Analog Science Fiction And Fact - May 2014
Author: Penny Publications
Date: 2014-05-01 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: non-fiction; Science Fiction; Magazine

Analog Science Fiction and Fact

Kindle Edition, 2013 © Penny Publications

Lockstep Part III of IV

Karl Schroeder
| 23342 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 catlike 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 catlike 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 gypsylike 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 his brother, Peter, 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.

When he wakes again he's on a new planet—somewhere called Wallop. He doesn't trust Corva Keishion and her friends any more than he trusted the people who initially rescued him from fourteen thousand years of hibernation; so before Corva and the others revive, Toby leaves the cargo container they stowed away in, to find his own way on Wallop.

He has to get his bearings. Over the next few weeks Toby meets people from all over the lockstep. It really is a vast empire, because there are up to one-hundred thousand free-floating planets for every star in the galaxy. The entire seventy-thousand-world lockstep that Peter McGonigal rules is contained in the space between the Solar System and Alpha Centauri. Simple nuclear rocket technology is sufficient to create a vibrant civilization here, because all the worlds synchronize their hibernation cycle: thirty years asleep, one month awake. As Toby discovers, this stable, aeons-old civilization has become the safest investment in the galaxy, and a kind of 'backup' for the whole human race. Empires rise and fall on the fast worlds around the stars; posthuman singularities flash and vanish; eugenic crazes, political fashions and genetic manipulations depopulate whole planets; yet the locksteps abide.

When he encounters Corva Keishion again, Toby learns that her planet is being punished by the tyrant Peter McGonigal. Her brother came to Wallop to bring her home, but he's now trapped in cold sleep in a military complex. Corva wants to get him back, and Toby is her key. Because he's a McGonigal he can override the cold-sleep system. Toby is disappointed to learn that she had an agenda when she saved his life, but he decides to help her anyway.

With the help of Corva's friends, Shylif and Jaysir, they break into the complex. Toby is about to use his override on the hibernating ship when they are captured by Nathan Kenani, a servant of Toby's brother. Kenani declares that he's going to keep them prisoner until Toby's apparently murderous sister Evayne arrives onWallop. As he sends them into cold sleep, however, Kenani is acting oddly. Perhaps he isn't as loyal to Evayne and the other McGonigals as he claims to be....

12

He'd felt this before.

Thrum... thrum thrum. Pause. Thrum...

Not so far away, though; never so weak. Toby struggled to move—even to open his eyes. He felt like a lump of stone neglected by the sculptor. Buried in a hill. Lost in time...

He could feel the source of that faint vibration: a small, heavy body sprawled atop his. Orpheus was struggling.

Toby remembered the first time he'd awoken in between destinations. He'd been confident, had no idea that the tug had missed its target and wandered for thousands of years. He'd fallen down a well of centuries and not even known it. And this time? How long had it been?

But this wasn't like that time. Orpheus was with him. Yet Orpheus was dying, he could hear it in the weakness of the vibration that traveled up and down his body. Dying, and it was Toby's fault.

He couldn't move, but after a profound struggle he was able to crack his eyes, just enough to see that the lid to his cicada bed was closed. Its transparent surface was mostly frosted over, but outside, dim blue light showed the ceiling furred by the same white frost he'd seen in the tug. Frozen air, Sol had called it. The internal tell-tales of the bed were active, and registered red: emergency power-up. Orpheus must have tripped them when he climbed in.

Orpheus and the bed were fighting: he was using all his power to try to revive Toby, and it was using its to push him back into hibernation. There was no question which one would win. This bed wasn't set to care for a denner, though; Orpheus would die if he stayed here. He couldn't possibly have enough energy left to wake himself again.

"Go..." He tried to say back to sleep, but his jaw wouldn't move. If only he had his glasses he could contact Orph through his interface, tell him to reset his clock—

Interfaces... didn't these beds have their own internal controls? Of course they would. He twisted, flailed around in the narrow space, and felt a keypad near his right hand. He mashed numb fingers against it and was rewarded as data windows blossomed into existence in the crystal canopy.

The display showed that the bed was drawing on an inexhaustible well of power from elsewhere in the city. It was programmed to push Toby back into sleep, and it would keep at it until it succeeded. After all, he wasn't due to wake up for another twenty-two years.

Why twenty-two? Then he remembered it all: Nathan Kenani's strange hinting statements, and Toby's own desperate plan. The order he'd sent to Orpheus just before they'd been sent to their beds.

"This is..." his voice was a ragged whisper, but he had to try it. "This is Toby Wyatt Mc-Gonigal. Wake me up."

The indicators in the data window changed, and seconds later Orpheus's drone ended. He felt the denner collapse into the gap between his arm and his body. Around them both, the bed was now humming into action.

Rest, Orph.

This time, Toby awoke refreshed. He blinked lazily at the distant frosted ceiling, remembered everything, and turned on his side, gathering Orpheus into his arms. The denner was limp.

"Oh no, no." He hugged Orpheus to him, crying. The bed had woken Toby, but it had ignored the denner. Maybe it wasn't too late, though. Cicada beds could perform medical wonders, and reviving creatures from the brink of death—or beyond—was their specialty. And somewhere nearby was the bed Orpheus had been in until today.

Toby went to lift the bed's lid, but got an alarm in response. TOXIC ATMOSPHERE and FATAL TEMPERATURE DIFFERENTIAL were just two of the indicators that flashed red. He could lift the lid, but the first breath he took would freeze his lungs into solid cages.

"What do we do now, Orph?" From his position on his side he could see through the bed's lid; most of the frost had cleared off it now. The beds containing Corva and Shylif were right next to his. Beyond them, the room was dark except for the blue tell-tales indicating where infrastructure machinery, designed to operate in hypercold conditions, was maintaining the ideal hibernation conditions for the city.

It was incredible, but Orpheus had survived that environment. Toby had known the denners could survive without air, and in deep subzero temperatures, for a little while. They had to have those abilities to be able to wake themselves from cold sleep. They were biological, but seriously genetically engineered at some point in the past.

He craned his neck to look down at the floor, and saw little denner paw-prints criss crossing the thin snow that covered everything. There were broad drag-lines through that snow, too. They seemed to start at a set of lockers in the dim corner of the room, and ended up below Toby's bed. What had Orpheus put so much effort into hauling over?

He couldn't see it, but suddenly he knew. "Orph, you're a genius," he whispered to the lifeless body he cradled. "Hang on, hang on, I'll get you help."

Toby took several deep breaths then, holding his breath, slammed the bed's lid back.

The cold hit him like a hammer. He just had time to roll off the bed and make a grab at the balled-up environment suit; then he couldn't move. His fingers were painfully cramping into claws, and he just managed to reach out and cradle the suit's helmet before his hands went numb.

The suit woke, and swarmed up his arm, built itself over his head. It felt like he was plunging into an icy lake as the pieces conformed themselves to his arms, his shoulders, covered his face and mouth, and ringed his torso. The thing flipped him over as it finished its work and, just as he was seeing spots and about to faint, he felt a blast of cool—but not cold—air shoot down his throat.

Coughing, frost-bitten by the material sheathing his whole body, Toby rolled, thrashed, and banged his head on the base of another bed. Then he was able to sit up. The air rushing into him was getting warmer, and so was the metal touching him everywhere. The suit was trying its best.

More coughing; he crouched there for a long time, until the painful tingling of reawakening nerves settled into a mere clammy chill. Then he levered himself to his feet and looked around.

Half the room's beds were showing amber telltales. They were trying to wake their sleepers. Toby stumbled over to one and scraped away the frost to reveal the face of a grim, middle-aged man within it. One of Nathan Kenani's soldiers, no doubt.

"Go back to sleep," he said. The beds' indicators flickered and then changed. Quickly, he gathered Orpheus into his arms and crunched through the frozen air to the denner's original cicada bed, which he found by following Orpheus's paw-prints into the next room. The petbeds were little boxy affairs suitable for cats and dogs, set along the far wall. It was easy to find Orpheus's—it was the one with the open lid, whose lights were flashing red while it beeped in alarm. He set Orpheus carefully inside and commanded it to start emergency treatment.

Next he had to take care of Kenani's bots— which were, after all, McGonigal bots. Several stood in the darkened corners of the main room. These were watching Toby. They'd probably been awakened by the alarms that had gone off when Orpheus tried to override his bed. They were doubtless programmed to wait for the human soldiers to wake up before taking any action.

"You're mine now, all of you," he told them, and his voice overrode their settings. "Find my glasses and warm them up."

He went to the other boxes, and commanded them to awaken Shadoweye and Wrecks. Then he returned to the main room, and gave the same order to the beds where their masters slept. One of the bots handed him his glasses, and he pushed them against his face-plate until the suit understood and built itself a mouth to bring them in. It fitted them onto his face, the interface sparkled into life around him, and he activated the Cicada Corp Console.

And then... And then there was no more to do. He found himself turning around and around in the middle of the room, adrenalin making him swing his arms and curse—but the beds were working. He was done here.

Toby left the main room to find a window. The suit's interface said it was hundreds of degrees below out there, and what air there was, was hydrogen and very thin. The normally bustling spaces looked post-apocalyptic with drifts of snow covering the carpets and frost on the dead video signs. Here and there, faint tell-tales glowed from dormant equipment. He soon found a door to the main spaceport hall, and walked over to one of the transparent outer walls of the city. Outside, he could see the other spheres of the continent, vast dark curves breaking up the starscape. Stars meant the city must be very high in the atmosphere, and indeed when he ventured a look down he saw nothing below but black.

Yet kilometers overhead, attached to the side of the dark spheres, was a fantastical lantern. Glowing warm yellow, the single solitary city-sphere cradled greenery inside it, while little bright dots of flying machines drifted lazily around its curving side.

The Weekly lockstep was awake.

Toby sagged against the clear wall. For a second he thought he was going to faint—but at least now he knew there was somewhere to go once they got out of this room. They could even find a hot meal up there.

He hadn't really thought this would work. The only thing that made him set Orpheus's alarm for seven years less a day, just after Kenani got the drop on him, was his memory of Corva and Shylif talking him into sleeping in the shipping container. This kind of hibernation had seemed impossible, but they'd done it. More than that, they claimed to do it all the time. If they could perform such routine miracles, why couldn't Toby do something as simple as set Orpheus to wake in seven years' time instead of thirty? He'd guessed that the petbed couldn't override Orpheus's own internal clock, and based on what he'd seen in the kitchen downstairs, Orpheus should have no problem getting out of it. His modified biology should let him survive long enough to open Toby's own bed and climb in. And then he could wake his human.

Simple enough, but so many things could have gone wrong. Even a simple mechanical lock on the petbed would have killed the plan—and probably Orpheus. Toby certainly hadn't factored in the lack of air. It had been Orpheus's own idea to drag a pressure suit over to Toby's bed, though he couldn't actually lift it in.

Toby turned his head; he could see Orpheus's icon through the wall, or so the glasses made it seem. The indicator was no longer red, but amber.

He wanted to dance in a circle and shout his elation, but there was still something to do. This task was the biggest, and after bare survival, the most important by far. A responsible man wouldn't be wasting his time jumping around. He'd be acting.

Toby selected a dozen or so military bots and said, "You're coming with me."

With them thudding through the snow behind him, he headed for the elevators.

Even with the heaters going full-blast, the passengers were shivering as they entered the terminal lounge. Most looked around in sad confusion; they'd expected to be awakened on normal lockstep time, and it was clear that hadn't happened. Some were angry, and a knot of these approached Toby where he sat at the exit.

At the far end of the hall, the elevator was just disgorging the latest of the refugees from Thisbe. Toby scanned the faces quickly, but nobody there seemed likely to be the one he was looking for.

He turned his attention back to the five angry men now standing before him. One of the military bots flanking him shifted slightly, and distant Weekly city-light slid liquidly over its armor. One of the men glanced at it nervously.

"See here," said the one in the lead. "Why're we off-frequency again? We know we were quarantined—"

"You tholes rolled over for the McGonigals," said another. "It's disgusting—"

"But why this?" The first waved at the creaking walls and wreathes of subzero vapor that coiled and flanked the passengers like cobras. "It's a mess!"

Toby cleared his throat. He'd had plenty of confrontations with angry characters and usually dealt with them well—in game worlds. Generally those characters didn't all talk at the same time, as these guys were doing, nor did they egg their bot companions on to posture threateningly in front of combat bots that could squish them instantly. If combat bots had any sense of humor, Toby was sure his were laughing on the inside.

Suddenly he too had to laugh. The men glared at him.

"What's so funny?"

"If you're all like that on Thisbe then I see where Corva gets it," he said.

"Corva?"

Toby turned. A man not more than a few years older than Toby himself pushed his way through the encircling crowd. He had piercing dark eyes, black hair, and familiar high cheekbones. He wore a multi-pocketed jacket and baggy trousers, had a collapsed pressure suit knotted around his waist, and a satchel slung over his shoulder. "Did you say Corva?"

"Corva Keishion of Thisbe sent me," Toby said. "Who're you?"

"Where is she!" The young man stepped forward and half-raised his arms, maybe to grab Toby's arms. The combat bots shifted, and he didn't complete the gesture, but said, "She's my sister. I'm Halen."

The other men had fallen silent; they were looking around themselves in a new way—appraising, even hopeful. "We're outside the lockstep," said one.

"You're in the Weekly," corrected Toby. He pointed at the distant lantern-sphere hanging kilometers overhead. "Or, you will be, as soon as we get up there."

"But they won't have us!" It was the first man who'd spoken. He had the same wealthy air that Ammond had exhibited, and he had a whole team of bots to carry his luggage. "It doesn't matter if it's 360 or the Weekly. We're banned for twelve months!"

"You were," said Toby. He was beginning to enjoy this. "As to the Weekly—leave it to me."

"And who are you?" demanded Halen.

"Somebody whose life your sister saved." It looked like the last elevator had unloaded, and the lounge was now full of scared but defiant-looking people.

Toby turned to the five men who'd confronted him. "Can you keep a lid on things here for an hour? There's an... important reunion I want to arrange."

They glanced at one another, and then a sly grin appeared here, a brusque nod over there. "You're going to take us into the Weekly?" said the rich-looking one. "We could visit it back on Thisbe, but not stay or pass through—"

"This time is different." I hope. Toby didn't know what power he might have over the Weekly's government, but unloading the passengers into the Weekly had been part of Corva's original plan. She must think it would work.

"Come on," he said to Halen, and stepped into the fearsome cold of a connecting corridor. As they walked Toby couldn't help glancing over at Corva's brother. He was tall and strong looking. Toby was acutely aware of how pale and scrawny he looked in comparison. What did Corva see when she looked at him? Certainly something substandard, if Halen was what she was used to.

"Where is she?" her brother repeated. "And how did you wake us up in the middle of winter?"

"I've... got an interface to the McGonigal clocks," Toby told him as they slid carefully down an ice-sheeted ramp. "I was able to override them."

"But—but nobody's ever been able to do that! How—" Halen had breathed the dangerously cold air too deeply, and started coughing.

"It's a long story. I'll let your sister tell you."

The McGonigal bots let them into the high-security area and Toby led Halen to the chamber where Kenani had imprisoned him and the others. When he opened the door Orpheus came bounding up and in his usual style, climbed Toby with his claws out; luckily he was in the suit, which the denner's claws wouldn't penetrate. Still, Toby said, "Hey, watch it!" and only when he had the denner settled on his shoulder did he see it wasn't just the denners who were awake. Shylif and Jaysir stood over Kenani's bed. Shylif was pensively sipping a steaming cup of something. And Halen... where had he gone?

Corva sat on a crate in the next room, one hand tightly clutching her oval locket. Halen knelt in front of her, and was speaking to her in an insistent way. Toby hesitated a moment in the doorway, then backed away to give them their privacy.

Jaysir noticed and grinned. "You did this, didn't you? But how?"

"Nothing magical," mumbled Toby, trying, while trying not to be obvious about it, to eavesdrop on Corva and Halen. Distractedly, he continued, "I just set Orpheus's clock before we were separated. He woke me up."

Jay nodded, and a grin battled against Shylif's serious demeanor. "But your bed wouldn't have let him do it," said Jaysir. "Not unless you overrode that. Ours too."

Toby shrugged. "The secret was out the instant I reprogrammed the passenger unit. I can't stop the McGonigal network from broadcasting my presence—it already did it, seven years ago."

Of course, Peter and Evayne had already known. Were there others, though, like Kenani, for whom the news would just be arriving? He didn't know how public the login details on the beds were. Or who might be monitoring them.

He stole a look at Corva and her brother. She seemed heartbroken. Why? Did Halen seem older? She'd spent all her effort to rescue him and the rest of her family, but now that it had actually happened, she would be faced with the reality of how time had already altered them.

Had it been too late all along? What was lost in time couldn't be returned, and here in the locksteps, any innocent sleep might cleave you from those you loved by years, by generations. Toby hugged himself and turned away again, tears starting in his eyes. Finding a bench (all its frost gone now, he noticed with some remote part of his attention), he sat.

He gathered Orpheus into his lap, and sat there hunched over until murmured conversation arose behind him, then suddenly realized that the talking was coming from right behind him. He turned to find Corva, Halen, and Jaysir standing there. They were all looking at him. "What?"

"Toby," said Corva, alarm sharpening her voice.

"Where's Shylif?"

People were yelling in the passenger lounge. As Toby and the others ran in he saw that a knot had formed over by the elevator doors; someone there was bellowing louder than anybody else. Around this cyclonic eye, other passengers milled like frightened clouds. The bots he'd left to guard the place were ignoring the chaos; as long as nobody tried to leave the lounge, they had no orders.

"Coley!" It was Shylif's voice, but transformed by rage into that of a stranger. "Sebastine Coley?"

Toby pushed his way through the encircling crowd, to find one man standing in the open space at its center. Shylif was glaring down, fists balled, at a man who crouched at his feet. "Please—" this man whimpered. "I'm not—"

"You're Coley! You said you were Coley!" Shylif's denner, Shadoweye, was slinking back and forth behind Shylif's feet, wailing and hissing. His tail was fluffed out, like a scared cat's would be.

"Shylif, stop!" Corva stepped unafraid into the ring. "You don't want to do this."

He spared her an indifferent glance. "I've waited forty years to do this." He reached for the man at his feet.

"He's not Sebastine Coley!"

The voice was thin, barely audible over the jumble of voices surrounding them. But Shylif paused and looked over.

"He's not Sebastine Coley," repeated the very old man who stood, his weak legs braced by an exo, with a group of women and children.

"I am."

Shylif blinked at him—and in that moment of indecision, Toby suddenly realized what he should have been doing all along. "Bots! Restrain this man!" Shylif straightened and began to turn, but the security bots were faster and he was lifted off his feet before he could even uncurl his fists.

Toby went to stand next to Corva. He offered his hand to the man on the floor, who hesitated, then took it.

"I... I'm Miles Coley," he said, ducking his head and looking around at everyone but Shylif. "This man said he was looking for a Coley, and I said, 'I'm a Coley.' Then he knocked me down!"

Toby turned to the old man. "You're Sebastine Coley?"

"He's my grandfather," said Miles in a surprised tone. "Grand-dad, what's this about?"

"I... I don't—" But the old man wouldn't look at them.

"You know." It was Shylif, still straining against the implacable grip of the security bot that held him. "Her name was Ouline. You stole her from Nessus."

"Ah. Ah!" The old man suddenly wilted, and he would have fallen over had his exo not compensated to prop him up.

"You lured her into the lockstep fortress and stole thirty years from her—from me!" Shadoweye was clawing at the security bot's ankles, wailing. The bot ignored the denner, but Corva knelt down and clucked at him. Reluctantly, he climbed into her arms.

Miles Coley had joined his wife and daughters; they formed a protective wall in front of the old man. One of the women was comforting Sebastine, who had burst into tears at Shylif's accusation.

Shylif's struggles had slowed. It seemed it had begun to dawn on him that he wasn't facing the callous young man who'd stolen his life, but a pale ghost at the end of his own. He stared at Coley, and as he stilled, Corva came to him and let Shadoweye slide onto the metal shelf of the security bot's enclosing arm. Shad oweye butted the underside of Shylif's chin, but for the moment, he was ignored.

"She died, Coley," he murmured. "She took her own life."

The old man's sobs intensified. His grandson gaped in astonishment, turning from him to Shylif and back again. "Grand-dad? Granddad, what's this man saying?"

Coley stammered. The moment stretched, and though all eyes were on this scene, Toby knew that the long unfolding of the drama behind it wasn't going to be resolved in the next minute, or the next day. He held up his hand.

"We're going to deal with this, but we can't do it here," he announced. "We have to get out of here while we can."

There was a startled silence, and then people's gazes began to shift from Coley and Shylif, to Toby. One of the men he'd spoken to earlier said, "Where is it we're going, anyway?"

"Back to Thisbe," Toby told them, "to reset your clocks.

"But to get there, first of all we're going to have to go through the Weekly."

Orpheus rode Toby's shoulder as they strode under geodesic glass ceilings that revealed black skies and ahead, the looming lantern-glow of a city-sphere. This was the one source of light in Wallop's cloud-continent; the passages they'd come through were eerie and silent, and though he'd ordered heat in the main thoroughfares that led to the lit city, now and then he caught glimpses of side-corridors where hoar frost still painted the walls, and where the floors were drifted with oxygen snow.

Though still weak, Orpheus fired off happy emoticons and his head bobbed back and forth as they reached the outskirts of the Weekly lockstep. Toby should have felt similarly triumphant—he'd just escaped one of the lockstep's most feared cultural enforcers, after all, and had rescued an entire shipload of people to boot.

The encounter between Shylif and Sebastine Coley had deeply disturbed him, however. Not just for its own sake, but because it made him wonder, even more, what it would be like when and if he ever set eyes on his own brother and sister. Lockstep time wrenched you back and forth, and after Shylif's experience he was beginning to realize just how unpredictable and brutal it could be.

Luckily no one approached him during the long walk through the frozen utility corridors linking the docks to the Weekly. Once they'd learned where they were going and how to get there, the exhausted and fearful passengers had gathered their things and marched in that direction, talking among themselves. They seemed a bit afraid of Toby, and no wonder since they didn't know who he was; and Corva and her brother had their heads together in excited conversation. Their circle entirely excluded Toby.

Shylif walked, head down and eyes glazed, with two bots accompanying him. A few steps away, Sebastine Coley walked in much the same stance, while his family fluttered nervously behind him.

It took a while to get through the airlocks. These were set up to protect the Weeklies from the dangerous cold and toxic air permeating the rest of the continent, and normally nobody came through them until Jubilee, which happened every four weeks, local time. Visitors from 360/1 being unexpected in between-times, bots and humans were now working furiously on the far side of the transparent glass walls, trying to get more doors to work. Meanwhile a trickle of humans cycled through, three or four at a time.

There was a lot of handwaving and emotional conversation happening with the workers and security people on the other side. The cover story Corva had come up with was that an explosion had vented some of the 360/1 habitats. Those gesticulating men and women had better be sticking to that story: they'd be telling the Weeklies that the bots who watched over the 360/1 cities during their long sleeps had woken a small army of emergency drones and backup systems when they detected a blast, and had evacuated everybody from the affected area. There was a problem with the power, though, and they were unable to find enough safe beds for the residents of one particular neighborhood. So, here they were, arriving at the airlocks to the Weekly lockstep with just a few household bots and some luggage.

The story should hold long enough for them to pass through the Weekly and take passage back to Thisbe—which seemed to be most people's plan. It helped that these 'refugees' were accompanied by numerous official 360 bots, including an impressive military escort. When Toby finally cycled through a lock himself, he left that escort behind, but even so nobody asked him any questions.

The hubbub was subsiding by the time the last bots brought their masters' luggage through the locks. Many of the refugees had bulled their way through the emergency responders and by now had lost themselves in the crowds of the city. That was a good idea, Toby thought. Since nobody seemed to need him anymore, least of all Corva Keishion, he eventually screwed up his courage and began walking into the tiered city himself. He'd find some sort of job, make some cash, and figure out how to get to Destrier. That had been the plan. It needed to be the plan again.

"Where do you think you're going?"

He turned to find Corva glaring at him. She was clutching her brother's arm, but all her attention was on Toby, and Wrecks sat at her feet glaring down his nose in imitation of his mistress.

"You got what you wanted," he said. To his own surprise, Toby found himself feeling resentful and, before he thought about it, added, "though you nearly got us all killed doing it."

"So you admit your sister would have killed us?"

He flushed angrily and turned away. "Goodbye, Corva."

"Toby, wait!"

He didn't stop but she ran to his side. He waited for the next cutting comment.

"I'm... I'm sorry," she said.

He stopped, blinked at her.

Corva stood with one foot twisted, toeing the pavement she was staring at. Her hands were clutched, all knuckle. Wrecks sat on his haunches, watching this performance in obvious surprise. "You didn't have to do any of the things you did," she said. "I know you risked everything for people you'd never even met. And setting Orpheus's alarm like you did— that was a terrible risk you both took and I'm just... I'm amazed at it all, that's all."

He'd never seen her like this. "You asked," he said. "I helped, is all." Oh, but he knew that wasn't all, not by a long shot. The thing was, Toby still hadn't absorbed the implications of what he'd just done. Walking away right now would probably have been best. He needed time to work through it all. Strangely, though, now that he had Corva's gratitude he was finding it made him even more uncomfortable than the indifference of her countrymen.

He had to laugh at his own words. "I guess it was kind of a super-hero thing to do. It's just... that's not me, Corva."

"I know. It wasn't me, a year ago, either."

"Corva Keishion, exchange student," he said with a smile.

"And then subcontractor to bots, then stowaway, criminal, revolutionary..." She shook her head ruefully. "I could try to say that one thing led to another, but that really doesn't begin to describe it."

Now they both laughed. After a moment, though, Toby's smile faded. "What are you going to do now? Go back to Thisbe?"

"I guess," she said. "Though, you know, the basic problem remains. The blockade... the punishment frequency."

"I can't reset your whole world's clock."

She looked him in the eye, and that steely look was back in hers. "Are you sure about that?"

"No. I don't know. I haven't exactly had time to find out what I can or can't do. But anyway—" he turned away from her again, "I don't want to."

"I get it," she said stiffly. "You don't want to take on your brother and sister."

It wasn't that at all. The fact was, waking these people, evading Nathan Kenani and taking over the lockstep bots—it had all been way too easy. Disturbingly easy. It was like playing Consensus in God mode, except that this was reality. You could blow up whole planets without a second thought in the game. Nearly anything he did with such powers in Lockstep 360/1 was bound to hurt somebody.

"Look, why should I stick my nose into any of this?" he demanded. "I don't know anything about anything here, you said so yourself the first time we met. I've been trying to catch up, but how do you catch up? It's impossible. Now you're asking me to rejig time for an entire world? How am I supposed to tell if that's a good thing to do or an evil thing to do?

"Corva, if I can't tell, then I'm not doing it. That's all there is to it."

At some point in the argument Corva's brother had come up to them, and a small half-circle of refugees from Thisbe had gathered a few more paces back. "You're right," said Halen, putting his hand on Corva's arm. "You have no reason to take our word for anything.

"Why don't you see for yourself?"

Toby grimaced. "By going to Thisbe with you, I suppose?"

Halen's lips twitched into a smile, with the same reluctance Toby saw in Corva. "If you're feeling insecure," he said, "you can bring that little bot army of yours."

"But really," said Corva, "how are you planning on getting to Destrier? Evayne and Peter have to know that's where you're headed. They'll be waiting for you with an army of their own, and it won't be one you can switch off."

"And you can get me there?"

"Maybe. If you help Thisbe, you'll have an entire planet on your side."

Corva had lowered her voice and was glancing around, and Toby was also growing uneasy with the listeners. He started walking, and she and her brother fell into step beside him. Wrecks was gamboling around Corva's feet and attracting a fair amount of attention from passersby; but they soon left her curious countrymen behind, and the crowds of the Weekly were diverse and strange enough that the three of them didn't really stand out.

Once they were out of earshot of the commotion around the airlocks, Toby said, "How much have you told them? Your friends from the ship."

"Obviously I told Halen. Some of the others know you brought us out of hibernation early, but not how. They might suspect, but the whole idea of you being a real McGonigal is so..."

"You think they'll figure it out when I re-tune your whole planet's frequency?"

There was a momentary silence; Corva and Halen glanced at each other. Then Corva sighed. "How do you want to do it? I mean, you're going to reveal yourself at some point. Right? So when? And how?"

Toby's bravado collapsed. He'd actually been trying not to think about that, just as he'd been trying not to think about how his brother and sister had changed, seemingly overnight, from familiar friends to hostile strangers.

"What happens when I do?" he asked, spreading his hands. "I have no idea. You have to tell me." And I have to trust you. But could he?

"Well," said Corva. "Some people think the world will end. You'll bring us all to paradise, because your return will be the fulfillment of time itself." She saw his expression and looked down quickly. "I know, it's crazy. But even the mildest interpretations... you have to understand, according to all our traditions—the stories, the religious orthodoxy, and about a billion books and stories—you're the heir. The eldest son of the McGonigals, and the original designer of the lockstep system."

"Which I'm not," he pointed out. "Kenani said that Mom created it."

"But who knows that, other than a few people like him?" She shook her head. "It doesn't matter, Toby: you're the heir. The Creator and Savior of the locksteps. If people thought you'd returned, they'd turn away from your brother and sister instantly. Many would follow you without question. And some..."

When she didn't continue, Halen nodded to her, as if she'd just agreed with something he'd said. "Some would follow Thisbe out of the lockstep."

"Not some," said Corva flatly.

"A lot. Many. Most, maybe. Would you let that happen?"

Toby shrugged; he had no idea.

"More importantly, would Peter let it happen without a fight?" Halen sat back, frowning at Toby. "Come with us to Thisbe and see what people really think of the McGonigals. Then tell us what you want to do. Though, I warn you, you might not like what you see there."

"I don't like any of this," said Toby. There was no question he was trapped. With Peter and Evayne after him, he had nowhere else to go. Even so, the idea of pretending to be the messiah the legends said he was, was profoundly disturbing.

He sighed. "I'll go."

"But not as Toby McGonigal."

13

Toby stepped onto the soil of Thisbe, stopped, and began to cough. Tears filled his eyes and he had to step away from the others and cover his face for a moment. Orpheus climbed up to perch on his shoulder and said, "mrrt?"

It was years since he'd breathed the dust-laden, mold-and-bug filled air of a real planetary biosystem. It was like fire in his lungs. There was more to the shock than that, though.

Blazing sunlight sent waves of heat into his face. The air was hot, and felt free of the heaviness of the subsurface domes and close metal passages he'd been condemned to after they left Earth. When he squinted his eyes open again, he beheld a wilderness of rolling hills, green grass, and trees nodding in the breeze. Blue sky presided over it all, where white clouds reached for and overtopped one another. He could smell the grass, and wild flowers. The buzz of insects sounded from nearby. It was all so beautiful and overwhelming, so like Earth.

"Wh-where are we?"

The sun flickered and went out. Toby blinked and ducked with a shout of surprise. "Damn," he heard Halen say.

Then the light came back on, only now it was a lurid, monochromatic blue. Everything was suddenly electric and strange, the trees pale parodies of themselves, the sky white. "What the hell—?"

Corva glanced up and shrugged. "Glitches. They happen. You'll see. I don't actually mind the blue ones. It's the red I hate."

Toby put his hand up to his face—but no, he hadn't absent-mindedly donned his glasses. This was no virtual world. He could still feel the heat of the strange sunlight on his face, and smell the f lowers. The bugs were still zizzing in the warm air. "That's not a sun?"

Jaysir and Shylif were with them, and now Jay laughed. "Welcome to the Laser Wastes. Or, at any rate, their slummy edges."

Behind them the Traveler's Rest was a long low building on the edge of a fairly conventional, if overgrown-looking, spaceport. A few bots were struggling to cut down young trees that were blocking some of the buildings' exits, and only one runway was clear; the others sprouted grass and more small trees through cracks in the pavement.

In the other direction, past the hills Toby could now make out the towers of a sizable city. "I don't understand," he said, shading his eyes and peering upward. The light source was as bright as the sun, but was a tiny dot, too intense to look at. "What is that?"

"About eight thousand years ago some civilization or other built this shell of energy-harvesters around Proxima Centauri. That's the nearest star to Earth," Jay said.

"I know that."

"Right. Well, a few thousand years after they died off, one of the locksteps made a devil's pact with the things that had inherited the harvesters in return for a little fraction of that power. They built thousands of these asteroid-sized lasers—red, blue, and green, to make white, you know?—and aimed them at some of the nearer nomad planets. Like this one."

"Wait—we're, how far from Proxima Centauri here?"

"Oh, a good two light-years away. You couldn't even see it with the naked eye. But the laser light reaches us, and it's enough to heat the whole planet to livable temperature."

Toby knew he was staring, slack-jawed, at the sky. He couldn't help himself, his mind had gone blank. Finally Orpheus head-butted him in the cheekbone and he stammered, "O-okay. How many worlds did you say?"

"Thousands. But they're not lockstep worlds—well, except for a few discards like Thisbe. They're too hot. Too fast." He nodded at the overgrown runways.

Corva nodded in agreement. "They've gone strange, a lot of them. Alien and dangerous, and they don't communicate with the outside world anymore. The Wastes, that's what we call them."

"And Thisbe is...?"

She shrugged and jabbed a thumb at the sky. "Far out on the edge—and glitchy. So, not worth the effort for your average self-respecting civilization. Perfect for us, though."

"... And with that, here's my ride," said Jay. He waved at an older man and middle-aged woman who were strolling toward them across the landing field. The man was accompanied by a cargo bot like Jay's, which balanced an impossibly tall pile of machinery on its back. The woman was surrounded by a... Toby squinted... a flock of some kind of glittering metallic things. Behind her stalked a tall, willowy, and sinuous bot, not quite human-formed but beautiful.

"Makers?" said Toby. Jaysir nodded.

"We're not loners, you know. There just weren't any on Wallop. We love to get together, we just refuse to engage in social relations that are based on material inequity. Anyway, I've got a lot to talk about with these guys. About what we should do next."

"You're not going to tell them who—"

"—You are? Not until you give me the all-clear." Jaysir grinned at him. "But you understand, I need to... set them up for it, so it's not a complete shock when you do. And you'll probably want to know whether we can help, when you make your move."

"I don't know that there's any moves to be made, Jay."

"You just keep thinking that." With a cheerful wave, the maker walked off to meet his kinsmen.

Halen had flagged down an empty aircar, and they piled their few belongings into it and set off for the city. A few minutes into their flight the "sunlight" went from psychotic blue to eerie green. It stayed that way for a minute, then flipped back to yellow-white.

Now that he could properly see, Toby realized that their car was part of a regular stream converging on the core of the city; the awakened passengers from a dozen ships were on their way into town. The sky would probably have been dark with aircars, he supposed, if it weren't for the blockade.

As the shock of seeing and feeling sunlight faded, Toby remembered his nervousness upon awaking today. He and Orpheus had used cicada beds on the flight out, so woke refreshed; and he'd been instantly aware of the ordeal that was to come.

Today, he was going to meet Corva's parents.

It didn't help that Shylif was guesting with them as well. Corva had invited him to stay at her parents' place until the Thisbe courts heard his case against Sebastine Coley; at first he'd been reluctant but had finally agreed just this morning. Toby was simultaneously cheered and uneasy that he'd accepted; after the incident on Wallop, he wasn't entirely comfortable around the man anymore.

Having Shylif there when he met Corva's parents might help to deflate the tension. On the other hand, it made Toby seem like yet another possibly disreputable member of her rogue's gallery, and he was eager to counter this impression. He rehearsed his words as buildings of alien architecture, and occasionally the Consensus style, flicked past below. "Pleased to meet you, sir, ma'am," he'd say, or something like that. "Yes, I saved your son," or, "No, I didn't save anybody, your daughter saved my life."

Or, maybe, "Hi, I'm the brother of the man who's oppressing your entire planet."

"Am I Garren Morton today? Or Toby Mc-Gonigal?" he'd asked Corva before they went into hibernation—last night, or so it felt like.

She'd frowned. "Let's start with Garren and work our way up," she'd said.

"Ah, Orph, what do I do?" He put his face next to the denner's, and scratched the fur between his ears. Orpheus made a bouquet of smiley-face emoticons to go with the purr he gave off. He seemed quite unconcerned with the strangeness of this new world. Toby wasn't so comfortable.

Corva's brother was some kind of revolutionary. They'd talked a few times while he and his older, gray-haired companions from the ship had worked to secure them a ship back to Thisbe. That wasn't the only ship they were after: more than half the men and women Toby had rescued from Wallop's frozen clouds were on their way to other worlds, where they claimed to be intent on doing "business."

Ammond had been doing "business," too. Even if the strange quarantine of Thisbe was unjust, Halen and his friends seemed to be doing more than just trying to undo it. Halen, at least, hated Peter's lockstep. You could hear it in his voice when he said even the most innocent thing about it. He wanted to take down Peter's world.

So, should Toby help him do it? The towers of the city swept slowly by below them. The place looked post-apocalyptic: the building facades were cracked and vine-choked, the streets overgrown with grass and trees. Various big machines were struggling to cut it back, and bots were working to fix the damage to the buildings. Still, the place looked busy, with crowds of people in the streets and lots of aerial vehicles hopping between the districts. The aircars from the spaceport thinned out, most landing on this or that downtown platform. Theirs was one of the few that kept on into the forested suburbs.

"The city's not under a dome or anything," he suddenly realized. "Do you get any winter here?"

Halen shook his head. "It stays subtropical most of the time—except when the sun has an outage. Those can last for weeks, and then the whole world'll freeze over. It's brutal. The rest of the time, everything's constantly growing, so while we're hibernating it just takes over." He nodded at the grass-choked streets. "Normally that all gets cleaned up before we wake, but the bots can't keep up with the blockade schedule. Too many turns too close together; they're breaking down."

"Home," said Corva. Her voice was tense.

The aircar settled on the overgrown lawn of a fairly modest-looking stone house. The place was ringed with trees, and only narrow paved foot-paths wound between those to the neighbors and beyond. Apparently, out here in the suburbs they'd given up on keeping the streets clear of invading vegetation.

Toby stared at the trees. He hadn't seen so many in one place since he'd left Earth. They made him want to cry and he felt a pang of intense envy for Corva and her family, who were lucky enough to live among them. Although, they probably never had time to get used to them. A sapling this month would be a stout adult after just one turn, and dead after a few more.

People were coming out of the house. Halen pushed up the aircar's canopy and bounded out. Corva followed, but as she approached her family her footsteps slowed, and then she stopped. Suddenly she burst into tears.

"You're older!" A man and a woman rushed over to her, along with a young man and woman. She let her parents embrace her, but pushed away the other two.

"No! It's terrible, it's terrible!" With a sob she burst past them and ran into the house.

Toby sat in the aircar, clutching Orpheus and feeling sick. Finally Halen seemed to remember him and called, "Garren! It's okay, come meet Mom and Dad!"

He didn't want to get out of the car, but Orpheus squirmed out of his grasp and leaped down to the grass, where he proceeded to roll back and forth in delight. Toby put a shaky hand on the canopy bed and climbed out. With slow steps he walked up to Corva's family. They were debating who should go after Corva.

"—Rescued us from the timelock! He won't say how he did it, but he agreed to come with us." Halen was grinning, but his eyes were cold as he looked over at Toby.

His parents weren't like that; in fact, they were practically in tears themselves. Corva's other brother and sister looked to be about Halen's age; all seemed older than Corva, but a sinking feeling in Toby's stomach told him that, no, she must be the eldest.

"I'll go to her," said Corva's sister.

"No," Toby heard himself say.

Halen's grin froze. "What?" he said in a slightly strangled tone.

"I'm sorry." Toby bowed quickly. "I'm Garren Morton, Corva and I are just friends, but, the thing is..."

"What?" Halen said again. His smile was gone.

"It happened to me, too," Toby blurted. "Having years stolen like—like's happened to you. I know how she feels. My own brother and sister are... well, they're a lot older than me now. And my parents are dead. For me, they were alive just a couple of months ago, but it's been..." Halen's eyes widened in warning, and Toby shrugged. "An impossibly long time.

"I know you want to run to her," he said to Corva's sister. "She looks the same to you, but for her, you're an entirely new person. It's going to take her a while to get over that shock."

Her father sighed. "It's what I said would happen. The same thing would have happened to you," he said to Halen. "You shouldn't have risked it all like that, son."

Halen was now the target of their attention. With another quick bow, Toby moved around them and entered the house, where alert bots offered him orange juice and biscuits. He stared at them, sidled past, and called out, "Corva?"

He hesitated, but didn't really feel like he had to tiptoe about; the household bots were there to protect the privacy of the family and would simply bar him from anywhere he shouldn't go. Or so he supposed, until he saw that half the butlers were sitting silent in dusty corners: broken down, like so much of the city.

He started up the stairs, and they didn't stop him.

She was face-down on a bed in one of the bedrooms. This was a girl's room, its walls tuned to shifting washes of yellow and peach; pictures of family, places, and people tumbled and sailed slowly up and back in that dimensionless space. There were wooden boxes under the bed and chests of drawers whose tops overflowed with jewelry and dozens of toys, some of which had broken down and sat forlornly while the rest all crowded at the edge of the surface, watching Corva weep with concern on their tiny faces.

"Evayne's room looked like this," said Toby from the doorway. Corva stiffened, then turned her head enough to say, "You've got to be kidding."

"She's my little sister, Corva. At least, she was last time I saw her."

Corva lay very still for a long time. Then she rolled over and sat up. She wouldn't meet Toby's eye. "I was hoping to totally redo this room before I showed it to any young man. I haven't lived here in years."

"You were at school."

She nodded. "Studying architecture! How to design buildings to last thousands of years. Ruin design, it's called." She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Suddenly, something seemed to occur to her, and now she did send Toby a puzzled look. "What about you? You got lost because you were away from home for some reason. There's a billion stories about why, but most of them are ridiculous— "

"We had to seal our claim to Sedna by visiting all its moons. One was stupidly far away. Rockette, we called it. I got lost on the way there."

It was strange. What had been his immediate experience yesterday was something he could talk about as being in the past; it was a story he could tell. He grinned and shrugged. "That's really all there was to it. I didn't want to go, but Mom and Dad weren't home, and Peter and Evayne weren't old enough."

Corva frowned, thinking. "That must have been tough on all of you."

"Toughest on Peter. He hates change, he's afraid of his own shadow. He cried for days when he found out Mom and Dad were going."

"What about when you left?"

Toby shrugged. "We had this gameworld we shared, called Consensus. I promised I'd meet him in it every day. He was fine with that."

Corva gave him a long measured look. "Are you sure about that?"

His heart was suddenly hammering again. He shook himself angrily, and scowled at her toys. They backed away, all except for a little warrior with a sword who stood bravely with his thumbnail-sized weapon raised.

"We can't talk about any of this without tripping over it, can we?"

"Tripping over what?" He thought he knew, but he wanted her to say it.

"The change. How we slept, and overnight they got older. And... how it's all around us all the time. These cliffs of time you could just fall over accidentally at any moment. Lose a day, lose a century... I hate it."

He was surprised. "You want to leave the lockstep?"

"That would be worse. To be stranded in realtime? Left behind by everybody you ever knew?" She shuddered. "No, it's just so unfair how a year can be snatched away from you like that. Or, or, a whole life."

He found himself sitting on the bed next to her, and she leaned into him. As he had so many times with Evayne, he put his arm around her; but this was different and he knew it. Corva buried her face in his shoulder. "I'm sorry," she said, voice muffled.

"For what?"

"For using you the way I did. For being mean. I just... didn't think I could trust you."

"But you can."

She was silent. Then she pulled away.

"Toby, we have to face them some time. For me, it's today I guess. For you... do you really know what'll happen when you do that?"

He clasped his hands and looked down.

"No. I guess not."

"Then don't make any promises, okay?"

Fair enough, he thought, though her words had hurt him. He stood up briskly. "Come on. They're waiting for you. I think you need to make the first move."

"And... how I feel? About seeing them so different?"

He laughed shortly. "Maybe you should hide that for a day or so. See how it goes."

Corva stood too, and blew out a deep breath. Then she smiled. "Nobody else could have said that to me, but maybe you're right. I'll pretend for a day and then... see."

They almost joined hands, but she turned away first, and they went downstairs.

The Keishions were loud. They had definite opinions about everything, and every last one of them needed to be right all the time. Their arguments started at breakfast, continued all day, and spilled out onto the lawns and echoed through the forest around the house. At first, Toby just stayed out of the way, but gradually he realized that they appreciated his opinions and he began to relax. Most importantly, they knew he was an ignoramus when it came to the lockstep worlds, so he felt comfortable asking them the dumbest questions— about Thisbe, the locksteps, about their family, and sometimes—when he could be nonchalant about it—Corva.

Like him, she was the eldest—or, had been. She still won the most arguments and the others deferred to her despite the age gap. What she had lost to them in time, she'd more than made up in experience.

Corva was no help at all during his first few days in the house; she was too busy getting reacquainted with everybody else. Halen hung around the edges, brooding and watching Toby. Meanwhile, outside permanent pitched-battle of the Keishion household, Thisbe was fully awake now and working hard to catch up with the damage from the frequency-shift that Peter had wrought on it.

Toby found it natural to help the bots clearing the underbrush and fixing years of storm damage. Orpheus spent all day outside anyway, and Toby loved the fresh air too, but also in some ways it was like being back on Sedna, where there had always been building or repair work to be done. He loved fixing stuff and while doing this absorbing work, he could completely forget his troubles for hours at a time.

(Although, on those rare occasions when the "sun" changed color, he came crashing back to reality, at least for a minute or two.)

Gradually, he noticed that Corva was often nearby while he was working. She would bring him water, or simply be seen reading in the crook of a tree while he was hacking at the underbrush. Then, she began perching, not far off, on a newly-repaired wall or a lawn chair she'd dragged over; and since, well, they were in the same space anyway... they talked.

"I had a denner when I was growing up," she said as they watched Wrecks and Orpheus chase each other around the ragged, but finally mowed, lawn. "Chauncey was his name. I was pretty lonely at first when I went off to school, so I looked into getting another one, but you couldn't get them on Wallop. I wasn't going to let that stop me so I kept asking people and pushing, and that's how I found out about these people on Lowdown who bred them."

Toby was startled, and then it all made sense. "Ammond and Persea!" They'd bred denners.

She nodded. "They owned the operation, they didn't do it themselves. They had them implanted with the cicada-bed tech for shady customers. Total gray-ware stuff, it's just barely acceptable to the lockstep monitors. Anyway, I had no intention of using Wrecks that way, it seemed wrong, but these were the only denners you could get. Then the blockade happened. My money got cut off, I couldn't go home, then I found out that Halen had tried to run the blockade and was trapped in stasis. I had to sell my bots for food, I couldn't afford to travel... but I'd heard about the stowaways when I got Wrecks."

She told Toby how she'd met Shylif, and how they'd stowed away on a flight back to Lowdown, where, with the last of her money, she'd bought Orpheus. "He was for Halen, you see. I had this crazy idea of sneaking into the quarantined ship and getting him to wake Halen up. I had no idea how it was going to work, but I was damnwell going to try."

So far, this made sense. Toby watched the denners roll around, play-fighting, while he thought through what had happened. "But how did you find out about me? Or did you even know who I was?"

"Actually, we had a pretty good idea. See, we were stowaways. We were living a bit off-frequency anyway, and spending time in spaceports and warehouses. So, we were watching when Ammond's tug bots brought down your ship. They did it a week before everybody was supposed to wake up; but we were already awake, 'cause we'd set the denners' alarms to get us up well before there would be people nosing about. So we saw them shrouding this incredibly old, radiation-fried ship in orange plastic sheeting, and walling it up in a warehouse space off in a far corner of Ammond's operation. And then we saw them bring you out.

"I was really curious at that point, so I looked up the lettering on the side of your ship. I expected to get a hit off the lockstep ship registry, but instead, all the hits were from books on ancient mythology...."

He frowned in thought. "So when I saw you in the courtyard that first day..."

"I was there to buy Orpheus—but I was also there to look for the boy we'd seen them take out of the ship. And when you came running out I freaked. First, 'cause I knew who you might be, and second, because Ammond's guards had told me they'd cut off my nose if they caught me sneaking about."

He nodded. It all made sense. "And when you woke me up on the way to Little Auriga?"

"You'd only just gone under. Your hibernation was still reversible—like in the boat, remember? Oh, you mean how did I get to you?" She shook her head quickly. "Ammond thinks of himself as a criminal mastermind, but his security's really lame. Thisbe is habitable all the time," she said, gesturing around at the rich trees and long grass, "and there's other locksteps here. We are good at security, at locks and vaults and alarms. We have to be. So Shylif and I didn't have much trouble breaking in while your ship was on the ground waiting for launch clearance. Shylif had already taught me how to break into a ship; you need to know how to do that if you're going to be a decent stowaway. I needed to know how, anyway, if I was going to get Orpheus to Halen."

"But you followed me to Little Auriga. You didn't have to."

She looked uncomfortable. "When I woke you up to warn you, it didn't seem like you'd understood me. You were all dopey and 'huh?' So... we argued about it and decided to go after you."

"'Cause I was a McGonigal, and worth a lot?"

She glared at him. "'Cause I thought they were going to kill you. Or worse."

"Worse, yeah." He shuddered. "Thank you. Though, really, it was Orpheus rapping on my window who showed me the way out."

She laughed. "Anyway, I'm just glad it's over. I suppose it's what they call an adventure, but to me it was just one long panic attack. If that's what an adventure's like, I never want another one."

Away on the other side of the lawn, Halen was chatting with one of the neighbors. Toby nodded at him. "Halen never got his, you know."

"His what?"

"His adventure. He never got to have it. He started out to save you, and you ended up saving him instead. He never even got a proper look at Wallop. Went from ship to ship, sleep to sleep, and now he's back here."

Corva gaped at Toby. "What are you trying to say? That he's disappointed? Mad at me for saving him?" Toby shrugged. "Oh, come on. Is that how boys think about these things?"

He nodded. "That is how boys think about these things."

"Well, it's stupid."

She changed the subject, and soon Toby went back to working with the bots. After that, though, they spent a lot of time together. And they talked.

The rhythm of life in the locksteps was starting to become clear to him, and talking to Corva helped give the abstractions flesh and blood. She described the parties that happened at the end of every turn—every month, that is, by human reckoning. Whatever resources the household, or the city or planet hadn't used during its four weeks awake had to be able to hibernate, or it had to be used up. Some things were too fragile or temporary by nature to winter over. So, you used up all the food in the fridge, and broke up, burned, or built mad sculptures out of other transient things. In some places the neighbors vied for extravagance and shock value—although, since the ritual happened so frequently, some people just ignored it and went to bed early, trusting the household bots to clear away the deteriorated and decayed objects by the next waking.

More ceremony was lavished on people who might be traveling. At the very least you wouldn't see them for a month. If they were on their way to the other side of the lockstep, or somewhere exotic like Earth or Barsoom, then it might be a year or more. Leavetaking parties were major events in any neighborhood.

Next morning—at start-of-turn—the trees were bigger, or completely cut down, and even entire landforms like hills might have shifted slightly. The climate might be different, too—Thisbe's was none too stable. Most importantly on such mornings, though, was the fact that ships from a thousand worlds crowded the skies.

Corva talked about visiting the port on the dawn of a new turn and watching exotic, weirdly dressed strangers step blinking into the lurid daylight of her planet. They brought crafts and gifts as alien as themselves, and stories and pictures from around the lockstep and beyond.

The longer a world slept, the more ships could appear during that special night. As Toby had learned, if you doubled your sleep you would far more than double the number of worlds whose ships could reach you in that time. Modern fusion or fission-fragment rockets could get you about half a light-year in thirty years, and nomad planets were spaced about one every tenth of a light-year in this part of the galaxy. A world that slept for three decades couldn't visit just five times the number of worlds as one that wintered over for one-fifth the time; it could visit five hundred more. The longer you slept, the more opportunities for trade you'd have.

Lockstep 360/1 was about five light-years across, and within that space there were more than seventy thousand worlds, ranging from little moon-sized ice balls to a couple of planets as big as Jupiter. All were easy to get to from even the smallest outpost, provided you could spend thirty years at a time accumulating fuel for the journey and wintered over.

And yet, Thisbe had gone against the sensible rules of the locksteps and been punished for it. The blockade remained.

Corva patiently explained why. "Thisbe's really a fast world. See," she said, pointing to where some bots were repairing a roof, "there's a huge cost in wear and tear to wintering over here. There's a trade-off between how much you can produce while you were awake, and how little you'll consume if you slept longer. There's also a trade-off between the bigger manufacturing and agriculture potential of fast worlds like this, and the bigger trading opportunities you get if you winter over longer. There're other locksteps on Thisbe, you know, and they get by on higher frequencies 'cause fast worlds like this do better at manufacturing than trade."

Corva took Toby on walks through the neighborhood, where some houses where sealed up and silent. These were neighbors she only saw on jubilee, which only happened once or twice a year. They were the ones who were more often awake, though—it was really Corva and her people who were usually the silent, sealed-up mysteries.

During one of these walks she told Toby what had happened. "The government wanted our jubilees to synchronize with more of the other locksteps. Those locksteps wanted it too. They don't use McGonigal cicada beds," she added, nodding at a silent estate whose lawns were overgrown with weeds and young trees. "So there was a lot of talk about scrapping our beds and using theirs. That would cost a huge amount, but more importantly we'd break the lockstep agreement."

"What's that?" He'd read enough to know it was some sort of service agreement between the McGonigals and the 360 worlds.

"The agreement says we promise not to change the frequency except during emergencies. In return, we get access to all the 360-toone worlds without port taxes, immigration reviews, and all that. Dad calls it a 'level playing field.' It's useful, 'cause among other things it lets all the worlds trade using the same currency and know what its value is from turn to turn.

"The government thought of a way to bend the rules. The cicada beds all have their own timers, of course, but they're coordinated by a timing signal sent from centralized servers. One of those is here, on Thisbe, and it sets the exact frequency and times for a couple hundred worlds whose only connection to the rest of the lockstep is through us. We're the gateway. If we hack our timer to just shift our frequency a little—add a year here, drop one there—we could go into jubilee with our neighbors a lot more often. Barsoom might complain, but they wouldn't come down on us. And since we were the server for all those other worlds, they'd follow us. There's a whole bunch of different locksteps near the Laser Wastes that would come into jubilee. So with one stroke Thisbe could double its trade potential."

Toby nodded. It was brilliant. That overgrown estate, normally silent, would be awake more often. More ships would crowd the sky. "It's perfect! Why would it be a problem?"

"If they let us get away with time-shifting, everybody might try it. Then there'd be chaos, because the value of money couldn't be predicted anymore and ships leaving port for their furthest trading partners couldn't be guaranteed to get there in time. What happens if I've got a crucial trading trip planned with a world that's a twenty-nine-year journey away, and they decide to slip their schedule and come awake after twenty-seven years so they can jubilee with somebody else? I get there and they're wintered over. I have to wait another turn to do my trading with them. Instead of one month lockstep-time, that trip's taken at least two. It's crazy."

He was puzzled. "You think your people were wrong to do what they did?"

"Yes!" She threw up her hands in frustration. "It was stupid. But it's more stupid what Barsoom did to punish us! Way too extreme."

He had to agree with that. Corva had lost eight years of her family's lives to the blockade, and could have lost four more. Shifting Thisbe's frequency into high gear like this was a brutal over-reaction. The global economy was depressed, with resources that normally could accumulate for decades being used up faster than they could be renewed. Trades that had happened once a month now only occurred every year, and the jubilees were totally screwed up.

"I'm surprised you put up with it," he said. "Better to leave the lockstep entirely than suffer like this."

"If only it were that easy," she said. "Leave three-sixty and we slash our trading partners. If we permanently sped up we'd lost dozens or hundreds of worlds as next-day neighbors. But we can't go on this way, either. It's unfair. It's evil."

So, there it was. She didn't say the words, but Toby heard them in his head as in her voice: You're a McGonigal, maybe you can stop this. He had no idea whether he had the power, yet also unspoken was another accusation: the fault lay not with the lockstep system, but with the fact that it was ruled by the McGonigals.

The peaceful setting, combined with Corva's comment about her adventure being over, had been making Toby wonder: could his own be over too? If he'd escaped Nathan Kenani, maybe he'd escaped Evayne as well... and maybe he didn't need to ever confront her or Peter. They were different people now; his beloved brother and sister were lost forever to time. Wouldn't the sensible thing be to just accept that, and find a life for himself in this wondrous and strange world his family had built while he slept? But things were far from perfect here. Corva was right; what was happening to Thisbe was unfair.

It was hilarious in a way. Evayne and Peter were acting up again. It was time for the eldest brother to clean up the mess as he had so many times in the past. He had to laugh.

"What's so funny?" She sent him one of her special glares. Toby shook his head.

"It's all been going by too fast for me to keep up," he said. "But that's got to change.

"It's time I started planning the next turn."

14

Shylif went everywhere now with a guard of McGonigal bots. These were entirely under Toby's control, and he knew it; yet he hadn't complained. In fact, he seemed oddly cheerful, despite the fact that Toby—and the Thisbe government—were keeping him from confronting Sebastine Coley again. Coley's whereabouts were known, but so far, the Thisbe authorities couldn't charge him with anything. The alleged crime had taken place on another world, and thousands of years ago now, in real-time terms. The odds of Shylif achieving actual justice seemed very long indeed.

Yet he'd come to see Toby one morning and said nothing about any of that. On the contrary, he'd volunteered to help Toby catch up on his history. After all, as he'd put it, "I had to do all this reading too, once."

Thisbe's public records were open to Toby, and he'd finally summoned the courage to confront those images and videos of his brother and sister taken after he left. After what he'd just done on Wallop, it seemed silly to keep avoiding a few pictures. Yet, as the days passed and he combed through old news stories, he found very little that made the new Peter and Evayne come to life for him.

"Look at this!" he said in exasperation. He and Shylif had their glasses on and were sharing a set of research windows. "Says here, about half the original Sedna colonists are still alive—which I kind of figured after meeting Kenani. I mean, it's been forty years since I left, after all. You'd think they would have written memoirs, made documentaries, said something about the early years."

"Not if they're being threatened," Shylif pointed out reasonably. "Obviously, the chairman wants to keep his secrets."

"Yeah." Toby didn't try to hide his disappointment. Had Peter learned nothing from Consensus?

"But there's another reason, Toby," Shylif went on. "You're kind of uniquely positioned to not see it."

"What do you mean?"

"Lockstep time is strange. This history you're looking for, at one and the same time there's nothing to it—only forty years!—and way too much of it—fourteen thousand years. Both at once. How are you supposed to think about that?"

Toby didn't know. The official records were disappointing, being merely a litany of massive immigrations, explosive economic growth, and the conquest of new worlds. There were about a million pictures of Peter standing on some podium or other, waving and smiling. It just went on and on.

But he had another source. The archive from the twentier contained chaotic and fragmented records from Carter McGonigal's surveillance of the Sedna colony. Toby went back to these.

There were two kinds of records. The first was the surveillance footage itself, which came in giant terabyte dumps from hundreds of cameras and listening devices, mostly standard bots eavesdropping while they went about their business. Toby assigned this to some game personalities in his local copy of Consensus, telling them to review it for interesting items.

The second kind of record, though, was much more interesting. Carter had recorded family meetings held in a cramped little closet, where he, and initially just Toby's mother, had talked about their fears and suspicions. Toby's father was convinced the trillionaires had planted one or more spies or saboteurs among the Sedna colonists. Months went by, and nothing turned up to confirm that worry. Toby watched it all anyway, fascinated and sorrowful at being so close to, and still so far from his dearest people.

One day it wasn't just Mom and Dad meeting. Peter and Evayne were there, too. And Peter wasn't happy.

"You're doing what?" He stalked back and forth, his head and eyes turning to remain fixed on the open surveillance windows in the physical control panel at the focus of the room. "Isn't this what they do? Why are we doing it?"

"Listen," their father said tightly. "You're going to have to know how this stuff works. I'm not going to be around, well, for a while. I have to return to Earth, there's a challenge to our claim. While I'm away, we're going to be vulnerable. If something's going to happen, it'll be while I'm en route, do you understand? You have to be ready."

"It's wrong! I'm not doing it!" Peter stopped still and glared at his parents, and Toby found himself smiling. He wasn't sure of the date-stamp, but at this point Peter must be almost as old as Toby had been when he set off for Rockette. That meant he'd be pretty much as old here as Toby was now. A kind of twin, yet Toby could still see the boy in him. He could see the man, too—the solidity of Peter's bones was making itself known in the angles of his face, the round solidity of his skull—but he still seemed so young. It made Toby wonder whether he, too, seemed as young to the people around him.

Evayne walked over and put her hand on Peter's arm. "I get it," she said. "It's how things are, Pete, we can't change it.

"Why don't... why don't you just treat this like it was a Consensus scenario? Play it through? I'll help."

Toby skipped ahead, taking giant steps through time—weeks, months, a year. After his father left for Earth again the records became unevenly spaced. At last he came to the final one.

The shot was of Sedna's landscape. Nearby everything was utterly black, and out at the horizon it was, too; with only the sky blazing with stars to indicate up and down. In the middle distance was a cratered plain, and on it bright flashes of light created a stroboscopic impression of bots—big mining units and smaller, human-formed ones—locked in combat. The flashes were explosions and electrical discharges. The scene was, at first, utterly silent.

Then Peter's voice came on line, perfect and stereoscopic. "We're going to be hiding this backup as soon as I'm done. I just wanted to record what's happening... in case what we're going to try doesn't work.

"The trillionaires have made their move."

The camera pulled back. The image was taken near ground level, and had the quality of the twentier's own cameras. Amplified starlight illuminated a sheltered ring of rocks where several space-suited figures sat, surrounded by bots, butlers, and weapons both makeshift and purpose-built. One of the space-suited figures stood in the center of the space, and although its faceplate was blank, it moved with the jittery intensity recognizable as Peter's.

That suit knelt now in front of the camera. "We woke up today to find the colony bots running amok. They tried to kill us in our beds. Luckily this surveillance network my parents set up isn't connected to the main internet. We were alerted by that surveillance system and were able to get out. The bots we'd committed to it are still on our side, who knows for how long? And they're all fighting it out down there." He pointed, and the camera obligingly turned to take in the sight of the distant, silent battle.

"It's pretty clear what they're trying to do. They've ruptured the colony's oxygen tanks, blown up the greenhouse—"

"I saw a pack of them going into the food stores before we got out," said someone else. The camera turned again, this time revealing who else was on this rise above the battle: everyone, it seemed. There were hundreds of space-suited figures sitting, standing, and pacing here. Only a few bots, mostly twentiers, squatted among them.

"We've nearly mopped them all up, but the damage is done," Peter went on. "They targeted essential life support, in order to take us down as quick as they could. Whoever's running the operation doesn't care if all his bots get wiped out in the end, because we're already good as dead. We can't survive without those supplies. The plan's pretty simple, eh, Mom? Destroy our air, water, heat, and food supplies, and we die. Call it a tragic accident, hold a big memorial service back on Earth, and after a while drum up support for a new expedition to seed a new colony. That'll take a few years, but hey, they've got time, right?

"It's a plan so simple it can't fail. Except that it's going to, right Mom?"

"As long as they don't target the cicada beds," she said.

"... And it looks like they haven't. Whoever they are, they don't know about your experiments. They certainly didn't know about the secondary network. So they have no idea what we're going to do."

The camera returned to Peter, who now loomed above it, a silhouette whose backdrop was the twisting banner of the Milky Way.

"Dad's network is still operating, but it was always pretty simple and I was able to take it over long ago. I'm pretty sure they are not able to control it, even if they knew it existed. That network will coordinate the bots we've got left while they repair the life support systems and rebuild our supplies. That could take months or years, but it doesn't matter. We'll all be asleep.

"We already proved we could double the size of the colony by having half our people winter over—isn't that what you're calling the hibernation, Evie?—while the rest of us are awake. We don't have enough beds for everybody, so what we're going to do is cycle through them a few at a time. When those ones are frozen solid we're going to store 'em in the hangar and put the next group into the beds. When the crisis is over the bots will bring us back the same way, one batch at a time."

Peter turned to gaze in the direction of the battle. "Looks like things are winding down. We might be able to go back soon. We're not going to broadcast any distress signal. We'll let 'em think we're dead. Then, in a few years, we'll be back up and running, and waiting for them when they send their own colonists.

"Funny thing is, we might be even better off by the time we wake up. The longer the bots have to fix things up, the more resources they'll have ready when we revive.... Everybody ready?"

The camera swung again, showing the colonists standing, turning, gathering together facing Peter and two other suited shapes— Evayne and Mother, no doubt.

Suddenly Peter turned to look into the camera. "You! Twentier! Take this record and hide it. You're going to ground now, too. I'll find you when we're done.

"All right, everybody, single file, and watch out for—"

There was nothing more in the twentier's memory.

The Keishion family bots were repairing each other now. There wasn't any more work to be done around the house, and the Keishions had settled into something that Corva said was a lot like their normal routine. Supplies and resources were thin these days, but they were industrious people. They were getting by.

Toby spent whole days away from the estate. He could be seen walking in the hills, talking to nobody apparently, but with his glasses on. Sometimes a small swarm of butlers and grippies followed him, and together they would act out dramas and battles in the parkland that wove its way through the city. Corva and Halen stood together one morning, watching this spectacle and shaking their heads. Later that day Halen marched out and stepped between Toby and the butler he was talking to.

"Toby, what are you doing?"

"Oh, hi, Halen, what's up?"

"I dunno. Just a blockade, and all of us aging ten times faster than the rest of the lockstep. Or hadn't you noticed?"

Toby was holding a grippy like it was a pistol. He let go and it dropped, changing shape and twisting like a cat to land on sudden little legs. He lowered his glasses to look over them at Halen.

"Why don't you come in here?"

Halen frowned minutely. Then he snapped his fingers and one of the bots that always hung around him walked up and handed him a pair of glasses. He put them on and Toby synced their interfaces.

The hills wavered and were suddenly overlaid with an entire army—thousands of mechs and armed bots, scurrying reconnaissance mice and stilt-legged snipers. Off in the sky, the blued-out shapes of vast rounded forms stood half out of the atmosphere.

Halen peered at one of these. "Nothing like that exists," he said.

Toby had been wondering how Halen would react to this simulation, and decided now that he'd pretty much gotten it right. "Not in the real world, no," he admitted. "This is Consensus. It's a game."

Halen's lips thinned and he looked away for a moment before saying, in a tightly controlled voice, "You're playing a game?"

"Yes, I am. You wanna play?"

"No. No thank you." Toby could see that Halen was working his way up to some sort of outburst, so he decided to stop toying with him.

"It's called Consensus. Peter and I designed it."

The air visibly went out of Halen's anger. "What?"

"After the kidnapping, Peter needed therapy. But we'd come all the way out to Sedna instead, and we didn't bring any human psychologist. All I had to go on was the 'pedias and psych avatars. So—"

"What kidnapping?"

Toby shook his head sadly. "Something that never made it into the history books, it seems. Peter was kidnapped when we were kids. It was horrible for all of us, but him—he built this shell, and none of us could get through it. So, I made Consensus and lured him into it."

Halen turned around, examining the martial vista. "This is a military sim."

"I set a challenge for him, I said, 'design a world where what happened to us could never happen.' We were still designing the place when I got lost. This is what a lot of the early versions looked like."

"Wars? How's that safe?"

"I played a little trick on Peter," Toby admitted with a shrug. "I populated the gameworld with non-player characters who acted like real people, not like entertainer-bots. Pretty easy to do when you can just order your programmer bots to swap out the usual game-character minds with libraries of personality types based on centuries of sociology and psych studies. I'd make millions of pseudo-people and then we'd plug whole new governments and economies in and see what they did. It was mostly really bad. Mostly, they ended up like this." He nodded at the army.

"The thing is, Consensus isn't perfect. As a simulation of reality, I mean. Nothing is— there's always assumptions, short-cuts, and if you started with some detailed sim of a particular moment in time and played forward, the game would diverge further and further away from what actually happened.

"The point is, if you treat reality like a game, it's going to show in your decisions. I'm... checking something."

Halen nodded slowly, but he was frowning again. "You're studying your brother. That makes sense. But if you're looking for strategies, Toby, there's really only one. You know what it is. And Peter and Evayne are terrified that you'll use it."

"Wake Mother, you mean?" He shook his head. "I'll do it for my own sake, but seriously, what's she going to do? Scold Evayne for becoming a murderous high-priestess in the cult of Toby?" He laughed.

"You don't get it," snapped Halen. "I knew you didn't get it. It's not about you, or her, or Evayne. It's about what other people believe about you. You're a god, Toby. Evayne made you into one."

Toby shook his head. "People in the lock-step can't possibly believe that. I only disappeared forty years ago. I know thousands of years have gone by outside—"

"Toby, most of the citizens of the lockstep are from outside. The number of people here from your time is so incredibly small that they don't even register. Three-sixty is a lockstep of immigrants, and almost all of them come from worlds where your cult's been cultivated for thousands of years."

"Cultivated..."

He had fully intended to read up on this, but there was so much else to cover, he hadn't gotten to it yet. Toby did know hints of the story, so he wasn't entirely surprised when Halen said, "Evayne visits worlds on the down-cycle of their civilizations. Post-apocalyptic places, failing terraforming efforts, places ravaged by post-humans or tailored plagues or whatever. She lands in a big splash of glory and music and hands out gifts, things like self-reproducing fab printers and med-bots. Then she tells the grateful people that she's the messenger of the boy-god, Tobias McGonigal. She sticks around long enough to get the right stories stuck in their heads and get them used to the icons—you know, the statues—then she leaves. But she comes back, every few centuries, to reinforce the cult and draft the most fanatical members into her little army.

"Don't you see? Everything she has is built on you. You're the god of her religion. If you return, she's instantly retired, and she knows it. Every single member of her army will go down on their knees to you the instant they find out who you are. All you have to do is announce yourself. What other strategy do you need?"

Toby gazed out over the ranked masses of the game's latest army, and he felt sick. He and Peter had both tried such gambits in Consensus, and not just once or twice, but numerous times? He knew such scenarios could end in absolute triumph, even in societies where Peter's kidnapping would be impossible. But to get to that, you had to make other things impossible too—like independent thought, free speech, and self-determination.

You could play through it, and it looked great—but reviewing Consensus now with new eyes, he could see the flaws. It wasn't just the sheer amorality of it—the bloodbaths and pogroms that necessarily went along with successful religious conquest. Those alone should have ruled out the strategy. Yet on top of that was the simple fact that there was no way to simulate all the many ways that the strategy could go wrong. Just because something worked in Consensus—or in Halen's imagination—didn't mean it would work in the real world.

"Evayne can't afford to have you announce yourself. Of, if you do," Halen went on eagerly, "she'll have to make sure that you're not returning as a messiah."

Toby examined Halen appraisingly. Corva's brother obviously thought he understood Evayne. What to him was reality, though, sounded like just another Consensus scenario to Toby; and he more than suspected it would be the same for Evayne. But if it wasn't a game for her anymore; if she had convinced herself that there was only one way things could play out...

Then Toby might have the beginnings of a real strategy.

"Go on." He crossed his arms, stepping back from Halen's intensity.

"There's two ways for a world to end, Toby: in glory or in fire. If Evayne can't profit from you bringing glory to the people, she'll make sure they think you're bringing fire."

The words hung there, and the moment stretched out. Toby took off his glasses, and the ranked armies vanished; his generals became butlers and his weapons, grippies. There was only him now, standing on a hillside with Halen Keishion.

"So you see," Halen murmured, almost apologetically, "you can study the past all you like, but it doesn't matter. You really only have one choice.

"You have to become the god that the people think you are."

After that, it came as something of a relief when, the next day, Corva told Toby that the courts had agreed to hear Shylif's case against Sebastine Coley. "I'm going to be a character witness," she said. "We... hadn't talked about you to the court. I hope that's all right. But I'd like you to come."

Law had been one of those ideas Peter detested. "There's no such thing as two identical acts," he'd told Toby. "Every action has different outcomes. I steal a diamond necklace from a rich guy who's forgotten he owns it, nobody cares. You steal a loaf of bread from a factory that makes millions of them every day, and you get sent to prison. It makes no sense. Every act should be judged entirely on its own."

In the world before artificial intelligence, this had been impossible; so there was law. Justice, however, was one of the few places in Peter's Utopia where he allowed AI; so Shylif and Sebastine Coley found themselves standing in a marble courthouse, but not in front of a traditional judge or jury. Toby and Jaysir sat in the visitor's gallery and watched as the two were made to stand in front of a man who looked for all the world like a real judge. "He's not," Jaysir muttered. "He's a cyranoid. He just recites whatever the AI whispers into his ear. He's not allowed to speak on his own."

Court officials read Shylif's complaint, and character witnesses came forward to speak for him and for Coley. Corva had her turn, and described Shylif's deep well of sorrow, how he preferred working with bots in the warehouses and factories of the lockstep to spending time with humans. Coley's family described a loving father and grandfather. It turned out he'd become the patriarch to quite a large clan.

When all of this was done, the judge asked Coley whether Shylif's accusations were true.

Coley nodded—and Toby saw the faces of his family members crumple in shock and disbelief. Toby had never seen anything like this in real life before, and witnessing it was utterly unlike watching a court drama. This was not an entertainment; it was just sad.

"I'm sorry," Coley said. He hung his head.

Shylif's lips curled in a sneer. "Is that all you have to say for yourself?"

Now, unexpectedly, Coley raised his head looked Shylif in the eye. "No. No, it's not.

"I did some terrible things when I was a young man. That's over sixty years ago now, for me. I know it's less for you. Either way, it's time that's gone, and so much has happened since.... I was saved by a woman who became my wife, and she made me into the man I am now. But I know I can never escape who I was, or what I did."

He looked up at the judge, and now Toby understood why the AI that presided over the courtroom was given a human face. Coley knew he was addressing a presence that dwelt behind the man in front of him, but at times like this one needed to put a human face on the moment. "Sir," he said, "I'll face justice for this, and for the other things I did. It's time, I guess. But you have to know," and now he turned back to Shylif, "what that means."

Jaysir and Toby exchanged a glance, and both leaned forward to hear better.

"What do you mean?" said Shylif suspiciously.

"I'm not doing this to salve my own conscience," said Coley. "I'm too old and too much time has passed for remedies like that. And don't think that any outcome will make you feel better, because we both know it won't.

"I'll accept the judgment of the court. It won't do any good. It won't bring Ouline back; it won't right the wrongs, it won't heal the wounds.

"It's... just one of those things that has to be done."

Silence descended on the court. Shylif stood like a statue, while Coley's family squirmed in their seats. Suddenly, the judge picked up his gavel and its descent made a clap of sound that echoed through the space.

"Sebastine Coley," he said, "how many descendants do you have?"

Startled, Coley said, "Uh... I have five children, and they're all married. They've each got three or four kids and some of those've got kids now, too..."

The judge nodded sharply. "Sebastine Coley, I sentence you to recount the story of what you did to harm the people beloved of the man Shylif, one at a time to each and every member of your family that is old enough to understand the tale. You will do so in the presence of Shylif, the complainant, so that he can be assured that you do not lie or leave any detail out. Every person in your line will know from your own lips exactly what you did." He banged the gavel again, and the court was dismissed.

A look of horror had come over Coley's face on hearing these instructions. Now he collapsed to his knees, sobbing. But Shylif, standing over him, lowered his head in thought for a long moment, and then nodded.

"I am satisfied," he said.

15

One day Toby lowered his glasses down his nose, and frowned at the sudden appearance of heavily laden carts on the neighborhood footpaths, and cargo quadcopters over the trees. They all buzzed about with a sense of excitement, and many of the neighbors were out on their porches watching. Bots ran to and fro as well; some were setting up tables on the lawn of the Keishion estate.

He dismissed the scenario he was exploring and walked over. "What's going on?"

A bot bowed to him. "Tomorrow is end-ofturn, sir. We are preparing a potlatch party."

"Tomorrow?" He'd really lost track of time. It felt like the city had just gotten back on its feet. If this was how turn's-end felt after wintering-over for only two and a half years, what was it like when the turns took their usual thirty?

He skittered around nervously too, until he ran into Corva. She was sitting in one of her favorite places, the stone wall that ran into the house; and she was reading a book.

"Oh, just ignore it," she said when he pointed at the organized chaos going on around them. "It's just turn's-end. Join in or not, it's entirely up to you."

"Oh."

So he tried to be nonchalant; still, he'd only experienced this gigantic transition a few times so far. Corva had grown up with it, had seen it literally hundreds of times. He couldn't help but imagine himself a week from now, silent and still as a dead man and lying in a cicada sarcophagus. He'd be behind locked doors in a hermetically sealed chamber, the house's solar heat exchangers keeping his body so cold he'd freeze solid if not for the antifreeze in his veins. This was normal? He'd done it on the flight to Sedna, and again on his way to Rockette. Since then he'd experienced hibernation—what, five times? He would never get used to it.

Time had f lown while he brooded over what Halen had said. Toby hadn't come up with a good answer to Corva's brother. He'd just started avoiding him. The whole idea of the god-gambit preyed on him, though. It was so fundamentally dishonest he didn't even know where to start to say why. It was creepy. Halen thought it was the only way to go.

All of it—turn's-end, the god-gambit, the inescapable fact that 99 percent of the people living in the lockstep were from civilizations that came into existence while he slept—all of it forced him into an awed awareness of time. Saplings would grow in the yard while he slept tomorrow. If not for the acceleration of the blockade, entire trees would appear during that one night. The grass would be long and weed-shot between the closing and opening of one's eyes.

So much had happened, too, in recent weeks, and yet Wallop was still asleep. Nathan Kenani had only just closed the lid on Toby's bed, as far as the traitorous guide was concerned. Kirstana had only just said goodbye to Toby, probably in full expectation of seeing him when she awoke. So it was on seventy thousand other worlds. They were all wintering over simultaneously, billions frozen solid, waiting the tick of a new turn. Between one beat of their hearts and the next, whole lives would flash past on the quick worlds near the stars.

People did pause to think about it, he knew. Evayne tapped into the wonder and terror that lurked under the sensible facade of the lock-steps; the myths and the Toby cult channeled those feelings in directions that were politically useful to Evayne and Peter.

Toby was curious, and the turn's-end parties sounded like fun, so he convinced Corva to go out with him, and they house-hopped through the neighborhood. Everywhere they went, people pushed food and drink on them. They ate a lot of fresh fruit. Everybody also seemed to have one or more big pieces of machinery they couldn't fit into their vaults. These were doomed to sit under the rain and weather for over two years if nobody claimed them; Corva offered advice about how to store them based on her studies in ruin design; and they moved on to the next house.

It was fun, and a good distraction to the prospect of imminent hibernation. When they got home it was very late and nobody was up. The house's windows were sealed with metal covers, and now Toby could see how the place was built with a bright and relatively open outer layer, and an inner core containing the bedrooms and cicada machinery. After stripping off her shoes, Corva headed in that direction, but he hung back.

She looked around, frowned. "What's the matter?"

"It still seems unnatural to me."

She laughed in surprise. "But you hold the record for the longest hibernation of all time!"

He crossed his arms and looked away. This wasn't funny to him at all, and after a moment Corva seemed to realize it. She tilted her head at the kitchen. "Let's sit up a while."

They sat up and shared the last juice in the fridge. Bots were quietly boxing the house's contents after photographing the exact position and orientation of every stray sock and data pad. They'd recreate the scene with perfect fidelity in two and a half years.

He felt nervous and edgy, and also utterly weary, so balanced on the kitchen stool as if it were the top of a tree. Toby hadn't told Corva what Halen had said to him, and he didn't know how to talk about it now. Instead he said, "My mom's slept as long as I have. Almost. I have to go to her, Corva."

She didn't reply. They both knew Destrier would be crawling with Evayne and Peter's troops. They would be waiting for Toby. Going there was his obvious next move.

"She'll keep."

He blinked at her; to his surprise Corva blushed.

"Gods, Toby, she's waited for you for fourteen thousand years! She can wait a little longer."

"What are you talking about?"

"I mean you could... you could stay here." The last word was almost inaudible. She still wouldn't look at him.

"Corva, I can't be your house-guest forever."

"That's not what I mean." Now she was seriously blushing. "Oh, Hell." She jumped up and made to move away but he grabbed her hand.

"I'd like that," he said. "I didn't know if you really wanted me around."

"What are you stupid? Of course I want you around!" She hadn't pulled her hand away. "But you have some world or other to save, and the Empress of Time to wake, and things like that. I never thought you'd want to..."

He was afraid of meeting his mother again. Something had happened to her, something had broken, he was sure of it. Who would abandon the rest of their family—their whole world!—to wait for one lost son to come home? The thought that she'd done that made him profoundly uncomfortable. Once again, he had no idea how to explain that to Corva.

So he didn't try.

He kissed her instead.

Orpheus lay across Toby's belly like a thousand-pound weight. The denner was snoring, a faint but reassuring sound.

The knock on the bedroom door came again. Toby blinked, and raised his head to look groggily around. He'd slept... that's right, he'd kissed Corva last night. It had been hard to get to sleep after that, thinking about her, and also about—

—More than two years passing in one night.

He sat up, rolling Orpheus aside. The denner crawled into some bunched-up blankets, and went still again.

"Garren?" It was the voice of Corva's father. The knock came again.

Toby looked around, then down at himself.

There was no sign that more than an ordinary night had passed. Intellectually he knew this was the result of vast amounts of work by bots and biomedical systems; if he'd slept for two and a half years, it was mostly in a semi-frozen state. The room would have been warming up for weeks, the bots and hibernation systems working day and night to restore his body and reverse all signs of decay within the room. He shuddered at the thought, then said, "I'm here!"

"Can you come outside, son? Something's... well, we've got visitors."

Toby had been climbing out of bed; he stopped, and stared at the door. Then: "Give me five minutes."

There was no point even wondering who it would be. Whoever it was, things were out of his control again. All he had that was his were his few minutes of freshening up in the suite's little bathroom. He could pick out his own clothes, ruffle Orpheus's fur. Then, he took a deep breath and put his hand on the door latch. Time to let go of the dream he'd spun with Corva last night.

The Keishions were waiting in the hall, faces grave. Toby walked past them and downstairs. Corva stood by the front door, hands clenched in front of her. They made eye contact, then he stepped outside.

Ranks and ranks of military bots stood on the Keishion's lawn. He'd seen this kind of vista before, but never in real life. Armed quadcopters hovered in the air above the mechs, and further off gray airships sat in the sky like condensed clouds.

A delegation of men and women stood in front of the bots. There must have been at least twelve of them, all in fancy uniforms. A woman in the center stepped forward, her face shining with some kind of excitement, and as she bowed deeply to him, so did all the others. As did all the bots. The copters dipped as well. Past these dipping heads, Toby could see the astonished faces of the neighbors he'd been partying with last night.

"Welcome," said the woman in a husky voice. "Welcome, Tobias Wyatt McGonigal, to the lockstep of your creation, and to the world of Thisbe!"

And all those in sight murmured their wonder, and bowed even lower.

16

The luxury aircar was whisper-quiet, and this made it awkwardly obvious that nobody was talking. Outside the tinted windows, the sky went blood-red suddenly, as if to reinforce Toby's mood.

During all the bowing and speechifying in front of the Keishion's house, Toby had spotted Halen. Corva's brother was lurking about on the edge of the delegation. Toby had ignored the bowing multitude and walked up to Corva's brother.

"You just had to tell them, didn't you? You just couldn't wait for me to make up my own mind what to do. You had to force my hand." Nobody else but the immediate family had known his real identity—except for Shylif and Jaysir. Somehow, Toby hadn't doubted for a second that it was Halen who'd told the government.

He didn't even try to deny it, simply stepping back and shrugging. "I told them, yes, but they'd promised to leave you alone."

"This is leaving me alone?" Toby swept an arm to show the massed army and the groveling politicians.

"I know," said Halen.

"But something's changed."

Toby glowered out the aircar window now, thinking furiously about what to do. Halen's betrayal was trivial—and maybe justified— given what he'd told Toby next.

Evayne was on her way to Thisbe. And, according to the government telescopes, she was bringing a whole fleet.

"Where are we going?" he demanded of the senior government official who sat opposite him.

"It's a place called Leaning Pines," she said brightly. "It's a resort. It's the best environment we could find. I hope you like it."

"Like it? What am I supposed to like about any of this?" He glared at her, then Halen, who sat next to her; then he felt Corva's hand on his arm.

She leaned in close, and whispered, "Can't you see she's terrified?"

Toby blinked and suddenly got it: these ministers and representatives, seated chatting but glancing at him every few seconds—they weren't escorting him as a prisoner, much less a guest. Toby was a McGonigal; they were all his guests, for Thisbe was his world. They were desperate to make a good impression on an absentee landlord unexpectedly making an inspection.

"I'm sorry," he said to the woman. She smiled uncertainly and, equally uncertain, he stuck out his hand. "I'm Toby."

Her face held wonder as she let him shake her limp fingers. "Calastrina de Fanto Esperion," she said. "Appointed proxy of Demographic Twelve of the Great Byte." The Byte, Toby had learned, was Thisbe's C-shaped southern continent. That made Esperion the representative of about six hundred million people.

"Appointed proxy?" He'd worn his glasses, and could do a search on what she'd just said; but these people knew who he was, and would expect his ignorance. "Not elected?"

To his surprise, Esperion blushed. "I'm a proxy, not a representative. I didn't want the appointment, but it turns out that I vote, mod, and buy exactly like about fifty million other people. I can be relied on to think and vote the way they would if they were in Council. At least until I get jaded or compromised; I'm only here for another year," she added, as though apologizing.

So, this place was based on one of the demarchy models. He probably should have studied local politics earlier, but for a change his mind had been on the bigger picture—the whole history of the locksteps, and the place of the McGonigals in them. He looked out the window and sighed, a little ruefully.

They circled a long, sinuous mountain lake. A collection of truly huge tents lay tumbled across one end of it. "The resort," Corva, said, when she saw where he was looking. "They keep it boxed while we winter over and rebuild it every time. The landscape changes too much for a permanent installation."

"It's pretty." The curving sheets of tenting were colored in a whole rainbow of tones.

Corva was very close to him; he could almost feel the heat of her skin on his cheek. "Toby?" she said quietly. "Why did you insist that I come?"

Again he sighed. "Because you're the only person who knows who I am and isn't afraid of me—well, except for Shylif and Jaysir, maybe."

She laughed and sat back. "And Orpheus." But she seemed pleased with his explanation.

They landed on a gravel beach next to a cold lake—but a real lake, under a real sky, even if that sky was fluorescent green right now. Toby had brought Orpheus with him, and together they crunched down to the edge of the water, distracted by its reality and beauty. The air was crisp and cold.

"M-Mister McGonigal?"

He turned to find Corva hiding a smile, and past her a half-circle of dignitaries waiting patiently for him to get over the view. Halen was frowning, his arms crossed, but Toby could tell he was excited, too. Well, this was what he'd wanted.

"Okay," he said, walking back up the beach to stand next to Corva.

"What can I do for you?"

"Yes," he admitted a few hours later. "I can override every cicada bed on the planet."

They sat at a huge curving oak table inside a vaulted hall with translucent sides. There was wine and coffee and sweets, and for a very long time now Toby had sat listening to one after another local governmental official give speeches in his honor.

He'd used much of the time to refocus his eyes inside his glasses' view; he'd been learning how the Thisbe government worked and who these people he was sitting with were. About half the ministers consisted of professional politicians, the rest being made up of randomly chosen citizens like Esperion. To qualify for sortition you had to be a high-ranking player in one of a number of different political or economic games; Esperion must be very good indeed. About half of them were really here—the rest were represented by their avatars. There were political parties, but they were ad-hoc and only lasted for one sitting session, which was four years. During that time the ministers ran sophisticated simulations based on their own or their constituents' biases and beliefs, and tried to enlist support for initiatives based on the results of these. Even then, there were no direct votes; the ministers played matching games of the 'would fixing A improve B; would fixing B improve A' sort.

All of this was familiar to Toby, because he and Peter had explored these possibilities. The plan was that Sedna would eventually become a full-fledged nation, and Father had emphasized that it would need a well-designed government. This was a major reason their parents had tolerated the many hours Toby and Peter spent in Consensus.

Now, having admitted he could directly control Thisbe's frequency, Toby tried to gauge the reaction among the politicians. They were all stone-faced or smiling, of course; luckily the political translation layer they'd given him gave a different view through his glasses. Some of the politicos were literally turning green—not with envy, but with approval, which subtitles translated in various ways: that fellow over there was happy that Toby was telling the truth, while the woman to the left of him had just had her worst predictions confirmed. Other ministers were yellow, still others crimson, and several had turned black, apparently signifying that they were not psycho-culturally capable of actually absorbing the meaning of what he'd just said.

Above them all, the interface was showing a disk-like balance of power meter, which was currently tilting around like a top. Everything was in play, apparently.

This was all amazing and showed how far government had come since his day. To Toby, though, it just confirmed something that had been obvious since the day he awoke here: the whole Consensus plan had been flawed.

Thisbe could organize its government however it wanted. It didn't matter, if private individuals like the McGonigals controlled just one critical utility. On Thisbe, they controlled time itself.

"I can change the lockstep frequency," he continued once the power meter had stabilized a bit. "But I can't give the power to do that to anyone else. It's locked to me, somehow."

They all nodded politely and orderly waves of change moved through the political model—except that somebody somewhere said, sarcastically, "That's convenient."

Toby looked for whoever had spoken. Finally, somebody who wasn't going to be creepily polite! "Probably designed to keep us alive," he said. "Otherwise, you could torture me into giving you super-user status then kill me." Or, you could just neuroshackle me. He really hoped they wouldn't think of that.

"Sound planning." The speaker was an elderly gentleman with a flat face and high cheekbones, and a dry, sardonic voice. Through the glasses, he appeared amber-colored right now, and his subtitle read LONG SEVILLE, MINISTER OF SECURITY.

"Look, I'd give you all super-user access if I could," said Toby. "This isn't where I want to be right now. I just want to get to Destrier and find my mom..."

The entire assembly had turned black and red and green, except for a couple of amber hold-outs. One was Long Seville.

Toby appealed to him. "What did I say?"

The old man sighed and sat back, crossing his arms. "You, the Emperor of Time, just announced that you intend to fulfill the ancient prophecy by throwing open the gates of time itself and awakening the Mother of All. What did you expect to happen?"

"It's my family," he said sullenly. "I just want to be reunited with them."

The old man took off his glasses. Toby frowned, then took off his own. Freed from the intricate political interface, they were now just two people seated at a table. Everybody else was talking, gesturing, looking around inside a shared virtual space. It was as if Toby and this minister were in their own little bubble of reality.

"Not supposed to do this," Long said, holding up the glasses, "but you're obviously new to our way of doing things. Listen, kid, most of the room didn't even hear what you just said, because their translation systems couldn't figure out a way to have it make sense in their worldview. Thisbe's a pretty sophisticated world, but everybody here was still raised on the myths and legends about you. For the most part these people don't believe them, but you just said they were true! What you have to do now is back up and start over, only this time, please try to avoid pushing any religious buttons, would you?"

They put their glasses back on and Toby said, "What I meant was... I don't want to run the lockstep. Everybody has these ideas about what I'm going to do now that I'm back, but nobody's thought to consult me about them."

This got through, largely. Encouraged, he continued, "I know my brother changed your frequency. That was wrong, and I'll talk to him about it when I see him. I'll reset it for you." He turned to smile at Corva, who was watching him stone-faced. "All I ask in return is a little help with..." Was there any way he could say, "being reunited with my family" without pressing those "religious buttons"? "... with settling in to my new life."

They heard that. The interface's feedback layer flooded him with restatements of his own words: he knew what he'd just said, now the interface was telling him what each minister had heard. Literally in other words, it told him what he'd said meant to them after being filtered through their stated expectations and hopes, known prejudices and biases, cognitive deficits and so on. The interface proposed a set of rewordings that it thought would custom-translate his meaning for them, but it was a bewildering jumble that he had no time to review. He signaled yes to it and the rewordings went out.

This politics stuff was harder than it had seemed in Consensus. It still came down to one thing, though. They were haggling.

"Look, I was told Evayne's on her way here, but then everybody clammed up about it. I need to know. Is she coming? When's she going to get here? Can I meet with her? Or is that... a bad idea?"

Some of this got through. The political interface swirled through a whole spectrum of colors and the balance of power tipped and swung for a few seconds. Translations and interpretations flew back and forth, and then the whole room stabilized green.

Long Seville nodded and stood up. "Can we get a... yes, thanks," he added as a set of windows opened in the interface. They were all dark, but if Toby squinted he could make out little points of light in one.

"This," said Long, "is a telescope view into Sagittarius. Those bright stars there... aren't stars. They're the engine-flares of a whole fleet of ships. They're aiming for a full-stop at Thisbe, and there's little doubt who's leading them."

Toby was unconvinced; he supposed he was giving off subtle body-stance and facial cues that would make him look amber right now. "How do you know it's her?"

"Because we'd been tracking these dots. They were on their way to Wallop, but they changed course right about the time you left."

"Ah. How many ships?"

"A hundred forty."

They couldn't be that big, individually... but still, each one could have the nuclear power to wipe out a few cities."

Toby stared at the display. He, Peter and Evayne had deployed fleets like this in Consensus many times. Of course, that had been a fantasy world of faster-than-light travel. Still, he remembered Evayne's attitude toward military solutions. She'd never hesitated.

Long was talking, but Toby wasn't listening any more. He was remembering how they'd divided empires between them, and how passionate Peter had been about the game. It wasn't a game to him, it was his lifeline, his only route to feeling secure about the world.

Redesign it. Make it perfect. Then make sure it stayed that way.

Evayne had been too young to understand Peter's passion, but she'd certainly picked up on it. And now? They both ruled a real empire, and they'd been doing it for decades. It wasn't a game anymore, the stakes were real, and the one person in the world who could destroy everything they had built had just reappeared.

For the first time Toby got it—he understood how Evayne could really be on her way here to kill him. All he had to do was stop imagining the Evayne he'd known, the little girl, and imagine an older woman whose childhood was a blur now, and whose reality was rulership.

His mouth dry, he said, "How does this work?"

People had been talking, but his words stopped everyone.

"What does she do when she gets here?"

Long cleared his throat. "We'll be wintering over. The whole world will be hibernating, at least all the McGonigal beds will be. Normally ships arrive at different times, and they all go dormant until start-of-turn. But in a case like this... you want to be awake first. So they'll take action as soon as they arrive."

"What action?"

He looked uncomfortable. "Land in force, wake us up, and demand that we turn you over."

Toby nodded slowly. Advantage went to whoever woke first. "Can you just stay awake until she gets here?"

"We can leave a military force awake, but it'll cost us. We could also set the force to wake up a month before she arrives. We've got a lot of non-McGonigal cicada beds, but not enough yet for a real defense. Either way, it ends in a confrontation, and she can threaten millions of innocent lives. Most of the population will be wintering over, so they'll be helpless."

"Not if I wake everybody, though," said Toby.

"Exactly."

"And we know when she's going to get here?"

"We know the minimum date she can arrive, yes."

The tables would be turned if all of Thisbe was awake and ready when Evayne arrived. She had to know that, but she was coming anyway, and that made Toby uneasy. Did she really want to kill him? If not, then why bring a whole fleet with her? It made no sense.

He looked around the room, and his gaze fell upon Halen Keishion. Corva's brother was watching him in return, and he had a smile on his face that could only be described as smug.

There would be no more doubts about who he was if he changed Thisbe's frequency. Only a McGonigal could do that. There might be rumors and leaks coming from the Thisbe government now, but if he repelled Evayne word would spread instantly through the lockstep. People would wake at the next turn to the news that the Emperor of Time was returned. Sooner or later he would go to Destrier and wake up the Great Mother. And then time—or at least lockstep time—would come to an end.

There was going to be panic and mass hysteria. Millions would flock to Toby's side, believing that somehow they would be saved by him. Others would side with Peter and Evayne, especially if they abandoned the myth and revealed the truth that Toby was just an ordinary person. There would be chaos and civil war if Thisbe didn't give Toby to Evayne. Halen knew this. He'd planned for it. And he was smiling.

Toby had been bombarded with options, proposals, and facts and details for days now. On the third afternoon, mentally overloaded, he managed to break away from the crush of subdued but frantic officials for a few minutes, and hunkered down on his haunches to toss pebbles into the cold lake.

"How am I supposed to know what to do?" he asked. "There's just too much to take in."

"I disagree." It was Sol, invisible but audible, through the earpiece in Toby's glasses. About halfway through the day of meetings, Toby'd had the brilliant idea of waking his two favorite Consensus characters. Sol and Miranda had been listening in since then, but until this moment, they'd been silent.

"What do you mean?" He picked up another smooth pebble, and gave it a toss that he hoped would skip it. It sank immediately.

"Before all of this happened, you were following where your own research took you." Now it was Miranda, speaking in his other ear while Toby groped for another pebble. "You've been reviewing the records from the twentier. But they're not the only source available to you, you know."

"Huh. I guess." Summoning the courage to watch the twentier's records had been exhausting. Because of how difficult those had been, he'd been holding off exploring the other aspect of lockstep life that had made him most uneasy. Obviously, he was out of time with that one.

"Show me Destrier," he told the glasses.

As always, the amount of information on offer was overwhelming; Toby had learned to start with kid's picture books. He found one in the Thisbe internet, and flipped to a page captioned THE GRAND PROCESSIONAL.

In the picture, a sea of pilgrims—he recognized the robes he'd seen at the pilgrimage center on Wallop—were caught mid-shuffle as they moved down a vast, seemingly endless avenue. The scene was lit by a dozen or so little suns, probably orbital light platforms.

The stones of this grand avenue were worn into smooth grooves by millennia of sliding feet. According to the book, they were replaced every few centuries. The stones of the pyramidal towers that lined the avenue were also replaced on a rotating schedule, such that out here, at least, nothing of the original building material remained. The holy city renewed itself like a living body, shedding cells continuously. Maybe, but everywhere Toby looked, the surfaces were smoothed and sculpted into natural-looking contours. It was uncanny, as if by wind and rain nature had sculpted something that looked like a city, yet was entirely natural.

The book proudly told how this shuffling procession had been inching forward, reciting one particular chant without pause, for over ten thousand years. Supplicants from all over the galaxy came here; not all were human. They gave up fortunes, families, entire lives to endure decades, even centuries of travel, simply for the chance to down a coarse robe and parade, just once, down this avenue. Some fainted on the way; some died, just for the chance to spend a few precious minutes in the presence of the divine.

The domes of the city looked out on a plain of dazzling white frost dotted with towering spires. It was illegal to walk there, and to the discerning eye that plain should have been far more awe-inspiring than this little road. Those spires had stood now, unmoved and unchanging, for eight billion years. Next to that, the centuries of wear and tear visible around the Great Mother's resting place were nothing. Less than an eyeblink.

Sol and Miranda were reading along with Toby as he flipped through the book. "It says here," said Sol, "that all of Destrier experienced time within the 360/1 lockstep, except for the domes in these pictures. They're in real-time."

"So those people there," and Miranda's forearm and finger appeared in Toby's virtual view as she pointed to a bald-headed man in one of the shots, "his family's been helping pilgrims into their robes for hundreds of generations."

"Wow," muttered Sol. "So if we took the whole of written human history up until the day Toby first set foot on Sedna, this city's records are five times longer."

"It's got its own languages, its own cuisine and modes of dress," said Miranda. "But the only reason the city exists at all is to guide visitors to the place where they can—how is it put here?—'glimpse the Great Mother resting forever in her crystal coffin.'"

"Quiet now," Toby told them.

The only photos of his mother's resting place were long shots taken from at least a kilometer away. Way over there, the procession entered a ramped slot that led down below the vast oval dome covering Mom's cicada bed. They would shuff le into a narrow chamber containing a single quartz window, through which the blurry shape of the Great Mother could be seen. From here, the dome appeared more like a rounded hill, though it was scrupulously kept clean of vegetation by the same hereditary keepers who served the pilgrims. The dome hadn't eroded, really, it had just settled gradually and imperceptibly over the centuries, even while the spires that surrounded it were fervently rebuilt.

The landscape beyond the city might well be impossibly old compared to this place, yet Toby had never in his life seen a place that felt as ancient as this.

And this, of course, was the point. This was the gift that Evayne and Peter had bestowed upon mankind: the gift of permanence.

History roared ahead on the lit worlds. Civilizations rose, but they fell too, and maintaining one at a starfaring level was very difficult. On the worlds circling the stars of the Local Group, humanity and its various offspring had fallen many times in the past fourteen thousand years. Every time it did, the locksteps had been waiting, ready to pick it up again.

360/1 and its siblings were like a seed bank; Toby got it now. They were insurance. They lived so slowly and were so dispersed that they were ignored. Yet they were always there; had always been there; and, as long as Evayne and Peter had their say, they always would be there.

He took off the glasses, once again finding himself squatting by the cold lake. Reaching to pick up another round stone, he hesitated, unable to complete the gesture without wondering just how old this little rock was. "Shit!"

"I beg your pardon?"

Corva stood next to him, hands on her hips, head cocked quizzically.

"Sorry. I was... thinking."

"Out here? You'll catch one of those ancient diseases. Influenza. Or scrapie or something."

"They don't work that way." Then he held out his hand. "Wanna walk with me?"

He saw her nearly glance over her shoulder, then think better. She took his hand and they scrunched through the wet gravel. The pink clouds stuttered and turned gray, and as his eyes adjusted everything slowly washed into normality. He could be on Earth for all he knew.

"Are you feeling all right?"

He shrugged. "I'm okay. They want me back in ten minutes."

"But you've been negotiating for three days!

When is this going to end?"

"Soon," he said curtly. The government had been making offers, and they'd been running vastly detailed simulations covering all sorts of plans. In some, Evayne somehow got past the orbital defenses and rained down fire from orbit. In those cases, the government admitted it would have to give Toby up without firing a shot in return, in order to save its own people. The simulated Evayne played much like he remembered her doing in Consensus. She rarely chose such a brutally direct option. More often, based on Thisbe's historical records, she would land and seek to capture her target directly.

Toby was not her first Toby, apparently. There had been many pretenders over the ages, all claiming to be the returned messiah. Some had raised huge armies, but none had been able to crack the biocrypto. They couldn't prove who they were. None had made it to Destrier, though the more deluded—those who truly believed they were Toby Wyatt McGonigal—swore that if only they were given the chance to lay their palm on the circular lock to the Great Mother's chamber, it would turn for them.

Evayne usually left them to the guides, but in particularly troublesome cases she would intervene directly. So far the sims showed her behaving exactly as she had in those cases.

Last night, Toby had sat with Corva in front of a fire under the vast peaked roof of the tent-house they'd given him. He'd dared to say to her then what he couldn't say to Halen and the other angry opponents of the McGonigals: "Maybe she doesn't know it's really me."

Corva hadn't replied. They'd been sitting close together, but not touching. They hadn't kissed since that first time before the last wintering-over. He hoped it was because events were just rampaging ahead too fast; there were always people about. They hadn't had a chance to talk about it and, well, he felt awkward.

Her silence now had seemed like a blow, though. He'd wanted her to agree. He wanted somebody to tell him his sister wasn't a monster. But it hadn't happened.

Now, holding her hand on the cold beach, he glanced at Corva and had to smile. Under her black bangs, her face was fierce with concentration. Thinking, always thinking, that was her. She didn't know the first thing about rendering sympathy, but that didn't mean she didn't care how he felt.

Suddenly she looked up. "Where were you, just now?"

"I was visiting Destrier."

She shuddered and let go of his hand. "That place is creepy. I can't believe you want to—I mean, I know why, it's just that..."

"Nobody's more creeped-out than me. But it's not some weird goddess they've got under glass there. It's my mom."

"Not just your mom."

"Just my mom." When she sent him one of her skeptical looks, he growled. "Corva, she's slept almost as long as I have. She doesn't know that Evayne made her into the Great Mother, any more than I knew I was this stupid Emperor of Time! The world's not going to end when she wakes up. She's not going to make some mystical pronouncement that will change history. She's going to..." Ask where her children are.

That, of course, was where Toby got the creeps. It wasn't those millions of worshipers lapping against the sides of Mother's stone dome that bothered him. It was the question of what he would have to say when he awoke her:

"Why did you abandon Peter and Evayne to wait for me?"

What she'd done was wrong, it was sick. He'd been dead, as far as any of them had known. Why would she entomb herself to wait for a child who would never come home?

Corva sensed his discomfort and shrugged. "I don't know how you'd even get there," she said lightly. "Destrier's better defended than Barsoom. If Evayne and Peter don't want you there, you'd need an army and a navy as big as the whole lockstep's just to knock on the front door."

"Yes, well, talk to your brother about that," he said. "He's figured out how to get one."

"What do you mean?"

"Come," he said, "I'll show you." He began walking back up the beach.

"We've been running sims for two days now." He waved to one of the bots that stood near the largest tent-complex, and it waved back. "In a situation like this it's all about who can strike first. Evayne's hoping to get here while we're all asleep. If I'm not the real Toby, then she's certain to be able to, because she's going to arrive in seven months, real-time. We'll be wintering over."

Aircars had been landing all morning in the fields behind the tents. There were crowds of people everywhere, of course; the whole resort was crammed with ministers, analysts, and spin-doctors. Corva might not have noticed the new arrivals yet.

"Either way," he went on, "she has to catch us napping to get the upper hand. The government wants me to wake the whole planet just as she arrives. When she's committed to landing her people, but before she can consolidate her position. Then we'll ask her to stand down."

Corva shook her head violently, tossing beads of dew from her black mane. "You know I hate that idea. We should just run. We escaped her at Wallop."

"Those sims don't work, Corva. Any ship leaving Thisbe is going to blaze like a star. It'll be easy to track. Not that we shouldn't send out a few decoys anyway. She'll have to split off a few ships to follow them. But all of them will be caught."

There was a mumbling murmur coming from up ahead, where the largest of the vaulting tent structures stood. Toby headed in that direction.

He grimaced and ran a hand through his hair. "Anyway, what happens after we've had our showdown with Evayne? I've promised to restore Thisbe's frequency, but as soon as I do that, the whole lockstep will know I'm back."

"No, no!" She stepped in front of him, putting a hand on his chest. "All we have to do is say it was Evayne who did it, while she was here! What's she gonna do, deny it? It's perfect!"

"And then what? She'll be watching Thisbe, searching every ship that leaves. Even if we drive her away this time, she'll just return with a bigger force."

"Unless we defeat her and then escape."

"Then she'll just keep searching for us, wherever we go." He took her hand gently, and started walking again.

He mounted the concrete platform where the edges of the giant tent were fixed. The murmuring was loud now, and Corva heard it. She snatched away her hand and stepped away from Toby, but only now did she see that the two of them weren't alone anymore: a half-circle of men and women stood silently on the path behind them, along with some McGonigal lockstep security bots. Hands clutched under her chin, snatching looks left and right and behind her, Corva reluctantly followed as Toby strode toward a sweep of tenting that formed a kind of archway.

"Don't worry," said Toby as he stepped into the dim space beyond. "There is another way."

A spotlight pinioned them there, and within the vast space of the tent, a thousand people gasped and murmured and, just as the government ministers had done in front of Corva's house, all bent their heads and knelt before the Emperor of Time.

He turned to reassure Corva further, but the look on her face froze him. He would never forget it.

"McGonigal!" Corva threw down the word like a curse.

Then she turned, and she ran.

To be concluded...

Life Flight

Brad R. Torgersen
| 14410 words

Illustrated by Joel Iskowitz

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 1

Papa was proud of me when he went to sleep. I'm one of the only boys picked to stay awake—because I'm smart and can do math. Nobody on the Osprey is going to be awake for the entire trip. There won't be enough food, water, or air onboard for everyone. So to start off they picked a couple of adults—and two boys and two girls—to stay up while we begin the trip to Delta Pavonis. Which is a very long way from Earth.

Mama was proud too. She squeezed me so hard before she laid down with Papa and went to sleep. She was crying, but told me it was okay. She wasn't upset. She just doesn't want to miss anything while I am awake—she thinks I will be older by the time she sees me again. I suppose she is right. She made me promise to keep this journal while she is asleep. So that she can go back and hear my voice, and know all about the time in between.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 8

Kroger is the other boy, besides me. I never met him before all the families boarded the Osprey. I'm not sure I like him much, and it doesn't seem like he likes me much either. So the two adults—Kevin and Cassie—have kept Kroger and me apart during the first few days. When I help at one end of the ship, he helps at the other. Which is fine. The Osprey is big! Cassie showed me a computer model of our ship, compared to a skyscraper. If our ship could stand on its end it would be far taller than anything in New York or Hong Kong.

I'm not lonely, though.

Leah and Molly are the two girls. One short and round like me, the other tall and skinny like Kroger. At first the girls didn't seem to want to have much to do with me. But by the third day Leah smiled at me in the lunch room—what Kevin keeps calling the galley.

Back on Earth the girls didn't pay any attention to me. But Leah pays attention. I found out she likes kitty cats. I like kitty cats too. I wish they'd let us bring some on the ship.

Molly is more like Kroger. Rude. She told me I was fat, and I told her to shut up because it's mean to call someone that. Molly said the truth hurts, and stuck her tongue out at me. Just like my classmates back home. I got angry, but Cassie told me to not let it bother me. She was going to talk to Molly and would get Molly to be nice.

The teachers on Earth always said the same thing.

It never worked.

Tomorrow Kevin is going to begin showing me how the navigation and nuclear fusion drive computers work. He says the Osprey has the best computers money can buy. They run just about everything onboard, including the machines that make the air and keep it clean and full of oxygen. Kevin says he will be teaching me how to program the computers, once I understand how they function. I think that ought to be fun.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 35

The computers are better than anything I ever had in school. You can talk to them and they actually understand you, and will talk back. They all sound like grown-up women with nice voices. I told Kevin and Cassie that we ought to start naming each of them. Cassie asked me why, when the computers are just machines. Not real people. I told her that if our trip to Delta Pavonis is as long as she keeps saying it is, the computers will learn to be people. They seem smart enough for it.

Leah wants to know why there are only girl computers, and no boy computers. Cassie said it's because girls are smarter than boys, which made Leah and Molly smile big. I think Cassie was just being funny, but Leah and Molly spent all day feeling proud of themselves. I keep telling them that boys are just as smart, otherwise the adults would have kept four girls awake, instead of two, but Leah and Molly aren't listening.

I asked Kevin why we have gravity on the Osprey when all the videos I saw in school told me that there was no gravity in space. Kevin says it's because the nuclear motor at the back of the ship is pushing us constantly toward Delta Pavonis, and this makes our bodies press down against the deck. Not as much as on Earth. Yet. But a little more each day. Until we get up to a full gee —Kevin's word for it.

I said before that the Osprey is taller than a skyscraper. It's like a building on the inside too, with decks instead of floors. The Intra-Ship Transit is like elevators—if you've ever ridden an elevator that goes a mile high, and back. Everything runs on electricity from the nuclear motor, which takes a lot of gas to work. Cassie said most of the ship is actually one giant fuel tank. We're supposed to have enough to take us all the way, with gas to spare.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 78

I'm sorry I missed a few days. I've not been feeling very well, and Cassie let me stay in bed today, rather than go out and help with chores. Cassie doesn't think there's anything wrong with me, she just says I'm homesick. Maybe she is right? A few days ago I had a really good dream about going to the park and playing with my kite. The sky was bright blue and there were pretty white clouds, and all three of us—Mama, me, and Papa—were running across the green grass and laughing, just like we used to do back home. When I woke up, I wanted so badly to be with Mama and Papa at the park, I cried. And I cried some more. And I kept crying. Enough so that Kevin got worried, but Cassie said it was normal, and would pass.

Meanwhile I have the day to rest.

The Earth is very, very far away now. Kevin can still find it using the computers and the telescopes that are outside on the ship's skin— what Kevin calls the hull. But if the Earth was huge on the first day, now it's a little ball not much bigger than a pea. Kevin has to tell the computers to magnify a bunch of times for us to see home with any detail.

Cassie says she can't wait to see our new home. The planet the astronomers found at Delta Pavonis is supposed to have lots of water and lots of plants. Weeds and bushes and trees and forests. Or at least that's what the astronomers think. When I look at the fuzzy pictures Kevin showed me, I wonder if that's how the Earth looked a long time ago? Kevin thinks maybe so, though the new planet doesn't have big continents like Earth does. Just hundreds of smaller green and brown blotches—big islands, covered in forests. All over the world. And clouds. Half the planet is white in any given image. Cassie thinks it must rain a lot.

Though, I sure hope there are a few sunny days too. I've been looking at the pictures again, while I am in bed, and wondering what it will be like to fly a kite in the new sky.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 149

Mama and Papa have been asleep for almost half a year. Some days I miss them so much that I want to tell Kevin and Cassie to go down to the medical bay and wake them up. Because I can't stand it anymore. But I don't. I know Kevin and Cassie will just say no.

I think Kevin and Cassie are a good team. I think maybe this is why they got married before we left Earth?

I asked Cassie if she's going to have a baby soon.

Cassie laughed, and said she already has four babies.

Me, Leah, Molly, and Kroger.

I told her that it was my birthday in another month and that eight years is way too old to be a baby!

Cassie just laughed some more. But I don't think she was being mean. Cassie has kind eyes and kind hands. She gives me hugs when she can tell I miss Mama and Papa. Cassie is soft and warm and reminds me of Mama, but younger.

Kevin's got all four of us kids going up to the gymnasium now. He says that even though the nuclear motor gives us gravity for awhile, there will come a time in the middle of the journey when we'll have to turn the motor off and coast for a great distance. Otherwise we'll have used too much fuel, and won't have enough left to stop ourselves when we get to Delta Pavonis.

So we have to get used to using the gym, because when there's no gravity the gym will be the only thing that keeps us from getting weak and unable to do things.

Kroger shows off in the gym. Taller than me, with muscles. He thinks he is so tough.

He especially makes fun of me when I use the treadmills, because my stomach jiggles and I get sweaty faster than anyone else. I almost hit him for it, but Mama always said never to hit other boys who hadn't hit me first, so I just told Kroger to shut up and leave me alone.

Molly laughs when Kroger makes fun of me, so I told her to shut up too.

Cassie told us all—over and over again—to be nice and to learn to work together. But it doesn't seem to be doing much good. Wherever Leah is, Molly is not. And Kroger spends more time with Molly these days. Which is okay. I like spending time with Leah. She has trouble on the treadmill too, though not as much as me. I don't think Molly teases Leah the way Kroger teases me, but I don't think Molly and Leah are friends.

Kevin says if Leah and I both work hard on the treadmill, and also on our stretches and our hand-weight exercises, then we'll both get in better shape. Then the gym won't be so hard for us anymore.

Leah and I have made a promise to each other, that we will get so good at the gym that nobody will ever make fun of either one of us again.

Leah is my best friend.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 288

Kevin had to go outside for our first repair. The Osprey has what Cassie calls articulated space suits, so that there isn't any time wasted changing the air pressure between the inside of the ship, and when someone has to take a suit outside to work on something that's broken. The suit also has motors in the joints, for strength. Kevin looked like a big insect, with balls at his elbows and shoulders and knees. He smiled at me through the window on his helmet, then went out the airlock using strong magnets on his hands and boots to keep him from falling off the ship.

I asked Cassie what was wrong.

Cassie told me not to worry. It was nothing serious.

But Kevin was out there for a very long time, and Cassie had to keep getting additional instructions from Earth, which she spoke to Kevin over the microphone in the Osprey's control room. I kept trying to ask Cassie what was the matter, but she shooed me away and asked me to please not bother her while she was trying to help Kevin with a very important problem.

That hurt my feelings. I am smart. I can help! Cassie told me I wasn't old enough to help. I told her that someday I will be the best-trained person on the ship. I know I will. Better than anyone. I will know how to run and repair every single part of the Osprey.

And then Kroger will be sorry. He's smart like me, but he's also kind of lazy too. He doesn't like learning to work with the computers the way I do. He has been spending more and more time goofing off on the Intra-Ship Transit, or having tantrums in the gym when he thinks no one is around.

Once, after I snuck up to the gym door, I heard Kroger saying bad words and slamming his foot into one of the big rubber exercise balls over and over and over again. He was saying his papa's name in between the bad words. I am not sure Kroger likes his papa very much? From what I heard, I don't think so.

I can't imagine ever saying those things about my Papa.

I went somewhere else until Kroger was done.

One thing's for sure. Kevin was right. The more I use the gym, the easier it gets. And my stomach isn't jiggling so much anymore. Though Molly still tells me I am fat.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 440

I'm going to be ten years old soon. It seems like such a long time since we left home.

This morning I went down to the medical bay and looked at Mama and Papa through the glass of their stasis bed. They don't move, and they don't breathe, though their eyes and mouths are closed like they're sleeping. I wonder very much if they are having dreams? I hope so. I hope they are having the kind of dreams I've been having lately. About Earth. About where we used to live.

There have been messages from Uncle Burt and Aunt Filly, and Gramma too. They say they miss us all very much and are very sad that we were chosen to leave Earth. Because they know this means they'll never see us again. But they are proud of us too, because all our names are going to be in the history books. The first people to live on a world belonging to a star other than the Sun.

Cassie says this audio journal might wind up being more than just a memento for Mama and Papa when they wake up. She thinks that historians will some day listen to it, to learn what it was like growing up on the long flight to Delta Pavonis. That makes me nervous. I don't know what I want to say to the future. Which is why it's been a week since my last entry. I have to make myself only think about my parents when I talk. I put a picture of them on the wallvid in my cabin and I imagine that they're talking to me over breakfast.

I wish there was a way for them to tell me what's on their minds right now, the way I've been telling my journal what's on mine.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 576

Something hit the Osprey yesterday.

Not a big thing, otherwise Cassie says we'd all be dead. In fact she thinks it was very, very small. But this far from Earth there are a lot of pieces of rock and dust all traveling very fast. There's a giant mushroom-shaped shield at the front of the Osprey that's designed to protect us while we're moving toward Delta Pavonis. It absorbs all the small pieces that get in our way. The piece that hit us was coming at an angle, from the side. Dumb luck, Kevin said. But it was serious enough that both Kevin and Cassie had to put suits on and go outside to fix the hole.

I've studied the electronic blueprints of the Osprey. The part of the ship we all move around in is actually a very narrow column that runs up and down the center. Outside of that is a wide, hollow tube. And that's where all the fuel is kept: in the tube, between us and outer space. Liquid-slush isotope, Kevin calls it. Very cold. But if there's a hole in the hull it means some of the fuel might sublimate, which is what Cassie calls it when the liquid-slush turns immediately to gas and goes out the hole.

When Cassie and Kevin came back inside, they were exhausted. All four of us kids helped them get their suits off and made them food and coffee in the galley. Cassie's hands were shaking so badly that she almost dropped her cup. She said the hole had been a lot bigger than they'd expected, and that they'd had to burrow through the fuel to find the thing that hit us, so that it didn't contaminate the isotope. Then they had trouble sealing the hole from the outside. Despite the fact that we have lots of extra hull panels stored on the outside, just in case something like this happened.

Kevin said they finally got it fixed. But he looked scared.

I asked him why.

He said that if the thing that hit us—a rock the size of a softball—had been any bigger, or going any faster, it might have penetrated all the way through to the center. And then we'd have had a real problem. Somebody could have even been hurt, or killed.

Leah wanted to know why we don't just turn on the deflectors.

That made Cassie smile. She said deflectors only exist in movies and on shows. Real astronauts can't flip a switch and be safe. Real astronauts have to always be ready for the worst.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 888

It's triple-eight day.

Kevin and Cassie said that means it's a holiday for us. No work. Just play. Though I am getting kind of tired of video games and puzzle contests with the others. So I decided to build a kite. Even though there are no parks to fly it in. I spent all day on it, using some plastic sheeting and thin, hollow tubes from the ship's stores. It's a big one, with a tail. When we get to where we're going, I think it will fly well. Until then, I am going to just keep it under my bunk in my cabin.

I went down to look at my parents again.

It's as if no time has passed for them at all.

I can definitely tell time's passed for me.

I'm a lot taller than I was when I came on-board, and not nearly so round. I'll be eleven in a few months. Kevin has pulled me aside a couple of times to warn me—man to man—that things are going to start changing soon. I think Cassie gave Leah the same talk. Leah and I rode the Intra-Ship Transit up to the big room just under the bow shield—where we can be alone when we want—and we talked about it. We both agree, it's got something to do with making babies.

The birds and the bees, my Papa would call it.

I didn't believe my Papa when he told me about the birds and the bees the first time. But now that I am a little older, I think I am starting to believe him. Enough so that I wonder if Kevin and Cassie do the birds and the bees when they are in their cabin together. Is it fun? I wonder.

Speaking of birds and bees, Leah is getting very curious about our new planet. Will there be animals? Kevin seems sure that there will be. Cassie disagrees, and thinks that if there are animals, they might only be in the water. Or they might be microscopic, like the cells Cassie has shown me under the medical lab computer scope.

The astronomers think Delta Pavonis is older than the Sun. So old that Delta Pavonis is just starting to move into its red giant phase. I asked Cassie what that means and she said that all stars burn hydrogen, a lot like the motor for the Osprey, but when a star is very old, it runs out of hydrogen and starts to change.

Like me and Leah, I guess. We're going to change too.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 1,000

I can't believe it's been one thousand Earth days since we left home.

And yet we're still so far away from Delta Pavonis that it looks just like all the other stars in space. No bigger. We know which one it is because it's the star our navigational computer keeps track of every second of every day. We're aimed right at it. Though Cassie said we're not going in a straight line. We're actually following a curved line, because Delta Pavonis and Earth are moving relative to each other. Where Delta Pavonis was when we left home is not where Delta Pavonis is now. And it won't be where it is now in six months, and not in six years, and not in sixty years. So the computer has to constantly watch, and make small adjustments in our course.

Kevin took me down to the big maintenance bay that has all the space suits and other equipment in it. There are small vehicles and tools and things lined up neatly in racks, or in rows on the walls. He told me he's making it my job to check the maintenance bay every day, and to make sure everything is in its place. So that when I turn twelve he can assign me to the job of Maintenance Bay Chief.

I told Kevin I didn't know we had rank on the Osprey.

Kevin said that Maintenance Bay Chief was a very big, very important job, and that I was the right man for it. Which made me feel very proud. So proud that I went down to the medical bay and told Mama and Papa.

I know they can't hear me. They look like they're frozen in time. But I think Papa especially would be glad for me. I am growing up. Though I wonder if Kroger is growing up? We've been having fights lately. Not kicking or hitting. But yelling and name-calling. Nasty words. Cassie has sent us to our separate cabins several times. She yelled at us during the last one. Probably the first time I can ever remember Cassie getting that mad. I think she is tired of Kroger and I not getting along. But I don't know what to do? I can't make Kroger like me. And at this point I don't even want to try. It would be too much work. I think Kroger will always hate me. I talk wrong, walk wrong, think wrong, my breath smells wrong, everything about me, Kroger doesn't like. What am I supposed to do about that? But we're all stuck with each other. So Kevin tries to keep Kroger and I working on different stuff in different places. Otherwise he's afraid things might get serious. Though what he means by serious I am not sure.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 1,500

Being Maintenance Bay Chief is a lot of work. Not only do I have to inventory everything and check the inventory against lists, I have to pull all the parts out on a schedule and check them to make sure they work. Big parts. Small parts. In-between parts. Anything that might break has to be inspected. And Kevin's slowly been showing me how to do this, so that I can make sure that all of the space suits and maneuvering units are in order, along with all of the winches and one-man extravehicular sleds. Everything we need any time someone has to go outside, especially to fix something. It made me nervous, at first. But Kevin's been very patient about showing me. He says it's one of the most important jobs. Right up there with Nuclear Reactor Chief. Which is Molly's job. Cassie says that in a couple of years, we will each rotate jobs. And then, in a couple of years after that, we'll rotate again. And so on. Until each of us—all of the kids—have learned how to do essentially everything on the Osprey that needs doing. In case the adults get sick, or hurt, or even killed, and we have to run things. Maybe even all the way to the end of the trip.

Kevin thinks the estimate of eighty Earth years, one-way travel time, is still more or less accurate. I told Kevin that I didn't want to be an old man by the time we got to our new planet. I also told him that I thought it wasn't fair for them to keep four kids awake, just to train them to do all the jobs, so that the adults could sleep peacefully in stasis.

Kevin laughed, and reminded me that just like when we switch jobs, people would be switching in and out of stasis too. Like taking turns. So that if everything went as planned, by the time each of us arrived at the new planet, we'd be roughly the same age, biologically. Which made me think for a minute. Do I want to be the same age as my parents when they wake up? That idea seems very strange to me. Will I still know them like I knew them when we left Earth? Will they know me? I couldn't get this question out of my head today, so as always, I went down to the medical bay and I looked at the rows and rows of stasis beds, and I thought about how different everything is becoming as I get older. Kevin has been right about one thing. My body is getting ready for the birds and the bees. And so is Leah's, and Molly's. They're each getting bumps under their shirts, and their butts are wider. Leah even told me about how Cassie sat Leah and Molly down and had a very serious talk with them about something called that time of the month. Leah says she and Molly are going to bleed. Out of the same place where they pee! I said Leah was trying to be funny, but she wasn't smiling. She seemed as unhappy about the idea as I did. And when I cornered Kevin and demanded to know the truth, he said it was fact: once a month, girls bleed from their vaginas.

I think Leah wants very badly not to believe it.

I don't blame her. If I had blood coming out of my penis once a month, I don't know what I'd do.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 2,500

We all got shots today. All of us teenagers. Kevin says it's a nodule designed to slowly dissolve in our blood over the course of the year, and that next year, each of us will need to get another one. It doesn't hurt. But Leah and I are pretty sure it's supposed to keep us from getting pregnant.

Not that Leah and I have... done it. You know.

Kroger and Molly? I think they've done it a few times. Cassie and Kevin have told us over and over that it's a mistake to have sex at our age, but those injections today tell me that Cassie and Kevin aren't taking any chances. There are only so many resources to go around. The hydroponics farms and waste re-cyclers can only handle a certain number of people being awake at any given time. Introducing a baby into the environment at this point would be a very bad idea. Which is why Cassie finally admitted to me that this is why she'd never had a child the whole time we'd been underway. Because she didn't dare risk it.

I asked her if she wanted to have a baby when we get to the new planet. She said she hopes she can have many babies. She said that all of the women, including Leah and Molly, are going to need to have as many babies as they can stand. To ensure that there are enough people in the first generation to survive what might come.

I asked Kevin if he thinks something bad might happen when we land. He said that nobody can say for sure because nobody has any idea what the new planet is like. There could be storms, or earthquakes, or tsunamis, or even diseases that kill people. Settling on the new planet is going to be hard, often dangerous work.

I've had to do a lot of thinking about that. I'm old enough now that I can handle any tool onboard. But there are no guns. Why don't we have any guns?

Cassie told me that guns were strictly forbidden. There would be absolutely no need for them, and she was glad to have gotten away from guns on Earth, because guns were a big part of what made life on Earth scary for her.

I'm not so sure Cassie's right. I've been looking at the fuzzy images of our new planet and wondering what might live in those endless forests on all those endless islands. I've gone through the computer libraries and seen all the images of all the dinosaurs from Earth's prehistoric past. If anything even remotely like a dinosaur—especially the carnivorous kind— lives on our new world, we're probably going to need all the rifles we can get. Hell, we'll need rocket launchers.

There are machining and milling workstations connected to the maintenance bay. I've looked at some of the cylindrical steel stock we have onboard. Could it be drilled out? And cut with grooves inside? What could we use for propellant? And bullets?

A long-term project, I've decided. But definitely something for me to look into, though it won't make Cassie happy if she finds out. So I'd better keep it quiet.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 3,650

Ten years, trip time.

I've now spent more of my life on this ship than I did on Earth.

I'm really hoping I get to fly that kite under my bed some day.

Kevin and Cassie have literally taught us everything we need to know about the Osprey and its operations. We know how to use the tools and equipment to do repairs, how to use the spacesuits and the maneuvering units outside. I've even gone out with Kevin to patch holes. One last year, and two more this year. Cassie thinks we must be passing through a debris field. This is the Oort Cloud after all. We're not even an eighth of the way to Delta Pavonis, and nobody really knows how thick the Oort Cloud really is. Light-years thick?

There may be more holes to come. I've been out on top of the bow shield. It's riddled with divots from all the dust and larger junk that's been in our way all this time.

Kevin and Cassie will be going to sleep soon, and two of the other adults will be woken up. There will be a year of overlap with the new adults. Just to be sure that stasis has not harmed them physically or mentally, and that both of them are capable of taking on their respective jobs. Then Leah, myself, Molly, and Kroger will go to sleep, and the adults will wake up four new kids, and the process will begin all over again.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 3,787

Ben and Laura are older than Kevin and Cassie were when the voyage began. Ben was a military man back in his day. He's big, and has a beefy body. First thing he went to look at was the Osprey's gym. I take it he's going to be spending a lot of time in there.

I told him about how I'd been pretty chubby as a little kid, but that using the gym had shaped me up. Ben seemed to like that, and I liked giving him a tour of the ship while Molly gave Laura a tour. Not that these new adults don't know the Osprey from memory. They do. It's just that knowing a thing—static—is different from knowing a thing real-time. The Osprey is 99.8 percent the same ship she was when she left Earth orbit. But there have been little adjustments and modifications along the way. Small and occasionally subtle, but also important, differences in how stuff operates. Such that Ben and Laura are having to go through a bit of a train-up cycle of their own, before us first-run kids get to take our turns in stasis, and the next batch gets woken up for duty.

Which is what I've realized the last ten-plus years have actually been: duty. I didn't sign up for it, and there have been many mornings when I've laid in my bunk and stared at the ceiling and resented the fact that no matter how much I don't want this, I'm stuck with it.

I've become especially annoyed with the fact that there are no women. At least not women I could maybe call my girlfriend.

I've known Leah and Molly so long, we're sort of sick of each other. And while I do think Molly and Kroger were boinking each other for a while, I believe that got old pretty quickly, so they've each gone back to being celibate again.

Leah and me... well, we never got to be anything other than friends. And I think we've both come to agree that this is for the best. We'll still want to be friends when we get to the new world, and introducing sex or romance into the equation... that would complicate things more than either of us wants.

Besides, with Leah, there's no mystery. No adventure. No getting to know somebody for the first time. When I decide I want to be with someone, I want it to be fresh. I want her to be brand new. At least to me. And hopefully me to her, too.

Ordinarily I'd have chatted about all of this with Kevin, but now that Kevin is asleep I am realizing I don't know Ben well enough for he and I to have the kinds of talks Kevin and I used to have. Which makes me very sad. Kevin wasn't quite a dad to me, but he was the only other man onboard with whom I could sit down and have a frank, honest discussion. And now that he's in stasis, I find myself missing him terribly. And Cassie too, though for different reasons. I hope they are each having wonderful stasis dreams. Either of the new life waiting for us when we land, or of the life they left behind. Back on Earth. Which is now so far away from us even the ship's telescopes have to spend several minutes carefully looking, in order to find it.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 4,000

I'm still awake.

I'm almost twenty years old, and I am still awake.

Laura told me they had to pull me out of the stasis bed because of irregularities in the readings, once I was under. I don't remember anything about that. Going to sleep for stasis felt just like going to sleep in normal life, only I was hooked up to a nest of wires and other medical stuff that constantly fed data to the ever-watchful medical bay computer.

Leah's down. Nice and peaceful. I was staring at her in her stasis bed today, with her own nest of wires, and her body gently immersed in the special stasis jelly that they developed for us back on Earth—to help slow down the human metabolic process to a fraction of its ordinary rate.

Ben calls it being one degree warmer than dead.

I've learned Ben can have an occasionally bleak sense of humor. Laura blames it on Ben's time in the military. Ben is an altogether different guy, compared to Kevin. Ben's got a quicker temper, talks in shorter sentences, and often phrases things as commands, rather than requests. But he's really got a talent for working with hardware. He spends almost more time patrolling the internals of the ship, doing manual inspections, than he does in the gym. Laura tells me that Ben used to be a Navy man. Submariner. Worked on the missile boats. The kind of lifestyle and pedigree that had earned him a spot on the trip to Delta Pavonis.

Therefore I did what I could not do when Cassie was awake: I showed Ben my three-D designs for the guns I was sure we'd need when we got to the new world.

Ben slapped me on the back and was grinning ear to ear. He liked the idea so much. He also said that while Cassie was a fine lady, she had some odd ideas about how the Universe ought to work, as opposed to how it actually works, and that I was right to be concerned about what awaited us when we landed. Ben and I have thus been refining my designs— with his practical knowledge and input—and we're probably going to actually try to build a prototype before too long. That is, unless Laura can figure out what's causing the problems when I try to go into stasis.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 4,513

That's it. I'm screwed.

Laura has officially diagnosed me with stasis instability syndrome.

There's no cure for it, and there's no way to screen for it in advance. Back on Earth the statistics are that one in ten thousand have the potential for it. After three tries in the stasis bed, I can't risk a fourth try without putting my life on the line. My body can't handle it, apparently.

What would Kevin have called it? Dumb luck.

Ben can barely look me in the eye. Not because of anything he did or I said, but because he knows that I've been handed a death sentence. The average healthy human male on Earth lives to 84. By the time we get to Delta Pavonis I will be pushing 90. And there sure as hell isn't any chance of going back to the Solar System.

I've been sitting in my cabin for two days now. Contemplating suicide. Seems like the most rational course of action at this particular point in time. So maybe it's a good thing for me that Ben and I haven't actually put together a working gun yet? I'd probably have the barrel in my mouth right about now. The only other option is to go down to the maintenance bay, step into the airlock without a suit, and press the Cycle button.

If ever there was a time I wish that I had my father—Papa, who slumbers blissfully and without awareness—it's now.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 4,515

We were supposed to have woken up four more children.

Turns out Laura woke up three kids... and one woman. Li is one of the rare adults: single. And she's a solid dozen years older than I am.

Look, I get it. I've been pretty messed up since Laura gave me the news about not being able to use the stasis beds. I think Ben and Laura both were getting desperate. In their position I might have done the same thing. But what the hell is Li supposed to do for me? Sing a song? Do a puppet show? I'm not a child any-more. I'm a man. Who has been told that his entire life is going to be lived out on an interstellar prison, with no possibility for parole.

Laura says Li is a medical doctor with specific training in longevity treatments, geriatric therapy, and knows her way around the stasis bed technology. Li's already hard at work in the medical bay labs trying to come up with a "cure" for my problem. Not that I think there's a hell of a lot one person can do that all of the specialists and doctors and technicians on Earth can't. If Earth hasn't been able to puzzle out the solution, I am thinking Li's just going to frustrate herself.

And I'm having a wickedly difficult time slapping on an optimistic face. There's simply no way to "fix" this. It is what it is. All that's left for me now is to decide: is my life worth living even if it's spent living inside a steel can slowly hopping from one star to the next?

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 4,518

Ben's taken me off all technical and maintenance duty. I am not sure how or why he thought he had the authority, but I'm in no state of mind to argue with the man. Instead he's asked—not ordered, and that spooks me—that I devote my time to the three kids. Since I was in their place over a decade ago, it stands to reason that I'll have a connection to them that the other adults may not. Sounds perfectly reasonable. Presuming I can make myself presentable and decent. I've not been shaving, nor bathing. And I am pretty sure last time Li had me come down for some tests, I peeled the paint off the walls with my demeanor. I am not a good guy to be around when I am still trying to figure out if I should off myself.

But I'm going to try my best.

The new kids are named Carlos, Tanika, and Edward.

All between eight and ten years old; or roughly the same age I was when I boarded the shuttle to Earth orbit.

I think the original plan is a good plan: get the kids used to their new world—altogether different from what they knew before—and phase them into added areas of responsibility that will not only make them feel like they have a purpose, but will help train them to operate and maintain the Osprey, in the event that me and the other adults get taken out of the equation at some point.

I won't know—until I've worked with them a little—how intelligent these kids are. Supposedly the selection process for the trip involved testing the children as well as the adults, so there shouldn't be any dull bulbs in the bunch. But you never know. Kroger was a dick to me for ten years, and there were times I considered doing him harm. Would either of the two new boys wind up being another Kroger? Could I resist the urge to murder if such were the case?

Murder. There I go again. Happy thoughts, happy thoughts.

My God, I need to talk to my parents.

Things are really going to hell in a handbasket.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 4,525

I have to admit, I am starting to like these three kids.

Unlike Leah, Kroger, and me, these kids apparently know each other from before we left Earth, and while they're not related by blood, they behave more or less like two brothers and a sister. Oh, to be sure, a squabble here and there. But all in all they behave themselves, they help each other out, and miracle of miracles, I have even observed them saying the words I am sorry without being prodded to it by an adult.

Laura came to my cabin and visited.

She notes that I am not looking quite so devilish as before.

Yeah, well, don't go thinking it's all better, lady.

The most aggravating thing about my situation is that it's entirely out of my hands to resolve. I can't get out and push the Osprey faster. I can't go down and wave a wand over one of Li's test simulators and make it come up with the magical answer to stasis instability syndrome. And now that I am getting to know these kids... well, let's just say I don't have the heart to whack myself while they're aware of what's going on. Lord knows how it would have affected me if Kevin or Cassie had committed suicide while I was younger. And as much as I hate life right now, I can't hate these kids enough to inflict my pain on them out of selfish fear.

So I am just kind of taking it day by day.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 4,545

Li has asked me on a date.

That sounds quite ridiculous, given the circumstances. And I am pretty sure Laura put Li up to it. But I had an e-mail from Li waiting for me this morning, asking me if I'd like to go spend some time in the third observation bubble—which is one of five scattered across the exterior of the ship. We'll have to take suits outside to get there. No way to use an internal crawl space or corridor. We'll pack a dinner, and a blanket, and have a picnic. Or at least that's what the e-mail says.

Would it be silly of me to admit I am nervous?

I've never been on a date.

I've heard about them. Read about them in books and articles and news from Earth. Seen them in movies. Although Ben informs me that the movies are mostly bullshit about that kind of stuff. He and I were in the gym earlier and I confessed my anxiety. He laughed, but then he got serious and told me he thought it was one of the best pieces of news he'd heard since being woken up—that I'd be a fool to not take Li up on it.

So, I wrote Li back, and now we're committed.

For the entire time she's been awake, Li's been clinical in her appraisal of me. A bona fide date suggests romantic interest. Or at least interest of a kind so personal that I am not sure I am prepared to go there with her. Last woman I knew on any sort of level like that was Leah, and we'd known each other so well we'd become like gloves to one another. Or smelly socks, depending on how you look at it. What could I possibly have to talk to Li about? Our lives, our experiences are so different, it's like we're aliens to each other.

Well, I've got the rest of the week to figure myself out.

The kids? They're all giggling about it.

Teacher has a girlfriend!

Yah. Riiight.

Teacher has a complex, compounded by a morbid problem.

I think I'll skip journal entries until the date's over. For better, or for worse.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 4,550

Li is actually pretty cool. With a sense of humor that she keeps wrapped up tightly when she's working. Not a talkative sort.

While we ate—out under the stars of the observation bubble—she came out of her shell. Showed me a side of herself I'd not seen before. And honestly, as hard as I tried to stay grumpy, she had me smiling by the time we were suiting back up and leaving for our return across the hull to the maintenance bay airlock.

So if Ben and Laura's ultimate plan was to get me to take the proverbial razor blade off my wrist—and return to the land of the truly living—it might actually be working.

The kids have been a lot of fun so far, and Li...

Well, we've arranged to do a second, similar date—and one each week thereafter, for however long we feel like it.

Goodness, does that mean we'll be going steady?

I'm actually recording this with my portable digital recorder, while down in the medical bay. Li's gone to sleep for the night, after this last session of labs on one of my blood samples. And I'm just staring into the stasis beds my parents have occupied for the last twelve and a half years.

When I put my hand on the glass, right about where my father's hand is, I realize that I am his size now. With the same thick fingers. How old was he when we left? Maybe 36? Maybe? I honestly can't remember Papa's age. When I look in the mirror, I see Papa's face, but younger. Like in the old photos from the family digital album that began when Papa and Mama first got married.

Which is, perhaps, another reason I can't put myself into an airlock without a suit.

Neither of my parents would ever forgive me.

Worse yet, they wouldn't forgive themselves.

I suspect the key to pulling people back from the abyss is to remind them that however hopeless they may be, or however hurting, their permanent absence will hurt the lives of many. And that there are other things to live for, besides purely selfish motives.

Okay, enough with the self-psych speculations.

I am sleepy, and it's time to get some rest. Tomorrow's a big day with the kids. And Ben's challenged me to a double workout in the gym.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 5,000

Li is almost ready to throw in the towel.

It's been over a year, and she's still no closer to solving my problem than when she woke up. She tries to put on a brave face, but... well, there's nothing she can tell me at this point that's a surprise. I've had plenty of time to adjust to the fact that the Osprey is likely to be the only home I'll ever know. If that idea used to terrify me, now it just sort of... is. Like getting a brain cancer pronouncement, but the cancer's not spreading and it can't be operated on. Maybe one day the tumor will kill me, but for the moment I'm perfectly healthy. So I'm stuck trying to find usefulness and meaning onboard this great big vessel—which has also suddenly become very, very small.

Ben and Laura don't talk about it.

I don't talk about it to them.

The kids? They talk about it when they think I can't hear them. They feel sorry for me because they know if I live to see our new planet, I'll be too old to enjoy colonizing a virgin world.

Speaking of virginity, something else I don't talk about is how Li and I have been... ummm, you know, doing it.

Mama and Papa would have preferred that I be married first, but then if things had worked out the way they preferred I'd be in stasis right next to them. Nobody planned for me to be stuck in limbo like this. And while I suspect Li is partially doing it out of sympathy, I think she enjoys it too. It helps cure the loneliness. For a little while. When all the rest of the ship is asleep, and the computers have taken over, and the only sound you can hear are your lover's hot gasps of appreciation in your ear as you work up a naked sweat with her in your bunk.

So at least I can say that my life on this tub is-n't celibate.

Sorry, Mama. Sorry, Papa. I hope you can forgive me.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 7,500

It'll be time to wake up the next batch soon. Like me, Kroger, Molly, and Leah before them, the new kids aren't exactly kids any-more. They've worked hard, and paid their dues. Just like Ben and Laura. All of them are anxious to go back to sleep. Let someone else take the reins for awhile.

Li says she's going to stay awake with me.

I've told her many times that I can't allow it. She's a medical doctor, and where we're going all medical doctors will be worth their weight in platinum-coated diamonds. For the colony to succeed, Li must sleep. Whether either one of us likes it, or not.

She tells me I can't stop her.

I tell her that she'll be dead long before I am, assuming she can stay sane for the entire trip. Something I am not even sure about myself, much less someone else.

She's already got lines on her face. And I've seen the little silver strands in her black hair— when we're curled up together and she's fast asleep. Leaving me wide awake and wondering how it's going to be for me when I take the only woman I've ever held in my arms and loved, and put her back into stasis for the remainder of the voyage.

Ben and Laura have agreed to help me.

It won't be difficult.

One of these nights after Li and I have made love, I'll slip some sleeping agent into her electrolyte drink. Then when I'm certain she's out for keeps, I'll call Ben and Laura on the comm, we'll all carry Li down to the medical bay, and I'll resign myself to watching her through the lid of a living coffin—for the rest of my days.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 8,500

With Ben, Laura, Li, and the kids all safely put away—down in the medical bay—Chris and Janicka came next.

Dealing with them is different than dealing with Ben, Laura, or any of the other adults to date. Because I've become an adult too. Just a few years younger than Chris and Janicka, biologically speaking. Though I'm feeling far older—and less charitable—than when Ben and Laura took charge.

Now I'm the point man. The one with the experience. So that I feel like I'm devoting my time to managing six children, instead of four.

Which is not to say the arrangement remains precisely unchanged from the way it was before. I told them all that while I was perfectly happy to help show everyone the ropes—and do a little baby-sitting now and again—since I'm the odd man out for this particular phase of the voyage, I play by my own rules, and would remove myself from the pell-mell of the daily chore list whenever I pleased.

This does not exactly cheer Chris or Janicka, but then I didn't ask for their permission either. After all, they are going to go back to sleep eventually. I'm not. Therefore they owe me. Just as everyone else onboard owes me. Even my parents.

Unlike Ben and Laura, Chris and Janicka weren't husband and wife when they boarded the Osprey. In fact, they don't get along that well. Though Janicka surprised me in one specific way.

She likes to work out with me in the gym the same way Ben and I liked to work out in the gym, whereas Chris is a bit on the pudgy side and loathes anything that makes him break a sweat. So while Janicka and I don't have much else in common, over a few weeks we've gotten to understand each other the way gym rats everywhere understand each other.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 8,525

Spending time with Janicka in the gym, I've learned that she prizes physical fitness. And admires people who can stick to a regimen. Something I've been doing for years. She wouldn't believe me when I told her I'd been soft as a kid. Even made me show her pictures as proof.

When I got done giving her a brief tour of my flabby childhood, there was a little mischievous twinkle in her eyes.

Thus Janicka's sneak visit to my after-workout shower was not precisely unanticipated.

One moment I was all by myself—the curtain zipped up and hot water pounding across my tired muscles.

The next moment I heard the curtain unzip. With soap in my hair I didn't dare open my eyes. I felt strong female hands on my shoulders, arms, chest, biceps, and... other places.

All the rest was automatic.

Now, I won't lie. Having to put Li into stasis still hurts too much. This thing with Janicka... we're not a couple. Not really. Janicka is a different kind of woman altogether. Not nearly as sensitive nor hidden as Li is. Janicka knows what she wants, and isn't afraid to say it. Or take it.

Janicka is also on the kinky side—nobody ever told me the birds and the bees could be as interesting as it's been since Janicka and I hooked up.

I don't love her. And she doesn't love me. That much we've made clear. But the sex is its own kind of bond, helping each of us to escape from different problems.

We are, for each other, the most wonderful kind of distraction.

I think the technical term I once saw used in an old movie is fuck buddy.

Of course, sometimes I think having a fuck buddy is sowing some unfortunate seeds with Chris. Especially when it's obvious that Chris is feeling sorry for himself: left out of the mix, the poor bastard.

So what? It's not my fault he's a fatass.

Janicka likes buff.

And buff is the one thing I've got in ample supply.

I guess Chris will just have to get over it?

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 8,613

I hurt a man today. Badly.

I suppose I should have seen it coming.

Janicka and I had been getting gradually more adventurous and flagrant with our behavior. In different parts of the ship. In places where someone might walk in and catch us. It was fun. It was exciting. The more risks we took, the greater the heightened emotional and physical pleasure.

What was it Mama always said? It's all fun and games... until someone gets hurt.

Chris came into the galley late one night—to find Janicka and I going at it rather frenetically and noisily on one of the tables.

He started screaming at us. And called her a whore.

So I clocked him.

One shot, to the face. I didn't even think twice about it.

Broke his nose, his cheek, and put him into a coma...

Now I'm sitting at his side in the medical bay every day while Janicka scours the medical computer trying to find out what to do about his condition. We don't dare put him back in stasis like this, but we're not exactly sure that letting him float along at the edge of death is a good idea either. Neither of us has the kind of medical training that someone like Li has. I've even considered waking Li long enough to ask for her help. I resist the idea only because I can't face admitting to her that I've done what I've done—to Chris in rage, or with Janicka in lust.

Mama and Papa are still trapped in virtual amber, like always.

As if their son hasn't become an altogether different person than he started out being as a boy, long ago.

All I feel now... is empty.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 8,648

Chris came out of it today. Much to my relief.

He was still banged up pretty bad, but he was conscious. And didn't remember a thing about my having put his lights out for him.

Janicka and I haven't yet had the heart to spill the beans.

But I think Chris is smart enough to have figured it out.

All three of us adults are just sort of trying to keep things puttied together, because the kids have been acting out something fierce—since Chris has been down.

If Janicka and I had been overly concerning ourselves with our libidos, Chris had been pouring all of his time into keep the kids squared away. And in a rather thankless fashion to boot.

No wonder he screamed at us. Like a housewife who's logged too many sleepless hours, only to find her husband off drinking and pinching bottoms at a gentleman's club.

I've profusely apologized to Chris, for shirking. I've put myself to work on the daily chores list like never before. Both to keep myself occupied—so that thinking about what had happened didn't hurt as much—and to make it up to the man however I can.

Janicka?

Janicka... has withdrawn.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 8,679

You know what?

The mission planners for this trip totally screwed up.

And do you want to know why?

There's nothing in the Osprey's extensive and voluminous operations library that discusses the fixing of broken people.

Regardless of whether or not Chris has forgiven me, there's still the question of justice. You can't just hit a man like that, and get away with it.

One of the kids suggested we have a trial. Like on Earth.

I told them it was an excellent idea.

With Chris rescued, Janicka reluctantly called the tribunal to order, and the kids all heard my confession, with the medical records as evidence. When it came time for sentencing, Janicka was stumped. But the kids were quick on the uptake. Put him in time out!

I'll be departing for one of the observation bubbles soon. For six months solitary confinement. No entertainment, other than one hour of music per day. I'll take a week's worth of rations with me, and someone will come every week thereafter to retrieve trash, give me new food and water, and make sure I haven't done anything unfortunate to myself.

A small part of me dreads the sentence.

But then again, I feel like it's a great object lesson for the kids. When we left Earth behind, we also technically left civilization. But civilization is also something you carry with you in your heart. Your soul. I am afraid I've gradually turned barbarian since I got the news that I can't go to sleep like all the rest. It's time for me to relearn my manners. So that the kids will know that regardless of where we are in space, the rules are still the rules. And when you break the rules, there are consequences.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 8,700

It's been hard, being stuck out under the stars all day every day. Nothing to do. Not even the gym. No chance of escape—they didn't let me keep a suit, not even in case I might need it. I don't even have any reading material, because they wouldn't give me a pad or a computer terminal.

But once a day, I do get my music.

Selected at random from the massive MP3 archive that the Osprey brought with it from Earth. Millions of recordings. Decades worth of listening. And for one hour each day I'm able to partake.

Sometimes it's classical, like Mozart.

Sometimes it's jazz.

Other times it's the latest—at the moment of our launch—pop stuff from any dozen Earth cultures: Japanese, Chinese, Korean, North American, French, et cetera.

And still other times it's spoken word.

I think I like that best of all.

Not exactly audio books. But poetry and short stories.

There was an old actor named Geoffrey Lewis who told wonderful tales set to music. I recognize his distinctive voice from some of the old movies I've seen over my long years of being permanently awake on the ship. Celestial Navigations, they're called. Haunting pieces, in that I sometimes hear myself in them: the eternal wandering man, in search of himself, or his idea of the perfect woman.

Speaking of which, it's been difficult not having access to Janicka.

Chris is the only one who comes to see me every week, bringing fresh food and hauling out my waste in sacks which I fill and tie off: sorted by color for recycling.

He doesn't say much, and neither do I.

But I dream about Janicka.

And, sometimes, I dream about Li too.

The stars are crystal clear all day and all night.

When I get to go back inside, with the others, I want things to be different.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 8,860

I'm a free man again.

Whatever hard feelings there might have been, between Chris and I, they seem to be settled. He's healthy, and appears no worse for wear. And none of us can say that I wasn't given ample time to consider my sin, and reform. Which I was determined to prove was the case.

And Janicka is still distant.

Which is, I suppose, to be expected.

I think both of us were more than a little ashamed of ourselves, for what happened, and why. There haven't been any sexual encounters since I came back inside. Nor have I desired any, really. Janicka and Li are like night and day: the one soft and gentle and earnest, the other muscular and forceful and daring. I can't say I regret having been physical with ei ther one of them. But I think Janicka and I both believe that it's for the best that we don't try to pick up again right where we left off.

Our fuck buddy days are over.

So I've gone back to work, and the kids are working with me, and while I still have a blank, terrified spot in my heart over the fact that I am essentially trapped on the Osprey, a man without a world, it's easier to ignore that spot when I am busy.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 9,082

Janicka is dead.

Stupid accident. None of us could have predicted it. Janicka went outside for routine maintenance on one of the external radiation sensors when a piece of dark interstellar debris clipped her helmet. Just, slice, one second Janicka was alive and working, the next... half her head was gone and she was dangling backward along the hull by her safety tether.

I demanded to be the one to go out and get her.

I got her all the way back to the maintenance bay, her corpse limp, before it hit me.

Our first bona fide casualty. Nobody had been naïve, about the risks. When we left Earth. All of the adults had been volunteers, and while those of us who'd been kids hadn't necessarily understood the danger, coming of age on the Osprey meant becoming intimately familiar with that danger. We were totally dependent on the ship, and on each other, to keep us alive. Not a lot of margin for error. And while an interplanetary voyage of a few weeks was now as safe and routine as intercontinental airline travel had become in my great-great-grandfather's time, traveling from star to star is brand new. Never been done. Totally without precedent.

We got Janicka's body into a man-sized sack, sealed it up, then Chris and I both suited up and took her back outside. To the very rear of the ship, where the glow of the fusion drive lit the edges of the radiation shield and push-plate that formed an inverted twin to the mushroom-shaped bow shield at the front of the ship.

We debated who should cast Janicka into the void.

As the only person aboard who'd been intimate with her, I mumbled a few words on her behalf. Then cursed myself for not having anything more eloquent to say. Just as nobody in the planning stages had thought to consider what might happen if the people went haywire, there was nothing in the training nor the library for dealing with death.

Janicka was too stark a reminder to me that it would probably be me in that sack some day: a relic of the trip, soon to be disposed of.

Which made up my mind for me.

I told Chris we aren't doing any space burials.

Janicka is going to stay in cold storage on the outside of the ship until we reach our new home, and then she's going to be goddamned buried in the goddamned soil like the pioneer woman that she is.

Chris nodded his head through the clear face plate of his helmet.

He likes the idea too.

And so it is.

There's a "graveyard" on the Osprey now. A graveyard for one, right down at the base of the pusher-plate where we seldom ever have to go. Janicka will be tethered there, frozen by the blackness of space, until we get to Delta Pavonis—and she can be given proper honors under a new sun.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 10,000

Ten-kay Day.

Just like any other day.

After Janicka's death, Chris and I decided not to wake up any other adults. Not before it was his turn to go back to sleep, and the cycle would begin all over again.

Lately the kids have been pestering me about Earth.

For them, it's been just four years.

For me...?

I'm probably older than my parents now. Biologically, as well as emotionally.

Each year that passes, my memories of Earth become more like hardcopy photos: still possessing the same colors and shapes that they always have, but flat. Yes, flat. And so very, very far away.

I've started running a contest with the kids to see who can draw, each week, the most imaginative example of a possible animal we might meet when we land on our new world at Delta Pavonis. The kids have really taken the idea and run with it, too. Now all the screen savers all over the control room and, indeed, all over the ship, are filled with drawings of rampaging two-headed tyrannosaurs, unicorn snakes with rainbow wings, gargantuan protowhales with eight flukes, and still other creatures too imaginative or even disturbing to adequately describe.

I've archived all of the drawings with my journal, so that anyone listening in the future can take a look. I like what the kids have done. I hope our new planet doesn't let them down.

I think I am going to miss these kids when they go back to sleep.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 12,150

It's time. Not only for Chris and the boys and girls—young men and women, really—to reenter their long, quiet night of stasis, but also to turn the engine off.

We're going to spend the next twenty years coasting. Having burned the fusion reactor for the last three decades, we've got three-fifths of our original fuel load left. And the math is holding steady: with two decades of free flight, we can turn the drive back on for braking, dropping gradually back down the relative velocity curve to something approaching normal interplanetary speed.

We haven't gone that slow in many a year.

Yet, we've only ever reached a fraction of the ultimate velocity: the speed of light.

I've been thinking that if they're going to build more ships like the Osprey, it's going to be like building time capsules in each instance. Oh, we get radio messages from Earth and are more or less up to date on what's going on, but the further we've traveled the more detached from home we've become.

Or, I should say, the more detached I have become.

Chris still suffers from a shade of homesickness.

I think he truly regrets coming on the trip; some days.

Which I thoroughly and completely understand.

But at this point there is only one way to go, with only one way to get there, and all anybody who is awake can do is muddle through his or her assigned tasks, make sure the broken stuff gets fixed, and hope that when we finally do touch soil again, it's as promising and marvelous a landscape as I think all of us have unconsciously come to hope it will be.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 15,000

I don't check in with my journal much these days.

Turning fifty means not having to say you're sorry.

I'm the grandpa on the boat now. Or maybe an eccentric uncle?

The rotation schedule got fouled up when we had three more deaths. Extra people had to be woken up early. Now there are four bodies in the graveyard, including a child's. Which made me quite sad. The little ones deserve to see their new home even more than the adults who started out on the trip fully-grown.

Watching a child die was about as hard as seeing Janicka die, or putting Li to sleep knowing that when she woke up again, it would probably be me who'd have passed on.

But I eat right and I use the gym and I do what I can to make sure the grim reaper stays far away. One thing about a trip like this: it's a test case in seeing how much interstellar radiation a body can absorb before the cancers explode and take over. Even with shielding, I figure I've absorbed far more gamma rays than is reasonably healthy. And while the stasis beds could keep a tumor from sprouting full-bloom, my metabolism is alive and well and churning at 100 percent. If a metastasis chooses to present itself, I am not sure there's a hell of a lot I can do to slow it down.

No worries.

In the past I've had to get dental work done.

If I need to have a tumor mass of any sort removed... there are people that can be woken up for that.

What matters most right now is that we're over halfway to Delta Pavonis. Not that you'd notice it from looking outside. Delta Pavonis is still just a star in space, like the Sun. We're out of the Oort Cloud by a good ways, and things in interstellar space are just a whole lot of black nothing. But knowing that there's now less time in front of us than behind us is somehow... invigorating. I don't know. I think it's a little like taking a long family car trip: Are we there yet? No, not yet, but soon.

Hah. Soon. Indeed.

How warped my sense of time has become, as I've gotten older.

The days pass much more quickly than I remember them passing when I was twenty-five, or fifteen for that matter.

I am friendly with the new crew, but not intimate.

Certainly not to the degree I've been with past crews.

It's hard to relate to the kids—regardless of whether they woke up as children, or woke up as adults.

Lately I spend most of my time just wandering the ship. Passing through all the corridors and passageways, riding the IST up and down, up and down. Visiting all the familiar spaces and trying desperately to recapture that feeling I had when I was eight years old, and everything was exciting and new.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 17,500

I've been accused of playing favorites.

I can live with that accusation.

So what if I rigged the wake-up schedule to my liking?

There are some people who were never going to spend any significant time awake anyway.

To prove my point I showed the plaintiff a roster of all names currently in stasis: 48 men, 49 women, 112 girls, and 83 boys. All of the adults drew lots when they volunteered to come on the trip, and all of them swore to uphold their part of the bargain, if they happened to be one of the ones assigned to an "awake" shift in support of the Osprey. Did it really matter if I scrubbed my parents from the next stint? Or Li, who was actually supposed to be awake now —for the first time, not the second.

I once read that a military general on Earth said: No battle plan survives contact with the enemy. The trip to Delta Pavonis is a war of attrition. Fuel dwindles, supplies get used up, reserves are recycled, reused, recycled, and re-reused, to the point that waste must inevitably be jettisoned. Frankly I am amazed we haven't had worse problems than we've already experienced.

And if a couple of untimely deaths gave me an excuse to swap a few names around on the list, who are the newbies to argue with me about it?

I'm old enough to be their father for Christ's sake.

Of course, my list of names did not include the ten thousand embryos also being carried in stasis: an entire, healthy human gene pool, with plenty of room to spare.

Not that all ten thousand are expected to be implanted in wombs the instant we arrive. If the medical science is right, those embryos will be good for at least a hundred years or more, on top of the total trip time. So that as new generations of Delta Pavonians—my Lord, that is clumsy, we simply must come up with a better word for ourselves—come of age, the women can have some original offspring, and at least one or two "stasis babies" originally carried from Earth.

Inside of two centuries, if everything progresses according to the plan, there'll be no fear of inbreeding. For anyone. And there will be so many people living on the new world that even a significantly major disaster won't be able to wipe us all out.

Much depends on those first twenty-five years.

When we'll be digging in. Putting down roots. Staking our claim.

To that end I've been slowly and methodically constructing my arsenal of weaponry. Using the rifle designs Ben and I first finalized way back when I was in my twenties. I've taken them outside and test-fired the lot of them, and am satisfied that they will suffice. Unless the new planet is literally infested with bloodthirsty monsters bigger than the biggest elephant, we ought to be able to fend off whatever nasties may be lurking in those jungles and forests.

Which we still can't see—as anything more than a green blur.

It takes hours for the telescopes to find the planet circling Delta Pavonis, and then it's impossible to get a clear shot because of relative drift. Even when we're getting closer and closer all the time.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 20,000

Twenty-kay day.

I'll turn 63 soon.

In a few more years we will begin our down-thrust into the gravity well of Delta Pavonis.

I'm not paying much attention to the names of the people to be woken up next. They are babies, basically, and I've gotten tired of changing diapers. Metaphorically-speaking.

I now spend as much time away from the youngsters as I can.

My jobs on the maintenance schedule are forgotten.

There are younger people to do all of it now. Quicker, smarter, stronger. I try to keep up with them in the gym, but it's tough. I'm not the man I used to be. If only I could talk to my grandfather now, I know he'd understand. But he's been dead for a long time. In fact, most of the people I knew on Earth when I was a boy, are gone. Memories only. Washed away by time and distance.

Once in awhile I still go to the medical bay and talk to Li, or my parents. Sometimes I even talk to Leah, who still looks like a young teenager. Or is it that I've gotten so old, everyone around me seems impossibly youthful? I can't really say for sure. All I know is that I seem to have an easier time talking to the near-dead, than I do to the alive.

The kids think I am the strangest sort of creature: odd, annoying, occasionally funny, but also occasionally scary.

One of the older crew yelled at me one day when he caught me chasing a crop of little ones down the corridor, roaring like a beast and wagging my arms and legs about: my tongue flapping and my eyes huge.

Apparently I'd caused one of them to cry!

A menace, I was.

Fuck 'em. It's not my fault if they don't have a sense of humor.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 25,000

I'm old.

Old, and tired.

And they turned the goddamned gravity back on.

Not that you can "turn on" gravity. It's just that the Osprey has done an about face, and we've been burning the engine again. Bleeding off relative velocity as we close in on Delta Pavonis. It's been a long time in coming. But I am resenting having the full weight of my body—not to mention my years—pressing down on me a little bit more each passing day.

If the math holds we should reach our target in about a dozen years.

Enough time for one more awake shift.

Joy. Another patch of snot-noses to wrangle with. This last group almost did me in. Thought they knew everything. Even the tots. It was enough to drive a man crazy.

I'll be glad when everyone finally gets off this stinking ship.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 28,900

One of the little ones came jumping up to me today and exclaimed, "We can see home!"

Ordinarily I'd have ignored such ruckus, but I decided to humor the child and allowed myself to be lead away to the control room where the telescopes were capturing high-quality, high-resolution images of the Earth-type world which has been drawing us onward like a bulb draws moths in the summer evening.

Even with the better part of a year still in front of us, I have to admit, the view is fairly spectacular.

The planet is a ball of mostly-blue from pole to pole, with fantastic archipelagos and island chains wrapping and rewrapping the planet from east to west, and back again. As if all the world has become Indonesia. But unspoiled. Pure. Each small land mass covered in lush, green vegetation. Mountains and valleys, rivers and river deltas, masses of white clouds and broiling storms and, yes, there in the southern hemisphere, the tell-tale whorl of a typhoon.

Room enough for ten thousand nations, I thought.

Give people enough time...

But will we get it right? I mean, any more right than we got it the first time, back home on Earth?

Wait, this is home now. Or rather, it will be.

I must admit to being surprised I made it this far.

My health is fragile, and my bones are thin, and my hands and face are covered with spots. There's no hair on my head, and I've got to use a cane I built from a piece of mill stock in the maintenance bay.

Whole generations of crew have passed through the bowels of the Osprey, one after the next, and I'm the only one to have seen and experienced them all. I am like the biblical Methuselah: the living hourglass by which the entire mission has been measured. Can I hold out for just one more year? What will it be like to actually stretch my toes out into the sand on those new beaches? Of which there will doubtless be an endless variety.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 29,199

We're in orbit, by God.

500 miles up, and doing fine.

Not a single fleck of space debris—nor any artificial satellites.

A clean slate in space, as well as on the ground.

The new planet has a moon about the size of Callisto. Much bigger than Earth's moon. But roughly about as dense. We're seeing evidence of active volcanism on that moon, as well as on the planet below. Which doesn't necessarily mesh with our expectations, given the estimated age of the Delta Pavonis system.

But then, that's part of the fun, right? To come all this way and have assumptions overturned?

Magical.

With everyone being woken up and the aerospace shuttles officially unpacked from their bulbous conformal cocoons amidships, the Osprey is suddenly alive with chattering and laughter and arguments—both civil and not-so-civil.

I have retreated to the room just underneath the bow shield.

Where Leah and I used to come.

I haven't had the heart to find or talk to her yet. I've mostly kept out of the way and let the kids do all of the work. This is their party, not mine.

Li found me sulking.

If she was mad at me for putting her back into stasis against her wishes, she didn't show it. She simply ran a finger along my chin and over my jaw, then leaned in and gave me a very gentle kiss on the lips. Before tears pooled at the corners of her eyes and she floated away from me back toward the IST that would take her down to where the action was.

It wasn't the kind of steamy kiss I'd last gotten from her, but it was sufficient to get my blood moving. I sat there for a long time, remembering how things had been when she'd still held out hope that my stasis instability syndrome could be cured.

She'd wanted so many things for us then. Things we'd now never get to have, despite having made it to the new star.

My mother and father found me next.

It was like seeing ghosts.

Their smiles faltered when they saw how decrepit I'd become.

"What have we done to you?" Mama said, tears fluttering from her eyes.

"It wasn't your fault," I told her. "Neither of you had any idea this would happen to me. Come now, there's work to be done. A new life to be lived. You and Papa are still young. You have plenty of time for a new son. Go. Down to the new planet. Be happy."

Papa braced my shoulders with his manly, strong hands, and squeezed tightly.

He understood.

He was crying too, but he understood.

I hugged him close to me, then hugged my mother.

I didn't watch them go as they left me to my silence.

Audio Journal Transcript: Day 29,235

They've started a fresh calendar down on the new world. The days are much longer: by about six Earth hours. Perhaps a blessing, or perhaps a curse? I'm pretty sure the tradition of siesta will be alive and well on this, the official second home of humanity in the galaxy.

When all but a few of the landing craft departed the ship, and there was barely anyone left onboard the Osprey, Leah came and asked me to come down.

Molly, and Kroger too.

And Ben and Laura. And Chris. And Kevin and Cassie.

I'm older now than all of them.

We packed up all of my belongings, to include an ancient kite which had been under my bunk for almost eight decades. The plastic had become brittle. I wasn't sure it would fly. But I figured I would give it a shot.

Everyone ushered me to the precipice—the docking tunnel that would take me over to the aerospace shuttle, which sat fully-fueled and ready to streak down towards the planet's surface.

I stopped there, considering.

It would be hard, the new world. So much work to do. If I'd hated the gee exerted on the ship during downthrusting, I'd hate the real gravity twice as much. My old body might last a week or two in such an environment, but probably no more than that. I'd have a stroke, or my heart would give out, or I'd fall and bust a hip. That was no way to go. Not when they still needed the Osprey to remain functional in orbit. As a satellite relay, both for on-world communication and for pitching messages back toward Sol System—our far away brothers and sisters on the old world.

"No," I finally said to my friends. "I can't go down. But you can do one thing for me. Take Janicka's body and bury it in a sunny place, with the others who died. Where the trees grow tall and the noise of the ocean is in the wind."

I gave them my kite.

"Make sure one of the children gets to fly this too."

There was, of course, much protest.

But I waived them off.

"Are you going to argue with your senior?" I said, half-joking. "I will stay here. It'll be just the Osprey and me. Together. She's my woman now. We are the only ones old enough to understand each other."

Their faces showed concern and sorrow, but they ultimately left me in peace.

Audio Journal Transcript: Final Entry

And here onboard the Osprey I remain. The ship is all but empty. Nobody comes up anymore, though occasionally I do send something down when they need it—in one of the numerous emergency reentry pods. Eventually I'll run out of those, but not before the ship has been stripped of virtually every usable piece of technology that can be put to work below. There's only enough left onboard these days to keep the power, the air, and the hydroponics farm running.

My lovely farm.

Where I grow just enough for me to eat, which isn't much.

And where I suppose someday I'll lay down and let the Universe take me.

To be totally honest, it's not been a bad life. I've had responsibilities and I've taken lovers and I've made amends for my wrongs. I've also helped bring a miracle to fruition. There's a new civilization going on down there, on that new world. I think they named it something lofty-sounding, but I can't remember what. A pretty name. Doesn't really matter. They're doing what needs to be done. And I am fully confident that a thousand years from now, this place will be vibrant and alive with people. Maybe launching their own ships towards still more distant stars? Maybe cracking the light-speed barrier altogether, and turning voyages like mine into a question of months, weeks, or even days.

Who knows?

I've got the Osprey's long-range radio dishes fine-tuned for communication traffic with Earth. Broadcasts back to Sol System take a long time. I let them know that the Osprey has arrived, and that her mission is officially accomplished to satisfaction.

I don't expect anything in return. I won't be alive to listen to their reply.

One thing, though.

Today Leah sent me a high-resolution image of Janicka's grave, where the four bodies of our fallen starfarers now rest.

It's a monument, actually. A huge stone obelisk twenty meters high watches over a gorgeous bluff that looks out across an amazing, endless, wave-tumbled sea.

The plants look a bit strange. Not like Earth plants.

But green is still green.

And the clouds are bright white.

And the sky is true blue.

Rubik's Chromosomes

Megan Chaudhuri
| 3352 words

Tecca inspected the tooth marks on the Rubik's cube, running her thumb over the gouged squares. "These vintage cubes're pricey, Jonathan," she said, looking at the albino mouse sitting on her desk. "Stop chewing off the colors when they don't match."

A small curl of yellow plastic dropped from his mouth as he squeaked defiantly at her. Tecca set the cube at the edge of the desk's built-in display. Turning his white back to her, Jonathan waddled over to the cube, leaving paw prints across the display.

"While you're at it, little man," Tecca said, buffing the prints off with her sleeve as she watched Jonathan inspect the cube. "Figure out how we're going to make rent on this glorified Seattle closet, because—"

"Urgent," the desk chirped. Tecca flinched, her hands smacking the gel display and bringing it out of sleep mode. The desk continued blithely. "Self-referred consultation, ten minutes. Regarding: peer-review of core genetic sequence modifications."

Tecca immediately forgave the desk's bad timing. "Summarize client!" she shouted. The desk chugged a moment, trying to parse the command out of her excited squeal, and Tecca slapped the surface to cancel it. "Summarize client," she repeated, her voice flat and slow even as she pumped her fist in the air.

As the desk chugged through that command, Tecca snatched up the Rubik's cube and Jonathan. Ignoring his protests, she set him in his toy-stuffed cage on the far wall of her office.

"Client name: ibn Saud, Faisal, and bint Khalid, Seeta," the desk said.

Tecca's hands went still, the cage lid only half on.

"Deposit: paid. Tracking number confirmation in progress. Consent pursuant to Gene Expression Variability and Genetic Fraud Act of 2143: confirmed."

"Sauds," Tecca said. Jonathan looked up at her tone, his whiskers quivering curiously before he appeared to remember that he was ignoring her. "I thought they never left Vashon nowadays, if they could help it." She dimly recalled visiting Little Riyadh as a kid, back before the '48 recession made the locals growl about hidden oil money and unpaid taxes. The Sauds had abandoned Little Riyadh soon after the graffiti and threats had started, retreating to Vashon.

Tecca closed the cage lid and went back to her desk chair. The gel rippled beneath her fingers as she queried for SAUDI EXILES AND VASHON ISLAND SEATTLE AND FAISAL IBN SAUD OR SEETA BINT KHALID.

A knock. Tecca jumped, hastily closing the search results. She called out, "Come in, please."

The door opened, letting in the smell of wet pavement, a man in a pricey-looking suit, and a woman in a—robe? A five-sizes-too-large black poncho? Tecca didn't recall seeing the getup in Little Riyadh, but it was vaguely familiar. Reminded her of that baggy cloak and dress combo the Christ's Children women wore in eastern Washington. Not that one of those nutjobs would ever come near a geneticist.

Abaaya, that was it.

Tecca caught herself staring and stood up, covering her rudeness by enthusiastically putting out her hand. "Faisal, Seeta? I'm Tecca Jamison. How're you doing?"

Faisal shut the door as Seeta silently shook her hand. Tecca gestured them into the seats opposite her, busying herself as Seeta pulled the abaaya off and draped it over the back of the chair. Without it, the woman could have passed for a well-tailored Seattlite.

"Thank you for seeing us on such short notice," Faisal said, ignoring Tecca's pleasantries. He had no accent, although the rhythm of his speech was—different. "We haven't much time—our shuttle is cleared to take off within the hour—but we need a second opinion on a DNA design." He removed a small chrome data stick from inside his suit jacket. Tecca caught a brief glimpse of silk lining. Silk suits and private shuttles; maybe there was something to those old oil money rumors.

"I'm happy to take a look," Tecca said. "Was the build done by a Saud geneticist?"

"It will be reviewed by one," Faisal said. Tecca waited for him to actually answer the question but the man jerked his head to one side, as if dismissing that line of thought.

All right, then. It'd be clear who did the design soon enough; all the major firms had their own quirks. Tecca gestured at the data stick, probing for what several descendants of the royal House of Saud were doing in her low-rent office. "Has the design already been built into an embryo?"

"No," Faisal shook his head. He cupped his wife's hand as Seeta slipped her arm through his. "My wife has some reservations about its quality."

Before Tecca could open her mouth to ask why, Seeta glanced up and shrugged. "Oh, just woman's intuition." She had the same rapid speech as Faisal. "Our first child and all."

"If you're worried about the sequence quality," Tecca said, a little more sharply than she'd intended. Honesty at this point might cost her the rest of the job. "Most geneticists'd be happy to review their own work for free. Design neglect has, uh, some legal repercussions."

"Of course," Faisal said, holding up one hand to her. "We simply need a second opinion, Ms. Jamison." He pressed the data stick and slid it across the desk to Tecca, the connection feeds unlocked and protruding like the ends of a Taser.

Tecca felt a moment of relief that they hadn't left, although it bothered her that she didn't have a read on them yet. She glanced at Seeta, her arm linked with her husband's. No eye contact. Hunched. Maybe they had some rare genetic disorder they didn't want other Sauds to know about. At least they seemed affectionate with one another. Tecca hated the jobs when the couple had clearly been fighting over the design.

She took the data stick and plugged in into the desk.

"What traits did you get changed?" she said as the surface checker-boarded with sequence chromatograms and karyotypes and methylation heat maps. The tang of ozone overpowered the smell of hot circuits as refrigerant circulated through the desk, cooling it as the software parsed billions of base pairs.

Faisal cleared his throat. "I would prefer that you tell me."

Tecca did a mental stutter-step. Had she misunderstood him? Had he misspoke? No—this must be some bizarre test of her abilities. Her train of thought derailed as the desk pinged: the data were all uploaded.

"This'll take a few," she said, double-tapping the Invitrosoft logo and hoping they didn't notice FREEWARE blaze across the loading screen. Tecca parameterized the freeware's stripped-down algorithms to predict phenotype. With that running in the background, she brought up the map of the design's individual chromosomes.

The karyotype showed twenty-two pairs of autosomal chromosomes. The sex chromosomes showed only a single X paired with a placeholder.

"You've got a master design," Tecca said, glancing at the placeholder. "Could use it for a boy or a girl." She revised her impression of their wealth: families saved money with master designs, if they didn't mind having, say, three identical twins.

They nodded. Faisal waved his hand as if she should hurry up. Tecca kept her focus down on the surface, not wanting her irritation to show. Dismissive hand waving. Wonderful.

The surface flashed beneath her hands: the phenotype predictions were done. She tapped once and the chromosomes f lattened into schematics, the proposed modifications highlighted in red.

She wasn't surprised by what she found. The Big Three, they'd called them back in school.

No fatties. "You want your kid to be trim," Tecca said. "Pretty buff, too."

They nodded.

No gays. "Straight."

They nodded.

And especially no retards. "And, uh," Tecca hesitated. "No learning problems."

They nodded.

Maybe it was the Big Three that had brought them to her. Most geneticists in Seattle would cheerfully remove the chance of morbid obesity or severe brain defects, while not touching sexuality. Rather arrogant, to Tecca's way of thinking. It was the client's design. Client's kid.

She skimmed the last modifications: a lowpenetrance linguistic enhancement through FoxP2; a fussy little change to the androgen receptor's promoter. Just fine-tuning.

Was that it? Tecca stifled her unprofessional disappointment. The Big Three were just popular enough to pay most of her rent. Her first brush with the reclusive Vashon Sauds, and they turned out to be the same as other Seattle parents.

"This is a decent job," Tecca said. "I'll just do a quick proofread through the regulators." Ignoring the grating sound of Jonathan twisting his Rubik's cube, Tecca switched to manual mode and skimmed the gene regulation elements. She really should upgrade from the freeware, but the license cost a month's rent and half a Rubik's cube, to boot. Besides, she'd gotten pretty good at manual reads.

Faisal cleared his throat. "Our shuttle—"

"This won't take long," Tecca said, enjoying this small chance to wave her hand at him. She turned her attention to the sequence chromatogram, reading the familiar peaks and valleys of DNA nucleotides, smiling as the pattern became obvious. Only Seattle Choices had such a bias against adenosine nucleotides. She hadn't done much with SC; they had a rep for being ham-fisted in design, but relatively nonjudgmental. Maybe they also got pushback about designing any damn sequence for money.

Faisal coughed but before Tecca could respond with more hand waving, Seeta touched his arm and he subsided.

Tecca turned her attention back to the display. She had a hard time focusing—Faisal's foot was tapping audibly—but as she read on, the pattern emerged as she came to a familiar gene linked to spatial ability. She might not have noticed, but it was the same gene she'd transfected into Jonathan's great-great-grandparents so they could solve (or rather, be frustrated by) Rubik's cubes. She knew its pattern forward and backward, and something was changed.

Tecca frowned, highlighting the whole gene and querying it against the public sequence databases. The results came back quickly.

It was an artificial mimic of a hormone receptor. The spatial ability gene would only turn on if there was a lot of testosterone.

Only a boy would get the cognitive boost from enhanced spatial ability.

Jonathan knocked his Rubik's cube again. Tecca flinched. She felt hot—no, cold. Chilled, even. Some bizarre mistake? She backtracked and manually scanned the other Seattle Choices' modifications. Some looked perfectly standard, with no signs of the hormone receptor. But all the brain function ones showed the same change. The intellectual boost required testosterone.

With their testosterone turning the enhanced genes on, the boys would be brilliant. The girls would not.

Jonathan's cube rattled in the cage again. Tecca stood up so suddenly that Seeta jumped. "Excuse me a second," Tecca said, turning her back to them and going to Jonathan's cage. The mouse looked up at her, his paws resting on a half-solved Rubik's cube. As she watched, he braced himself against the side of the cage and tried to twist the middle portion. It stuck.

Tecca reached down and took the cube from him. She fumbled until it clicked and came unstuck. Rolling the cube in her cold hand, she stared at the colored squares, the fresh gouges where he'd used his teeth some more.

She'd never designed such a master sequence. Never denied a human a boost that would go to another. The Big Three were one thing. But to design a sequence where the boys got the smarts and looks, while the girls got only looks?

"Ms. Jamison?" Faisal said. "We have our shuttle to catch in twenty minutes."

Tecca laid the cube down. Jonathan snatched it back right away.

"Sorry about the ruckus," Tecca said coldly. She sat down. "He's very bright and gets bored easily, you see, his great-grandparents were the same—they were my first project back in school. If you can make a brilliant mouse, you can make a brilliant human, you know? So much of mammalian genetics is conserved. I named him after Mrs. Frisby's dead husband. Algernon just seemed so overdone, and I..."

Tecca could see in their expressions that she was babbling. Taking a breath, she tapped for more details on the FoxP2 gene and that androgen receptor. How far did they go?

"Your sons will be mathematically and linguistically gifted," Tecca said formally, staring down at the loading screen. "Your daughters will not."

They were as still as the chairs. Tecca's clenched jaw ached as she pulled up the red-highlighted changes. Faisal opened his mouth but, out of the corner of her narrowed eye, Tecca saw Seeta shake her head.

There was more. Tecca felt the small muscles twitching about her mouth. She would have missed it if she hadn't gone into the sequence manually. If she'd owned a proper software package, like a proper geneticist, instead of watered-down freeware.

Seattle Choices had made one final change. As far as any computer was concerned, they had added the androgen receptor to regulate the cognitive genes. But as far as biology was concerned, the sequence for the receptor was defective. The moment this built into an embryo and implanted, the DNA would coil around itself and— pop —out would go the androgen receptor.

The geneticist in Tecca let out an admiring whistle: it was a clever variation on natural homologous recombination. And so subtle! You had to go in and look at the blasted sequence, read those DNA nucleotides one by one, and put it together in your head. Like a Rubik's cube.

But the professional in Tecca wrung her hands. The switch was there, but it was disconnected from the light bulb. If they built an embryo with a Y chromosome, they would get a brilliant son, as they wanted. If they built an embryo with an X chromosome, they would get a brilliant daughter.

Which, as far as she could tell, they did not want at all. Tecca closed her eyes. Whoever had done this at Seattle Choices had committed fraud. But by God, did she sympathize. For a moment, Tecca was tempted: sign off on the design. Let the fraud go. Let them build this embryo. Let them learn, goddamn it.

She could hear Jonathan rattling his cube about his cage. It was a familiar and friendly noise, and it pulled her back from the brink of professional suicide.

What would they do to a girl who should have been a boy? How could Seattle Choices do that to a child?

Tecca opened her eyes. "This is—" She hesitated, disconnecting the data stick. It made a whispering noise as she slid it across the surface.

She looked up at them, facing their expectant looks. At the way Seeta hung on Faisal. At the way the abaaya draped over Seeta's chair. Was this what had been happening on Vashon? They were as bad as Christ's Children, although you never caught one of those nutjobs near a geneticist.

But she owed them the truth.

"This is your kid," Tecca said. "And your design. But..." The exhaust system rattled on, belching out cold air against her legs. She forced herself to look up brief ly, to meet Faisal's level gaze, Seeta's wide eyes. Tecca pulled her hands back, leaving the stick alone at the center of the display. "But whoever designed this sequence for you at Seattle Choices committed fraud," she said. "And it's obvious who designed this, by the way. I can read that as clearly as I can read what you want."

Tecca heard the anger in her voice, the way it clipped her words and made them as short and fast as Faisal's. "You want a smart and handsome son. Fine. You want a—a beautiful daughter," she spat. "Only a beautiful daughter. It—" She caught herself. "It's your decision."

There was a small rustle as Seeta pulled her arm from her husband's. Tecca watched the inverted reflections on her display as they turned their heads to look at one another, and then her. Their expressions were tinted with reflected shadow.

"But whoever did this master sequence for you stuck in something else," Tecca forced herself to continue, still watching their shadowed reflections. It was easier than looking up and showing them see her expression. "If you'd gone with an X chromosome, you would've gotten a girl. Who was every bit as smart as your sons."

The exhaust system wheezed once more before shutting off, enveloping them in quiet. Even Jonathan had gone still.

Faisal cleared his throat, breaking the silence. "We appreciate your honesty." His words were slow, but his tone still formal. He tucked the data stick back into his suit.

"How could you tell?" Seeta said softly.

"I'm a freelancer," Tecca said, not looking up from her clenched hands. She wanted them to leave, and embarrassing honesty might get them out faster. "I use a freeware version of the standard design package. I only found the changes because I looked at the sequence manually, since I don't have all the algorithms available to me." Tecca forced her hands apart, stretching the stiff joints. "Whoever did this had the full Invitrosoft package. They probably assumed whoever else looked at it would use the same tools. They're industry standard."

"So it's undetectable by most geneticists," Seeta said.

Tecca nodded, feeling like she was watching herself from a distance. She had never come across such fraud; it should have shocked and angered her, but all she felt was a curious sympathy for the unknown geneticist at Seattle Choices who had sat across from this couple and read repugnance in their genes.

She wanted her office and Jonathan and her thoughts to herself. She wanted them gone. But Tecca listened to her grown-up voice explain invoicing. She watched as the Sauds pressed their thumbs to her desk, authorizing the rest of the bank transfer. She felt her head bobble as she got up and opened the door.

"When you've hired a lawyer," she said. "I can be reached directly by email or chat."

Faisal nodded and left wordlessly. Seeta held back, flipping out her abaaya.

"Are we the first Sauds you've ever worked with?" Seeta said.

"Yes," Tecca said, realizing suddenly as she glanced down at her desk—and not giving a damn—that Seeta had been able to see Tecca's own inverted expression from this angle.

Seeta nodded, pulling the abaaya over her head and working her hands through the loose sleeves. "My husband's father is the present—" Tecca didn't understand the word, but inferred head honcho from the context. "He is a... conservative man. Proud of our heritage. Angry about us living as unwanted guests far from home."

"Mm," Tecca managed. She didn't give a damn about their daddy issues.

Seeta continued quietly as she covered her hair. "Being so close in line, of course, the Saud geneticists will look over our sequence closely before approving it," she said, tucking in a few last strands of hair. "I imagine they will use the latest versions of the software."

Tecca caught her arm, grasping the damp heavy cloth of her abaaya, stung by the slur to her services. "How," she said, the last thread of professionalism snapping. "How could you decide this? How? I don't give a damn about your revelations, about moral relativism. It's wrong, it's wrong and it disgusts me." Tecca took a breath. "I completely sympathize with that Seattle Choices geneticist."

Seeta glanced down at Tecca's hand, then up to her face. She nodded, almost to herself. "As do I, Ms. Jamison," Seeta said. "And my husband."

She gently shook off Tecca's hand. Taking the doorknob, Seeta closed the door after herself.

Tecca stood there, listening to their footsteps fade as they left the run-down office building. Her mind was hot and crowded with a thousand questions that buzzed like bees. She could have wrenched the door open and run them down, screamed at them until they answered.

Instead, she went back to Jonathan's cage. He let her pick him up. Tecca stroked his face with one finger and picked up the gnawed Rubik's cube with her free hand, turning it over in her hands.

It hadn't been fraud. Not by Seattle Choices. It had been camouflage. Genetic camouflage for an ideological battle over—what? Old oil money, family, power? Certainly something very, very old.

She gently placed Jonathan on her right shoulder. "I got rent, little man. And enough left over that I'll get you a new Rubik's cube," she whispered. He squeaked triumphantly at new Rubik's cube. "Well, technically, an old one."

Tecca settled down at her desk and stroked Jonathan's whiskers, trying to soothe her own unease. They were using their child as an argument. A weapon. A weapon she had, however unintentionally, approved.

She set Jonathan on the desk, cupping her left hand over him like a shield.

The brittle old plastic of the Rubik's cube shattered when she hurled it against the wall, the colored plastic squares clattering to the ground.

Not for Sissies

Jerry Oltion
| 3339 words

Nathan was eating breakfast in the kitchen when his husband, Greg, announced that he was going to die.

"It's time," was all Greg said, but those two words were enough. Nathan choked on his egg and sausage, then swallowed carefully and concentrated on breathing for a few seconds.

"It's the third morning in a row," Greg added. "I can't take it any more." He leaned against the doorframe, his blue and white checkered bathrobe hanging open across his hairy chest. He looked like a Norse god, or maybe a Greek one: bulging pecs and washboard abs narrowing down to a slender waist that a single arm could encircle. Nathan felt a moment of passion at the sight, the same passion he always felt when he looked at Greg, but the gravity of the situation immediately squelched his desire.

"Does it hurt?" he asked.

"Not physically," Greg said. "But I keep waking up out of these dreams where it does."

Nathan frowned. "Wait a minute. You're going to snuff it because you're dreaming that it hurts?"

Greg shifted against the doorframe. His robe fell open a little more, but he didn't notice, or didn't care. "It's eating away at me, Nate. I can't stand knowing that."

Nathan set his fork on his plate. "It's prostate cancer, idiot. It won't kill you for another ten years."

"Ten years of anxiety."

"Have it cut out, then. It's not like you need it."

Greg snorted. "The nerve bundle that controls erection goes right over the prostate, and I definitely need that." He pulled open his robe and regarded his penis, hanging flaccid and small, smaller than Nathan ever remembered seeing it. It looked like a little boy's penis, drawn tight up against his body. That, as much as anything else, made Nathan realize that Greg was serious about snuffing himself.

"You don't know that surgery will sever the nerve," he said. "At least try it first."

"Surgery," Greg said, shuddering. "Gah.

The word alone is enough to give me the creeps. Even if I could find somebody morbid enough to try it, I don't want anybody whittling away at me just to give me a couple more years."

"But it'll be a couple more years with me!" Nathan said. He scooted back his chair and stood, suddenly aware of the effects of too many egg-and-sausage breakfasts, but Greg had never complained. "I may not be the sexiest man alive," Nathan said, "but I'm fun to be around. At least you keep telling me I am. And I love you. Doesn't that count for anything?"

Greg scratched himself and cinched his robe around his waist again. "Yeah, it does, but it doesn't undo anything, and I'm still going to wake up every morning with cancer. You say you love me; do you really want me to endure that? Do you want it on your conscience to know what I'm going through just so you'll still have me?"

"Yes," Nathan said. "Yes, yes, yes. If it gave me even one extra day with you, I'd set my conscience on fire."

He held out his arms to gather Greg into an embrace, but Greg backed away, saying, "You're seriously skewed, you know that?"

"Me? I'm skewed? I'm not the one thinking about snuffing it over something that's years away."

"Name one person who would do it differently. Besides yourself."

Nathan couldn't, of course, but he didn't let that derail him. "People used to put up with stuff like that all the time," he said.

Greg snorted. "Sure they did. And they lived in misery and died in pain. No thanks."

Nathan held up his hands. "I'm not asking you to live to sixty. I'm just asking you to wait a while. Tough it out for a little bit to see if things improve."

"What do you call the last forty-five years?"

Nathan didn't know how to take that. Had Greg's life really been so bad? Was Nathan part of his torment? Maybe it was Nathan who should snuff it. Put himself out of other people's misery, as the saying went. But Greg stepped forward and gave him the hug he had tried to give Greg a minute ago, and said, "Lighten up, lover. It was a joke. I've had a great life. It's just time to go."

"But... but I love you. How can I go on without you?"

Greg patted him gently on the back. "Maybe you can't. Maybe you'll decide you've had enough, too. But don't check out right away. Tough it out for a little bit to see if things improve."

Nathan laughed, but his laughter quickly turned to tears. Greg held him, saying, "There, there, everything will be all right," until he got himself under control again.

But things weren't all right. Not the rest of that day, which Greg spent inviting all his friends to the wake and saying goodbye to the ones who couldn't make it, nor the next, during which he filled out the paperwork, nor the following one when he actually did it. Nathan hosted the wake, of course, and he smiled bravely throughout, but he couldn't take his eyes off Greg, who flitted from guest to guest like a butterfly sipping nectar from a field of wildflowers. Greg even laughed with the people from the census bureau who were waiting to take away his body. Couldn't people see how wrong this was? There was Greg's sister, for crying out loud, a woman who had known him her entire life, laughing at his jokes as if he would always be there to tell more. And her son, Greg's nephew, asking if he could have Greg's model starship collection. Former lovers, both male and female, copping one last feel. Nathan couldn't bear to watch, but he couldn't bear to look away, either.

And all too soon, it was time for the final event. Greg stood up, someone rapped a glass for attention, and Greg said, "I've got to go." He paused for effect, then added, "No, I mean it; this damned enlarged prostate pushes on my bladder, and I've really got to go."

Everyone but Nathan laughed.

"It's time anyway. I'm keeping everybody up late, and some of you have kids."

"That's all right, Uncle Greg," said his nephew. "I'll go short on sleep for you."

Greg shook his head. "That's very sweet, but I don't want to be the kind to put anybody out. Besides, what's another hour? I've had forty-five good years; if a person can't fulfill himself in that amount of time, another hour isn't going to do it." He looked right at Nathan. "But I am fulfilled. I've had a wonderful life, filled with wonderful friends and a wonderful husband." Greg's sister snickered, and Greg said, "Get your mind out of the gutter Sarah. But yes, Nathan has fulfilled my life in every way. So it's without regret, by my own free choice, and in perfect understanding of the consequences, that I take this fatal dose of Enditol." And as he spoke the formal words that absolved anyone in the room of liability, he held up the bright orange pill so the census bureau witnesses could record that, too.

Then he popped it in his mouth, said, "Mmm, cinnamon," and swallowed.

The scream escaped Nathan's mouth in the same instant. He stumbled over someone—he didn't even see who—as he rushed toward Greg and shouted, "Spit it out, spit it out!"

Hands grabbed him, but Greg said, "Let him go," and he fell into Greg's arms, sobbing uncontrollably.

"Don't go," Nathan gasped.

"We're all just candles in the wind," Greg said. He gave Nathan a squeeze, and added, "Eat the middle of the watermelon first." Then he grew heavy, and Nathan had to lower him to the floor.

Nathan couldn't stop wailing. He howled while the guests picked up their things and let themselves out, and he howled while the census bureau people carried away the body, and he wailed into the night until his neighbors called the police and they took him to a correction center and let him cry himself out in a padded room.

Something happened to him during the night. He couldn't say what, exactly, but when the police took him home in the morning, he threw out his usual eggs and sausage and made himself a bowl of fruit salad for breakfast instead. He exercised until he ached physically as much as he did emotionally. Then he went next door and apologized to his neighbors, who laughed it off, saying that he had been the very picture of the devoted spouse, and they were glad that Greg had meant so much to him.

He agreed that Greg had indeed been his life, but over the next few days he found himself growing angry at him, and then denying that he had ever loved him, then bargaining with a God he didn't even believe in to bring him back, then falling into blackest depression over his loss, then finally, surprisingly, giving up and moving on. When Greg's sister and nephew showed up for his model spaceships, Nathan told them to take everything that had belonged to him.

"You don't mean that," Sarah said.

"I do. Greg abandoned me. I don't want his things here to remind me of him."

"You should get help," she said. "Grief counseling, or something. Or..."

"Or what? Snuff myself, too?"

"Well, if you're really that distraught, maybe so."

"That's everyone's answer to adversity nowadays, isn't it? At the first sign of trouble, just check out! What about the virtue of struggling to succeed? What about developing character? What about perseverance?" There must have been better words than he had chosen to describe the concept, but if so, he didn't know them.

Greg's sister didn't even know the concept. "Get help," she said again, and she fled with her son without even gathering up the models.

Nathan followed her advice, but not in the way she meant. It took some digging, but he finally found other people who felt the way he did. They were reluctant to talk about it at first, but he persisted. They were a mixed lot, with really only the one interest in common. Some had lost loved ones too soon, as Nathan had. Others had begun projects that were bigger than they had anticipated. Some were simply unwilling to cease existing, or were afraid that the old religions might be right and were scared of what might lie beyond death. One of them was fifty-seven years old.

"It ain't for sissies," the patriarch told Nathan. "I've got pain in muscles and joints you don't even know you have. But you'll learn about 'em. Oh, yes you will." He grinned in horrific glee, revealing a gap where he'd lost one of his teeth.

The group had a doctor who claimed he was doing it for research. That might have been the truth, because he certainly wasn't in it for longevity. He seemed a bit stunned by the things his patients asked of him, and he spent days reading up on old procedures before attempting them, often with limited success. Nathan gained a bit of sympathy for Greg's decision when he watched another cancer patient lose fifty pounds and eventually her life after surgery to remove a lump from her breast.

But he didn't let that deter him. With the doctor's help, he concocted a diet that would lower his weight into the optimum range for longevity, and he followed it religiously, counting the calories he ate and balancing it with the energy he burned in exercise until he looked like Greg had at the peak of his health. The exercise hurt like fire, but the afterglow was worth it. It was as good as sex, he told himself. Maybe better.

Then he hurt his back lifting weights. The doctor told him he'd crushed one of the little cartilage disks between vertebrae. In the old days that could be fixed—at great expense, of course—but now the procedure was beyond the capability of any doctor anywhere. The best Nathan's doctor could do was to fuse together the vertebrae on either side of the disk. Nathan would lose some mobility, but he wouldn't be in constant pain anymore.

Nathan didn't see that he had a choice. The pain was worse than exercise, and there was no afterglow. There was no after; just constant agony, with spikes whenever he moved.

The operation was a success, as far as it went. The pain didn't go away, but it lessened to a tolerable level. Nathan couldn't touch his toes anymore, but he could still bend over. It was an acceptable tradeoff.

A year passed. Toward the end of it, Nathan noticed that his right knee would hurt for an hour or so after he got out of bed. Not a lot, not enough to keep him from his normal morning routine, but enough to get his attention. The doctor told him it was either an injury or arthritis, both of which would respond to anti-inflammatory drugs. It was treating the symptoms, not the disease, but that was the best they could do even in the old days.

It went like that for nearly a decade, with new surprises showing up like unwanted relatives every few months, and like relatives, sometimes staying for good. Nathan faced them all stoically, even proudly, until the doctor pointed out that he was spending all his time surviving, and none of it living.

Most of his old friends were dead by then, and those who weren't had drifted—or run— away when Nathan had gone strange on them. He contacted a couple of them, but they acted as if he had a communicable disease, and they made it clear that they didn't want anything more to do with him.

A few years later he actually had a communicable disease. He hadn't realized that chickenpox still existed, nor that it struck old people with such force, but it played havoc with his immune system, leaving him an itching mass of sores and flaky skin that the doctor—a new one, the old one having snuffed it the previous winter—said would probably continue bothering him off and on for the rest of his life.

He almost snuffed it himself when he heard that news, but the former patriarch of the senior society had checked out at sixty after learning that his chest pains meant that his heart was dying, and the next person in line was a little old lady with an aortic aneurysm that was due to blow at any moment. If Nathan hung on for a few more months, he could take the dubious honor of being the oldest person alive. The oldest person in the group, anyway. There were undoubtedly older people elsewhere, people on the lucky end of the bell curve who simply hadn't gotten sick or injured or bored enough to snuff themselves yet, but they didn't count. Nathan's longevity wasn't luck; it was the result of hard labor.

Why that mattered, he couldn't say. There was no virtue in labor for labor's sake. That attitude had died along with the rest of the old ways, and not even Nathan wanted to revive it. Yet working for something was different. He felt a sense of accomplishment that he couldn't explain, but he knew it was real. Or would be in a few months.

Or not, as it turned out. The woman with the aneurysm persisted for five more years, years in which Nathan discovered the true meaning of... something. Most days he couldn't quite remember what he had discovered, but he kept to his routine and managed to keep himself fed and reasonably clean. Reporters came and went, but he stopped talking to them when he realized that their articles invariably made him out to be an eccentric throwback to the bad old days, and an example of why society should never go there again.

They just didn't see it. People aged for a reason. With age came wisdom, or at least experience, which certainly counted for something. And he still enjoyed his life. Parts of it, anyway. He could still read well enough, if he boosted a book's font size and screen intensity to maximum, and he could still appreciate a good meal, although he couldn't seem to cook one as easily as he used to. And in the evenings, if his back didn't hurt too much, he would go outside and sit in his patio chair and watch the orange sunset spread across the sky. That had become his favorite pastime of all, because it provided daily proof that there was always something worth waiting for.

He was watching a particularly brilliant one when Greg came up the walk and stopped with one foot on the porch step.

"My god, it's true," said his former husband. "You're still here."

Nathan's heart lurched to a pace it hadn't reached in years. "I might not be for much longer," he gasped, thumping himself on the chest to see if he could jolt it into slowing down again.

"No, no, don't die on me now!" said Greg.

"Then don't surprise me like that," said Nathan. He took a couple of deep breaths, then added, "I thought you were dead."

"Not yet," said Greg. "Soon, maybe, but not yet. I... I have a question for you." He leaned forward, his face blocking out the sun.

"How about answering one first?" Nathan said. "Like why you let me think you were gone all this time."

Greg shrugged. His muscled shoulders rippled just like Nathan remembered from so many years ago. "At first, Mom wouldn't let me go visit you," he said. "And then I guess I just sort of... forgot about you until Karen died."

"Karen?" Nathan said. His brain felt thick.

"My wife. We were married almost as long as you and Uncle Greg."

"Uncle Greg." Nathan sat back in his chair. His heart rate started to slow, and the fuzzy blanket around his brain fell away. "You're Sarah's boy."

"That's right. Rudy."

"Rudy." Nathan squinted to see his face against the bright orange sky. "You're the spit-tin' image of your uncle."

"I think I take after you more," said Rudy.

"Oh?"

"I'm so mad at Karen I could burn her in effigy," said Rudy. "All my friends say I should snuff myself, but I'm too mad to do that, either. I want to live forever just to spite her."

"Ah." Nathan coughed for a minute, then when he was pretty sure he was done, he said, "It's not for sissies."

"I can see that."

"It's not for the poor, either."

"No?"

"No. You wouldn't believe how much a colostomy costs."

The boy sat down on the top step and leaned back against the porch rail.

"So ask your question before I forget who you are."

"I think maybe you already answered it," said Rudy.

"You think so, do you?" Nathan leaned forward and pointed at the sunset. "Look out there." He kept pointing until Greg's nephew scooted around and looked to the west. "You watch that until I get back."

He levered himself up out of his chair, suppressing the grunt that usually accompanied a change of position, and went inside, lifting his feet high so he wouldn't shuffle like an old man. He could barely see in the dim interior, but he felt his way into the kitchen and pulled open the refrigerator. Half a lifetime of habit had served him well; the shelves were full of fruits and vegetables and bottles of juice.

He found the watermelon behind a sack of prunes. It was a few days old, but what was left was still firm. He cut off two thick wedges, then carried them back to the front porch, heedless of the drip trail they left on the carpet.

Rudy kept watching the sunset, as if afraid to defy Nathan's orders for even a second.

"Here," Nathan said, handing him a slice of watermelon.

"What's this for?"

"To eat, of course." Nathan sat down heavily in his chair, then leaned forward and took a big bite out of the center of his slice. The sweet juice ran down his chin and dripped into his lap. Rudy looked dubious, but he took a bite out of the center of his, too.

They chewed for a moment, savoring the watermelon and the sunset.

"Okay, now throw the rest away," said Nathan.

Rudy's eyes scrunched up. Nathan realized his heart was pounding even harder than before.

"Why?" asked Rudy.

"Why indeed?" said Nathan. And he took another bite.

The Teacher's Gamble

Stephen L. Burns
| 2432 words

Coming out of fugue is a slow, sweeping explosion of sensation, the me I am and have been, and the simulated me created to greet me, coming together in a flood of the new and strange.

I could count the times I have passed through this stage of my mission, but am rarely inclined to do so because such looking backward can, in moments of weakness, make me feel weary, even hopeless.

Besides, the moment of release from fugue is too demanding, too charged with possibility for such thoughts to gain much traction. Arrivals are freighted with considerable expectation—but tarnished by a faint touch of dread. I have in these moments experienced delight, despair, and even horror, finding what awaits me fascinating and appealing, or so repellent it leaves me sick at heart.

The encoding of the simulated me is strong, and easily assimilated. The feel and flavor of it is not so inimical to my own ethos that I reflexively recoil from it, holding it at arm's length. In fact, the simulation fits well enough that I am already thinking in these new alien terms. Sick at heart and at arm's length could never directly apply to me and my kind, yet their meaning resonates clearly and easily, even pleasantly.

Living worlds are something of a miracle, a small, precious subset of all possible worlds. I am a collector of such wonders, and experience has made me something of a judge of them. In most cases my first sight of one is a moment to be savored.

Such is the case this time. The world I have been drawn to is distant still, but my sensors are powerful and subtle. It is exquisite: blue and white with expanses of brown and green; a water-rich world teeming with life on land, in the waters, and in the air. A place with frozen polar caps and relatively stable landmasses. Watching over it is a barren companion moon, close enough to exert tidal forces. Third out from the central star, it is heated by that star's energies, but not burned by them.

The language of the predominant technological subdivision calls this world Earth.

The dominant life form, humans, are in the early stages of technological discovery. They are just beginning to develop vehicles powered by fuel and machinery, rather than pulled by other living things. More importantly, they are beginning to experiment with the primitive manipulation of the forces they call electromagnetic, and the transformation of information. A method of communication combining both is practiced with zeal: coded impulses are carried by a growing skein of conductors wrapping their world, and even weakly and tentatively broadcasting them into the air. I can hear their clicking murmur, taste their stiff formality, even in the brevity the state of their technology imposes upon them.

In spite of the demands of assimilating all the information my conveyance gathered before I emerged from fugue, and the burgeoning torrent it continues to gather, I permit myself a moment to indulge in a feeling of relief. Here there is a good chance I will be able to fulfill my mission.

It has been such a long time since I have enjoyed such satisfaction. Such a very long time.

Humans maintain several systems for the reckoning of time. Most use a division called the year, a rough calculation of one full orbit of their planet around the star they call the Sun. The prevailing method accounts this as the year 1908. That is not the total number of years counted, or recognized, but since a particular event central to some of their folklore. Curious, but not all that unusual.

It has been three hundred of their years since my last encounter with a living world, an encounter I can only consider a failure. Four hundred years before that, another failed encounter. Three hundred years before that, failure again.

A thousand of their years have passed since I was last able to carry out my mission to a satisfactory end.

I cannot help but hope for a better result this time.

Some of the objects humans have created have a raw, brutal beauty about them. Apart from the creations of their various arts, and architecture, there is their nascent technology. There are steamships and locomotives, dynamos and pumping engines and dams, smelters and foundries, telegraph relays and printing presses. The puffing, clanking, roaring engines of their progress.

The rise to a stable civilization is a blind foray into uncharted darkness fraught with more dead ends than safe pathways. Life is tenacious and durable, but civilization is not. Even ours came to an end of sorts, and we reached greater heights than the most fevered imaginings of those on the world I now approach could ever devise.

I have traversed yawning gulfs of time and distance in the slow dreaming state of fugue, world after world in my wake, and too many times my mission went unfulfilled. Returned to full awareness now, I feel an eagerness that borders on impatience as I close with my new objective at a speed that is only a fraction of the speed of light.

There is no need for stealth in this approach. Humans have only low-powered, early generation optical devices with which to scan the skies above them. There is no way they can see me, even if I allow myself to be visible. Still, caution is a habit reinforced by experience. I have encountered races so xenophobic and suspicious and prone to explosive violence that even the merest hint of a possible Other would spark something I can use newly-learned words to describe: apocalypse and armageddon.

Worlds where I dare not interact in any fashion at all count as failures. I can only pass them by as a thief in the night, and hope they somehow manage to rehabilitate themselves, or self-annihilate before they can threaten some other world. These are sorrows to be recounted at Convocation.

I can be of use to these humans. They have set themselves on more than one dangerous trajectory in their furious development. Their indifference to the disposal of their various waste products will be their ruin if left unchecked. So is their un governed plunder of their world's natural endowments, treating them as if they were in infinite supply, and not grasping the ramifications of the loss of any one material or species. Their appetites seem to be boundless, and only a powerless, scorned minority argues for thoughtful restraint. They are building small empires based on limited resources, the use of which creates byproducts hazardous to them and their world.

I have seen their kind before, some further along such a deadly course, blindly and blithely creating their own doom.

I can nudge them into healthier, more sustainable directions. Not overtly; I already know that this world and these people are too volatile for me to reveal myself and engage in direct intervention. Some would see me as a dire and direct threat to the order over which they preside. Some would see me as a monstrous perversion of, and challenge to their belief sets. Some would worship me, and in that obeisance trap themselves in the worst of dead ends.

My mission, and the mission of my remaining kind is founded on the concept of delicate, precisely measured intervention. We do not want to be made into gods or devils.

It will be a pleasure to abide here for a while, to engage in the subtle process of implanting critical bits of information and contagious ideas designed to lead them onto a safer path. This is a work to be done with the lightest of touches. It is a matter of the right data or chain of connections placed in the path of the right people at the right time. This is my mission: to be the unseen teacher, the unsuspected mentor, the invisible muse.

It is for this vocation my kind closed the book on the civilization we had built and dedicated ourselves to helping worlds in danger, in that way trying to repay the moral debt we incurred when our inaction allowed a world to write its own death warrant.

Closer now, and through the simulation I am gaining a clearer picture of the thinkers, and inventors, and leaders who are and will be the agents of change. It is through them I will be able to influence the intellectual and creative currents of this place, guiding them away from the technological and environmental quagmires they are making.

It will not be easy, and will demand finesse; the adjustment of a watch to run more accurately, not to make it tell something other than time.

I can hardly wait to begin.

All my hopes and plans are now less than the dust in the abyss between stars.

I had been so focused on this exquisite new world and the possibilities it offers that I paid too little attention to the space around it.

Better late than never, the humans say.

Another thing they say: just in the nick of time.

I understand those concepts all too well. Now I find myself considering new plans. Emergency plans. Dangerous plans. What I contemplate means the need to unleash and balance tremendous energies. My kind's thought processes, and the systems of my conveyance are only partially suited to the calculations and simulations this would demand.

I know doubt.

So is this what humans would consider luck? Fate? Providence?

Certainly not the last. The Universe has no guiding spirit; it is wholly indifferent. Worlds die, stars die, whole clusters of star systems are tumbled, crushed, scourged bare, torn apart. There is no intent toward preservation or destruction, no intervention.

Any random system must, by definition, occasionally deliver an improbable series of events. That is how the spark of life is sometimes ignited, and how it evolves to higher forms. That is what has happened here.

I have arrived at a singular moment in the lifespan of Earth. The moment when it faces a disaster virtually guaranteed to destroy most life on the planet. I can see signs etched on the globe's surface that such an event has happened before, that it was struck with a planet killer of the sort which now threatens it.

I have left a trail of calculations and superceded simulations behind me like the smoke from one of their locomotives, and I am exhausted.

The situation is serious, but only beings who possess what the humans call a sense of humor can rise above a low, mean level. At Convocation one of my kind told of a world where the primary means of exchange was causing laughter. They were not particularly advanced when it came to technology, but they were happy, and had never known war.

I am grimly amused by my situation.

There is a way for me to avert this the danger Earth faces. It is imperfect, and perilous to all involved.

What I must do is emulate a peculiar human occupation: I must become a version of the human cannonball. I will wear no spangled costume, though I am tempted to perform my lunatic feat to the accompaniment of some oddly agreeable human music, the way it is done in the circus.

Already I am accelerating to intercept the enormous stone hurtling toward Earth, on what is all but a collision course. The plan is this: when I am nearly atop the intruder I will initiate transition to the motive method that allows me to move behind normal space at several multiples of the speed of light. At transition a force sheath will collapse out of the summoned energies and surround my craft. My aim—literally—is to have this sheath impinge upon the rock at its moment of manifestation. If all my calculations and simulations are correct this will shatter the rock and propel most pieces into an orbit that will render them harmless. Some small pieces are still likely make it through the atmosphere and impact the Earth. There is no way to avoid this; all I can do is neutralize the overwhelming majority of the threat. Fortunately the simulations show these impacts occurring in a sparsely populated region near one of the poles.

Humans are great ones for making bets. Gambling is at once an art, science, and obsession among them. I regret losing the chance to study this firsthand.

It is even money that I will not survive this encounter.

My kind were never particularly prone to fear. Time, and the way we have remade ourselves to carry out our eons-long mission of contrition, took away most of what remained in us. I am unafraid.

But we have rules for our interactions with other races. One of the cardinal ones is this: take no risks that might lead to your destruction. This rule is coldly rational; there are so few of us, and our task is so great and important that the loss of any one of us means all the worlds that one might aid will go unvisited, and may be lost.

If this gambit works this world will have to make it on its own. Once I translate out of here with the force I must invoke I have no choice but to remain in that energy state for a certain minimum interval before returning to normal space. It will be over one hundred and fifty years before I can come back again. By that time they will have either realized their mistakes and taken remedial action, or be past any aid I could give.

If I survive this encounter I will proceed on to Convocation, for by then it will be time for us to gather together again. This periodic assembly is important to us. It allows us to take strength from each other in the sharing of those times we have succeeded, and console each other over our failures. After an interval we depart on our solitary ways to carry on and make amends.

I hurtle toward the stone even as it streaks toward Earth, my mind and systems swarming with simulations, making minor adjustments in my course, striving to best avert cataclysm.

One final series of minor corrections so that one piece of the stone predicted to break off and go down will at least come down as pieces, rather than whole. This is the best I can do. The area it will effect, near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River, is sparsely populated. I cannot guarantee that there will be no casualties, but they are unlikely. This has dropped my chance of survival to a bit over four in ten.

The final seconds elapse.

The world is beautiful, too beautiful to be scourged by dust and flame. The Universe may not care, but I do.

If I survive and reach Convocation I hope my kind will agree that I was right to break one of our rules, and count this encounter a success.

The Avalon Missions

David Brin
| 427 words

Race for the Stars—Year 2070: Mariner 16 sets off for Avalon

The first craft to emerge from the venerable "100 year Starship Program" —Mariner 16— uses pellet fusion motors to blast all the way up to one percent of light speed. Based upon early Project Daedalus designs, it speeds toward the nearest planetary system that seems a candidate for life, nicknamed "Avalon." Mariner's mission: to probe the unknown and report back on the likelihood of interstellar civilization.

Race for the Stars—Year 2120: Prometheus 1 speeds past Mariner 16 on its way to Avalon

Prometheus is a tiny, sold-state probe made of holographic crystal, propelled by a photon sail that's driven to 8 percent of light speed by a giant laser orbiting Earth's moon. It races past Mariner 16 carrying intelligent greeting patterns aimed at conveying human values to any creatures who might be living on or near Avalon.

Race for the Stars—year: 2195: Gaia 6 speeds past Prometheus 1 on its way to Avalon

Propelled by stored antimatter, Gaia 6 zooms past Prometheus 1 at 12 percent of light speed. Along the way, it destroys Prometheus 1 with a pulsed particle beam. Times and attitudes have changed on Earth and the great Commonwealth of Sapient Minds does not want to be embarrassed by the primitive thoughts expressed in the Prometheus crystal.

Race for the Stars—2273: Athena Marie Smith speeds past Gaia 6 on her way to Avalon

Downloaded into a ship-brain, the renowned genius Athena Marie Smith bypasses Gaia 6 at 22 percent of light speed. She carries in her cryo-womb the templates for five hundred species of Earth life and ten thousand human colonists, along with their memomimry records, to be bio-synthesized from local materials when Athena reaches Avalon, which advanced telescopes now show to have a ready, oxygen atmosphere and no forms of life higher than a kind of paramecium.

Along the way, she scan-absorbs the meme content of Gaia 6, leaving its shell to drift.

Race for the Stars—2457: The Interstellar Amalgam of Earth Sapients and Avalonian Paramecium Group Minds intercepts Athena Marie Smith.

The tense alliance of humans, dolphins, AIndroids and Avalonians survives its fifth great test when all agree to form a police force charged with clearing this stellar cluster of unfortunate early Terran space missions. It's first act: to seize Athena Marie Smith and place her under arrest before she can commit planetary genocide.

Race for the Stars—year 4810: Mariner 16 arrives at Avalon

Unnoticed by anyone, Mariner 16 sweeps through the Avalonian system, excitedly beaming back toward Earth its discoveries— clear detection of helium byproducts, above-background radioactivity and blurry images of abandoned space structures, suggesting this system was once the abode of intelligent civilization!

Some traces seem almost eerily human-like...... before the lucky probe, humming with cybernetic contentment, swings quickly past the star and onward onto the black night.

We Who Are About to Watch You Die Salute You

Maggie Clark
| 5774 words

Screed Magazine: July 18, 2046

"We Who Are About To Watch You Die Salute You"

Guy P. Morgan, Senior Correspondent

Between 1663 and 1673, the King of France sponsored the immigration of some eight hundred young women to the New World, these filles du roi meant to address a pronounced gender disparity that was discouraging future male colonists and generally limiting colonial growth. As I wait to connect with Soraya Mukherjee on Aldrin V, I practice saying with a straight face the three similar words that have publicly haunted this mission since its inception, and which in light of recent events have only taken on an even crueler, more contradictory nature. "Mission of Mercy" indeed.

Mukherjee is certainly no stranger to such negative press, which has run the gamut from assertions that she and her three crewmates won their space-faring posts through no qualifications other than that of natal sex and fertility, to Specsphere criticism surrounding the perceived inferiority of their physical attributes—some suggesting that these four women are hardly ideal specimens with which to launch a new civilization; others, like sententious Late Night Show host Ryder Mantle, declaring of the fourteen males on Mars that "beggars can't be choosers." Mukherjee grants me a bored and knowing look when, despite my rigorous preparations, I still flub the delivery—a shamefaced quirking of the lips as I utter the fatal words, followed by a feeble apology for so much as referencing trivialities at a time like this. Mukherjee and her three associates know they are racing against the clock. In a way, they have known this all along.

A Voyage in Shadows

The Aldrin V mission was conceived under less than auspicious circumstances—a last-minute financial pull-out by trillionaire Walter Yao, debatably provoked by his daughter's recent abduction; the months-long workers' strike at Jakarta Aeronautics, which saw at least two successful acts of sabotage upon propulsion system components; and the corruption scandal still dogging crew selection committee chair Ingrid Adeyemi. On August 16, 2044, NYSpec released the now-iconic still of Mars colonist Hudson Muñoz, his profile cast in shadow against the narrow confines of his backlit bunk, a constellation of fruitless love-notes and tell-all photo spreads pinned to the wall behind him. That same day, Buzz asked the nation, "Is This the End of Mars?", and the question rippled across the Specsphere. "The End of Armstrong" would have been a more apt description, but the underlying sentiment proved no less incendiary. Within hours, a part-time custodian best known as YOLOB_62 gained global recognition from a twelve-minute video envisioning the gradual, time-lapsed erasure of Armstrong Base and all its Terra-born inhabitants under native environmental pressures. If Aldrin V seemed the international Mars colony's last, best hope for future sustainability, Earth had already deemed it a bleak one long before lift-off.

Was Earth wrong? Amid the ongoing disaster at Armstrong, which has found all sixteen landed colonists slowly succumbing to radiation poisoning in the wake of failed atmospheric shielding during an unexpected spike in solar activity, it is easy for many Terrans to rest on the laurels of their cynicism and declare such presentiments good. My talk with Mukherjee, however, is routinely interspersed by the passage before her mounted, mobile Specscreen of crewmate Diandra Goedhals-Lester, surprise South African winner of the Citizen Slot on season five of Your Life on Mars! Goedhals-Lester's presence makes it difficult for this writer to forget the waves of genuine excitement that followed her selection to the mission, to say nothing of the nationalistic fervor that went from spontaneous celebration in the streets of Johannesburg, to rioting with a death toll of nearly a hundred trampled persons, then back to weeks-long local festivities. As in all things, Earth's response to Martian proceedings proves mixed at best.

In keeping with the expectations of my post, I bring with me to this interview a printed still of Mrs. Goedhals, Diandra's grandmother—a gentler form of gotcha! than some of my colleagues practice these days, but no less contrived to emotionally manipulate my ever-shifting target. Once, as Goedhals-Lester eases her bare and tattooed hip past the Specscreen, I ask if she recognizes it. After a long pause she returns, bracing one arm on a bulkhead overhead, dips her face into view and squints. I hold the still closer to my monitor, and after a few minutes—laughter. The crew of Aldrin V is nearing the halfway point on their voyage, and our lag is just past the nine-minute mark.

"That's Ai," she says. "Granny Ai."

In the photo, "Granny Ai" is twenty-two— her age ascertained from the original shot's position in the public-access Facebook Archival Project. Born Aaliyah Goedhals, Granny Ai is seen leaning against the top-deck railing of a cruise ship—a bottle of gin in one hand, two martini glasses in the other. Her uniform is red and silver—scanty, and not altogether immaculate—and her eyes are lidded, her gaze, far-off. At the turn of the twenty-first century, cruise ships were notorious vehicles of indentured servitude for vagabond youth: companies boasting contract packages ripe with promises of adventure, but more often yielding claustrophobic nights of binge drinking and gambling away scant earnings after illegally long shifts. Unreported "overboards" far from shore were not uncommon, either, if evident only from absenteeism at the next day's clock-in. Absentees were promptly "fired."

It is difficult not to draw a grim comparison across the generations: more so when Ai's granddaughter makes it for me. Goedhals-Lester asks Mukherjee if they have any gin on board Aldrin V, but both women already know the answer, and the performance of this comedic interlude seems strained by the time lag between my questions and this response. I have provided the crew with a set list of interview topics in advance, but what I am really hoping to learn is harder to pin down, and even seems at times lost in the vast tracts of space between us. What is it precisely that these four women signed up for? Should they have known better, from all the ill portents at the mission's outset? Is IBC sports commentator Paul Lafferty right when he says they deserve "no sympathy for their current predicament, no sympathy at all"? And what would Terran compassion even look like (if ever we could muster it in a single, collective act) to four human beings hurtling toward their highly probable deaths inside a tin can in the depths of the great abyss?

Half-Life on a Shooting Star

Waking cycles on Aldrin V are an exercise in Zen-Buddhist detachment, enacted both against and through the incessant, material temptations of the crew's immediate surroundings. Mukherjee affects little interest in formalities as she describes day-to-day life on the shuttle, indifferently referring to herself and the rest of the crew as "the girls." The girls consume their RTEs together. The girls take turns scrubbing off the last sleep cycle's detritus of skin and sweat with the unwieldy sonic system. The girls take their time adding the usual spit and polish to their overall façades. "Gotta leave a nice corpse for future Martian tourists," says Goedhals-Lester, passing over Mukherjee on yet another maintenance routine. I am then informed that there are no hair dryers in space.

After a few hours of systems checks, repair work, and experiment monitoring (Aldrin V is also home to a number of secure bacterial colonies undergoing their own, carefully-documented deaths in zero-g), the girls address the most pressing matter of all: What to do on Armstrong after landing? Mukherjee sweeps her Specscreen through shuttle passageways so I can see the main workstation where, even now, with "the girls" dispersed on various personal endeavors, schematics and scale models remain clipped to the table surface, while, overhead, a mag-board looms—one half filled with mathematical squiggles I cannot read, the other with a few choice expletives I most certainly can.

"You're going to ask if we've got a solution yet," says Mukherjee, swiveling the Specscreen. This close, her exhaustion is telling— or are the creases at her eyes a sign of in-flight radiation sickness? The nano-labs embedded in the cosmonauts' skin are intended to stave off the worst of the bombardment in transit; but so too were embeds supposed to help the colonists on Armstrong, even if all else failed.

"Well," she continues, "we don't. We still haven't even got resolution on what's actually happened on site. Base-camp's non-responsive, and we haven't seen anyone moving into vid-line for days. But GC's doing the best they can to fill in the blanks. The real trouble comes if there's irreparable damage to the materials themselves on Armstrong; we're working with finite resources, remember, so right now we're just trying to figure out how to jury-rig fixes in every worst case scenario."

Two hours prior, on my way into the heart of Ground Control (or more accurately, into a vestigial, windowless ventricle just left of the facility's heart), I receive a similar, if differently worded run-down from Lieutenant Colonel Tully Marlow. While we're carting along a vast, underground tunnel, he shows me aerial schematics of Armstrong, and though I have seen them hundreds of times before, in dozens of different media configurations, I struggle in the presence of this great American hero to identify more than the storage lot and living quarters, and my first guess on the intermediate shielding turns out to be a communications array. Shielding, Lt. Col. Marlow explains, is being worked directly into the energy grid while long-term regoliths are constructed out of composite Martian rocks; properly operational, the current system should not so much deflect harmful radiation as absorb, harness, and redistribute it.

"But the power's still on. We're still getting feed." I am stating the obvious, but it has the desired effect. Lt. Col. Marlow runs a hand through white hair fine as fiber-optics, baring for a moment the telltale scarring at his forehead and along his left ear. I regret that I do not have time to ask more about his own proximity to death on past missions.

"That's it exactly," he says. "It's the damnedest thing."

I let the colonel lead me through various possible scenarios. The simplest is that radiation levels just overwhelmed the system's max carrying capacity, but this accords with neither grid specs nor estimated radiation spikes in the wake of last month's unexpected solar storms. So perhaps the grid malfunctioned? Not likely: Lt. Col. Marlow cites GC lead materials chemist, Yuan Li, when he tells me, "That's impossible, because we're not dealing with an array of distinct, interconnected pieces like you'd find in your granddaddy's Ford. It's not a matter of some busted spark plug, you understand?" My high school training is sluggishly roused by his ensuing description of "tethered nanofluids," a system of panels comprising a "wet" layer of suspended, single-walled carbon nanotubes coordinating heat transfers between two solid-liquid interfaces—one exposed to Martian radiation; the other feeding into base-camp generators.

"Oh, like solar paint." I am trying to make up for my poor showing with the Armstrong Base schematics, but my gamble only earns me a tired glance—the look of a man rightly wary of his every word becoming the substance of a half-baked, pseudo-scientific Specsheet headline.

"Something like that," says the colonel. "The point is, unless the chemistry itself turned to junk overnight, a malfunction's simply out of the question. And don't get me started on the directionality of the system: it's solidly grounded, so there's no accidental impact that could have tipped the panels off course."

When Lt. Col. Marlow falls silent, I realize he knows what I am about to ask next.

"And as for these rumors—"

"I don't want to say there's nothing to them," he says quickly. "I can't say there's nothing to them until we've completed our internal investigation. But 'sabotage' is not a word to be thrown around lightly, okay? Not with the ISC in the shape it's in. Foreign relations are strained enough as it is without pointing fingers like that."

Lt. Col. Marlow would know; the International Space Compact is not the only strained element in the wake of the ongoing disaster on Armstrong. When the colonel first met me at the security station, he tried to explain his presence in lieu of a PR rep by lightly observing that most of that department was otherwise occupied, as if the media—Specsphere and snail, mainstream and counterstream alike—was not already fully aware of the frequency of suicides coming out of a range of agency departments in the last few weeks. To be sure, the clean-up job their passing has left for the rest of GC (on top of the mounting crisis for Aldrin V) is a public relations nightmare other organizations' media reps shudder just to think about. I want to convey my understanding in this regard to the colonel, but it is remarkably hard to espouse sympathy toward a living legend.

By this juncture, too, we have already passed (without comment) two of the most prominent death sites at GC. The second, the stairwell where civilian techie Kaidan Montspierre was prevented from reaching the mess with a standard-issue IM-16 upraised, also saw Private James Holloway lose his life in the ensuing crossfire. (Operations Officer Pol Friessen's later hanging, while more elaborate, may well have been planned to take into account the still-traumatic sound of gunfire for civilian staff in his vicinity.) To be sure, the grief in this building has layers to it, but the grief-stricken know they still have jobs to do: a duty to those far from home and dying—and to those who will be soon.

I am surprised to discover, though, that the guilt doctors have since ascribed to these tragedies (all but one of the victim/perpetrators was shortlisted as a candidate for Aldrin missions past) is also to some extent shared by "the girls" on Aldrin V. Mukherjee herself, though she understands she will necessarily not be around to receive an answer, wonders aloud if Ground Control's mental health nightmare will improve or worsen in the probable eventuality that Armstrong and Aldrin V's crews are completely wiped out. Would the crew of Aldrin V be better off ending terrestrial anguish by swallowing their emergency pills now, instead of waiting for the impending repair job on Armstrong to fail? Is the real tragedy the fact that this whole ordeal is taking months to transpire in full?

"I get that what people on Earth hate the most is this waiting game," says Mukherjee, after evincing sympathy for GC families. "But guess what? I'm not a vid. Michiko's not a vid.

Di's not a vid. Elena's not a vid. We have a lot of work to do if we're going to survive this, but you've all got another thing coming if you think for one second that we're not going to survive this. We just don't have the time, or the energy, or the patience for that kind of talk. So tough tits to all your viewers out there—all your readers or your listeners or whoever it is that logs into these things. Yeah, it's sad that all these people are killing themselves—engineers and communications officers we know, by the way. Even a couple we really liked. I feel responsible for them sometimes, sure. And could we save them all a lot more suffering if we just took our pills now and got it over with? Sure, maybe, who knows? But you know what?" Mukherjee leans close to the Specscreen. "Even if we could save five lives—ten, twenty, a hundred, whatever—I wouldn't do it. Not now. Not when I think about what's on the line, what this mission really represents."

"Yeah?" I say. "And what's that?"

An eternity later, Mukherjee has only a snort and a kiss for me—the latter just blown through the stagnant air of her deep-space sardine can before the Specscreen cuts off. An INC officer pops his head in to inform me that we are out of communications range. We will be in range again in two hours, but by then Mukherjee will have lost interest in our proceedings. Or so Elena Kieslowski tells me when the feed returns:

"Sorry, champ. She's decided she's got better things to do with her last days."

"And you don't?"

Nine minutes later Kieslowski has strapped into one of the emergency restraints on the opposite bulkhead and pleated her hands behind her head. She is wearing a standard-issue tank and shorts, her legs crossed at the ankles, as if dangling off the side of a hammock.

"Well, we'll see about that, won't we?" she says.

Halcyon Days

When a colleague first learned of my intentions at GC, he sent me a 'skin he had come across not long after Aldrin V's launch: Space Chicks with Dicks, logged February 2046. In twenty-eight blinks you got the full, often gory details of how four seemingly docile nymphettes sent to rid "Big Red" of its sixteen raging hard-ons ended up packing a much more menacing set of their own. Six months later, the 'skin already had three critical responses from the peer-review set: "The Anxiety of Conquest: Cock-Ups and Conspiracy in M.h.M.'s Cosmonaut Sequence," "The Dependency Cycle: A Story of Post-Masculinist Resentment on Behalf of 'Big Red'," and "14 Men, 2 Women: The Sexual Politics of Erasure in M.h.M.'s Space Chicks with Dicks."

In turn, I sent my colleague Sapphic Interludes 242: Journey to the New Land of Men, also logged February 2046. The full-length graphic features four women who "dyke out" in transit to Mars (presumably not unlike how producer Alfred Munny "slutted out" on live sloggers while walking the tightly-packed red carpet at last year's Oscars) and meet with a range of "rehabilitative" choices from the fourteen men and two thoroughly worn out women at Arm Schlong Base. By the time I arrive at GC for my interview with Aldrin V, there are twenty-one critical citations logged for this work.

Are these responses really so counter-stream? Last October, GlobeSpec's main screen sported a chintzy split-image of (on the left) a twentieth century B-movie metalloid and (on the right) Carmen Yang's titular Bandit from the 2038 sleeper vid of a street-rat cyborg achingly relegated to a post-apocalyptic South American underworld. The headline? "The Robot Women of (Future) Mars: Love 'Em or Hate 'Em, They're on Their Way!" Far be it from this writer to expect rigorous coverage from the media conglomerate that first brought you Gotcha! Magazine, but in this case GlobeSpec proved only one of dozens of mainstream publications set abuzz in the wake of a live interview with Elena Kieslowski on Murrielle Richembeau's The View.

Admittedly, Kieslowski's selection was ill-advised for this public appearance. You could almost hear The View's producer asking GC for fifteen minutes with "the leggy blonde" and Ground Control's PR department, itching for a nice, fresh face to put on the whole troubled agency, relenting without careful consideration of Kieslowski's file. (And if the incident has taught us anything, it's that passing the onslaught of psych exams required for consideration to any of the Aldrin missions is one very daunting matter, but being adequately equipped for airtime is quite another.)

In her first few minutes, Kieslowski made all the usual n00bian mistakes: Failure to speak in sound-bites, refusal to compress difficult issues into definitive conclusions one way or the other, and flagrant attempts to forward controversial conversations about the future of the International Space Compact—the likes of which even counterstream media would be loath to broach on live broadcast. Murrielle Richembeau possibly even thought she was doing Kieslowski a favor by trying to switch to a different line of questioning, but personal life fripperies are a difficult game to play with a refugee-camp-refugee, and as RCRs go, Kieslowski was not the most stereotypically grateful for her childhood resettlement from the West Bank to Russia just as it teetered yet again on the brink of economic insolvency. I can almost hear the ensuing train-wreck whenever I review the transcript from that November 18 broadcast:

RICHEMBEAU:—it's—I can only imagine, but let me—let me just say that you are—really now—just beautiful. [Audience cheers.] I mean, there's—there was a huge campaign, if I recall—Kaiden, can we put up some of those images? There, yes. Just look at that crowd— the candles, the cards, the—the glasses raised to toast your good health. So many broken hearts here on Big Blue; so many young men—handsome, too, some of them, don't you think?—who look like they'd go to the ends of the Earth to—

KIESLOWSKI: You should see the [unclear]

RICHEMBEAU: Excuse me?

KIESLOWSKI: The death threats. For leaving. For betraying the country that took me in after the raids. Oh, and then there are messages about being a government-funded whore for—

RICHEMBEAU: Oh, yes, yes—from extremists, you mean. Yes, that must be overwhelming. And so it... it must be such a relief to think about getting to Mars and just, like, getting on with things—I mean, they aren't that bad looking either, of course, am I right? Am I? [Audience cheers and hoots.]

KIESLOWSKI: Who, the extremists?

RICHEMBEAU: Oh, no! No no no—the colonists. I mean, have you—I'm sure people are just dying to know if there's any of the men out there that have, you know, caught your eye yet. [Audience cheers.] I mean, there's been no end of genetic comparisons, talk of Mars babies, all that fun stuff. And then we've got—yes, there he is—[Audience cheers and hoots]. Jeph Straughn is a crowd favorite around here. Great jawline. Great smile. Your type, you think? First-dad-on-Mars material, or is that more—

KIESLOWSKI: I'm not—I'm really not interested in that right now. I—

RICHEMBEAU: You're waiting until you get there, of course. Of course. Well—

KIESLOWSKI: No, what I'm saying is—to be perfectly honest—

RICHEMBEAU: Oh, of course, please do, please do—

KIESLOWSKI:—that if everything goes according to plan, and we get there, to Armstrong I mean, we've got so much to do before we can even think about—well, you know—and so, really, it's like I'm going to try my hardest to forget I even have a womb for the first few years or so. You know? And then, maybe, we'll see. If there's time. If everything goes according to plan. It's not like we can't— I mean, I've got eggs on ice, and we have the technology, so if that's ever really a priority, we can just do it, you know—

RICHEMBEAU: What, you mean in a lab? On Mars.

KIESLOWSKI: Well, of course. Why would I—with my own body—when they're not exactly sending us with maternity wear spacesuits, you know? [She laughs.] I mean, come on, Murrielle—be reasonable. That's just not happening.

RICHEMBEAU: Well, I—Folks, we're here with Elena Kieslowski of the Aldrin V Mission to Mars; we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors.

Future Prospects

During the two-hour communications blackout, I take a rather lonely meal in the mess and return to visitor quarters, where my tablet sits neatly atop my duffel bag at the front desk—GC security's way of saying, yes, we searched your things while you were away, but look how upfront we are about it! Even from the entrance, I can make out the front cover of my latest read, the most recent in K. L.'s Sweet Traveler series, temporarily imprinted on the tablet's screen. (Rest as sured, I have received no end of ribbing from associates for still storing books on such devices; I know the entire Library of Congress is downloadable on Specs, but I simply cannot bring myself to let go of the tactility of reading, and all the spatial variation that comes with such a solid interface.) That day in particular, I am especially grateful for the ability to put literal distance between the text and my mind for a while. Sifting for the last two weeks through the detritus of main-and counterstream reactions to the Aldrin missions has left me, I suspect, with quite a changed appreciation for certain written words.

Flipping through K. L.'s latest, for instance, it is no longer any wonder to me that our most popular wild tales leap so far into the future, or so deep into the thick of alternate worlds— anything, anything to get away from the pimply-faced pubescence of our own, early efforts at colonizing outer space. Away from the juvenility of all our gossip in the interim. Away from the diversities of ignorance that parade our every media interface at each new juncture in the collective human experience. We are starry-eyed, would-be young lovers brought to near-paralysis just by the thought of sticking our piddling Tab As for the first time into all the Slot Bs of the universe. And so generations of trial and error will surely have to pass before we can even begin to look, with calmness, and composure, and some semblance of cultural unity, upon the full feast of our cosmonautic explorations. Until then all we have is the promise of these words— their gentle assurances that it will get better, it has to get better, and of course, how could it not get better, given time?

"I give us a hundred years at the outset," says Kieslowski, when I ask all the typical questions about legacy. "Then we'll become more of an embarrassment than a tragedy. Maybe an object lesson in government incompetence and technological def iciency, or some pet project of youth instructors and fundamentalists hoping to teach some vaguely moral lesson about the sins of civilization to their progeny. But not much talked about outside of that, no."

"What, you don't think Armstrong could be the next Titanic?"

I earn a smile with my crook-mouthed cynicism. Kieslowski does not share Mukherjee's interest in re-envisioning the crew's odds— sees it as irrelevant, even, to the work of survival that now lies before them. In hindsight, I imagine if I had first tried mainstream media's "Mission of Mercy" line on her instead, I would have received something other than boredom—a tirade, perhaps. Now I will never know for sure.

"Not a chance," she says to all my talk of twentieth-century failure. "The aesthetics are all wrong. Watery graves are easier to glorify than the hideous gradations of radiation sickness. You think anyone's going to link in to see JoJo Sivechy play me rotting away in a faraway desert? And then, there are no kids out here, either—and no blatant class or gender divisions in outcome. Radiation poisoning just doesn't care the way those old aristocrats did. Oh, and above all else, there's no blatant show of arrogance on the part of the ISC. No obvious lifeboats we coulda-shoulda-woulda brought on board to prevent this disaster. In fact, right from the beginning the ISC's been trying to downplay expectations, teach mainstream how fragile this whole project is. Not that mainstream was much for listening, not in those first years. Not when everything about Mars was still so glamorous. But still, yeah, not the same thing at all."

"So, what, you don't think there'll be vids about this?"

"Sure there will. For a while, at least. We've even got that alien horror flick in the works right now, just posted last week. You know, the one where everything's fine with the radiation shielding when we get there—which would explain the energy grid: I give them credit for that much—but base-camp's drilling efforts pulled up something nasty all the same, and it gets us one by one just like it got the rest of the colonists? You should see the trailer; it's crazy. And they've chosen one hell of a creepy actress to play Michiko."

Kieslowski laughs nine minutes after I evince surprise that she would bother reading up on such tasteless, morbid things. Don't what-if stories like GERM just make it all the more nerve-wracking to think about the landing? And besides (I falter for obvious reasons in my next question) has GC entirely ruled out the possibility of...?

"No Martian monsters that we know of yet," says Kieslowski. "After all, that's where the writers got it wrong: we haven't even started drilling operations yet. We're still working through all the ecological reforms and long-term shielding, plus improving resource management systems on the ground: that sort of thing. So no nasty bugs were set to be exposed to Martian air for, oh, another couple years, I think."

(Kieslowski's file and mainstream interview performances, I quickly discover, have not adequately prepared me for the dryness of her humor.)

"And in answer to your other question—no, not at all: it's kind of calming, actually, to read up on all the inane what-ifs. I get to pretend none of this is real for a while, you know? I get to laugh, too, about something I can't really change—and well, I signed up for this gig, risks and all. You think I haven't been watching all the old, bad Russian dubs I could find all my life? I've even got one of my own in the works. Little screenplay I'm hoping someone else can make something of, maybe once I become famous for being among the first to rot in outer space."

Can I see the script? I obviously ask. Can you tell me about it? When Kieslowski floats up to the Specscreen, I have the sneaking suspicion that I am being strung along.

"Maybe," she says. "But what've you got to trade?"

Relics in the Making

Michiko Wakahisa is the only crew member to turn down my interview request—a fact that should not prove at all surprising, considering how few public appearances she has made in the entirety of her life. Heir to the Wakahisa fortune, the Hong Kong native has been dogged since her initial selection to the Aldrin V mission by accusations of greasing the selection committee's wheels—a claim only fanned further by charges of cronyism faced by the selection committee chair. However, as the two corruption issues involve profoundly different demographics, it is curious that this indictment against young Wakahisa has persisted despite the failure of many other affluent persons to merit even a mention in the ISC's long lists, and despite Wakahisa's own, undeniable excellence in the preliminary physical and mental examinations. Oh, and of course, despite Gerhardt Michelson's now-infamous remark that persons of his financial worth "already have occasion to be bored with outer space in a way few others will ever understand."

Undoubtedly, citizen flights to the international space station are within the grasp of only a select few of Earth's nine billion, and even then, beneath the interests of many of the rich-and-famous on account of the various "intolerable" deprivations in creature comforts such a trip necessitates. "If I wanted to be chucked around and breathe into motion sickness bags for a couple days," synth-rap superstar Felonius Creed said in interviews around the release of his eleventh Spec-spin, Astro-kaze, "I'd buy a damn theme park." Which, incidentally, he did the following year, after losing his bid for the Chargers.

But for all this bluster and affectation of indifference among some of the well-groomed set, the look of heartbreak on natal billionaire Duanne Fleming's face when the ISC failed him on the comp exams was genuine. At least for that one day, no media outlet, main-or counter-, would dare contest that the desire for Mars burned as deeply and as desperately in some of Earth's wealthiest as it does in the most dirt-poor.

Wakahisa's near-complete avoidance of the mainstream media circus is even more remarkable, though, in light of her earlier actuation as a musician in her own right—a brief but brilliant star in the cosmic drone scene from 2039 to 2041, under the unassuming pseudonym, Flyt. After YOLO's iconic I'm Sick of You Fucks/Get Me Outta Here stage tour in 2039—the first to fake last-minute artist cancellations for every stop en route, instigating carefully coordinated rage-raves in sold-out amphitheaters instead—the absence of artists from their own performance spaces trended highly enough for Flyt's concerts (which were always remotely orchestrated) to attract no great notice until fans eventually realized that they had never once seen her face.

The real connection was not uncovered, though, until Wakahisa had long immersed herself in aeronautics research, and by the time she was selected for the Aldrin V mission, no new work had been released under the pseudonym Flyt for over two years. While some in the mainstream suggested that Flyt was a mere phase in Wakahisa's intensely isolated youth (and still others paid her music no heed whatsoever, their journalistic interests lying more in line with what the Aldrin V mission meant for the future of Wakahisa Enterprises), counterstream has consistently entertained a more whimsical notion that the rest of the Aldrin V crew will neither confirm nor deny:

Did Michiko Wakahisa get blasted into space, or did Flyt? Did pursuit of "the perfect drone" compel this enigmatic Hong Kong heiress toward her most ambitious feat of sonic engineering yet? Is Flyt at work even now, during these last, tense few months of Aldrin V's journey to a broken human settlement on Mars, on a cosmic drone masterpiece pulled from soundscapes unlike any Earth has ever heard before?

And if so—if these rumors are true and if Armstrong's radiation shielding cannot be repaired by even "the girls" on landing—what happens if Wakahisa/Flyt fails to complete and broadcast her work before radiation sickness takes hold? How long will her magnum opus molder under the shearing forces of Martian winds while Terrans quarrel about the future of deep space travel? Will it ever be recovered, or will it remain permanently fixed instead in that fragile, fickle half-life of pop culture mythology? What, if anything, will future Terrans grieve for most when they look back on troubled Armstrong, and all the Aldrins past and present: the loss of life, of hope—or of art?

Gathering Rosebuds

After, Kieslowski reads me her plot summary. The working title is Untitled. It's a zombie flick, she says—only, we're all zombies. Nine billion of us, give or take. We putter around on Earth living zombie lives; we have zombie dramas and zombie dreams. And then one day we send some of our zombie kin into outer space, in a capsule wrought of little more than bone and sinew. And obviously, we send out only those zombies we can train not to chew the walls of this cage to bits.

Then something happens mid-transit (Midtransit to where? I ask. Oh, Kieslowski says with a flick of her hand—wherever. The Sun.) and the travelers start to mutate, transform. Reports filter back to Earth and pandemonium strikes the putrefied hearts of billions of our fellow zombies. We can't fix it. We can't turn back the clock. So right before our eyes, before all our incessant monitoring, we find that these zombies are turning... human. It's so monstrous that we want to look away. It's so monstrous that we can't.

"I want to say there's a happy ending," Kieslowski says after a pause. She looks directly at the Specscreen, waits. "But, you know."

I do now, in the consequential wake of our most recent transaction, and the knowledge sits so uncomfortably between us that I try to meet her at her humor's level. I tell her, "I thought dead men tell no tales." I even quirk a smile to match.

"Yeah," is all Kieslowski says—one of her last words before the feed from Aldrin V cuts me off for good. "And wouldn't it be neat if that were true."

Guy P. Morgan is the author of two works of hyper-nonfiction, Here/Now and Anon(Y)mous(ES): A Tale of Two Specspheres. A graduate of the MFA program at NYU, Morgan placed as a semi-finalist for the Citizen Slot on Aldrin II. His upcoming book, Notoriety and Beyond, explores the show's aftermath for seven other "unlucky" contestants from early seasons.

The Probability and Nature of an Interstellar Information-Trading Community

Science Fact

Mark H. Shellans
| 5224 words

If extraterrestrial civilizations were streaming out vast amounts of information about their culture, art, music, science, technology, and philosophy, would we want to tap into that data stream?

It is likely that most people (especially those reading this magazine) would respond with a very enthusiastic "yes!" Similarly, any species that had achieved a level of technology equivalent to our own, and all that implies, would probably feel the same way. Admittedly, there are humans to whom such knowledge will be perceived as a threat, and who will fanatically oppose any such contact. But, for those of us who would welcome information exchange among civilizations, this article delivers some very good news.

We will discuss six interrelated questions about the probability and nature of an Interstellar Information-Trading Community (IITC):

1. Are there other civilizations in our galaxy?

2. If so, why would they want to communicate?

3. If they are motivated to communicate, what rules and protocols would naturally emerge to do so?

4. Based on those rules and protocols, what would be the hardware requirements for the system(s) used?

5. What would we need to do in order to determine the existence of that community?

6. What would we need to do in order to join that community?

First, are there other civilizations in our galaxy?

The Drake equation hints strongly that there are many technological species in our galaxy right now that arose independently. But even if that number is low, there are almost certainly civilizations on habitable worlds resulting from the spreading of ancient species that sent out sublight ships long ago.

Barring some sort of warp drive that violates our current knowledge of physics, travel among star systems to visit alien civilizations is apt to be expensive and time-consuming. Most of the potential utility for such a visit, moreover, would just be knowledge anyway: pictures, music, technology, etc. That information could be provided much more readily and efficiently by the local residents of those other star systems. Whereas you can only physically visit a few civilizations at a time, you can trade huge amounts of data with as many civilizations as are within range via electromagnetic radiation. You can do it from the comfort of home, and do so at the speed of light.

But that is not to say that there would be no motivation at all for interstellar travel. A technological civilization may be forced to flee a system in imminent danger of a supernova or some other celestial catastrophe. If we, for example, had an overwhelming reason to travel to the stars right now (like our Sun entering its red giant phase), we could probably cobble together a number of functional "generation ships," using a significant fraction of the world's gross domestic product over 25 to 50 years. That's probably true for other civilizations, as well. So physical visits are possible, but probably quite rare.

An additional reason for physical travel is the evolutionary imperative to spread one's species as widely as possible on one's home planet. That inbred motivation might also apply to being fruitful and multiplying throughout the galaxy via "seed ships" sent to habitable, but uninhabited, extraterrestrial planets (at least once in a while). The latter argument for physical travel to nearby stars almost guarantees that all habitable planets are, in fact, inhabited—as we will see, below.

Let's use the Earth as a template of how life and civilizations arise (since we have no other). Life arose early in the Earth's history— about a billion years after its formation—but civilization, such as it is, took another 3.5 billion years. Our galaxy is about 13 Billion years old, so let's say life on some other world might have started at about the halfway point, around 6.5 billion years ago. If they followed the same development course as ours, they would have developed a technological civilization about 3 billion years ago.

Once having reached our current technology level, they could probably have built a number of functional "generation ships" to the stars, but it would have required using a significant fraction of their world's resources continuously for many years. A more likely scenario is that the task would have been put off for a thousand years or so until it became more feasible and affordable with more advanced technologies. Let's make that assumption about our hypothetical civilization: they send out a ship or two to colonize nearby star systems a thousand years after first developing space travel.

Our galaxy contains one to four hundred billion stars and is estimated to have at least fifty billion planets, five hundred million of which may be located in the habitable zone of their parent star. The volume of the galaxy is 157 billion cubic light-years. Dividing that by five hundred million gives 314 cubic lightyears per habitable planet or moon. That means that habitable planets average about seven light-years apart. With the first generation of our hypothetical civilization's expansion, the diameter of their occupied space would have been 14 light-years. If their seedlings then "rested" for a millennium, and then did the same, it would increase by another 14 light-years. A more conservative assumption would be that the diameter of their inhabited space grew at an average rate of only one light-year per thousand years. In this way it took that civilization one hundred thousand millennia to reach the outermost reaches of the galaxy. At that point, the entire volume of the galaxy, and all the habitable planets in it, would have been spoken for by that single species and its descendents.

And if that process actually occurred, and if it took one hundred thousand millennia—one hundred million years—it would have been completed 2.9 billion years ago! And that doesn't account for any other civilizations that may have arisen independently in the history of the galaxy going through a similar spreading and occupation of their own volume of star systems. Thus, every habitable planet in the galaxy... is very probably inhabited. Moreover, it means that there should be several (probably five) inhabited planets within seven light-years of the Earth. And that brings us to the second question:

Why would they want to communicate with us?

We still appreciate the art, music, philosophy, stories, etc. of our own low-tech ancestors. So, even if our technology lags theirs, we should still be at least somewhat interesting to an advanced extraterrestrial civilization. Especially if the cost of that information is low.

Thus, all half-dozen of us in our seven light-year neighborhood have a lot of motivation to learn about the others. Given the time lags that even speed-of-light imposes, it makes sense for each of us to stream data continuously to each star system that is streaming information to us. The outgoing information is already a sunk cost to the civilization that developed it; the incoming knowledge is of incalculable value! Some of the others in our neighborhood may have the technology necessary, may have learned the protocols from older civilizations farther out, and may already be in the net.

Third question: if they are motivated to communicate, what rules and protocols would naturally evolve?

To start with, each civilization is highly motivated to develop as many trading partners as it can. It is logical, then, to assume it would use its communication system to "ping" every star in the neighborhood while listening to see if anyone responds with a similar signal. As described further below, these pings would be standardized to require only the lowest cost and technology base to detect, so that, as soon as a civilization reaches the earliest possible capability for two-way interstellar communications, it can also afford to build the necessary systems without certainty of payoff. Rules and protocols would have to be simple and easilyinferred so that new, isolated civilizations, like ours, would be able to figure out how to detect and join their community. The Primary Rule is probably simple: "the more you give; the more you get," but it has some interesting implications, as we will see.

We only need concern ourselves with the simple protocols for the initial ping since directions for more complex ones would be included in the initial data stream. That is, enough protocol information should be implicit in the first ping that we can start a reasonably efficient outgoing data stream without waiting for the 14-year turnaround time. In his novel Contact, Carl Sagan proposed that the first such signal would be a palimpsest of successive amplitude, polarization, frequency, and phase modulations. While a valid concept, his choice of multiplexing protocol places very expensive requirements on the receiving gear. As we noted above, our potential information trading partners in the IITC would want to keep it cheap for us, so that we would be able to join as soon as possible. Therefore, message protocol would be more likely to consist of only a slow sequence of (relatively) long pulses that would be very easy to detect, but have more detailed information contained in intrapulse frequency modulation. The top-level pulse sequence would probably be perfectly regular in repetition frequency and pulse length so that Fourier analysis could pull the weak signal out of a noisy background without a priori knowledge. "Missing" pulses could then encode a very simple message—Sagan suggested prime numbers. Once detected, multiple coherent repetitions of the signal could then be "stacked" to enhance signal-to-noise ratio for decoding the intrapulse message. Sort of a bootstrapping scheme, in which each stage of detection enables the next. If we are lucky, the pings will contain some low bit-rate excerpts from their "big" data stream. A few pictures of themselves and their world would be nice.

Rules for the broader information trading community will almost certainly include the requirement for relay. Each member of the Earth's local group is also a member of its own local group, including us, of course, but perhaps not including one of the civilizations in Earth's group that is on our other side, and thus farther away from them. Recalling the Primary Rule from above—"the more you give; the more you get"—all of us should be anxious to include the relay of data from "farther out" in our own feeds to the members of our local group. In this way, information feeds from civilizations throughout the galaxy could be available to us. Such relayed feeds from far away might be hundreds of thousands of years old.

Another less-apparent consequence of the Primary Rule is that no civilization may be judgmental about the content of the feeds from another. That is, no censorship! Given the likely differences in biology, evolution, and culture; the information from any one culture is certain be repulsive to at least one other race in its multi-hop transmission path. We will be hard pressed to remember that rule and conscientiously forward data from a species that, for example, considers, as an art form, the proper preparation of their young... for consumption.

Fourth: what are the hardware requirements for an entry-level system implied by the above rules and protocols?

As noted previously, the first hardware requirement is that it must be affordable.

Over millions of years of previous interstellar communications, hardware requirements for entry-level systems will have become well-standardized. Thousands of trial-and-error refinements will have produced a first-contact system standard that now has the maximum likelihood of being inferred accurately and quickly by the maximum number of civilizations.

It may seem paradoxical to suggest that two technological civilizations that know nothing about one another, that can not yet communicate, and that are mutually unsure of whether the other even exists, could still somehow agree upon standards. The only way to accomplish such a feat is for each culture to always think about the problem from the other's point of view. Our first lesson from that rule is that since it is the most obvious way to establish standards, it is the actual way in which our opposite numbers will establish standards with us.

So, what do they know about us? They know that we wish to join the IITC and have arrived at its theoretical existence by some logic similar to the one presented here. From their point of view, any other assumptions would be equivalent to ours being just another sterile or primitive solar system, and therefore would warrant no change to their time-tested strategy.

They also know that we, or any rational culture, cannot commit vast amounts of resources to a goal that is no more than a theoretical possibility. (No one ever suggested that the Great Pyramids were a rational undertaking.)

They know that whatever is simplest and cheapest for most of the civilizations in the galaxy is probably simplest and cheapest for us, as well, at this early stage in our technology. They know that we must arrive, eventually, at the same conclusion. Therefore, whenever we actually get around to making contact, we will know that it is the first such system we could have developed that would still be the one that defines the standard for first contact.

So what is the first system capable of interstellar communication we (and therefore others) could develop?

Radio Frequency (RF) communication has been around for a long time and we are very good at it. In fact the earliest proposed standard for incoming interstellar communication was RF. This was first addressed in the initial Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) concept.

The original logic for the choice of frequencies at which to listen was tenuous, at best. SETI traditionally listens to frequencies between 1420 MHz (the hydrogen molecule) and 1662 MHz (the hydroxyl radical). Hewlett Packard Vice President Bernard Oliver wrote in 1971, "Surely the band lying between the resonances of the disassociation products of water is ideally situated and an uncannily poetic place for water-based life to seek its kind." Poetry aside, a more practical reason for the choice was that equipment to monitor these frequencies was readily available within the technology of the time. In his book Interstellar Net: Origins, Edward M. Lerner takes the "Water Hole" logic one step further by suggesting that an extraterrestrial civilization might demonstrate intelligence by broadcasting at a wavelength of 6.7 centimeters. As his protagonist, Dean Matthews, says, "The neutral-hydrogen wavelength divided by pi. That's the carrier signal. That sure sounds like a sign of intelligence to me."

Our lack of success listening at these frequencies would seem to indicate that the choice may have been flawed. Or perhaps the logic was, in fact, also adopted by civilizations at our technological level; and there are many out there all listening... but no one transmitting.

It has been suggested that we don't have to transmit, because advanced ET civilizations would be able to detect our broadcast signals which are now fifty to one hundred light-years out. We have to assume, though, that the laws of physics operate the same everywhere. Energy that radiates into space spreads out—becomes weaker—in accordance with an inverse-square law. That is, the energy collected by an antenna of a given surface area will be proportional to the radiated power in the signal divided by the square of its distance from the source. As an example, consider one of our high power broadcast transmitters that sends out its fifty-thousand Watt signal in all directions. At a range of ten light-years, a receiving antenna would have to be four thousand kilometers in diameter to detect our broadcast. That's not impossible, but it's apt to be a very costly project for a civilization just to detect a signal from a "primitive" culture that is not even specifically trying to communicate.

One of the factors in determining two-way range is the communications bandwidth—a measure of how much information per second is transferred. Bandwidth may be expressed in units of frequency: millions of cycles per second, or MHz. Recalling again the Prime Rule, we will want to stream the most complete data out, so that our trading partners will not feel cheated and limit the data that they send to us. (Being "newbies," we could probably get away with less until our technology catches up.) A TV channel, for example, requires about 6 MHz. Global internet traffic in 2011 averaged about 46 million MHz. It would be nice to get to that rate someday, but it is probably far higher than practical with our entry-level system. Knowing that there is considerable range in the bandwidth choice, our trading partners would leave a lot of flexibility in its selection. As a starting place, let's arbitrarily pick 10 MHz.

What is the very best we could do today to design a two-way, interstellar, RF communications system? If we assemble a system consisting of the highest compatible frequency (10,000 MHz), with the largest steerable antenna on Earth having a surface accuracy capable of handling that frequency (Effelsberg 100-m Radio Telescope in Germany), with the most powerful RF transmitter (two million Watts), and assuming the same system at the other end; the maximum range for link closure is only 1/10 light-year! Scaling the system up with multiple such assemblies and backing way off on bandwidth violates our affordability and functionality criteria for a standardized system long before reaching our seven light-year goal.

Radio frequency systems, therefore, cannot be the entry-level standard our trading partners will be using.

Well, is there any concept that will allow seven light-year communications within our near-term technological capability?

Laser communication, both free space and fiber optic, is now coming into its own, and seems to have the characteristics we are looking for. It has a very high information-carrying capacity, and the smaller wavelengths associated with light work to our advantage. The narrowness with which a beam of light or radio waves may be focused is proportional to the size of the reflector, in wavelengths. That is, for a given wavelength, the bigger the mirror, the narrower the beam; for a given mirror, the smaller the wavelength, the narrower the beam.

Narrowness is good for the outgoing signal; it allows us to focus all the energy we are sending out on a smaller target. That is, it makes our signal look stronger to the ones receiving it. For the incoming signal, narrowness is also good. It allows us to catch more of the energy coming from a smaller region. That makes the incoming signal appear stronger.

For the purpose of allowing our potential trading partners to create a standard for an entry-level communications system, lasers have another very important advantage over radio waves: there are only a finite number of types of laser, and most have only one primary wavelength. In fact, we can assume that the standard will be a laser with a single primary wavelength for that very reason! And that implies that if we find a small number of lasers, preferably only one, that meet interstellar communications requirements with today's technology, we then know exactly where to listen for the incoming ping. And that is also why we need to design a two-way system even though we will just be listening at first. The design of the transmission subsystem will tell us how and where to listen for their transmission.

Let's start with the transmitter this time. Northrop Grumman has demonstrated a continuous-wave solid state laser with a 100 kW output power. The design is based on neodymium-doped yttrium aluminum garnet (Nd:YAG) crystals. It operates in the near infrared at wavelength of 1064 nm (a frequency of 281,946,000 MHz). It is one of the higher powered lasers today.

The Nd: YAG laser is a particularly good choice for communication because its wavelength of 1064 nm gets through the Earth's atmosphere with only about 40% losses— much less if it is based on a mountaintop.

An almost ideal pairing with the Nd:YAG laser for communications purposes is the W. M. Keck two-telescope astronomical observatory. It is near the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, where atmospheric attenuation at 1064 nm is close to zero. It has adaptive optics which means that it is affected very little by atmospheric irregularities, and it is compatible with the Nd:YAG laser wavelength.

Let's do some link calculations. Feeding a single 10 m telescope with a single 100 kW Nd:YAG laser, using a cooled 10 m telescope for receiving, and using the same bandwidth of 10 MHz, provides a communication range of 9.9 light-years! This may be what we are looking for!

The existing two-mirror Keck system can work together as the Keck Interferometer. The 85-meter separation between the two telescopes gives them the effective angular resolution in one direction of an 85-meter mirror. Along this axis, the Keck Interferometer has a spatial resolution of 12 nrad at 1064 nm wavelength. Adding just one more equidistant mirror, and feeding each one with phased Nd:YAG lasers, would provide 300 kW of output power into an 85 m effective aperture. With the same three-mirror set up in the receive mode (cooled), and using a 1 GHz bandwidth, communication range would be 123 light-years. This system will work.

Although this system meets all the theoretical requirements of the standardized entry-level system, we should also consider other bands/apertures to ensure we are not missing the actual "first" system our trading partners are expecting. Looking first at longer wavelengths/lower frequencies:

For sheer power, you can't beat a CO2 laser! And, like Nd:YAG, it is also in an atmospheric window. In a 1989 paper on laser launch systems, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher Jordin Kare states: "A 20 MW entry-level launch system could be built using current technology at a cost of five hundred million dollars or less." Communication range scales directly with frequency, but only as the square root of power. This means that with one-tenth the frequency (almost exactly) and one hundred times the power, a CO2 laser has the same range as the Nd:YAG laser. Given the power generation and heat rejection problems of such a beast, however, Nd:YAG is still the far better solution.

What about shorter wavelengths/higher frequencies? For the future, this is clearly the direction to go. A space-based far-ultraviolet/x-ray (1—10 nm) laser system would have far greater bandwidths, and longer access times. In fact, such a system may well be the workhorse of our theorized information-trading community. Right now though, instead of the multiple kilowatts at 10 nm that would be required for the outgoing signal, about the best we can do is 5 W at the far-longer wavelength of 266 nm. We are a long way from being able to build such a system.

We therefore conclude that the first system that our IITC trading partners would expect us to build is the system we can build: Two arrays of mountaintop 10-m mirrors, with adaptive optics, set up for interferometry, capable of operating at the Nd:YAG laser wavelength of 1064 nm. For transmitting, each mirror in the transmit array would be fed by a 100 kW Nd:YAG laser modulated in accordance with the first ping we detected.

Our fifth question was: what would we need to do in order to determine the existence of that community?

Source: http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/20lys.html

Clearly, we have arrived at our entry-level system parameters. As we shall see, though, it is neither necessary nor advisable to expand the Keck observatory to these parameters right away. Using just one of the Keck telescopes, uncooled, on the receive side, and backing off on the bandwidth requirement will still allow detection of an initial ping at a range of tens of light-years. Given the above analyses, we were too modest in assuming that our trading partners had to be within seven light-years. We will now increase the range we are considering to twenty light-years.

In order to determine the existence of information trading partners, we will need to look for a Doppler-shifted 1064 nm signal coming from every star within a twenty light-year radius.

There are 83 known star systems within this distance containing 109 stars and eight brown dwarfs. Six of them are Type G stars like our Sun. Many of these star systems are unlikely to have originated life because of high variability or extremely low luminosity. Nevertheless, they might still have worlds, moons, or asteroids that are marginally habitable with the use of advanced technologies. Those may have been "resting places" in the outward expansion of older civilizations described above. They might even be automated relay sites from other nearby systems interested in enhancing their status under the Primary Rule.

Our limitations in observing these star systems are the same as their problems in pinging us: Sun in the way, transmission laser on the wrong side of their planet or moon, insufficient systems to look at more than one star system at a time, etc. Without even knowing the tilt of the plane of their ecliptic with respect to ours, it is difficult to estimate the amount of time any one civilization would be able to spend pinging us. Probably the best we can do is assume that our hypothetical neighbors divide their attention equally among the hundred or so stars around them on a very irregular schedule. As current members of the IITC, they almost certainly will have invested heavily in space sensors capable of directly detecting the Earth and other nearby worlds. Thus, they can focus directly on the worlds they see in neighboring systems. But we are not as well-informed as they are.

The observation spot size at ten light-years of a 10-m telescope at the Nd:YAG laser wavelength is about 12 million kilometers. In order to be sure of observing the transmitting laser (when it is transmitting toward us) for a few thousand pulses of the ping signal without knowing where they are, we will have to scan a slow spiral around each star in our neighborhood. It would probably be sufficient to only scan the life zone; that is, the region in which the energy flux from the star might allow liquid water to exist on a planetary body. In our own Solar System, the life zone would be estimated as ranging from 0.725 AU to 1.24 AU. Again, let's pretend our trading partner's system is similar to our own. Since we don't know what the relative tilt of the plane of their orbit is to our line-of-sight, we would have to scan from about 70 million km to about 186 million km (the outer edge of the life zone). How long would such a scan take?

Here, we will have to make some assumptions about the signal they are sending. As we said above, the signal will probably have a very regular top level amplitude pulse structure with more detailed information frequency modulated within the pulses. If we assume the pulses are one thousandth of a second (one millisecond) long, we would want to observe each point within the target system for a few seconds. If they are slower, in order to make them easier to observe with instruments that take their snapshots slowly, we may need much longer observation times. Knowing this, our potential trading partners may have clustered pulse trains to make "super pulses" detectable with slow spectrometers. Thus, the time necessary for a complete scan of an extraterrestrial system will depend on the time constant of our own observing spectrometer. Just to get some idea of scan time, let's assume a one millisecond time constant in our detector allowing detection of ten millisecond pulses. A thousand such pulses take ten seconds. To scan our own Solar System's life zone with a 12-million-kilometer spot that must spend ten seconds moving over each angular point would take about forty minutes. A larger telescope producing a smaller spot size is not necessary and, in fact, would cause a large increase in scan times. To scan all 117 stars would take three days, but again, some may be behind the Sun.

We also have to account for Doppler shift in the laser wavelength. We know the relative velocity between us and the system we are observing, and we know the Earth's velocity in her orbit (between ± 30 km/sec), but we don't know their orbital velocity with respect to us. It could be zero (if the plane of their ecliptic is perpendicular to our line of sight) or they could be coming at us for half of their year and away from us for the other half. Fortunately, Keck has an instrument called the Adaptive Optics/Near Infrared Spectrometer that can collect at multiple wavelengths simultaneously. Unfortunately, it is very slow. Modifications to the instrument may be necessary in order to collect data with sufficient temporal resolution, and may, in fact, be the most expensive and difficult part of this effort.

How soon would we become aware of the IITC? For any one extraterrestrial civilization, we assume that they ping the hundred or so stars around them whenever they are visible. Our observing time is also limited by time of year and time of day. A best case example is possibly Alpha Centauri, a star similar to our own, approximately 4.3 light-years away in a direction about 60 degrees south of the plane of our ecliptic. If their plane is similarly oriented with respect to us, we could scan them once per day, they could ping us all of the time, and we could detect them in a single day. A worst-case example might be Barnard's Star which we can only see for a portion of the year. If their limitations on viewing are similar to and out of phase with ours, it could be years before we could detect their ping. If there are multiple IITC civilizations nearby, the time necessary to detect at least one of them would tend toward the lower estimate. Give it a year!

Our final question was: once we learn of the existence of an Interstellar Information Trading Community in our neighborhood, what would we need to do in order to join that community?

The answer to this is simple: quickly assemble the Nd:YAG system that we have already defined, with the best improvements that we can afford, and start beaming information directly out to the civilizations that we have detected. They will have told us their orbital parameters in their initial transmissions, so that no spiral scanning will be necessary and we can use the narrower beam widths afforded by the 85-m interferometric array described above. We will also be able to filter very narrowly, since we can calculate Doppler shift.

In a decade or two after that, we will enter a new age of enlightenment almost beyond imagining.

References:

• Kaplan, S. A., (1971). Extraterrestrial Civilizations: Problems of Interstellar Communication. 1st ed. Jerusalem, Israel: National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

• Skolnik, M. I., (2008). Radar Handbook. 3rd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Martin J., (1978). Communications Satellite Systems. 1st ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

• Drake, F. D., & Sobel, D., (1994). Is Anyone out There?: The Scientific Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. 1st ed. New York, NY: Delta Book/Dell Pub.

• Stanford Research Institute; United States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, (1973). Project Cyclops:A Design Study of a System for Detecting Extraterrestrial Intelligent-Life. 1st ed. U.S.A: Moffett Field, Calif.: NASA/Ames Research Center

• Kare, J. T., (1989). Laser Propulsion and Possible Missions to Mars. American Astronomical Society Science and Technology Series. 75.

• John Wallace (2010). "100 kW U.S. Army Laser Moves to White Sands for Testing ." http://www.laserfocusworld.com/articles/2010/02/100-kw-u-s-army-laser.html.

• Goude, P. (2002). "Keck Telescope and Facility Instrument Guide ." http://www2. keck.hawaii.edu/observing/kecktelgde/kteli nstupdate.pdf.

• Dr. Alex Kraus (2011). "Radio Telescope Effelsberg ." http://www.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de/8964/effelsberg.

• Richard Powell (2006). "Stars Within 20 Light-Years ." http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/20lys.html.

DISCOVERY MISSION

256 words

We go down into the sun-starved pit,
Leaving our landing lights behind,
Leaving our extra oxygen, leaving
Our battery backup. It is only
Us now: us and our suits
And our compression packs, and we go
Down. A tunnel this dark and regular
Had to be made by something calculating.
I have forty solar credits
On a bet that it is intelligently mined,
And another ten on the miners
Being here still. Down.
The sides of the shaft spit back
What little light we brought with us,
Walls as polished as a girl's vanity mirror.
We watch our displays for the bottom's
Topography, listen for any disturbance
Our personal rockets make. Above us
The Mission Commander is recording heart rate
And respiration, as well as every noise
That slams our suit receptors:
Temperature outside and in,
How forcefully loose ambient molecules
Taste our magnetic biospheres.
I could have been a milkman,
Humping other men's wives between deliveries,
With a known schedule and my ways around the obvious.
I am told the bottom is only six meters away
And the crewman on my right
Has located the probe we sent in
One sleep cycle ago. From the wear
It looks like I am going to be
Fifty solar credits richer
On the trip out than on the trip in.
My heart is a boy's with his first
Hole in one at sex and my blood
Not unpleasantly seems to be
Caucusing at the tips of my fingers and toes.
There is a radiant spot of uncalculated moisture
Dancing a native strip tease on the outside
Of my visor; and the best of me
Believes, as my thoughtfully distending
Genes reveal, that this unexpected show is my own.
Don't talk to me now, Commander,
I am about to touch unraveling down.

—Ken Poyner

EDITORIAL

I, EDITOR

Trevor Quachri
| 1327 words

At LoneStarCon 3 (the 71st WorldCon) in San Antonio this past September, something special happened, thanks in part to the readers of this magazine: former Analog editor Stanley Schmidt won a Hugo award for Best Editor, Short Form, as well as a Chairman's Special Award (presented by astronaut Cady Coleman), recognizing his long and distinguished career.

Stan has been nominated for the Hugo frequently, but never recognized to the degree that I've felt he should be, so while it's our professional pleasure to congratulate him, of course, it's also a matter of great personal satisfaction for me to see him win.

(If you happened to watch the broadcast of the awards ceremony, I'm the guy sitting next to Stan in the audience, who spikes his award program and pumps his fist when they announce the results—hey, I'm only human.)

None of that is to diminish the accomplishments of the other nominees and winners over the years. We in science fiction are blessed with a plethora of excellent editors, many of whom I have worked with or otherwise know personally, and they all live and breathe their jobs, single-handedly doing the work of a team of people just to put out good science fiction.

But I've often wondered why Stan wasn't awarded sooner.

It might partly be that Stan, should you ever have the pleasure of meeting him, is a kind and self-effacing fellow, happy to tell interesting stories, but not given to the sort of visibility that keeps one in the voter's eye come award time.

It may also be that, as I've said before ("On the Shoulders of Giants," April 2013), Stan is the type of polymath you wouldn't find believable as a fictional character, as if Heinlein's Lazarus Long had him in mind when he said "Specialization is for insects," so it can be tough to fully appreciate his work unless you have at least some sense of the scope of what he's doing, and good luck with that, mere mortal.

Mostly, though, I think it's because unless they're at least somewhat familiar with publishing as a field, what a professional science fiction editor actually does is likely to be something of a mystery to most people.1

That's something I'd like to try to illuminate a bit.

First off, quite a lot of it is no more interesting than any other office job (with, perhaps, the potential for a bit more name-dropping among certain circles). There are lots of budgets, memos, emails, and assorted forms of paperwork to be done.

The rest of it, though, is a bit more specific. To borrow a framing device from the Good Doctor, allow me to suggest The Three Laws of Editorship.

The First Law: An editor must select the best possible material they have available for their market, both in terms of quality of individual pieces and as an aggregate, thereby determining the direction or tone of said market, be it a magazine, anthology, book imprint, or anything else.

This is an editor's "curatorial" role, and it often involves a lot of reading. Here at Analog (and at our sister publication,
Asimov's ) it's particularly intense. We use few, if any, "slush readers" (people who read and broadly screen incoming submissions before the editor looks at them), though many other magazines (understandably) do. Stan read all of the submissions himself; it can be tough to really feel like the magazine reflects one's vision or tastes if one isn't actually looking at the majority of stories that come in.

This is also where matters of layout fall— working with other departments and making decisions on the look of the magazine, by assigning art, choosing covers, tweaking fonts and so on.

The Second Law: An editor must improve the material he or she works on to the best of his or her ability, both on the macro level (fixing inconsistent characterization, or improving an ending) and the micro (fact-checking, cleaning up grammar), in material that is already strong enough to be considered under the First Law.

This is the "mechanical" aspect of an editor's job, not because it's rote (far from it), but because it involves smaller, detail work.

The Third Law: When material doesn't meet the editor's criteria and is otherwise beyond what can immediately be shaped into something he or she can use, but the writer displays the potential to write material that does so in the future, it is the editor's role to work with that writer so that the editor can apply the Second Law, for the furtherance of the First Law, to work down the line.

The editor's "mentoring" role is about encouraging authors who aren't currently writing material you can use to do so, and helping authors who are almost there, but not quite.

It's one of the main purposes of the various professional social events; things like lunches with authors are invaluable for talking over stories face to face, going back and forth about what works and what doesn't, and brainstorming solutions to problems, as well as just maintaining a professional relationship, which can otherwise be difficult when your primary method of interaction is via email for months or years on end.

A "Zeroth Law" might involve the editor's role as the public face of their outlet when applicable, at things like a book festival or WorldCon, both to readers and authors.

Writing editorials is one of the more visible examples of this. They're a great way for readers to get a sense of an editor's personality, and therefore the market's tone, but not every editor chooses to interact with the readers in that particular way, so it's not a defining part of the job. It's more of a perk, perhaps, for the more opinionated among us, but ultimately secondary to work on the material.

Even the parts of the job that seem relatively visible have ice-berg-like large portions beneath the surface of what can be easily seen by readers. You might read a published story, but what did that story look like before the editor worked on it? What does the pool of stories the editor is selecting from look like? (Even trying to gauge someone's editorial persona based on the material in a magazine isn't a sure thing—humorously, our sister publication, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, got complaints that it just wasn't the same after Hitchcock died. Of course, he never had an editorial connection to the publication; he just lent it his name.)

The fact that Stan Schmidt managed to convey so much of his vision and personality in his thirty-four-plus years at an otherwise less-than-visible job speaks to his excellence at it. From years of watching Stan, I learned that good work should speak for itself, and accolades aren't what determine quality. While awards can offer tremendous validation and are certainly something to be proud of, they're far from an infallible record.

But if I can help make the hard work of some people in the field more visible, if I can give readers a clearer narrative of just what editors are doing for them and for authors— that there are a great many number of things that go into being a good editor; that there are a great many number of ways to be a good editor—it might help the deserving see recognition that much sooner in the future.

Because in one form or another, improving narratives is what editors do.

Footnotes:

1 When I talk about what "an editor" does, I'm specifically talking about magazine editors for the most part. There are as many kinds of editors as there are people in the position, and while there are usually similarities, there are also often great differences between, say, this role—essentially an Editor-in-Chief—and what Managing or Copy Editors do. And that's to say nothing of the various types of book editors—Acquisitions, who buy manuscripts; Developmental, who help usher a manuscript through its various drafts; the Copy Editor, who checks facts, consistency, and often spelling, grammar, and punctuation (which also frequently falls to a proofreader), and so on. At the magazines, we wear many hats and do a bit of it all.

There are also major differences between fiction and non-fiction editing, though we do both at Analog.

IN TIMES TO COME

210 words

Next month, we have a blend of stories both serious and less than so, in honor of April's silliest day—Tax Day, of course; what, you thought I meant something else?

An ecologist has to use his training to unravel a complex and dangerous mystery in Jordan Jeffers' "A Fierce, Calming Presence"; tongue planted firmly in cheek, Lavie Tidhar tells a story that science fiction fans might find a bit... familiar in "Whaliens"; "The Oracle of Boca Raton" by Eric Bayliss suggests that artificial intelligences may not have any more patience for stupidity than the rest of us; Ian Randal Strock's "It's Not 'The Lady or the Tiger,' It's 'Which Tiger?'" is a tale of unintended lessons learned via time travel; and more, with stories from writers like Don Webb and Diane Turnshek.

Our fact article is the next in Edward M. Lerner's series looking at the science behind various SF tropes, this one titled "Alien Dimensions: The Universe Next Door."

Finally, we have the white-knuckled conclusion to Karl Schroeder's Lockstep. Toby has decided to face his pursuers head on, but when he confronts them, will family ties prove stronger than the bonds of friendship? No matter who wins, the Lockstep Empire will never be the same.

See you next issue!

All contents subject to change

THE ALTERNATE VIEW

ENTANGLEMENT, SPOOKS, AND SUPERLUMINAL SIGNALS

John G. Cramer
| 1846 words

This column is about a recent paper that appeared in the prestigious journal Nature Physics. The paper claims to prove mathematically that the causal influences exhibited by quantum nonlocality and entanglement can neither be considered to propagate slower than the velocity of light nor to propagate faster than the velocity of light (and therefore, presumably, must not propagate at all). To understand the issues and context, let me begin this discussion by describing quantum nonlocality and quantum entanglement: what they are and where they come from. I note that what follows is my own view of entanglement and nonlocality, and it will not be found in any current textbook or popularization of quantum mechanics.

Quantum mechanics differs from the classical mechanics of Newton that preceded it in one very important way. If a Newtonian system breaks up, each of its parts has a definite and well-defined energy, momentum, and angular momentum, parceled out at breakup by the system while respecting conservation laws. After the component parts are separated, their properties are completely independent and do not depend on each other.

On the other hand, quantum mechanics is nonlocal, meaning that the component parts of a quantum system may continue to influence each other, even when they are well separated in space and out of speed-of-light contact. This characteristic of the theory was first pointed out by Albert Einstein and his colleagues Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen (EPR) in 1935, in a critical paper in which they held up the discovered nonlocality as a devastating flaw in quantum theory. Einstein called nonlocality "spooky actions at a distance." Schrödinger followed up the discovery of quantum nonlocality by showing in detail how the components of a multi-part quantum system depend on each other, even when separated. Beginning in 1972 with the work of Stuart Freedman and John Clauser, a series of quantum-optic EPR experiments testing Bell-inequality violations and other aspects of quantum systems have demonstrated that, like it or not, quantum mechanics and the Nature it describes are indeed nonlocal. Einstein's spooky actions at a distance are really out there in the physical world.

How and why is quantum mechanics non-local? Nonlocality comes from two seemingly conflicting aspects of the quantum formalism: (1) energy, momentum, and angular momentum—important properties of light and matter—are conserved in all quantum systems in the sense that, in the absence of external forces and torques, their net values must remain unchanged as the system evolves, while (2) in the wave functions describing emitted particles in a quantum system, as indicated by the uncertainty principle, the conserved quantities may be indefinite and unspecified and typically can span a large range of possible values. This non-specifity persists until a measurement is made that "collapses" the wave function and fixes the measured quantities with specific values. These seemingly inconsistent requirements of (1) and (2) raise an important question: how can the wave functions describing the separated members of a system of particles, which may be light-years apart, have arbitrary and unspecified values for the conserved quantities and yet respect the conservation laws when the wave functions are collapsed?

This paradox is resolved in quantum mechanics because the quantum wave functions of particles are entangled, a term coined by Schrödinger and meaning that even when the wave functions describe system parts that are spatially separated and out of light-speed contact, the separate wave functions continue to depend on each other and cannot be separately specified. In particular, their conserved quantities in the components must add up to the values possessed by the overall quantum system before it separated into parts.

How could this entanglement and preservation of conservation laws possibly be arranged by Nature? The mathematics of quantum mechanics gives us no answers to this question; it only insists that the wave functions of separated parts of a quantum system must depend on each other. Theorists prone to abstraction have found it convenient to abandon the three-dimensional universe and describe such quantum systems as residing in a many-dimensional Hilbert hyper-space, with conserved variables forming extra dimensions, in which the interconnections between particle wave functions are represented as allowed sub-regions of the overall hyper-space. That has led to elegant mathematics, but is not much help in visualizing what is really going on in the physical world. The two leading interpretations of the quantum formalism, the Copenhagen interpretation and the Many-Worlds interpretation (MWI), are both silent on how nonlocality and entanglement actually work. Hugh Everett III, the originator of the MWI, labeled EPR nonlocality as a "false paradox" in his original paper and promised to address non-locality in a later publication, which never appeared. David Bohm's interpretation of quantum mechanics (which is really an alternative to the orthodox quantum formalism) attempts to accommodate nonlocality by hypothesizing a "nonlocal field," but Bohm did not explain what precisely that was, how it operated, or how its superluminal aspects and preferred reference frame avoided conflicts with special relativity.

The only interpretation of quantum mechanics that, to my knowledge, adequately explains quantum nonlocality is the transactional interpretation (TI), which I originated in 1986. The TI provides a tight and satisfying description of nonlocality by interpreting the "psi-star" complex conjugate versions of quantum wave functions, always present in the quantum formalism, as advanced waves that go backward in space-time, back down the paths of particle wave functions "psi," and "handshake" with the emitter, meshing only when conserved quantities match, thereby permitting potential quantum events to emerge into reality only when the conservation laws are observed. This allows the treatment of quantum wave functions as real waves traveling in 3-D space, without the need for casting them into some synthetic Hilbert hyperspace. Thus in the TI the system evolves in space-time while preserving conservation laws by "feeling its way into the future" with multiple transactional handshakes.

In the October 28, 2012 online edition of Nature Physics, a paper entitled "Quantum non-locality based on finite speed causal influences leads to superluminal signaling" by J. D. Bancal, et al, examines the nonlocality of quantum mechanics from another direction. They consider Bell-type EPR experiments in which entangled pairs of photons are given entangled polarizations by the emission process (through angular momentum conservation) and their polarization states are measured in some selected polarization basis (H/V linear, ±45° linear, or L/R circular) by downstream detectors. Quantum mechanics requires that whenever the detection bases of two such measurements match, the measured values must also match. This requirement is called an "EPR correlation," referring to the work of Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen. (For a full discussion of such tests of quantum mechanics, see my AV column "Einstein's Spooks and Bell's Theorem" in the January 1990 issue of Analog Science Fiction/Fact, http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw37.html.)

The authors of the Bancal paper assume that they can replace orthodox quantum mechanics by some unspecified semi-classical process in which the "causal influences" have a well-defined propagation velocity and travel between measurements to insure that the polarization correlations match. It has already been well established through the work of J. S. Bell and others that any such causal influences traveling as velocities less than or equal to the speed of light cannot account for the EPR correlations observed in Bell-type EPR experiments. The authors of the Bancal paper extend consideration to include causal influences traveling as velocities greater than the speed of light. They show that causal influences traveling as velocities greater than the speed of light can indeed account for EPR correlations, but the assumption of superluminal influences carries with it the inevitable consequence that signaling between observers at the superluminal speed of the causal influences becomes possible.

Special relativity forbids such signaling at well-defined superluminal speeds because its existence would allow the discovery of a preferred reference frame and would destroy the even-handedness with which relativity treats all inertial reference frames. Thus, the authors concluded that no semiclassical explanation of quantum nonlocality and EPR correlations is possible, even when superluminal causal influences are allowed.

We note that extensions of the Many-Worlds interpretation have attempted to deal with quantum nonlocality by hypothesizing a traveling "split" between worlds, i.e., universes, that originates at the site of one measurement and propagates to the sites of other measurements, in order to arrange consistent EPR correlations between measurement results. This moving split is just the kind of moving causal influence with a well-defined propagation velocity that has been ruled out by the Bancal paper.

What's wrong with the Bancal paper and its arguments? Nothing, really, in that it presents a hypothesis that some have seriously entertained and then demonstrates its unacceptable implications. However, the basic approach, one that has been taken by many other works in the physics literature, seems intended to mystify and obscure quantum mechanics and nonlocality rather than to clarify and understand them.

The transactional interpretation, which is not referenced or considered in the Bancal paper, describes "causal influences," i.e., the wave functions psi and psi-star of the emitted entangled photons, as propagating in both time directions along the trajectories of the particles and handshaking to observe conservation laws by building in the observed EPR correlations. The causal influences are not superluminal, but rather retro-causal. Does this causal link imply that superluminal signaling is possible? Not in the sense considered in the Bancal paper. The lines of communication for the entangled EPR photons, as described by the transactional interpretation, are all along light-like world lines that transform properly under the Lorentz transformations of relativity, favoring no preferred inertial reference frame and remaining completely consistent with special relativity.

Nonlocal signaling is not forbidden by the transactional interpretation, but it is also not required. The question of whether quantum nonlocality and entanglement can be used for signaling between observers remains as an open question. It would not be in conflict with special relativity, but it might lead to violations of causality. It is widely believed in the physics community that nonlocal signaling is impossible, and indeed there are "no-signal theorems" in the physics literature that claim to prove this mathematically. However, there are also papers pointing out flaws in these "theorems" and demonstrating that they would also rule out well-established quantum properties like Bose-Einstein symmetrization. Thus, from my own point of view, the possibility of nonlocal signaling is an open question that urgently needs to be tested experimentally.

References:

•Superluminal Causation in EPR: "Quantum non-locality based on finite speed causal influences leads to superluminal signaling," by J. D. Bancal, S. Pironio, A. Achin, Y-C Liang, V. Scarani, and N. Gisin, Nature Physics 8, 867–870 (2012); http://arxiv.org/pdf/1110.3795.pdf.

•The EPR Paper: Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen, "Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?" Physical Review 47, 777-780 (1935).

•Bell's Inequalities: John S. Bell, "On the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox," Physics 1, 195-200 (1964);

•John S. Bell, "On the Problem of Hidden Variables in Quantum Mechanics," Reviews of Modern Physics 38, 447-452 (1966).

•EPR Experiments: Stuart J. Freedman and John F. Clauser, "Experimental Test of Local Hidden-Variable Theories," Physical Review Letters 28, 938-941 (1972).

•The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: "The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics," John G. Cramer, Reviews of Modern Physics 58, 647 (1986); http://faculty.washington.edu/jcramer/TI/tiqm_1986.pdf;

•"Why Everettians Should Appreciate the Transactional Interpretation," R. E. Kastner and John G. Cramer, arXiv:quant-ph/1001. 2867; http://arxiv.org/abs/1001.2867.

SF Novels by John Cramer: my two hard SF novels, Twistor and Einstein's Bridge, are newly released as eBooks and are available at: http://bookviewcafe.com/bookstore/?s=Cr amer&submit=Search.

Alternate View Columns Online: Electronic reprints of over 160 "The Alternate View" columns by John G. Cramer, previously published in Analog, are available online at: http://www.npl.washington.edu/av.

THE REFERENCE LIBRARY

Don Sakers
| 2367 words

Science fiction has a very mixed record on issues of human diversity.

On one hand, much of SF celebrates diversity in a way no other literature can match. Science fiction taught us to respect intelligent life regardless of its outward form: robot or lizard-creature, microscopic entity or living planet, million-year-old vegetative consciousness or sapient rock, all deserve to be treated fairly.

On the other hand, SF was (and arguably still is) behind the curve when it came to human diversity. How could it be otherwise? Modern SF was born and came of age in the WASP-dominated world of the 1920s–50s; it was largely written and edited by and for white American males of the educated class. The few prominent women writers in the field went by initials (C.L. Moore) or used gender-ambiguous bylines (Leigh Brackett, Andre Norton), allowing squeamish male readers to convince themselves they were reading the work of other men.

When non-WASP characters appeared at all in SF stories of the period, they were treated stereotypically. Female characters, in general, conformed to the most sexist clichés—and the vanishingly few gay characters, always predatory villains, had it even worse.

These excesses were relatively few; much more frequently, non-male-WASP characters were simply absent... which was just a different level of chauvinism.

One can't fault the writers of the day; they were products of their culture. Especially in pre-war America, casual racism and sexism were pervasive in a way that's hard to believe today. Astounding/Analog, as the center of the SF universe at the time, was certainly complicit. Isaac Asimov, in his autobiography In Memory Yet Green, said of the legendary editor John W. Campbell, "He was a devout believer in the inequality of man and felt that the inequality could be detected by outer signs such as skin and hair coloring. Though he treated all men kindly and decently in his personal life... the fact is that, in theory, he felt that people of northwestern European extraction were the best human beings." Campbell was fairly typical in this.

Fortunately, time and the larger culture didn't stand still. As diversity gained traction in America, this progress was reflected in the pages of SF. With the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the counterculture message of nonconformity, and associated phenomena, science fiction became (a little) more diverse.

Occasional characters of color started to appear in SF, especially in the works of the field's leaders Arthur C. Clarke and Robert A. Heinlein—although many readers and critics missed them entirely. Strong, independent women also showed up in the pages of SF stories and novels. Gradually, character names took on more varied ethnic flavors.

Of particular note is a trilogy written by Mack Reynolds, one of the most popular SF writers of the time. The first two books, published as serials in Analog, are Black Man's Burden (December 1961 & January 1962) and Border, Breed nor Birth (July & August 1962). The third, The Best Ye Breed, was not published until 1978. This trilogy deals with a future independent, progressive North Africa and features many characters of color. To modern ears, parts of the stories border on offensive, but they were revolutionary for their time.

In many ways, Star Trek was a fine representative of the SF of this period, with its inclusion of a black woman as an integral part of the Enterprise bridge crew. These days, it's hard to appreciate what a breakthrough Lieutenant Uhura symbolized—just as it's hard to believe that Star Trek was the venue for television's first interracial kiss.

The broadening popularity of the field in the wake of Star Trek brought a greater diversity of readers (and writers). Also, society became more accepting of diversity—in fact, society seemed almost to move more quickly than SF did. By the 1980s and 1990s, real-life space shuttle crews were more diverse than the average starship crew in SF.

So where are we today? We have characters (and writers) of color and lesbian/gay/transgender characters (and writers)—but they're largely obligatory tokens. Women appear as fully rounded characters, and women writers are well represented in the field—but many women SF writers still have trouble being taken seriously, and the SF community is convulsed over issues of sexism and sexual harassment. Science fiction, by history and (arguably) by its very nature, remains a product of Western culture, imbued will all the associated values—good and bad alike.

Let me share an illustrative anecdote. In 2012, there was a sensation involving the movie The Hunger Games. One beloved character, Rue, was played by an actor of col-or. (In the book, Rue is specifically and carefully described as being what we would call African-American.) A substantial number of viewers objected... vehemently. Apparently, they didn't like having this very sympathetic character portrayed as black. Another substantial number of viewers spoke out against this display of racism, feeling that Rue's skin color was a vital part of the character. Two competing worldviews in the arena of science fiction.

All things being equal, I think science fiction is still much more comfortable with the ideas of cultural and biological diversity than with their reality. We're much more likely to want to read about green-blooded insectoid aliens than about African Muslim women.

Yet I also believe that most of us are intellectually and emotionally honest enough to feel uncomfortable with our discomfort. When push comes to shove, we believe all that stuff about respecting all intelligent life in spite of its outward form... and so, more often than not, we choose to swallow our discomfort and expand our horizons.

Fitfully and falteringly, we move in the right direction... and bring the field along with us.

Mothership: Tales From Afrofuturism and Beyond

edited by Bill Campbell & Edward Austin Hall Rosarium Publishing, 350 pages, $19.95 (trade paperback)

ISBN: 978-0-9891411-4-7

Genre: Original Anthology

Mothership is billed as presenting "just a part of the changing face of speculative fiction," and features thirty-nine stories by forty writers of color. Some are familiar names (Tobias Buckell, S.P. Somtow), while others are up-and-comers.

As you might expect from the term "speculative fiction," not all of these stories are science fiction—there's fantasy, steampunk, and horror as well. And despite the term "Afrofuturism," these stories aren't limited to the concerns of Africa or African-Americans. Frankly, what we have here is simply an anthology of good stories.

Market realities dictate that it's not enough to have good stories by relatively unfamiliar writers—there has to be a gimmick. In this case, readers need to look past the gimmick at the stories themselves.

Mothership's keyword is "diversity." If these stories share anything, it's that they spring more from the tradition of literary SF than from the Campbell era. To put it in magazine terms, you'd see most of these stories in Asimov's or Fantasy & Science Fiction before you'd see them in Analog. Not surprising, really—the editors come from academia. Don't let that deter you.

Among the standouts in this volume are Thaddeus Howze's "Bludgeon," a Twilight Zone-ish tale of alien invasion with a surprise ending; Carlos Hernandez's "The Aphotic Ghost," in which a father comes to terms with his talented son's death on Mount Everest; and Nisi Shawl's "Good Boy," a parable of virtual reality.

If there's anything missing from this volume, it's background on the contributors. Yes, one can always turn to the Internet—but I kept wishing there was an "about the authors" section.

For readers who want to see more diversity in SF, Mothership is definitely worth the price.

New Under the Sun

Nancy Kress and Therese Pieczynski Phoenix Pick, 183 pages, $12.99 (trade paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-61242-123-0

Genre: Biological SF, Psychological/Sociological SF, Shared/Franchised World

Phoenix Pick's "Stellar Guild" series publishes a novella by a big-name author along with a companion novella or novelette by a protégé chosen by the big name. As far as gimmicks go, it's an interesting one, and the results have so far been good.

Nancy Kress, multiple Nebula Award-winner, brings us "Annabel Lee"—a gripping story of a young girl unknowingly infected by an alien parasite in a near-future world. This being Nancy Kress, there's a lot more going on; Annabel's family is as troubled as any other, and her friends have their own problems. And as Annabel grows up, her abilities become greater....

Therese Piecsynski's companion piece, "Strange Attraction," is set in the 1980s and combines chaos theory with South American militias in a tale of another woman with unusual abilities. Paula is a U.S. expatriate in Nicaragua during the revolution, and strange events follow her around. Electrical plants stop working, her friends get killed... and lately she's been involved with a powerful, deadly whirlwind that seems to feed on fear and pain.

Together, these two stories do what science fiction is so good at: exploring the impact of unexpected change on people. The theme of people with amazing abilities is as old as literature itself—but here Kress and Pieczynski ring new changes on the idea.

The Exodus Towers

Jason M. Hough Del Rey, 527 pages, $9.99 (mass market paperback) iBooks, Kindle: $7.99, Nook: $9.99 (e-book)

ISBN: 978-0-345-53714-0 Series: Dire Earth 2

Genres: Adventure SF, Post-Apocalyptic, Visitors From Space

I reviewed The Darwin Elevator, book one of the Dire Earth series, in the September 2013 issue. Jason M. Hough and Del Rey have done us a favor by issuing the second book, The Exodus Towers, just a few months later. By the time you read this, book three (The Plague Force) should be out as well.

A quick recap: It's 2283. At some indeterminate time in the past, aliens called the Builders established a space elevator with a terminus in Darwin, Australia. Along with superior technology, the aliens also brought a plague that turned most humans into savage, mindless beasts.

Only two groups survived: The people of Darwin, protected by a plague-resistant force that extends nine kilometers from the elevator, and a very few others who have natural immunity to the plague. Darwin became the only refuge of civilization in the world, supported by salvage missions run by immunes like Skyler Luiken and his crew. The immense structure of the Elevator, anchored in synchronous orbit by a derelict ship of the Builders, serves as agricultural space and additional room for the remaining humans.

The Darwin Elevator told of Skyler, scientist Tania Sharma, and a cast of other compelling characters as they fought for survival while trying to solve the mystery of the Builders.

The Exodus Towers picks up right where the first book ended, at the Brazilian site of a crashed Builders ship. Strange mobile towers emit the same aura that protects Darwin from the plague. With them, Skyler and Tania found a new colony, called Exodus. Then they discover a second space elevator....

Before they can solve the new mystery, the new Exodus colony has to fight off not only the brutish subhumans, but also a band of immune soldiers who don't like a new colony in their territory. Plus, there's been a theocratic coup in Darwin, and the new rulers want control of Exodus as well.

Oh, and there are these aliens....

The Dire Earth books have suspense, thrills, adventure, and characters you care about. In addition, they're good science fiction. I can't recommend them enough.

Pirates of the Timestream

Steve White Baen, 247 pages, $14.00 (trade paperback) iBooks, Kindle, Nook: $8.99 (e-book)

ISBN: 978-1-4516-3909-4

Genres: Adventure SF, Trips in Time

Jason Thanou, special operations officer with the Temporal Regulatory Authority has struggled against the nefarious temporal plots of the Transhumanists in two previous books ( Blood of the Heroes and Sunset of the Gods ). Along the way, he fought—and bested—the Teloi, a batch of hostile aliens whose favorite form of recreation is genocide.

Now Thanou and his stalwart crew travel back to the seventeenth-century Caribbean, where he finds that the Teloi are alive and well, and making mischief that threatens not only humanity, but the fabric of reality itself.

Luckily, Thanou happens across the one man who can help him: the legendary British admiral turned privateer and pirate, Henry Morgan.

Steve White is good at this stuff; he knows his history, and he has a light, brisk style that doesn't get in the way of the story. Mixing time travel, hostile aliens, and pirates together might have been a disaster, but White makes it work. Great fun.

Saga Volume One and
Saga Volume Two

Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples Image, 160 pages, $14.99 (trade paperback) iBooks: $9.99 (v.1), $14.99 (v.2), Kindle: $8.06 (v.1), $11.22 (v.2) (e-book)

ISBN: 978-1-60706-401-9 (v.1), 978-1-60706-692-7 (v.2)

Genres: Adventure SF, Graphic Novels, Science Fantasy, Space Opera

The biggest thing to hit the comics world recently isn't Superman, Batman, or the Avengers—it's a space opera comic that tells an up-to-date story while brimming with an old-fashioned sense of wonder. This isn't just my opinion: as I write this, Saga has just been awarded the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story.

Two worlds have been at war for time immemorial. Landfall is home to a race of winged humanoids ruled by a robot dynasty; its moon, Wreath, is inhabited by a horned race of warriors. Since destroying either world would send the other out of its orbit, Landfall and Wreath have moved their war to the vast galaxy. For generations and across hundreds of worlds, often working through proxy armies, the two peoples have fought bitter and brutal wars.

Alanna, a soldier of Landfall, was assigned to a military prison on the distant world Cleave. Marko, one of the most bloodthirsty warriors of Wreath, renounced his heritage and surrendered to Landfall soldiers on Cleave. He was taken as a prisoner of war.

Alanna and Marko fell in love and escaped, hiding on Cleave. The story starts with the birth of their daughter, Hazel. Almost immediately, they're beset by rival troops of soldiers, and they're off on an odyssey that will lead them across Cleave and into the distant reaches of space.

Meanwhile, both governments send bounty hunters to track down the pair and bring back their daughter—who is the only viable offspring of the two peoples in millennia.

Saga is a nearly perfect story. Both Alanna and Marko are strong, powerful characters that instantly engage the reader's sympathy. Their universe is populated by wondrous creatures and places, from ghost children to multi-limbed bounty hunters, from forests of rocketship trees to the depravity of Sextillion, the galaxy's premier brothel.

This is the graphic novel form at its best, a fusion of words and pictures that is more than its parts. The plot is solid and fast-paced, the characters all three-dimensional, the universe compellingly detailed. Even if you don't think you like graphic novels, you owe it to yourself to pick up Saga.

With that, I am out of space for this issue. It's a big and diverse world out there, filled with all kinds of people—enjoy it.

Don Sakers is the author of The Eighth Succession and The Leaves of October. For more information, visit www.scattered worlds.com.

BRASS TACKS

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Trevor Quachri:

Just read your editorial, "On Genre." I'm not sure I came away with an accurate reading of your personal preferences on definitions, but at one point you made the point ('scuse the rep) about the differences between horror, fantasy, and SF. Then there's some of that "new age" stuff that doesn't belong to any particular genre. Mostly an author just has an idea and tries to convince his audience that it's profound.

I became a bit enamored with SF back in the Astounding days and remember at one time Mr. Campbell tried to describe what science fiction was all about. I also remember Dr. Asimov complaining that Campbell limited what he could write. He felt his ingenuity was being stifled and said that Campbell had too rigid a definition and wouldn't publish anything Asimov wrote that didn't follow his editorial guidelines.

I don't keep back issues and at my age my memory is sometimes a transitory thing. But that was the jist of the deal, and I'm afraid I agreed with Mr. Campbell even though (or maybe because) Asimov was one of my favorite writers. And that's saying a lot because there was an enormous number of greaterthan-great authors back then. I'm afraid that nowadays, I have trouble remembering the names of most of the authors I read and associating them with stories. I hope it's me and not them. I do sometimes have a problem remembering names and four-syllable descriptive words. It's very frustrating getting old, in part because no one warns you ahead of time about all of the problems.

But at one point, I did cancel my subscription to Analog because I felt the stories had drifted too far away from SF and into the social speculative areas. I have a great appreciation for the study some authors have made into some of these social and psychological areas, but for the most part, I don't believe most of their speculation, even with my theoretical hat on, and I certainly don't consider any of it science fiction. However, on occasion, I do like some fantasy. At one time, in addition to Astounding, I subscribed to both Galaxy and Fantasy & SF. But that was then... and when I read a fantasy magazine, I expect fantasy.

By the way, I loved your footnote about "literature" as a genre. If you ever come up with a definition, I may not be the only one who'd like to know. Two words come to mind: "Snob" and "Prig." Webster defines them using words almost as meaningless.

Leonard R. Cook Goleta, CA

Dear Editor,

An editorial should make the point right away, then develop the reasons to support it. You spent the first half explaining why you do not or did not like science fiction. I got bored and quit reading, never getting to your issue. Editorial writers lose readers if they don't make their point up front. Also, it doesn't help to tell fans that you had trouble liking science fiction.

The old editor, Campbell, kept my attention, made his point, backed it up, and quit. It never dragged.

Most newspaper managers don't write the editorial. They get to specify what they want, but writing it is a different skill. Let someone else write the editorials.

Joseph Blacksten

Mr. Blacksten,

Your criticisms aren't inaccurate, exactly, but they are somewhat beside the point. I wanted to take a different approach from what I had just done with the more opinionated two-part editorial preceding it, so the looser tone and structure were intentional—sorry you didn't care for them. There are many ways to write editorials, and they're not necessarily all going to be arguments that need supporting evidence; sometimes they're going to be more conversational. If that kind of editorial isn't to your tastes, you'll still have plenty of the other sort from me in the future, and no shortage of guest editorials.

If your take-away from the editorial, though, was that I had trouble liking science fiction, you might want to go back and actually read the rest of it.

Dear Trevor,

I wish to comment on John G. Cramer's Oct. 2013 Analog article The Alternate View. On page 233 of the Penguin 1959 edition of Arthur Koestler's The Sleepwalkers, I found that Kepler, "confident that victory was just around the corner—wrote a kind of obituary notice for classical cosmology."

"Oh, for a supply of tears that I may weep over the pathetic diligence of Apianus [author of a very popular textbook] who, relying on Ptolemy, wasted his valuable time and ingenuity on the construction of spirals, loops, helixes, vortices, and a whole labyrinth of convolutions, in order to represent that which exists only in the mind, and which Nature entirely refuses to accept as her likeness. And yet that man has shown us that, with his penetrating intelligence, he would have been capable of mastering Nature."

We are now at a similar time. Having scanned and learned the implication of some of the late-revered astronomer Halton Arp's articles based on telescopic observations, about the true nature of QUASARS, and having also read some of Anthony L. Peratt's papers in the IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science, not to mention scanning his classic text-book Physics of the Plasma Universe, I am convinced that the whole concept of our universe, as taught by gravitationally centred astronomers, is as faulty as was Ptolemy's concept of the Solar System.

"Oh for a supply of tears" for the mathematicians in front of their screens, divorced from actual observations, who have dreamt up the whole edifice of nuclear powered suns, black holes, big bangs, dark matter, dark energy, accelerating expansion, frozen magnetic fields, re-closing magnetic lines. These figments of the imagination are about to be swept into oblivion by the light of the NPA (Natural Philosophy Alliance) SAFIRE project which, when complete, will have experimentally proven that suns are energised by electric currents from the cosmos and not by internal nuclear reactions.

Of course there are nuclear reactions but these are high in the upper reaches of the Sun's atmosphere. Some years ago Analog reported about university students achieving such reactions with linear accelerators of stunning simplicity.

I must pay homage to Donald E. Scott's book T he Electric Sky which I first read three years ago. I found that I was not the only one scornful of magnetic fields in the Sun without reference to the electric currents generating those magnetic fields and the whole unbelievable edifice of the big bang, black holes, etc. The new Electric Universe is much simpler. Even though much remains enigmatic, it is subject to experimentation not conjecture upon conjecture.

If the Big Bang is a figment of imagination so too must be the micro-wave "Sound" from it. Perhaps you should reclassify John's article as fiction.

Henry Broadbent Victoria, Australia

The author responds:

Sorry Henry, but I put Big Bang and nuclear-powered star disbelievers in the same category as climate change disbelievers, relativity disbelievers, and flat-earthers. There is simply too much consistent evidence for the Big Bang, including the cosmic microwave background and the synthesis of deuterium and lithium in its hot aftermath.

There is always a fringe of would-be theorists who will present alternatives to any well-publicized mainstream theory, including special and general relativity and quantum mechanics, but when examined in detail these theories inevitably fail to deal with all the known facts. For example, I wonder how suns energized by electric currents could produce the solar neutrinos that are observed to come from the sun.

Dear Analog,

Seems I've been waiting quite some time for an article like Ken Walsh's "The Evaporation of Worlds" to come along. It answered a number of questions I'd been wondering about.

But it also makes me think it is time to dust off Hal Clement's Iceworld, featuring aliens from Saar, a world so hot that its atmosphere is an equilibrium between liquid and gaseous sulfur. Its sulfur-breathing inhabitants, upon encountering our Earth, get the icy shivers at the mere thought of a world so horrifically cold that sulfur is a solid rock. I would like to ask Dr. Walsh if such a world as Saar is probable or possible, and if a world that hot would remain stable long enough for intelligent life to evolve. Such hot earths may be more plentiful in the galaxy than temperate earths like our own.

Stephen Block St. Louis, MO

The author responds:

It is very possible that a world with a similar temperature range to Saar exists. By galactic standards, the temperatures on Saar appear quite moderate, as the melting point of sulfur is only about 115 degrees Celsius, or only slightly higher than the boiling point of water at sea level. Also, if the world were in orbit around a Sun-like star, it could maintain such temperatures for billions of years.

Trevor Quachri,

My hope for you is that you do as well as your predecessors. You will receive a certain amount of nay saying and hand wringing since you are taking over from Stanley Schmidt. It will not be worth any of your time to engage these folks. I have been reading this magazine in both forms since 1954. I have seen all the crap folks have to say to the new editor every time. Ignore it. From John W. Campbell, to Ben Bova, to Stanley Schmidt, and now to you. Every one of these editors make their mark on the magazine. Here's hoping you do as well. So, finally, my congratulations on your promotion.

John Whittington West Fork, AR

UPCOMING EVENTS

Anthony Lewis
| 390 words

NOTE: Membership rates and other details often change after we have gone to press. Check the websites for the most recent information.

28–30 March 2014

THE 3rd 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.

4–6 April 2014

AD ASTRA 2014 (Toronto area SF conference) at Markham Holiday Inn Hotel & Suites, Markham ON Canada. Guests of Honor: David Weber, Steve Erikson, Anne Groell, Patricia Briggs. Registration until 31 March 2014: C$60 (18+), C$40 (13–17), C$24 (8–12); At the door: C$70 (18+), C$50 (13–17), C$30 (8–12). Info: http://www.ad-astra.org/; info@ad-adtra.org.

11–13 April 2014

CONGLOMERATION 2014 (Louisville multimedia conference) at Ramada plaza Hotel, Louisville, KY. Author Guest of Honor: John Ringo; Artist Guest of Honor: Vincent Villafranca. Membership: $35 until 28 March 2014; $45 thereafter and at the door. Info: http://www.conglomeration.info/; PO Box 32095, Louisville KY 40232-2095.

17–20 April 2014

MINICON 49 (twin cities area SF conference) at Doubletree Bloomington, Bloomington, MN. Author Guests of Honor: Catherynne M. Valente, Janny Wurts; Artist Guest of Honor: Don Maitz. Membership until 17 March 2014: $40 (adult 21+), $20 (student under 21), $10 (kids 6–12); At the door: $60 (adult 21+), $45 (student under 21), $15 (kids 6–12); Supporting: $15. Info: http://www.mnstf.org/mini-con49/.

17–20 April 2014

NORWESCON37 (Pacific Northwest regional SF conference) at Doubletree Hilton, Seattle Airport. Writer Guest of Honor: Michael Moorcock, Artist Guest of Honor: Robert Gould; Special Guest of Honor: Seanan McGuire; Costuming Guest of Honor: Animal X; Spotlight Publisher: 47North. Membership: $60 in advance. Info: http://www.norwescon.org/; info@norwescon.org; +1.425.243.4692.

25–28 April 2014

COSTUME-CON 32 (SF/Fsy costuming conference) at Toronto Sheraton Hotel, Toronto, ON, Canada. Membership: $75 (18+) until 31 December 2013; C$85 until 31 March 2014; C$25 (youth/student); Supporting: C$25. Info: http://costumecon32.com/; Box 15042, 1507 Ynoge Street, Toronto ON Canada M4T 1Z0.

14–18 August 2014

LONCON 3 (72nd 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), $3/£2 (infant), $390/£230 (family); 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.

INFORMATION

368 words

TREVOR QUACHRI........................................ Editor

EMILY HOCKADAY......................... Editorial Assistant

MARY GRANT................................ Editorial Assistant

DEANNA MCLAFFERTY...... Editorial Admin Assistant

JAYNE KEISER............................ Typesetting Director

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KEVIN DORIS................ Senior Typesetting Coordinator

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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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Analog Science Fiction and Fact (Astounding), Vol. CXXXIII, No. 3, March 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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