mouth (2012)—readers have followed the course of Hound Bridget ban, ex-Shadow Donovan buigh, and their harper daughter Mearana as they struggled to navigate both the Long Game and a deadly civil war within the Shadow organization.

Now it's all come down to this: Donovan buigh, captive of rebels, is taken to Old Terra, to the Secret City where the Shadows rule. Donovan has information that will allow the rebels to take the City, and the rebels are perfectly willing to use torture to get it out of him.

Meanwhile, Mearana has been kidnapped by the treacherous Shadow Ravn Olafsdattr. Bridget buigh puts together a pack of Hounds for a rescue mission—while knowing that this is exactly what Ravn wants her to do.

All the pieces are on the board, all the players are in the game, the long struggle is at last coming to an end... and the stakes are very personal. But one thing is sure in this universe: nothing is what it seems.

If you've read and enjoyed the previous books, you'll certainly enjoy this one. If not, and if you're the kind of reader who enjoys espionage and baroque politics, you'll probably want to go back and start with The January Dancer.

Transcendental

James Gunn

Tor, 304 pages, $25.99 (hardcover)

iBooks, Nook: $12.99; Kindle: $11.04 (e-book)

ISBN: 978-1-7653-3501-2

Genre: Philosophical/Religious SF, Psychological/Sociological SF

James Gunn is one of the true masters of science fiction. No, really—he received SFWA's Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award in 2007. Gunn has been active in the field since 1948, and not just stories and novels; in 1976 the Science Fiction Research Association gave him their Pilgrim Award for lifetime achievement in SF scholarship, and he's won the Hugo Award (among others) for his nonfiction about the SF field.

If you've read Analog for any length of time, you've seen James Gunn in these pages.

Gunn's last novel was in 2005; his newest, Transcendental, is worth the wait.

In this future of many worlds and intelligent species, there's a new force among the stars: the Transcendentalism movement. At the edge of explored space, a mysterious prophet claims he can help beings achieve the highly spiritual state of transcendence.

Riley is a human war veteran who joins dozens of others, of many different species and planets, on a pilgrimage to find the prophet. Unlike the others, Riley's not along to achieve transcendence—his mission is to kill the prophet.

During the journey, various fellow travelers tell their stories, Canterbury Tales style. As these tales unfold and tensions aboard the ship mount, Riley realizes that not all his fellow pilgrims are seeking transcendence. Especially the friendly but enigmatic woman Asha....

Gunn combines exotic aliens worthy of James White with psychological twists and philosophical speculation—I'm reminded of James Tiptree Jr.'s Brightness Falls From the Air. Riley is a compellingly damaged man in search of truth, who ultimately finds that he's as much a pilgrim as any of the others.

John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood

Michael D. Sellers

Universal Media, 370 pages, $15.95 (trade paperback)

Kindle: $3.99 (e-book)

ISBN: 978-0-6156823-1-0

Genre: Nonfiction

Getting back to Mars for a moment, here's a book that tells the story of a long-awaited journey to the Red Planet that went horribly wrong. And it's a true story.

Since Edgar Rice Burroughs's A Princess of Mars appeared in 1912 (as a serial titled "Under the Moons of Mars" in the February issue of The All-Story), readers have been desperate for a film version.

In the centennial year, that long-awaited movie was released—and in the opinion of many, it was a very successful adaptation, a visual feast that evoked the sense of wonder of the original story.

The film, however, was a box-office flop.

Michael D. Sellers wondered what happened, and this book is the result.

In very readable prose, Sellers tells the history of Burroughs's Mars books, and the century-long challenge of bringing to the screen the world Burroughs called Barsoom. He follows the course of development of the 2012 film, and explains the factors that led to its perceived failure—overbudgeting, inexperience, and outright hostility among the higher levels of Disney Studios.

For anyone interested in the inner workings of Hollywood, or anyone who liked John Carter and wondered what happened, this is definitely a worthwhile read.

That brings us to the end of this column. If you get the chance, take a look at the eastern sky a few hours before sunrise: the Red Planet should be in Leo about the time this issue is on the stands. Give that little red dot a friendly wave for me, and I'll see you next time.

Don Sakers is the author of The Eighth Succession and The Leaves of October. For more information, visit www.scatteredworlds.com.

BRASS TACKS

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Dear Mr. Quachri:

In the June issue's Alternate View column ("On the Sucking Out of Inertia"), Jeffery Kooistra makes several comments on the use of an inertia-reducing process to create a space drive. I would like to add two comments of my own, if I may.

First, the reduction of a body's inertia by something like a tuning process would violate the law pertaining to conservation of energy, doing so by way of Einstein's mass-energy theorem. In order to reduce the inertia of a body, such as a spaceship, we have available to us only two processes: we can either shove matter overboard, as in a rocket, or we can convert matter into energy and allow it to radiate. (We actually have devices that use that latter process to reduce the inertia of a single component by a fraction of one percent. Two of those devices obliterated a pair of Japanese cities in 1945.) Any other process would constitute an act of magic.

And secondly, when Dr. Kooistra invokes conservation of linear momentum and claims that reducing the mass of a spaceship by a certain proportion results in increasing the velocity of that ship by the same proportion, my first question is "Velocity relative to what?" The ship displays different velocities to different observers if those observers are moving relative to one another, so it would also, when the drive is turned on, display different delta-vees. That gives us an absurdity, unless we live in a universe in which all real velocities are properly referred to a single universal inertial frame of reference and all relative velocities have no dynamic value whatsoever. Thus the drive will work in a universe founded upon a state of absolute rest, but not in one, like ours, founded upon a state of absolute motion (the speed of light); it will work in a Newtonian space-andtime, but not in an Einsteinian space-time. Bummer!

Cordially, Dennis Anthony

Greetings!

Mr. Martin Shoemaker wrote a very good mystery story with all the parts neatly put together. Hope to see more of his stories in the future.

C. Henry Depew Tallahassee, FL

Editors,

Please confirm that "Tethered" was an April Fool joke (in spite of the mid-April delivery and July/August cover date), and not a complete lapse of editing responsibility. The story made mincemeat of physics, orbital mechanics, and facts, not just one disposable character. The scenario places high, medium, and low orbits just a kilometer or so apart (with radically different orbital velocities), and a similar distance above the distinct top of the ionosphere. It puts a satellite intended to protect one region of earth in "low" orbit ("geosynchronous" is never mentioned). It has a chemical-flame rocket coming from the moon to Earth at an average straight-line speed greater than 15 times Earth's escape velocity. I could go on and on, but this was either a very poor joke (with a missing punch line), or it didn't belong in Analog.

Anonymous

The author responds...

Thank you for your comments—you have some valid points. However, I would like to point out that "Tethered" never specifies the distances between orbits, but only the distance between the ship and LEO when it is about to exit MEO and enter LEO, in a future where the manipulation of debris has made such boundaries easily visible. It also does not specify how the Chinese barge is propelled (chemical-flame rockets are never mentioned), if any kind of matter propulsion is the means of travel at all. Of course the velocity is extremely large; that is why the Chinese won't disclose the designs "for all the Saudi oil they can get." Lastly, although the satellite is intended to protect a region on Earth, this does not mean it relies solely on geosynchronous orbit to remain fixed; for all we know, before the protagonists reached it, the satellite was self-propelled. I sincerely appreciate your concerns, but some of them are based on assumptions about the story which are not explicitly stated.

I would also like to note that there is a surplus of science in "Tethered" that was peer-reviewed and fact-checked. There are so many factual details that I cannot possibly list them all here. I made sure to vet previous drafts of the story with a University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg assistant professor of physics, an MIT PhD graduate who is a member of the American Astronomical Society, and of course with a significant amount of independent academic research. Still, please forgive any imperfections you may encounter in "Tethered"—all errors are my own.

I hope we can appreciate the most important scientific issue raised in "Tethered:" The escalating dilemma of the Kessler Syndrome, and the general failure on the part of governments and the private sector to address both the root causes of artificial debris and the unregulated militarization of space, the latter of which may pose the greatest threat to the progress of science.

Good day Trevor,

As usual, I went straight to the editorial when Analog arrived and enjoyed the story of digging gems out of old issues. But it wasn't until I got to the end that I realized it wasn't you who wrote the article.

This is way too good an idea to let go to waste. Can you add an oldie-but-goodie along with some background to future Analog's?

Cheers, Tony

P.S. I really enjoyed "A Cup of Dirt"—funny story, good writing style, great ending!

Dear Editors,

I'm not sure if I should be addressing these comments to Trevor or to Jamie Rubin, guest editor for the June issue. My comments are sparked by Jamie's editorial, but Trevor might take a hand in any potential action items that may eventually evolve out of recommendations I will make.

The editorial certainly stirred up a lot of nostalgia in my head for many of the gems mentioned, whether I read them or not. Not that I was able to read them at the time. In 1939, for example, I was not even born yet! It wasn't until I was old enough to be allowed to cross the street by myself that I discovered the public library, and then the collection of science fiction books therein. In those books were some of the gems that Mr. Rubin describes, and I learned to love SF from those. At that time, it never even occurred to me that some of the stories I read were extracted from periodicals, or that I might want to read them a) in the original and b) other similar stories that I missed out on reading because I only had access to those stories the book editor chose to include.

Having read the June editorial, however, I now know that at least one complete collection of Analog exists. I also strongly suspect that there's no realistic way I can currently get access to it. Nor should I; these days, it's not necessary to get physical access to an information source, in order to access the information.

So first I have a question: does a digital archive exist for all those issues of Analog? And if so, how does one get access to it? My second question is: if such an archive doesn't exist, why not create one? I (and undoubtedly many, if not all, of your other readers) would love to be able to read some of those old stories that we missed at the time, and read the ones we read in other sources in the original.

Best regards and keep up the good work!

Howard Mark Suffern, NY

The primary problem with running reprints of stories (or creating and maintaining a digital archive of classic issues) is that we don't actually have the rights to do so. The authors themselves own their stories (which is how it should be), and for obvious reasons, nobody thought to buy digital reprint rights back before there were such things as home computers, so we'd have to track down the current rights holders and pay them again. That's more than fair—creators deserve to be paid for their creations—but that would also take a lot of money, and there's almost no way such a project would make back even a small fraction of its cost. Until the stories enter the public domain (and when they do, we'd gladly help Google or any other such body that wants to preserve them), we have to content ourselves with reading them in anthologies and collections.

Dear Trevor,

I enjoyed your editorial (Analog, September 2013) about violent video games. One piece of evidence that those calling for censorship of the media never mention is that, as the level of violence in games (and comics and television) has gone up and up, violence in real life has been going down. For example, according to the World Almanac, the murder rate dropped more than 30% between 1994 and 2003. Sadly, the kind of people who blame violence on video games are impervious to data.

Rick Norwood Mountain Home, Tennessee

Dear Mr. Quachri,

I am pleased that you have managed to avoid destroying Analog in your first few months of editorship. However, I strongly encourage you to remain vigilant against the "soft-creep"—you know what I'm talking about don't you? It's the tendency to want to publish more stories that are literary (or should I say "literary?"), poetic, and lacking in hard science. Don't let it happen.

I'll just pull an example out of the July/August double. (Great issue, by the way—packed with good stuff.) But what was up with "Other People's Avatars" (Howard V. Hendrix)? It was like the protagonist was walking around in a dream, the boundary between reality and VR was blurred, he was maybe hallucinating on drugs (or not), and the whole thing was very unsatisfying. I call it "acid-trip" science fiction, and I don't like it. It's weak. And simply working the name of Julian Jaynes at one point is not enough to turn a story into hard SF!

Here's something else from the July/August issue that caught my attention—are we doing product placement now? In "Tethered" (Durrani), one of the characters was eating a Twix bar through the whole story. I'm not going to go back and count how many times the brand was mentioned, but I distinctly recall that it was often enough to be intrusive. And she was drinking a Dr. Pepper, too.

Now, if Analog authors are starting to get product placement deals, I think that's a great thing and I fully support it. But I want to be told. Brand names in short fiction are a good thing. They are vivid details that can often create or strengthen an emotional response. And if Analog 's guys are getting paid for doing it, all the better. But for all I know, Durrani just stuck them in because he doesn't know any better.

Keep it up. Christopher Meyers

So far, so good, eh? I figured I'd wait to completely ruin the magazine for at least another couple of issues. Got to get to the end of the serial, after all.

But seriously, I do know what you mean by "soft creep" (and, yes, by "literary"). As much as I share your concern, though, there's also such a thing as "hard creep." Analog has long published stories about science, or stories with time travel, or stories exploring alien culture and language, and under too strict a definition of "hard SF"none of those things (among many others) would have been possible, and that's worth bearing in mind.

As for the use of brand names, while I'd love to be big enough to attract the attention of a multinational conglomerate offering us a product placement deal, we'd never take them up on it. Still, you're not the only reader to find those specific story details obtrusive, and I'll definitely remember that in the future. (It's also funny to try to picture products specifically pitched at Analog readers: somehow, I don't think they'd get very far with soda and candy bars.)

Dear Mr. Quachri,

After reading Mr. Kooistra's Alternate View about "The Death of the Rocket Equation," I was a bit taken aback. The premise being that anti-matter was so powerful an energy resource that a miniscule of the fuel could propel a spaceship to anyplace in the cosmos in a minimum of time. The rationale being that not only did it contain oodles of energy but its own mass was not a part of the equation.

When I thought about that fact, I began to wonder how an infinite amount of force could be applied to a conventional spacecraft without tearing the ship into tiny pieces. Applying an infinite amount of force to any device means that the device must be able to stand the strain of the thrust

I can imagine such an anti-matter engine starting up and thrusting itself right through the spacecraft like plunging a hot knife through a chunk of butter. It's not likely the butter would even move.

Leonard R. Cook

2013 Index

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Here is the Index to 2013, Analog 's Volume CXXXII Entries are arranged alphabetically by author, with month and page. When the author's name and/or part of the entry's title is omitted, it is the same as that of the previous entry. Multiple entries by the same author are listed alphabetically according to the story/article title. Collaborations are listed under all authors with cross references. Unless otherwise noted, each entry is identified as an Alternate View (av), editorial (ed), fact article (fa), guest editorial (ge), novella (na), novelette (nt), poem (pm), Probability Zero (pz), serial (se), special feature (sf), or short story (ss).

IT'S ANLAB TIME AGAIN

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YOUR BALLOT WILL BE AUTOMATICALLY ENTERED IN OUR DRAWING FOR A FREE ONE-YEAR SUBSCRIPTION!

Welcome to the year 2014! As usual, we're asking you to choose your favorites via the Analytical Laboratory. Not only will your votes provide tangible awards for authors and artists, but your feedback will help guide the selections we offer you in the future. Your vote is important!

Look over all your copies of Analog dated 2013, or refer to the index on the following pages. Pick your three favorites in each of the following categories: novella, novelette, short story, science fact article, and cover. If you're not sure about a piece's category, you'll find it listed both in the Table of Contents for the issue in which it appeared, and in the Index. In the event of a disagreement between the Table of Contents and the Index, the Index should be considered correct. List your choices in order of preference (your favorite in each category is #1) on the ballot below, and either mail it in or send it by e-mail. You can also vote at our website, www.analogsf.com . The ballot is intended to make it easier for you to vote, but if you don't want to cut it out, feel free to copy it.

To be sure your vote counts, please have it reach us by February 1, 2014.

Please, only vote once! Thank you very much!

Votes via snail mail: AnLab, Analog, 267 Broadway, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10007.

Votes via the Internet: www.analogsf.com or analogsf@dellmagazines.com

UPCOMING EVENTS

Anthony Lewis
| 382 words

NOTE: Membership rates and other details often change after we have gone to press. Check the websites for the most recent information.

28 February–2 March 2014

RING OF FIRE CON (southeastern Virginia multi-genre conference) at Holiday Inn Virginia Beach Norfolk Hotel and Conference Center, Virginia Beach, VA. Guests of Honor: Eien Strife, HR R2D2 Builders, Lord Ramirez, Charles Dunbar. Registration: $40 until 28 January 2014. Info:
http://www.rofcon.com/

14–16 March 2014

LUNACON 57 (New York City area SF conference) at Westchester Hilton, Rye Brook, NY. Writer Guest of Honor: Jonathan Marberry; Artist Guest of Honor: Randy Gallegos; Special Guest: Michael F. Flynn. Registration: $50 until 22 February 2014; $60 thereafter and at the door. Info: 2014.lunacon.org.

21–23 March 2014

CONDOR 21 (San Diego area SF conference) at Guest of Honor: Gail Carriger. Registration: $45 until 10 March; $50 at the door. Info:
http://www.condorcon.org/html/mainmenu.html .

27–30 March 2014

Chi-Fi 1 (Chicago SF, Fsy, and comic book conference) at Westin Chicago North Shore, Chicago, IL. Author Guests of Honor: Jim Butcher, Marie Brennan, Laura Hawks, Donna Thorland. Registration: $70 until 17 February 2014; $80 at the door. Student and active duty military $10 less. Info: Chi-Fi.org.

28–30 March 2014

The 3 rd
Conference on Middle Earth, Part 2 (Tolkien-oriented fantasy conference) at Westford Regency Hotel, Westford, MA. Info:
www.3rdcome.org;thain@3rdcome.org . 164 Williamsburg Court, Albany, NY 12203.

14–18 August 2014

LONCON 3 (72 nd
World Science Fiction Convention) at International Conference Centre, ExCel, London Docklands, U.K. Guests of Honor: Iain M. Banks, John Clute, Chris Foss, Malcolm Edwards, Jeanne Gomoll, Robin Hobb, Bryan Talbot. Membership: until 30 April 2013. Attending: $160/£95 (adult), $110/£65 (young adult), $50/£30 (child), infant $3/£2, family $390/£230; Supporting: $40/£25. This is the SF universe's annual get-together. Professionals and readers from all over the world will be in attendance. Talks, panels, films, fancy dress competition—the works. Nominate and vote for the Hugos. Info:
http://www.loncon3.org/ ; Loncon 3, 379 Myrtle Road, Sheffield S2 3QH, United Kingdom.

Running a convention? If your convention has a telephone or fax number, e-mail address, or web page, please let us know so that we can publish this information. We must have your information in hand SIX months before the date of your convention.

Attending a convention? When calling conventions for information, do not call collect and do not call too late in the evening. It is best to include a S.A.S.E. when requesting information; include an International Reply Coupon if the convention is in a different country.

Information

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TREVOR QUACHRI........................................ Editor

EMILY HOCKADAY......................... Editorial Assistant

MARY GRANT................................ Editorial Assistant

DEANNA MCLAFFERTY...... Editorial Admin Assistant

JAYNE KEISER............................ Typesetting Director

SUZANNE LEMKE......... Assistant Typesetting Manager

KEVIN DORIS................ Senior Typesetting Coordinator

VICTORIA GREEN........................ Senior Art Director

CINDY TIBERI.................................. Production Artist

LAURA TULLEY................ Senior Production Manager

JENNIFER CONE....................... Production Associate

ABIGAIL BROWNING................................ Manager, Subsidiary Rights and Marketing

TERRIE POLY..................... Digital Publishing Manager

SANDY MARLOWE...................... Circulation Services

PETER KANTER

Publisher

BRUCE SHERBOW

Senior Vice President Sales, Marketing, and IT

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Vice President, Editorial and Product Development

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Analog Science Fiction And Fact (Astounding), Vol. CXXXIII, Nos. 1 & 2, January/February 2014. ISSN 1059-2113, USPS 488-910, GST#123054108. Published monthly except for combined January/February and July/August double issues by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications. One-year subscription $55.90 in the United States and possessions, in all other countries $65.90 (GST included in Canada), payable in advance in U.S. funds. First copy of new subscription will be mailed within eight weeks of receipt of order. When reporting change of address allow 6 to 8 weeks and give new address as well as the old address as it appears on the last label. Periodical postage paid at Norwalk, CT and additional mailing offices. Canadian postage paid at Montreal, Quebec, Canada Post International Publications Mail, Product Sales Agreement No. 40012460. (c) 2013 by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications, all rights reserved. Dell is a trademark registered in the U.S. Patent Office. Protection secured under the Universal Copyright Convention. Reproduction or use of editorial or pictorial content in any manner without express permission is prohibited. All stories in this magazine are fiction. No actual persons are designated by name or character. Any similarity is coincidental. All submissions must be accompanied by a stamped self-addressed envelope, the publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork.

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Table of Contents

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