Analog Science Fiction and Fact - 2014-08
Author: Penny Publications
Date: 2014-09-01 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction; Science Fiction; non-fiction; Magazine; Periodical
Rights: Kindle Edition, © 2014 Penny Publications

Analog Science Fiction and Fact

Kindle Edition, 2014 © Penny Publications

Championship B'tok

Edward M. Lerner | 14652 words

Chapter 1

By the directed stimulation of neurons, virtual knight captured imaginary pawn.

"Crap," Lyle Logan said. Many thousand championship games uploaded into his neural implant—and not one of them anticipated that gambit.

"Mate in five moves," Corrigan agreed. "And, by the way, we'll arrive before lunch."

Lyle banished the game from his mind's eye. Likewise, his opponent, with the perpetual devil-may-care smirk. Wearing a snug leather helmet, its chinstraps dangling, and aviator goggles. Seated in the open cockpit of some dawn-of-flight biplane. As AI avatars went, that wasn't especially ironic. Corrigan might have been out walking on the virtual wing.

Lyle told himself, yet again, that there was no shame in losing at chess to an artificial intelligence. Even to an AI who specialized in piloting, not games of strategy. Even in losing over and over, more times than Lyle could remember.

Doubtless Corrigan remembered.

"Good game," Lyle said. The measure of his boredom was that he spoke aloud when neural interface would have been faster. One measure, in any event. Should anyone ever ask, he had spent the entire trip at two gees, without a break except the few minutes at turnover, for the miserable-duty pay.

Why did a roboship never break down within a billion klicks of civilization?

With a thought he pulled up virtual images from the ship's sensors. 2182 DV189 finally presented a recognizable, if battered, profile. On that Phobos-sized, stippled snowball, one speck was the autonomous mining ship he had been sent to repair. He was close enough, at last, to detect its low-power, self-contained, traffic-control transponder. The mining ship was otherwise unresponsive, whether queried, commanded, or sent a master reset.

Of course, a multibillion-sol ship going silent was why Lyle had been dispatched into the outer darkness aboard a very fast ship.

"How soon can you set us down?" he asked Corrigan.

"Forty minutes."

He'd wondered for days what could have gone wrong on the miner. Something unusual, for sure. Any AI had too many levels of redundancy, too many fail-safes and fallback modes, to have gone silent without warning. And yet this miner had. Rumor had it, others, too.

With nothing better to do, Lyle tried, once again, to make contact. Nada. For the hell of it, he cranked up the beam power from the comm laser. Still no response, but the vapors boiled off the snowball revealed water, oxygen, and lots of hydrocarbons. Even metals.

"I'll suit up," Lyle announced. Sooner started, sooner finished. And sooner on his way back to civilization. Or, though he hoped otherwise, dispatched on another service call. The Kuiper Belt was big, and no way, no how, could human crew accompany every ship.

"We have robots to make the initial survey."

Yes, they had. Perhaps he would even end up delegating the repairs to bots. But he would diagnose the problem faster, because the bots weren't all that bright. Had they been half as smart as Corrigan—

He wouldn't go near them, much less be alone with them. Who would?

AIs were colleagues, often friends. Certainly Corrigan was a friend, if not the sort of buddy with whom he could share a carouse.

So why not AI-smart robots?

Robots, somehow, were different. Because they would be... competitors? Possible successors? Maybe. That was only part of it. The reasoned part. The noncreepy part. He wasn't the type to imagine things going bump in the night—but neither did he want to create them. Give enough smarts to robots, and would they be so different from zombies and vampires?

If dreading smart robots made him irrational, so be it.

Lyle gestured vaguely, trying to encompass the claustrophobic bridge. The adjoining multipurpose "room," in which he slept, ate, exercised, and washed, was yet tinier. Betty was all legs. Apart from military couriers, he doubted any ship was faster or offered a greater cruising range. "I feel like a change of scenery."

In his mind's eye, Corrigan shrugged. Lyle took that as "okay." Or, maybe, as "wacky human."

On snowballs like the one Betty approached, one docked more so than one landed. He felt his ship shudder, just a bit, as Corrigan fired grapples. By then deceleration had ceased, and with it any semblance of gravity. He waited, already suited up, in the air lock.

As soon as Corrigan had winched them down to the snowball, almost before the AI could dispatch survey bots from a cargo hold, Lyle was through the outer hatch. The distant Sun, although merely a spark, outshone the full Moon seen from Earth. With a bit of amplification by his visor, he could see fine. But that spark, so near the horizon, would soon set. Hills and rubble piles cast long, inky shadows across the pockmarked landscape. Where the Sun managed to reach, the surface glinted: a brittle, frozen froth of ice mottled with tarry streamers. His HUD declared the surface temperature to be a balmy fifty. In degrees absolute.

Mining ship 129 stood, looming, perhaps a hundred meters distant, halfway to the freakishly close horizon. All struts and pipes and reagent tanks, MS129 was as much a factory/smeltery/refinery as a vessel. By comparison, his ship—no matter its thirty meters of fuel tank, reaction-mass tank, and mighty fusion drive—was a toy. Just a whole lot faster than the lumbering miner.

Dozens of robots, motionless, lay strewn across the landscape. That couldn't be good.

Whatever had happened here had happened fast. The first thing a mining ship did was construct tanks to receive what it extracted. He saw only two storage tanks, neither complete.

Lyle's own bots, spiderlike, scuttled toward the miner, rolling out and staking safety cable for him and deploying work lights. On his HUD, status indicators glowed green. He gave the bots a fifty-meter head start before following, hand over hand, his safety tethers clipped to the cable. One careless twitch here could set him adrift in space.

By the time he reached the mining vessel, bots had already begun to encircle it with more cable. Moving clockwise, he began a methodical survey. Calling where the main cable met the loop twelve o'clock, it was at four o'clock where he first spotted a problem.

A more-or-less oval region, about one meter by two, about six meters from the ground, looked... weird. Stuff had boiled/bubbled/spewed from MS129's hull to freeze into a formless glob. The gravity was too feeble and the temperature too cold for anything resembling icicles to have formed.

Per the schematics on his HUD, a primary computing node was just beneath.

A meteoroid strike? Something internal overloaded, shorted out, or otherwise overheating? Maybe. Didn't matter. A single comp node gone bad would not disable the ship. It had three more nodes just like this one.

"Ouch," Corrigan remarked. He was monitoring through Lyle's helmet camera and a radio link.

Lyle resumed his circuit around the inert vessel. At five o'clock on his imaginary clock face, he plunged into the mining ship's long shadow. Methodically he surveyed, as the bots aimed work lights wherever he looked. Nothing seemed amiss until, around ten o'-clock: a second melted-and-recongealed mass. A second main computing node.

Had a meteoroid struck one node, drilled through the ship, to exit through a second node? That wasn't impossible—just damned improbable. He was surprised at Corrigan's failure to comment.

"Are you seeing this?" Lyle netted.

A static hiss was the only answer. Interference from all the metal in the mining ship's hull? Perhaps. Even so, the link should have been relayed around the ship from bot to bot.

With a shrug and a yank on his safety tether, Lyle resumed his survey.

Two comp nodes down, he mused, but the hull seemed otherwise intact. That should leave MS129 with a pair of functioning comp nodes. Unless those, too, had somehow—

Something jabbed Lyle in the back. Something hard. One of his damned robots?

On the emergency radio band, a synthed voice directed, "Do not move."

Chapter 2

Hunters: The intelligent species of the dim red-dwarf Barnard's Star system (see related entry). After the constellation—Ophiuchus, "The Serpent Holder"—in which Barnard's Star can (with a telescope) be seen from Earth, Hunters are commonly referred to as Snakes. In formal/diplomatic usage, for their native world of K'vith, they are known as K'vithians.

Hunters evolved from pack-hunting carnivores. Their early culture centered on clan structures, an apparent extension of preintelligence packs. From that genesis has developed an economic system of pure laissez-faire, caveat-emptor capitalism, centered on competing clan-based corporations. The dominant group dynamics are territoriality between clans—in modern times, the contested "territory" can be commercial rather than geographical in nature—and competition for status within and among clans. Usually of relevance only to the clans, these rivalries have sometimes impacted interstellar relations.

A Hunter enclave exists on the Uranian moon of Ariel, settled by survivors of an unsuccessful Sol system incursion (see related entries. "Himalia Incident" and "Arblen Ems settlement"). Following eighteen years of close United Planets supervision, Ariel Colony has been allowed to exercise broader (but still limited) self-rule.

—Internetopedia

The woman sat alone in the all but deserted cafeteria, picking indifferently at the tossed salad on her meal tray. At the soft zip-zip of shoes against grip strips, she glanced up. "Did I do something wrong?"

"No," Carl Rowland answered, arching an eyebrow. "Why would you ask that?"

"Because the warden made a beeline for me."

Beeline? Earther slang, he supposed. Warden, he understood. As someone had once noted, the most anxious man in a prison.

"UP liaison," Carl corrected. That was his job title, for the past couple of years, anyway, though the change fooled no one. If Ariel was no longer a POW camp, if its residents had been granted new privileges, neither was this the typical United Planets protectorate.

Nor would it ever be. Not on his watch.

The young woman still eyed him skeptically. Only she was no more young than he was middle-aged.

"Let's try this again." Carl offered his hand. "Carl Rowland. We don't see many new faces here." Not human faces, anyway. The Snakes bred like rabbits. That was another thing he worried about, no matter that the population barely topped twenty thousand. "I just stopped by to introduce myself and ask how civilization is faring."

"Grace DiMeara." She set down her fork to shake hands. Hardly anyone did that anymore. "Who says I'm from civilization?"

Truth was, he knew her name. Knew her flight plan, the ship's registration, and her passenger's stated business here. He knew that Grace was thirty-five, though something (her eyes? The massive, antique bracelet? The facial nanornaments so understated he barely saw them?) made her seem older. No ship got to land on this rock without a thorough review. Under his classified title, UPIA station chief, all that intel came through him.

"Simple process of elimination," he said. "You're not from around here."

She had a nice laugh. "If you're planning to chat me up, you may as well have a seat."

He sat. "So, routine flight?"

"That's how I like 'em." Grace reclaimed her fork and went back to pushing lettuce shreds around her bowl. "Anyway, as routine as it could be with the owner aboard."

"Corrine Elman. The worlds-famous reporter."

"That's her."

"Too bad. You had to keep everything shipshape."

"Mmm." Grace fixed her eyes on her salad. Not speaking ill of the boss.

He held in a grin. Grace wouldn't know it, but he and Corinne went way back. To call Corinne a slob would be too kind. But that was from another life, another era. When he had gone by a different name, had worn a different face.

The year he'd spent as Corinne's personal pilot had been among the happiest in his life.

Or, at least, that had been a simpler time. When, with the mob's bounty on his head, he'd only had to fear for himself. That and whether, between projects, Corinne would get bored enough to investigate him. She was scarily good at finding out stuff.

Then the Snakes showed up, aboard a stolen starship.

After swindling the UP, kidnapping humanity's leading scientists (and Corinne, in the wrong place at the wrong time), and shattering the entire freaking Jovian moon of Himalia to cover their tracks, the Snakes made a run for interstellar space. Leaving him, among others, to mount a desperate rescue mission. Successful, too: apart from destroying the only known starship.

In saving Corinne and the rest—and a bunch of Centaur prisoners: the ship's longhostage, rightful crew—he had caught the eye of some UPIA types. Who better to forever bury his past than the United Planet's premier spy agency? Where better to lie low than this godforsaken, ass-end-of-nowhere rock?

And so, here he was. The warden. And Corinne, his supposed friend, whom he had not seen in years, hadn't even bothered to message that she was coming.

"How long will you be on Ariel?" Carl asked.

Grace shrugged. "You'll have to ask the boss."

"You know? I might just do that."

Chapter 3

In a series of glides and hops, Corinne Elman followed her escorts. Only her hops, as often as not, bounced her off the corridor's low ceiling. Too many of her glides did their best to become pratfalls.

While her Snake escorts moved with an understated elegance.

When had she last been farther from Earth than the zenith of a suborbital jaunt? Too long, clearly. She had just begun to reacquire micro-gee skills—and to keep down food— when her ship had reached low-grav little Ariel. Whereupon she discovered new ways to flounder.

That she still owned a long-range interplanetary ship was fairly ridiculous, no matter that renting it out made it a decent investment. But to sell Odyssey would mean admitting she no longer expected to launch on short notice, unconstrained by commercial flight schedules, to chase a Big Story. That she had ceased to be a journalist.

So you are still a journalist? Then quit whining. Quit wallowing. Observe.

At least act like a journalist lest anyone wonder why you're here.

What did she see? A windowless corridor. Without retinal enhancements things would have seemed dim. Other than off Earth, the passageway could have been most anywhere.

Not so the Snakes, streaming both ways.

Snakes: Two arms, two legs, and a head. Upright posture. And there any resemblance to humans ended. Whippet-thin. Nostrils set flat in the plane of the face—and a third, upward-gazing eye set near the apex of the skull.

Hairless and iridescent-scaled. Glimpses of retractable talons in each fingertip (and, as they wore sandals, each toe). The tallest Snakes stood a quarter meter shorter than she—and she struggled to aspire to petite.

Not about you, Corinne chided herself.

Clumsily, she hopped/glided/careened after her minders.

Filter plugs irritated her nostrils without keeping out the smells of rotten eggs, freshly struck matches, and all manner of other sulfurous stinks. Collectively, bouquet de Snake. Aptly, fire and brimstone. Every whiff raised bad memories.

They traveled along a main "road." Lesser tunnels split off every few meters, marked by wall plaques labeled for life support, power generation, and other basic services. To her right, beyond an arc of clear wall, stretched a vast underground farm. To her left, a few meters later, a second plasteel wall looked over an ancient crater. In its hollow sprawled factories, pipelines, and a fusion reactor. Spacesuited workers teemed around a construction whose facade looked newly patched.

How many Snakes had she seen? Dozens, at least. Maybe hundreds. Adults and children. Workers. Families. The ones sporting nape-of-the-neck ridges were male. Clad, regardless of gender, in belted, one-piece jump-suits. A rainbow of colors and adornments denoted schools, civic groups, and utility workers.

But it was the uniforms of Snake officialdom that drew Corinne's eye, the black garb of the police that made her want to cringe. She had had too much experience with Snake warriors. In twenty years, she had not forgotten.

No matter how hard she tried.

A clumsy hop sent her tumbling. "Sorry," she said.

"Careful," said an escort. And he was the talkative member of the pair.

She had visited Ariel before. Visited the Foremost before. It wasn't much farther to the clan leader's office, she remembered, not needing to access the map upload in her implant.

And she had a job to do here, if not what the Foremost might imagine.

"Walt," Corinne netted. "I'm almost there."

In her mind's eye, seated behind a battered wooden desk, an avatar appeared. His suit, two centuries out of style, and the bristly mustache honored Walter Cronkite. The imaginary cigarettes he chain-smoked were an homage to Edward R. Murrow.

"I'm ready," Walt said.

Turning a corner, they came to a foyer offering human-and Snake-sized chairs.

"Here," an escort said. His eyes glazed, telltale of an implant-mediated infosphere consultation.

Wait here, she supposed that meant. Clanspeak implied verbs. Only the more fluid English speakers managed to use verbs appropriately. Glithwah would.

The escort reconnected with the physical world. "Arblen Ems Firh Glithwah, Foremost, in acknowledgment of your arrival."

Definitely, wait here.

Corinne decided: I don't think so.

I'm ready.

So, anyway, Glithwah supposed the message would indicate, in preemptory tone if perhaps not in precise wording. Her implant had shown only a sender ID. Glithwah dismissed the alert, the message unopened, focused on her labors. She didn't have to see this woman, even after agreeing to an interview, although to refuse now could raise suspicions.

None of which elevated keeping an appointment to the importance of understanding the latest accident.

I'm tired of waiting.

The second message might have said that. Or not. Glithwah dismissed it, too, unread, concentrating on recent industrial accidents. More than she could explain—other than by attribution to United Planets saboteurs. And, perhaps related: the pattern of attempts to penetrate the colony's secure networks. (Or, the experts told her, at least two patterns. One grouping of failed intrusions, almost certainly, was by their jailers. The other would-be intruders would be her rivals within the clan.)

And if the surge in accidents had not occupied her thoughts, other important matters would. The productivity of mines, factories, and farms. Demographic data. Staffing trends and labor shortages. Graduation rates and skills deficits. Macroeconomic statistics. Current events on Ariel and across the solar system...

Though the details were endless, the flood of information somehow kept managing to grow. It was too much to wrap her brain around. Even offloading much of the load to her implant. Even netting to trusted allies. Even delegating simulations and analyses to trusted AIs.

But maybe with an AI in her brain? Not netted and bandwidth-limited. Physically embedded, thoroughly integrated.

Though they remained a tiny minority, more and more humans were doing that. The Augmented, the changelings called themselves. Two minds, one never sleeping, in one body.

A temptation, every now and again, just for a moment....

And if the notion weren't disgusting? It wouldn't have mattered. Glithwah's United Planets overlords would never allow the clan access to such advanced technology.

And so, summary graphs, tables, and animations lined her office walls. As for her aspirations for the clan and her progress toward achieving them, the walls gave no hints.

At a hesitant knock, Glithwah glanced at the door. "What?" she snapped.

An aide entered. He said, "Foremost, that woman in attendance for her interview."

Mind to mind, "that woman" would have been fine. Too kind, in fact: Corinne Elman merited no courtesy. Aloud, however, the phrase lacked discipline.

No matter that humans could not reproduce any Hunter language. (Absent the gene tweaks to grow an extra pair of vocal cords. A handful of diplomats had had the procedure done.) Plenty of humans understood clan-speak. Elman had never demonstrated that aptitude, but Glithwah had her suspicions. And if the woman didn't understand? She would have a translator AI netted in.

As Glithwah would link with Loshtof, to interpret and analyze the journalist's every word and gesture. The AI was but a netted command away.

(No matter that Glithwah had long ago trained herself to think in all major human languages, and even to grasp their often absurd units of measure. "Know your enemy" was clan protocol long before Sun Tzu scribbled The Art of War.)

"Respect for my guest," she growled at the aide.

Because she would not have that woman stirring up the human public over needless slights. Some waiting, though, to put the human in her place? To remind who was Foremost of the clan and who a mere gossipmonger? That was appropriate. Perhaps even expected.

In English this time, her voice pitched to carry to the anteroom, Glithwah ordered, "In five minutes, show in Ms. Elman."

His head bowed and shoulders hunched, Cluth Monar scurried away.

Glithwah netted to a security cam. Her visitor squirmed in her chair. Jammed her hands into pockets, then removed them. Studied her nails. Curled a long tress around a finger. Once, twice, the woman's eyes glazed over in a netted consultation.

Glithwah returned to the data on industrial accidents, satisfied she would not be matching wits with an Augmented.

Many of the recent incidents were true accidents, traceable to carelessness, bad luck, or honest equipment failures. A few incidents she hoped appeared to be more of the same. But some events, that her most trusted aides had failed to explain, had the feel of sabotage. Glithwah, without proof, knew whom to blame: Carl Rowland and his minions. Who else could it be? Starting with the latest gray-goo runaway in Nanofab Twelve, when—

A mind's ear chime revealed the five minutes were almost up. With a thought, Glithwah netted in Loshtof. She blanked the floor-to-ceiling displays.

Turned a featureless slate gray, the walls looked as though she hid something.

Setting the walls transparent, crescent Uranus imbued her office with a wan, blue-green cast. The planet's rings, edge-on, were barely visible. Miranda was just past full phase, other inner moons mere dots.

Much better, she decided.

A final inspection revealed her desk to be too neat. It and everything on it were props. With the brush of a hand, she ruffled a neat stack of printouts.

It had been a basic tenet of clan doctrine since the surrender: never appear organized to the humans.

At Glithwah's door, another knock—this one self-assured.

Not waiting for a response, Corinne Elman strode into the office. Or tried, anyway, her entrance ungainly. But however clumsy her manner, Corinne's mind had always been adroit. For a human, anyway.

Her hair was longer than Glithwah remembered, and shot through with more gray. Her face was rounder than when they had last met, five Earth years earlier. She was short for an Earthborn human—and still, standing in the recessed foyer, she and Glithwah stood eye to eye. If Corinne should exhibit the egregious bad manners to step up onto the Hunter tier of the split-level office, the low ceiling would force her to crouch; they would remain eye to eye.

Corinne took a seat on the lower level. "Foremost, I am pleased to see you again."

Are you now? Glithwah thought. You had the good fortune, for a journalist, anyway, to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. And having survived to tell—and sell—the tale. The experience made you wealthy. You've milked the one incident, exploited the clan, ever since.

But Glithwah said only, "Welcome back to Ariel."

For in one sense, the visit was welcome. Something long dreaded was at long last at hand. She might finally put this interview behind her. What was it anyway with humans and anniversaries?

She found comfort in the knowledge she would be elsewhere before the next five-year "commemoration."

"Thank you, Foremost." Elman leaned forward. "And thanks for agreeing to meet with me. I'm sure you're busy. Shall we get started?"

"Are we waiting for a cameraman?"

"Not necessary. I have an A/V upgrade."

An implant to record everything the woman saw and heard. Yet one more technology withheld from the clan.

Glithwah bided her time, hid her ire.

Corinne squirmed, just a little, in her chair.

"Shall we begin, then?"

To Glithwah's mind's eye, Loshtof texted unnecessarily: SOME EMBARRASSMENT.

"That will be fine,"

Glithwah said.

"Do you know what story would interest my viewers?"

"I do not."

But Glithwah could guess: humans loved to gloat. Because while the United Planets leadership continued to suppress just how dicey matters had been, at some level, however intuitive, humans saw the big picture. That a few thousand Hunters had made fools of them.

Too bad the humans would not stay beaten. Worlds of them, billions of them, could absorb one rout after another and keep coming. The endgame left Victorious adrift and abandoned, the clan decimated, its leadership slaughtered. It left the evacuees stranded on this remote moon, to beg and plead for resources and technology that should be theirs.

But that would change... if their captors remained clueless for a little while longer. To which end, disinformation channeled through this irksome reporter might contribute.

"No," Glithwah repeated. "What story would interest your viewers?"

"Change. Progress." Corinne smiled. "The last time I visited, this was a frontier settlement. Ariel has become a civilized world. You did that."

If human authorities should ever learn half of what had been accomplished—much less how, or why—her life was forfeit. Perhaps many lives. Did Corinne suspect?

"What do you mean?" Glithwah asked.

"Such false modesty. I could not fail to notice the recent construction, least of all the colony's own spaceport."

A civilian spaceport, the woman meant. A spaceport not controlled by the United Planets occupation forces. With splayed fingers, Corinne swept wisps of hair off her forehead. There was a momentary frown that Loshtof annotated, SHE IS NERVOUS. POSSIBLY CONFLICTED.

"We should have had ships earlier," Glithwah said. "That we weren't permitted any had consequences."

"How so?"

(FEIGNED INTEREST, Loshtof interpreted.)

Glithwah had picked up on that, too. What was going on here? Off a corner of the desk, from the hand-carved wooden chess set that had once been her uncle's, she took a castle. Rolled the piece between fingers and thumb. "Without practice, many skills are lost. Such as piloting, to be sure. And such as the knack for keeping ships f lying, when something goes amiss. Because something always does."

Corinne's face reddened. (EMBARRASSED, texted Loshtof.)

Taking the point—when, after so many years, the clan had been permitted to acquire a few lumbering, obsolete scoop ships—that two vessels and crews had been lost? For something as mundane as harvesting of Uranian atmosphere, the gathering of deuterium and helium-3 for the colony's energy needs?

Corinne's periodic rehashing of the old conflict having played no small part in denying the clan autonomy—and ships—for so many years.

"I see," the woman said. "If it's any consolation, I understand the authorities have been looking into a spate of unexplained mishaps across the outer system. It's not only your clan that has lost ships."

"How is that a consolation?"

Murmuring something apologetic, red-faced again, Corinne segued into a banal interview question. What do you remember about the "incident" twenty years earlier?

Time and again Glithwah offered a contrite response—even, tersely, and with rigid circumspection, admitting to having regrets. She did regret the casualties, thousands among the humans, hundreds among the clan—but not for the reason Corinne might expect. In war, casualties were unavoidable. Any Foremost learned to accept them. What Glithwah could not accept, despite the decades that had passed, was so many having died for naught.

Failure was what made the losses sting.

Failure was what she would not permit to stand.

The questions kept coming. Do you appreciate the help the UP has given to build a new home? (Of course.) Has Ariel come to seem like home? (Yes.) Can humans and Hunters learn to get along? (But we already have.) And on, and on. And on.

The human had come a long way to ask general questions that she could as well have sent by vidmail, to which Glithwah could have recorded answers. The only acceptable responses were obvious. She dared to believe that this pointless interview must soon end.

More and more, the questions seemed pro forma, the questioner disengaged.

And then Corinne surprised her. "Foremost, about this anniversary..."

"Yes?"

"Let's move beyond past conflict and beyond the steady progress of the Ariel settlement. Discovery is all but complete. What are your thoughts about that?"

Discovery. Humanity's second starship. The first was seven years on its way, repatriating survivors of Victorious's original crew—those not resettled on Earth, too old and feeble for the long voyage—to Alpha Centauri.

"A great accomplishment," Glithwah said. "From what we are told." That wasn't much.

"Nothing more, Foremost?"

Glithwah set down the chess piece. "I haven't thought much about it."

"Truly? Discovery could be used to send home your people."

"It could," Glithwah agreed. It wouldn't, of course. The investment to build Discovery, to manufacture enough antimatter to fuel an interstellar drive, had been, well, astronomical. And if the humans had been so inclined, regardless? Great Clan rivalries had exiled Arblen Ems to K'rath's comet belt in the first place. The exiles would not be welcome.

But Arblen Ems would be great again. Glithwah felt it. She believed it. More, she had sworn it.

Then would come the time for a return to K'rath.

Chapter 4

InterstellarNet: The network that made possible and continues to bind the interstellar trading community. Radio-based commerce in intellectual property accelerated—and continues to bring into convergence—the technological repertoires of all member species.

A key milestone in InterstellarNet history was the development of, and cross-species agreement upon, artificially intelligent surrogates as local trade representatives for distant societies. Quarantine procedures govern the delivery and operational environment of each alien agent, protecting agents and their host networks from subversion by the other. Only once, soon after the earliest deployments of AI agents, has this security mechanism been breached. A trapdoor hidden within imported biocomputers, technology that had been licensed by Earth from the Hunters of Barnard's Star, was exploited by their trade agent. The attempt at extortion was foiled, the vulnerability within the adopted technology expunged, and the AI returned to its containment (see related article, "Snake Subterfuge").

What impact the dawning age of travel among the stars will have on the Interstellar-Net community remains to be seen.

—Internetopedia

From the spartan living room of his modest apartment, Carl consulted with the stern-faced, severely tailored woman who was going by the name of Danica Chidambaram. As far as everyone else on this rock knew, Danica, who arrived the week before as a passenger aboard a routine supply run, worked for Worldswide Insurance.

Who better than a claims adjuster to poke around the sites of Snake industrial accidents?

In a glimpse across the Commons, the nearest they had come in person on this world, Danica seemed shy but pleasant, with a mild manner and an averted gaze. But that reticent nature was an act, as contrived as her avatar. Among her fellow spooks, she was a flaming extrovert.

They were linked by the most robust and tightly controlled encryption software known to mankind. Across the entire solar system, perhaps a few dozen operatives, their names and exact numbers also classified, had access to the tech. (A few United Planet high officials doubtless had also gotten the biochip upgrade, though Carl knew that to be so only of the deputy director of UP Intelligence, having twice delivered especially sensitive reports to his boss on a COSMIC ULTRA link.) All the fancy tech notwithstanding, Carl would have preferred to debrief Danica in his office: behind two locked doors (inner and outer rooms alike swept every morning for bugs), within the most thoroughly shielded facility on Ariel.

Talented actor that Danica was, she might not have revealed any more face-to-face than over the link. He still wished they could have met in person. Spying was a lonely business.

"So what do you think?" he asked her. "Let's start with the deuterium refinery."

"Heavy hydrogen is still hydrogen. All it took was a spark." Danica shrugged. "Boom."

The Snake investigative report had surmised much the same.

"Uh-huh. And the source of that spark?"

"We may never know. Between the blast itself and the dome blowout, evidence is, shall we say, scattered. As often as not, vaporized."

"Speculate," he said.

"Carelessness? Sabotage? I don't know. I'll keep looking, but don't expect definitive answers."

"Can you confirm the headcount?" Snake media had reported twelve fatalities, most missing and presumed dead, and three times as many injured.

"Not without running DNA screens, or the Snake equivalent, against several square klicks of Ariel's surface. Maybe not then. Stuff got blasted off-world."

He considered. "It could have been much worse, I suppose. An hour later, when a bunch of trainees were due..."

Danica turned her hands palms-up. For someone so loath to speculate, spying was an odd career choice.

"The meltdown at the plasteel mill?"

"Software glitch," she said.

"And?"

Another shrug. "Of unclear provenance."

"And the gray-goo incident?"

"Puzzling. It was Centaur nanotech."

In other words, mature and reliable. "And did it have any software glitches?"

"By inference, yes, but no one has found it. Or is apt to."

Because the standard response to nanoassemblers run amok was flamethrowers.

Case by case, they reviewed the various recent Snake misfortunes. None related in any obvious way to Ariel's other run of bad luck, several months earlier, the scoop-ship losses. Bottom line: mayhem and destruction, all of unclear antecedents. A high toll, but seldom as bad as it might have been.

"Insurance fraud?" Carl eventually asked.

Shrug.

"Ever feel you were trapped in a game of b'tok?"

"What's that?"

"The traditional Snake game of strategy."

"Oh. Like chess."

"Kind of."

Except that b'tok was to chess as chess was to rock-paper-scissors. For starters, b'tok was four-dimensional and could only be played virtually. The offensive and defensive capabilities of a b'tok game icon depended on its 3-D coordinates, the time spent at that location, and interactions with nearby pieces both friendly and rival. Also unlike chess, with its unchanging board of sixty-four squares, the b'tok domain of play evolved. It developed turn by turn, and the view differed by side. A player saw only as far as his pieces had explored. The dynamics tended to undo any equilibrium that might arise between rivals; it was a rare match that ended in a draw.

He could play, just a little. As a reason for unofficial face time with Glithwah, he tried to fit in a game at least once a month. Almost every match Carl did better—and yet he never won. He had come to believe that she played just well enough to beat him, imparting as little as possible about how experts played the game.

Carl's gut also told him the wave of accidents was sabotage. If so, if the Foremost was up to something, who was he kidding that he would win this game of cat-and-mouse?

Danica said, "Tell me why you're thinking insurance fraud."

"The usual reason. For the money."

"Money for...?"

She didn't need to know Carl's source: Pashwah, the Snake trade AI on Earth. Its latest allegations were scary, and he had confirmed bits and pieces. Someone new was buying alien tech. Someone canny, their transactions relayed from world to world, at each step disguised by an anonymizer service. But anonymized or not, large cash flows couldn't entirely hide. Regulators had to know when banks made big bets with their own money, and when big bets were made by customers. Even the banks used by aliens' trade agents.

If Pashwah's inferences were to be believed—not a given, because the Great Clans to whom it was programmed to defer knew how to carry a grudge—that shadowy buyer was clan Arblen Ems.

"For?" Danica prompted again.

This time Carl shrugged. It meant he didn't care to say, not that he couldn't. Raising an eyebrow, Danica acknowledged the distinction.

She was too smart not to involve.

"To acquire interstellar trade goods," he told her. "The transactions are too well hidden, too indirect, to know anything more than that there's been a big secretive InterstellarNet buy. I don't know by whom. I don't know from whom. I don't know of what."

"But you suspect the local Snakes."

"As does my sometimes reliable source."

Danica needed a moment to take it all in. "I gather that my supposed employers paid out on the earliest claims."

"Uh-huh."

"And you have a theory what the Snakes would buy."

"Yeah. Advanced industrial tech. The last couple years I've had to run things with a light hand, but I still get to oversee imports. Glithwah keeps asking for advanced robotics. I keep denying her requests."

"How advanced?"

"Boater tech." Boaters because their sun, Epsilon Eridani, appeared in the constellation Eridanus, the River.

"We haven't deployed much Boater robotics. Humans. Have we?"

No, and he approved. From what he'd seen, Boater bots were... creepy. Too lifelike. Too R.U.R. But if humans had been built like jellyfish—the nearest terrestrial analogue to a Boater—he conceded he might have seen the pluses. Whatever the reason, Boaters had embraced robotics early and wholeheartedly.

With a shiver he kept from his avatar, he answered her, curtly, "No."

"Why keep asking for your okay? So you won't suspect they already have the tech?"

"That's my guess." As he guessed Glithwah knew he would turn her down. Given Ariel's ongoing labor shortage, not to ask for such useful tech might also have made him suspicious.

So who lied to him? The wily Snake, or the wily Snake AI?

Danica said, "Suppose the locals did obtain Boater robotics. We're talking designs, nothing physical. Sure, they could smuggle the banned designs to this world. But why? You'd see if the Snakes built a new, modern factory. Which, I assume, you haven't seen."

"You're right," he conceded. "I gather that in your poking around, you haven't, either."

"Nope. So maybe we're barking up the wrong tree. Maybe the Snakes are working a different angle."

"Maybe." Or maybe, as whenever he sat down to b'tok with Glithwah, he was several moves behind.

Chapter 5

Amid a grove of dwarf pines, in the settlement's single, tiny, terrestrial park, Carl caught up with Corinne. Having full access to the public-safety cameras helped.

"Hey, stranger," he said. "Busy, I see."

"Hey, yourself." She kept glancing at the ceiling, at the less-than-convincing sky simulation he had, over the years, taught himself to ignore. Her left hand clutched a pinecone. With her right hand, scale by scale, she was picking the cone apart.

He didn't remember her as a fidgeter. Of course, he hadn't seen her in... five years. People changed. Witness that she hadn't radioed that she was coming. It made him sad.

"How's your better half?" he asked.

"Fine, thanks," Corinne said. "Though she's less than thrilled at me jaunting three billion klicks from home."

"Can you blame her?" But that sounded judgmental, as though he wasn't happy to see Corinne. He changed subjects. "I met Grace. She seems nice."

"Nice enough." Corinne shrugged. "Just a temp. My regular pilot caught a bug. I was lucky to find someone on short notice open to making the trek to Uranus. 'Maybe just this once,' Grace told me. Truth be told, her chief motivation seems to be bringing home a Banak. Without middlemen, without shipping costs, she ought to turn a tidy profit."

"This rock isn't a big tourist attraction," Carl agreed. As for Dolmar Banak's work, no matter how trendy the sculptures might have become in-system, they did nothing for Carl. All Snake art was odd enough. Snake impressionism...

His implant pinged, sparing them both his impersonation of an art critic. He said, "Work calls. Give me a minute." Expecting within that minute to be offering his excuses—because the ping was COSMIC ULTRA.

"It's about time you made contact," said the avatar that appeared on the link. "I couldn't risk being seen to be looking for you." It was Corinne.

"It's complicated," the avatar said. It wore the battered captain's hat he had favored back when—using another name, wearing another face—he had worked for her. Odyssey's familiar, cluttered bridge provided the backdrop.

Only this couldn't be Corinne. He wondered what game Danica was playing.

"Life is complicated," he netted back. Aloud, gesturing at a park bench, he said, "Why don't we sit?"

Corinne tossed away the tortured pinecone. Glancing around, admiring the park, she sat. "Reminds me of Nottingham. Ever been there?"

Nottingham? As in the Sheriff of? He couldn't imagine any resemblance, not unless Sherwood Forest had been reduced to a dozen trees.

Whoever it was on the link said, "You don't believe I'm me, despite the encryption."

He didn't know what to think. COSMIC ULTRA crypto was seriously compute-intensive. To handle the load, a neural implant needed a major upgrade, and it did not suffice to know the top-secret algorithms. You had to put that code into a nanite, get it across the blood-brain barrier, and splice the nanite, just so, into the implant. Accomplishing all that required a fancy designer microbe, combining Snake microbiology with a terrestrial retrovirus. And lest, somehow, the tech get stolen—or recovered from a dead agent's brain—the transporter microbe incorporated elements of viral meningitis. Take the microbe without a dose of the matching vaccine, and you died. Quickly. And badly.

"Convince me," he answered.

"I have a message for you," the avatar said. "From someone I hope you will believe."

The Corinne avatar receded, its Manhattan skyline backdrop with it, to a corner of the consensual meeting space. In their place: an iridescent sphere afloat in a featureless mist. A padlock icon showed the sphere to be spinning—and also a recording secured with COS-MIC ULTRA encryption.

"Ir am Robyn Tanaka A#$#&6," the message began.

The pronoun. The suffix. The avatar, devoid of personality. All three suggested an Augmented. (Not that he'd ever known one. The tech had yet to be invented when he had first hidden himself away on Ariel.) The voice, without emotion, without a trace of gender, pointed to the AI component as dominant when the recording was made. And Robyn Tanaka, Secretary-General of the Interstellar Commerce Union, was among the UP top officials apt to have COSMIC ULTRA clearance. Within the ICU, perhaps even the only one.

Nottingham, Corinne had said. Nottingham. Sherwood Forest. Robin Hood. Robyn Tanaka. He could connect the dots. But what could the ICU want with him?

"The United Planets faces a serious challenge," the sphere continued. "Security, at the highest levels, has been compromised. Ir cannot go through normal channels. Corinne is among the few outsiders enlisted to help. She nominated you as another. Ir hope you will accept, because worlds are in peril."

Left unstated: that giving COSMIC ULTRA access to Corinne was itself a security breach at the highest level. If he reported this, someone would go to prison for long time. If he kept it to himself, he might end up in prison.

But what if this undefined threat was for real?

The sphere faded. Corinne's avatar expanded to reclaim the entire consensual meeting space. "Just from me having high-level codes, you know I've made a friend in high places, whether or not you believe that friend is Robyn. So, where can we talk?"

His office? Get Corinne inside a shielded room and he'd know whether she was on the secure link. But to have Corinne in "the warden's" office would not be keeping their encounter casual.

His ship, then? It, too, was well shielded. He just needed a pretext.

Carl netted, "Ask me about the rash of accidents in Snake industrial facilities."

"I was wondering," Corinne said aloud, "about this rash of industrial accidents. The Foremost doesn't care to volunteer much. Can you tell me anything?"

"Better than that. I was going to fly out tomorrow to see for myself what's left of the old deuterium refinery." Halfway around this little world. "Care to ride with me?"

"That'd be great," she said, standing.

"Thanks," her avatar added with a wink. And dropped the link.

Carl radioed the tower to report an air-recirc fan had died and needed swapping out. Traffic Control bumped his shuttle to the end of the line for takeoff. As he sifted hand tools in a drawer, he got a ping. COSMIC ULTRA.

"I imagine that little charade was for me," the avatar said. Corinne.

"Now I know it is you." He closed the drawer and sat. "I figure we have fifteen minutes or so before anyone checks on us. Use them wisely."

She unbelted from her crash couch, stood, and stretched. She was short enough to manage despite the shuttle's cramped cockpit. "This will take a few minutes to explain. You won't want to believe it. Neither did Robyn, at first."

"Why don't you begin at the beginning?"

"That's a half billion years ago."

"Talk fast, then," he suggested.

She laughed. "Here's the deal. Half a billion or so years ago, very quickly, life on Earth changed. Whole new phyla of life appeared. Pretty much every sort of animal life more complex than a bacterial colony. Paleontologists call that period the Cambrian Explosion."

"Not an obviously existential threat to the present world order," he said.

"Maybe not, but a bunch of worlds had similar experiences at around the same time." She waved off his objection. "Coincidence? Hard to swallow, even if that were the only eleven-of-a-kind concurrence. It's not." She rattled off others. "And if the known intelligent species—native to worlds differing in age by billions of years—hadn't all developed high-tech within a few years of one another. And if—"

"You mean the InterstellarNet members," he got in.

"Yeah." Rummaging beneath the copilot console in the tiny corner locker, she found a drink bulb of water. "Eleven species close together, in a galaxy that's otherwise silent. Quite the twist of fate—if it is. We call it the Mathews conundrum. And if..."

Carl let the words wash over him. He could scarcely grasp the broad outlines, much less pore over the timelines and data files Corinne transferred as she spoke. So what did he think?

That he sought out conspiracy for a living. But a conspiracy dating back to the Cambrian era?

When he objected, Corinne, said, "We think they have the technology to slow the passage of time. Slow it way down."

He just looked at her.

"That's another long story," she said.

Time they didn't have, if he planned to keep up appearances and take off soon. Something had to wait, and magic tech to slow time seemed like a good candidate.

"Talk to me." With stiffened fingers, Corinne poked him in the shoulder. "You look, shall we say, less than convinced."

"I'll say this for your bad guy. He's persistent. A half-billion years after conspiring with the trilobites, he's whispering in Mary Shelley's ear as she writes Frankenstein. And to some Czech playwright, as he writes about robots." Carl ended on a rising inflection, not remembering much about the play. He was pretty sure, though, that it ended with the robots rebelling against their human masters.

Corinne nodded. "R.U.R. Standing for Rossum's Universal Robots. And Karel Čapek didn't just write a play about robots, he invented the word. The thing is..."

"There's more?"

"Yeah. Literature like Frankenstein and R.U.R. crops up across InterstellarNet species. And everywhere the effect is the same. Whole lines of scientific inquiry get rendered untenable, at the least delayed for many years."

Uh-huh. Maybe anxiety over new technology was normal. Maybe stories in which everything went smoothly didn't catch on.

But if he turned around Corinne's suspicions...

"Okay," he said. "Say that selected research was discouraged. How many lines of investigation got pushed ahead?"

"Huh." She gave him a sideways look. "No one has asked that question. See, this is why we need you."

Carl's console display showed they had been talking for about ten minutes. He called the tower. " Tempest, here. My fan problem is fixed."

"Roger that, Tempest," Traffic Control radioed back. "We'll have you on your way in a few minutes."

Corinne plopped back into her crash couch and buckled up. "Which part is hardest to swallow?"

"We're talking about aliens, right? Only not any we know. Someone from waaaaay back. Impossibly far back." She didn't comment so he plowed ahead. "What am I supposed to believe? That the aliens look like us? That they have robots or androids or whatever that do? Or that human agents serve these aliens for reasons we don't yet know?"

"Something like that. Pick one."

"Secret, starfaring aliens."

"Robyn named them the Interveners," Corinne said. "And I don't see starships as a big obstacle to belief. We have starships. As do the Centaurs."

As would the Snakes—instead, in fact, of humanity—if the hijacked Centaur ship hadn't been wrested away from them.

Helping to retake Victorious was one of the few real accomplishments in Carl's messy, muddled life. Not so much destroying the starship in the process. That was the stuff of nightmares. His other recurring nightmare was that the Snakes had another starship secretly under construction. They had had control of Victorious for decades. What were the odds they hadn't learned enough to copy it?

Awake, he told himself no one could hide a project that size. Not even someone as devious as Glithwah.

"You okay, Carl?"

"Yeah." He could worry any time about the Snakes. "So why, exactly, would these Interveners do all this?" If they even exist. Her evidence, such as it was, was entirely circumstantial.

"Haven't a clue." Corinne sighed. "Robyn hasn't a clue. Not either half of her. Well, she believes Frankenstein and the like were intended to discourage tech developments, but she hasn't a guess why. As for the larger questions—why influence us at all, why interventions vary by solar system, why the meddling began so long ago—she's as lost as me."

Traffic Control interrupted. "Tempest, you're next up for takeoff."

"Roger that." Carl gave his console a final look-over. He radioed back, "Ready when you are, tower."

"One other thing..." Corinne said.

Nothing good, he guessed. "And that is?"

"Bad stuff happens to people who come too close to seeing the pattern. They disappear, suffer odd 'accidents,' have unexpected things happen to them." She netted yet another file, and his quick skim turned up names in the ICU and the UP Secretariat. "I got into this mess by investigating an historian's strange disappearance."

Mess was an understatement. "Any more good cheer to share?"

"That's it." Corinne flashed a wan smile.

"So, are you in?"

"To do what, now?"

"What you can. What's necessary. In your line of work, you'll know better than I what that might be."

The tower radioed again, clearing Tempest for immediate take-off. It was a relief to turn his attention to ship's instruments, to concentrate on the pitted and fractured landscape racing past a few klicks below. Flying over one of Ariel's sinuous canyons, hundreds of klicks long and in places ten deep, even the largest crater seemed puny.

How much punier, mere humans?

Was he in? And what would being in mean? Apart, by failing to report the compromise of COSMIC ULTRA tech, from being in league with traitors. Apart from, at least technically, becoming a traitor himself.

It all boiled down to Corinne. So which was she: insane, treasonous, or as savvy and honest as he had always believed?

It wasn't even a contest.

He told her, "I'm in."

Chapter 6

Caliban (moon): A small outer satellite of Uranus, discovered in 1997. Caliban's irregular orbit—both retrograde and dramatically tipped from the planet's equatorial plane—suggests a captured asteroid rather than a naturally formed satellite. Its composition (as a codiscoverer had predicted, "A plum-pudding mixture of rocks and ice") and reddish hue imply an origin in the Kuiper Belt. Like most Uranian moons, this one is named for a character in the play The Tempest. Shakespeare's Caliban was the brutal and misshapen slave of the sorcerer Prospero.

Caliban's small size (eighty kilometers in diameter), remoteness (mean orbital radius of 7.3 million kilometers) and irregular orbit render it unattractive for commercial exploitation. This tiny world has seldom been visited and remains unsettled.

—Internetopedia

With hand and claw, tentacle and pincer, the warriors fought. Grappling, they smashed and slashed and tore out entrails. They struggled and they died. A short distance away, across a dim and rocky plain, others dueled with laser rifles and projectile weapons, shock devices and grenades.

Boaters designed their robotics for industry, not infantry. Reoptimizing for combat required testing and time.

Over the theretofore silent mind's-eye video, the narration began. "Progress substantial. Faster than my forecast."

No matter the voiceover's redundancy, Glithwah found pleasure in that summation.

Each message entailed a risk, however small, of interception. Encryption might safeguard content, but the UPIA had only to backtrack an incoming message to uncover Caliban base. And so, besides robustly encrypted, reports were infrequent, sent at low power, and relayed through a string of scattered, stealthed comm buoys.

The buoys also few and far between.

As Pimal gave details, the video spoke for itself. Combat robots, several octets of them, undergoing their final field trials. Weapons, of every sort from personal arms to MIRVed rockets. Secret factories humming, the Boater robotic designs instantly productive for that purpose. A deuterium refinery at full capacity. Vessels of the clan's reconstituted navy—the scoop ships reported lost and several of the captured vessels—armed, armored, and made stealthy. All concealed within roofed-over craters on the remote moon.

Over a reprise of robot duels, Rashk Pimal said, "Finalization imminent of combat chassis."

It was welcome news, but Glithwah permitted herself a moment of envy. Day after day, year after year, she was the clan's public face. She cooperated. Projected contrition. Exhibited patience. Feigned assimilation. Was seen to enforce the UP's onerous rules. Complained only enough to maintain credibility, to allay suspicions—

All the while, in the privacy of her head and through anonymity of the infosphere, planning and conspiring.

While Pimal, her tactical officer, enjoyed the freedom to act. Being believed dead had its rewards.

Among Glithwah's secrets was that the clan had a tactical officer. Carl Rowland and his UPIA lackeys would not approve. Then again, if things continued to go according to plan, the days of caring what the UPIA thought, or suspected, or knew, were numbered.

That prospect made the upcoming game of b'tok with Carl a bit more palatable.

"It has been too long since we played," Glithwah said. "Not since before your reporter friend came and left. She and I had a good meeting."

In the clamor and chaos of Ariel Commons surrounding shift change, Carl had to struggle to follow an out-loud conversation, much less to discipline his thoughts for b'tok. Given his supposed recent progress—defeat at a less embarrassing level?—Glithwah had proposed taking the competition up a notch. Championship b'tok was played amid distraction. It was yet another way that b'tok seemed Machiavellian.

Except that, to a Snake, Machiavelli was an adorable naïf and a rank amateur.

Crap. His thoughts already tugged in too many directions. More distraction was the last thing he needed. What had Glithwah commented on? Oh, right. Corinne's visit.

"We're more like old acquaintances," Carl answered, wondering whether the Interveners were as observant as Glithwah. If Interveners even existed. With each passing day, Corinne's assertions seemed more, well, fantastical. "Over the years, she and I have gone our separate ways. Apart from mooching a ride from me, we hardly saw each other this visit. Regardless, I'm glad your discussion went okay."

Glithwah sipped from a bulb of iced lovath, the Snake analogue to coffee, while, in their consensual space, a b'tok "board" took form. She asked, "Do you recognize the configuration?"

B'tok, despite its many rules, had no fixed starting point. Games employed any layout and any deployment of opposing forces to which both players agreed. That fluidity was one more reason Carl struggled. With chess, at least, he could fall back upon standard openings.

Did he recognize anything? Boats. Primitive aircraft. A few specks of land in a vast ocean. Where his game icons lacked knowledge, the topography was grayed out. Given the stylized representation of b'tok, he wondered if the simulation was on K'vith, Earth, or a fictional world.

As he pondered, three diners, deep in high-pitched, guttural conversation, finished their meals and stood. Winding through the commons, making a path through closely grouped tables, the Snakes nodded deferentially to Glithwah. One trod on Carl's shoe. All part of championship-level play.

Focus. Carl shook his head. "What is this place?"

"A part of your Pacific Ocean. The Battle of Midway. A sea-and-air skirmish from your Second World War. I set you up with the side that won."

To make his inevitable loss that much more humbling.

"Okay," Carl said. If he had the right conflict in mind, that was more than two centuries earlier. He could not remember the sides, much less a particular battle.

"Shall we begin?"

The question was rhetorical, because in a corner of Carl's netted vision, a game timer began to increment. "What's the latest word about the refinery accident?" He wanted to know anyway, and to ask might distract Glithwah.

He launched aircraft to surveil the unknown regions of the game map. Just a few of his planes, lest Glithwah's forces should take him by surprise. He sent up a few more planes to patrol around his ships, to give warning of any attack. He adjusted the deployment of his ships, dithering whether when bunched up they protected one another or just put all his eggs in one easily bombed basket. Except for enemy surveil lance planes in the distance, Glithwah's forces remained hidden.

"Metal fatigue," Glithwah said. "Tubing burst in a cryogenic coolant loop. Our engineers suspect radiation embrittlement in the..."

As Carl considered that diagnosis, and wondered whether embrittlement was a word or a coinage of Glithwah's, and as a definition popped into his mind's eye, within the game a sortie burst from the clouds. Waves of planes darted toward one of the islands. He ordered more of his planes into the air, and was dismayed at how slowly they responded.

As his supply icons disappeared in puffs of symbolic flame, as bomb-crater icons marked his runways unusable, he wondered: Who's distracting whom?

Which suggested the possibility the surprise attack, so early in the game, might be intended to divert him from Glithwah's answer. She wouldn't lie—about things he could, and would, confirm. The deuterium refinery had had metal fatigue. That didn't preclude the bad tubing being there on purpose. But sacrificing a third of the colony's energy supply in an insurance scam? That would be no small thing! Not to mention the loss of life.

Could Glithwah want illicit tech that much?

Belatedly, as he launched shipboard aircraft to drive off the attackers, one of his long-range surveillance planes radioed in the location of Glithwah's carrier group. His options and confusion expanded. Should he attack at once, with his reserves? Wait till he could refuel the planes now flying defense? Hold back planes lest Glithwah attack with more aircraft? As he weighed his choices, fighter planes from Glithwah's carriers chased away his recon planes.

"... Specialized alloys in the tubing," Glithwah continued explaining. "After a supply ship failed to appear, we had to postpone routine maintenance."

His position deteriorating rapidly, Carl reminded himself the conversation was his purpose here. What did one more embarrassing loss matter after so many?

"What's the prognosis for repairing or replacing the refinery?" Carl asked. "How long can the settlement operate with just two units before having to ration power? And can I pull a few strings for you regarding replacement parts?"

"Pull strings? I see: to expedite. Yes, that would be appreciated."

And in swooped more of Glithwah's planes, wave upon wave.

His aircraft scattered, his ships vulnerable, Carl relegated his play to reflex. As for the bigger puzzle, he saw only unpalatable answers. One: with parts unavailable and maintenance overdue, the Snakes recklessly kept a critical facility in operation. Why not shut it down, at least while their reserve supplies lasted?

Two: Glithwah, playing a longer game, making a point about dependency, wanted the refinery to go boom. She'd been pushing him to permit the settlement its own long-range ships for resupply. The accident investigation would, without doubt, report metal fatigue. But maybe Glithwah had had old tubing reinstalled, kept from past maintenance.

(One of his aircraft carriers, its flight deck aflame, dead in the water, racked by explosions, began to sink. "Too bad," Glithwah said. Carl scarcely noticed.)

Or, three: the Snakes needed money, lots of it. The disaster was simple insurance fraud.

Or, four. Four was the most intriguing. The most worrisome. The hardest to know how to handle. Four was sabotage, but not of Glithwah's doing. Factions among the Snakes were nothing new, but rivalries had not yet (to his knowledge) risen to major sabotage.

But there was another spin he could put on the sabotage scenario. Suppose Snakes were indeed trying to get their talons into Boater robotics—tech that someone had long tried to keep from this solar system?

Then perhaps the Interveners had an agent right here on Ariel, among the Snakes.

Chapter 7

Alongside the banded and ringed magnificence that was Saturn, above the potato shaped, much cratered, icy moon Prometheus, against a field of diamond-sharp stars, hung Discovery: a featureless patch of black. Dark as pitch. Surface laser-ablated to a smooth finish. Details lost in the blur of its stately rotation.

A dim and ghostly presence. And ghostly the starship would remain. Because scrolling across the bottom of the strik ing image, the repeating message from the project office on Prometheus began, Media access revoked.

It might have been nice to have been told that, oh, say, a half-billion klicks earlier.

"This is nonsense," Corinne snapped, turning her head this way and that, defying anyone and anything in Odyssey 's cramped bridge to contradict her. Posturing, all of it. She had included Discovery on her itinerary to make the trip less about Ariel. Less, if the Interveners should be watching, about her connecting with Carl.

If someone else chose to take the blame for rerouting her home—great. With Saturn and Uranus on more or less opposite sides of the Sun, she hadn't yet gone far out of her way. Home sooner to Denise had its charms.

Corinne kept glowering, to keep up appearances.

"It's pretty damn rude," Grace said. "I mean, this isn't a jaunt anyone would undertake on a whim. Aren't you offended?"

"I'm sure they have their reasons." Reaching into the holo—flicking through the text, past the excuses, reading between the lines—Corinne got to a reason. "A shipboard accident. This close to scheduled departure, they'll be scurrying to clean up."

"How bad an accident?"

"They don't say."

Nor did any of the hour-old broadcasts within reach of Odyssey's high-gain antenna. So, most likely: no worlds had shattered this time. No innocents had been slaughtered. Nothing had as much as interrupted the transfer of fuel from the antimatter factory on Prometheus.

The glimpse of Discovery, so like the ship of her nightmares, still made her queasy.

"I'd be hopping mad, too," Grace said. Misreading the grimace on Corinne's face? "I mean, you're a worlds-class reporter. Near legendary. The voice and face of the Himalia Incident and of the raid to retake Victorious. If anyone has earned the right to cover a story about a starship, that's got to be you."

"Only near legendary?" Dismissing the flattery with humor.

"Well?" Grace persisted. "Tell the truth. Don't you feel slighted?"

"A bit, maybe." Well, yes, actually. "Set aside the ship's tour and the interviews I had scheduled. Any accident aboard Discovery is news in its own right. The construction crew shouldn't be turning away the media."

"And it's a free solar system.

Except for Snakes." "Except for Snakes," Corinne agreed.

"So...?"

"Okay, I admit it. I am annoyed. And curious, too. But they've revoked my access."

"Are you sure?"

"What do you mean?" More: what does your sly smile mean?

"Who's to say we got that message?" Grace gestured at the main nav holo. "Look."

In which nothing was anywhere close to them.

"So, just show up." Because who could turn them away after coming about three trillion klicks?

"That's what I'm thinking." Grace grinned. "Have I mentioned? I haven't gotten around to acknowledging the message. It'd be easy enough to clear it from the ship's log."

"They know we're coming from Ariel. If they can't reach us, they'll relay the message through Ariel."

"Then we ignore messages from Ariel, too." Grace gestured again at the nav display. "We're long gone from the neighborhood. Considering the distance, no one will think a thing about us not responding."

"Maybe." Something didn't ring true to Corinne. "I'm surprised you care so much. Don't I remember you sneering at interstellar travel as a lifestyle choice, not flying?"

"That doesn't mean I wouldn't want to see a starship. It's a flying habitat. It's my taxes at work. It's a whole freaking manmade world. "

"Uh-huh."

"Laying it on too thick? When I signed on, I was expecting a longer gig."

With a bigger payday at the end. So, okay, Corinne could see why cutting the trip short might disappoint her rent-a-pilot. That didn't make Grace wrong.

Because, damn it, she was still journalist enough to race straight to wherever people didn't want her.

And because something had struck her. The UP had an interstellar drive only because Snakes had hijacked Victorious to this solar system. Given how the Interveners discour aged some kinds of tech, maybe they weren't big fans of human-built starships.

Maybe whatever had happened to Discovery wasn't an accident.

Chapter 8

"I feel like a rat in a maze," Danica grumbled. Privately and silently, of course. Over a COSMIC ULTRA link.

In her real-time audio and video feed, collapsed into a corner of Carl's mind's eye, nothing seemed all that challenging. Then again, this world was his home. He had lived on Ariel longer than, well, anywhere else. To her, this was all new.

"Just souvenir shopping," he reminded her. Corinne's pilot had given him the idea. "If anyone asks, someone in the Commons mentioned Banak's work to you. So when you saw him on the street, you thought you'd ask about buying a piece."

The sculptor himself could be seen via public-safety cameras making his way down the pedestrian tunnel to the Snake spaceport. While he retrieved his package, Carl might get fifteen minutes to plant bugs and make a quick search. Infamous recluse that Banak was, known to hole up in his gallery/workshop/apartment for days, even weeks, at a time, they had to make an opportunity.

"I know my cover story," Danica said. "It doesn't make the corridors any less claustrophobic."

"And me being a head taller than you, it shouldn't be a mystery why you're there and I'm here."

"Yeah, yeah." In her vid feed, two Snakes in rumpled jumpsuits, perhaps cargo handlers, glided down the corridor toward her. As they passed, Danica rated only the briefest of sidelong glances. Three minutes later she netted, "We're here."

In any event, Banak was there, showing a package claim, to be waved into a storeroom by the bored-looking Snake watchman. Danica's point of view indicated she had hung back, loitering at a view port in the passenger terminal. Her job was to stall Banak if he started home too soon. "Be careful," Carl netted back. "Yeah, yeah." Ariel's entire population wouldn't fill a small town. Local security—originally, by UP insistence—was correspondingly relaxed. If Carl had known only what Danica knew, he'd have been as dismissive.

Whistling tunelessly, with one hand in a jacket pocket, Carl sauntered up to the door of Banak's gallery. A sign read CLOSED, in clan-speak, English, and Mandarin.

Along the left edge of his augmented vision, four red dots dimly glowed: security systems flagged by his gear. The low intensity denoted mere commercial-grade alarms, although to have four systems seemed excessive. Nothing his Agency gear couldn't handle with ease.

Uh-huh. And what did the Agency wizards know of Intervener tech?

Danica netted, "From what I can see through the doorway, Banak is wandering up and down the aisles of the receiving area. Maybe his package is misplaced?"

"Maybe." Or maybe Banak was also exploiting an opportunity. "Be careful."

"That's twice in two minutes. Something you want to tell me?"

"No." What he had already shared—that Banak might be behind some of the recent sabotage—should suff ice. That the Snake might be doing it as part of an interstellar conspiracy spanning eons? That was on a need-to-know basis.

And if Danica already knew? He already suspected one Intervener agent. Why not two? All the more reason to treat today's op as routine.

Reporting success with a slight vibration, the device in his pocket overrode Banak's alarms and reset the electromagnetic lock. The door unlatched with a soft click.

Low on the hinge-side doorjamb, a circle pulsed. An app on Carl's implant, highlighting something out of place. A filament of some kind, stretched across the crack. Old school. He captured an image, so that he could restore the filament as he had found it.

"I'm in," he advised Danica.

Her avatar smirked. "Be careful."

"I deserve that."

Banak had left the overhead lights on in his gallery before leaving to retrieve his unexpected parcel. No reason, therefore, to work in the dark by the artificial tint of amplified vision. Scouting around back, in the messy, congested, workshop area, Carl found he could dispense with hardwiring his bug. Inductively self-charging cordless tools lay everywhere; Banak would never notice the sip of power the bug would take to recharge. From a deep squat, ducking his head, Carl stuck a bug far back beneath a Snake-low workbench.

In the workshop, as in the main gallery, sculptures loomed: big metallic constructions welded, hammered, and twisted into eerie, contorted shapes. A tall, skinny pyramid giving birth to a mutant lobster. An upright coffin. (Obviously not. Snakes didn't bury their dead.) A chain-link fence/snake devouring its tail.

Nonrepresentational art, even of the human kind, eluded Carl. He hadn't a clue about Snake abstract art. Half the time, he couldn't even decide whether a particular sculpture was finished. The price tags on the gallery pieces suggested that someone appreciated Banak's talent. Or maybe the prices just reflected novelty. In the Snake home system, all metal, even iron, was precious.

"How are you coming?" Danica netted.

"Done," he answered. "What about Banak?"

"Still searching for his package. Pretending, anyway." Between sidelong glances, her relayed vision continued to take in the desolate, much churned landscape beyond the window. "Checking over everything on all the shelves. I guess you'll have time to look around, too."

"Turn a bit to your right," he said. One of Danica's peeks had caught someone sliding past. A second look left him no doubt. After twenty years on this rock, he thought he knew most of the Snake counter-intel types. Glithwah and company, just as surely, knew who among the human workforce worked for him, which was why he had brought in Danica. "That's one of Glithwah's senior people. Not the sort to be sent on routine errands."

"We knew the Snake authorities are interested in Banak. Isn't that why we are?"

"Yeah." Carl wasn't even lying, just not being entirely truthful. Glithwah's people watching Banak had caught his eye.

But Carl didn't plan to share what kept him curious. Not with anyone but Corinne.

Twenty years earlier, in the shattered hulk of Victorious, the op had been billed as a final sweep for survivors. The search-and-rescue squad did, in fact, come across an injured Centaur. But that was serendipity; what the marines sought was any kind of records. Petabytes of scavenged data, personal files and clan records alike, were taken aboard the final evac ship to depart the dying starship.

By sixty years, a Snake—if he survived that long—was a senior citizen. And yet in more than a century, "Banak" had scarcely aged.

Sole survivors, without family and friends, were common enough among Ariel's settlers. The Snake who called himself Banak would not have stood out. Just as, two decades earlier still, fleeing the Barnard's Star system, a lone refugee reaching Victorious might have drawn sympathy, but no special attention. Just as, before that, cycles of clan warfare had time and again created opportunities to disappear. And then, under a new name, to reinvent oneself...

In purloined archives, the names changed. Faces changed, too, but not the bone structure beneath or the subcutaneous patterns of blood vessels. To recognize the same Snake in four separate guises took UPIA facial-recognition software that peered beyond the visible spectrum.

Perhaps before anything else, recognition took the right person looking. Someone who had had, more than once, to reinvent himself. So: Carl might have discovered an Intervener mole.

Or, more than likely, he emulated the proverbial drunk who searched for his lost keys where the light was best.

"Banak and the newcomer are arguing," Danica netted. "That's to judge from body language. The watchman doesn't seem happy, either. I'm going to sidle closer. Maybe I'll overhear something."

"Be—"

"Careful," she completed. "Yeah, yeah."

Banak dawdled amid the crowded shelves. He had spotted his package—and left it, for now—on the first shelf he checked, where the arrival notice suggested it would be. He wasn't expecting a package. What mattered was the excuse to survey the cargo area.

Something unusual was underway in the colony, and that something was approaching a crisis. The Foremost herself revealed nothing, but several among her minions lacked Glithwah's discipline. Their preoccupation spoke to something major soon to occur.

Something, doubtless, of which their UP watcher would disapprove.

If Glithwah connived only to evade United Planet rules, Banak would ignore it. He always did, Hunter enough still to savor such defiance. But what if Glithwah's scheming involved something he was duty-bound to resist?

Until he discovered the nature of the plot, he would not rest.

And so, the notice to retrieve a package had been fortuitous. The cargo incoming to Ariel might offer clues. What unusual had been received? Were any of the typical imports present in unaccustomed quantity? Boxes and bins told him nothing—but to the subtle instruments he carried, even sealed cargo, even the trace chemicals in the very air, had already implied much.

Such as crates of ships' life-support components generically—some might say, misleadingly—labeled as heavy-industrial goods. Such as pilferage from the stocks of specialty alloys imported for rebuilding the shattered deuterium refinery—but with additional uses. Such as—

"You there."

Banak startled at the voice. A moment ago, he had been alone but for the bored watchman standing idle in the outer office. The nearby public-safety cameras into which Banak remained netted had shown no one else. They still showed no on else.

And yet here stood Cluth Monar, one of Glithwah's chief lieutenants. The public camera feeds had been overridden, making this a Security operation. It meant he had been followed—with his pockets full of instrumentation he could neither explain nor permit to fall into others' hands.

"Me?" Banak asked.

"You." Monar stepped closer, sharp talons peeking from his fingertips. "Reason for your extended presence in this area?"

Banak held out his claim slip. "Location of my package uncertain."

"Or perhaps inappropriate curiosity."

About what? Banak wanted to know. But more, he wanted to escape that storeroom, to avoid becoming the object of Monar's curiosity—unless he was already too late for that.

Banak said, "Just inefficient. Search almost at completion."

With feigned nonchalance, he continued a slow scan of the shelves. To retrace his steps and claim his package now would only establish his dissembling. "Old eyes," he grumbled.

"Your thorough explanations necessary," Monar said. "In my office."

The spaceport watchman no longer seemed bored. Beyond the anteroom, from a hallway still vacant on the public-network view, Banak heard hurried footsteps. Many of them.

The future became all too clear to Banak. Taken into custody. His instruments found. Suspicions raised. His gallery and workshop searched.

Ancient secrets imperiled.

He had served the masters faithfully, devotedly, unquestioningly, for far too long to allow that.

The consequences for him scarcely mattered.

"Something's up," Danica netted. "I'm going to amble by the storeroom door."

Be careful, he thought. At himself, too.

If Glithwah's operatives were bringing in Banak, others would be showing up— soon—to tear apart this gallery. Maybe he would overhear something before they found his bug. He permitted himself a last, quick look, with images from his entry overlaid on the real-time view. Where he had bumped against a workbench, the double vision revealed a welding torch out of its place. He nudged it to its original position. And over there—

On one sculpture, the sort-of coffin, a red spot glowed where all had been inert metal. "Run!" he netted to Danica.

He was out of the workshop, through the gallery, the door into the curving public corridor not quite shut behind him, when the blinding flash came. And the searing heat. And the palpable sound—for the instant before his eardrums burst.

The "coffin" had been rigged. Why it?

He flew through the air scarcely long enough for synapses to fire. To remember how Banak disappeared for days into his workshop. To intuit that Banak slept, or hibernated, or slowed time in that "coffin." To realize that the coffin's open cavity was at least a meter longer than needed to accommodate a Snake. And to marvel that, just maybe, he had his first clue to the physical nature of the Interveners.

Then, as a wall loomed to swat Carl, the world went dark.

Chapter 9

From boundless apathy, out of a deadening fog, sensation emerged. The scratchiness of stiff sheets. Soft, rhythmic beeping. An antiseptic smell. A dry, scratchy throat. In his left arm, an odd twinge. A f loating sensation...

Drugged! Forcing open gummy eyes, Carl saw the issue with his arm was an IV needle. The beeps came from bedside instruments. A hospital room, then. Because...

The memories flooded back. "Danica," he croaked.

"You're okay," a familiar voice said.

Bruce Wycliffe, the latest deputy to rotate through, sat to Carl's right beside the bed. Bruce looked like he hadn't slept in a while. The man was more bureaucrat than spy. They had never gotten along.

Carl found a control, elevated the head of the bed, before rasping, "How long?"

"Since the explosions? Almost two weeks. You were pretty banged up. The doctors had you in a medically induced coma."

"I hope..." Carl's wish lost itself for a time in a coughing fit, "I hope you haven't been sitting here that whole while."

Bruce offered a bulb of water. "I didn't have that luxury. Things have been busy."

"Anyone, besides me?"

"Twelve dead. Twice that injured."

He must have been the closest to the explosion. How had so many others...?

"Go back, Bruce. You said explosions, plural."

"Correct. Two. You got... caught by the smaller one."

The smaller one? The other explosion must have been horrendous. Then there was Bruce's hesitation, and his circumlocution, as though the room might be bugged.

"I'm well enough to net," Carl sent. "Start explaining."

Bruce studied his shoes.

"That wasn't a suggestion," Carl prompted.

"All right." Bruce's avatar joined the link. "But lose the attitude. You're not the boss anymore. Even Snakes have rights, you know? And you were caught red-handed, at the very least burgling Banak's rooms. As soon as you're ambulatory, ideally before you're in any shape for Glithwah to talk with, I'm to put you on the first ship home."

Home? He'd lived on Ariel for twenty years. As Carl Rowland, he had never lived elsewhere. Even after softheaded policies demoted him to an all but powerless observer, he had stayed. A ship home? Hardly.

Recalled to Earth.

"Think of it as a request, then," Carl netted.

"Or a parting favor."

The update was no favor. Banak's second bomb had been in... Banak. No one would be questioning him or any of the five who had been ready to take him into custody. Five more Snakes had died nearby, from explosive decompression. And Glithwah was more than a little curious why Carl happened to be at the terrorist's gallery when the bomb there went off. She anticipated "a chat" before Carl left.

His thoughts remained fuzzy: drugs not yet out of his system, he supposed. He could still add small numbers. The answer was obvious, but he needed to hear it. "Twelve dead?"

"Yeah. That insurance woman visiting from down-system. Decompression, too."

Because he had assigned Danica to keep an eye on Banak. Wearily, Carl dropped off the link. "Thanks for coming, Bruce. I think I need some sleep."

Bruce stood. "Get well soon."

Maybe, Carl heard a shred of human concern in the comment. Mostly, he heard satisfaction at getting rid of him.

Still unsteady on his feet, Carl made his way into the Foremost's off ice. Her walls had been set transparent, showing the stark landscape outside.

"You look terrible," Glithwah said. "Sit."

And you're gloating, Carl thought. Glad to be rid of me. Glad to have stolid, unimaginative Bruce as the only one here to watch. He sat.

"You'll be going home tomorrow," she said.

"Yes." And a long, uncomfortable flight it would be, aboard the freighter that had been held over while he convalesced. Danica's sealed casket was already aboard.

"So," Glithwah said, "tell me about Banak. The truth."

The truth? It was tempting, if only to shake Glithwah's smug complacency. How much easier her scheming—whatever it was— would proceed without him. He settled for the partial truth he had shared with Danica. "I became interested in Banak because you were interested. Do you care to explain?"

She licked her lips: the Snake version of a smile. "I'll miss our game."

Of b'tok? Or the larger game? Getting him sent away, having Bruce left as the token UP observer, was a coup in the latter.

But he hadn't left yet. He asked, "What was Banak up to?"

"Why ask me? The listening device found in his gallery was not of clan manufacture."

"I know nothing about that."

"A pity." Lips licked once more. "And the dead woman?"

"An innocent bystander, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like several of the victims."

"My medical people did autopsies." Glithwah leaned forward in her chair, fixed him with a stare. "The clan's bystanders did not exhibit abnormal brain chemistry."

He stared straight back. "I know nothing about that."

Nothing more than that an agent's implant dissolved when it sensed an oxygen-level drop in the cerebrospinal fluid. You could not recover information, even in death, from an operative's implant. No more than—Carl had seen pictures from the explosion scene—anyone would be recovering information from the scattered stains that had once been Banak.

"To be sure," Glithwah said skeptically. "What can you tell me?"

"Nothing." Because apart from Corinne and—once he got back to Earth—Robyn Tanaka, he would not be discussing what he had learned with anyone.

"If not citizens, exactly, we of Arblen Ems are members of the United Planets. We have rights, too. You violated them."

Her little speech had an air of dismissal. Despite Ariel's trivial gravity, he struggled to climb to his feet. He shuffled to the door and paused, out of breath.

Carl's valedictory was shorter. "Be good."

Admiral, despite her grand name, was plodding, scruffy, and old. She moved lots of cargo cheaply, and her owners wanted nothing more. Accommodations for the rare passenger? Dependable hot water? A decent galley, or even synthesizers that didn't impart to every meal an aftertaste of sweaty socks and days-old fish? The scow offered no such amenities, much less decent comm gear.

Leaving Carl, eager to get word to Corinne, frustrated almost out of his skull.

He could not trust this ancient comm gear to send anything securely. That ruled out transmitting anything specific. Not his evidence of an Intervener mole, deceased, among the Arblen Ems exiles. Not the image in his implant of what might be an Intervener time retarder. And most certainly not his musings whether Robyn had the influence to postpone Discovery's scheduled departure to the Mobie home world. The Mobies were hive minds, each a continent-sized swarm. Wherever the Interveners came from, it wasn't Tau Ceti.

Still, he would have liked some response to the short message he had sent Corinne: THAT THING WE DISCUSSED? I'VE SEEN IT NOW, TOO.

A day passed. He tried relaying his message via Ariel's much larger transmitter. That attempt didn't make it through, either.

He told himself the absence of an acknowledgment meant nothing. So, Odyssey had deviated somewhat from its flight plan. So, what? It could mean space junk to be dodged, or a spot of unscheduled maintenance, or Corinne, being Corinne, having simply changed her plans. Piloting for her, those many years ago, he'd seen all three.

Only he wasn't flying Odyssey. Neither, due to mischance, was Corinne's regular pilot. Leaving Carl to wonder about the woman who was at the helm. And about something he devoutly hoped was a freakish coincidence.

Grace DiMeara had traveled to Ariel to meet with Banak.

Chapter 10

In a remote mining camp, deep within an abandoned shaft, without deputies or aides, Glithwah rendezvoused with her tactical officer. She desired his insight and candor.

He stood as she entered. "Foremost," he greeted her. "Pimal," she answered. "Welcome to Ariel." Tall and trim, martial in his bearing, Rashk Pimal was the very embodiment of a Hunter warrior. He even bore battle scars. A jagged slash crossed one cheek, from a melee in seizing one of the clan's new ships. A forearm bore a puckered burn scar, from putting down a human riot in the internment camp.

When had she last seen combat? As a young lieutenant, aboard Victorious, in the final struggle against UP commandos. Twenty interminable years ago....

Pimal's poise told her that their plans continued to advance. His stance added that he prepared to challenge her. In his shoes—leading the return to independence and honor, while an aging Foremost begged favors from the humans—she would aspire, too.

Only let her plan succeed and, if such should be the will of the clan, she would gladly retire. But not today.

"Your conclusions," Glithwah asked directly. Weeks had had to pass after the explosions, after Carl Rowland's fortuitous and ignominious departure. Long enough to smuggle Pimal back to Ariel aboard a routine scoop-ship flight. Long enough for her to resume the occasional routine inspection tour without drawing unwelcome attention.

Pimal had had more than ample time to consider the evidence.

He did not hesitate. "A conspiracy against the clan."

"By whom? And to what purpose?"

"Intracranial bomb no random occurrence.

So, Banak, of course."

"Of course." She waited for Pimal to explain, or to address her other question. He did neither. "How strange a thing: a conspiracy of just one."

"More than one, Foremost. But whom else? Long study in search of an answer. Detailed study of Banak."

"The conspirators? UPIA?"

"A strange thing about Banak." Pimal's eyes glittered. "Banak absent from clan records prior to Victorious. "

Many of the clan's records had been lost or abandoned in the chaos of evacuation. "Not without precedent," she reminded.

"Banak unfamiliar also to other evacuees." A talon point flicked into sight and as quickly retracted, as though to dismiss the obvious rejoinder. Sole survivors bereft of family had been all too common. "And yet not."

"Not the time for riddles," she growled.

"My pardon, Foremost. Among the elders, his art familiar. From earliest days aboard Victorious. "

Too long ago for Banak to have created them. She said, "By a parent, then, or a mentor or"—what was that human term?—"role model."

"Perhaps, though as parent doubtful. Earlier sculptor without any resemblance to Banak. And yet...?"

"The other conspirators?" Glithwah reminded.

"Almost there." Pimal's eyes glazed, reviewing details in his implant or netting to an aide. "That earlier sculptor also without any youthful presence in clan records. A metallurgist, a supposed refugee of the clan wars."

"Not impossible," she said.

"Nor this impossible." He netted an image: a charred metal structure, much taller than a Hunter, its dominant feature a long central cavity. A twisted ruin from Banak's workshop. Ground zero of that explosion. "Except for the isotopic analysis. Metal origin on K'vith."

"A moment, Pimal." While I think.

Human organized their prehistory around metal tools: the Bronze Age, the Iron Age. K'vith, though, was almost without metal. The earliest Hunter eras marked stages in the development of ceramics. What very little metal a Hunter ship carried was in trace amounts within electronic devices.

Nor were only the humans so fortunate. She had been a cadet, little more than a child, but she remembered her first glimpses of Victorious. What a shock it had been. Metal walls. Metal shelves. The Centaurs had even squandered metal on mere table utensils!

That cadet could never have foreseen commanding a metal army—but on Caliban, such a force grew larger by the day. A fleet sheltered there, too, on which to carry her robot warriors. Thanks to Pimal's diligence. Thanks to her own scheming.

None of that could explain the twisted metal sculpture.

To have possessed so much metal back home meant wealth and stature. Someone among the clan should have recognized Banak's mentor. And yet, no one admitted to.

"A longstanding conspiracy," she concluded. "No other option credible. Agents of another clan?" From among the accursed Great Clans that had driven Arblen Ems to exile among the comets?

"Perhaps," Pimal allowed.

Suppose that metallurgist was another clan's agent. Suppose he recruited and trained Banak. How better, light-years from home, to serve his clan than by spying on Arblen Ems? How better to misuse Arblen Ems than through sabotage and by leaking its secrets to the UPIA?

Pieces of the puzzle still eluded her. "And Carl Rowland's near-death?"

"An accident, perhaps."

Like the "insurance" woman? In the wrong place at the wrong time, Rowland had called it. Glithwah had not believed him, either.

"No accident," Glithwah decided. Banak, knowing he had been caught, must have tried to clean up after himself. Likely he had summoned Rowland to a trap.

Pimal peered into distance, into the murky depths of the abandoned mine shaft. "No accident," he agreed.

With Earth looming in the bridge view port, Carl was as ignorant as when he'd first set foot aboard Admiral. About Corinne's location and safety. About whether Grace DiMeara was an Intervener operative. About the goals of the Interveners. About where the Interveners came from, and whether Discovery —with Robyn's intercession—might carry a human mission there. And about, in contrast, an almost trivial matter: whatever plans the UPIA had for him.

Just let him get to Earth, and all that might change.

Any Sec-Gen of the ICU was a formidable figure. Robyn Tanaka, besides, was an Augmented. With Augmented intelligence and the ICU resources she controlled, surely together they could find Corinne.

If no better option presented itself, Discovery had been Corinne's last known destination. He'd take a ship to Prometheus and backtrack. Any ICU ship would do. Or a ship he hired. Twenty years back pay ought to cover it. If need be, on a ship he stole.

"You want to sit?" Admiral's pilot said. He was a scrawny guy, on the squirrelly side, but he'd been genial enough during the long flight. Mostly they had talked hockey. Devon, the taciturn copilot and engineer, had mostly grunted. Devon had no use for sports.

Carl shrugged. "I'm fine, Brad."

"That wasn't really a question."

"Right." Carl took the jump seat behind Devon.

Between exchanges with Traffic Control, Brad asked, "So who do you like in the playoffs? The Rangers or—"

"Whoa!" Devon interrupted. "The ship's fine. It's something on the news."

Admiral was barely in range for Earth's commercial comm. Carl had yet to link in. When he reached the ground had seemed soon enough to start catching up.

"What channel?" Brad asked. "Any channel."

That sounded ominous. Carl let his implant choose. And then he froze. The breaking news involved a car bombing.

Robyn Tanaka was dead.

"Your orders, Foremost?" Pimal asked.

Because, at last, their consultation was complete.

She commanded a robot army and a war fleet in which to transport it. She commanded yet more ships, enough to evacuate everyone yearning to be free. Her UPIA watchdog was discredited and banished. Of her Great Clan opponents, their saboteur was no more than smears on a wall. Across the solar system, Discovery's outfitting would be almost complete.

The pieces were in place. The opportunity would never be better.

Her voice firm, her bearing proud, Glithwah directed, "Capture of human starship."

The earliest hints of an Intervener conspiracy emerged in "The Matthews Conundrum," in the November 2013 issue. Expanded and novelized, earlier crises of the InterstellarNet era (several first seen in Analog) are available as InterstellarNet: Origins and InterstellarNet: New Order.

Plastic Thingy

Mark Niemann-Ross

9389 words

Illustrated by Josh Meehan

"Hey. Guy with the broom. Like, I need a plastic thingy."

Her noisy appearance at the front counter of Hankins Hardware is only made louder by the smell of chlorine. Doing her part to keep Portland weird, I think, as I put down the broom. She's wearing a funny sort of jacket, stretch pants, and steel-toed boots. Maybe that's odd, but what's really unique is her just standing by the counter.

Regular customers of Hankins Hardware know the store layout. They walk in, briefly acknowledge our presence, then disappear down the appropriate row. You want paint? Look in aisle one. Bolts? Located across the front of the store. Aisle five has been electrical for the past two centuries.

Newbies like her walk in and execute a "Deer in the Headlights" maneuver, freezing and scanning the store. Sometimes they carry a handful of broken parts or a plastic bag of moist pipes. Not wanting to admit they're confused, they take a right turn and head toward the paint aisle. If we're quick, we can intercept and point them in the right direction. If not, we wait until they loop around and reappear at the front of the gardening aisle.

But not this girl. No handful of parts. No wandering to the paint aisle. She just stands there, expecting us to get her a plastic thingy. It's near closing time, I should give her the endof-day brush off.

Every employee at Hankins has seen the obnoxiously cheery training video, but it's unnecessary. We like working here. We like the challenge of a customer puzzle. In my three years at Hankins, I've diagnosed the remains of hundreds of do-it-yourself projects. I can usually send customers home with enough fittings and washers to have a fighting chance at reassembly, possibly even improved functionality. Nothing's more uplifting than a weekend-warrior returning to the store with parts they didn't need and a story about the broken what-sit that now works perfectly, closing the narrative with you-guys-are-the-greatest-and-I'll-beback as they merrily head out the door into their sunnier future. I've got time to help her. That's one problem with my life—I've got plenty of time.

"I can help," I say. "What are you working on?"

"I'm not sure, you know?" she asks. In the normal customer scenario on the training video, this is where she pulls out the broken thing needing parts—or at least a photo. But she has apparently not seen the training video. "We're pretty sure it has to be plastic. But you're going to have to help us figure that out."

I'm beginning to think this could be one of those challenging customer situations from the training video. Dave, the only other employee in the store, sniggers. I've pulled the short straw on this customer encounter and he's going to retell and enhance this at the next employee party. Maybe she's one of the mystery shoppers, intent on tormenting me until I volunteer to set my hair on fire, at which point she will hand out a Mystery Shopper medal plus a five hundred dollar bonus. Oh yes, I think. A bonus could mean a new game console in my future.

Plus, a Mystery Shopper medal would offset Dave's self-righteous lecture I've been hearing for most of the past year. Dave tells me I'm pathetic, I need a girlfriend, and I should develop some hobbies not involving computers. I agree about the need for a girlfriend, but the whole "being social" thing is daunting. Social means going out at night. With people. And talking. To them. About something. Erk.

I ask, "Are you working on water or electricity?"

She thinks for a minute. Furrowed brow and pursed lips. Cute.

"Stuff flows through it, like a pipe. Dig?" she asks. "But electricity or water? Who knows. Better give me something that can handle either."

Game on, mystery shopper. I smile.

"Okay—do you need some PVC conduit?" I volley back. "It's waterproof if you seal it correctly."

"Could be. Can you show me some?" She bounces along behind me towards the electricity aisle. Funny kind of walk—sort of tip-toe and high energy. Perky, I think. She looks at the elbow joint I'm holding up.

"Probably the right idea, but that won't work, you know," she says. "Like, wrong color. Needs to be red."

"Well, we have red paint. But let's focus on what it needs to do. Is plastic important? Can it be metal? Or something else?"

"I'm not, like, good with the technical stuff—I just do language." She reaches in her coat pocket, but comes out with a cell phone instead of the plastic thingy I hoped for. "Let me ask."

She rubs her finger over the display like she's playing Tetris. Maybe she's using some sort of new dialing app. She bites her lip for a minute, then forcefully pokes at the phone.

"His Greatness says I'm stupid," she says, looking up. "He thinks we're all stupid and inferior. According to him, the Universe is just too complex for anyone like us to understand. Better show me some other stuff. Something red, you know?"

Garden hose? I'm thinking. Red electrical tape? Dave is still smirking behind the cash register as we pass en route to aisle two.

"Wait!" she announces. She digs through the snack shelf and comes out with a handful of our finest bubblegum. A brief look, then pulls the entire box off the shelf. "I'll take it. How much?"

My turn to laugh at Dave. We sell gum by the piece, not the box. Nobody's ever bought a whole box. Dave's going to have to ring it up like a handful of loose bolts and washers. He reluctantly starts counting. One. Two. Three. Four...

"Um, Miss," I say. "We don't all need to stand around while Dave figures this out. We have some red things back here." I point to home and garden. She looks at me, grabs one piece of gum, unwraps it and places it in her mouth like a twenty-dollar chocolate truffle. Closes her eyes and chews. Awkward silence from Dave and me.

"Wow," she says. "There is nothing like home-grown. Okay broom-guy. Show me red." She follows me down the home and garden aisle.

We dig around in the bins, but nothing's working. Red things don't seem to be appropriate electrical conductors, or they aren't the right size, or who knows what. I'm sure to get the Mystery Shopper award any minute. I have a flash of brilliance.

"Maybe there's something in the catalog," I walk to the front counter with her in tow. Dave is finishing the count as I reach behind the register for the overly large catalog. "How about we go across the street to Jerry's bar, I'll buy us a pair of beers and we can see if there's anything listed that might work."

She lights up. "Beer?" she asks, executing a little bounce. "Dyn-O-Mite! I love beer! Mr. I'min-a-big-purple-hurry can cool his interstellar jets. Let's go."

Dave is staring at me in astonishment. Granted, I am stretching far outside my introverted norm with the beer ploy, but I'm going all-out for the medal. I am going to provide exceptional customer experience.

"Um, the gum is seven dollars, thirty-five cents," Dave says.

"Far out!" she responds.

Far out? I wonder. An unexpected dialect of Portland retrospeak.

She pulls out a wad of bills, drops them in front of Dave and pops her gum. Dave paws through the money, revealing a mix of foreign currency, older U.S. dollars, and some plastic and metallic play money. He makes change for an old twenty and hands her a receipt. She scoops up the gum and assorted bills as we head out the door.

Personally, I can't stop smiling. I'm about to be awarded the Mystery Shopper medal, score five hundred dollars and share beers with a cute girl. Dave will need to stop with the being-social-and-girlfriend lecture. And the employee party story is absolutely going to be in my favor. I'm stiffing Dave by leaving him to close up shop, but this is just too good. We cross Hawthorne Boulevard and enter Jerry's Bar.

"By the way," I say. "My name is Roger. Roger Cadden. C-A-D-D-E-N" Spell it correctly on the medal, please.

"Sara," she replies. She doesn't look up from the menu. "Sara Ferrous. Do they really serve tater tots? I haven't had those since Wisconsin."

"Your names rhyme," I say.

She looks up and pops her gum. "Do they?" she asks. Sarcastically.

I am so smooth, I think. Not!

The waiter swings by for drink orders.

"I'm splurging. I'll have a Michelob," Sara tells the waiter. "And, like, a plate of Tater Tots."

"Sorry," our waiter says. "We only pour microbrews on tap. Nothing in bottles."

"Okay. Then I'll have a Michelob on tap."

Our waiter smiles. I wonder if he's thinking Sara is a mystery guest for the restaurant. This bar hasn't poured a glass of Michelob for at least twenty years. I ponder telling the waiter she's my mystery shopper, but I don't want to ruin the surprise when Sara hands me the award and check. In any case, he doesn't seem to mind flirting with Sara. Who wouldn't?

"We're fresh out," he replies. "How about our Little Bagdad Lager? Pretty much the same thing." He turns to me. "And for you?"

"I'll have a glass of porter," I reply. I'd love a full pint, but want to keep my wits about me. "And a basket of Cajun Tater Tots."

The waiter heads off and I pull out the store catalog. Thick, ungainly book, lots of pictures and numbers. Most of the pages are black and white, but a few are in color. This could take a long time if we proceed page-by-page, but I'm committed.

"So let's see what we can find that looks familiar," I start. "How about some of these sump-pump parts? They work on electricity and water."

The waiter returns with beer, distracting Sara from my attempted exemplary customer service. She sips, closes her eyes and smiles. But only for a minute, after which she consumes two massive gulps and belches like a college sorority sister. The tater tots show up in time to sop up the beer.

"Mibht be," she mumbles, spewing small bits of tater tots in my beer. Her pronunciation is the slightest bit slurred and has a new Midwestern accent. "Let's ask his great bulbous self! He's the one who wants this stuff anyways."

Sara drinks a third of the pint of Little Bagdad Lager and pulls out her cell phone. She plays Tetris for a minute while the display blinks and wiggles. I'm not sure it's a good idea for her to be drunk-dialing the award committee, but she has a head of steam and proceeds without asking for my advice.

"Ficus wants to see," Sara says. "Hold up the catalog."

I'm guessing Ficus is the fictional mystery parent/boyfriend/husband trying to fix the mystery whatever. I hold up the catalog and look at Sara's ring finger. No ring, so it must be boyfriend or parent. Interesting.

Sara turns the phone to the catalog. I'm expecting a picture of Ficus, but instead there are lines and colors moving up, down, left, and right. The patterns move in from the center and fade to the outside, like a Star Wars jump through hyperspace. Sara takes a quick glance at the face of the cell phone.

"Like, he wants to know if you have anything red."

"Red? For plumbing, or electrical?"

"Hang on." She finger-paints, then ponders. "He says 'it depends.' Or he might be saying 'it changes.' It's, like, hard to know what he means for sure, you know? He wants you to turn the page."

I obey, furrowing my brows at the returning waiter.

"I'll have another beer," Sara chirps. "Next page," she tells me.

I spend ten minutes displaying consecutive pages of the catalog to the cell phone. I show plastic thingies for plumbing. For electrical. For hanging on walls and for gluing. I'm beginning to feel stupid and Sara is beginning to be drunk. She turns the phone back to read it, then gives it two strokes and a poke.

"Putz!" Sara exclaims louder than necessary. "I came all the way down here, and now he says this is taking too long. He wants you to come take a look. Fine, let's book." She grabs her gum and tries to stand up. The beers have gone to her head.

Warning klaxons go off inside my head. Following a mystery shopper to her home is probably not approved as part of excellent customer service. I consider the possibility that Sara is a psychopath, she is luring me to her basement and I am going to wind up hanging from a meat hook. Hopefully we're heading to a big corporate surprise party where I'm the guest of honor and the CEO is going to hand me the award.

I pay the tab and we head for the door. Sara staggers, catching herself on my arm. Maybe dating Sara is part of the award package? One can hope.

At the door, Sara pauses, then carefully pulls all the band posters down from the window. "These things are awesome!" she whispers and rolls them into a tube. "Loooo-king Goooood!"

We turn off Hawthorne Boulevard and walk about a block. I assume we are headed for a meeting room in one of the apartment buildings, but she stops at a large shipping container parked in the street. Pressing her palm to a panel opens a sliding door. Funny place for an award ceremony.

"Watch your step," she laughs as she trips over the threshold. I follow her into a room filled with electronic displays, two chairs with seat belts, and a large open area in the back. Sara places the band posters and gum in a locker, then incorrectly estimates the distance to one of the seats and crashes into it. She drunkenly buckles up.

"Sit! Sit down and fasten up, this is waaay cool!"

She pulls out her cell phone and begins finger-painting. Things in the walls began to power up. I don't see any meat hooks, but this really isn't what I expected for a corporate award ceremony. Maybe a teleconference? Perhaps the CEO is going to appear on the large display on the wall? Maybe Dave will pop out, shouting "Candid Camera!"

I buckle up when the container lurches. Why are they loading us onto a truck? I wonder. I stop wondering as all hell breaks loose. Impossibly, we drop for a full ten seconds. I know, because I am screaming like a thirteenyear-old girl at a Justin Bieber concert and continue to do so until I run out of breath.

"I love this part," Sara says, laughing. "Okay—hang on, here's where it gets bitchin'!"

Bitchin' is right. I no longer need seat belts— I'm not going anywhere, except backward into the seat. We are accelerating upward like a turbocharged Ferrari on I–5 making the late-night Portland to Vancouver run. Not just gaining speed—gaining acceleration. My cheeks are moving toward the back of my neck, leaving my nose all by itself at the front of my face.

I think, This is not good.This is not normal. I should leave now. Screw the award, get me out of this box.

I manage to stop screaming and look over at Sara. She's playing Tetris on her phone. After a couple of lifetimes, or maybe minutes, we start to coast. Now I'm floating up against the straps. We bump something, and I hear noises outside. The container lurches and the door opens. I wish I was looking at a residential street, but it's dark outside.

I remember Dave told me stories about outof-body experiences. In cases of extreme trauma, a person's mind takes a little vacation. Floats around. Stops trying to make sense of everything. Watches all the pretty lights. That's what I'm feeling. I suspect I should be concerned. As odd as Portland might be, floating out of a chair is not what I expect. But I'm enjoying my little mind-vacation. My other option is to resume screaming and curl up in a ball. Oh well. I follow Sara across the room. I'm floating. She's walking. I wish I could walk.

"Oops," She laughs. My floating around the container is a big practical joke. Ha ha. "You need some boots."

She walks to a closet and retrieves a pair of extra-large galoshes. Reaching for my floating foot, she stuffs it in the boot and pulls a tab. The boot shrink-wraps itself to my foot. She grabs the boot and guides it, and me, to the ground. I stick—how convenient! The process repeats and now we are standing face-to-face. Little things still float around, but with a small amount of effort, I'm walking again.

I think, I should get a pair of these... for all the times I'm weightless.

Sara heads for the door and with a minute of hesitation, I follow. There must be a pool nearby, the smell of chlorine has become much stronger. Sara leads me down a hallway, into an eight-sided room with four doors and four windows, out one of the doors, down a hallway and we stop at a door.

She puts her palm up against a panel. It flashes three short whites, one long. Nothing happens.

"Come on," Sara shouts at the door. "Book it. You knew we were on our way. Spaz!"

The door doesn't answer and neither do I. Maybe the door won't open. I picture myself dangling weightless from a meat hook. The mild up-and-down motion of the floor is making me seasick. Maybe I can go someplace where my keys don't float.

"I should explain. Like, we're on a ship—in orbit," Sara turns and looks up at me. "We weren't planning to be here long this time, just a quick pop in and say hello. Like, catch some theater, suck up the broadcasts and run for the trading station. Supposed to be a quick trip, then stuff fritzes out and we need a patch. Does Ficus have spares? Noooooooooo! So it's my job to go find the next best thing. Looks like that was you." She stops to take a breath and smile at me.

I realize I'm at a pivotal moment.

I could wake up. Unfortunately, I'm probably already awake.

I could scream and run. Unfortunately, the only place to run is a flying shipping container and I don't know how to fly it.

I could accept the fact I am in orbit on a spaceship. Fortunately, I am in orbit with Sara.

I'm going to stand here by the door. Maybe something interesting will happen. I could be okay with a little sci-fi role-play. Maybe later on, Sara will get out her Princess Leia costume and I can play Han Solo.

The panel flashes two short and the door opens. Sara walks through the door. I peek in, checking for meat hooks. None in sight. I'm looking around for a hot tub—the smell of chlorine is stronger in this octagonal room. Each wall has a large, sealed window and a door. No doorknobs. Some of the rooms behind the windows are dark, some are lit but empty.

In the center is a... thingy. When you work in a hardware store, live theater takes on a new interest. At first glance a theatrical stage looks like it has real oak floors. Real fireplaces. Functioning electronics. Most people buy into the deception. But when you hang around with plumbing and paint all day, you notice the stage is made of plywood coated with high-gloss varnish. Theatrical props are made out of ordinary stuff. You inventory the parts and what aisle to find them in.

None of that works with the setup in front of me. The thing in the room is not theater parts. It reaches from floor to ceiling and looks like a tree made out of surplus vacuum cleaners. But it's real and consists of stuff I would not be able to find in any hardware store. It's dominated by red pipes. Several of them hang loose. Red liquid oozes from them and forms floating globules in the air. Red vapor comes out of the access port on the side. Lots of red. I really hope this isn't blood, because if it is, a guy with a chainsaw and a hockey mask is waiting behind one of those doors.

Sara goes to face a window displaying a large purple plant. She does an odd sort of dance and after a minute, the plant moves its stem, twists around and runs a few tendrils across the glass. Sara gestures. More tendrils move.

"Like, I'd introduce you," Sara turns to me and says, "but he doesn't have a name you'd understand or that I'm going to take the effort to translate. And calling him—'he'—is wrong, but it works for now. He's the ship's engineer and he's a little stressed out, you know. Plus he thinks we're airheads because we only have one brain. Sometimes he's kind of a jerk."

I don't even flinch. An egotistical stressed out plant flying a spaceship. Why not?

"Here's the skinny," continues Sara. "He says he knows how that's supposed to work." Sara gestures at the tower of surplus vacuum cleaner parts. "But he isn't able to fix it with the parts he has. You hopefully know where to get parts. So the two of you have to work together."

"He can't come in here while the room is filled with our atmosphere. I've learned his sign language—it's full body—so I'll translate." Sara stops and grins. I'm not sure she's sobered up yet.

Okay, I think. The gauntlet has been thrown down. I should walk out the door and catch a bus. That's probably not an option, so I might as well stick around and help the ficus plant fix the doo-hickey in the middle of the room.

"Sara," I ask. "What does this thing do?"

Sara dances around in front of the plant. The plant dances back. Sara ponders, consults her hand-held, dances a bit, studies Ficus, then turns back to me.

"He says it would take years to understand. It's some sort of a switch, but he says that doesn't matter, just that it's broken and needs to be fixed."

"Ask the plant what happens if this doesn't get repaired?" I ask. I want to make sure I'm not breaking my brain trying to fix a toilet or a home entertainment system.

Sara dances. The plant dances. "He says the paint on the outside of the ship will get scratched. Or... he might be saying we're going to burn up when we lose orbit. I'm not sure. Either way, it is going to happen in about... uh, lemme think... uh... I think he says it will be in about six hours, give or take twenty-seven minutes."

Nice. Scratched paint or a fiery death. If I'm going to fix this, I need to figure out what's broken. Then I need to figure out how to fix it. Then I need some red plastic things to fix it with. No more difficult than finding replacement parts for Ikea furniture. And six hours, twenty-seven minutes to do it.

"What exactly is broken?" I ask Ficus-The-Plant via Sara. "I see parts all over, and it looks like some of this stuff used to connect, but this thing is just one big confused dishwasher."

While I poke around the innards of the vacuum-cleaner-tree, Ficus describes the broken part. "It's round with three and one-half sides," Sara tells me. "That's bogus, but Ficus insisted. He sent me a picture."

Sara rubs the face of her cell phone and holds it up for me to see. I'm looking at a red hockey puck with five holes, but no indication of size. Zooming out from the drawing reveals it's part of a sub-assembly, but no indication where it might be located. I spend fifteen minutes looking inside the pillar of mystery before I find something round and flat. Pipes run in. Pipes run out. Getting it out from behind all the other somethings is going to be more difficult than fixing a cross-threaded metric wingnut. I have no idea how I'll replace it.

Ficus explains (dances? mimes?) about how fluid enters the puck. When it leaves, it's power—like electricity but different. Whatever flows through the puck changes state—fluid—power—fluid. This widget isn't working because the fluid whatsit isn't staying away from the power goo. They mix at the wrong time, and apparently mixed drinks don't make spaceships fly right.

"We're in one of the tech rooms off the loading dock," Sara says while I'm poking around the whatever-it-might-be. When she isn't translating, she gets chatty, and right now, she's trying to explain the overall size of the ship. "There are a few levels, most of which I've never been on. They aren't configured with our atmosphere. Us oxygen breathers have our part of the ship we stick to and mingle with the chlorine-breathers in rooms like this. Game night is pretty groovy when you figure out what the rules are."

Sara tends to go off-topic, but now I know why everything smells like a pool—Ficus breathes chlorine.

"I came on board in 1978," Sara continues. "Like, I was working in Wisconsin at a community theater. I did sign language for the audience. I like to talk and I must have a knack for translating. This guy asked me if I wanted to travel in space. I'd just seen Star Wars; so cool, you know. We've been picking up Star Wars episodes all along. Did you know there's a three-planet competition for the best Jar-Jar Binks impersonation?"

Sara is right, she likes to talk. In between conversations with Ficus, Sara chatters about anything. Everything. I should find it distracting, but it's the closest I can manage to making small talk.

"I don't know how they got the first human to come on board." Sara tells me. "When we swing by, we do a bit of recruiting. We mostly bring on theater majors and musicians. That's where the big moolah is—selling cultural artifacts, music, theater. Totally rad, but Earth BGrade movies are always about how aliens are going to steal water or women. Actually, we're here to steal the B-Grade movies—once they're translated, the chlorine-breathers love them. Makes 'em laugh—I think. That's the best I can figure out, you know?"

My fingers are full of potentially carcinogenic goo, but in the short-term, it isn't flesh eating. I can see red and blue "stuff" going upand-down a pipe and notice there are postage-stamp sized pads scattered next to the tubes. When the blue stuff goes by, they vibrate. I ask Sara to ask Ficus what they're supposed to be doing.

Sara does the watusi, a few steps from the hokey-poky and signals the runner on third to steal home. "He says they're diagnostics. When not-red goes by, they vibrate. He says they're not important right now."

Ficus's answer is 100 percent accurate and 0 percent useful. It's obvious blue makes the pads vibrate. I keep poking around. How am I supposed to get the puck out?

"Why are all these pipes red?" I ask. I should have asked "Is this thing dangerous? " but curiosity, cats, etc.

"He says it won't work if they aren't red," Sara translates. "Like, he's talking physics. I didn't get a lot in school, so I'm kind of guessing. Some of the stuff in the pipes has to be encouraged to turn red so it doesn't go where it isn't supposed to be. It's like he's using the same words as when we recruit crew members from planets."

Ficus is vastly more expository than any other plant I've met on Earth and keeps Sara hopping—literally. I suspect much of what Ficus says is lost in all the hand-waving; little of it makes sense and of the parts that do make sense, less of it is useful.

I also think Sara is getting frustrated. I can understand; this is frustrating for me, and I don't have to foxtrot around the room with Einstein-The-Plant. She's trying to discuss engineering via the medium of creative dance. If we fail, the paint on the outside of the ship gets scratched. I'm guessing Ficus is somewhat exasperated as well, at least to the equivalent a chlorine-breathing houseplant might feel emotion. As for me, what if I can't get out of this crazy space-opera before the timer runs out?

I'm worried about Ficus for another reason. At Hankins Hardware, we've learned to recognize overwhelmed customers. They get started on projects beyond their abilities, get frustrated, then come yell at us. Sometimes their T-shirt is wet with plumbing effluent. Or the electrical outlet they are replacing has telltale short-circuit burn marks. They try to look authoritative, but grab entirely the wrong parts. They miss the problem because they focus on the wrong things.

Ficus isn't wearing a wet T-shirt, but he has a big problem and it's clear he doesn't know how to fix it. I don't know if plants have ego problems but he may not be happy about some single-brained earthling fixing his little red spaceship. Would he—it?—be willing to let the paint get scratched instead of getting shown up by a meat bag from an insignificant trading backwater? Is he telling me everything I need to know? Does he even know what I need to know?

More ominously, the up-and-down motion of the ship is getting more pronounced. It's faster and bigger. Even if I allow myself to float, everything fastened down is rising and falling. Now I have personal experience with something actually spinning out of control.

We've been at this for at least an hour and it's clear there is no way to get the three-and-onehalf sided puck out without explosives. We don't sell dynamite at Hankins, so that's not an option. I'm guessing Ficus wouldn't like it either.

"Ask Ficus if I can connect these pipes back together," I ask the assembled plant/mineral/vegetable audience. "I'd like to see what the puck doesn't do, so I can guess at what it does do."

Sara squinted. "You have got to be joshin' me. How am I supposed to translate that to him?"

"Just ask Ficus if I can reconnect the pipes without breaking the ship."

Sara shrugs at me, then she shrugs, flails, and bows to Ficus. Ficus wiggles back.

"He says, and I'm pretty sure I'm getting this correct, 'that would be redundant and a waste of time.'"

"If I don't know what it's supposed to do, at least I should know what it isn't supposed to do, and the only way I'll learn that is if we let it do what it shouldn't be doing," I say. With less tact than before—I'm getting tired—I continue with my feeble, single-brained attempt at debate with a superior plant. "Just ask Ficus—Will I break the ship if I reconnect the pipes?"

Sara looks at me, turns to Ficus, gestures, then stops and turns back to me. Her mouth twitches and her eyes get moist.

"Sometimes he's hard to read, but something is wrong. He's starting to insult you— calling you a cheap piece of meat."

Sara wipes her eyes with the frilled sleeve of her theater jacket and stares at the floor. I stare at the same part of the f loor, unsure what choice of phrases I can select from my collection of witty repartees to bring her back to her formerly bouncy self. I suspect getting Sara back to happy is going to be more difficult than fixing the red hoover tree. Taking a huge risk, I reach out and hold Sara's hand. I've seen it work on Star Trek. If it works for Captain Kirk, maybe it can work for me.

"Look," I say. "We're all tired and worried. But this is going to work out. We'll fix the thingy."

"Thanks," Sara says. Miracle of miracles, she continues to hold my hand. Oh happy day, oh frabjous day. I almost forgot there is a possibility we are going to burn up in reentry. She continues, "I'm glad you're here. I'll convince him to try reconnecting the pipe."

Ficus was not part of our little emotional theater and is still being petulant. Maybe he is being petal-ant —I smile at my own little joke made in the privacy of my own little head. He still addresses me as the diminutive piece of meat—Sara translates it as "Chuck Roast," or simply "Chuck" when she realizes I find it amusing. As amusing as could be possible in the middle of a life/death situation.

For example: "Tell Chuck," Ficus says. (At which point I snicker, which makes Sara smile, which makes me smile, and the bluebirds are singing and the soundtrack swells into a big choreographed declaration-of-mutual-love number and the audience applauds....)

"Tell Chuck," Ficus says, "reconnecting the pipes will not fix the [untranslatable]. Reconnecting the pipes will produce immediate evidence of failure." Ficus wants to argue the futility of my proposed experiment more than he wants to find a solution. Aliens are so tiresome.

In a burst of human recklessness I grab what appears to be a "red stuff" conduit and thrust it into the twist-lock socket it is obviously designed to fit. As Ficus predicted, the evidence of failure is immediate. The column throbs upwards from the floor with red. Just before the red goo enters the puck, some of it turns blue and enters, some goes dark and stays out. The diagnostic thrummers vibrate at the blue/dark junctures and the vacuum cleaner pillar issues an ominous clacking sound. The ship oscillations double in amplitude and frequency. I grab the pipe, twist and pull. It comes free and the clacking stops. Experiment complete. Researcher frightened. Plant and animal observation team having a fit. Ship settles down to a manageable rise-and-fall although still more pronounced than before I experimented.

Sara doesn't bother to translate the agitated plant's words. "What the hell are you doing?" she asks. She's waving her hands in plant-speak, unaware her excited shrieking is quite sufficient to express her concern. "Ficus said not to reconnect those pipes and you just went ahead and did it. That was totally whacked!"

I should pay more attention to her, but instead, I'm poking at the insides of the pillar. "I think I know why he hasn't been able to fix this."

She stops emoting. "Really?" she asks.

"Possibly," I say. "You mentioned Ficus says red and not-red. How many colors can he see?"

"I don't know," says Sara. "He's only ever mentioned red and not-red." "Never blue?

Never green? Never yellow?"

"No," Sara answers. "I've never learned any of his color gestures, other than red."

"I think it's because he's colorblind. Or he sees different colors than we do. When I plugged in the pipe, I saw red, blue, and black. But the diagnostic vibrators only registered not-red. He can't tell what's broken because it's not broken in a way he can see, or his diagnostic tools recognize. I can see blue—which is an important distinction between red and black. I can see variations of "not-red"—and probably that's what's not working."

We're ignoring the wildly contorting Ficus thrashing around behind the glass wall. Sara seems to understand what I'm saying and returns to the window to dance out an explanation. I stare, realizing I'm gaining an appreciation for the graceful moves Sara uses to communicate. Or perhaps I'm just appreciating the graceful Sara. I realize I'm staring when she puts her hands to her hips and glares at me.

"He thinks that makes sense," she translates. "He's talking physics again, trying to tell me something about bits of something every second. I'm guessing he's talking about frequency or wavelength but I'm not sure."

I'm (probably) right! I've won the game show quiz and can claim a prize. Now—what could I possibly want for a prize? I look at Sara.

"Let's leave it at that," I say. "What I need to know is how red parts affect the stuff flowing around inside of this thing."

Sara leaps to Ficus's window and gestures. Dances. Emotes relief. He gestures back. Sara puzzles for a minute, pulls out her not-a-cell phone then pauses and collects her thoughts.

"He's changed context, you know." she says. "Almost like he is telling a fable. He started with something like 'long ago and far away.' He's talking about a good place and a bad place. Like places on a map. There's a hero traveling from the bad place to the good place. At first the hero isn't good. He's like all the other bad people in the bad place. Along the journey, he (it?) learns things from—I guess 'teachers' is probably the best way to put it. When he gets to the good place, he thinks it's normal and doesn't realize it's different than the bad place. He's become good, but good is normal in the good place. So he thinks he's still normal. The hero doesn't change, but the listener of the story changes their understanding of good or bad. Sounds like a lot of jive-talk, you know?"

I've been working in a spaceship with a dancing girl and a sentient plant for almost three hours. Why would this story make less sense than anything else? If Ficus thinks the best way to describe the need for red parts is a fable; why not? He's got more brains than I do.

"Is he saying the red stuff is self-aware and wants to improve?" I ask Sara.

Dancing and motion. Puzzlement. More cell phone stroking. "No," Sara translates. "It doesn't think. But it responds to suggestions. The goo in the pipes doesn't know what it wants to do, but if you surround it with red, it will do the same. When it's red, it works."

I look at the pipe dangling from the hoovertree. It isn't oozing red goop and I can see the interior of the pipe is red. Sure enough—the pipe is encouraging good behavior on behalf of the amoral goo. All this ship needed was a good theologian and a healthy dose of old-time religion. The Church of the Holy Red.

I gather up my courage. "Sara," I say. "I'm going to need to plug this thing back in again. I need to find the broken connectors, and to do that, I need to test them. It will only take a minute, but tell him what I'm doing."

Sara translates, then steps back and looks at me. "He's giving you the hairy eyeball and says this is getting risky. When you did that the last time, we lost about forty-six minutes before bad things happen. It's going to get worse each time you plug it back together. He doesn't have time to argue, he doesn't like it, but he says to make it as quick as possible. He wants to count down from five, then you need to be fast. He'll try to keep things from breaking. He men tioned the paint on the outside of the ship again."

What I'm planning seems about as responsible as playing musical chairs in a geriatric home, but I take a deep breath, look at Sara, wish she would give me a kiss for luck like Princess Leia did for Luke before they swung over the chasm while being shot at by stormtroopers, take another deep breath to clear my mind, then watch Ficus wave a tendril five times.

I jam the first hose and twist. Red ascends faster than before, clacking gets louder—almost painful, and the floor bounces like a trampoline. Holding on to the pillar for balance against the rocking of the ship, I attach the second, third, fourth, and fifth pipes. The pipes turn red, some blue, some black. I do my best to develop a photographic memory and remember which pipes are blue, then unplug them all.

"He's frantic," Sara tells me in her too-loud voice. I wonder how many large chunks of the ship will survive a sudden and fiery loss of altitude and where they might land. Without asking, I disconnect one of the smaller red pipes and one of the not-red pipes I noticed during our latest flirtation with death. I look inside and smile.

I show them to Sara so she can translate to Ficus. Inside the not-red/blue/bad pipe, I can see gouges filled with a hard, blue deposit. The red/good pipe has the same gouges, but there aren't any blue deposits. My red/not-red theory is holding water. Granted, I'm doing a lot of hand-waving, but this is the best I can do given my limited knowledge of interstellar spaceship maintenance. Ficus and Sara don't seem too bothered by my blurring of the facts. Theory doesn't matter. Solutions matter.

"Fixing these pipes is going to be way easier than changing out the puck," I tell Sara. "It's just like the inside of a water heater. Tell Ficus we need a bunch of replacement pipe. I can tell which ones need to be swapped out, then we're good to go."

Sara dances. I watch. Ficus is responding, but my mind wanders back to a ballet I had seen in grade school. I don't remember being as moved then as I am by watching Sara now.

"Are you listening?" she says. She must have been saying something, but I was daydreaming.

"Sorry," I reply. "Where are the new tubes?"

"We ain't got Jack," she says. She's not happy. "There are no tubes, you know? Like, we don't carry spares."

Great. Maybe these tubes don't break often enough to warrant carrying around extras. No surprise; nobody thinks to check on their spare tire until they need it. When they do, it's dark and cold and there's no gas station within five miles. No spare tire, just like no spare red pipes.

"We need to go shopping," I tell Sara. "I won't ask if we have enough time to hop back down to Earth, because I don't want to know the bad news. Tell Ficus we need to calmly proceed to one of the exits, keep our hands, feet and vines inside the windows, fasten our safety belts, and land near the hardware store. I'm betting I know what we can use to fix this."

Ficus declines to accompany us due to the incompatibilities of our atmospheric requirements, but does a breath-taking job of remotely piloting Sara and I down to the store. Breathtaking in the literal sense—it isn't much more than six or seven minutes door-to-door. Somebody (some-plant) is apparently in a hurry and neglected to read the warnings about acceleration limitations of the prototypical human. How they manage to do all this up-and-down over a city without setting off every radar in the United States is puzzling, but not on my current list of things to worry about. My list consists only of red things.

The acceleration stops, we get out and run for the store. Sara can't help but stop and grab band posters from the telephone poles. I can't figure out if she is oblivious or optimistic.

While Sara is stealing posters, it occurs to me I could simply run for home. If I hide under my pillow, Sara and Ficus will never find me. But then, the paint would get scratched when the spaceship comes down in a huge fiery ball, crushing my apartment building, my pillow, and me. My last thought would be of Ficus, scolding me for being such a simpleton and gloating about the obvious superiority of multiple brains. Better to just get the parts.

Dave had closed the store hours ago, so we are able to shop without explanations. I pack several boxes from multiple departments. Electrical tape (it comes packed four rolls to the box with different colors, so sometime later I'll have to find spaceships needing tape in blue, green and black). PVC pipe. PVC connectors. High-temperature engine paint (red). Glue, screws and nails. One of the two-hundred-andfifty-piece toolkits. Tomato support sticks from the gardening section. Ten spools of electrical wire (red insulation only).

Sara dashes down the aisles, grabbing a random assortment: Red keyrings, a spray bottle of sink cleaner (pink), transparent tubing, bungie cords, a rake, a handful of novelty flashlights with lasers in the middle, some batteries, another box of gum.

I ring it all up on my account (with my employee discount—Ficus better appreciate what a good value he's getting). I assume if I save the world from falling spaceship debris, someone will be kind enough to reimburse me for the $359.81 worth of parts.

The return trip is just as dramatic and awe-inspiring as the first (as in screaming "Awwwwwwe, Noooooo"), but Ficus has a self-serving interest in our safe arrival, so the bumps and gee's are survivable. Stepping out of the box, I notice the floor oscillations have increased. It's like a fun house, except fun-houses at the circus don't burn up on reentry.

My plan is to replace the malfunctioning pipes with PVC, painted red on the inside. It's not going to be pretty, but it might last until they can get to the Interstellar Quikee Mart to obtain proper replacements. I'm assuming the red goo won't dissolve the PVC. If my flesh is still attached, the tubing might work okay. Probably not a sound assumption, but desperate times call for making things up and ignoring whatever facts might stand in the way.

I use a small electric saw to cut open the pipe, then spray the insides with red paint. I'm trying not to goop it on because it probably needs to dry before the red goo runs through it. But who knows, I'm guessing at most of this anyway. I set it aside to dry and start measuring the gaps between pipes and pucks.

Between sightseeing trips to Earth, unauthorized experiments with pipes and creative dance sessions with the plant, we have less than two hours before an unwelcome splashdown. Unfortunately, things aren't fitting. Paint isn't drying. Access ports are apparently designed for plant tendrils, not ape-hands. Ficus supplies a constant stream of useless advice and dire warnings of impending disaster. He has mastered the art of irritation.

Red paint is smeared across my clothes and everything is slippery. I'm sure I've skinned my knuckles, but can't tell if it's blood or paint. I'm considering telling Tall-Purple-And-Bulbous my complete plan and leave him to fix the thing. But I realize this would involve trying to describe it to Sara, who would describe it to Tall-Purple-and-Bulbous, who would gesture back a critique, which Sara would have to translate, which I would have to answer, which Sara would have to translate, etc. That's when I get back to reconnecting the frobulators.

"Ficus," I shout after a particularly unhelpful piece of advice is translated by Sara. "If you're such a smart piece of broccoli, why don't you just come in here and put this in the right place? And Sara, be sure to tell him I called him Ficus, as in a smelly, dime-store plant!"

Sara is staring at me. Dammit. I am so frustrated I could spit. I throw a pair of pliers across the room—a totally unsatisfying gesture when it hits the wall and floats back. Sara turns to Ficus and translates. Ficus wastes no time shaking his stems in response. Sara watches, dances back, then pauses. She turns away from Ficus to look at me.

"He says to tell you he overestimated your ability to help." Sara looks tired and upset. "He thinks you should leave before time runs out." There is about an hour left before paint-scratching commences and we are all short-tempered. Nothing like an impending fireball to rattle your cool.

It's thoughtful of Ficus to give me a chance to save my skin, but I see three problems: First, I would be riding back to Earth in a metal box being driven by a plant preoccupied with his impending demise. Second, Sara. Third, I'd never get another chance to save the world. WWLD? (What would Luke do?)

I float over and grab the pliers. "Tell him," I talk to Sara, but look at Ficus. "Tell him I will redouble my efforts."

Sara patches things up with Ficus. I glue the PVC pipe back together (red inside) and try to cram one of these pipes into the puck. The connection is behind a plate and a something else. My knuckles get reskinned.

"Sara, would you hold a flashlight so I can see?" I ask. Sara floats up behind me and touches one foot to the ground for an anchor. She again reminds me of a ballerina I semi-ignored on that grade school field trip. Sara snaps the switch on one of the novelty flashlights and I snap back to the here-and-now as well. The diagnostics go crazy under the not-red light. Between the rocking of the ship, the thrumming of the diagnostics, and the skinning of my knuckles I am ready to scream. The pipe refuses to fit into the puck and I can't get enough leverage to force it into place. I grunt and swear, wrenching the pipe and jostling against Sara. She grips the flashlight, changing it to laser mode. The diagnostic pads stop vibrating.

Maybe I'm doing this wrong. PVC pipe isn't working. It doesn't fit and I'm not going to be able to cut, paint, and trim enough before we scratch the paint against the North American Continent. But red lasers work; at least, according to the diagnostics. I step back, cross my arms and think for a minute.

With an enthusiasm born of comic-book heroism, I rip out all the PVC. Easy to do since it wasn't fitting anyways. I slice up a piece of the transparent tubing, jam it in the puck and duct-tape it to the red goo pipe. I grab Sara's hand with the flashlight laser and point it at the pipe. Right on cue, red goo shyly oozes up the pipe, following the line of the laser. The diagnostics are happy, red goo is flowing into the puck and endorphins flood my brain.

"That is bitchin'! Gimme five!" Sara screams. I'm still holding her hand with the laser so it's only natural to give her an enthusiastic hug and a big fat kiss on the mouth. Oh. The kiss was unexpected and we both pull back in embarrassment. Awkward pause.

"Yes. That was cool," I turn from Sara to admire my work. Even Ficus seems to be pleased when Sara tells him, although it's difficult for me to read much into his combination foxtrot and macarena. I start slicing tubing. This is going to work.

It takes a precious half-hour, but I've covered all the joints in red electrical tape. Left a bit of blood smeared around the sharper internal parts (not my intent, but it was a nice touch, so I don't clean it up). Sara helps me glue and tape sticks into a scaffolding to support the lasers. Wires run from the flashlights feed power from the batteries. The toolkit is scattered and floating around the room. It is a mess.

"Tell him we're ready to try this thing," I look at Sara. I am pleased. I flip on the lasers with an improvised dance step of my own making.

The lasers work with a vengeance, red goo charges up the tubes and busts loose at the puck. I've forgotten lesson number one about wearing eye protection and am given a refresher course in proper safety protocols. Red goo sprays Sara and me. Diagnostics angrily inform us of the event—ever-so-helpful. My eyes sting like paint thinner in an open wound and Sara is curled in a floating ball, moaning in pain. If I had a can of mace, I'd spray myself in the face to reduce the pain. Blinking through massive tears, I flip off the lasers. Ouch, ouch, ouch.

I glance at Ficus, who is hula dancing behind the window.

"Sara." I nudge her. "What is he saying?"

Sara unfolds and tries to clear her eyes. Blinks. Wipes. Looks up at Ficus.

"He says it worked." Her eyes show extreme pain, but she has a huge, dopey grin. "It's not perfect, but it will do for now. He wants to come out and see it for himself."

Sara takes my hand and I follow her to the door of one of the connecting rooms. Stepping inside, the door seals with a hiss. From one of the closets, Sara retrieves bottles of water and we improvise an eyewash station. Our eyes are red and teary, but I lose the urge to gouge them out of my head.

Sara blinks and looks out the window. The room is filling with a yellow-green mist.

"What's the mist?" I asked Sara.

"Chlorine. He's cycling the atmosphere so he can take a look."

Ficus's door opens and he slides into the engineering room. I realize the gesturing plant I have seen through the window is only a stalk protruding from the top of a slug-like body. I've seen this before: overweight customers carrying potted plants. Unlike them, he moves with a graceful, pulsating ripple toward the center of the room. Tendrils reach toward the vacuum-cleaner-column, touching the diagnostic panels. He takes the roll of duct-tape and smoothly repairs the blown tubes. I wish I had three-foot long fingers.

He flips on the lasers and it works like a charm. I look at Sara. I look at the column. How beautiful, I think.

For almost five minutes, Ficus admires my work, then perambulates over to our window and performs a quick dance step for Sara.

"He's impressed. He wants to know if you'd like to stick around," Sara said. "He says you're good with solving problems. Or you've got long fingers. Maybe long tendrils. Again—this doesn't translate quite right, but it's a compliment. He's referring to you as an expensive piece of meat."

This is an abrupt and unexpected turn of events. Fifteen minutes ago, I was uncertain if I had any future except as an overcooked cheap piece of meat experiencing a rapid return to Earth. Now I had an invertebrate plant offering me a bright future as an interstellar fixit guy.

"How often would I get shore leave?" I asked. I should have asked about the benefits package but it's hard to think after being maced.

"On Earth? Every couple of years," she says. "Like, this isn't one of our frequent stops. But I'm not sure how relativity twists that around. Ficus has a different sense of time than I do, so it's hopeless to ask him to figure it out. You'd be able to stop by occasionally, you know?"

"I don't miss it," she continues. "Everyone here is nice to me and I don't mind the work. Of course, it's not as glamorous as you might think—we have to work hard and between stops there's a lot of downtime. Sometimes we sleep through it and you wake up with a huge hangover."

"What makes it cool is the concerts and theater. Some of it I don't understand." Sara gestured at His Happy Bulbous Self outside the window. "He likes plant opera, which is mostly standing around and shedding body parts. But the knife-dancing is powerful, once you get used to sitting in an atmosphere bubble so you can see it live. You'd love it."

Then she replays her smile. My earthly romantic endeavors hadn't been productive and I'm between girlfriends. A long way between. Sara Ferrous is amusing, smart, and attractive. And being on a spaceship with her and lots of spare time could be... well... interesting.

Or at least, could have been. I think about Sara and keep the hardware store stocked with as much red inventory as I can order. But I like it here. I have new friends. Trust me, saying goodbye to Sara was the hardest thing I've ever done. But staying with Sara on that ship was a bigger jump than I was ready for.

When Sara realized I wasn't going to f ly away with them into the sunset, she offered me a second-best option. They left some killer recording devices I can fit in my pocket. I show up for live music and theater whenever I get the chance. I still spend time playing games, but my interests are leaning to dance. All the recordings, band posters and souvenir programs get stored in the "shed" in my back yard. Next time Sara is in the neighborhood, she promises to "catch me on the flip-side" and retrieve the shed and its contents, splitting the proceeds fifty-f ifty. I keep a fresh pack of gum around at all times, just to be a good host.

Dave is incessantly curious about my night with Sara. I haven't told him anything other than, "She was kind of spacey." Trite, but it makes me laugh.

If culture is what Earth is good for, I ought to at least take an interest. Now that I've met Sara, I know what kind of a girlfriend I'm looking for. Someday that ideal girl will walk into the store with a handful of parts, see us standing behind the counter and ask the question I'm hoping to hear.

"Can you help me get a plastic thingy?"

Beneath the Ice of Enceladus

James C. Glass | 8505 words

Illustrated by Vincent DiFate

Twelve hours out from Herschel Base, Anna Hegel finally vented when Phil made another crack about wasting space for "bug" people on the mission. Her face flushed when she glared at him, and she tried hard to control the angry quaver in her voice.

"I really hope I'm not going to have a problem with you, Phil. We're going to be spending a lot of time together in close quarters, whether you like it or not."

Phil Yallowitz was seated in front of Anna, so she couldn't see his face.

"That's my point," said Phil. "This isn't a bug hunt for me, it's a test of a vessel I've worked on for seven years. I need an electronic tech, not a scientist."

Sitting next to Anna, the tech assigned to the submersible program seemed to take offense at that. "Hey, man, you've got me. I'm certified mechanical and electrical."

"I don't need to have any light tubes changed. How are you with spectrum analyzers?"

The tech chuckled and turned to Anna. "Don't feel bad, Doctor. He bad-mouths me, too."

Sitting at the shuttle control desk, Mission Commander Mike Goffin looked over his shoulder and raised an eyebrow at them. Above him, Enceladus was already huge on his view screen.

"Stop it, all of you."

"Yes sir!" said the tech, and grinned.

"Read the mission profile again, Phil. A mission specialist was a must. The only debate was whether it would be a geologist or an astrobiologist, and the bug people won. The only reason we're here is because the water is easy to get to. The Europa team is understandably furious about their budget being cut so we could get our one chance here. One shot, people, so you'd better be able to work together on this. It's a long way back to Earth for anyone who can't do it."

There was a long silence after Mike said that.

Herschel Base was fifty kilometers west and north of the South Pole, and the view screen showed a new yet strangely tortured surface there. Unlike the northern, lightly cratered hemisphere of Enceladus, the southern area, at long distance, appeared relatively smooth and thus geologically more recent, but close inspection had long ago revealed a jumbled surface of cracks and rills, valleys and depressions as if some great glacier had spread there. Saturn was a bright ball thirty degrees in diameter, rings edge-on and faintly visible. Icy Mimas was beginning a transit, and Titan was a large, fuzzy orb in a black sky as the shuttle began its vertical descent to the base. Looking at Titan, Anna thought of the research platform orbiting above its hazy atmosphere. It had been her home for the past three years.

At fifty kilometers altitude, four fractures were clearly visible, bounded on either side by ridges, features that had been known as "tiger stripes" for well over a century. Closer, the fissures seemed choked with shining blocks and boulders—water ice with traces of ammonia, methane, and other simple organics. Out on the horizon, a plume of vapor rose far above the descending shuttle.

Water vapor, thought to be coming from eruptions of liquid from a surface whose average temperature was only seventy-five degrees Kelvin.

Below the surface of Enceladus, liquid water had to exist.

And where there was water, there might be life.

Anna Hegel had arrived with the intention of finding it. This was an ambition she shared with three generations of women in her family. Time had run out for two of them, and was getting dangerously short for the third. Herschel Base appeared below them as a black, fifty-meter-diameter spot on a chaotic jumble of ice in the fissure, or sulcus, known as Damascus. The roof and access module bristled with instrument arrays and a microwave dish. There was a jolt beneath their feet when shuttle lock occurred. Anna felt a subtle gravity, one hundredth that of Earth, but she'd been living with ten times that on Titan Station for three years. Despite regular exercise her limbs were like sticks, and within a year or two she would have to decide whether to remain in space or abandon her life's work and return to Earth as her mother and grandmother had done.

For them, it had been too late.

The floor hatch screeched as Mike pulled it open. He gestured to Anna.

"Ladies first."

Anna looked down; saw hands waving to her from the end of a hollow cylinder a few meters long. She made a little hop, and dropped like a dust mote. Several seconds later, hands grasped her and pulled her to one side as the others came down.

A slender, blond woman reached out her hand.

"Welcome to Herschel."

"Wow, it's cold in here," said Anna, and shivered.

The woman smiled. "Nothing like outside. It'll be better down below."

Three men were with the woman, and reached up as first Phil and his tech came down the tube, then Mike after them. The woman shook Anna's hand. "I'm Helena. I'll be your lab tech, and introduce you to Commander Kassner."

The space they occupied ended in a shaft angled at thirty degrees from their vertical, and lined with hand rungs. Anna followed Helena through it with practiced ease, and they came out into a living space shaped like a ring. There were instrument panels and video monitors floor to ceiling. One monitor showed a tech guiding Mike into the shaft above them.

"It's smaller than I expected," said Anna.

"There are several levels," said Helena. "Bunks and mess are just below this one, but you'll be working out of the lower levels. The whole base is a tapered cylinder, and most of it is insulation and concentric vacuum layers. They literally pounded a cork into a volcanic vent when they made this place. And the two outer layers are spring-loaded composites that flex. The ice is constantly moving around us. You'll hear it soon enough."

Anna felt tightness in her throat, and Helena smiled.

"Don't worry. I've been here four months, and we haven't been crushed yet. This place really only has to last another two weeks if you people get your job done."

A joke, perhaps, but Anna wasn't amused by it.

Helena showed Anna around the ring. A central shaft with rungs on a pole took them down to the next level where the odor of coffee was in the air and Mike was talking to a tall, square-jawed man in astronaut blues. The conversation stopped when Helena and Anna approached them, and Mike smiled.

"This is Doctor Anna Hegel, sir."

"Eric Kassner is our base commander," said Helena.

Kassner stuck out his hand, and his grip was bone hard. "It's a small Universe. I knew your mother years ago. How is she these days?"

Anna blinked. "Sorry to say she's dead, sir, waited too long to return to Earth. Her heart couldn't take it."

"Sorry to hear that. She had everyone's respect on Europa. It has been a tough mission there."

"Too much ice, sir. I doubt if they'll ever get through it. I guess that's why I'm here."

"Plenty of ice here, too, but an ocean is right beneath us, and you people are going to tell us what's there."

"Yes, sir."

"So when do we see it?" asked Mike.

"Soon enough. The time is short, but we're not going to rush unnecessarily. The submersible has to be proven at depth, and we don't even know what we're diving into yet. This module is plugging what used to be a volcanic vent, and the shaft down has been changing ever since the water flow was restricted. We're floating in the thing, and sonar returns are garbled. There could be a sea, a lake, or a puddle down there. First job is to find the end of the shaft and scan what's below it. There won't be much room for maneuvering."

"I'm sure Phil Yallowitz can handle it. The vessel is his baby," said Mike.

Kassner turned back to Anna. "Your mother was a patient person, and I hope you are too. The first dips will be with tech and pilot only."

"I understand, sir," said Anna, "as long as you remember we only have two weeks until our return window to Titan."

Kassner nodded. "I know that, Doctor, but I also intend to send you home alive."

Anna suddenly felt a vibration, and the floor tilted beneath her feet, nearly tipping her over. She grabbed Mike's arm, as there was a terrible screech from the walls, like some metal talon was scraping there. Anna's heart hammered from the shock of it.

Kassner looked at her calmly. "Vapor bubble. You'll get used to them. Earthquakes are less frequent, but scarier. The water reservoir below us is under pressure, and is either very small, or there's a big heat source there. Please keep in mind this is an extraordinarily dynamic environment. Yes, we want to explore it as quickly as we can. We just don't want it to kill us."

The commander reached out and shook their hands again. "Welcome to Herschel Base. Helena will show you where to bunk, and there will be a general briefing for all of you in the mess in exactly two hours."

Helena touched Anna's elbow. "This way," she said, and took them away to their quarters.

Sleep was a challenge. Anna's satchel was inclined slightly from the vertical in a six cubic meter niche behind a poly-steel grill. It was not totally unlike the shuttle, but that had been quiet during what passed for night, and she'd floated around in her bag. On Herschel the floor and walls were forever heaving and shaking, and the constant groaning and screaming of hard ice and rock scraping metal kept her awake for most of her sleep shift. She fought off the effects with strong coffee until Helena gave her something that knocked her out cold, and life was good again.

Mike and Phil and two techs made the first dip two-work shifts after arrival. Anna went down to bottom level to watch their progress on a television monitor after they'd submerged. Phil's submersible was shaped like a shallow, inverted soup bowl with ports on the sides, bow steering and diving planes, and a nose bubble. Two retractable claws folded up along two sides, and there were three directional lights forward. Armor was sufficient for two thousand feet Earth-side, and was definitely overkill for what they were expecting, but in Phil's own words: "You never know."

There were no screws; three ports aft were all there was to see of a jet propulsion system fueled by hypergolic Anistol, as used for maneuvering by the shuttle. Water and hydrogen were the only emissions, and viewed as safe in any oxygen-free environment.

Anna watched as Mike, Phil, and two techs opened the hatch on top of the submersible and climbed in. The yellow paint of the hull complimented the yellowish-green of the water it floated in, and there was a musty odor in the air. Commander Kassner manned the comm panel and Anna joined him there while a base tech closed and sealed the hatch.

"Diving," said Phil, and there was a roiling on the water surface where the submersible floated in its tank.

"Opening lock," said Kassner, and moved his hand. The submersible dropped into a lock below the tank, where pressure could be varied in transferring the vessel to the outside.

"Pressurizing," said Kassner, and Anna felt the floor move beneath her. The walls around them groaned. Kassner looked at her. "It's okay. We bob up and down a bit. In the low gravity, pressure changes are subtle. If there's an ocean below us I doubt if it's very deep." He looked up at a monitor. "Lights on. Opening outer door."

On the monitor, silvery doors slid aside and three bright beams of light disappeared into blackness, the beam edges tinged green.

"No particulates," said Anna.

"Pieces of ice once in a while, and those bubbles that come from some depth." Kassner smiled. "I'm sure you'd like to see something more interesting."

"That's why I'm here. Right now, I'll settle for water samples."

"Automatic, and real-time." Kassner pointed. "Follow that monitor. Readings are every four meters."

When Anna looked at the monitor, a simple spectrum was already building there: traces of ammonia, methane, sulfur, and iron.

"The vent is widening," said Mike, and Anna looked at the other monitor again. Blackness ahead, the faint glow of ice from the sides. Suddenly, there was a faint reflection from something in front of the submersible.

"Slowing," said Phil. A shelf of ice came out of the blackness, oriented left to right and descending at a steep angle.

"The shaft turns here, and I see an edge to it. Cracks all over the place."

There was a faint, blue outline of something, and blackness beyond it.

"That's what has been scattering our sonar," said Kassner. "I'd put the first buoy right where it turns."

"Okay," said Mike, "but let's find the end first. I see it. We'll put the first buoy there."

"Don't go beyond that point. We'll check out the vessel at depth tomorrow. I want those relays in first."

"Right."

The monitor image faded, and then went to random noise and cosmic background. "What's happening?" asked Anna.

"They're around the corner. A relay buoy will go at the shaft opening, another at the turn by the shelf, and we should have data communication the rest of the way if there's really a large body of water there."

They waited nervously for half an hour, and suddenly the monitor showed a picture of ice close-up and a conical package anchored to it by a short chain.

"Are you getting sonar yet?" asked Mike, and his voice was extraordinarily loud and clear.

Kassner leaned to his left and looked at another monitor. "Got it. Multiplexing. The phones are even more exceptional. Sounds like you're with us here. So, let's see what we have down there."

They watched the multiplexed pattern of the pulsed sonar build for fifteen minutes before Kassner said, "It's a small sea or a lake, running parallel to the fissure. Depth goes to two or three hundred meters, and it's big, maybe ten klicks long, three wide. The vent comes out of the ceiling of the thing. The bottom reflections are coming up with rough areas, like there's some structure down there. And no, you can't take a quick look."

"Figured," said Mike. "Take'er up, Phil."

The men returned to the base in a jubilant mood.

And Anna didn't sleep a wink that night.

It was three Earth-days until the next submersion. Erratic readings in the vessel's pilot deck were finally traced to a damaged optical cable, and a new one threaded through a wall to replace it. Only Mike and Phil would go down this time, and Anna tried hard to be patient.

"There's room for me, and all I want to do is look outside," she said.

"You'd do better to watch the spectrometer readouts here," said Mike. "This is a systems check, and we won't be going anywhere near the bottom."

"Watch the monitor," said Phil. "There's nothing to see until we go deep. You'll be bored."

Inside, she despised Phil's condescending tone of voice, but Anna kept her face expressionless.

"I can do that quietly, and not be in the way, Phil. And if you see anything at all interesting, I'm sure you'll be alert enough to include me in the discussion of it."

"Absolutely," said Mike, but Phil said nothing and looked away from her.

The submersible disappeared beneath the yellowish-green surface with a gentle roil of bubbles. After a few minutes, Anna dismissed her irritation and carefully watched the spectrometer readings as the vessel reached the shelf at the bottom of the vent and sailed out into open water.

The water there was even more pristine than in the vent. The lines for ammonia and iron nearly disappeared. After a few minutes a small peak developed for sodium when the vessel was sailing near the ceiling of the mammoth cavern, and at one point there was a small spike in sulfur. Anna noted the exact time of each event; it was something to do. Commander Kassner's attention was focused on the sonar readings the entire time.

A few minutes later, things got more interesting when Phil began putting his machine through her paces, beginning with a test of the bow planes in turns and steep dives. The bottom was at three hundred meters at that point, and the dive went to one hundred. Anna stared hard at the monitor, but there were only three beams of light disappearing into darkness. Whatever was on the bottom was a poor reflector. But when she looked back at the spectrometer readings, a sharp line for sulfur was growing, and it suddenly stopped as Anna noted the time again.

"Local concentration of sulfur where you are," she said.

There was a pause. "Don't see anything," said Mike.

"The bottom is quite rough below you," said Kassner. "We're getting a lot of scattering."

"I'll want to go down there," said Anna, and then grabbed hard for a wall rung when the floor beneath her began shaking violently. She hung on grimly as the shaking went on for several seconds. It stopped as quickly as it had begun.

"That was no gas bubble," said Anna. Kassner turned to look at her, and she didn't like what she saw in his eyes.

"Quake," said Kassner. "There were a few of them when Herschel was first inserted into the vent, but this is the first big one since. Hope it didn't plug up the vent. Mike, are you there?"

"Loud and clear," said Mike. "We just had some turbulence here, and something dark dropped past us toward the bottom."

"We had a quake up here, pretty strong, a shaker. You'd better come up right away."

"Okay. We've gone through our list for now; the rest has to be done at depth. That must have been a rock that came past us. It went down like a chunk of iron. Good thing it didn't hit us."

"I'll feel better when you see the vent is clear," said Kassner.

"Blowing tanks," said Phil. "We'll be there in a minute or two."

Anna was worried, and Kassner saw it on her face. "Good communications, so the shaft can't be plugged."

As if in reply, Mike called in only seconds later, "We have a little problem here," and at that instant Anna felt the floor shake again beneath her feet.

"Some debris on the shelf here, and another rock just came down. Wouldn't take much to make a tight fit. We'll clean it off with the articulators. Stand by."

The news was worse a minute later.

"Now we have a real problem. The port articulator is frozen up, and the servo is showing an overload when I try to deploy it. Starboard claw is working fine, and we're cleaning off the shelf, but we need to have both articulators working at depth. This could be a major repair."

"We don't have the time," said Anna.

"We'll make the time," said Phil. "I'm not taking this thing down with a broken arm and then take the blame if we need it."

"Understood," said Kassner. "For now, let's play it by ear."

"And I'm going down on the next dive," added Anna.

Phil started to say something, but there was a click and his voice was cut off.

Ten minutes later the vessel surfaced in a roil of bubbles and the hatch popped open. Phil climbed out and went straight to the port articulator folded tightly against yellow metal like an injured arm. "I need a speed wrench," he said, and a tech brought one to him.

Mike climbed out of the vessel, stepped over to the edge of the tank, and whispered to Kassner and Anna. "Let's get some coffee and let Phil work."

They went up one level and had coffee. "Dark down there, and clear," said Mike. "Any light color on the bottom would have shown up in our beams. There's rock peeking through ice on the walls, and especially on the ceiling. It was like a cave dive."

"Anything interesting will likely be on the bottom," said Anna. "The spectrometer showed some interesting sulfur spikes while you were down there."

"Oh," said Mike, "yes, there was one place where Phil thought he saw a couple of bubbles go by us."

Anna's heart leapt. "Did you record it?"

Mike shook his head. "Nope. It was just a few seconds after we came out of our dive."

"I'll backtrack it," said Anna. She turned to go back to lower level, and nearly ran into Phil as he came out of the central shaft connecting all levels. He looked both saddened and subdued.

"Well, I really screwed up."

"What?" Anna didn't know Phil was capable of admitting an error to anyone, let alone her.

"I should have inspected the articulators before we left Titan Base. A joint seal was split; God knows how long that bearing was exposed to hard vacuum. It looks like a porcupine."

Anna's mouth hung open in confusion.

"Epitaxial growth in hard vacuum has made hair crystals at the carbon boundaries and welded the joint. I don't suppose we have a high-voltage unit here; something at, say, thirty kilovolts and a milliamp?"

"Nothing like that," said Kassner.

Phil sighed, obviously upset with himself. Anna was strangely tempted to touch his arm in comfort.

"One quick check on Titan Station, and I would have found it. I can't burn it off, so I'll have to do it the hard way. I can snap the bearing out easy enough, but then I have to polish everything down to the original tolerances, and that's a trial-and-error hand job that could take days."

"We don't have days!" shouted Anna.

Phil winced, and Anna looked down at her feet.

"Sorry. We don't have time for blame, either. We only have ten Earth days at most. I'm willing to go down there with one articulator working."

"I don't think so," said Kassner, and Mike nodded in agreement.

"I need at least two dives to see what's down there," pleaded Anna. "In case you've forgotten, that is our primary mission."

"With help I can fix it in a day, two days tops," said Phil. "We'll work around the clock."

Everyone looked at Kassner, and he looked back at each of them in turn.

"I'm not hearing objections. Okay, recruit whoever you need, and do it."

"I'll help," said Anna.

Phil actually smiled at her. "No offense, but I'll use the techs. They know their way around a machine shop, and this is precision handwork we have to do. Thanks."

"Then I can use the time to go over the sonar scans and target some areas to look at. I'll have a plan ready for us in a day. Don't beat yourself up, Phil. We'll get this done," said Anna.

Phil couldn't look at her, simply mumbled something, turned, and climbed back down the central shaft to bottom level, where his work awaited him.

Mike put a hand on Anna's shoulder. "He's basically a good guy, you know. Right now his self-confidence is bruised, and we need to hope it heals fast."

"It has to," said Anna, but she worried about it. This is my last chance, she thought.

Her relief came a day and a half later, when Phil announced the articulator was now working, and Anna had to rush to finish her plan for the next dive.

There was another quake just before they submerged. Sonar showed no blockage in the vent below them, but a few small cracks had become big ones. The quakes were becoming more frequent. Kassner said it was a cyclic thing related to the positions of Titan and Mimas, and he expected the shaking to lessen soon.

Anna felt cramped in the submersible, was seated on a shelf behind Mike and Phil where she could watch the instruments and look out both the portholes and nose bubble at the same time.

Phil blew tanks gradually to slow their decent in a low-gravity environment where pumps and water-jets were a substitute for buoyancy. Using the bow planes, Phil literally flew the vessel down the vent and out over the shelf into deep water. He made a few swoops and turns, deployed both articulators, tested each joint before turning his attention to a map of areas Anna had found interesting. Anna leaned over his shoulder and pointed at the map as Phil and Mike studied it.

"The rough areas on the bottom are most interesting. There's a lot of sonar scattering in these three regions, and lighter detail in some others. I'd like to hit these five if we can, and while we're at it we can look closer at the smoother regions."

"We'll have to get around enough to map the entire cavern, and that's one dive by itself," said Mike. "It's in the mission statement, Anna."

"We can extrapolate a lot if we stay close to the bottom in the 30 percent we've already scanned." Anna pointed. "Go here first. You were above this area when I got a nice sulfur spike on the spectrometer."

"Okay," said Phil. Map coordinates were relative to the pinging buoy in the vent below Herschel, and they were already close. Phil began a slow descent on a helical path towards the bottom.

Anna squinted, willing herself to see through the gloom. Her heartbeat quickened as Mike called off the distance to the bottom. At fifty meters they passed a bubble the size of a dinner plate. The view below was a dirty gray, and at twenty meters there was a dark splotch that moved across their view as Phil leveled out the dive and slowed.

At ten meters the bottom finally came into view, and at first Anna only felt disappointment. It looked like dark gray sand with occasional boulders protruding, nothing like what she'd expected from the sonar reflections.

But at three meters, Phil brought the vessel to a crawl, and the view outside was dramatically different. The boulders were now little towers of dark material like basalt, and the sand was a coarse gravel of dark rock and dirty ice. Even closer, the meter-high towers were made of dirty ice covered with an orange stain that reflected weakly in the bright lights. "We have to get a sample of that," said Anna.

Kassner had been watching everything from Herschel Base, and suddenly called in. "We're getting spikes for sulfur and sodium, and a trace of iron. The area you're in right now is loaded with methane, and it's over two-seven-seven Kelvin there. There was a sharp increase in temperature when you reached ten meters above bottom."

"Reminds me of Earth-side smokers, but there's all kinds of complex life forms around those things," said Anna. "All I see here is some kind of stain. We're sampling it. Could be bacterial."

"Wishful thinking," said Phil. "Looks mineral to me."

Phil looked surprised when Anna said, "You're probably right, but let's get a good sample of it, and also the gravel and bottom ice. That has a different sheen to it."

"Bubbles," said Mike, pointing.

Anna looked, and saw a stream of small bubbles leaking from the base of a tower, rising slowly and coalescing to form a single larger bubble, which drifted lazily upwards. "Can we get a temperature reading on that tower's surface?"

"Should have it," said Phil. He'd been working an articulator to break off a small nubbin from the side of the tower, and was dropping it into the specimen basket beneath the nose bubble.

"Two-eight-three Kelvin," said Kassner

"The bottom must be porous," said Anna. "These towers could be crystallites of a rock-ice mix where heat channels are coming through. I bet we have a mix of rock and methane clathrate down here, but if there are any methane breathers I sure don't see them."

Phil steered the submersible at a crawl through a small forest of towers, and columns of small bubbles rose from a few of them, but there was no sign of a living thing or any remnants of life, and then the bottom was soon relatively smooth again. They stopped for samples several times, but spent most of the dive just in sight of the bottom. They mapped the extent of the cavern in all directions. It was not so much an underground sea as it was a lake, unstable at best with all the seismic activity, and unlikely to be large or stable enough for life to have evolved there. There were more forests of little, bubbling towers, and vast expanses of black rock mixed with methane in ice, and by the end of the dive they had explored all the prime interesting areas Anna had marked on the sonar maps. There was a secondary list of prospects where small echo dispersions had been observed, but both Mike and Phil felt they had "seen it all" when they returned to Herschel Base. They left Anna to analyze the specimens they'd brought up and to define targets for the next dive. They would also be mapping the cavern ceiling in a search for other vents, and that was scheduled to take much of the dive time.

Anna expected her specimen analysis to take days, and there would only be time for one more dive before she had to leave.

Kassner seemed to sense her dark mood, and shared a cup of coffee with her that first evening back from the depths.

"You're disappointed," he said.

"I guess, but I have to admit a moon this small probably hasn't been around long enough in a tidal environment to evolve any life forms. It was a long shot, and a negative result is still a result. That's science."

"Would have been nice for the family history," said Kassner.

"You have a file on me?"

"You bet I do. Your pedigree is what brought you here."

"You must mean my grandmother. Do you know the Martian bacteria she discovered are still controversial? Half the science community still thinks it was a contaminant. And mom had to return to Earth before they even got a fourth of the way through Europa's ice. New discoveries are wonderful, but circumstances and a lot of luck are involved. And I have one more dive to get some."

"Then let's drink to luck," said Kassner, and he raised his squeeze bottle.

Their bottles touched as another small quake made the floor shudder beneath their feet.

Midway through the dive Anna felt herself relaxed but saddened, resigned to the fact the mission would be a scientifically interesting mapping of a subterranean lake beneath the surface of Enceladus. The geologists would be excited, but for Anna's colleagues in astrobiology there would be nothing to talk about. Her work on Titan had reached a dead end; the big moon had fascinating chemistry and geology, but no life. Perhaps she could return to Mars and build on what her grandmother had done. The gravity there was much higher, and she could then return to Earth in her later years and write up her lifetime of experiences in the outer regions of the Solar System. It would also tie together the work of three generations of women in her family.

For Anna, it was a good plan, and an acceptable plan, though her dream of finding extraterrestrial life was fading fast.

But it was a plan that changed abruptly after the fourth hour of the dive.

Sample analysis had shown no life. There was silicate rock mixed with dense, rich methane clathrate, and the stain on the little towers was iron sulfide. The gas bubbles were likely hydrogen sulfide, though she'd not been able to sample them directly. Every test for bacteria, every test for chemical reactions used by known life forms, had been negative.

For nearly four hours they had cruised near the bottom, observing occasional clusters of crystalline towers, but mostly vast plains of pebbles and methane-rich water ice. Kassner had called in twice with news of renewed quake activity, and they had seen several large chunks of ice drifting downward toward the bottom. Communication with Kassner had become garbled, cutting in and out after that. Mike was worried about it, and said so. "We might have to cut it short, Anna. With all these quakes, we don't want to be trapped down here."

Anna ignored his concerns. She had marked four places on the sonar maps where there were small depressions in the bottom that showed weak dispersions similar to what was seen with tower clusters. They were now nearing the first of them. Anna's attention had wandered a bit as she thought about returning to Mars, but something suddenly caught her eye.

"I see flashing lights," she said, and leaned forward to look ahead through the nose bubble. "Reflections?"

"No," said Phil. "I see it, too. Yellowishgreen—flickering, straight ahead."

"And beyond," said Mike. "One source is close, the other fainter."

In the darkness beneath the ice of Enceladus, the flashes of light suddenly ceased.

Phil had slowed to a crawl, but remained on course. The plain ahead was level, then rose a meter to form a hillock that curved away from them. And just beyond it was what Anna first thought was another tower, different this time, a feature glowing bronze in the bright lights of the submersible.

They came close, hovering over a crater-like depression two meters deep. The object it held reminded Anna of a dead tree with several bare branches. It was anchored in methaneclathrate and stood four meters high, and around it were several others only a meter tall. Branches swayed slowly in the turbulence created by the submersible's jets. Their surfaces were rough and mottled in bronze and dark brown, and from the dark areas streams of tiny bubbles pulsed in bursts that floated lazily upwards.

"Oh, my God, oh my God," gasped Anna, and she could scarcely breathe.

"It's soft," said Mike. "Hollow, maybe."

"Not rigid," whispered Anna. "Look at the tangle of tubules at its base, anchoring it to the ice. The bubbles have to be hydrogen. It's using methane. I think it's alive."

"A plant? Looks like a metal sculpture. Now it's not moving," said Mike.

"The jets are off. No more wake. The currents move it. That doesn't mean it's alive," said Phil, "but something was flashing lights at us until we got close."

"Not now."

"Turn off our lights."

"What? You want to be blind down here? I don't think so." Phil shook his head.

"Just the big headlights. We can still see close from the interior lights," said Anna.

"I can back off a bit." Phil frowned.

"No. I want to see if we can provoke a reaction."

"Why don't I just touch it with an articulator, then?"

"You might hurt it."

Mike reached over and turned off the exterior lights. "Enough," he said.

Outside, the strange tree-looking thing was dimly illuminated. They waited for long minutes, but nothing happened. "It's some kind of crystallized tower like the others, only a different shape," said Phil.

"We need to turn off the interior lights." Anna's heart was thumping hard in her excitement.

"How long?" asked Mike.

"A few minutes. It saw our lights and flashed at us, but stopped when we got close. I want to try something with this." Anna held up a small penlight she routinely carried with her on a ring with two keys and a flat, multiple-bladed screwdriver.

Phil shook his head, but Mike put a hand on his shoulder. "Five minutes, and no longer. Turn the lights out, Phil, and start counting."

The lights went out, and they were sitting in pitch-blackness. "This is really dumb," said Phil.

They waited one minute, then two. There was a faint scraping sound from outside that came and went, and nothing to be seen. Finally, Anna moved her hand close to the nose bubble and began flashing her little penlight off and on. She continued for half a minute, and then stopped.

There was no response, but Phil suddenly shifted in his seat. "I see some faint flashes way off to the left of us. Maybe we should move."

Anna flashed her light several times, waited a few seconds, then did it again and held her breath.

From outside, green lights flickered dimly at first, like a dance of shy fireflies. The lights began near the edges of the nose bubble and moved inward, getting brighter.

"Yes!" said Anna, and she flashed her little penlight again.

The response was immediate and bright; multiple points of flashing green illuminating the ends of branches. There was a scraping sound from the outer hull of the submersible, and suddenly a glowing tendril of green struck the center of the nose bubble and recoiled from it.

"Yikes!" gasped Phil, and with one hand hit the outside lights, while the other reached to start the engine pumps.

The thing outside had extended two branches to grasp the submersible just above the bow planes, and a third branch was now waving slowly back and forth in the bright lights. The jets went on with a whoosh and Phil backed up several meters to get out of its reach.

"Stop! Stop!" yelled Anna, but Phil had already done it. He smiled wanly at Mike, who was still staring at the thing. "Pretty fast for a rock," he said, and then turned to Anna. "I suppose you want samples, now. How do we do that? I could probably break something off with an articulator."

"Absolutely not," said Anna. "It could be a plant, a coral community, or a single, intelligent entity. I will not take a chance on harming it before we have some idea what it is. The response could have been chemically or intelligently directed. If it's a plant, there must be dead ones. Look for debris in the depression it's in."

Phil peered out the side of the nose bubble. "There's more than just this one. I see green lights flickering again from our left, maybe a few meters away."

The object of their attention had pulled its branches in tightly against the main trunk and was now motionless, an abstract statue mottled in bronze and dark brown.

They drew closer. Phil activated an articulator, extended a claw, and poked gingerly at gravel and ice near the object's base. There was a short piece of something white and showing large pores that he placed in the sample box. Plant or animal, there were two small versions of the big one rooted there, but Anna insisted they not be touched. And even though they came within reach of it, the big one remained motionless the entire time the bright lights were on.

"Let's move," said Mike. "There's more to see left of us, but the lights have stopped flashing."

"Okay," said Anna. "Is it possible to dim our lights?"

"No. I'll come in slow this time, and turn off the lights when we get in close."

Phil backed off with a single jet pulse, and veered left in the direction of the other lights they'd seen. They saw another large chunk of ice come down and impact softly with the sea floor, stirring up a cloud of sand and pebbles.

It was twenty meters before they saw reflections from tall stalks rising from the bottom. Phil came in slowly this time. They saw several branched trunks standing close together, and from the end of one branch came a single flash of green. Two meters from the nearest branch, the submersible's lights went out. The interior lights illuminated the scene dimly, an abstract portrait of bronze figures on black.

"They're moving," whispered Anna.

Branches waved ever so gently in still water, the movement synchronous among several thick trunks. Even in dim light there were occasional flashes of green, which they could now see were coming from little nubbins on the ends of the branches. Mike looked off to the right.

"The one we just left is flashing again."

"They're talking about us," said Anna.

"Maybe, or just warning each other of danger. Whatever. You got what you came for, Anna. It's certainly a surprise to me," said Phil.

"You sure you don't want a living sample of these things?"

"I can't do it. There's no precedent for any life form above bacterial level. It's a case for the Council of Nations. If it's allowed, someone else will have to do it, or maybe I'll get a chance to come back someday. We have our pictures and spectra, and all the water samples. That'll have to be enough for now."

Phil used the articulators to scoop up some samples near the bases of the trunks. The occupants of the little depression in gravel and methane clathrate seemed undisturbed by it. Bronze limbs waved gently and decorated themselves in flashes of green. Anna watched, mesmerized, burning the sight into her memory.

"We really have to finish our mapping and look for other vents," Mike finally said.

"Will we have time for another dive?" Anna felt an ache in her chest.

"Not this trip," said Mike. "You'll have to come back again, if you can."

"The base might get swallowed up, and the vents plugged. There might not be another chance."

"I know, but we have to finish the mission plan. Let's go, Phil."

Phil looked over his shoulder at Anna and frowned at the agony written on her face.

"Got to go, Anna. We'll call Kassner right now, and get your discovery on the record."

Anna nodded, and pressed her lips together as they backed away. Green flashes sent them on their way, light from living things anchored in ice at the bottom of a subterranean lake of a tiny, geologically active moon cold beyond belief, in the outer reaches of the Solar System. It was a miracle, a thing to be studied for a lifetime, and she was being forced to leave it.

Mile called Kassner, but there was no response, not even static. "I don't like this. The signal was clear until a while ago."

"Could be scattering," said Phil. "There's a lot of rough topology near the bottom."

"So take us up a hundred feet or so."

Phil did it, and Mike tried again. "Herschel Base, can you hear us? Anna has a major discovery to report. Come in!"

Nothing.

"This is bad," said Mike. "With all those big cracks we saw in the vent, a piece of ice could have sheared off and taken out the transponder."

"Or plugged the vent," said Phil.

Anna's heart jumped. "How long can we stay down here?"

"Oh, another eight hours or so," Phil said calmly.

"I'm not abandoning the rest of this mission, people, but we'll have to hurry it up," said Mike. "Follow the profile, Phil, but double-time it. Finding another vent won't help us; we have no way to survive on the surface. We have to come up at Herschel Base. We have four hours left on the profile. Let's do it in two, and go home."

Mike said it with determination, but all three of them could hear the overtone of fear in his voice.

Getting back to base was suddenly not a matter of reporting an important discovery, but of survival.

Anna said little during the rest of the dive, and was on the edge of tears the entire time. For two hours they made sonar maps of the rest of the cavern, took several samples from the ceiling and walls, and saw what they thought was another vent, though it was too narrow for them to explore it. Mike kept on calling Kassner, but there was only dead silence in return. There was certainly no time for further exploration of the bottom. Anna distracted herself by pointing out several more areas on her sonar maps she was now certain harbored life. The little depressions were where the methane clathrate was so exposed to serve as anchors for the life on Enceladus. But now there would be no time extensions for the mission. After two hours, worry had turned to fear, and they hurried back to the Herschel Base vent under full power.

What they found at the vent matched their worst fears.

A huge boulder of ice had calved from the vent wall, and was plugging it at a steep angle, its tip resting on the shelf that the transponder had been anchored to. As they came up to it, the ceiling above them shuddered and small pieces of ice clattered off the top of the submersible. Phil wiggled the controls, and they backed off to one side of the vent. "Pretty loose inside the vent," he said. "Let's see if my baby can unplug this thing in low gravity."

For nearly an hour Phil used the articulators to push against the icy plug in various directions, but even with the slightest movement there was an avalanche of debris from above that terrorized all of them. Mike was on the radio continuously, but getting nothing.

There was a sudden crash of boulders on the roof of the submersible. "See that?" said Phil. "It wobbled. The tip is wedged where the shelf comes out of the wall. The shelf is holding it up. Maybe if I can break off the tip—"

Phil moved in closer, used the articulators to pull back on the tip of the plug, and wiggled it back and forth. When Anna saw the movement, her hope soared. They were making progress, the base only a hundred meters or so above them, and they had air left for hours.

And then, quite suddenly, they had minutes.

The plug wobbled, and there was a horrible impact on the roof of the submersible. The interior lights flickered, and Anna was momentarily deafened by a shriek of tortured metal from the hull walls. The impact lifted her from her seat and slammed her sideways as she clapped her hands over her ears.

"No, no, NO!" gasped Phil. Mike hadn't strapped in, was on the floor and holding one hand to a bloody gash on his forehead.

"What's that hissing sound?" said Anna.

"We're losing our air and fuel! That last avalanche must have breached the outer hull. Mike, get up and strap in. Hang on, Anna. We've got to do this quick, or we're dead!"

Anna gulped and grasped the arms of her chair, the hissing sound now loud in her ears. She smelled fuel and her own sweat.

She had never thought about death, especially her own, but now it came to her.

Mike managed to get in his seat and strap in as Phil backed off a few meters from the vent shelf and the shower of debris coming down there.

"Sorry baby," said Phil, not talking to a person, "but we have to do this the hard way."

The submersible lurched forward and rushed toward the shelf at the bottom of the vent, crashing into it hard at a point just below the observation bubble.

"Phil!" screamed Anna, but Phil was backing off again, stopping, and the submersible lurched forward once more. The second crash seemed softer, ice resisting, crumbling, and allowing them a creep forward after contact. The craft jerked backward in a blink, pitching Anna forward in her chair. Outside was chaos, a shattered shelf of ice falling away, the sharp tip of the plug sheared off at a steep angle with it. A huge fang of ice fell out of the vent, and disappeared from view.

The air in the cabin was musty, and Anna had a sudden headache. The submersible accelerated. Small pieces of ice clattered off the hull as they flew up the vent and through an open lock unprepared for them. They came out of the water in a roil of bubbles, and Anna had one glimpse of two shocked technicians jumping away from the pool.

For one moment, while Mike and Phil told their story, Anna was silent and just happy to be alive. But when the men turned it over to her and she described her discovery she was suddenly depressed again, and she came close to crying when Kassner and then Helena embraced and congratulated her.

It was at that moment when Phil climbed off the hull of his battered submersible and grinned at her. He had something wet and glistening in a gloved hand, and he handed it to Anna. "This should lighten your mood. Look what I found stuck between the base of the port articulator and the hull. When that thing grabbed us and I pulled away it must have snapped this off. No wonder the thing was thrashing around so much."

Anna's heart skipped a beat. In Phil's hand was a six-inch section from the end of a branch. The end nubbin was intact, the other end of the section shredded like a torn piece of Yucca stalk. The piece was still wet, but the mottled bronze and brown spots were fading before her eyes.

"Quick, get it in water!"

Mike grabbed a pan from a bench and filled it with water from the tank.

Anna giggled, grabbed Phil's arm and kissed him on the cheek. "Thank you! Oh, I've got to get some ice on this!"

Helena ran for ice. Anna grabbed the pan, and rushed away with her new treasure. Behind her, Phil said something that might have bothered her once, but didn't now in her moment of joy.

"Now there's a mood shift for you," said Phil.

One day out from Enceladus, Anna emerged from her cubicle and joined Mike and Phil on the control deck for a squeeze of tea.

"Ah, the scientist walks among us," said Mike. "Tea?"

"Thanks," said Anna, and accepted a squeeze bottle from him. "I've been writing up a summary of the examinations I made on Herschel. I can't do anything else until we get to Titan."

"Well, you'll have to tell us all about it," said Phil.

Anna took a suck of tea. "There isn't a lot I can say right now. The dead fragment you dug out of the gravel is almost as interesting as the fresh specimen. The closest thing I can think of on Earth is coral, but the structure is silicate, not carbonate. The bronze areas on the surface show iron sulfide. There could be bacteria producing that since there's both iron and sulfur in the dark gravel, and also in the ice, but on the whole I'm seeing a colony of tiny worm-like critters living in a labyrinth of tubules, and my bet is a methane metabolism with hydrogen output. I've frozen the sample in some water mixed with methane clathrate. We even have the little nubbin where the light is emitted. It seems to be silicate with trace sulfur. I radioed all of this ahead, and everyone at the lab is so excited."

Phil looked over his shoulder at her. "When you accept your Nobel Prize, we'll expect an invitation to the ceremony."

Anna smiled. "Well—that isn't going to happen."

"Why not?"

"Even if I got the award I wouldn't be there to accept it."

"I thought you were thinking about cycling back to Earth," said Mike.

"I was. I was thinking about it seriously until a few days ago." "Ah," said Mike, and winked at Phil. There was a pause while Anna took another suck of tea, and then said, "Commander Kassner said he and his crew are cycling out in two months. I'm coming back with the replacement crew. That will give me six months for dives to study the Ice Corals."

"That's what you're going to call them?" asked Mike.

"For now. I'll let some official give them a Latin name. I have a lifetime of work to do on this project, and I'm not going back to Earth to do it."

"Well, I guess we'll be seeing you around here, then," said Phil.

"You bet," said Anna, "just as long as the articulators work the first time."

"Ouch," said Phil.

Release

Jacob A. Boyd | 6305 words

You push the button.

Suddenly, the tumbling stars are stilled.

Your corps fighter is nose to nose with a Tivhari fighter, suspended inside a zero bubble. The bubble glides in low orbit around Melville IV, heading toward the northern pole, its speed marked by the gradual dimming of the planet as you pass over where it is dusk, then twilight, then night. Fiery volcanic plumes pancake against the high atmosphere of grey clouds, their immense size betrayed by how they linger and seem to churn in slow motion.

With her two rows of tiny, black, chitinous arms, the Tivhari pilot scrabbles against the glass of her cockpit. You have stolen something from her, your death. Even if you now push the button and release the zero bubble, at this range, momentum nullified, her kamikaze would be no more than a fender bender. For all her effort to kill you, she has only separated you from your wing and sealed her fate.

The Tivhari came from beyond the edge of the galactic arm, out in the far, thin expanse above you, perhaps from one of the few pinpoints of light you see that if magnified would fractal and expand to reveal a galaxy hidden in plain sight.

You blink stinging dryness from your eyes.

You're staring. The expanse is so flat, so black, with so little for your eyes to catch on, you fear your mind might claw at it, find a soft spot, dig a hole, crawl inside, and pull it closed behind you.

You take a deep breath and wet your lips with your tongue.

Without food or water, Tivhari die within four days. You can do that. You can wait her out.

You can do that.

The Pilot Academy trains you not to hit the button.

Inside the cockpits of corps fighters, there is only one button. The button. Press it once, you start the zero bubble. Press it again, you end it. Press it a third time, it restarts, but by draining its energy from your nav computer and jump drive. It is for emergencies only. You control your fighters' attitude and thrust with hand motions inside a Liquid Interface Chamber the size of a baby's incubator; the weapons, comms, and various other moving parts by touching fingertip contacts together in sequence. With synaptic therapy, it's second nature. Your hindbrain pulses with flight recordings from the best pilot classes who came before you—irrevocable yet imperfect. You have no recording from inside a zero bubble.

After your final pilot therapy session, you are restrained and the skin at your elbows is flensed free, then the major tugs it and rolls it up over your wrists so it bunches in bloody inverted tubes.

Under the dry, heated breeze from the station's atmosphere scrubbers, it feels like your arms end in exposed nerves licked by fire. You try not to move pulsing red sinew. You scream until your voice is a bloody squeak, and flail against your bonds. You try not to think of red salmon flesh and how it chars when laid on white, smoking coals, then flakes apart when dry. It is a distant memory, like something dreamed, not something experienced.

"Relax," the major says. He is an older class of pilot than you. He shows you clean scar lines ringing his smooth, muscled forearms.

"You've had the therapy. You'll think of salmon flesh," the major says. "Then you're past it."

Your breathing calms, and he rolls the skin back to your elbows.

The major leads you through the station to a long, quiet hall crowded with doors. He keys one open and herds you into to a room large enough for a mock cockpit— LIC and grav-cradle, though no viewer or 3-D field dome. Black sound-canceling baffles rib the walls in rows of tiny pyramids. Interface liquid bio-luminesces through the LIC's clear panels, causing the contact gloves to glow sapphire. The contents under pressure, the gloves protrude from the LIC like they are reaching at you.

The major paints the protruding gloves with medical nanite goo, which smells like a cross between motor oil and sour milk. You lay face-down in the grav-cradle and sleeve your arms into the gloves. The goo is tingling and cool. It gets under your skin, inside you. The major tells you if you pull free from the gloves before you're released, it will lead to massive staph infection. The station's atmosphere scrubbers aren't perfect, and the corps doesn't cover hypos for space-heads who can't follow orders. Hypos go to those who need them, ground troops returning from strikes against the Tivhari on outer arm planets. Pilots don't need them. If you're hit, vacuum is the sterilizer.

The major locks you inside the room.

For four days, you lay alone.

The LIC provides the only light. The interface liquid is alive, a culture held over and extended many, many generations. The room smells of ozone, a byproduct from the liquid. Inside its chamber, it has all the nutrients it'll ever need. Your control gestures and fingertip sequences mix it and feed it.

The door is behind you. You cannot move your body to look at it without pulling free. If you pull free, the light will dim.

You're babbling when the major returns and releases you. The hand on your shoulder, the weight of it, its warmth and the person it implies are both real and impossible, terrible and lovely. The soundproof room expanded in your mind to envelop the core worlds which lay like glittering opals spilled along the galactic arm; the front where Tivhari swarm the arm's outer fringe; and everything unseen and unknown beyond. Outside the room lay nothing. Inside lay everything. The major came from outside. His whispered voice brings you back to the worlds.

"Good job," the major says. "You're ready for your fighter. Don't touch the button, unless you need to."

His voice strikes the solitary cord strung down the crumbling tower of your being. It is like hearing God.

You have lost ten pounds.

In a bare hall within the station, you are seated at one end of a long table with others just like you, their forearms ringed with fresh scar tissue. Even fidgeting your slippered feet across the steel decking sounds like scraping sand across the tension of a drum.

The long table has been rendered in micro lattices from anodized plastic, printed segment by segment from the station's supply line. The benches, too. Everything in the hall can be melted down, fed back to the supply, and repurposed at will. It is all sturdy, yet so light you fear the breeze from the scrubbers could blow it away.

From the door at the far end of the table, servers arrive with food and lay it before you, then leave.

Buttery rolls steam when you break them apart. You dip the broken ends into cups of almond honey. You bite into turkey legs lathered in smoky barbeque sauce, the bones of which you hold in your fists. The tastes are familiar, yet this is the first time you've eaten such foods. You've earned it, passed the corps' tests and graduated through therapy.

Your tongue burns on the meat. Blisters form and pop on the roof of your mouth. There are no utensils. Globs of fat smear and congeal on your chin, collect between your fingers with sticky sauce. You drink real black coffee until you shake.

When a mouthful of raw steak lodges in your throat, your eyes bulge and you rise from the table and glare at the others who have frozen midgorge to watch you. They look like you, like each other, their heads shaved, their muscled builds shaped by electrical stimuli regimens, every last one in pilot casuals. They are all the same height. In a moment of clarity, you understand you are alone, then pound your abdomen down against the side of the table once... twice... then dislodge the obstruction. Partially chewed steak flies over the table and lands in the punchbowl with a splash. A roar of laughter fills the hall.

Suddenly, you are surrounded. Someone pounds you on the back. You do not see who it was. Your chest hurts; you fear you have broken some ribs and will have to hide the injury in order to go out with the assault wave. Someone says, "Well, that was a close call."

You smile and shakily accept their jibes.

"What: you wanted to get it over with before the Tivhari got a chance?"

"Couldn't help yourself, huh?"

"Scrawny fucker."

They all speak your language without accent. Their voices all sound the same. You are glad someone, anyone is speaking, even if to single you out.

The circle widens around you, and you notice a man standing with his face to the corner, the only one not laughing. At his sides, his clean hands rapidly repeat control gestures you read even from your distance: concentrate fuel to thrusters, full thrust, concentrate fuel to thrusters, full thrust... He is trying to escape.

Your stare draws attention to him, and the laughter dies away.

The major enters. The man locks hard, shaky eyes on you while the major escorts him from the hall.

You return to your seat. Your partially chewed steak slaps onto the table before you and speckles your casuals with red spiced punch. Someone fished it out and threw it back to you. The silence grows severe. You pop the cold steak into your mouth and chew. The room erupts with laughter. You fake choking, those nearest rush to your aid, and you wave them off with a grin. The laughter doubles.

You regain your weight.

The major introduces you to your fighter. She has a name— Skulldugger. In script like riveted steel, it stamps her white hull beside where a tech ascends caution-orange steps to fit your LIC into her egg-shaped cockpit. Spidery cracks scrimshaw the grinning skull decal beside the name. Below it, Roman numerals XXVIII are painted in black, followed by the stenciled shape of a man. Skulldugger killed twenty-eight Tivhari before she lost her pilot.

"She's a good ship," the major says. "She came back. She'll bring you back."

Skulldugger can fly herself to rendezvous if unmanned.

She is shaped like an oversized chicken egg glued fat-end to fat-end to a ring of five other oversized chicken eggs, everything seamless and contained under the stippled white of her hull, even the point collapse cannons and HARP blasters. You have worked their control gestures endlessly in your mind. You know how to crush a Tivhari fighter in upon itself at six clicks, how to fire thrumming radiation balls as hot as suns. But the button, synaptic therapy has given you no reference for it. The best pilots don't use it.

Twenty-eight is more than is painted on any of the other fighters, even the major's. His fighter has no kills on it, a sign of rank, of not keeping track anymore. His is painted an iridescent yellow that hurts your eyes to look at directly. He is staying behind during the assault. His fighter would draw attention, even in the shadow of a moon.

You imagine yourself in his position someday. You are the same, but for experience. You are better even, more classes reside in your hindbrain.

"Don't let it go to your head," the major says, indicating Skulldugger's kills. "It isn't enough by a long shot."

The Tivhari are parasites who expand their territory by dusting atmospheres with their seed, like fish wildly milting into currents baubled with eggs. Their seeds rarely create life. Unluckily, humans are unique. Once in gested, Tivhari seeds connect with gut bacteria and grow into barbed tubes. They dig in and grow and strain to fill all 7.6 meters of intestines until backup forces the barbs to tear through intestinal walls, and the Tivhari burst free.

The Tivhari don't care what planets they dust. They'll try anything. They're driven, swimming upstream toward the core planets.

You assure the major you're fine, you're not anxious, it's just your ribs. He locks eyes with you and says he hasn't noticed any stiffness or shortness of breath. He is sure you will perform admirably. You've graduated through the synaptic therapies. His hindbrain contains more of the prime cipher than yours. Yours has been aggregated since he graduated the pilot therapies. Within a few classes, he won't be able to relate to the new pilots while you will. You're starting out ahead of where he started.

While completing the ten jumps to the fringe, Skulldugger communicates with the other fighters in your squadron and randomly trades jump points. At each point, you are alone in space but for one fellow pilot, a different one at each point. You'll arrive at the rally point in formation, your squadron the tip of the wing's lance. Until then, it is a goose chase in reverse, your wing scattered. The star field shifts around you as though someone has clicked your viewer from one slide to the next, growing dimmer and less dense.

On jump eight, Skulldugger arrives over planet Magdalena—named after its founder's wife, the names of the Gods long exhausted. It looks like a blue ball sneezed on by a giant who had a mouthful of islands. It is about a quarter larger than Earth. White clouds band its equator and calve swirling formations that scud out toward the poles to dissipate and collide in ponderous puffs.

You shouldn't have time to appreciate such things.

You tap thumb to pinky in sequence, and gambol your wrists to spin Skulldugger in a slow sine wave pan. Your hindbrain pulses for patience, but you form your hands into the sign for peace, and ping for friendlies.

Magdalena is silent.

Tivhari dusted Magdalena when the Corps started its push-back campaign to flush them from the galactic arm. It is not your target. Tivhari evolve at a rate faster than fruit flies, yet those on Magdalena aren't even "adolescent." It'll be decades before they develop brain and appendages enough to make use of the colonizers' ships and escape off planet. Colonizer ships are complicated though, and there is a chance they'll blow themselves up and ground themselves until they can build their own spacecrafts, which could be decades more. By then, they'll have evolved to their plateau state, their DNA shortened during quick evolution and unable to continue the rush—stuck like humans in a crawl along the evolutionary ladder, age by age.

They aren't going anywhere. Magdalena's water is seeded. It'll take time and concentrated resources you don't have onboard to clear Magdalena for human habitation again.

Your comms crackle with an incoming.

"This is Magdalena Base Five, thank God you've come."

You are not to speak with the planet. Your hindbrain tells you even if Tivhari can't make it off planet, they may be able to communicate, to mimic. You are not to give them info that may be sent ahead, even of your presence. You have already made a mistake by pinging. You should have exercised patience.

"This is Magdalena Base Five, repeat, Magdalena Base Five, friendlies, over."

Your partner fighter pops into orbit over Magdalena, a neon-green blip on your 3-D field dome. It locks in on Skulldugger with a flat band comm line. A fraction of a second between jumps caused the delay.

You jump away.

In formation within the shadow of a moon at the outer fringe, Skulldugger sights a Tivhari seed ship fleet flying over Melville IV, and enlarges it for your viewer. Glinting in the full strike of the system's yellow sun, gargantuan, whale-shaped ships which house thousands of king Tivhari have locked a synchronous orbit over Melville IV's equatorial sea. Dark, roiling clouds veil much of Melville IV's surface, punched through from beneath by volcanic flares.

Skulldugger counts two hundred seed ships, more than expected. Dissemination ships swarm from hangar bays, which split the seed ships' black-steel faces. They dive into Melville IV's atmosphere and return to their hangars.

Each seed ship is capable of generating thousands of barrels of dusting seed a day. Left unchecked, Tivhari will do just that until they're spent, then replaced.

There are no humans on Melville IV. There is water, a foothold. With what they're doing, it'll take a hundred times the resources Magdalena needs to clear it.

Skulldugger goes wild with blaring alarms, and jolts the interface liquid so it glows ruby. You've been locked on. Tivhari are behind you, emerging from behind the moon whose shadow the corps predicted would hide you. You feel guilty; you shouldn't have pinged over Magdalena.

You barrel roll to avoid what may already be coming at you, then nose planetward in an erratic scribble to shake the lock and drag what else may follow into the gravity well. A fellow pilot has the same idea and dives beside you. A rooster tail of glowing interface liquid bursts from his cockpit, spectruming through the primary colors as it freezes and dies. You didn't see what hit him. His path was straighter than yours though, a surer track for Tivhari jump munitions. Once true-locked, a hardened tungsten bolt fitted with a jump drive had a straight course through him into the planet.

Before you nose back, a fiery fingernail scratch scores the smoky atmosphere filling your viewer—a Tivhari jump bolt missed you.

With a flip of your wrists, Skulldugger pivots to face the pursuing Tivhari. Your body feels like a hollow thing filled with sloshing wet pieces, your ribs a brittle, creaky cage; even the grav-cradle can't nullify all the force of the sudden turn and thrust. You pinch thumb to pointer, and the pursuing Tivhari fighter crumples in upon itself and disappears. Skulldugger bucks with its disappearance as though hitting a speed bump.

Skulldugger's collapse cache tics down one of its dozen units.

You realign Skulldugger for a view of the dogfight. The scrum is traveling from the moon, closing in on the seed ship fleet. Tivhari fighters are painted a bright, fuck-off, I'm one bad son of a bitch Rorschach of neon caution-orange that tickles a frightened, reptilian part of your brain. It is not something synaptic therapy readied you for. It is something new from the Tivhari.

The LIC registers your hands' tremor, shakes Skulldugger.

Concentrate fuel to thrusters, full thrust; you head in.

Dissemination ships pour from the seed ships. They are unarmed, manned by docile spent males. They are dangerous like debris is dangerous. Tivhari females pilot their fighters. They outnumber your wing five to one.

Nearer the seed ship fleet, Tivhari fighters switch from jump munitions to gauss cannons, the rounds of which won't punch through seed ship hulls and keep going to hit another if they miss you. Skulldugger jukes with your hands' trembling and condenses the shaky scene on your viewer into a more stable view with minimum tracer blur.

At six clicks, you collapse a seed ship, and Skulldugger jars from its disappearance.

Skulldugger wails with alarms, a Tivhari fighter has locked on.

Skulldugger counts one hundred fifty seed ships left before you veer away in perpendicular orbit to the Tivhari fleet and head for Melville IV's northern pole. It wasn't your hands' trembling that caused so much shaking for Skulldugger, rather the rapid collapse of so many large ships. Your wing has kept its eye on the prize. Skulldugger counts your squadron. Of its twelve fighters, five have been lost. Those remaining are all in the midge cloud mix surrounding the seed ships; the remaining five squadrons of the wing less so, scattered to save their asses and pick off Tivhari fighters one at a time.

You dive toward a bright volcanic flare pancaking across Melville IV's upper atmosphere. The pursuing Tivhari matches route. Before it can true-lock, you about-face Skulldugger, pinch thumb to pointer, and the Tivhari dodges, fires its gauss wide into the atmosphere. You snap your fingers. Skulldugger thrums and fires blinding little suns, which the Tivhari shrugs past. HARP rounds hurtle away like winking stars, growing dimmer, dimmer. You pass each other, close enough to spit, then about-face for another pass.

The Tivhari switches to pinwheel rounds, specially shaped reels of flex cord that unfurl with rifling spin and come at you like expanding rotor blades.

Eventually, she runs out and returns to her gauss.

The elastic rhythm of your passes locks you alone together in a shallow orbit.

The seething mass of Melville IV obscures the main battle, the Tivhari fleet's lock over the great equatorial sea dragging it away at the speed of the planet's rotation.

Upper atmosphere bumps Skulldugger from below. To break free would be to expose yourself and concede an angle of attack. You ride out the passes, and grow comfortable enough for point collapse. Skulldugger's weapon cache tics to half, a quarter. You are wasting it. A Tivhari f leet remains, which shouldn't. It is your mission. Not this.

A pinwheel round blooms from the Tivhari fighter and chops toward you. You pull Skulldugger up from shallow orbit, drawing the Tivhari after, then enter a battle fugue—your control gestures a wild flurry of instinct, anger, and fear, wondrous to you for their split-second tactic, like they had been planned, yet terrifying for their desperation, Skulldugger a part of you, your skin, you. Somewhere, maybe in your body, pain wraps around ribs like fine burning wire. You're screaming, cursing—cyst bitch, shit-eater, you shit-eating bug fucker! —when you find yourself back in shallow orbit, trading passes, thrumming Skulldugger for tiny sun after terrible tiny sun.

Skulldugger's weapons cache color-codes to red, low. There is a reserve, something below E. You blank out the cache, keep firing.

Your passes grow closer. The Tivhari stops firing.

Before you collide, before you pull free from the contact gloves and push the button, you think she is more determined than you. She would kill herself to kill you. She is a weapon.

You push the button.

Suddenly, everything is still.

You are nose to nose with the Tivhari fighter, suspended in a zero bubble, speeding in orbit around Melville IV toward the northern pole—a double-yolked egg.

The Tivhari pilot scrabbles at her cockpit glass, then her multifaceted mouth fingers spread apart. A throat tube protrudes and spits a vicious bile-colored acid against her cockpit's glass that obscures her with browning bubbles.

She comes to her senses and wipes the acid clean with something like a rag. When she looks at you, she sees only the sleek nose of Skulldugger. Perhaps she can see the tally marked on Skulldugger's side. Perhaps she understands, has seen it before. You can't say how—the arrangement and swell between her facial plates, the tuck of her mouth fingers—but you can tell she is frightened. She knows what you know. Even if she breaks through her cockpit, she will get no further. She is in a zero bubble. It will stop her. And you control its button. If she breaks through, you can press release and fill her cockpit with vacuum. When you do that, there's no telling how strong she'll be, if she'll be able to force the rest of her way out, if she'll be able to get to you before Skulldugger speeds away. Perhaps you have HARP rounds left. Perhaps she has chambered her final pinwheel round, reserved for just this moment.

You can't say how you know, but she wants to live.

You want to live.

Jump rounds fired point blank at the zero bubble would disintegrate on impact. Flat band comm lines can't penetrate it. It glides unperturbed along its orbit. In time, at the speed you're going, Skulldugger will pass within eyeball range of the Tivhari fleet when you round the pole toward the equator. The orbits should coincide.

You stare into space then look at the Tivhari.

She, too, is looking out. Cloudy grey nictitating membranes window-shade back and forth over her beady black eyes, then she focuses on you.

You tell yourself she was thinking of home, if Tivhari have such a concept.

She retrieves the rag she used to wipe her cockpit glass, dabs an arm-point into it, then scratches the glass in a deliberate motion. When she is done she has etched a copy of the man stenciled on Skulldugger's hull. She leans back into her cockpit, and spasmodic convulsions wrack her. It is a moment before you realize she is laughing.

Sweat beads on your upper lip.

Her convulsions die away to minor after-shocks, shell-hard caps cover her eyes, and her body swells and shrinks with the easy deep breathing of sleep.

It was a trap, all of it; the bait too tempting for the corps to overlook. It is why there were so many more Tivhari ships than expected. The Tivhari have more—no telling how many more. You no more know where they come from than they know where you come from. What the corps destroyed so far could be only a fraction, their forward troops. Pride blinded those who designed the assault wave, let them think you had the Tivhari on the run, that they were desperate while they led you to space they can reach without impediment.

It is not your fault. You did not tip them off.

Suddenly, you find yourself staring out into the far, thin expanse—you ignored Magdalena Base Five, people, your people. They had thanked God for your arrival.

Though Tivhari evolve uniquely on each planet where their seeds find a home, they all grow toward a common form. And they look after their own, no matter how different they've become. It is why they fought so ferociously when humans discovered they penetrated beyond the fringe—retreat meant they left theirs behind.

You blink tears from your eyes. The cockpit has dimmed, the interface liquid gone unmixed.

One deep breath leads to another. And another. And another. Your hands cramp from hyperventilation. Your calves bunch in hardened, painful knots. Your hindbrain tells you it is stupid. Tivhari are man-sized f leas. You wedge pauses between breaths. The pauses lengthen until you're breathing normally and your hands uncurl.

You are giving the Tivhari too much credit. Many smarter people than you have considered the scenario and decided to put you where you are. They had you in mind. They would not make a mistake. You don't know everything. It is not your job, never was. You know what you know, amalgamated and true. Your job was to repel the Tivhari.

Now, your job is to survive.

You sleeve your arms back into the contact gloves. It is the most comfortable position within Skulldugger. You snap your fingers, gambol your wrists, pinch thumb to pointer. Skulldugger remains unresponsive. The interface liquid glows sapphire, bubbles, and vents ozone.

You are distinctly aware Skulldugger can fly to rendezvous if unmanned, has done so before.

Your hindbrain senses panic stirring and puts you to sleep. You do not fight it; it has kept you alive so far. Your dreams are not kind to you. Skulldugger has rounded Melville IV's pole when you wake.

The Tivhari points at you, then below you at the planet. You. The planet. You do not know how long she has been doing this. Her gestures grow emphatic, sharp, stabbing. As far as Skulldugger is concerned, the zero bubble shrank the universe to the dimensions of your cockpit. Her 3-D field dome is blank. Your viewer is locked in place.

Experimentally, you switch off Skulldugger's view stabilizer, and the few stars ornamenting the vacuum shake.

The Tivhari points at you, the planet.

Your orbit is degrading.

The zero bubble is slowly falling into Melville IV's upper atmosphere, bumping on its rough edges.

The Tivhari's mouth fingers part. Her cockpit glass fogs. She is screaming at you, a warning. If you do not release the bubble soon, best case scenario, when you do the atmosphere will tear at you. If you manage to remain intact and right yourself, you'll have to dodge volcanic flares to escape. Your orbit won't last four days. You are a good pilot, but if you wait it out, you will pay for your stubbornness with your life.

She adds a phase to her gestures, points, points, then raises her chitinous arms away from her controls. She is making a deal. She will not attack. She is conceding.

Your hindbrain vibrates with caution. It is a trick. Saying she will not attack means she could. Point blank, a pinwheel round may not have room to unfurl, but it'd do the trick.

You are at war.

She is afraid.

The battle with the Tivhari f leet slowly sweeps into view. You switch on Skulldugger's view stabilizer, yet it is hard to tell who is winning. There are so many ships, and everything is moving. Currents within the melee grow apparent. Small clouds of Tivhari chase individual corps fighters, who dart among the seed ships. With each of their passes, dots of fire perforate seed ship hulls. Among them, you spot an iridescent yellow dot, the major. He has arrived with reinforcements. His tail of Tivhari is greater than all the others, more defined. He has made them mad.

You pull free from the contact gloves and pound the dome of your cockpit, then remember the Tivhari cannot see you. She ends her pointing and intently watches the battle.

One of the corps fighters explodes. Its comet tail of pursuers feathers away to join the others. You watch the Tivhari for reaction. Shell-hard caps close over her eyes. She leans back into her cockpit.

You hold a hand over the button. Your hindbrain quickens for you to push it. Your hand shakes.

It was not as much of a trap as you suspected. Tivhari wouldn't wantonly sacrifice seed ships. If it was a trap, they would've f led. They are making a stand. Your wing needs you, if only to draw pursuers away from those still armed, to give them a more sporting chance. When worse comes to worst, you can kamikaze.

The battle passes from view.

The Tivhari opens her eyes, stares into the void, then stares at you. She taps the man-shaped stencil etched on her cockpit glass.

At times, corps pilots have been pursued by Tivhari as their fighters jumped back toward rendezvous. Rendezvous is never less than five jumps, and after four, if the fighter still pings nonfriendlies, it alters course for a completely abandoned sector of space, then self-destructs. Your hindbrain pulses this is to be your fate. You will wait until you pass the fight again, then get as many to follow as you can. It is honorable. It lures Tivhari away from core planets, away from the battle, and damages them distant from repair.

Arid pain needles behind your eyes, creeps up the back of your neck to clench like a tightening fist at the base of your skull. You draw a thick tongue across dry lips. You try not to think of water.

You switch off Skulldugger's view stabilizer. The few stars shake.

Smoke replaces them. It is everywhere. Melville IV's atmosphere has swallowed the zero bubble. The Tivhari sits up, braces her arms against the walls of her cockpit. She doesn't have the option of view stabilization. It is all coming at her raw; her brain tells her she is being rattled, though the zero bubble protects her. She darts her gaze around her cockpit dome. You find yourself doing the same. You have waited too long, your fall faster than anticipated. You should have listened.

Suddenly, you are free of the smoke, the few stars returned. It was an escaping plume, nothing more.

You laugh until tears wet your cheeks, then wipe them dry. The Tivhari's nictitating membranes squeegee milky fluid from her glistening black eyes.

She has tears.

You look toward the black of the void, and your mind skates away. By the time you look back at the Tivhari, she has scratched the man-shaped stencil from her cockpit glass. You don't know when she did this. Apologies shouldn't go unnoticed.

Your eyes are drawn to the void.

You try not to think of turkey legs with smoky barbeque sauce, of almond honey. Steak. It is inappropriate. Weak.

When the battle sweeps into view, it is on the opposite side of Skulldugger than it was on first pass. The zero bubble has slowed, delayed your arrival. It is difficult to see details.

The number of seed ships has dwindled to maybe a dozen-plus, the rest fled or collapsed. Your wing and the major's reinforcements have dwindled, too. A single iridescent yellow corps fighter is starkly identifiable, chased by a thick swarm of Tivhari. Explosions firework within the swarm. A seed ship vanishes. Another jerks like a balloon that has had its string cut, and rises/falls toward Melville IV. The yellow dot weaves among the lumbering seed ships, wringing the trailing swarm between them and producing a long, thin tail. The yellow dot turns to face the swarm, darts into it, and lights up the churning, coalescing mass from within. It does not make it out the far side.

Milky fluid streams from the Tivhari's black eyes.

You pull free from the contact gloves and pound your cockpit's ceiling. She doesn't get to cry. You are screaming, raving, your voice hoarse, throat raw, when the remaining battle passes from view.

You will kill her. You will crash the zero bubble into Melville IV's volcanic sea, let it sink to the bottom, then press release. The weight of the ocean will bear down on you both. This is why you didn't press the button for release. You are not afraid. You are making a point.

It is a relief to know what you are here to do.

You will not give her the satisfaction of her tears. She will suffer for each one. Her suffering will match your own and exceed it, for knowing she does not control it. The major deserves as much.

The dry fist squeezing the base of your skull grows claws. You are aware of how your tongue's placement against your teeth makes you salivate. You do not think about water.

Melville IV's atmosphere blots out the stars, then passes, blots out, passes. Traverses through atmosphere grow more regular. You are no longer bouncing off, but descending in earnest.

The Tivhari protrudes her throat tube, dabs an arm-point into its orifice, and etches the stenciled shape of a Tivhari on her cockpit glass. She understands. She is going to die. She leans back into her cockpit and watches the stars strobe by.

You cannot spot the fight on the next pass of the equator. You consider for a moment the zero bubble has slowed so your orbits no longer coincide, then shiver. You are being too hopeful. Both sides have left, their points made, the site a battleground, never a home.

You are being dramatic and sentimental. One more Tivhari won't make a difference. Only to you. And you are alone.

You are not being a pilot.

You are distinctly aware there is no winning. There is only life.

The atmospheric plumes widen. The zero bubble spends more time in atmosphere than out. There is no opal-strewn galactic arm, no fringe, no beyond. The bubble is everything. Soon, it will be nothing.

The zero bubble emerges from the atmosphere. A stunning volcanic flare towers ahead of you like a wall the size of God. You will collide with it. You will pass into it. You have taken it too far.

The flare consumes you. It is impossibly bright. You are falling into it. You will miss the sea and instead land in the heart of upheaval. You will burn. There will be no pressure.

You are babbling apologies to the Tivhari when the zero bubble emerges out the far side of the flare, falling in a calm shaft of air like the eye of a storm.

Your hindbrain senses panic and smothers it with fatigue. As though fighting to wake from a dream, you hit the button for release.

You plunge your arms into the contact gloves. The Tivhari tumbles from view.

Concentrate fuel to thrusters, full thrust.

Skulldugger rattles and bucks. Nothing is permanent. Everything is shifting, transforming, dissipating, growing together. It is thinning, darkening, loosening, breaking apart. It is nothing, everything. Suddenly, the black void spreads before you. You have escaped.

Above Melville IV, you form your hands into the sign for peace and ping for friendlies. The planet is silent. You fly a circle over where you emerged and widen your search in a swirling pattern. You try not to think of water.

Skulldugger wails with alarms, and jolts the interface liquid so it glows ruby. You have been locked on. You point Skulldugger's nose at the approaching Tivhari and go limp in the grav-cradle. It is her. She is more determined than you. She is a weapon.

The Tivhari blows past, close enough to spit, and fires a pinwheel round off into space, then is gone, jumped away.

You snap your fingers, firing a single sun harmlessly into the far, thin expanse. You wish she would've seen. You snap them again. Nothing.

You press your palms together as though in prayer, and Skulldugger jumps for rendezvous.

You are weeping uncontrollably when the new acting major places his hand on your shoulder and helps you from Skulldugger into the station's hangar.

"Good job," the new major tells you.

He leads you from the hangar to a well-lit room in the center of the station. The room is so long you cannot see its end. Uniform rows of tables with synaptic drips feeding into clear-paneled incubators recede into the distance. Each incubator contains a baby boy. The major hands you off to one of the men attending to the incubators. He looks like you. You think you recognize him. If he is who you think he is, his hair has grown out some since last you saw him. It is surprising to see him. They have let him keep his pilot casuals. He has regained some weight, but still is lean.

He leads you to one of the incubators. "They like to be touched," he says, and sleeves his clean hands into the contact gloves fitted into the side of the incubator. He strokes the baby boy's head, then takes a tiny hand between his thumb and pointer. The hand clenches in reflex. "Good job," he whispers to the baby.

His hand movements are gentle and slow, the manic, rapid control gestures gone from them.

He looks at you and smiles, his eyes softened and calm. "They grow better with human touch. They even grow faster."

You are distinctly aware everything in the station can be melted down and repurposed.

He removes his arms from the incubator and gestures for you to try.

Your hindbrain tells you it's okay. It is a baby. You sleeve into the contact gloves and touch the baby boy's hand. It clenches around your finger, its strength surprising. You smile and look at the man, who smiles back and nods like you should continue. You touch the baby boy's hand. Again, tiny pink digits close around your finger, the response simple, beautiful, and ingrained. Your arms are tingling and cool, like you're glowing.

"Good job," you whisper to the baby boy.

It'll take time, but you're sure the Corps will win.

Vladimir Chong Chooses to Die

Lavie Tidhar | 4657 words

The clinic was cool and calm, a pine-scented oasis in the heart of Central Station. Cool calm white walls. Cool calm air conditioning humming, coolly and calmly. Vladimir Chong hated it immediately. He did not find it soothing. He did not find it calming. It was a white room; it resembled too much the inside of his own head.

"Mr. Chong?" The nurse was a woman he recalled with exactness. Benevolence Jones, cousin of Miriam Jones who was his boy Boris's childhood sweetheart. He remembered Benevolence as a child with thin woven dread-locks and a wicked smile, a few years younger than his own boy, trailing after her cousin Miriam in adoration. Now she was a matronly woman in starched white and dreadlocks thicker and fewer. She smelled of soap. "The mortality consultant will see you now," she said.

Vlad nodded. He got up. There was nothing wrong with his motor functions. He followed her to the consultant's office. Vlad could remember with perfect recall hundreds of such offices. They always looked the same. They could have easily been the same room, with the same person sitting behind them. He was not afraid of death. He could remember death. His father, Weiwei, had died at home. Vlad could remember it several ways. He could remember his father's own dying moment—broken sentences forming in the brain, the touch of the pillow hurting strangely, the look in his boy's eyes, a sense of wonder, filling him, momentarily, then blackness, a slow encroachment that swallowed whatever last sentence he had meant to say.

He could remember it from his mother's memories, though he seldom went into them, preferred to segment them separately, when he still could. She was sitting by the bed, not crying, then fetching tea, cookies, looking after the guests coming in and out, visiting the deathbed of Weiwei. She spared time for her boy, for little Vlady, too, and her memories were all intermingled of the moment her husband died, her hand on Vlady's short hair, her eyes on Weiwei who seemed to be struggling to say something then stopped, and was very still.

He could remember it his own way, though it was an early memory, and confused. Wetness. Lips moving like a fish's, without sound. The smell of floor cleaner. Accidentally brushing against the cool metal leg of R. Brother Patch-It, the robo-priest, who stood by the bed and spoke the words of the Way of Robot, though Weiwei was not a practitioner of that, nor any other, religion.

"Mr. Chong?"

The mortality consultant was a tall thin North Tel Aviv Jew. "I'm Dr. Graff," he said.

Vlad nodded politely. Dr. Graff gestured to a chair. "Please, sit down."

Vlad sat, remembering like an echo, like reflections multiplying between two mirrors. A universe of Chongs sitting down at doctor's offices throughout the years. His mother when she sat down and the doctor said, "I'm afraid the news is not good." His father after a work injury when he had shattered his leg bones falling in his exoskeleton from the uncompleted fourth level of Central Station. Boris when he was five and his node was infected by a hostile malware virus with rudimentary intelligence. His sister's boy's eldest when they took him to the hospital in Tel Aviv, worried about his heart. And on and on, though none, yet, in a life termination clinic. He, Vlad, son of Weiwei, father of Boris, was the first of the line to visit one of those.

He'd been sitting in his flat when it happened. A moment of clarity. It felt like emerging out of a cold bright sea. When he was submerged in the sea he could see each individual drop of water, and each one was a disconnected memory, and it was drowning him. It was never meant to be this way.

Weiwei's Curse, or Weiwei's Folly, they called it. Vlad could remember Weiwei's determination, his ambition, his human desire to be remembered, to continue to be a part of his family and their lives. Remembered the trip up the hill to the Old City of Jaffa, Weiwei cycling in the heat, parking the bicycle at last in the shade, against the cool old stones, and visiting the Oracle.

What manner of thing it was he didn't know, this lineage of memory, infecting like a virus the Chongs as a whole. It was the Oracle's doing, and she was not human, or mostly not. Joined, Bonded, she was as much Other as not, for all that she wore a human body.

It had served. In past times it had offered comfort, at times, remembering what others knew, what they had done. He remembered his father climbing into his exoskeleton, slowly climbing, like a crab, along the unfinished side of Central Station. Later he, too, worked on the building, two generations of Chongs it took to bring it to completion. Only to see his own son go up in the great elevators, a boy afraid of family, of sharing, a boy determined to escape, to follow a dream of the stars. He saw him climb up the elevators and to the great roof, saw him climb into the orbital flyer that took him to Gateway and, from there, to the Belt and Mars and beyond. But still the link persisted, even from afar, the memories traveling, slower than light, between the worlds. Vlad had missed his boy. Missed the work on the space port, the easy camaraderie with the others. Missed his wife whose memory still lived inside him, but whose name, like a cancer, had been eaten away.

He remembered the smell of her, the taste of her sweat and the swell of her belly, when they were both young and the streets of Central Station smelled of night-blooming jasmine and mutton fat. Remembered her with Boris holding her hand, at five years old, walking through the same old streets, with the space port, completed, rising ahead of them, a hand pointing at the stars.

Boris: "What is that, Daddy?"

Vlad: "It's Central Station, Boris."

Boris, gesturing around him at the old streets, the rundown apartment blocks: "And this?"

"It's Central Station."

Boris, laughing. Vlad joining him and she smiled, the woman who was gone now, whose only ghost remained, whose name he no longer knew.

Looking back (but that was a thing he could no longer do) that should have given him warning. Her name disappeared, the way keys or socks do. Misplaced and, later, could not be found.

Slowly, inexorably, the links that bound together memory, like RNA, began to weaken and break.

"Mr. Chong?"

"Doctor. Yes."

"Mr. Chong, we treat all our patients with complete confidentiality."

"Of course."

"We have a range of options available, of course—" the doctor coughed politely. "I am bound to ask you, however—before we go over them—have you made, or wish to make, any post-mortal arrangements?"

Vlad regarded the doctor for a moment. Silence had become a part of him in recent years. Slowly the memory boundaries tore and recall, like shards of hard glass, fragmented and shattered in his mind. More and more he found himself sitting, for hours or days, in his flat, rocking in the ancient chair Weiwei once brought home from the Jaffa flea market, in triumph, raising it above his head, this short, wiry Chinese man in this land of Arabs and Jews. Vlad had loved Weiwei. Now he hated him almost as much he loved him. The ghost of Weiwei, his memory, still lived on in his ruined mind.

For hours, days, he sat in the rocking chair, examining memories like globes of light. Disconnected, he did not know how one related to the other, or whose the memory had been, his own or someone else's. For hours and days, alone, in the silence like a dust.

Lucidity came and went without a pattern. Once he opened his eyes and breathed in and saw Boris crouching beside him, an older, thinner version of the boy who held his hand and looked up at the sky and asked questions. "Boris?" he asked, surprise catching at the word. His mouth felt raw with disuse.

"Dad."

"What... are you doing here?"

"I've been back a month, Dad."

"A month?" Pride, and hurt, made his throat constrict. "And you only now come to visit me?"

"I've been here," Boris said, gently. "With you. Dad—"

But Vlad stopped him. "Why are you back?" he said. "You should have stayed in the Up and Out. There is nothing for you, now. Boris. You were always too big for your boots."

"Dad—"

"Go away!" He almost shouted. Felt himself pleading. His fingers gripped the side arms of the ancient rocking chair. "Go, Boris. You don't belong here anymore."

"I came back because of you!" his son was shouting at him. "Look at you! Look at—"

Then that, too, became just another memory, detached, floating out of his reach. The next time he broke through the water Boris was gone and Vlad went downstairs and sat in the cafe with Ibrahim, the alte-zachen man, and played backgammon and drank coffee in the sun, and for a while everything was as it should be.

The next time he saw Boris he was not alone, but with Miriam, who Vlad saw, from time to time. "Boris!" he said, tears, unbidden, coming to his eyes. He hugged his boy, there, in the middle of the street.

"Dad..." Boris was taller than him now, he realized with a start. "You're feeling better?"

"I feel fine!" He held on to him tight, then released him. "You've grown," he said.

"I've been away a long time," Boris said.

"You're thin. You should eat more."

"Dad..."

"Miriam," Vlad said. Giddy. "Vlad," she said. She put her hand, lightly, on his shoulder. "It's good to see you."

"You found him again," he said.

"He..." she hesitated. "We ran into each other," she said.

"That's good. That is good," Vlad said. "Come. Let me buy you a drink. To celebrate."

"Dad, I don't think—"

"No one asks you to think!" Vlad snapped. "Come," he said, more gently. "Come."

They sat in the coffee shop. Vlad ordered a sheesha pipe, a bottle of arak. Three glasses. He poured. Hands steady. Central Station rising before them like a signpost for the future. For Vlad it was pointing the wrong way, it was a part of his past. "L'chaim," he said. They raised their glasses and drank.

A moment of dislocation. Then he was in the flat again and the old robot, R. Patch-It, was standing there. "What are you doing here?" Vlad snapped. He remembered remembering; moving memories like cubes between his hands, hanging them in the air before him. Trying to make sense of how they fit each other, which came before which.

"I was looking after you," the robot said. Vlad remembered the robot, through his own memories and through Weiwei's. R. Patch-it, who doubled as a moyel, had circumcised Vlad as a baby, had performed the same service for Boris, when his time came. Old even before Weiwei came to this land as a young, poor migrant worker, all those years before.

"Leave me be," Vlad said. Resented suddenly the interference. "Boris sent you," he said. Not a question. "He is worried," the robot said. "So am I, Vlad—"

"What makes you so much better?" Vlad said. "A robot. You're an object. A piece of metal with an I-loop. What do you know of being alive?"

The robot didn't answer. Later, Vlad realized he was not there, that the flat was empty, and had been empty for some time.

None of it would have bothered him so much if he could only remember her name.

"Post-mortal options?" he said, echoing the doctor.

"Yes, yes," the doctor said. "There are several standard possibilities we really must discuss before we—"

"Such as?"

He could feel time slipping away. Urgency gripped him. A man should be allowed to determine the time of his going. To go in dignity. Even to make it this far in life was an achievement, something to celebrate. Very well.

"Very well," he said.

"We could freeze you," the doctor said.

"Freeze me."

He felt robbed of willpower. Fought the memories crowding in on him. No one in the family had ever been frozen before.

"Freeze you until such time as you wish to be awakened," Dr. Graff said. "A century or two?"

"I assume the costs are considerable."

"It's a standard contract," Dr. Graff said. "Estate plus—"

"Yes," Vlad said. "That is to say, no. What do you think will happen in one, or two, or five hundred years from now?"

"Often, patients are sick with incurable illnesses," Dr. Graff said. "They hope for a cure. Others are time tourists, disillusioned with our era, wishing to seek out the new, the strange."

"The future."

"The future," Dr. Graff agreed.

"I've seen the future," Vlad said. "It's the past I can't get back to, Dr. Graff. There is too much of it and it's broken and it exists only in my head. I don't want to travel to the future."

"There is also the possibility of freezing on board an Exodus ship," the doctor said. "To travel beyond the Up and Out. You could be awakened on a new planet, a new world."

Vlad smiled. "My boy," he said, softly.

"Excuse me?"

"My boy, Boris. He's a doctor too, you know."

"Boris Chong? I remember him. We were colleagues together," Dr. Graff said. "In the birthing clinics. A long time ago. He left for Mars, didn't he?"

"He's back," Vlad said. "He was always a good boy."

"I'll be sure to look him up," Dr. Graff said.

"I don't want to go to the stars," Vlad said.

"Going away seldom changes what we are."

"Indeed," the doctor said. "Well, there is also of course the possibility of upload?"

"Existing as an I-loop simulation while the old body and mind die anyway?"

"Yes."

"Doctor, I will live on as memory," Vlad said. "That is something I cannot change. Every bit of me, everything that makes me what I am will survive so my grandchildren and my nephew's children and all the ones born in Central Station and beyond, now and in the future, can recall through me all I have seen, if they so wish." He smiled again. "Do you think they will be smarter? Do you think they will learn from my mistakes and not make their own?"

"No," the doctor said.

"I am Weiwei's son, and have Weiwei's Folly in my mind and in my node. I am, already, memory, Dr. Graff. But memory is not me. Are we done with the preliminaries?"

"You could be cyborged."

"My sister is over 80 percent cyborged now, Doctor," Vlad said. "Missus Chong the Elder, they call her now. She belongs to the Church of Robot. One day she will be Translated, no doubt. But her path is not mine."

"Then you are determined."

"Yes."

The doctor sighed, leaned back in his chair. "In that case," he said, "we have a catalogue." He rummaged in a desk drawer and returned with a printed book. A book! Vlad was delighted. He touched the paper, smelled it, and for a moment felt like a child again.

He leafed through it with inexpert fingers, savoring the tactile sensation. Page after page of cool, calm alternatives. "What's this?" he said.

"Ah, yes. A popular choice," Dr. Graff said. "Blood loss in a warm, scented bath. Soft music, candles. A bottle of wine. A pill beforehand to ensure there is no pain. A traditional choice."

"Tradition is important," Vlad said.

"Yes. Yes."

But Vlad was leafing ahead. "This?" he said, with slight revulsion.

"Faux-murder, yes," the doctor said. "Simulated. We cannot sanction humans for the purpose, of course. Nor a digital intelligence, obviously. But we have very life-like simulacra with a basic operating brain, nothing with consciousness, of course, of course. Some of our patients like the idea of a violent death. It is more... theatrical."

"I notice one can sign off the recording rights?"

"Some people like to... watch. Yes. And some patients appreciate an audience. There is some financial compensation paid to one's heirs in those circumstances—"

"Garish," Vlad said.

"Quite, quite," the doctor said.

"Vulgar."

"That is, certainly, a valid view point, yes, y—"

Vlad was leafing further. "I never thought there were so many ways—" he said.

"So many," the doctor said. "We, humans, are remarkably good at devising new ways to die."

The doctor sat still as Vlad leafed through the rest of the catalogue. "You do not need to decide right away, of course," the doctor said. "We do, in fact, advise a period of consideration before—"

"What if I wanted to do it immediately?" Vlad said.

"There is, of course, paperwork, a process—" the doctor said.

"But it is possible?"

"Of course. We have many of the basic options available right here, in the mortality rooms, complete with full post-mortal service and burial—"

"I'd like this," Vlad said, tapping the page with his finger. The doctor leaned over. "This—oh," he said. "Yes. Surprisingly popular. But not, of course, available, as it were—" he spread his arms in what might have been a shrug "—here. As it were."

"Of course," Vlad said.

"But we can arrange the travel, in full comfort, and accommodation beforehand—"

"Let's do that."

The doctor nodded. "Very well," he said."Let me call up the forms."

When he next surfaced from that great glittery sea he saw faces, close by. Boris looked angry. Miriam, concerned.

"God damn it, Dad."

"Don't swear at me, boy."

"You went to a fucking suicide clinic?""I go where I want!"

They glared at each other. Miriam laid a hand on Boris's shoulder. He looked at her. Looked at Boris. For a moment his face was the boy's he had been. Hurt in his eyes. Incomprehension. Like when something bad happens.

"Boris—"

"Dad—"

Vlad stood up. Stuck his face close to his boy's. "Go away," he said.

"No."

"Boris, I'm your father and I'm telling you to—"

Boris pushed him. Vlad, shocked, fell back. Tottered. Held on to the chair and just stopped himself from falling on the floor. Heard Miriam's sharp intake of breath. Miriam, horrified: "Boris, what did you—"

"Dad? Dad!"

"I'm fine," Vlad said. Righted himself. Almost smiled. "Silly boy," he said.

Boris, breathing hard. Vlad saw his hands, they were closed into fists. All that anger. Never helped anyone. Couldn't help but feel for the boy. "Look," he said. "Just—"

When he surfaced again Miriam was gone and Boris was sitting in a chair in the corner. The boy was asleep.

A good boy, Vlad thought. Came back. Worried for his old dad. Made him proud, really. A doctor. No children though. He would have liked grandchildren. A knock on the door. Boris blinking. The aug pulsing on his neck. Disgusting thing. "I'll get that," Vlad said. Went to the door.

The robot again. R. Patch-It. With Vlad's sister in tow. He should have known. "Vladimir Mordechai Chong," she said. "Just what do you think you're doing?"

"Hello, Tamara."

"Don't hello me, Vlad." She stepped inside and the robot followed. "Now what is this nonsense about you killing yourself?"

"For crying out loud, Tamara! Look at you." Vlad felt some of his anger gathering. It had been a long time coming. He had had a long moment of emerging from the sea, the memories falling away like water. Enough time to go to the clinic and make the arrangements. Not enough time, it had turned out, to execute them before another relapse. It was becoming harder to break the surface. Soon, he knew, he would remain submerged in water for good. "You're almost entirely a machine."

"We're all machines," his sister said. "Are you proud because the parts that make you are biological? Soft, fallible, weak? You may as well be proud of learning to clean your bottom or tying your shoelaces, Vlad. You're a machine, I'm a machine, and R. Brother Patch-It over there is a machine. When you're gone, you're gone. There's no afterlife but the one we build ourselves."

"The fabled robot heaven," Vlad said. He felt tired. "Enough!" he said. "I appreciate what you are trying to do. All of you. Boris."

"Yes, Dad?"

"Come here." It was strange, to see his boy and see this man, this almost stranger, that he had become. Something of Weiwei in him, though. Something of Vlad, too. "I can no longer remember your mother's name," he told him.

"What?"

"Boris, I spoke to the doctors. Weiwei's Folly has spread through me. Nodal filaments filling up every available space. Invading my body. I am drowning under the weight of memories. They make no sense any more. I don't know who I am because I can't make them behave. Boris..."

"Dad," Boris said. Vlad raised his hand and touched the boy's cheek. It was wet. He stroked it, gently. "I'm old, Boris. I'm old and I'm tired. I want to rest. I want to choose how I go, and I want to go with dignity, and with my mind intact. Is that so wrong?"

"No, Dad. No, it's not."

"Don't cry, Boris."

"I'm not crying."

"Good."

"Dad?"

"Yes?"

"I'm all right. You can let go, now."

Vlad released him. Remembered the boy who asked him to walk with him, "Just to the next lamp post, Dad." They'd go in the dark toward that pool of light and, on reaching it, stop. Then the boy would say, "Just to the next lamp post, Dad. I can go the rest on my own. Honest."

On and on they went, following the trail of lights. On and on they went until they made it safely home.

One's death should be a memorable occasion and, on this occasion, Vlad felt, everything really did go swimmingly.

They had departed by mini-bus from Central Station. Vlad sat in the front, enjoying the warmth of the sun, next to the driver. A small delegation sat in the back: Boris, and Miriam, Vlad's sister Tamara, R. Patch-It, Ibrahim the alte-zachen man and Eliezer, the god artist, both of whom once, long ago, worked with Vlad in the construction site. Relatives came to say their goodbyes, and the atmosphere was one almost of a party. Vlad hugged young Yan Chong, who was soon to marry his boyfriend, Youssou got a kiss on the cheek from his sister's friend Esther, who he had, once, almost had an affair with but, in the end, didn't. He remembered it well, and it was strange to see her so old. In his mind she was still the beautiful young woman he once got drunk with at a she-been, when his wife was away, somewhere, and they had come close to it but, in the end, they couldn't do it. He remembered walking back home, alone, and the sense of relief he'd felt when he came in through the door. Boris was a boy then. He was asleep and Vlad came and sat by his side and stroked his hair. Then he went and made himself a cup of tea.

The mini-bus spread out solar panel wings and began to glide almost soundlessly down the old tarmac road. Neighbors, friends, and relatives waved and shouted goodbyes. The bus turned left on Mount Zion and suddenly the old neighborhood disappeared from view. It felt like leaving home, for that is what it was. It felt sad but it also felt like freedom.

They turned on Salameh and soon came to the interchange and onto the old highway to Jerusalem. The rest of the journey went smoothly, in quiet, the coastal plain giving way gradually to hills. Then they came to the Bab-el-Wad and rose sharply along the mountain road to Jerusalem.

It felt like a rollercoaster along the mountain road, with sharp inclines giving way to sudden drops. They circled the city without going in and drove alone the circle road, between a Palestine on one side and an Israel on the other, though the two were often mixed up in such a way only the invisible digitals could keep them apart.

The change in geography was startling. Suddenly the mountains ended and they were dropping, and the desert began without warning. It was the strange thing about this country that had become Weiwei's home, Vlad thought—how quickly and startlingly the landscape changed in so small a place. It was no wonder the Arabs and the Jews had fought over it for so long.

Dunes appeared, the land became a yellow place and camels rested by the side of the old road. Down, down, down they went, until they passed the sign for the ocean level and kept going, following the road to the lowest place on Earth. Soon they were traveling past the Dead Sea and the blue, calm water reflected the sky like a mirror. Bromine released from the sea filled the air, causing a soothing, calming effect on the human psyche.

Just beyond the Dead Sea the Arava desert opened up and here, at last, some two hours after setting off from Central Station, they arrived at their destination.

The Euthanasia Park sat on its own in a green oasis of calm. They drew at the gates and parked in the almost empty car park. Boris helped Vlad down from his seat. Outside it was hot, a dry hotness that soothed and comforted. Water sprinklers made their whoosh-whooshwhoosh sound as they irrigated the manicured grass.

"Are you sure, Dad?" Boris said.

Vlad just nodded. He took in a deep breath of air. The smell of water and freshly cut grass. The smell of childhood.

Together they looked on the park. There, a swimming pool glinting blue, where one could drown in peace and tranquility. There, a massive, needle-like tower rising into the sky, for the jumpers, those who wanted to go out with one great rush of air. And there, at last, the thing that they had traveled all this way for. The Urbonas Ride.

The Euthanasia Coaster.

Named after its designer, Julijonas Urbonas, it was a thing of marvel and beautiful engineering. It began with an enormous climb, rising to half a kilometer above the ground. Then the drop. A five hundred meter drop straight down that led to a series of three hundred and thirty degree loops one after the other in rapid succession. Vlad felt his heart beating faster just by looking at it. He remembered the first time he had climbed up the space port in his exoskeleton. He had perched up there, on Level Five of the unfinished building, and looked down, and felt as though the whole city, the whole world, were his.

He could already feel the memories crowding in on him. Demanding that he take them, hold them, examine them, search amongst them for her name, but it was missing. He hugged his son again, and kissed his sister. "You old fool," she said. He shook hands with the robo-priest. Miriam, next. "Look after him," Vlad said, gesturing at his son.

"I will."

Then Eliezer, and Ibrahim. Two old men."One day I'll go on one of these," Eliezer said."What a rush."

"Not me," Ibrahim said. "It's the sea for me. Only the sea."

They kissed on the cheeks, hugged, one last time. Ibrahim brought out a bottle of arak. Eliezer had glasses. "We'll drink to you," Eliezer said.

"You do that."

With that he left them. He was left alone. The park waited for him, the machines heeding his steps. He went up to the roller coaster and sat down in the car and put on the safety belt carefully around himself.

The car began to move. Slowly it climbed, and climbed, and climbed. The desert down below, the park reduced to a tiny square of green. The Dead Sea in the distance, as smooth as a mirror, and he could almost think he could see Lot's wife, who had been turned into a pillar of salt.

The car reached the top and, for a moment, stayed there. It let him savor the moment.

Taste the air on his tongue. And suddenly he remembered her name. It was Aliyah.

The car dropped.

Vlad felt the gravity crushing him down, taking the air from his lungs. His heart beat the fastest it had ever beat, the blood rushed to his face. The wind howled in his ears, against his face. He dropped and leveled and for a moment air rushed in and he cried out in exultation. The car shot away from the drop and onto the first of the loops, carrying him with it, shot like a bullet at three hundred and fifty eight kilometers an hour. Vlad was propelled through loop after loop faster than he could think; until at last the enormous gravity, thus generated, claimed him.

"The results are in. I'm afraid you just didn't do very well."

Artifice

Naomi Kritzer | 4510 words

We toasted the end of Mandy's relationship over a game of Hydro-King. "I never liked him," I said, which was true. I didn't add, "and what still puzzles me is that you never liked him, either, so why did you move in with him?" People say, "never try to change a man" (or, if you're being egalitarian about it, "never try to change the person you're dating") but from the day they met, Mandy had viewed this guy as a work in progress. She'd even succeeded in dragging him to game night a few times, even though he clearly found board games unspeakably dull.

"Find a nice gamer boy next time," Larry suggested over the champagne. We met at night, in Larry's apartment, because Larry had an actual job instead of living entirely off his citizen's stipend like the rest of us. So on one hand, he was busy during the day; on the other, he had more money and could afford a much bigger space, big enough for seven people to meet and play board games.

(You'd be surprised at how many people think it's super retro that we play board games in person instead of immersive VR stuff. But did you know there are still Monopoly and Scrabble tournaments? Besides, when you get together with people in person, you can eat corn chips while you gossip.)

"I'm swearing off men," Mandy said. Larry's housekeeper came through with a tray of snacks. Mandy stared speculatively at it for a moment. The housekeeper was mostly silver, with little swiveling robot eyes on stalks. It rolled around the floor so everyone could get snacks, and Mandy grabbed a fistful of chips. "Too much goddamn work."

"He's probably saying the same thing about women right now," muttered Quinn, my boyfriend, in an undertone. I snickered, then felt guilty, since I ought to be giving Mandy the benefit of the doubt here. Still. I had to admit, I hoped her ex was toasting the split with his own friends right now while watching... was it baseball season? Tennis? Squash? He was into that sort of thing. Mandy, not so much.

Mandy had been in a great mood on game night, but I checked in with her the next week, just to see how she was doing. "Izzy!" she greeted me. "Come over! I want to introduce you to someone!"

I cringed. "Already?"

"It's not what you think. Just come over!"

I went over to Mandy's apartment—the ex had moved out, and she'd already eradicated every trace of him. The alcove where he'd had his things was now fully repurposed as her studio, with a half-finished painting on a big easel. I glanced at it—it was another of her photorealism attempts—and then looked over at the brown-haired, pleasant-faced young man on the sofa. He looked way too young for her. "Joe," she called. "Come here. I'd like to introduce you to Izzy."

He rose and strode over, holding out his hand. "It's a pleasure to meet you," he said in a voice that almost vibrated with sincerity. "You're the first of Mandy's friends I've had the chance to meet." There was a faint stress on the word Mandy and he glanced at her, which was a relief as he was making too much eye contact.

"Yeah," I said. "It's nice to meet you, too." I glanced at Mandy, thinking, is this guy for real?

Something about the self-satisfied look on Mandy's face tipped me off. "Oh. Oh, you didn't."

"My stupid ex got the housekeeper in the agreement," Mandy said. "I needed a new one anyway, I just... upgraded."

I looked "Joe" over. You have to pay a lot more for a robot that really looks human, but that explained Joe's unnerving perfection and slightly-too-youthful face. "You sure did. You couldn't have gotten by with a standard housekeeping model and, oh, a really nice vibrator? Because I'm sure that would've been cheaper."

"I didn't just want him for the bedroom. He's going to be my boyfriend. Right, Joe?"

He slipped his hand around her waist and leaned in to kiss her cheek. "I'll be with you as long as you want me, Mandy."

She pulled back and looked at him critically. "I like the physical gesture there but next time tell me you'll be with me forever."

He smiled at her with what looked exactly like human infatuation. "Of course, darling."

She turned back to me and said, "He learns really fast. I never have to tell him anything twice."

"You shouldn't have to," I said. "I mean, that's the whole point of a robot, right?"

"Exactly! I knew you'd understand."

Joe stood there, smiling at both of us.

When we paused he said, "Can I get you anything, Izzy? A drink? A snack? I make excellent sandwiches."

If it had been an ordinary housekeeper I'd have said yes, but this was creeping me out, so I said I'd eaten and that I needed to get home because I'd promised myself I'd make some progress on the symphony I was composing, and I took off.

Back at my own apartment, I sent my own housekeeper to make me a sandwich and some lemonade and sat down with the keyboard for a while to work, although mostly I stewed. My housekeeper was more basic and functional than Larry's; it didn't even have what you'd call a face, although it had enough functionality to cook (that was important to me) and clean (that was important to Quinn). Eventually Quinn came home and instead of playing him the piece I'd been working on, I told him about Mandy and her custom-designed man.

"Well," he said. "It's sad to say, but this is probably healthier than seeking out men as projects. Robots are very good at following instructions, unlike human beings. Also, Joe will never leave the toilet seat up, unless she instructs him to leave it up."

"I've never understood why she didn't just have the housekeeper check the bathroom after each use to flip the seat back down," I said. "Instead of making it an issue."

"Well, this guy will never use the bathroom at all, unless he has to go in there to recharge," Quinn said. "That's one problem solved, anyway."

I shouldn't have been surprised when Mandy brought Joe to game night.

He still had that friendly smile on his face pretty much all the time. It had a friendly smile on its face, I should say, but the fact is, when a robot really looks human it's hard not to think of it with a gender. Larry's housekeeper was a non-human-looking robot that was nonetheless sort of cute (the eyes "blink," things like that) and he sometimes pretends it's a pet, and Dawn and Shanice have the same basic model as me and Quinn but they gave theirs a name. Quinn and I were always very practical about it. Our housekeeper wasn't a person or a pet; it was a machine that we'd bought so it could do our cooking and clean the toilets and run errands. Lots of people give their housekeeping robots names, but they don't need names. (Unless you have two for some reason, but in a standard apartment space you don't need more than one to keep up with the work.)

We all knew by then that Mandy had bought a robot that looked human, so she couldn't play the game of introducing Joe and waiting to see how long it took for people to figure out what was up. She led Joe around the room, introducing him to everyone; no one refused to shake hands, though Shanice was obviously pretty uncomfortable with it. Joe sat down on one of the folding chairs, leaving the comfier seating spots for the humans, and smiled happily at all of us, not interrupting.

It got awkward when Mandy made it clear she wanted Joe to participate in the gaming.

"Don't be ridiculous," Larry said, bluntly. "These games are supposed to be tests of human skill. If I wanted to play Scrabble with a robot, I could do that, but it'll win almost every time since it has the dictionary built into its head."

"I've instructed him not to win anything a disproportionate amount of the time," Mandy said, defensively.

"So your robot friend is going to throw games deliberately? No. Just no."

"If he can't play, we're leaving," Mandy said.

There were groans all around, but Shanice suggested, "How about Diplomacy? With the robot, there's seven of us. And I wouldn't expect him to have any particular advantage with that game."

"Well, other than the fact that if Mandy orders him to ally with her, what else is he going to do?" Larry snapped.

I pondered this. "We can account for that," I said, as Mandy said, "I can order him right now to just play the game as it's supposed to be played—ally with me if it makes sense, betray me if it makes sense."

"Can he lie?" Quinn asked. We all stared at Joe, speculatively.

"Right," Dawn said. "I'll get the box."

Diplomacy is a seriously old-school game, invented in the mid-twentieth-century, and everyone pretends to be European powers from around World War I. There's no random element—no dice rolls or anything like that. You walk around persuading people to ally with you (by assuring them that you're trustworthy). Then everyone writes down their move secretly and all moves are revealed at one go. There's no rule that keeps you from lying, from making false promises, or from stabbing people in the back. In fact, in general you want to betray your allies one turn before they were going to turn on you.

A robot has a clear advantage in any game where a perfect memory or a lightening-fast ability to calculate odds will come in useful— which is to say, most of them. But in a game where you have to make a guess about who's lying to you, a robot's going to have a harder time. So we went with it, because by then we were all curious. Mandy reiterated to Joe that he should play the game to win—that he was allowed to lie to people, including her, and betray them, including her, in order to try to win. We had to trust that she wouldn't rescind that instruction quietly later on, but she probably realized that if he backed her when he should have betrayed her, that would be it. We wouldn't repeat this experiment.

During the first diplomatic phase I realized that no one was approaching Joe, probably more because he made them nervous than because they thought he'd sell them out to Mandy. I shrugged and edged over. I was playing Russia and Joe was playing Turkey and I was pretty sure that if we worked together we could squash any chance Mandy (who was playing Austria) had of winning the game by the end of 1903 as long as we could keep the other players from coming to her aid.

"Want an alliance?" I asked.

"Oh yes, please," Joe said, with bright enthusiasm. I wondered whether he would jump up and down and clap his hands if he won.

You're probably not a Diplomacy player so the precise ins-and-outs of who allied with whom and who got stabbed in the back when is not going to be particularly interesting to you, so I'll summarize: Joe was an adequate but not outstanding Diplomacy player because he could analyze the strategic advantage of all the possible actions but he was terrible at reading people and frankly he was pretty gullible. Also, he let the rest of us crush Mandy (I think we were sort of in the mood to do that, anyway) and since everyone figured he probably wasn't programmed for grudge-holding, I was able to persuade both Dawn and Quinn that I was totally going to double-cross Joe even though I then double-crossed Quinn. (I don't usually recommend playing Diplomacy with your boyfriend, but it works out for us).

Nobody won; we got down to me, Joe, Dawn, and Larry and then quit, because actually winning a game of Diplomacy can easily take all night. Joe clearly found that puzzling, but didn't complain.

Afterward, we ate pizza and drank beer, except for Joe, who sat quietly and watched us. When it was time to go home, he got Mandy's coat for her and also slipped on a coat himself, even though surely he wasn't going to get cold—it was a brisk fall evening but he wasn't in any danger of freezing solid yet. Everyone shook Joe's hand and we headed in our separate directions.

For most of the next year, Joe was Mandy's boyfriend.

And, he really was the perfect boyfriend. I mean, I like Quinn a lot. He makes me very happy. But there are areas of life where he is imperfect. For example, when he uses up a roll of toilet paper, he tends to leave the fresh roll on the back of the toilet instead of hanging it up neatly on the hook. Joe doesn't use the toilet, but if he did, he would always hang up the TP. In fact, if Mandy wanted to never have to hang up the TP, she could instruct Joe to check for unhung TP every so often and hang it up if it wasn't in place and he would do it without resentment or reminders.

Plus, Mandy could change him. I mean, in addition to telling him things like, "always hang up the toilet paper" and "make me my lunch every day," she could actually take him back in to have his personality altered, and in fact six weeks after she bought Joe she did just that. "He's so quiet," she explained. "It's not that I want him to interrupt, but I want him to initiate conversations, not just answer me when I talk to him. I told him that, and so he tries, but he doesn't come up with new things to talk about, it's always, 'how's your work, Mandy?' or 'how was your day, Mandy?' I mean, he's an excellent listener. It's not that I want to change that. But I want him to have more to say."

After the reprogramming, which Quinn called a personality transplant, Joe was chattier. A lot chattier. Dawn found him a lot more irritating because even though he didn't interrupt, he'd fill in silences and sometimes a silence is okay, you know?

One week, Dawn turned to him and said, "that story you're telling me? About the weird guy on the train? You told it last week. I don't want to hear stories twice. I know you can remember what you've told me, so why are you telling it again?"

Joe continued smiling at her, unflinching. "I'm sorry, Dawn," he said.

"No, you're not. You're just programmed to apologize when people get annoyed with you."

"To be fair," Shanice said, examining the cards she was holding (we were playing Power Quantum that day), "that's basically what I do."

Everyone laughed and Joe was quiet for a while, before he started in about some article he'd read in the paper. Mandy touched his hand and shot him a look and he stopped talking altogether.

The "read my look" thing turned out to be part of a new suite of features that included better ability to read body language, although frankly he still wasn't very good at it. Humans just don't behave in consistent ways. I mean, imagine trying to program a robot to recognize "angry" in someone's body language and not get it confused with "thinking really hard" (something we often were doing, playing games). We kept playing Diplomacy with him and he never got much better. The other games, he'd win a precisely proportionate amount of time... but not Diplomacy.

When they'd been seeing each other for about seven months, Mandy and I both decided to participate in an artistic challenge that involved collaborating with someone doing a very different art form. Someone had put up grant money—not a lot, but enough to be a nice supplement to the standard citizen's stipend. (A stipend is enough to pay for the standard apartment and feed yourself and even buy a housekeeper, but you have to save up for a long time if you want to travel or buy anything fancy. Mandy bought Joe with a pile of money she got for a commissioned painting.) Anyway, we figured, why not, and applied. Our first few meetings, we managed to stay fairly focused, although I have to admit I still didn't really understand the point of photorealistic art. (If you want something that looks like a photograph, why not take a photograph? Mandy had a long explanation of why photorealism was an interesting artistic movement and after a while I sort of tunedher out.) We decided we'd do a joint exhibit where people were supposed to look at some pictures she'd drawn while listening to musicians play something I'd composed to go with the pictures.

Mandy's favorite thing to draw were men. Naked men with nice muscles. She had a dozen pictures of Joe in the mix, a few pictures of her ex, and then various pictures of other artistic models she'd hired. I flipped through the portfolio. "Joe must make a good model," I said.

"There's almost no challenge in it," she said with a sigh. "He can sit perfectly still for as long as I need him to. If he has to get up for some reason, like if I need him to make dinner, he can always sit back down in the exact same position, not even a hair out of place. It's too easy."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, it's kind of the whole problem with Joe, honestly. Everything is too easy."

Joe was washing dishes over in the kitchen alcove when she said this, and I heard him pause, but he didn't say anything. A moment later, he went back to scrubbing.

As a last-ditch effort to keep the romance alive, Mandy took him in for yet another personality transplant that was supposed to make him argue with her. They quarreled once at game night over the game Mandy wanted— Joe insisted it wasn't her turn to pick and she ought to defer to Shanice—and I heard them fight once when I was at their apartment looking at drawings. Joe complained that Mandy had gotten herself a snack, left a mess, and not soaked the burned pan. "You do realize," he pointed out, "that it will take me four times as long to scrub this clean than it would have if you'd soaked it. Or told me when you burned the eggs. Or had me make you the snack in the first place." His tone was mild, cajoling, but with a hint of accusation.

Mandy shrugged it off. "Like you even care," she said.

"I do care," Joe said.

Mandy shot a look at me, at my seat on the couch, where I was looking at drawing and trying to ignore the argument. It was a look that said, Whatever; I know you're a robot and you've been programmed to say you're annoyed. "We can talk about this later," she said. "I'm busy with Izzy."

"I want an apology."

"Okay, Joe. I'm sorry."

"Thank you. That's all I wanted: an apology."

"Can we drop this now?" Mandy shouted.

"Of course, darling."

She made a face as she stalked back into the living room. "Let's go out and leave Mr. Personality here."

We went for a walk. "You could get it undone," I suggested. "The personality transplant, I mean. Right? If you're tired of arguments."

"It just feels wrong," she muttered. "Like taking away his freedom of will."

"He's a robot," I said. "Everything's programmed, whether it's arguing or telling you how pretty you are."

"I know. It was satisfying for a while, but now..."

They hung on for another few months, and then Mandy met a guy at the art exhibit. Erik was a music composer who didn't like my work, and told her she deserved better, and she immediately found him fascinating. He was taller than Joe, with a flabbier body and all the annoying habits Joe lacked, like leaving the toilet seat up and his underwear on the f loor. Joe, of course, picked up after them without complaining, since robots don't get jealous, and from the stories I heard (through friends—Mandy and I had a fight over Erik's opinion of my work) Erik thought cuckolding a robot was either hot or hilarious.

Erik was also not into gaming, and when game night rolled around, Mandy blew us off for a night of torrid sex, or maybe artistic endeavors. Probably sex.

Joe, however, turned up.

"I have brought potato chips," he said, when Larry let him in. That was Mandy's usual offering, but of course, Joe doesn't eat. He added the chips to the kitchen counter and then sat down on his usual folding chair and listened to the conversation.

Of course, we'd been gossiping about Mandy, so the conversation instantly died as we looked at everyone other than Joe and wondered, what exactly is the etiquette here? Finally Shanice turned to Joe and asked, "So, how are things with you, Joe?"

"Fine," Joe said.

"Really?" Shanice said. "No bitter resentment or jealousy over what's going on with Mandy?"

"No," Joe said. "Of course not."

"It's not in your programming, I guess."

"It was," Joe offered. "For about a week.

Mandy wanted me to be jealous, so she had that installed. But then she decided it was too much drama, and had it erased."

"She made you jealous?" That was precisely the sort of gossip we'd all been after, and I leaned in, wanting more. "What was that like?"

For a brief moment, I thought I saw a flicker of emotion in Joe's eyes, and then he said, "Tiring."

Everyone laughed.

"What do you mean, 'tiring?'" Shanice demanded.

"I ran down my battery more quickly and had to recharge," Joe said.

"Oh," Shanice said, losing interest.

"I tell you what," Larry said. "You can pick the first game tonight, Joe. What's your pleasure?"

"Diplomacy," Joe said. "Only, this time, I want to play all the way to the end."

Quinn hadn't been feeling well that evening, and I'd come on my own. (We hadn't actually had enough people to play Diplomacy—we'd played a game with a similar mechanic that called for five players instead of seven.) Things ran very late, and Joe offered to walk me home. A street-sweeper came by as we were walking, and Joe turned to watch it go past. I wondered if he felt a sense of kinship for that sort of robot, the non-human-looking ones. Or for the ones who had human faces but not very complex behavior, like the robots staffing the all-night grocery. Or if he felt all alone in the world. If he felt anything at all.

"I lied," he said, as the sweeper chugged away up the street.

"About what?"

"Mandy didn't actually have the jealousy module erased," he said. "She just told me she didn't want me acting jealous any more. She said she was tired of the drama."

I stopped for a moment and looked at Joe's face. These were all programming modules to affect behavior, I reminded myself, even as part of my tired brain thought, Joe looks so sad. "So she had one set of protocols installed to give you a set of behaviors," I said, "and then she overrode those instructions?"

"Basically."

"You know? If you were human, we all could have warned you before you got into the relationship that Mandy is a crazy, crazy girlfriend. If it's any consolation, she's going to drive that new guy, Erik, up the goddamn tree."

"Oh, she is already," Joe said, and mimicked Mandy softly. "'Honey, if you would just tell me when you're going to be home and try to stick to it'... 'honey, if you would just try to remember to put the milk away'... you get the idea."

"Does he promise her he'll change?"

"No. He says, 'If you wanted a robot, you should've stuck with your robot.'" He was quiet for a minute. "And then they both laugh."

"Is she going to keep you?" I asked.

"She hasn't said." He sighed. "If she sells me, I bet my next owner won't be into Diplomacy."

For the next four weeks, Joe came to game night.

Every time, he brought a bag of potato chips and a little bit of gossip about Mandy. Erik lasted for just over a month, and we thought perhaps Mandy would go back to Joe, but instead she picked up a new guy who had a beard (that Mandy wanted him to shave off) and a tattoo (that she didn't like) and who played guitar (but who'd be a lot better if he just applied himself).

And the week after that, Joe didn't turn up.

"Why do you even care?" Mandy said sharply. "First Larry, then Shanice, now you. It's a robot. I don't ask you what's new with your housekeeper."

I waited, silently, in her doorway. Behind her, in the apartment, I could see a new housekeeper cleaning the rug—chrome and silver, and shiny and new, but totally basic. Not a human-looking model, or even the cute kind with fake eyes.

"Jason found him creepy. And I can't say as I blame him. So I traded him in. Human-looking models are expensive—even used, I got a good enough price to maybe take a trip somewhere. Jason wants to go to the Grand Canyon."

I couldn't look at her anymore; I walked away. And I sent a message to Shanice, Dawn, Larry, and Quinn.

We met up at the robot dealer in Mandy's neighborhood, knowing it was probably too late. The store is staffed by robots, of course, human-looking models with the sort of limited range a sales person needs: infinite patience with difficult customers, perfect honesty with a cash box, and a smile that never goes away. This one looked like a girl, with blond hair. "Refurbished male human-looking robots?" she said. "Right this way."

There were twelve of Joe, standing in a line, neatly dressed, the same smile.

"We want a specif ic one," Shanice said. "The one that used to belong to our friend, Mandy."

"All models are customizable," said the clerk. "All can be adjusted to whatever skills and personality traits meet your particular needs. Do you all three live together?"

"You don't get it," Dawn said. "We want Joe."

I looked at the models on the shelf. "Which one of you is Joe?" None of them replied.

"You can name your robot however you like," the clerk said. "Any of them will be happy to answer to Joe."

"We want our Joe," Quinn said. "We want the Joe who remembers us."

"To protect your privacy, all the robots have their memories wiped when they're turned in," the clerk said. "If you can find out what particular personality modules your friend had downloaded into 'Joe,' we can certainly make you a fresh copy. In fact..." She checked her hand-held. "The most recent arrival is the one on the left; that's probably the specific robot your friend used to own."

We walked over to Joe.

"Do you remember me?" I asked.

Joe smiled the peaceful, unflinching smile I remembered from our first meeting. "It's a pleasure to meet you," he said in a voice that almost vibrated with sincerity.

I turned away.

Larry, Quinn, Dawn, Shanice and I looked at each other.

For a moment we were overwhelmed by the absurdity of this. Buying a human-model robot, even split five ways, was going to wipe out everyone's savings other than possibly Larry's. And for what? His memories were gone. His personality was a clean slate.

I turned back, and held out my hand. "I'm Izzy," I said. "We're taking you home, Joe."

"Do you like board games?" Larry asked as we walked out of the store with him. "Actually, let me rephrase. You liked board games before. You liked them a lot. We're going to teach you to play them again."

Calm

Alec Austin & Marissa Lingen | 4132 words

Marjan Sadeghi was running late, and her Proctor displayed a 32 percent chance that her haste was irrational and motivated by low blood sugar and fatigue poisons. Pausing to smooth down the fabric of her shipsuit and tie her hair back before leaving her cabin, Marjan drew a deep breath and tried to steady her vitals. 32 percent was still deep in the voluntary range, she told herself. The odds were two to one that her limbic system wasn't driving her to make choices she would immediately regret—or, worse, rationalize.

As Marjan's cabin door slid open, her earpiece vibrated, indicating that Ambassador Pua'a was trying to contact her. Trying not to sigh, Marjan tapped her tongue against one of her rear teeth, accepting the call.

"Counselor Sadeghi," the Sophont's mellifluous, inhumanly resonant voice said, its words carried to Marjan's ear by bone conduction. "I see your arrival at our tête-à-tête with the purported sapients of Wasp–18 Gamma will be... delayed."

Marjan felt her cheeks flush hot, and watched her Proctor's irrationality estimate spike to 70 percent before she tamped down her embarrassment. Pua'a, like the other Sophonts that deigned to interact with recently uplifted species such as humanity, wasn't known to indulge in sarcasm, innuendo, or similar conversational gambits. The shame and anger she felt at the ambassador pointing out her late start were relics of primate power games, not a rational response to a self-evident fact.

"Yes, Ambassador," Marjan said, her stomach rumbling as the scents of rooibos tea and coffee reached her as she strode past one of the ship's canteens.

"A pity," Pua'a said. "But since you'll be late anyway, be sure to grab some breakfast and get your blood sugar up. It wouldn't do for you to be impatient and short-tempered while evaluating the Wasp–18 Gammans."

"Yes, Ambassador," Marjan said, turning around and heading for the canteen. "Have the Drommies arrived yet, honored one?"

Pua'a gave a honk of disapproval as Marjan's irrationality estimate spiked again, going from green to yellow. "Counselor," Pua'a said reprovingly. "Drawing parallels between fellow sapients and creatures from one's home-world is tempting, I know. But it also prejudices your perceptions. Just because the residents of Wasp–18 Gamma have vestigial humps in which they store nutrient reserves does not mean they bear any further resemblance to your... aerodromes? No. Dromedaries."

"Understood, Ambassador," Marjan said as she collected a bulb of freshly brewed rooibos and a package of flatbread and fruit leather from the canteen. It didn't seem use ful to mention that the Wasp–18 Gammans spat a great deal, just like camels did. Pua'a would just accuse her of looking for points of similarity rather than differences, and—worst of all—he would be right. The human race's thought processes were full of heuristics, shortcuts, and biases that had been useful for individual survival back when Marjan's ancestors had been East African plains apes, but became liabilities when the descendants of those plains apes were put in a position to make decisions with planetary or interplanetary consequences.

When the Sophonts had first made contact with Earth, the icecaps were melted, the oceans acidified, and the planet was headed to become uninhabitable within three generations. With the Sophonts' help, Earth's ecosystem was slowly recovering, with atmospheric CO 2 levels dropping every year, but the price of the aliens' assistance had been uplift. The human race had had to collectively acknowledge that it was not fully sentient, and that steps should be taken to rectify that deficit.

There had been riots, of course, and anti-alien political movements, which to Marjan only proved the Sophonts' point. How rational was it to insist that things would have been better if your species had been allowed to drive itself to extinction? But people were invested in the idea that what they believed made sense. They believed it, after all! And they were rational human beings, and anyone who disagreed with them was clearly ill informed.

But all of that was the distant past. Marjan's grandparents barely remembered the riots, and everyone of her generation was accustomed to their Proctor as a constant companion, almost as if it was a part of themselves. Sometimes a preachy, heavy-handed part, thought Marjan, but still.

Fortified with breakfast, Marjan made her way to the ship's conference suite just as the Drom—Wasp–18 Gammans, she told herself sternly—were arriving. She was able to slip into the receiving line as though she had been there all along, smiling and bowing and welcoming them to Unification Space. Her fellow human counselor, Luis Garcia Ocampo, quirked a grin her way. Luis was a morning person, and Marjan counted on him to smooth any feathers that got ruffled before 0800 hours standard shipboard.

But no one seemed to be the least bit likely to take offense at anything so small as the timing of her arrival. In fact, the Wasp–18 Gammans (she knew she would get better at thinking of them that way if she tried) had surprisingly dulcet speeches for the aspirant nature of their language. Marjan had never seen such calm in sapients who didn't have Proctors—except, of course, in the ponderous, vaguely elephantine Sophonts, who didn't need them. She began to wonder if Pua'a's people had found their soulmates.

One of Marjan's jobs early in the negotiations was to compare metabolic data with the junior Wasp–18 Gamman diplomat, a looming and lumpy female called Tsak. They found several compatible proteins and only one or two common compounds that the Gammans couldn't eat in human food, so the canteen staff would have an easy job preparing the midday refreshments. When Marjan returned from that task, she found Luis leaning against the wall, watching the proceedings from a tactful distance. Pua'a and the lead Gamman diplomat had completed the astrographical portion of the proceedings, mapping out who claimed which territory in known space, and were discussing resources without a hint of secrecy or suspicion.

"Easiest first meeting I've ever assisted," Luis said to Marjan in undertones.

"I know, I can't believe it," said Marjan. "They're incredibly diplomatic. Frankly I can't see what good a Proctor would— oh my God what is she doing to that chair?"

They both started forward instinctively and then froze in horror. Tsak—the very same Tsak who only minutes earlier had assisted Marjan with canteen arrangements with a nearly-primate smile and many gestures of interstellar goodwill—had torn the polymer mesh seat from the chair and had gone on to bend the metal frame into a set of vicious hooks.

"Security," said Marjan into her earpiece, a fraction of a second after Luis made the same call.

The senior Gamman diplomat, Koorsor, stepped forward, again forming the facial expression Marjan had thought of as a smile. She regarded it with a great deal more caution now. "Where is your isolation, please?"

"Our what?"

"Your isolation. For moments of extreme duress."

"We... don't have one," said Luis.

"We have arranged ourselves not to have extreme duress," said Pua'a. "This is one of the many benefits that—"

"No isolation?" said Koorsor. "Oh dear."

"No isolation?" Tsak repeated in a scream.

"No isolation no isolation no isolation?"

"If we could perhaps adjourn to another room and leave her," said Koorsor, still smiling.

Marjan managed to catch Luis's eye as they left the room and Pua'a moved to intercept the security team they'd summoned. Luis wore the same glassy-eyed expression she knew she did. Her Proctor was reporting an 85 percent chance that she would make sub-optimal decisions, given the level of stress hormones in her bloodstream. Hoping that the Proctor wouldn't try to talk her out of it, Marjan locked the conference room door behind her, leaving Tsak to savage the polymer mesh on another chair, howling in frustration.

"The chairs—" Luis started.

"Do not worry, hooman, I will add your clans to the database." Koorsor pulled out his handheld, smoother and more curved to his hands than the ones the humans used. "How many clans do the hoomans have?"

"Uh—" Marjan felt she had been passed from one inexplicable crisis to another. "Thousands? Tens of thousands? I'm not sure. What database? What do clans have to do with our conference room chairs? What just happened there?"

Koorsor's smile was really beginning to grate on her nerves (80 percent suboptimal, reported the Proctor). "I will mark the property damage credit for 'hooman: unknown clan' until we have better information. Tens of thousands is a quite unwieldy number of clans! You might wish to merge some of them into super-clan alliances."

"We have alliances among many clans," said Luis. "But what on earth made Tsak so— so—"

"The chair was not comfortable for her back."

Marjan blurted, "If I did that to every chair, sofa, and bed that was uncomfortable for my back, we'd be flying around the galaxy with a kitchen table and a shoe tree."

"Shoe tree?"

"Do we need to get better chairs?" said Luis nervously. "The printer has been busy with some of the materials needed for the meeting, but we can make a rush order for it to print chairs if your people need—"

Koorsor honked. Marjan jumped back, afraid that the whole process was going to begin again, but after a moment she realized that the alien had been laughing. "Think nothing of it. It was a moment of shornoth. We are all subject to them. Tsak will have calmed herself within the hour, and the odds that she will go back into shornoth are incredibly small."

"That's, uh, that's good to know," said Luis.

"All of you?" said Marjan.

"It is a healthy release of emotion, vital to the day-to-day functioning of a sane people," said Koorsor. "Do you think that Pua'a will be able to relocate our discussion until Tsak is done?"

"I—I'll check," said Marjan, and left Luis to smile wanly at the alien diplomat.

"This shornoth," said Luis. "It's entirely directed at inanimate objects?"

Koorsor honked again, which was not quite as startling now that Luis had heard it once. "Oh no, not at all. This is why we have the clan databases for calculations of reparation."

"I... see," said Luis. "So much for a chair, so much for a table, so much for a junior diplomat's arm?"

"And so much for a junior diplomat," agreed Koorsor.

Luis swallowed hard. "Just a moment, please," he said in his most calm and diplomatic voice. His Proctor was showing him a 95 percent likelihood to make a poor decision due to stress chemicals—definitely time to remove himself from the situation and let someone else take the reins.

He found Pua'a chiding Marjan for her silly worries. "We have uplifted dozens of species, little human. They are all full of violence and rage and fear, all in need of our expert assistance to become fully sapient. Remember the sorry state of your own planet when we arrived! The Wasp–18 Gammans are no different. You must calm yourself. How I wish it had been feasible to fit you with one of the Proctors that could smooth out these unfortunate chemical spikes in your systems! Possibly more of your hot brewed leaf compounds might assist."

"Their database tracks payments for injury to other life forms," said Luis breathlessly. "Including death. They just—take it for granted, apparently."

Pua'a blinked at Luis, the nostrils at the end of its trunk flaring. "Oh dear," the Sophont said at length. "I fear we may need to reevaluate our contact strategy."

"You don't say?" Marjan muttered.

Pua'a snorted, sending a puff of warm air past Marjan. "You are both still overwhelmed by stress chemicals, so I will overlook that remark. Please, collect yourselves. I will deal with Koorsor and discover how prevalent this sort of spontaneous violence is."

"Koorsor suggested that all the Gammans were subject to it," Luis ventured as Pua'a lumbered towards the antechamber where they'd left the Gamman.

"So Marjan reported," Pua'a said, pausing on the threshold, and Luis fought down irritation at the thought that Pua'a had discounted Marjan's claim due to her Proctor's readings. "But we must conf irm the information. In matters that affect an entire species, a single diplomat's word is not sufficient. I will request historical and biological documentation to support Koorsor's claims." Pua'a flicked its trunk at its human assistants in dismissal. "Return once your Proctors report that you are rational again."

Marjan sighed as the bulkhead door slid shut behind Pua'a. "If the ambassador was human..." she murmured.

"... I'd call him a condescending ass," Luis finished for her. The two of them exchanged rueful glances.

"So," Marjan said after a moment. "I guess it's time for tea and deep breathing exercises. You want Rooibos or Matcha?"

Luis's Proctor took longer to return to a normal range than Marjan's did—the Sophonts claimed humans had a baseline 10 percent chance of irrationality, even when calm, well-fed, and rested—but once they'd finished their tea and hummus, Pua'a summoned them to meet with Koorsor once again.

"I apologize for my colleague startling you," Koorsor said, smiling and bobbing his head as the humans joined him and Pua'a in an intact conference room. "Tsak should be able to rejoin us shortly, and when she does, I am sure she will feel abashed at her breach of protocol."

Marjan looked to Pua'a to take the lead, but the Sophont was silent, apparently regarding the proper response to the Gamman's apology as obvious. "That is most gracious of you," she managed. "We, in turn, apologize for being so startled. Our contact team did not notify us of your people's tendency toward shornoth."

"Most regrettable," Koorsor said, nodding vigorously. "But now we understand each other better, and your clan will be appropriately compensated for your furnishings!"

Pua'a's voice reached Marjan and Luis via bone conduction as Koorsor finished. "The Xenology section is reviewing the documentation Koorsor provided. Preliminary indications suggest that shornoth is near-universal among the adult population. This must be rectified for the Gammans to considered for Unification."

As Marjan and Luis absorbed this news, Pua'a raised a control wand in its trunk, activating a projection that displayed images of a dozen species-specific forms of Proctor. "To understand a friend better is a great gift," Pua'a said. "The Unification seeks nothing more than to foster understanding and to help its member species overcome artifacts of their biological evolution, whether those are a tendency to startle and flee when exposed to subsonic vibrations, or a tendency to decide first and examine evidence later."

"A noble goal for a noble union," Koorsor declared, peering at the various devices and species that the projection depicted. "I hope that your hooman comrades now appreciate the importance of digestion to maintaining sentience!"

"Indeed," Pua'a rumbled. "Our scientific and cultural experts are examining the records you have provided us, but even a superficial examination reveals that the prevalence of shornoth has had a significant influence on the course of your history. Your earliest attempts at space flight were disrupted by it, I believe?"

Koorsor tilted his head, still smiling. "Disrupted? There were those who thought so, certainly. But in truth, it only proved a spur to further innovation. Our drives, you will note, are far more powerful than they once were— and all to accommodate the need for isolation!"

Pua'a's trunk faltered for a moment but then rose again proudly. "I suppose that is one point of view. But the examination of the evidence from a logical standpoint makes it difficult to see shornoth as a force for good in your people. Modern Gammans lose how many hours a year to shornoth?"

Before Koorsor could answer, Tsak entered the conference room, ducking her head and looking rumpled. "I beg pardon, sapients all, for the inconvenience of my shornoth timing."

"Not at all," said Pua'a, waving both hand and trunk magnanimously. "It has allowed us to begin discussing one of the crucial elements of bringing your people into Unification."

"To answer your question," said Koorsor, "it really varies how much time we lose to shornoth. Most of us stabilize around sexual maturity and can predict whether we will likely experience shornoth for an hour a day or for much, much less than that, and can plan our careers and lives accordingly. Gone are the days when we needed to rely on keeping ourselves fully stocked with nutrients in case we needed to go into isolation for weeks or months." He gestured ironically at his camel-like hump. "Our nutrient storage curves can be useful for long-term exploration or other modern needs, of course."

"Of course," said Pua'a. "We would not dream of interfering with how you store and process nutrients. The system you have evolved allows for a far more even digestive cycle than for some sapients such as humans. I commend you."

Marjan rolled her eyes. She was grateful that the Proctor had not yet been engineered to detect such movements.

"We are prepared to offer you an alternative to life with shornoth, however," said Pua'a. "The Unification species must all trust each other. Toward that end, I believe the Gammans would be a good candidate species for the particular form of Proctors that cleanse the bloodstream of irrationality-inducing hormones."

"Proctors?" said Koorsor. "What is a Proctor?"

Pua'a gestured with the wand, and the display changed. "Luis, Marjan? Can you show our guests your Proctor insertion points?"

Marjan walked over to Koorsor, leaving Luis to show Tsak the spot behind his ear that had healed over, leaving only a smooth green bump in case of malfunction access. It was less than the size of his smallest fingernail, and sometimes it was hard to believe that such a tiny thing could cause such disproportionate results.

"In your heads," said Tsak wonderingly.

"The ones we have don't filter blood chemicals," said Luis. "Humans have at least as much difficulty with absence of useful chemicals as the presence of... difficult ones."

"But you want us to filter ours," said Koorsor, swinging his large, blunt nose around to stare at Pua'a.

Pua'a inclined its head. "The burden of isolation would be completely gone. You could simply—"

"No," said Koorsor.

"I think if you look at our—"

"No," said Koorsor again. Marjan sidled backward a step, afraid that in a moment Luis would have to provide them with her clan name and find out exactly what they thought a junior diplomat was worth. But Koorsor did not seem to be filled with rage—or shornoth, if that was different—or any other emotion Marjan could detect.

She peered at him more closely.

"We appreciate your offer, of course," said Koorsor. "Once it became clear to me that you do not experience shornoth at all, I could see why you would think that its absence might be a useful bargaining chip in opening diplomatic relations. But this is how we understand the world. You other species, you cannot possibly imagine the clarity that comes in the wake of shornoth, the valuable insights that arise from having our times of isolation. This is how we are. We want no other way."

Pua'a put down the wand. It rippled its trunk in a way that Marjan had seen before, a self-calming, steadying gesture like humans used in squaring their shoulders or smoothing their apparel. "I fear I was insufficiently clear, dear Gamman colleague. The Proctor is a requirement for the other races of the Unification. This is one of the greatest gifts in the Universe, the ability to move to full sapience. Any who would refuse it—are not ready for the benefits of Unification."

Marjan found herself impressed despite herself at the calm and steadiness all the alien diplomats maintained. Pua'a sounded even more saddened and disgusted than usual by the foibles of lesser species, but very little of that was going to be obvious to someone with no experience with the Sophonts. And Koorsor—Koorsor's calm rivaled Pua'a's, reminding her of why they had initially thought the Proctor would gain the Gammans nothing.

She had never seen such an impasse.

"I will let you think on the information we have provided," said Pua'a finally. "Let us adjourn, each to our own chambers, that we may reconvene tomorrow with clear heads."

"An admirable goal," Koorsor replied.

Marjan and Luis often dined together, since their schedules meshed well and so did their temperaments. While the others were making elaborate diplomatic farewells, they slipped out to the canteen to pile their plates with protein balls, noodles, and tangy sauce from several hydroponically grown vegetables.

"I can't believe they turned Pua'a down flat," said Marjan.

Luis was still savoring the first mouthful of noodles and didn't answer immediately. When he did, he wore a rueful smile. "Oh, I can. You remember what I said about the ambassador being a condescending ass? The Proctor is like having the ambassador living behind my ear. I like not making stupid decisions under stress—but every once in a while it would be a relief to just do what seemed best without having the Proctor chiming in my ear about fatigue poisons or stress chemicals or low blood sugar."

Marjan thought of all the times her Proctor's insistence that fatigue or hunger took precedence had interrupted her work. "No, that's true, it can be a pain sometimes. But look at all the wars humanity used to get in. And all the bad business deals our ancestors made! Even if you're not going to the point of bombing your neighbors, without the Proctors we'd get into bad relationships and buy useless crap all the time."

Luis shrugged. "I could deal with a few more pieces of useless crap around my quarters."

"But the Gammans—"

"Oh, the Gammans should get Proctors," he said. "The Gammans should get superduper-hyper Proctors grown in high carbon-dioxide environments so they get really huge. A species that can't even keep from smashing up the furniture at a negotiating session? We cannot fit them for Proctors fast enough."

"Or get them off our ship," Marjan muttered. "Although I suppose it's not that much more comfort to have them on their own ship with those powerful engines Koorsor was going on about. Powerful engines and who knows what else. Better to just get the Proctors in as soon as possible."

"Before they decide to rampage through hydroponics, tear memory sticks out of the data library, or breach reactor containment," Luis agreed. They each took another bite of their protein balls, glumly contemplating the havoc a Gamman could wreak by going into shornoth without warning.

"Hey," Marjan said as Luis stirred noodles around on his tray distractedly. "Maybe Pua'a is going about this too directly."

"What?" Luis said, glancing at her. "Are you suggesting one of the Sophonts could be wrong?"

"Not wrong," Marjan said. "Just... close-minded. I mean, we agree with the Ambassador that the Gammans need Proctors. Right?"

"Jesus and Mary, do we ever," Luis muttered.

"And the Gammans flatly refused to consider adopting a Proctor that would keep them from entering shornoth at all."

"Oh no," Luis said, giving Marjan a stricken look. "Have you checked your Proctor, Marjan? You can't be serious."

"My Proctor's green," Marjan said. "15 percent chance of irrationality, which is the best I've done all day. You see it, don't you? There's an obvious compromise, which gives both sides what they want."

"Just so we're clear," Luis said, pushing his tray away from him, "you're suggesting we offer the Gammans a blood-f iltering Proctor which they can... what? Use to trigger shornoth at controlled intervals?"

"Right," Marjan said triumphantly, and watched her proctor's assessment of her irrationality spike to 20 percent based on her exuberance. "No more hydroponics rampages, or broken memory sticks, or containment breaches. Which you know they've had, if they can flip out over an uncomfortable chair."

"No more dismembered junior diplomats," Luis said, his gaze unfocused. "Oh, Pua'a will like that. You know he thinks putting a price on sapient life is barbaric."

"You think we might be able to get rid of the interclan database altogether?" Marjan asked.

Luis made a face. "Dunno. They'll still be smashing furniture, won't they?"

Marjan thought about that for a moment. "Maybe we can sell them some that's meant to get broken up and reassembled."

Pua'a beamed benevolently over the proceedings as Koorsor and Tsak held up the symbolic first Proctors for the Gamman species, baring broad teeth for the recording devices. It was an historic moment, and the two human junior diplomats were in the background. At the crucial still-image moment, Luis even had his head turned away to talk to one of the xenomedical staff.

But the Gammans were more appreciative of their part in the arrangements than the verdict of history was likely to be. Tsak cornered them after all the recording was done and the real Proctors—long since implanted, and far less shiny than the symbolic ones—had been switched on.

"It was you who thought of these, wasn't it?" she said. "You hoomans."

"How did you know?" asked Luis. "It was mostly Marjan," he added hastily. "I only helped a little."

Tsak's broad teeth flashed again. "The Sophonts know a lot. Koorsor is very impressed with them. Of course, I am too. But they do without the Proctors. I don't think they really understand what it means to have one. I think it takes another—another supposedly semisapient race to understand that."

Marjan smiled back at her. "I hope it won't offend you if I tell you that part of my motivation was keeping you from ripping my head off."

"Not at all," said Tsak. "That's the basis of all diplomacy."

SATURN'S "JET-PROPELLED" MOON AND THE SEARCH FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE

Richard A. Lovett | 5081 words

Science Fact

It was a shame, Aimee Miller thought, that the first alien life form discovered by humanity had to be killed in the process of looking at it. But such was the way with electron microscopy: in order to see the alien cell in enough detail, it was necessary to hit it with radiation guaranteed to kill it. Just as, afterward, it was necessary to chemically pick it apart to prove that this tiny bit of one-time life melted out of an ice grain wasn't something that had somehow hitchhiked from Earth.

But if there was one microbe, hopefully there were more. Aimee wasn't sure exactly where in its elaborate gravitational dance with Saturn's moons the Saturn orbiter currently was, but one thing was clear. The tiny grain of ice it had already plucked from the giant planet's tenuous E ring would forever change humanity's view of its place in the Universe. And as the mission progressed, the orbiter would be making repeated flybys of the mother lode of enigmatic ice grains:the tiny moon Enceladus, where for millions of years ice geysers had spewed microscopic snowflakes from underground cauldrons now proven to be cradles of life beyond Earth.

Simply stated, this small, frozen worldlet, a moon the size of England, had just become the hottest place in the Solar System.

Far fetched? Not as much as you might think. The most exotic part of this scenario might be Aimee's fancy bio-lab, which can do complex analyses no space mission has yet dreamed of. As for seeking life at Saturn? Many scientists think that might actually be the best (and easiest), place to look.

Sure, NASA's Curiosity rover has repeatedly confirmed what many have suspected: that once upon a time, Mars was habitable. But that was billions of years ago. If you switch the question to "Where, right now, might we find conditions suitable for life?" Mars becomes less interesting. In fact, the best options might be in places that barely crossed astrobiologists' radar as little as a few decades ago.

In Larry Niven's classic Known Space series, the first interstellar colonies were scouted by robotic probes designed to search out habitable worlds. Due to a programming error, however, what the probes reported as habitable planets turned out simply to be habitable "places"—small niches on otherwise bleak planets.

In Niven's stories, this was something of a running joke, as unsuspecting colonists were forced to adapt to worlds a lot less Earthlike than anticipated. But Niven's little gag may have been unexpectedly visionary. When it comes to seeking potential abodes for extraterrestrial life, the approach we've been taking, with its focus on Mars-roving and exoplanet-hunting, might be unnecessarily terra-centric (at a minimum, planet-centric). There might, in fact, be many exotic places where life could exist. One of the first to be recognized was Jupiter's moon Europa, which appears to have a planet-girdling sea beneath its icy surface, but it's possible to spin an argument for many such seas, even including one deep beneath the surface of Pluto. 1

But for the moment, the astrobiological spotlight is on a much more accessible world: Enceladus—a three-hundred-mile-wide moon of Saturn that many think might be the Solar System's best place to look for extraterrestrial life. "It has liquid water, organic carbon, nitrogen [in the form of ammonia], and an energy source," says Chris McKay, an astrobiologist at NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California. "There is no other environment in the Solar System [except Earth] where we can make all those claims."

Superficially, Enceladus seems a singularly uninteresting place to visit. White, round, and icy, it looks from a distance like nothing more than an overgrown cue ball. Named for a giant from Greek mythology, it isn't even all that big; Saturn alone has five larger moons. Enceladus could snuggle nicely between Baltimore and Boston with room to spare.

But sometimes, nomenclature is irony. In Greek lore, the giant Enceladus was buried under Italy's Mt. Etna, one of the world's most active volcanoes. In some versions of the story, in fact, it's his sleeping breath that fuels Etna's fires. And while nobody could have foreseen it when British astronomer William Herschel first spotted Enceladus in 1789, it turns out that the not-so-giant moon behaves in some ways like an enormous volcano.

"It's the only unambiguously cryovolcanically active moon in the Solar System," Dennis Matson, a planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, said in May 2011 at a gathering of Enceladus experts at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. 2

As the term indicates, cryovolcanoes don't spew lava—at least not lava as we know it. Rather, they extrude a mix of water and ammonia that's only hot compared to everything else nearby. And in Enceladus's case, it's not really lava, but instead geyser-like jets of ice spicules and chilly vapor—not so much an extraterrestrial Etna as a deep-frozen Yellowstone.

Although some people will argue that this isn't really a volcano, what makes Enceladus's cryovolcanoes, cryogeysers, cryofumeroles, or whatever you want to call them interesting is that their icy vapor most likely originated as water. If so, somewhere beneath the surface there may be an environment warm enough for life as we know it.

Better yet, in Enceladus's low surface gravity (slightly more than 1.1% that of Earth's) many of those ice grains are blasted all the way into space, where a properly equipped spacecraft might be able to swoop close and collect samples, including, perhaps, a few stray microbes caught up by the jets.

To look for life signs on Mars, we have to land rovers and drill into rocks for samples. On Enceladus, we might simply have to fly by and let the samples come to us.

Tiger Stripes

The first inkling Enceladus might be more than simply an iceball came in 1980 and 1981 when NASA's two Voyager spacecraft sped through the Saturn system, passing within 120,000 miles of Enceladus en route to Uranus, Neptune, and the edge of the Solar System.

Even from that close, the cameras of the era weren't good enough to reveal more than tantalizing hints that something about this moon was weird. But one of those hints was that the surface, while not truly cue-ball smooth, was unusually free of big craters: a sign that something had "resurfaced" the planet relatively recently, erasing traces of old impacts. Also, the Voyagers found that Enceladus orbits in the heart of Saturn's tenuous E ring (so faint it wasn't even seen until 1967), raising the possibility that somehow, the ring and moon were linked—most likely with the ring being created by material somehow being ejected from Enceladus's surface.

But that was pretty much all we knew until NASA's Cassini spacecraft arrived on the scene in 2004, more than two decades later.

Initially, Cassini's prime target was Saturn's truly giant moon, Titan, which has revealed a remarkably complex surface topography and a weather cycle in which methane plays the role of water, complete with lakes, seas, streambeds, thunderstorms, and seasons. But it didn't take the scientists long to take a look at Enceladus as well, on the first of what are now scheduled to be some two dozen flybys by the time the mission ends in 2017.

What they found became more exciting with each flyby.

One of the first discoveries was of strange, bluish bands near the south pole, quickly dubbed "tiger stripes." There were four major ones, now named for cities in The Arabian Nights —Alexandria, Cairo, Baghdad, and Damascus—lying in parallel, roughly 130 kilo-meters long and 35 kilometers apart. Clearly fault lines of some sort, they confirmed the Voyager-era discovery that Enceladus wasn't simply frozen in time, but bears unmistakable scars of recent geological activity.

But tectonic features are a dime a dozen in the outer Solar System. The tiger stripes were interesting, but not game changing.

The next surprise came a couple of months later, when a subsequent flyby revealed that the stripes weren't just cracks in Enceladus's icy façade—they were hot, at least by the standards of an airless moon, 870 million miles from the Sun, where the average temperature is somewhere around –330°F. In places, the tiger stripes have now been measured with temperatures as high as –139°F—still far colder than anything ever measured on the surface of Earth, but a strong sign of an internal heat source. It was a bit like going to Antarctica and measuring hot spots with temperatures higher than anything ever recorded in the Sahara. Clearly, something interesting was going on.

But the biggest find came later that year, when Cassini scientists released a photo showing a cloud of backlit particles jetting from Enceladus's south polar regions, right above the tiger stripes.

It would have made a great cover for a science fiction novel, making it look almost as though the moon was rocket propelled, blasting northward, out of its orbit. That's not actually the case, of course. (Nor is there enough impulse from the plume to overcome other forces holding Enceladus in its orbit.) Rather, the plume is Matson's cryovolcano: the jets from what are now known to be dozens of geysers spewing a total of 440 pounds of water vapor and ice particles into space each second—enough to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool every few hours.

It was evidence that Enceladus is indeed the source of the E ring, but the photo was so startling that the scientists took months before releasing it, double-checking their instruments to make sure the plume was real and not some odd type of lens flare or other instrumental artifact.

Since 2005, Cassini has made nearly twenty more flybys, one dipping as close as 13 miles to the surface, sampling the plume by flying right through its heart. Other flybys have photographed the surrounding terrain, made increasingly detailed thermal maps, and used spectroscopes to analyze the composition, speed, and density of the plume's dust grains and gas. One thing that's now known, for example, is that the stripes are valleys, each about 1,600 feet deep and 1.2 miles wide.

Flanking them on each side are low ridges, about three hundred feet high, giving the whole thing a vaguely "M"-shaped profile. (Although in this "M" the dip in the middle would extend well into the next line of type.) Even on Earth, these would be dramatic features, roughly comparable to Colorado's Black Canyon of the Gunnison. On much smaller Enceladus, they are enormous.

Not surprisingly, the geyser-like jets feeding the plume originate from vents in the tiger stripes, corresponding nicely to the hot spots. But this doesn't mean the tiger stripes are jetting vapor everywhere. Rather, the individual vents appear to be quite small, by some calculations (based on exhaust velocities of the particles) as narrow as a few tens of centimeters —roughly a foot.

Between the jets and the heat, Enceladus appears to be emitting an enormous amount of energy into space—about 16 gigawatts, Enceladus scientists have calculated: enough to power Washington D.C. and several of its suburbs. And with all of that energy comes not only water vapor and ice crystals, but a stew of intriguing chemicals: ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide, hydrogen cyanide, formaldehyde, acetylene, and other hydrocarbons.

None of this means that Enceladus has life. But with each successive find, the possibility of a habitable zone not far beneath its surface becomes ever more likely.

Water, carbon, nitrogen, and an energy source... Cassini wasn't sent to Saturn looking for life. But what it's found with instruments designed for other purposes definitely makes one wonder what a future mission, with a more specialized instrument package, might someday uncover.

The big question, of course, is what is producing the plumes.

Most of the energy needed to drive them probably comes from gravitational flexing, as Enceladus moves though Saturn's enormous gravity field. That causes the moon's inner materials to rub against each other, generating heat. But even if you also throw in heat from radioactive decay, there doesn't seem to be 16 gigawatts of energy, which means that there's either a missing energy source the scientists have yet to figure out, or that the plume isn't active all the time.

In fact, says Frank Postberg, a physicist at Heidelberg University, Germany, "the energy output suggests that [the plume] cannot be active much more than 10% of the time, at least at the current scale." Many Enceladus scientists therefore believe that instead of blasting away continuously, the plumes probably follow what engineers call a duty cycle, in which they turn on and off at intervals, accumulating energy for future eruptions during the inactive periods, much as earthly geysers do, but on a longer time scale.

Nobody knows how long the "on" cycles might last. All we know for sure is that the geysers have been at full blast ever since Cassini first saw them, a decade ago. And, since they do feed the E ring, it's also a pretty good guess that they've been going at least since the E ring was first spotted, 47 years ago. In fact, they've presumably been active long enough for the E ring as we know it to have formed— a process Postberg estimates would take somewhere between a few hundred and "maybe" a thousand years.

But maybe there's another marker for how long they've been active, says Paul Schenk, a planetary scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, Houston, Texas.

Snow.

Talcum Powder

When the plumes are operating, Enceladus isn't just a cold, airless world. It has weather. Cold and sunny, with a chance of snow flurries.

That's because many of the ice grains ejected from the geysers don't get far into the E-ring before Enceladus reclaims them. "The vast majority, we think, fall back to the surface," says Carolyn Porco, head of the Cassini imaging team.

But the snowfall isn't evenly distributed. In a 2010 study in the journal Icarus, a team led by Sascha Kempf, then of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, calculated that the dual effects of Enceladus's and Saturn's gravity would concentrate it into two narrow bands, stretching hundreds of kilometers northward from the tiger-stripe zone. 3

Based on this, Schenk went looking for snowdrifts. Using the highest-resolution photos available for the fallout zones, he found a 12x12 mile region where successive flybys had taken photos from different angles, allowing him to construct 3D "stereo" images showing an area whose topography was muted into rounded contours indicative of deep snow, with the ghostly outlines of underlying features peaking through. "It's different from what you see in other areas that have been photographed at high resolution," he says. "Those had incredible detail everywhere you look. This is much smoother. It really does look as if it's been mantled by a deposit."

The superfine ice crystals (finer-grained even than talcum powder, Schenk says) might make for the Solar System's best powder skiing, but the goal wasn't to find an exotic science-fictional vacationland. Rather, it was to measure the depth of the snow—something Schenk was able to do by using stereo images of snow-draped canyons, up to 1,600 feet deep and a mile across. From these photos, Schenk was able to distinguish the overlying snowpack from the underlying topography. "Slope breaks near ridge crests can be interpreted as a weak layer [snow] over a solid layer," he says. "I get a thickness of 125 meters (410 feet)—give or take fifty meters. It varies from site to site." 4

That's a lot of snow, anywhere. But on Enceladus, it's enormous, because Kempf's model doesn't show it coming down at blizzard rates. Rather, his team calculated that even in the highest snowfall zones it was accumulating at only a rate of one millimeter every 1,500 years. At that rate, it would take nearly two hundred million years to pile up 125 meters.

That said, there's a bit of apples and oranges going on in these calculations, because Kempf's calculations were based on highly compressed snow or ice, and Schenk's drifts might be quite fluffy—meaning they could pile up a lot deeper, faster. But even if there's a factor of ten difference, Schenk's finding still suggests that the plume must have been going for nearly twenty million years. And realistically, even in Enceladus's low gravity, snow at the bottom of that giant pile would be substantially compacted, which means that twenty million years is a lower-bound estimate.

But the point isn't to debate whether the plume has been going for twenty million years or two hundred million. Rather, it's that the jets aren't a brand-new feature. "It's a big step from a thousand to ten million years," says Postberg. "This is a whole new order of constraints for how long the plumes have been active."

Furthermore, it's possible that Postberg's duty cycle doesn't require the plumes to shut off entirely. Rather, they may ramp up and ramp down, without ever totally subsiding. If so, the average rate of snowfall on the rim of Schenk's canyon might be much lower than at present, and Schenk's snowfall record might extend not merely over tens of millions of years, but over hundreds of millions.

And that's important because the longer the geysers have been active, the greater the chances that the processes producing them might have given life enough time to evolve.

Urine Dumps

Life as we know it, of course, needs liquid water, not snow, so the mere fact the tiger stripes are jetting out moisture doesn't necessarily mean there's liquid beneath. Instead, the jets could be fueled by "dry" processes in which ice grains and vapor are spewed out without melting.

One such process could involve sublimation (in which ice evaporates directly into vapor, without ever getting warm enough to melt). Another might involve the decomposition of subsurface layers of clathrate deposits (a type of ice composed of a cage-like lattice, tightly woven enough to trap gas molecules).

Both processes occur on Earth. Fishermen often dredge up methane-containing clathrates (also called methane hydrates) from the Arctic waters, watching them decompose into water and methane. And villagers in Greenland use sublimation to air-dry laundry on cold, sunny days when temperatures never get close to freezing.

But these processes produce mostly water vapor, not the fifty/fifty mix of water vapor and ice crystals observed by Cassini's instruments, says Andrew Ingersoll, a planetary scientist from California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "It's hard to get solid-to-gas ratios of more than 1% if you think all the particles are forming from vapor," he says.

Water droplets, on the other hand, easily form clouds of tiny ice particles. "If you throw a blob of liquid into vacuum," Ingersoll says, citing astronaut "urine dumps" as an example, "it's not going to freeze into a big chunk. It'll break up and explode into a cloud of smaller particles."

An even worse blow to the "dry" theories comes from what happens when ice grains hit Cassini's cosmic dust analyzer as the spacecraft f lies through the heart of the plume. These collisions are energetic enough to produce a quick flash of light as the impact not only vaporizes the ice grain but ionizes its constituents, allowing scientists to determine the grain's composition from its spectra. And in a 2001 paper in Nature, Postberg's team saw clear indications of sodium chloride: salt. 5

Salty ice particles, Postberg says, are hard to explain with "dry" plume models, because even if salt is present underground, sublimation or clathrate degeneration should either leave it behind or bring up sodium vapor in the plume, something that has not been seen. For appreciable quantities of salt to be in the ice grains, he says, they must have begun as frothy bubbles fizzing out of a salty, subsurface ocean, rich in dissolved gases: bubbles that then collect into a wind that blows up through narrow fissures, emerging at the surface as the geyser-like jets seen from space.

Matson calls this a "Perrier ocean" and compares it to being on a beach on a blustery day. "When the surf is up," he says, "there's a lot of spray. You can smell the salt in the air." The amount of salt, Postberg adds, is about half that in Earth's oceans—comparable to what you'd get if you put liquid water in contact with primordial water for millions of years.

So far, we've been talking as though the existence of an underground ocean is all but proven. But nothing on the frontiers of science is that cut and dry, and not all the evidence points to liquid water.

One problem is the energy problem, which doesn't give enough heat to maintain a layer of water beneath the ice, everywhere, says Francis Nimmo, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

But that's just a minor difficulty, because if all of the gravitational energy is focused in one zone—such beneath the tiger stripes—there is plenty to produce a large, regional sea. And once such a sea forms, Nimmo says, it would concentrate gravitational flexion (and therefore heating) into its own region, thereby becoming self-perpetuating. In fact, he says, it's possible that such a regional sea might be a remnant of a once-larger ocean that long ago mostly froze. Another prospect is that a south-polar underground sea was created by a long-ago asteroid impact (a theory that draws support from the fact that the southern region containing the tiger stripes is separated from the rest of Enceladus by a "dichotomy boundary" marked by features that might—or might not—be remnants of exactly such a crater rim.)

On the other hand, complex fracture patterns in the ice around the tiger stripes region (including ones that appear to be remnants of several generations of prior tiger stripes) indicate that the entire ice shell of that part of Enceladus has slowly rotated, presumably due to asymmetric torques from Enceladus's notperfectly-circular orbit.

"There's no way to do that without a global ocean," says Simon Kattenhorn, a planetary geologist at the University of Idaho. "You can't have just the south polar terrain rotating above a local sea."

Another problem comes from the zoo of compounds found within the plume. Some of them, says Hunter Waite, a space physicist at the Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, Texas, are inconsistent with a liquid source because they are ones like hydrogen cyanide, which, if they had ever met liquid water should have reacted to produce other compounds not yet found. Others, like methane, simply aren't soluble in water.

In discussing this, however, Waite is careful not to argue that there's no liquid water: he merely notes that some of these chemicals are consistent with liquid water... and some aren't. "We don't know how to sort that out," he says. One possibility, he adds, is simply that chemicals in the plumes might come from multiple sources, some involving water, some not.

It's not a debate that's likely to be fully resolved in the near future. In the latest pro-ocean salvo, a 2013 paper in Nature spearheaded by Matt Hedman, a planetary scientist at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., reported that the intensity of the jets feeding Enceladus's plume varies with Enceladus's distance from Saturn. 6 "The jets of Enceladus apparently work like adjustable garden hose nozzles," Hedman said in a NASA press release. 7 "The nozzles are almost closed when Enceladus is closer to Saturn and are most open when the moon is farthest away. We think this has to do with how Saturn squeezes and releases the moon with its gravity."

That itself might simply be an intriguing factoid. But Hedman's coauthor, JPL planetary scientist Christophe Sotin, argues that it wouldn't work that way under "dry" models of plume formation. "The way the jets react so responsively to changing stresses on Enceladus suggests they have their origins in a large body of liquid water," he said in the same press release.

12C, 13 C, and Acetylene

Even if Enceladus has liquid water, that's not proof of life. Just to begin with, there has to be some way for microbes to turn the available energy into something it can use.

One option that would not be available in Enceladus's dark underground would be photosynthesis, the process by which earthly plants (and some microorganisms) harvest energy from sunlight. But one possibility that might be available, says McKay, is a "methanogen system" in which microorganisms live by obtaining both energy and biological building blocks by synthesizing methane from carbon dioxide. McKay is particularly fond of this idea because it might be sustainable over very long time periods if geological processes carry some of the methane produced by the bacteria back into zones hotter than 500°C. Those temperatures would decompose it back into building blocks usable by methanogen bacteria, meaning that overall Enceladus could have an ecosystem in which organisms subsist on chemicals recycled by geochemical heat. "The fact we see methane in the plume makes it interesting," McKay adds.

Ronald Oremland, a microbial biogeochemist with the U.S. Geological Survey's off ice in Menlo Park, California, believes an even better food source would be acetylene.

On Earth, this chemical doesn't occur naturally, although humans synthesize it as fuel for welding torches. But it exists in comets and there are hints it might be present in Enceladus's jets. And acetylene-eating organisms do exist on Earth. If there's enough acetylene on Enceladus, Oremland says, it could be "fast food" for microbes—a primordial food source on which Enceladus bugs might still be nibbling away. If so, possible biomarkers (chemicals indicating the existence of biological processes) for such organisms might be byproducts of acetylene metabolism, such as acetate and acetaldehyde.

Other possible biomarkers are amino acids, especially if they can be tested for "chirality," which is the degrees to which they mix mirror-imaged shapes known as D and L isomers.

Abiotic processes tend to produce an even mix of the two isomers. Biological ones favor one or the other. On Earth that's the L versions, though there's no known reason extraterrestrial life couldn't do the reverse. 8 But even if Enceladus organisms had the same L preference as earthly ones, any imbalance between the two isomers is a biomarker. "If we find amino acids and there's a strong chiral preference, that's persuasive evidence for a biological origin," McKay says.

But the best biomarkers, McKay and Oremland agree, might be found in the ratios of carbon's two stable isotopes, 12 C and 13 C. That's because biological processes produce compounds slightly enriched in 12 C, compared to nonbiological ones. (Testing 12 C/ 13 C ratios, in fact, is one way sports authorities can catch drug-cheating athletes, because synthetic hormones, produced in a lab, have different ratios from those produced by the athlete's own bodies.)

Thus, if the methane coming from Enceladus is unexpectedly rich in 12 C, it's a strong indication it's being made by bacteria. Similarly, if the plume is emitting acetylene byproducts that are richer in light carbon, Enceladus's primordial acetylene, it suggests that acetylene-eating bacteria may have been at work.

Unlike the electron microscope on Aimee's hypothetical spacecraft, the equipment to conduct carbon-isotope tests isn't actually all that elaborate. It just happens not to have been included in Cassini's payload, which means that carrying out such tests would require a return to Enceladus.

Several such missions are possible, said Nathan Strange, a mission architect at NASA's Jet Propulsion Agency in Pasadena, California, at a 2010 discussion group. 9 The simplest would merely be to go back to Saturn with a dedicated Enceladus mission. But it might be more efficient to use a multi-purpose mission that piggybacked a small Enceladus orbiter onto another dream project: a Titan rover.

A fancier mission might be an Enceladus lander, or possibly a "hopper," capable of launching itself from one landing zone to another. "The low gravity makes this possible," Strange said. "You could even hop across a jet."

A sample-return mission is also possible in which a probe flies through Enceladus's plume, collects some ice-grains and hurls them back to Earth for analysis. "This is really the low-hanging fruit" of sample-return missions, Peter Tsou of Sample Exploration Systems in La Canada, California, told space.com in conjunction with a December 5, 2012 presentation at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, California. "It would be a shame not to pick it." 10

Not that any of this can occur instantly. Every couple of decades it's possible to use Jupiter as a gravity-boost en route to Saturn, but the nearest window for that is most likely lost. "We're probably looking at 9 to 10 year flight times," Strange said.

Still, Enceladus presents a unique opportunity, both for scientists seeking answers to the ultimate question, and for science fiction fans who enjoy playing mental games of "what if?" "What we're being handed at Enceladus is a potential gift of looking at life in the outer Solar System," says Oremland. "What's appealing about Enceladus is that you have some of the conditions for life. There's liquid water under the ice. It seems to have been around a long time. How long, nobody knows. One hundred million years? A billion? That's a long time for life to get going, provided there's something to eat."

And for science fiction fans, Enceladus provides a world unlike anything the best minds in the field had ever, on their own, imagined.

From Dune to Dyson spheres, from Game of Thrones to "Nightfall," one of the mainstays of science fiction is "world-building"—the imagining of scientifically plausible planets sufficiently unlike our present existence to be worth a story, but not so implausible as to fall into the realm of fantasy. Sometimes, those are extrapolated from contemporary Earth.

Sometimes, they involve places like Arrakis, Trantor, or the Ringworld, with no known real-life analogs.

But sometimes, they are inspired by worlds like Enceladus, where reality outstrips imagination and science and wonder unexpectedly combine.

Footnotes:

1 Lisa Grossman, "Pluto's icy exterior may conceal an ocean," New Scientist, 16 September 2011.

2 Much of the background for this article comes from that meeting, of the Enceladus Focus Group, May 23–24, 2011.

3 Sascha Kempf, Uwe Beckmann, and Jürgen Schmidt, "How the Enceladus dust plume feeds Saturn's E ring," Icarus, Volume 206, Issue 2, April 2010, pp. 446–457.

4 I got this from the Enceladus Focus Group meeting, ibid, but Schenk later presented it at a joint meeting of U.S. and European planetary scientists in Nantes, France, October 3, 2011.

5 F. Postberg, J. Schmidt, J. Hillier, S. Kempf & R. Srama, "A salt-water reservoir as the source of a compositionally stratified plume on Enceladus," Nature 474, 620–622 (30 June 2011) doi:10.1038/nature10175.

6 "An observed correlation between plume activity and tidal stresses on Enceladus," M. M. Hedman, C. M. Gosmeyer, P. D. Nicholson, C. Sotin, R. H. Brown, R. N. Clark, K. H. Baines, B. J. Buratti & M. R. Showalter, Nature 500, 182–184 (8 August 2013) doi:10.1038/nature12371.

7 http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/news/newsreleases/newsrelease20130731/.

8 One SF story to examine this is "Technical Error," also known as "The Reversed Man," first published in 1950 by Arthur C. Clarke. It's not about alien life, per se, but a man who is mirror-imaged at the molecular level.

9 Enceladus Focus Group meeting, ibid.

10 Whether we want to bring possible alien microorganisms back to Earth is a different question (and one of the reasons why other Enceladus experts tend to view an orbiter as a more likely proposal).

HaiKu

Kate Gladstone | 9 words

Who rejects Darwin
show up for new flu shots and
antibiotics

EDITORIAL

THESE ARE NOT THE DRONES YOU'RE LOOKING FOR

Trevor Quachri | 1424 words

Like the much-maligned "bailout," "celebutante," 1 or "hipster," the word "drone" has become an increasingly relevant, yet unloved, part of our lexicon over the past several years.

As drones have occupied more and more of the 24-hour news cycle and our awareness of them has increased, so too have concerns over them, and, accordingly, rallies and protests specifically calling for the end of their use as weapons of war.

With the word carrying enough weighted connotation to inspire dedicated activists, we should ask: just what is a drone?

Also commonly called a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle), a remotely piloted aircraft (RPA, per the USAF), or unmanned aircraft system (UAS, per the FAA), a "drone" is simply "a remotely controlled pilotless aircraft or missile." They can range in size from eighty feet long to the size of a pen, and in price from the $17 million dollar Reaper to $300 for a used quadrotor on eBay. The line between "pilot-less vehicle" and "remote-controlled toy" is a slim one at the smaller end of the spectrum, and like remote-controlled toys, they're not hard for hobbyists to make on their own: in fact, the prototype of the Albatross, the non-combat predecessor of the Predator and Reaper, was literally built in a garage, using a go-kart engine, in the early '80s.

Militarily, they have two primary purposes: reconnaissance and combat, with the vast majority performing the former. The single most common drone is a carried glider that a soldier throws, by hand, to see what's beyond the visible terrain.

In a combat role, the two most common U.S. combat drones, the Predator and the Reaper, launch Hellfire missiles—the same airto-ground anti-tank weapon used by many helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, boats, and, experimentally, a Humvee.

So if they're not especially advanced, why are they becoming so prolific?

For one thing, they're cheap: that $17 million for a Reaper doesn't seem so bad compared to $150 million for an F-22 fighter jet or $200 million for an F-35. It's also easier to train a drone operator than a pilot. (They train in less than half the time; under one year for an operator, instead of two for a pilot.) More practically, while most are short range, some drones can be operated from half a world away—operators in the U.S. can control drones in Afghanistan—so the lives of the operators aren't at risk. They can also stay aloft past human endurance, swapping out operators in shifts, while the drone is limited only by fuel capacity. The U.S.'s Global Hawk can stay in the air for 35 hours; typical fighter planes only fly for two. In general, according to Mary Cummings of the MIT Humans and Automation Lab: "Planes can fly longer, they can pull more Gs, they can be more precise when they bomb, if a human is not in the cockpit." 2

Critics contend that drone strikes frequently cause civilian casualties, are too easily kept from the public, and the lack of risk for the operators increases the willingness to see military intervention as a solution in the future. Those are reasonable concerns.

But are those risks specific to drones? Perhaps. Reports on civilian casualties are difficult to confirm either way, since much information remains classified. But perhaps not—there's long been reason to be concerned about civilian casualties from traditional bombing campaigns, and the risk to pilots of manned aircraft hasn't acted as a deterrent to military action yet. To those killed, it makes little difference whether it was in a war or in a "peacekeeping action," and I suspect it would matter just as much to them whether it was by drone, manned AC-130 flying overhead, or a shell the size of a Cadillac fired from a ship off shore.

That's not to say there isn't any room for reasonable concern about the potential for governmental, corporate, and private abuse of drones.

Drones are not currently automated beyond flight software, as sometimes calling them "robot planes" might imply; they don't actually make any decisions. But work on just that kind of automation is currently taking place at the University of Pennsylvania, and it's easy to imagine the SFnal implications of it. Landmines are restricted under the Geneva Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, and for good reason: they're persistent and indiscriminate, apt to kill civilians years after being buried. If a truly autonomous drone were to make a bad decision, who's held accountable? The programmer?

One also probably doesn't have to think very hard about how readily available flying cameras are likely to affect our privacy; professional paparazzi must be champing at the bit.

But as with concerns about combat drones, we already have tools in place to shape how they should be used in day-to-day life. It's all too often ignored these past 13 years, but we have the Fourth Amendment and the reasonable expectations of privacy that flow from it. We shouldn't need much drone-specific legislation tacked on to what we already have, in spite of many states passing anti-drone specific bills: if it's illegal to peek over my fence to take photos of me sunbathing (I'd be flattered, but I'm a hairy Mediterranean; save yourself the trouble), then it should be illegal to fly a quadrotor over my fence to do the same.

There's a proverb attributed to Seneca that says, "A sword by itself does not slay; it is merely the weapon used by the slayer." 3 That's true enough, but one might then reasonably ask, "Must we make the swords as sharp as possible to give the slayer as easy a time with his business as we can?" Why should we put up with the possibility of misuse?

In this case, these "swords" also have other purposes beyond simply slaying. Amazon.com has serious plans to begin delivering packages by drone within the next few years; drones are a big part of the tech giants at Internet.org bringing affordable internet to developing nations; and we're on the cusp of drone-mounted cameras and lights achieving otherwise impossible shots for films.

Drones also patrol borders, monitor traffic, detect fires and tornadoes, do agricultural work in challenging terrain, bring humanitarian aid to hard-to-reach areas, and even deliver pizza and beer.

In many ways, the cat is already out of the bag. The FAA estimates that there will be ten thousand commercial drones in use by 2020. Fifty-five countries use them in some capacity, and the number is growing. However comfortable we might be with our own use of drones, it's only a matter of time before others are using them just as regularly, and for the same reasons. (Distaste for a tool or strategy usually only lasts until one sees how useful it is for themselves: early snipers were often seen as "unfair," partly because they shot at the officers behind the enlisted men up front, but it wasn't long before dedicated sharp-shooters were commonplace specialists.)

And that's all the more reason to make sure we're seeing the issues as clearly as possible.

This is neither a critique nor a defense of any military action, past, present, or future; that's largely its own issue. But treating drones as substantially different from manned aircraft would be a mistake. A fear of drones as a unique category of particularly ethically dubious new technology seems unfounded: matters of "collateral damage" or the unlawful killing of American citizens or issues with transparency and secrecy aren't inherent to drones any more than the possibility of being used in a terrorist attack is a problem inherent to airplanes. The flaws with the argument that drones are too advantageous because they keep operators safe would be more obvious if it was leveled at, say, body armor.

But the lack of transparency that allows these fears to grow is also a mistake, and why it's so important there be more oversight of the military, law enforcement agencies, and corporations who plan to use drones. Flouting the rule of law is more damaging than any external threat could be, and fears of what happens under the veil of secrecy cast shade on the positive potential of the technology. If anti-drone fears are largely unfounded, secrecy only helps to foster those misconceptions, so it's in everyone's best long-term interests that those who can be open and frank about how we use drones, do so. As ever, focusing on a specific device or technology misses the forest for the trees: how to better think about what people actually do with the technology.

For more on the various developing uses for drone technology, I heartily recommend the Popular Science blogs, available at: http://www.popsci.com/category/tags/dron es.

Footnotes:

1 A portmanteau of "celebrity" and "debutante," typically used to describe a reality TV star "famous for being famous."

2 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/military/riseof-the-drones.html

3 "Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit: occidentis telum est."

THE ALTERNATE VIEW

MYERS-BRIGGS AND I (AND YOU)

Jeffery D. Kooistra | 1843 words

When I first sat down to take the Myers-Briggs assessment (or the MBTI for Myers-Briggs Type Indicator—I encourage you to look it up for a deeper discussion of the details; it's a classification tool for telling a person what his personality is like and what it may mean for his life at work and play) I was skeptical that a fill-inthe-dot paper and pencil "test" was up to the task of revealing my personality. I would not have taken it at all if it hadn't been required for one of my education graduate classes. Since it was, with a sigh, I soldiered on through the hundreds of personal questions of the "Would you rather fish or cut bait?" variety.

When the results came back I found out that I was an INTP. I'll get to what the letters mean in a minute, but four pairs of letters (E-I, S-N, TF, J-P) are used yielding 16 personality types. The result delighted my professor, Corinne Kass (later Dean Kass), because she was also an INTP and I was the first student she'd ever had during her long career who shared her personality measure. We INTPs are relatively rare. No doubt our similarities was one reason I liked and respected her more than most, but I became a believer in the usefulness of the test when I read the list of characteristics of the INTP.

The packet that came with my test results listed 25 characteristics, almost all of which fit me, but three of them nailed my personality in ways that I hadn't noticed myself until I read the pithy descriptions. You would rather analyze your world than run it. Certainly true—I never wanted to grow up to be president, either of a country or a corporation. You are not easily impressed with authority of any kind. No surprise there to readers of my "Alternate Views." You tend to be quite flexible and adaptable until one of your ruling principles is violated. At that point, you stop adapting. This last was the most eye opening, but I immediately recalled instances where my near-instantaneous shift from pliable to inflexible really caught people off guard (and still does).

The letter combinations, briefly, mean the following. E is for Extraversion and I for Introversion, and most people understand that dimension already. More formally, E-types "focus on the outer world of people and things," and I-types "on the inner world of ideas and impressions." S-N is for Sensing and iNtuition, with S-types focusing on "the present and on concrete information gained from their senses," and N-types "on the future, with a view toward patterns and possibilities." T-F means Thinking and Feeling respectively, the former basing their decisions on "logic and objective analysis of cause and effect," the latter "primarily on values and on subjective evaluation of person-centered concerns." Finally, the J-P pairing has the J-type who likes a "planned and organized approach to life and prefers to have things settled," over against the P-type who likes a "flexible and spontaneous approach to life and prefers to keep his options open." (I paraphrased this a bit from the report that came with my results, copyright 1988 from Consulting Psychologists Press. You may find the wording somewhat different online, but the underlying meaning is the same.)

I took the test back in 1989, before Internet search engines, and long before Facebook was littered with links that would take you to ten-question "What's your personality?" tests. This was certainly for the best—if I had been anything other than ignorant about the Myers-Briggs, I likely would have tried to skew my answers so that I'd come out as an INTP. How could anyone not want to be independent and original and ingenious? How could a childhood science geek not want to be in the same company as Einstein, Newton, and Galileo? How could a man who finds deep thinking deeply pleasurable not want to share his per sonality type with Thales, Aristotle, and Aquinas?

Yes, I am proud to be INTP, and the only downside I wish I could change is the "absentminded professor" aspect, because it is a damn nuisance!

Since in fairness I can't keep referring to a packet only I have from 25 years ago, here's a link to a page I find useful, and I'll use it for the rest of this essay— http://www.personality-page.com/. I don't know if it's the best or the worst, or where it falls along the relative quality line of personality pages, but I like it.

From the homepage, clicking on the "Portraits" icon takes you to a list of the 16 personality types. Click on the one you want and it takes you to a thousand words or so, rather than an actual picture, of description of what that particular type is like. Click on INTP and it says that people like me are "The Thinkers" who "live in the world of theoretical possibilities," usually inside our own minds, and that we "highly value intelligence and the ability to apply logic to theories to find solutions." True enough in my case. It goes on to say we "approach problems and theories with enthusiasm and skepticism, ignoring existing rules and opinions and defining their own approach to the resolution." That's me again. On (what some may consider) the downside, the "INTP has no understanding or value for decisions made on the basis of personal subjectivity or feelings," which means we "don't understand the importance or relevance of applying subjective emotional considerations to decisions." Also true of me, but I've gotten better at not acting this way. I quibble with the choice of words, though. I do understand the relevance, but I don't appreciate it the way most people do.

And so it goes. SF is loaded with brilliant scientist loners like this. My own James Christian Dykstra is INTP. If you want an alien example, I'd label Niven's Pak Protectors as acting like INTPs most of the time (think of "Tunesmith" from Ringworld's Children). However, when they decide something needs to be done, it's INTJ all the way.

One very important aspect to keep in mind when you read these portraits, however, is that not all INTPs (or any of the other types) are created equal. That is, the relative strengths of the particular attributes can vary widely even within the same type. In my case, my "preference scores" (these show how consistent the test taker is in selecting one preference over the other) are 13 for I, 23 for N, 27 for T and 39 for P, the higher the score meaning the stronger the preference. So on any given day, I might seem more like an ENTP than an INTP, but it is much less likely that I'd act like an INTJ. (Here's a story idea. What about a person who scores only one or two on each preference? What would he be like? Would he seem boring, having no personality at all? Or would he be exceptionally popular, the perfect "everyman," sharing similarities with anyone he meets?)

Since my weakest preference is on the E-I scale, I should be quite similar to ENTPs. Jumping to their portrait, we find that these folks are "Visionaries," their "primary interest in life is understanding the world they live in," and they are "usually extremely quick and accurate in their ability to size up a situation." That's close. However, since they are "less interested in developing plans of action or making decisions than they are in generating possibilities and ideas," they find that "the implementation of an idea is usually a chore." So unlike the typical INTP procrastinator who finishes a project late, the ENTP is less likely to finish at all. But they're a lot more fun at parties. Maybe at one party out of five I'll act like an ENTP.

With my strongest preference being P over J, a look at the INTJ portrait reveals marked similarities and stark differences. An INTJ is "The Scientist" who "lives in the world of ideas and strategic planning." INTJs "value intelligence, knowledge, and competence, and typically have high standards in these regards," and I track with that. However, though like the INTP "they are tremendously insightful and usually they are very quick to understand new ideas," unlike them, "their primary interest is not understanding a concept, but rather applying that concept in a useful way." In other words, I'm a guy who wants to know why, while the INTJ just wants to know how.

I get to compare myself to an INTJ every day because my son is one, and with a vengeance. In tenth grade, Joshua will finish AP Calculus this semester at the top of his class. He will be dual-enrolled this fall, taking more calc at the junior college. He also arranges and composes music for the school orchestra (he plays cello), and worries that he'll have no classes left to take his senior year. His homework is finished early, his GPA perfect, and he is always looking to test out of classes. None of this happens with prodding from me. At his age, I didn't plan anything, homework was done in study hall and put off to the last minute, and I'd spend days trying to design an antimatter bomb or figure a way around the speed of light limit, but not a minute contemplating my future.

Now I compared my personality type to others herein because I know from the inside what INTPs are like. But even an SF story can be populated with only a few of them, and here is where the Myers-Briggs can help. The personality most opposite mine is the ESFJ, so if I wanted a character of that type in one of my stories, reading the portrait of the ESFJ would be a good place to start. This type is "The Caregiver" and reading about them reminds me of horoscope descriptions of the "born on this day" variety, all of which can be paraphrased as "Born on this day you have many admirable qualities." So even I, an INTP reading about an ESFJ, can appreciate that it's good to be "warmly interested in others," and that being "extremely good at reading others, and understanding their point of view" is a useful ability to have. But ESFJs are "not likely to enjoy having to do things which involve abstract, theoretical concepts, or impersonal analysis." (That rather cuts out physics, doesn't it?) And ESFJs are "traditional, and prefer to do things in the established way." Why? Because other people do it that way, that's why!

They might just as well be aliens to me.

My initial skepticism about the Myers-Briggs was unfounded because it's more like a ruler than a psychiatrist. Just as you know a girl five feet tall is shorter than a boy of six feet, the Myers-Briggs will help you understand why scientists almost always share personality types with an NT in the middle. For the writer, the test can be a means for keeping your major players consistent with real people, and can certainly serve as a cheat sheet for manufacturing minor characters.

And if you put the letters in a blender, you can pour out enough alien personalities to fill a galaxy.

IN TIMES TO COME

198 words

We're not ones to miss an opportunity for some seasonal stories, so our October issue has a host of fitting fiction, both light-hearted and more sinister.

First up, we're proud to present something that hasn't graced the pages of Analog for far too long: new fiction by Joyce and Stanley Schmidt. Not everybody really "gets" Halloween, but when "Opportunity Knocks," you just have to answer.

Then an installment of Edward M. Lerner's popular "science behind the stories" series serves as our fact article, this time about one of the Big Questions of SF: "Alien AWOLs: The Great Silence."

We'll also have a particularly white-knuckle Mike Christopher story from Dave Creek, "The Jenregar and the Light."

And there's a bunch more great content where that came from, like David Brin's unsettling piece of biological SF, "Chrysalis"; Tony Ballantyne's story of limits reached, "Threshold"; an unusual adventure from Andrew Barton in "Each Night I Dream of Liberty"; a close look at the ways biology and society intertwine in Mary E. Lowd's "The Hand-Havers"; and the Nietzche quote about gazing into the abyss exemplified in Ron Collins' "Unfolding the Multi-Cloud."

As well as, of course, all our usual top-notch columns. See you next month!

All contents subject to change

THE REFERENCE LIBRARY

Don Sakers | 2442 words

Romance has been part of science fiction since... well, forever. The list of romantic couples in SF is long and broad: John Carter & Dejah Thoris, Kim Kinnison & Clarissa MacDougall, Lessa & F'lar, Princess Leia & Han Solo... it just goes on and on.

Yet in another sense, "romance in SF" is a current, burning issue entangled in considerable controversy and strong emotions. It all depends on what meanings people attach to that word, "romance." Let's explore.

To begin with, lit-crit folks make a distinction between "romantic" and "modern" literature. Romantic fiction (with its roots in the eighteenth century Romanticism movement) is primarily focused on plot and narrative as expressed by characters; modern fiction (dating from the post-World War I Modernist era) is more concerned with perception and meaning as expressed by introspection. In this scheme, SF (like most other genre fiction) is in the romantic camp—although the New Wave of the 1970s brought some crossover from the modern side.

"Romance" also denotes a particular type of genre fiction: SF's big sister, if you will. The romance genre is huge; by some estimates, more than half of all novels published are genre romances (just over one-fifth are SF/fantasy; figures for SF alone are unavailable).

Of course, genre-bending is all the rage nowadays. There are two kinds of crossbreeds: Romances that include SF elements, and SF that includes romance elements. The former are marketed as "futuristic romances" or "sci-fi romances," while the latter are called "romantic SF."

And here's where some of the controversy comes in. There are some SF readers who complain (vociferously and publicly) about romantic SF. You can almost see their wrinkled noses as they cry, "You got romance in my science fiction!"

But... but... what about John & Dejah, [Speaking of John and Dejah, Leia and Han, there's also the "Planetary Romance": the pulpy "science fantasy" sibling of space opera — Ed. ] Kim & Clarissa, all the others? Romance has been in SF all along—why complain now?

In this case, "romance" is often code (conscious or not) to conceal the speaker's real concern. For it's not romance the reader objects to, but women.

Despite the best efforts of everyone involved, the society in which we live is still largely patriarchal. There's a segment of the population (yes, even among SF readers) who prefer women to be passive and obedient, their thoughts and concerns confined to a sphere where they don't bother men.

Oh, an occasional female character is fine, as long as they act like men. As long as they concern themselves with important things, and leave all that "girly stuff" outside the bounds of the story.

Now, I don't want to perpetuate all kinds of stereotypes; we know that there are many kinds of women and many kinds of men [we also know that there are more than two kinds of gender expression, but right now I don't have enough pages for that]. Yet there's one way to approach the world that's hierarchical, status-based, and deterministic—and another way that's networked, relationship-based, and probabilistic. You could call them "engineering" and "psychology" if you want; the readers I'm discussing usually call them "male" and "female."

Among many readers, there's the perception that SF should be on the "male" side, with the "female" stuff relegated to fantasy. To a mind that finds comfort in rigid categories, mixing the two can be disturbing. (Just try arguing with someone who insists that Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern books are fantasy, not SF.)

And here's yet another use of "romance." Remember I said that romantic fiction focuses on plot and narrative as expressed through characters? Historically, SF paid more attention to the plot and narrative side, while the romance genre paid more attention to characters and their relationships.

Cross-fertilization between the two genres has given rise to a type of SF narrative that pays as much attention to the characters and relationships between them as to the demands of the plot. In historical science fiction, it wasn't unusual for an author to spend more time developing the planet than the individuals who inhabit it. Romantic SF simply adds another level to the mix, with a focus on the social matrix in which those individuals live.

Reading is a very personal thing, and there's nothing wrong with confining one's taste to any particular type... or even complaining to one's close friends, over a cup of cheer, about all the trash that's getting published nowadays. In public discourse, however, let's try to cut down on impassioned arguments that suchand-such "isn't real science fiction." Our field is surely large enough to provide room for all varieties of SF.

Now, I happen to think that a wise reader occasionally widens his or her horizon to try something different. But that's just my opinion.

On to this month's books:

Dreamwalker
C. S. Friedman
DAW, 320 pages, $19.99 (hardcover)
Kindle: $9.78, iBooks, Nook: $10.99 (e-book)
ISBN: 978-0-7564-0888-6
Series: Dreamwalker Chronicles 1
Genres: Gates Between Worlds, Teen SF

C. S. Friedman is a name that should be familiar. She hit the field in 1987 with In Conquest Born, and since has earned a reputation for big, meaty books and series of intelligent, thrilling space opera and epic fantasy.

Dreamwalker is Friedman's first book aimed at the teen market, and it's a humdinger. Like the best Heinlein and Norton juveniles, this is a book as much for adults as for the smart, well-read teens who are the intended audience.

Jessica Drake, a fairly normal Virginia teenager, has weird dreams of other worlds. Some are reasonably like her own, others are vastly different. Jessica draws some of the worlds she sees, but she only shares her dreams with one other person: her little brother Tommy, who uses her visions in his online games.

Then a strange woman comes around the school asking about Jessica and her art. Before Jessica can confront the woman, Tommy goes missing.

Jessica enlists the aid of some friends to go looking for Tommy. They find that these other worlds are all too real... and they discover some awful truths about their own place in the Universe, and the dangerous conspiracy that has ruled their lives since they were born.

Dreamwalker is a grand adventure through many worlds, in which nothing is what it seems and threats lurk around every corner. Great for teens and adults alike, and a great introduction to Friedman for those who haven't encountered her before.

The Children of Kings
Marion Zimmer Bradley and Deborah J. Ross
DAW, 453 pages, $7.99 (paperback)
Kindle: $9.99, iBooks, Nook: $11.99 (e-book)
ISBN: 978-0-7564-0854-1
Series: Darkover
Genres: Beloved Worlds, Science Fantasy

Along with Anne McCaffrey, Marion Zimmer Bradley was a major early writer to bring romance elements into science fiction. Her Darkover series, starting in 1958 with The Planet Savers, used inherited psi abilities to meld tropes of fantasy with traditional science fiction. The Darkover books are heavily concerned with romantic and familial relationships between characters—many of the books also involve feminist and gender issues. Although popular enough among women readers to spawn multiple fanzines and even an annual convention, the Darkover books received less respect from traditionalists in the field.

Bradley died in 1999, leaving behind extensive notes on the Darkover mythos. Since then, the series has continued under the byline "Marion Zimmer Bradley and Deborah J. Ross," with Ross developing Bradley's ideas.

Darkover, for those who haven't had the pleasure, is a world facing enormous change. A lost Terran colony, the people of Darkover developed a semifeudal world with a technology based on psi. After devastating wars almost destroyed the planet, society became bound by the Compact, which prohibits the use of any weapon that acts beyond the reach of the one who wields it. This brought peace to the lands ruled by the Seven Domains.

Recently, spacefaring Terrans have returned to Darkover, and the clash of cultures is changing both Darkovans and Terrans.

Children of Kings tells the intertwined stories of two people caught in these changes.

Prince Gareth Elhalyn, unhappy at court, adopts a disguise and travels outside the Seven Domains to the Dry Towns, a desert society still ruled by warlords and blood feuds. There, he uncovers a smuggling operation bringing illegal Terran blasters—and other weapons— into the Dry Towns.

Meanwhile, a woman who calls herself Silvana, with a past connection to Gareth's family, lives among the native chieri, the otherworldly race that first gave Darkover its psi technology. The chieri, it turns out, once traveled between the stars just as Terrans do today... and they share their ancient knowledge with Silvana.

Of course, things are more complex than they seem: interstellar war has come to Darkover's doorstep, and Gareth and Silvana hold the keys to the planet's survival as an independent world.

Ross does a great job of channeling Bradley; Children of Kings is a worthy addition to the Darkover saga. If you've never visited Darkover, this is a good place to start.

Earthrise
M. C. A. Hogarth CreateSpace, 428 pages, $16.99 (trade paperback)
Kindle, Nook: $5.99 (e-book)
ISBN: 978-1-4849-9651-5
Series: Her Instruments 1; Pelted Paradox Universe
Genres: Space Opera

In M. C. A. Hogarth's Pelted universe, humans long ago genetically engineered various animal species into sapient beings, who spread out amongst the stars. While Earth remained something of a backwater, the other races advanced and developed an interstellar trade alliance.

Reese Eddings is in command of the trade ship TMS Earthrise, with a small crew of Pelted misfits. To say Earthrise isn't doing well could be an understatement; in fact, Reese constantly teeters on the edge of bankruptcy.

Until a man from her past appears with a job offer: to rescue a reclusive alien called Hirianthial from an organization of slavers. The money's good and the cause seems just, so Reese accepts.

In no time, the crew of Earthrise is out on the lawless frontier, fighting pirates, slavers, and other lowlifes. Then they get Hirianthial onboard and Reese discovers that he's enigmatic, annoying, and a prince among his people. The simple rescue mission suddenly becomes a game of alien politics, and Reese doesn't know most of the rules.

Hogarth is a gifted storyteller, and Reese Eddings is one of the snarkiest, most sarcastic ship captains in all of space. The thrills are nonstop, the alien cultures and races are well developed and fascinating, and there's just the right amount of humor to keep the whole thing fizzing. Those who like Sharon Lee and Steve Miller's Liaden Universe books will feel right at home here, and anyone who enjoys a fun and thoughtful space opera romp won't be disappointed.

Queen of Roses
Elizabeth McCoy
Amazon, 289 pages
Kindle: $3.99 (e-book)
Genres: Artificial Intelligences,
Comedies of Manners

This may be the first book I've reviewed that's available only in e-book format. I can think of all sorts of momentous things to say about that... perhaps in a future column.

Sarafina is an artificial intelligence, and one who's very good at her job. She does accounting for the First Daris Bank, plays 4D chess with fellow AIs, and whiles away the time until her indenture is paid off and she can be a free agent.

Then one day Sarafina wakes up, half-amnesiac, in a completely different environment. First Daris, it seems, was bought out and downsized in a hostile takeover, and Sarafina's been sold to the owner of an interstellar cruise line. Now Sarafina's activity director on the good ship Queen of Roses. Instead of accountants and figures, now she's dealing with a drunkard of a captain, an incompetent crew, substandard equipment, and—horror of horrors—passengers.

How is a well-brought-up, introverted accountant AI with no people skills to deal? Indignity is heaped on indignity, there's a stowaway to deal with... and then things get worse.

Queen of Roses is one of the most quietly hilarious books I've read in a long while, and poor Sarafina one of the most sympathetic AIs to ever come down the pike. The Queen of Roses is a delightful ship of fools, and if you're not laughing as you read this book, there's something wrong with you.

All is Silence
Robert L. Slater
Rocket Tears, 290 pages, $10.99(trade paperback)
Kindle, Nook: $4.99, iBooks: $6.99 (e-book)
ISBN: 978-0-9895-6877-7
Series: Deserted Lands 1
Genres: Post-Apocalyptic, Teen SF

Here's another of those teen books that is perfectly fit for adults. As a matter of fact, I'd hesitate before giving it to younger teens without knowing them pretty well—some of the language and situations are fairly mature.

Lizzie—or, as her friends know her, Crazy Lizzie—lives in Bellingham and she's a "troubled" teenager. Self-destructive and occasionally suicidal, she's busy trying to cope with modern life when a virus erupts throughout the population. In a week, Lizzie's family is dead.

Phones are out, internet service is spotty, and Lizzie's only contact with the world is through occasional text messages with other survivors.

This is hardly the familiar post-apocalyptic novel of zombie attacks and desperate efforts to rebuild civilization—it's a very personal story of one scared girl and the survivors she finds in the ruins of her world. Lizzie is hard-edged and gritty, but also vulnerable and kind. Her personality is so compelling that she grabs you by the heart and pulls you along until it's three in the morning and the story's over and you just want to read more.

Don't worry, All is Quiet is the first of a series.

Wizards, Aliens, and Starships: Physics and Math in Fantasy and Science Fiction
Charles L. Adler
Princeton University Press, 392 pages,$29.99 (hardcover)
Kindle: $16.17 (e-book)
ISBN: 978-0-6911-4715-4
Genres: Nonfiction

Not all that many decades ago, Physics and Math were teacher's pets who didn't want anything to do with Science Fiction... they even sniggered in the halls and made rude noises when Science Fiction walked by.

How things have changed. Science Fiction grew up to be a darling popular culture, and now Physics and Math are all, "Hey, we like Science Fiction too."

Well, we might turn around and treat them as badly as they treated us... but we're better than that. And heck, they're such a geeky pair of nerds, ya gotta love them.

Charles L. Adler, professor in the physics department at St. Mary's College in Maryland, is one of us—he's a lifelong fan of SF, and he knows what he's talking about. And Wizards, Aliens, and Starships is a great book for Analog readers, as well as anyone who wants to write hard SF. I mean, it's got honest-to-goodness equations —and the book is dedicated to Poul Anderson.

In very readable prose, with a good deal of humor, Adler covers a vast variety of topics: Harry Potter's flying car, space elevators, advanced propulsion systems, FTL, alien intelligences, terraforming, Dyson spheres and ring-worlds, and a timeline of the future universe out to a googol years. Along the way he draws many examples from real science fiction, and isn't afraid to speculate when necessary.

All in all, it's obvious that Wizards, Aliens, and Starships is a love letter to science fiction. Dr. Adler's bio says that he entertains fantasies of one day writing an SF novel... to which I can only say, Come on in, Charles, the water's fine!

On that note, I'm out of space. Until next time, don't be afraid to enjoy some romance in your science fiction.

Don Sakers is the author of Children of the Eighth Day and Meat and Machine. For more information, visit www.scatteredworlds.com.

BRASS TACKS

1710 words

Mr. Quachri:

I have been reading Analog, Asimov's, and occasionally , F& SF since my early twenties— well over 30 years. This morning, as I was finishing the last three audio entries of "Life Flight," by Brad R. Torgersen [March 2014], was the first time I had tears in my eyes, running down my cheeks.

I would like to thank you for choosing this story and Mr. Torgersen for becoming an author and writing the story.

"Life Flight" should win every award that is available for this year.

Thank you.

Mike McCullough Lake Zurich, IL

Dear Mr. Torgersen,

Just wanted to let you know that I found one of your stories in the newest issue of Analog. I sat down to soak my back last night, intending to get out of the tub in ten minutes or so. To occupy myself I picked up Analog and started reading "Life Flight" [March 2014]. I expected to find a good stopping point, as I usually do with a novella. The next thing I knew, the water was cold and I was reading the last lines.

I didn't notice a name for the character so in my mind I've started calling him Moses. They do seem to have a few attributes in common. (Trying not to give anything away...) I will be looking forward to more.

Kathleen Ross

Mr. Torgersen,

I had the opportunity to read your novelette "Life Flight" in this month's Analog [March 2014]. I carry a soft spot in my heart for stories about generation ships or ark ships traveling through the depths of space, probably from reading Heinlein's "Orphans of the Sky" in the back of my parents' station wagon one summer vacation. My dad was in the Air Force stationed in California, but my mom's family lived in eastern Tennessee. "Sky," along with a new-fangled 8-track player, passed the time as we drove there and back.

I lived your eighty-year journey, filling in the days with a healthy imagination, steered by your superb storyline. Some stories leave me hanging, but "Life Flight" satisfied me like a sliver of cheesecake after dinner! Thank you.

Warm regards, Alan England

Trevor,

Let me start by saying that I really enjoyed the story "Life Flight" in the March 2014 issue. If it had been published in a lesser magazine than Analog, I would probably leave it at that, but I expect more from Analog. I expect a reasonable attention to technical detail, and we don't get that in the story.

The problems start in the narrator's journal entry for day 35, where we learn that the ship is accelerating at a rate sufficient to cause the young writer to ask why he feels weight aboard the ship. The answer is that the ship is accelerating continuously, and that the acceleration will increase steadily until it reaches one g. We aren't given the rate of increase, but we do know that it can reach full acceleration before the initial acceleration phase of the journey is completed, because the narrator complains of feeling his "full weight" when the engines are turned back on after the coast phase. The descriptions in the story, which don't include any near weightlessness, suggest that the ship starts accelerating at a significant fraction of one g and gets to full acceleration fairly quickly. However, since the technical issues hinge on high acceleration, let's be conservative and assume that the acceleration starts at near zero and increases linearly to one g at the end of the boost phase (thirty years), averaging 1/2 g.

First there's the matter of fuel. We're told in the entry for day 12150 that 3/5 of the original fuel load is left at the end of the acceleration phase. Really? The payload during the acceleration phase is both the manned ship and the fuel required for the deceleration phase. It will take far more fuel during the acceleration phase than is needed during deceleration, so how can 3/5 be remaining? How bad is it? During the deceleration phase, even if the period were only twenty years at an average of 1/2 g, and even if we assume a photon rocket rather than the fusion engine mentioned in the story, the mass of fuel would be tens of thousands of times the mass of the manned ship. During acceleration, the mass of fuel required would be hundreds of millions times the mass of the final payload (at least). The described structure of the ship can't work.

Then there are the matters of time and distance. We also learn in the entry for day 12150 that the ship only reaches a fraction of the speed of light. In a relativistic universe that's always true, but the implication is that it's a small fraction. That won't be so. If Newton ruled, an acceleration of one g would get you to light speed in a bit under one year. He doesn't, of course, but you still reach a healthy fraction of light speed at 1/2 g for even one year. Accelerate for as long as thirty years (ship time!) at 1/2 g and you'll be close to light speed (relative to Earth), the time dilation factor will be huge, and the distance covered in the Earth frame of reference will be many orders of magnitude greater than the distance to Delta Pavonis, the end point of the story's journey (a bit under twenty light years away).

To be up to Analog standards, the story just needs a little work. Dramatically reduce the acceleration so that the speed remains non-relativistic and the journey actually takes the eighty years indicated in the story. Calculate the actual required fuel load, and propose an acceleration curve that works. For starters, it might be well to assume a constant thrust engine with acceleration at any time determined by the current total mass (ship and fuel). Will it be necessary to throttle the engine back near the end of the journey? What is optimum in terms of total fuel requirements and trip time?

On the medical side, I'd have to ask why they didn't put the entire crew to sleep for a year or two back on Earth (using Earth facilities) just to make sure that everyone could tolerate it. However, that would be another letter.

Steve Gray Orlando, FL

The author responds:

Steve Gray is correct to complain that my math in "Life Flight" was not precise. As a devotee (and collaborator) of Larry Niven, I take my "hard" science fiction very seriously. Still, even Larry himself was not perfect. There's a filk song about Larry's most famous example: oh, the Ringworld is unstable, the Ringworld is unstable, did the best that he was able, and that's good enough for me!

For my short works, I usually don't invest the kind of calculating time one might log on a full novel. And if ever I do novelize "Life Flight" I will absolutely be taking Steve's notes and using them to refine the specifics of the Osprey's journey. Just as Larry used criticism of the first Ringworld novel to greatly inform the descriptions and events of the second, to that franchise's credit. Steve, if the novelization does reach fruition, you can expect a nice credit for having done my homework for me.

For "Life Flight" the novelette, I was satisfied with what I call back-of-the-creative-envelope educated guesses. These are reasonably informed by the realities of the physics in question, without dwelling so much on the physics that the human aspect of the story gets swamped by the equations.

I imagined the Osprey as a thick, super-skyscraper-sized fuel tank filled with slush hydrogen isotope. The crew module is a very long, insulated, relatively thin cylinder running centerline through the slush. At one end of the Osprey is the bow shield, to protect against induced cosmic rays and other interstellar debris. At the other end is a pusher/shield plate punctured by the exhaust nozzle of a supremely efficient, yet necessarily very-low-thrust fusion drive. A drive that consumes reaction mass and reactor fuel at an amazingly miserly rate. So, it takes a long time for such a drive to push the Osprey up the relative acceleration curve, and then brake accordingly on the other end of the journey. How long—precisely?—was something I didn't feel the story needed to worry about. Nor did I factor in total time spent at one g, in a per-second-per-second cumulative sense. Just that the ship would never, ever come close to reaching truly relativistic speeds.

Again, all back-of-the-creative-envelope guesswork. Sorry if the way I described the action rang too many physics alarm bells, for those with better arithmetic skills than myself.

Hopefully Steve (and anyone else who noticed my imprecision) will forgive me.

Now, to the instability syndrome that keeps our hero from being able to sleep out the trip to his new world.

For this plot point, I made a single, key assumption: even well-funded, highly engineered operations sometimes can't plan for all possible contingencies.

In the body of the story I dropped the hint that the syndrome is fantastically rare and cannot reasonably be tested for. Why not? Well, maybe it takes different lengths of time for the problem to manifest in different people? Time the pre-mission planners didn't have? Or maybe the testing is prohibitively expensive? So much so that it wasn't in the mission budget? Or maybe medical science assumes that if the parents don't have it, their kids won't either? But the science got it wrong in our hero's case? Or maybe our hero just didn't have the problem when he boarded, but later grew into the problem post-puberty? I left it as a mental puzzle for readers to invent (using their own imaginations) why this problem would have gone unchecked before the Osprey's launch.

As with the math surrounding the Osprey's journey, I didn't dwell so much on the technical details of the instability syndrome so much as I dwelt on its human impact: the way such a discovery would virtually destroy a young man, and condemn him to a life not of his own choosing. How would any of us, faced with such a thing, react? What might our choices entail? How would we derive meaning from living out our days on a ship in a proverbial bottle? I found these questions much more engaging than the actual question of why the syndrome went undetected. And again, I hope Steve (and anyone else who wrinkled his or her brow at the issue) will forgive me.

Cheers, Analog! I look forward to seeing you all next time. And thank you for being the sharpest SF readers in the literary quadrant!

UPCOMING EVENTS

Anthony Lewis | 331 words

NOTE: Membership rates and other details often change after we have gone to press. Check the websites for the most recent information.

22–24 August 2014

SHAMROKON/EUROCON 2014 (European continental SF conference) at Dublin, Ireland. Guests of Honor: Jim Fitzpatrick, Seanan McGuire, Andrzej Sapkowski, Ylva Spångberg. Memberships: USD50, USD15 (under 21), concessionary USD35 (students, pensioners, etc); Supporting: USD15. Info:

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26–28 September 2014

SCI-CON TAMPA (Media-oriented SF conference) at Grand Hyatt Tampa Bay. Guests: Richard Hatch (BSG), Jack Stauffer (BSG), Nicki Clyne (BSG), Aron Eisenberg (ST:DS9), Dr. Story Musgrave (astronaut). Membership: $45 (adult) until 19 September, $50 at the door; $30 (age 11–15) until 19 September; kids-in-tow free. Info: http://scicontampa.com/.

3–5 October 2014

CONTRAFLOW IV (New Orleans area SF conference) at New Orleans Airport Hilton. Writer Guest of Honor: Gregory Benford; Fan Guest of Honor: Cherie Cerio. Membership: $40 (adult) until 31 August, $45 at the door; $10 (ages 8–19) until 31 August, $20 at the door; kids-in-tow free (ages 7 and under). Info: http://contraflowscifi.org/;info@contraflowscifi.org; Box 57927, New Orleans, LA 70157-7927.

19–23 August 2015

SASQUAN (73rd World Science Fiction Convention) at Spokane Convention Center, Spokane, WA. Guests of Honor: Brad Foster, David Gerrold, Vonda N. McIntyre, Tom Smith, Leslie Turek. Membership: currently. Attending $170 (ages 8–16), $90 (young adult 17–21), $70 (child 6–16); Supporting: $40. 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: sasquan.org/; info@sasquan.org; 15127 Main Street East, Suite 104, PMB 208, Sumner WA 98390.

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