Analog Science Fiction and Fact - March 2014
Author: Penny Publications
Date: 2014-03-01 06:00:00+00:00
Keywords: non-fiction; Science Fiction; Magazine

Analog Science Fiction and Fact

Kindle Edition, 2014 © Penny Publications

All Human Things

Dave Creek | 13734 words

Illustrated by Josh Meehan

"All Human things are subject to decay, and when fate summons, monarchs must obey."

—John Dryden

As he squeezed his way through the hole blasted into the crippled Jenregar starcraft, Mike Christopher thought, All right, so this is the last place I want to be—but a Human's apparently a captive in here, so it's worth the risk. He lowered himself carefully through the jagged tear in the ship's skin, being especially careful of the small propulsion unit on his back.

The first thing Mike saw in the narrow corridor was the body of a Jenregar individual. It was missing an arm, and bodily fluids were leaking from the hard carapace of its body. Its small eyes, which for the Jenregar were secondary sensory organs, stared, unseeing. The slender antennae extending from its forehead, which were smell receptors, hung limply. If the energy bolt from the Kojima didn't kill it, Mike thought, the sudden vacuum would have.

With the height of an average Jenregar being about three-quarters of a meter, Mike couldn't quite stand upright in the corridor. He glimpsed movement down the hallway and pulled his stunner. Two Jenregar, both of them wearing lifesuits, came around a corner, each carrying a different piece of equipment. They ignored Mike as they passed him and began working on the hole in the side of the ship. One instrument, it seemed, created a mesh over the hole. The other emitted a beam that caused the hole itself to smooth over at its rough edges and begin filling itself in.

Can't allow that, Mike thought, and aimed his stunner at the Jenregar. A couple of pops from the stunner, and they fell to the floor.

A voice over his datalink was loud enough to make him wince. "Mike—we read stunner fire from over there. Are you all right?"

That was the voice of Kelda Lee, the captain of the Earth Unity light cruiser Admiral Susan Kojima, which had punched the hole in the Jenregar ship. She'd "borrowed" him from the exploratory craft Asaph Hall just for this mission.

"Don't worry, Captain," Mike said. "Just making sure my escape route wasn't about to be blocked."

Mike could hear the relief in Captain Lee's voice. "Thanks, Mike. Find out what you can, but be careful."

I will, Mike thought as he checked his wrist sensor. The Human on board was located somewhere toward the front of the ship. Mike headed in that direction. The Jenregar craft was a small one, barely twenty-five meters long, with a crew of only twenty-seven. It was part of a swarm of such craft that had been detected out past the orbit of Neptune, headed directly for Earth.

Mike knew the Unity was probably correct in its assessment that the Jenregar was about to attack the Earth ("Was," because the Jenregar possessed only a single hive mind, with individuals acting only by hard-wired programming and coded chemical messages).

The corridor took a turn, and Mike found himself before an energy field, presumably one that had closed off most of the ship from the part now open to space. I wonder, does the shield also recognize pheromonal cues? He reached out a finger toward the field, and sure enough, it passed through easily. Damn, he thought, I'll take being lucky over being good any day. But as he stepped through the energy field, his first thought was, Maybe not so lucky after all.

A dozen Jenregar stood within a small room, several of them operating ship's systems, others just standing around. Looks like the bridge, or at least some sort of command center, Mike thought. But pretty crowded. I'd guess some of these Jenregar were evacuated from the damaged parts of the ship.

The Jenregar recognized one another and imparted information to one another by smell, so Mike's lifesuit had been infused with what he hoped were the appropriate scents that would allow him to pass as a member of the Jenregar crew. I would have to be one of the few Humans to have made contact with the Jenregar, he thought. Unfortunately, I'm probably the best person qualified for this mission.

Even if it's for an ungrateful Earth.

So far none of the Jenregar took notice of him—in the same manner, Humans didn't normally recognize one another by scent. Another glance at his wrist sensor, and Mike realized he was quite close to the other Human on board, who was probably just down a short corridor to his right. Mike headed that way—

—And found himself nearly face-to-face with that other Human.

The man sat at the end of the short corridor, his head in his hands as if in despair. I can't blame him, Mike thought. Captured whoknows-where, brought aboard this Jenregar ship, which then comes under attack, with no hope of rescue as far as he knows.

The man seemed to sense Mike's presence and looked up. He was in his thirties, with pale skin, curly hair, and a wide-eyed expression. Mike knew that in return, the man saw his unusual features that reflected all of Humanity's origins—light brown skin, tightly curled hair, bright blue eyes.

But Mike's next thought was: Did the Jenregar torture this man? He had a series of cuts all around his eyes, and his left eye in particular was swollen, as if he'd been beaten. His clothing seemed to sag around him, as if he'd started out as a much bigger man.

"Thank God," the man said. "Are you here to bring me out?"

"That's my intention," Mike said. But when he took another step forward the other man stood, almost bumping his head on the ceiling, and motioned for him to stop.

"Don't get any closer. If I try to take more than about four steps from this corner, I guess some kind of alarm goes off. The Jenregar come after me."

"I don't see anything," Mike said. "But I'd guess there's some kind of pheromonal barrier on the floor or the walls." He looked at the other man. "What's your name?"

"Jeremy Sheffield—have you heard anything about my wife?"

"I'm Mike Christopher—no, we didn't know anything about you until a few hours ago. There aren't any other Humans on this ship other than the two of us."

"Oh, God— Julia! We were on holiday—it was supposed to be a time we reconnected." Then Jeremy looked up at Mike. "Your name sounds familiar."

Mike couldn't be concerned about that right now. Over his datalink, he said, "Captain Lee, I've made contact. I'm about to get him out of here."

"Heard and understood," Captain Lee said. "Make it fast as you can. It looks like they've got automatic systems repairing their stardrive. You don't want to take a trip with them."

"Shit," Mike muttered. "You've got that right."

Jeremy asked, "Who were you talking to? What's wrong?"

"Unity warcraft—the Susan Kojima. They're the ones who punched the hole in this ship and disabled it."

"Warcraft? Oh, dear Lord, has it come to that?"

"That's part of what we're trying to find out. Listen, Jeremy—we've got to get you out of here. Do you still have your lifesuit tech?"

"Yes, thank goodness."

"I'm going to risk reaching my arm past that barrier." Mike pulled a small tube from a wrist pocket. "I'm going to want you to activate your suit, then take this tube and smash it over the top of it."

"I think I get it—Jenregar pheromones?"

"It'll be as if you transformed into a Jenregar right in front of them. Ready?"

"Ready," Jeremy said, and pressed his left middle finger into his palm. His lifesuit formed itself around him, Mike handed him the tube, and Jeremy smashed it over the top of his helmet.

"Com'on," Mike said. "We've got to get ourselves into the Jenregar population where they won't notice us."

Mike watched as Jeremy took a deep breath, then took that step. Mike put his hand on his stunner, looked all around. The Jenregar took no notice of either of them. He told Jeremy, "Let's get you back to Humanity," and he led the way back down the short corridor.

"I'm ready for that," Jeremy said. "You won't believe how long I've been in there, how many times they've knocked me unconscious." He shook his head. "This is like being inside a virt, only not as much fun."

Great, Mike thought. A virt enthusiast. Well, maybe a dose of reality will do him good. They reached the command center. But as Mike started to hurry through the crowded room, he sensed Jeremy wasn't right behind him. A look back, and he saw the man standing stock still in the middle of the room. Goddam it, he thought, and made his way over to Jeremy as quickly as he could, trying not to run right into any of the Jenregar.

He grabbed Jeremy's arm. "Com'on," he said.

"This is no time to lose your nerve."

Jeremy's features behind his helmet face-plate were a study in fear. "This is exactly the time," he said.

Mike eased his way past a couple of Jenregar, got behind Jeremy, and pushed, hard."Go," Mike said.

Jeremy went.

As they approached the energy field that led back to the damaged part of the Jenregar craft, Captain Lee spoke up again. "You've got to hurry, Mike—our sensors show their stardrive spinning up."

"We're getting there as quickly as we can!"

"You may not have a chance to—"

A tearing, rending sound broke off Captain Lee's words— Is this what a stardrive jump for a Jenregar ship normally sounds like? Mike wondered.

Mike didn't even have a chance to get through the energy shield before every nerve in his body felt as if it had caught fire and he screamed in agony as he slumped to the floor.

For Mike, in the instant of the Jenregar ship's stardrive transition, it was as if the Universe disappeared...

—As a five-year-old, he rushes toward his prospective foster parents, only to run right through their images.

—At age sixteen, he stands his ground with three bullies and holds his own against them thanks to the special abilities of his artificially conceived body.

—Just months after turning twenty-one, he watches the image of the receding Earth on a viewscreen, wondering if he'll ever want to return to his homeworld again.

... and the Universe returned, faster than thought.

Mike shook off those unpleasant memories. He knew he was lying on the floor, but he didn't know where and couldn't remember what made him pass out. When he tried to rub his head, his hand clunked against his bubble helmet.

He opened his eyes. Damn, he thought. The Jenregar ship. Hell of a place to wake up on.

And what the hell knocked me out like that?

He looked over at Jeremy, who was still unconscious. The stardrive jump, Mike thought. We could be anywhere—for all I know, the Jenregar homeworld. There's no amount of pheromones can hide us much longer.

Mike got to his feet and found himself standing right next to one of the Jenregar. Instinctively, he froze, expecting this particular Jenregar to walk right past him as if he were nothing unusual.

But this Jenregar individual looked right at him!

Mike was so startled it took a moment for him to concentrate and take a good look right back. This Jenregar's eyes are bigger than what's normal for them, Mike thought. They're comparable to a Human's eyes.

Mike's attention flashed back for an instant to his first sight of Jeremy, of the cuts and bruising all around his eyes, and Mike had to wonder— Have the Jenregar been performing experiments on him?

The Jenregar individual tried to grab Mike, but it only came up to his waist, and its tentacle-like arms didn't have the strength to hold onto him. Mike pulled himself free, pulled his stunner, and shot the Jenregar, who crumpled to the floor.

Now the other Jenregar in the command center took notice, but only of the Jenregar Mike had just shot. Gotta be grateful for small favors, Mike thought, as he pulled Jeremy up to a sitting position. "Wake up, dammit," he said, wishing he could slap the side of the man's face. Resigning himself to the inevitable, he pulled Jeremy up, laid him over one shoulder, grateful for the little bit of added strength a "normal" Human didn't have, and headed back down the corridor toward the damaged part of the ship.

They passed easily through the energy field as Mike activated his datalink: "This is Mike Christopher to Captain Lee. Kojima, do you read?"

No response.

As Mike reached the hole the Kojima had made in the side of the Jenregar ship, Mike found himself with a dilemma. I still have no idea where we jumped to, he thought. We might be in the middle of nowhere, waiting for a repair crew. Or in the midst of a Jenregar fleet.

Mike reached up and pulled himself just high enough out of the jagged hole in the ship to catch a glance all around. What he saw made him gasp.

Earth! Mike could barely believe he was seeing the Sun-drenched outlines of Europe and Africa, plainly visible even amidst the cloud cover, the strings of light on the world's night-side that were the cities of Asia.

It looks like we're just beyond synchronous orbit, Mike thought. And if it's not my imagination running ahead of me, it looks like the planet's getting closer by the moment.

Mike lowered himself back through the hole, his mind racing. Did he dare stay aboard this Jenregar ship? I've no idea where it's headed, whether into orbit or some kind of landing. If it's part of an invasion fleet, what are my chances of survival?

Mike saw several Jenregar starting down the corridor toward him and Jeremy. That settles that, he thought. Whether through that Jenregar who looked right at me or some other way, they've started to perceive us.

Time to go.

He grabbed the still-unconscious Jeremy, and lifted him up. We're better off taking our chances on our own, he thought. I can only hope my lifesuit's propulsion can get us a reasonable distance from this ship. Mike was careful not to let Jeremy's lifesuit catch on the hole's jagged edges as he pushed him through. He managed to hold onto one of Jeremy's legs as he pulled himself up.

Earth was getting closer. I can't make out any Human ships, or even other Jenregar ones, he thought, but what would the chances be that either would be within visual range?

Mike grabbed Jeremy in a close embrace, which at least was easier here in zero-G conditions on the skin of the Jenregar ship. He flexed his knees and jumped away from the Jenregar ship. Fortunately, Jeremy was slender enough that Mike could reach with his right hand around Jeremy's back to punch controls on his own lifesuit's left wrist. The small propulsion unit on his back pushed him and Jeremy away from the Jenregar craft at an angle perpendicular to its trajectory.

Soon the Jenregar ship receded from view. Over his datalink, Mike said, "This is Mike Christopher of the Unity exploration craft Asaph Hall. I'm on an unknown trajectory out of a Jenregar ship apparently approaching Earth. Does anyone copy?"

No one answered. He turned off the propulsion unit now that he and Jeremy were on somewhat of a different course than the Jenregar ship. Fuel's pretty limited, he thought. No telling when we might need to make a course correction. He set his lifesuit to send a constant distress call and activated a proximity alarm that would let him know if any craft approached, then took a closer look at Jeremy's face behind the bubble helmet. To his relief, he saw the man's eyelids flutter, saw him licking his lips. Com'on, dammit, he thought. Wake up!

Jeremy's eyes opened and Mike saw the instantaneous flash of fear in his features. Jeremy started to push away from him, but Mike held on tight. "No you don't," he said. "You've got to stick right here with me."

"What happened?" Jeremy asked. "How'd we get out here?"

"The Jenregar took a stardrive jump—when we woke up, they'd started noticing us. That's when I got us out of there."

"So that jump—that's when we lost consciousness, just like I told you had happened several times. That's what caused it?"

"Jenregar stardrives aren't calibrated for Human physiology. The same thing happened during the early days of Human stardrive flight."

"And would people have—some kind of dreams, or flashbacks?"

"They would," Mike said, not wanting to recall those he'd just experienced. "People would have to medicate themselves before a jump."

Jeremy looked all around. "Wait a minute— is that Earth?"

"It is."

"Then we're saved!"

"Not yet—I've got a beacon going, and I've tried to contact someone—anyone—on my datalink. But I haven't gotten a response yet."

"But we're headed toward Earth—that has to be good."

"Let's hope so—but even though I've gotten us out of sight of the Jenregar ship, we still have most of its momentum. We'd be running parallel to it, and I think we're headed right for the planet. Our lifesuits wouldn't survive reentry. And this propulsion unit isn't powerful enough to put us into orbit."

Jeremy said, "So we could still die."

"If we'd stayed on that Jenregar ship, we'd already be dead—or worse."

"I think I know what worse would amount to."

"I saw a Jenregar that had larger eyes than normal—similar to a Human's."

"They poked and prodded at my own eyes enough. I thought they were going to carve one out of me."

"How did they—" Mike was interrupted by his lifesuit's proximity alarm. "Oh, I hope that's good news."

"What is it?" Jeremy asked.

"Something's within a couple thousand kilo-meters."

"Thank God. Rescue!"

"We don't know that. Could be another Jenregar ship."

"I'll pray that it's a Human craft instead. Will you join me?"

"Sorry. I don't care if you do. But I know a god didn't create me. I'm—"

"Mike Christopher! I knew I recognized that name. You're the artificial Human!" Jeremy squirmed in Mike's grasp. "Let me go! You're an ungodly being—I don't want to have anything to do with you!"

Mike's anger helped him hold on that much tighter. "Now, listen—I'm your lifeline! I have the propulsion unit—I have the spacer experience. Whatever happens, I'm your best chance at staying alive."

"I may be better off with the Jenregar."

As Mike saw some sort of spacecraft silhouetted against the stars, he told Jeremy, "If we come out of this alive, you're welcome to go visit them again."

Mike sat in the commons aboard the Earth Unity light cruiser Admiral Susan Kojima and wondered how long Jeremy was going to sit across the table from him and ignore him.

Though given the alternatives, ignoring me might be the best thing that can happen, Mike thought. Jeremy represents my worst fear of the reception I might receive back on Earth.

Mike had left his homeworld twenty-five years earlier, having grown tired of the irrational reactions so many people had to his status as an artificial Human—someone created "from scratch" in a lab rather than through "natural" means.

Many organized religions didn't consider him to have a soul, and death threats were common. Artificial Humans were banned from coming into many governmental jurisdictions; never mind that the fear of them far exceeded their number; Mike, for instance, had never met another artificial Human.

But Mike himself had never known the details of his own background that had only recently come to light—his genesis had been possible only after what he thought of as a "catalog of horror." The project that originated him, the Genome Advancement Project—had been successful only after countless failed attempts at creating artificial life. Mike had seen the holos of preserved specimens of newborns that had developed without a brain, or with vestigial limbs, or with a single eye in the center of their face.

All that had happened before Mike's birth. But to someone like Jeremy, he thought, none of that matters. It's as if I'd created and killed those children myself to make sure I'd be born with a "normal" body. Not just normal in fact, but advanced—a little stronger than average, more resistant to disease. Even those slight advantages brought more resentment back on Earth than I could deal with.

And now my homeworld expects me to risk my life to help save it.

Mike wished Captain Lee would show up to give them their initial debriefing. Thank goodness they caught up to us, Mike thought. But Jeremy hasn't cast one eye my way since we entered the cargo bay and got checked out in the infirmary.

Mike blew on the hot chocolate, which was the only thing he felt he could stomach right now. Later will come a more substantial meal, and a change of clothes, and maybe even a real-water shower, he thought. But right now I'd be satisfied to get a polite word out of Jeremy.

Staring at the man didn't work. Neither did a discrete cough. He only sat there with a glass of water he hadn't sipped yet, by all accounts trying to ignore Mike's presence. Okay, fine, he thought. The direct approach. "Listen, Jeremy—"

"I don't want to talk to you."

Mike was grateful that's when Captain Lee walked in. She was a tall woman in her sixties, with silver hair that showed she'd never had youth-extension treatments. She's waiting kind of late to take care of that, Mike thought. If she wants to. None of my business, I suppose.

Mike rose and shook Captain Lee's hand. "Thanks for rescuing us."

Jeremy managed to set aside his sulk long enough to rise and accept a handshake, as well. "I appreciate what you've done for us, Captain."

Captain Lee regarded Jeremy, then Mike. "I was told the two of you don't seem to get along. Anything I should know about?"

Jeremy spoke up before Mike could get a word in: "I don't belong to an organized religion, Captain, but I do have a sense of God's word. And this—" He indicated Mike with a tilt of his head. "—person was a mistake. He isn't of God."

Captain Lee looked questioningly toward Mike, who replied, "I'm the first to acknowledge that. Humans made me, not some sort of deity."

Captain Lee said, "Since this has nothing to do with the issue at hand, I'd like to set this conflict aside. Jeremy, what can you tell us about the Jenregar?"

"We were leaving Costaguana." That was a Human-colonized world whose inhabitants were largely devoted to literary scholarship and scientific research. "They attacked our ship, came on board, killed several people, grabbed others—like me—like my wife Julia. Captain, have you heard anything from Costaguana? Anything about Julia?"

"I'm afraid we haven't. The first thing we knew about this Jenregar incursion is when some of their ships arrived in the outer system. The ship you and your wife were on probably isn't even overdue yet."

Jeremy put his head in his hands and sobbed.

Mike thought, I shouldn't feel so unkindly toward him. What he thinks about me isn't as important as the fact that he's concerned about his wife.

Jeremy cleared his throat, swallowed, and wiped his eyes. "I'm sorry."

Captain Lee said, "Nothing to be sorry about. What happened once you were on the Jenregar ship?"

"Julia and I were separated. I don't know what happened to her."

Mike said, "We couldn't detect any other Human lifesigns on that Jenregar ship."

"I think we may have docked with another ship at some point. I heard a lot of activity from the Jenregar, and the whole ship shook a couple of times—I heard a couple large 'clunking' sounds. It all seemed like some standard thing, the Jenregar weren't all excited or anything."

Captain Lee said, "You have to hold on to that little bit of hope about your wife."

"This whole trip was Julia's idea. I resisted, but she convinced me to go along—I wish I'd put my foot down and refused. She wanted us to do something 'real,' as she put it. Instead of, you know, virts all the time. But I have to ask, Captain, do you have a virt center here on your ship?"

"You're a virthead!" Mike blurted out.

Captain Lee shot Mike a not-now glance, and Jeremy said, "I consider that term insulting—as if I'd called you a 'synth,' which I know is a hateful term for your kind of people."

Mike couldn't help rolling his eyes. He knew many Earth natives had gone beyond using virtual reality as mere entertainment, or for informational purposes—they'd become addicted to the artificial realities created by total-immersion virtualities—some people spent significant portions of each day in such dream-worlds, slaying fantasy monsters, having sex with entertainment figures, even exploring hyper-realistic versions of real alien worlds.

Mike said, "You've just been saved from torture or death, or both, by the Jenregar, rescued from deep space, your wife is still missing, your home planet may be in danger, and you ask about a virt center. Wouldn't that definition apply?"

Jeremy started to reply, but Captain Lee said, "Gentlemen—we have more important matters before us. I'm supposed to make sure the two of you get down to Brussels as soon as possible for a more extensive debrief." The headquarters of the Earth Unity was located in Brussels. Captain Lee told Mike, "You were right about one thing, Mike. Earth is in danger."

Mike was surprised at his own emotional reaction—concern, even fear, for a world whose inhabitants had often treated him so poorly. "What are the Jenregar doing?"

"Attacking cities, trying to establish their own hives. Santiago, Chile, Tijuana, Mexico, Zhengzhou, China. We think North America's next."

"I don't understand," Jeremy said.

Mike told him, "The Jenregar live in these great mounds of earth—their hives. That's where they reproduce, bring all their food, establish living quarters."

Captain Lee activated a holo of a view looking down onto a city from orbit. Several large fires burned in scattered sites all through the city. In the middle of downtown, Mike saw what he recognized as a Jenregar mound. "This is Zhengzhou. The Jenregar has established its mound, and it's sending troops out to create a perimeter to protect it. It's even sending squads out into rural areas."

Jeremy still wouldn't look at Mike. This is why I haven't been back to Earth in a quarter century, he thought.

"And they're purposely doing this in the middle of cities," Captain Lee said, "because they know that limits our response. We can't just start shooting or bombing indiscriminately, or we kill our own people. I'll leave the rest to the folks down at Brussels. I'd hope they could—"

"Battle alert!" came the warning over the ship's P.A. "Incoming Jenregar ships—Captain to the bridge!"

Captain Lee stood and told Mike and Jeremy, "Mike, access your datalink and the ship's computer will get both of you to your proper stations." Then she was gone.

Jeremy just sat there at the table. "You heard her," Mike told him. "Let's go."

"With you? No, thanks!"

Mike grabbed Jeremy's arm and pulled him up from his seat. "How the hell did I get saddled with you? Do you want to live?"

"Of course I do," came the reluctant response.

"Then you're coming with me."

As they went out into the corridor, Mike said, "Computer—action stations for Mike Christopher and Jeremy Sheffield."

The answer came over Mike's datalink: "Lifepod two, deck four, corridor seven." A map of the route appeared on the inside of Mike's wrist.

"Lifepod?" Jeremy asked. "Don't tell me we're about to end up out in the middle of space again!"

"It's just a precaution," Mike said as he led the way down the corridor.

The ship shuddered under an impact, and Jeremy said, "Precaution, huh? Why would they send us there if we're weren't going to have to use that pod?"

"We don't have a combat role, so they put us into position just in case, so there's less last-minute scrambling around."

They found themselves at a grav tube leading down to deck four, and Mike stepped aside to let Jeremy go first. Jeremy looked at the tube, looked at Mike, and said, "I'm not gonna just step out into thin air."

Mike tried to keep the disgust out of his voice. "You can't tell me you've never used a grav tube before."

"Not aboard a spaceship under attack—or that might be about to go into stardrive!"

Mike tried to grab Jeremy again, but the man stepped back. "Oh, no—you're going to quit pushing me around. I can do what I want!"

"What you want," Mike told him, "is to live—now get the hell down there!"

Jeremy said, "I'm posting an official complaint about you when this emergency is over."

Fine, Mike thought as the ship shuddered again. It sounds like that could be months or years away. He watched as Jeremy stepped into the grav tube and landed on the deck below. Mike followed, and he and Jeremy were standing before a row of lifepods of various sizes. "Here we go," Mike said, indicating a small two-person pod. "This is ours."

"It's awfully damn small," Jeremy said.

"It's just for the two of us. And being smaller means it's less likely to be picked up by Jenregar sensors if we have to use it."

Jeremy began a verbal tirade of such vehemence and so many words that Mike could barely make out what the man was saying. In the midst of that, he heard over his datalink, "Mike and Jeremy, this is Captain Lee. If you're not in that lifepod yet, get in there and get ready to eject!"

"Oh, crap!" Mike said, and opened the pod's hatch. Its internal systems powered up automatically. It contained two recessed seats side by side, but facing in opposite directions.

Now it was Jeremy who grabbed Mike's arm. "Did she really say that? We really do have to blow ourselves out into space again?"

"I thought that was your big prediction— now get in!"

Jeremy stepped down into the pod. Mike followed and closed the hatch. "Strap in," he told Jeremy. "This thing's too small to have inertial compensators."

Jeremy sat in one of the two recessed positions in the lifepod. Mike moved in next to him in the cramped space and started checking out the pod's systems.

Captain Lee's voice came over his datalink as the ship rocked again: "I read you as inside the pod—is that correct?"

"We're here and strapped in."

"Stand by for launch."

Mike told Jeremy, "Hold on—we're about to launch."

"Wait a minute," Jeremy said. "Why can't we—"

It was as if the bottom dropped out of the small pod. Jeremy yelped in surprise and Mike didn't blame him. I've never liked thrill rides, he thought. Give me some good old inertial dampeners any day.

Something slammed into the lifepod, and Mike's head struck the wall, hard. I'd always believed "seeing stars" was just a phrase, he thought. All told, I'd rather look at them through a viewscreen.

Another impact, and the pod began to spin, a movement Mike hated even worse than the falling feeling. He hoped his own expression didn't mirror Jeremy's—the man was grasping the sides of his seat and had his mouth open to scream, but nothing was coming out.

Then the pod slowly stopped spinning.

"Thank goodness," Jeremy said. "Did that stop on purpose?"

"The gyros kicked in," Mike told him. He reached to one side to call up a readout on their trajectory.

"Should we activate our lifesuits?" Jeremy asked.

"They'll come on automatically if we lose air. But that's not what I'm worried about." Mike kept checking the readout, but to no effect. "The readout on our trajectory doesn't want to come up right."

"What the hell does that mean?" Jeremy demanded.

"It means I think we're coming down in the northern hemisphere, but I can't tell you exactly where."

"That covers a lot of ground, you know!"

"As long as we come down on the ground," Mike said.

"What does that mean?"

"It means the Earth's surface is covered by a lot more water than land. What if we land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean? We have to be ready for that."

"Dear Lord, this thing will sink like a stone!"

"It won't," Mike said. "And as long as its beacon is working, someone will find us."

Jeremy looked all around the interior of the pod, as if it were closing in on him. "What if they don't know to look for us? We don't even know if the Kojima survived, if they got to tell anyone about us."

"Brussels knows about us, Jeremy. They'll find us." I hope, Mike thought.

Jeremy clapped a hand over his eyes. "We don't even know what the Jenregar are doing—they may have taken over the Earth by now."

Mike put his hand on Jeremy's shoulder. "I've dealt with the Jenregar before. Being a hive mind makes them tough and efficient, but it's also their weakness. We have the advantage here on our homeworld. We'll beat them."

Jeremy lowered his hand. His eyes revealed a determination and inner strength Mike hadn't glimpsed in him before. Jeremy told Mike, "Take your hand off my shoulder."

Mike did. "I only meant—"

"I don't want you to touch me."

Mike made a show of examining the sensors again. "People like you are why I haven't been back on Earth in a quarter-century."

Jeremy said, "You feel you've been wronged."

"If you consider the other students beating me up in school. Death threats. Being spit upon. Yeah. You might say that."

Jeremy shook his head. "The whole thing was wrong."

Mike said, "How I was treated, you mean?"

"I mean the project that led to your conception. I've seen the pictures of those monstrosities—those babies. They died so you could exist."

"I never even knew they existed until a few weeks ago."

"But their short and terrible lives define you, Mike, whether you like it or not—what's that sound?"

A roaring that sounded at first as if it was coming from a great distance grew louder and louder, and a great buffeting rocked the pod. Mike said, "We're reentering Earth's atmosphere."

Jeremy glared at Mike. "And you don't know where we're landing?"

"Like I said, a water landing is most likely. But we could end up in the arctic, or the middle of a Siberian forest, or—"

"Enough!" Jeremy said. "I don't want to hear all the different ways we might die!"

"Then just hang on, and hope for the best."

Mike gave up trying to get the sensors to reveal anything, but that meant his imagination ran free as he considered the force of the atmosphere trying to break the pod apart, its heat trying to turn it into slag. He imagined what Jeremy didn't want to—the ocean splashdown, or being deposited within that thick Russian forest, the hopeful wait to be rescued. That's assuming anyone even knows to look for us, Mike thought. We don't even know what happened to the Kojima. It might've been destroyed before it had a chance to confirm to Brussels that we're on our way.

The roaring of the atmosphere beyond the skin of the lifepod began to fade, replaced by a low rumbling. "What's that sound mean?" Jeremy asked, as he clearly fought to keep his voice from cracking.

"It just means we're slowing down," Mike said. "Which is a good thing."

"What's slowing us down?"

"Pretty old-fashioned stuff—retro-rockets—"

The lifepod shook violently for several seconds, then became still again.

"—then parachutes."

"What is this, the Dark Ages?"

"This pod's too small for gravitics—just that simple."

Their small craft shuddered again a couple of times, then came to rest. Then began to rock back and forth, smoothly, rhythmically.

"Well, I didn't want to be right," Mike said. "But I was. Water landing."

"How do we find out where we've landed?" Jeremy asked.

"Well—the most practical way I know will be just to open the hatch and take a look outside."

Jeremy said, "And let whatever's outside come in—it could be water, like you said, or if you're wrong it could be a mountain lion or some sort of diseased plant life!"

Mike held up a hand and Jeremy wound down. "Gimme an alternative to just opening the hatch."

Jeremy seemed to deflate. "I guess we don't have one."

Mike stood up, made sure his stunner was handy at his side, and opened the hatch. A strong breeze brought in plenty of fresh, damp air. Funny thing, Mike thought as he started to pull himself up out of the hatch. The air doesn't smell salty like it would in the ocean.

But before he could stick his head outside the hatch, Jeremy pulled him back down, saying, "The hell with it—I'm not afraid to face what's out there!"

Mike could only watch as Jeremy stuck his head out of the hatch. "You were right!" he said. "Just water as far as I can see!"

Mike squeezed next to Jeremy and, looking over the other man's shoulder, indeed saw only water, beneath a beaming sun that told him it was midmorning. Then he looked in the opposite direction. What he saw made him tap Jeremy on the shoulder. "Look this way," he said.

In that direction stood the familiar sight of the Sears Tower (which at one time was called something else, but Mike couldn't remember that any more than he knew who Sears was), the Shedd Aquarium, and the rest of the familiar skyline of Chicago.

"So I was only a little right," Mike told Jeremy. A water landing's much better if it's in Lake Michigan!"

Within minutes, a hydrofoil boat just over twenty meters long began running toward them. Once it got within about a couple hundred meters of their pod, though, it began to circle, as if taking their measure.

"Wave," Mike said. "Look friendly. Try not to look like a Jenregar."

"Not funny," Jeremy said. But he waved, as did Mike.

The hydrofoil drew closer, and Mike saw the logo CHICAGO POLICE MARINE OPERATIONS on its side. Four uniformed men and women left the boat's pilot house and lined up along a railing at its bow. All of them armed, Mike thought. Mike waved again. No one waved back. I can't blame them. They probably have no idea who we are or why we're here—just that we dropped out of the sky in the waters next to a likely Jenregar target.

The hydrofoil drew within shouting distance. One of the women at the railing, her hand on her stunner, said, "Identify yourselves, please!"

Mike said, "We're from the Unity warship Admiral Susan Kojima. I'm Mike Christopher and this is Jeremy Sheffield."

The woman checked her wrist comm. "It seems we received a bulletin on you, Mr. Christopher—Mr. Sheffield. Along with about every other law enforcement and military unit in the world."

"What about the Kojima? "

"Seems it took some hard hits, but got away. Let's get both of you aboard, and we'll get you on your way to Brussels as soon as we can."

Moments later, Mike and Jeremy were standing on the bow of the hydrofoil as it rushed back to shore. The off icer who'd greeted them, Lt. Sharon Nyquist, told Mike, "Welcome back to Earth. I understand it's been quite a while since you've been here."

"Not exactly the way I intended to make it back, either."

"I understand that. Look off in the distance, there, to the northwest. See that?"

"Some kind of plume of smoke—the Jenregar?"

Lt. Nyquist nodded. "They're making one of those mounds in Arlington Heights."

"Damn. How serious is it, overall?"

"Serious enough. It's going to be tough getting you and Jeremy to Brussels—and we do want to get you there in person—comm channels are spotty. No orbital or suborbital craft are up. Except, rumor has it, some pretty dark intelligence missions. Wouldn't know about those."

"So we have to go on the surface?"

"Looks like it. Most of the main underground maglev routes are still running, at least within continents. Getting across the Atlantic or Pacific is the tough part—plenty of power disruptions, that kind of thing. Imagine being stranded in a tube as much as five or six klicks underground, and beneath the ocean, to boot."

"No thanks."

"I'm glad you came back, Mike. I... know what your circumstances were when you left. And I know of your previous experiences with the Jenregar. I think they could be valuable here."

Mike had been present on Korolev Habitat, a Human colony cylinder orbiting a distant star, seven years earlier when the Jenregar tried to take it over. He'd been the one to discover how to disguise himself against them using their own pheromones. He'd also figured out how to create another pheromone that fooled half of the Jenregar within the habitat into thinking the other half had died. They'd fallen over themselves trying to dispose of one another.

"I hope you're right," Mike said.

Lt. Nyquist said, "I guess you could say I also know what your circumstances were with other Humans, too. I believe you might find things are better for you now."

Though he had his doubts, Mike said, "I hope that's true. I have to admit, I'm struck by how right it feels to be back here—to be on a planet rather than on my ship and feel a single grav pulling on my body. To smell the air—I never realized how distinct a particular planet's atmosphere might be until just now. Even the way the clouds are formed, and how the waves around us rise and fall, seem to tell me I'm on Earth—and that it's home."

Jeremy rolled his eyes, told Mike, "Spare me," and headed toward the stern of the hydrofoil.

Lt. Nyquist raised her eyebrows in a silent question. Mike said, "He's a religionist. Doesn't think I have a soul, all that. He wouldn't wish any harm on me—at least, I think he wouldn't—but he considers me a 'mistake,' as he put it."

Lt. Nyquist clapped a hand onto Mike's shoulder. "Don't worry about him, Mike. You'll find enough people who support you to get by these days."

"I hope that's true—I've got enough to worry about with the Jenregar to keep an eye over my shoulder for threats from Humans."

The hydrofoil settled into the waters of Lake Michigan as it approached the 31st Street Harbor, which was crowded with people watching. Lt. Nyquist explained to Mike and Jeremy the difficulties involved in trying to get him and Jeremy to Brussels. "You're going to have to use surface or subsurface transport. The Unity's trying to route you the best way it can to get to Brussels. We've got a capsule to get you to the nearest station, but then you're on your own."

"I appreciate your help," Mike said, then indicated the line of people along the dock. "What's with our reception committee?"

"You're still an object of fascination, Mike. Once people realized who'd just landed in Lake Michigan, it was all over the social and news nets."

Jeremy spoke up for the first time in awhile. "I can see a bunch of news flitters, too." He pointed to a section of sky to their right that seemed to contain a cloud of buzzing insects.

"Don't worry about them. Flight laws only allow them to get so close, even if they aren't any bigger than a bug."

Jeremy said, "But their cameras can make it look like they're up in our faces."

"I'm not worried about any of that," Mike said. "I just want to get to Brussels."

Crewmembers jumped onto the dock and started tying the hydrofoil down. Lt. Nyquist joined the other uniformed officers and asked the crowd to move back. Mike smiled at the thought that just minutes earlier the same officers had been glaring at him and Jeremy with their hands on their stunners.

Most of those gathered at the dock moved back willingly—but several began shouting comments:

"We love you, Mike Christopher!"

"Go back to your filthy spacer friends!"

"Please, save us!"

"Leave the Earth alone—now!"

So, mixed reviews, Mike thought. He stepped down from the boat, marveling at this response, marveling as well at the latest clothing fashions, with their strange lapels and bright swatches of color, far from the utilitarian modes of clothing, unattached to pop culture trends, that spacers tended to wear. They even seemed strange in the ways they walked and gestured, their fluttering hands and wide eyes revealing an excitement Mike couldn't begin to associate with his own presence among them. He muttered, "How the hell do they even know who I am?"

Jeremy indicated the flurry of news flitters. "I'm sure this went world-wide the moment anyone spotted our pod. And once we stuck our heads out, facial recognition tech took over."

"Yeah. I'd forgotten how much people are devoted to their ideas of news."

"You're no doubt the latest fascination, Mike—though why anyone would want to glorify you I have no idea."

"I'm not looking to be glorified, Jeremy— I'm just trying to do the best I can for the Earth. It is my homeworld—despite all the people here who want me dead."

The officers had to be a bit more stern with the crowd, as many of the individuals within it didn't want to move back. Some were starting to push back against the officers, who pushed that much harder. The shouts were no longer about Mike:

"Police thugs!"

"We just want to see Mike!"

"Let us at him—we'll make him go home!" Mike saw Lt. Nyquist was growing more impatient by the moment. Finally, she pulled out her stunner and shot a blast into the air that echoed across the docks. The crowd stopped cold and became quiet.

"That's the only warning you're getting," Nyquist said. "The next person who pushes against one of my officers will be stunned and taken into custody. Is that clear?"

No one in the crowd spoke. Each individual settled into place, and they even formed a pathway toward the sleek black two-seater capsule that was at the curb awaiting Mike and Jeremy.

Lt. Nyquist holstered her stunner. "That's better," she muttered. She extended an arm toward the capsule, beckoning Mike and Jeremy toward it. "Gentlemen," she said. "Your steed."

"Thanks, Lieutenant," Mike said. "You couldn't have been more help."

Mike and Jeremy piled into the automated capsule, its nearly silent electric motor began to hum, and it pulled away from the dock. "Destination—Union Station," the capsule's voice said. "ETA twelve minutes."

Mike looked behind the capsule, and saw several people break away from Lt. Nyquist's officers and try to run alongside them, but the capsule quickly outpaced them and began racing along Lakeshore Drive. They were the only vehicle in sight on the broad streets, but plenty of people were taking in the sights along Lake Michigan. In the opposite direction stood the city's eternal skyscrapers, most either devoted to housing or standing as museums dedicated to the former market economy.

"That was disgusting back there," Jeremy said.

"You might not believe this," Mike said, "but I agree with you. I'm not here to be the subject of adulation."

"You simulate Human emotions very well."

"Listen," Mike said, "I'm as real and Human as you are—and I'm getting goddam tired of you trying to imply I'm not."

"You're right, Mike. I should probably just feel sorry for you."

Mike seethed silently as their capsule turned right onto South Canal Street, and soon was pulling up before Union Station's tall columns. They entered the building, the news flitters still hovering above.

Mike and Jeremy went right away to the Union Station's Great Hall. Mike made his way down the marble steps that had felt the tread of so many feet through countless decades that they had smooth grooves worn into them. He found his eyes drawn to the five-story atrium ceiling, marveling that he had more of a sense of wide-open spaces here than he had out in the open air.

Mike spotted a large screen off to one side that indicated upcoming departures. He went there, Jeremy right behind him, and scanned the listings.

Next to most of the departures for anywhere in Europe was the indication: POSTPONED. Others went right for CANCELLED.

"Dammit," Mike said.

"What do we do now?" Jeremy asked. "This is ridiculous that we can't get to Brussels."

"It's just like Lt. Nyquist was saying. The Jenregar have disrupted a lot of routes. Let's look at something non-direct. See—if we head west instead of east, we can get to California, up through Alaska and Siberia, and go that way."

"The long way around?"

"At four thousand kph, nothing takes that long. Look here—a train leaves for Denver in twenty minutes. Then that'll take us to Sacramento or San Diego. I, uh, vote for San Diego."

"Why's that?"

"We have a layover of a couple hours in either place. And I have a stop I'd like to make."

Thick fog, which the morning sun had yet to burn off, shrouded San Diego's Cortez Hill neighborhood as Mike and Jeremy trudged up a steep slope toward an unseen destination.

The Sun was barely discernible in the east as a fuzzy glow. To the west, Mike knew, he'd normally be able to enjoy a view of downtown San Diego, Balboa Park, and the Pacific Ocean, perhaps see a shuttle arcing from orbit down to the Starport. Instead, he felt as if he were walking across a stage set, his existence confined to a distance he could traverse in fewer than a dozen steps. Even those footsteps refused to resonate, as if sound couldn't be bothered to stray too far.

"I don't want to go here," Jeremy said. "It's an evil, evil place."

"For once I'll probably agree with you," Mike said. "But this is why I was headed to Earth to begin with. I have no way of knowing what's going to happen to the Earth—or to me—in the next few days or weeks—hell, the next few hours. I need to see this."

A building took shape before them and the fog opened around them like a theater curtain. Mike recognized the structure as his destination—the one-time facilities of the Genome Advancement Project.

The two-story building was of early twenty-first century design, with two wings that were asymmetrical, one slightly taller than the other. The entrance to the building's lobby stood between those wings, as did a glassed-in stairwell, which extended several meters past the rooftop and ended in a point, as if aiming into the sky or toward the stars.

The doorway into the lobby glided open and a bearded man about the same age as Mike, mid-forties, maybe a little older, walked out. He wore a tan caftan fringed with green at the collar and sleeves. "Good morning," he said, extending his hand toward Mike. "I'm Kemal Butali, the curator here."

Mike shook Kemal's hand. "Mike Christopher," he said. "And this is my... colleague, Jeremy Sheffield."

Kemal's mouth widened in a sideways grin that quickly faded. "I knew you'd returned to Earth. I witnessed your... arrival in Chicago. I anticipated that you might want to come here. I'm sorry. I know this isn't a pleasant time for you."

"Or for anyone on the planet, it would seem."

This time Kemal's smile appeared more tentative, as if it were a shield against emotions harsher than he wished to reveal just yet. A tilt of his head indicated the building behind him. "You know what's inside. You're the only person this place created that wasn't something horrific."

Mike drew cold, more from thoughts of what he was about to see than from the chill weather. "Well, then," he said. "I guess it's time for me to meet the family."

Kemal led Mike and Jeremy through the Genome Advancement Plan building's darkened lobby. They made their way through dim, dusty hallways until they reached a wide set of double doors. Kemal paused with one hand flat against one of the doors, his face mostly in shadow, his jaw set. "The main lab," he said. "Are you ready?"

Mike cleared his throat to keep his voice from cracking: "Let's go."

Kemal pushed the doors wide. Mike stepped through the doorway and found himself in a room both broad and deep, one filled with medical devices, scanners, and other equipment clearly decades old. The lights shone more brightly here than in the lobby or hallways, and Mike saw that despite this equipment's age, it had been kept in pristine condition.

Kemal indicated one device after another:

"This is an enzyme synthesizer. Right here, a protein regulator. Gene replicators over there. And beyond..."

Mike saw. The embodiment of his most basic fears, that until this moment had been only a series of terrible images. They floated within large clear tanks, all of them upon pedestals that raised them to eye level, many of them displaying expressions that Mike could only describe as shocked and horrified, as if death had come upon them suddenly, yet somehow had bid them to maintain these expressions across an expanse of decades.

Kemal stood dispassionately. Jeremy watched with what Mike could tell was growing disgust.

Before him—a fetus barely formed, but with four legs and three arms. Next to it, another, about six months advanced, its still glowing readouts indicating an empty brain cavity.

Another, with both gills and fur. Still another, a virtual skeleton with only the thinnest layer of skin.

And another and another, until Mike's mind cried, Stop!

Mike turned away, covering his face with both hands. He heard Kamal, as if from a distance, saying, "Some people did not want this place to become a magnet for those they maintained would actually... enjoy... seeing such things. Or even for the idly curious. But others of us—including myself—felt it was important not to suppress the magnitude of what happened here."

Mike wiped his eyes. "Despite my own reaction, I have to agree with you. This is a harsh memory, but one that shouldn't be wiped out."

In the distance, Mike caught a glimpse of another glass tank, this one empty. He went to it, knowing instinctively what it might be and what it might mean to him. For long moments, he just stood and stared, unable to speak.

Finally Kemal said, "That's an ectogenesis tank."

"I know."

Kemal pointed out the connections from the bottom of the empty tank to what Mike recognized as a nutrient sac, deflated, that rested inside. Kemal said, "The child floated within the sac, which floated in turn within the tank. A sterile field enveloped the entire device."

Mike swallowed. His mouth was dry. "And this..."

Kemal looked at him with sympathy. "Yes. This tank is where you were born."

Mike reached out with his right hand, realizing with an odd detachment that it was shaking. Odd, he thought, I don't feel that nervous. It's as if my body is reacting more viscerally than I am.

He touched the smooth glass of the tank and said to Kemal, "I'm told you had records of... how I came about."

Kemal strode to a large desk with a comp console built into it. He pressed a control. "Right here," he said, and a holo of a series of documents appeared next to him. Kemal pointed to the largest image. "You can see it all. At 42 weeks since conception, you weighed three kilos. You were 49 centimeters long. Heart rate 139 beats a minute."

"And who kept these records?"

"The man responsible for your... do you mind if we refer to it as your 'birth?' 'Decanting' sounds rather cold and impersonal."

"I've used it as shorthand all my life. Go ahead."

"Thank you. His name was Aaron Corbin. Brilliant scientist. A bit of a contradiction, as he considered himself a devout, though not always practicing, Catholic."

Mike drew in a deep breath. "That explains it!"

"Pardon me, but—explains what?"

"My name—Mike Christopher. Michael means 'who resembles God.' Christopher means 'bearing Christ inside.'"

Kemal folded his hands and nodded. "Ah, I see. You were also raised in a Catholic orphanage. And you are, rather famously, not a believer."

Mike asked Kemal, "How am I 'famously' anything?"

"The gossip holospheres are already on fire with opinions about your arrival."

"Everyone who thinks I'm some kind of soulless monster." He looked at Jeremy, who stood straight and tall, but didn't say anything.

"My friend," Kemal said, "I hardly find you a monster. As for your soul... that is God's purview, not mine."

Mike said, "You probably know what I say about that."

"You like to point out that you're the only person who knows that a deity did not create you. But I believe, Mike, that you are unnecessarily limiting God's abilities and intentions. And the fact that He may work through individual Humans." Kemal reached out and pushed the image of the first document aside and indicated the next one. "Shall we look at more?"

Mike gave a slow nod. "Of course."

Kemal motioned Mike closer to the floating images of Aaron Corbin's documents. "You'll be interested in this one. A description of your birth." Kemal touched Mike lightly on his shoulder. "I'll leave you awhile to look at it." Kemal left the lab; Mike heard his echoing footsteps as he headed toward the lobby.

Jeremy stood with Mike a moment longer, then followed Kemal.

Mike stepped toward the floating document and with a swoop of a hand brought the image closer. Its first words: PLACED A STERILE TOWEL ON AN EXAMINATION TABLE NEXT TO THE ECTOGENESIS TANK. I TOUCHED A CONTROL ON THE TANK AND ITS CLEAR TOP SLID ASIDE.

The document continued:I REACHED MY HANDS INTO THE WARM FLUID WITHIN AND RAISED THE NUTRIENT SAC, WITH THE CHILD INSIDE, OUT OF THE TANK. A handwritten note written with a shaky pen was inserted here: "Lord, forgive me, for I performed a role previously reserved only for You."

The more objective tone resumed with the standard print: INTO THE ECTOGENESIS TANK AND PLUCKED THE NEW-BORN OUT OF THE NUTRIENT SAC. SEPARATING THE ARTI-FICIAL UMBILICAL FROM THE BABY'S BODY IS AS MUCH MECHANICS AS BIOLOGY—IT POPPED RIGHT OUT. I SUC-TIONED THE INFANT'S MOUTH AND NOSE CLEAR OF FLU-ID, AND HEARD AN IMPRESSIVE SERIES OF CRIES. GOOD LUNGS, BRIGHT HEALTHY SKIN.

Tears fell down Mike's cheeks. He folded his arms and looked away from the document. This isn't a father's description, he thought.

He read on: THE CHILD'S SKIN IS A LIGHT BROWN, HIS HAIR DARK BROWN AND TIGHTLY CURLED. EYES A BRIGHT BLUE, BUT WITH EPICANTHIC FOLDS. HIS NOSE IS THIN AND STRAIGHT.

And that was it. A scientist's description, Mike thought, for an act borne of the desire for knowledge rather than a desire for love. I'm still all alone.

Mike left the lab, made his way through the darkened hallway again, and found Kemal and Jeremy sitting in the lobby. Kemal stood and looked at Mike expectantly. Jeremy didn't look up, merely sat with his arms folded. Kemal asked, "Did you see enough?"

"Yes. More than enough."

Kemal's voice was quiet: "Do you think you'll ever want to see this place again?"

Mike said, "I don't think so."

"I only ask because if you do, I'd like to be the one to show you around again." Kemal looked directly at Mike. "It's something we share now."

"How so?"

Kemal's gaze went through Mike, who wondered what the other man was seeing. Something from years ago, Mike thought, something that matters quite a bit to him.

"It's a test of us as a species," Kemal said, "how we react when individuals receive powers previously given nations—whether it's weapons that can destroy cities or biotech that can create life, as you say, 'from scratch.'" Kemal pressed the flat of his hands against his eyes for a long moment, apparently to hold back tears, then went on: "They worked here for decades, you know. The tech had grown sophisticated enough that they didn't need a large research facility. A replicator economy meant they didn't have to spend their days making money at a 'real' job."

"And so they spent those days..."

"Working on those first attempts. You've seen the pictures. You were one of the final projects. In between was my mother."

"Oh, no," Mike said. "Is she—"

"Still alive? No. Thank God for that. She barely had a face. She had only one arm. And her mind was apparently empty. But she lived to reach puberty."

"And they—bred her? That's how you came about?"

"If only it had been that simple. It would've been bad enough. Remember that Aaron Corbin considered himself at least somewhat a man of faith. He had his own strange morality, even though he took part in these hideous experiments. But some of the others working with him were highly intelligent sociopaths. No empathy for others. No friends, only potential victims."

"And your mother was... one of those victims?"

"She was raped," Kemal said. "Repeatedly, by one of the scientists."

"Not Corbin."

"No, it was another man, Gordon Sackett. In fact, when Corbin learned about it, he threw Sackett off the project. Corbin supervised my mother's prenatal care, made sure I was delivered safely. And unlike their other 'projects,' he gave her a name, or at least a first name. Amanda."

"Small comfort for her," Mike said. "Given her condition."

"As was the meaning of her name—'worthy of love.'"

"Corbin seems to have given a lot of thought to names."

"But little to morality. It doesn't seem to have occurred to him that if sociopaths are drawn to your cause, something's wrong with your cause."

"What happened to him?"

Kemal said, "Sentenced to prison. Refused emotional modification. Committed suicide a few years later."

Mike considered that. "Was he distraught over what he'd done—or that he wasn't allowed to continue?"

"He never said."

Mike extended his hand. "If I ever come back here," he said, "you're the man I'll want to see." Kemal shook Mike's hand, then pulled him into a brief embrace. He turned to leave, Jeremy trailing behind him.

Outside, Mike squinted against bright sunlight; no hint of fog remained.

Jeremy remained quiet until he and Mike boarded the maglev train that would take them to Alaska on the first leg of their trip to Brussels. They sat across from each other in a tightly sealed compartment without windows— there was nothing to see but bare walls anyway, and the only sounds were from the interior of the train, since they traveled through a tube that enveloped them in a vacuum.

At four thousand kph, the trip would only take about an hour, but Mike knew he and Jeremy had layovers of several hours both in Juneau and elsewhere that would keep delaying them. They had to take a roundabout route to avoid Jenregar incursions in various cities, many of which had targeted some of the major maglev routes for destruction.

About ten minutes into their journey, about the time they would've been passing beneath San Francisco, Jeremy sat with his elbows on his knees, looked up at Mike and asked him, "How do you live with yourself?"

Mike said, "I really don't want to get into this now."

"You saw those monsters back there."

"I was as disgusted as you were. But I didn't create them."

"I don't think I could live with myself if I knew what I really was."

"What would you have me do? I'm here— I'm the contact specialist on a Unity starcraft. I've been to dozens of worlds, got the rescue operation going on Splendor, acted as a diplomat with three other Galactic species as we watched the Moruteb system being destroyed by a rogue star. Should I just kill myself?"

"I have no problem with your actions, Mike—it's who you are, and who made you."

"So answer the question—what would you have me do?"

Jeremy looked away from Mike. "That's the part I haven't come up with."

I can't believe a trip on a planet's surface took this long, Mike thought as he and Jeremy exited the underground terminal of the Brussels-Luxembourg Railway Station just an hour or so after local dawn. From the time they'd boarded the maglev train in San Diego, transferred to a different train in Juneau, Alaska, transferred again in Novosibirsk, Russia and Athens, Greece, it had taken just over twelve hours for them to arrive here, with little opportunities for decent sleep or a meal other than snacks.

They left the towering glass and metal of the station, and the rumbling sounds of arriving and departing maglevs behind—fortunately, Earth Unity HQ was located in the old European Parliament's main building right above the maglev station.

"Thank goodness we're finally here," Mike said as they entered the main lobby. More bright surfaces, more glass.

Fatigue and strain showed in Jeremy's voice: "No one's happier about that than me."

Mike thought, I've lost count of how many times I've held my tongue, given that he had to be rescued from a Jenregar ship, and that he still has no idea what's become of his wife.

Once we're done with this briefing, it'll be good riddance to one another.

Before Mike could even begin the search for someone in authority, a woman exited an elevator to their right and walked directly to Mike. Her handshake was brief but strong. Chestnut eyes seemed to pierce directly into his consciousness. "I'm Neriah Fulton," she said in English, moving quickly to shake Jeremy's hand as well. "I'm kind of a 'floating diplomat' here. A non-specialist, you might say. I do whatever's needed, and right now what's needed is to find out what the hell the Jenregar are up to and what we can do about it."

"We're here to help," Mike said.

"Anything I can do," Jeremy told her.

"Excellent, gentlemen. Let's get started."

Neriah took Mike and Jeremy to a briefing room and introduced them to two other people, Damian Rivera and Luisa Torres. "They were rescued from a Jenregar mound in Madrid," Neriah told them. "As you can see, they were both... changed... by the Jenregar."

Damian's mouth had been altered to make it much smaller than the Human norm. His speech was halting, and sounded as if he was mumbling, but Mike's datalink translation of the man's Spanish also helped: "The Jenregar took me into that mound. They started working on me... without anesthetic. Apparently it's how they perform surgery on their own individuals, without regard for the pain they cause."

Neriah said, "Apparently the hive mind only receives information and some sensory impressions from its individuals. Any painful sensations aren't included."

Mike said, "So the hive mind doesn't know, and doesn't care. That fits in with what we already know about them. Individuals aren't important—only the group."

Luisa held up her left arm, which had been made into a Jenregar-like limb—a biological hydrostat which maintained its shape through the pressure of internal fluids, much like a worm or an elephant's trunk. "That's how they changed me, as well. I passed out from the pain more than once."

Jeremy said, "They'd just started working on me. They poked and prodded. I tried to look them in the eyes, develop some sort of rapport with them, but I realized they can barely see. They didn't care how much they hurt me."

Neriah asked, "How far did they get with you?"

"I thought at the time they were torturing me. I screamed at them, tried to let them know I'd tell them anything they wanted, but they didn't listen—I realized they couldn't understand me, weren't even trying."

Luisa reached out with her right hand, the one that was still Human, but Jeremy pulled his arm away from her. "Sorry," he said. "I know you're being sweet, but I can't stand to be touched right now. Only Julia. That's the only person I want touching me."

He's suffering post-traumatic stress, Mike thought. He's going to need major therapy whether his Julia returns safely to him or not.

Jeremy said, "I've told you all I can. I'm not an expert on xenobiology. I'd like to get some rest."

Neriah stood and told Jeremy, "We have quarters here in this building. I'll show you there." She asked Mike, "How about you?"

"I'm okay. I can go some more. I'd like to find out a few more things from Damian and Luisa."

Jeremy and Neriah departed. Mike told Damian and Luisa, "It looks as if the Jenregar is trying to develop a way to transcend its own abilities. They nabbed Jeremy from a Human ship, and it looks as if they were examining his eyes. And I saw a Jenregar individual with eyes that resembled a Human's. It was one of the most eerie sights I can imagine—scared the shit out of me."

Damian said, "We know the Jenregar are developing augmented eyesight so they can better detect Humans who infiltrate their mounds."

Luisa nodded. "We saw evidence of that in our own mound in Madrid."

Mike said, "I think any solution we find to defeating the Jenregar is going to be biological, not military. They're trying to combine our Human advantages with their own—use our own abilities against us. We're going to have to figure out how to use their abilities against them."

Damien ran a finger along the edge of his lower lip, as if still examining how the Jenregar had mutilated him. "They have been merciless toward us," he said. "We must be the same toward them."

Luisa said, "I want to kill them all."

Mike felt he had to say the word. "Genocide?"

"Call it whatever you like. It is what they would do to us, isn't it?"

"Yes, I'm afraid it is. The Jenregar doesn't pacify, it doesn't occupy. It doesn't assimilate. It kills and move on."

"Then we must do that first."

Mike had nothing to say for a moment, and Damian and Luisa also sat silently. We have to think not only about what we may have to do, Mike thought, but what we may have to become.

After a couple more hours of debriefing, Mike took Neriah's suggestion of grabbing a few hours sleep in quarters the Unity provided. When he woke up, it was nearly night. I'm out of sync, he thought. In more ways than one. I've got to figure out what to do next.

For now, he ordered a hot meal and sat in his suite and ate it alone. No company, no music, just his own disordered thoughts. Afterward, he stood on a balcony overlooking the lights of Brussels and wondered how long it might be until this great city saw a Jenregar incursion.

Here at the center of Belgian, European, and Earth Unity government, Mike was all too aware of the weight of history embodied within the very architecture of this city. And it's only the smallest part of Human endeavor and achievement, Mike thought. Everything I am physically may come from that goddam ectogenesis tank, but all the rest that makes me Human—science, music, logic, love— comes from this planet. Deny it, and I'm denying the Sibelius Violin Concerto, Victoria Falls, and the late city of Florence. It's as if the Earth's grav has been reaching out to me all these years, unseen, unfelt, but slowly and inexorably drawing me back to itself.

Until returning to Earth made me realize I love this world after all—despite people like Jeremy.

I have to find a way to help save it.

The door chime sounded. Mike took a deep breath. Not even a single night of peace, he thought, whoever this is, whatever they want.

He went to the door. "Who is it?"

"Neriah. It's urgent."

He opened the door and Neriah's crestfallen expression and slumped shoulders told him something was very wrong. "What's happened?" he asked.

"It's Jeremy's wife," she said. "She's dead."

"Is it confirmed? How do we know that?"

"We found the starcraft that she and Jeremy took from Costaguana. It was burned out inside, cast adrift. Most of the passengers and crew were never even taken off of it. Julia Sheffield was one of them. We've seen her body, confirmed her ID through DNA, prints, retina, everything."

"Dammit," Mike said. "Does Jeremy know?" "Not yet. I'd like you to go with me to tell him."

"Why me? I'm the last person he'd want to hear something like that from."

"Like it or not," Neriah said, "you did share an awful experience the last few days. You both know the Jenregar and what it's capable of. In the heat of emotion... maybe he'll remember something we can use."

"That's kind of cold."

"So's a world where Humanity isn't Earth's dominant lifeform anymore."

"All right," Mike said. "I'll come with you."

Mike had read about virt parlors, and seen cubes of what they looked like. But he wasn't prepared for the reality of it when he and Neriah entered the large, sterile, and pristine room located in a structure that was just a short walk from the European Parliament building.

Dozens, hundreds of dark green coffin shapes were laid out before them, each on a pedestal placing them chest-high. Silence ruled—no attendants were in sight and the tech involved both in maintaining each virt client and in delivering each one's preferred fantasy to his or her receptacle was utterly quiet.

Perhaps given the coffin-like shapes of each receptacle, Mike had expected the place would reek of dust and decay, but the scents that greeted them were surprisingly fresh and natural, as if they were walking across a grassy landscape or down toward a beach.

"Not what I anticipated," Mike told Neriah, as they walked down the line of receptacles, "but I still can't approve."

"Now, now. We can't all be famous explorers. Or even unknown Unity diplomats. And I've been known to indulge myself for an hour or two sometimes."

"Nothing wrong with that. But this is different. There's something wrong with a planet where a high percentage of its inhabitants would rather live in a fake reality for days at a time."

"You won't find a argument from me there." Neriah stopped before one of the receptacles. "Here he is."

Mike examined the readouts on the side of the receptacle. "Vitals look good. All in all, he seems pretty calm in there."

"Which I suppose is the point," Neriah said.

"I wonder if he's with Julia."

"In his fantasy, you mean?"

"Yeah. None of our business, of course, but..."

"Let's get this over with," Mike said.

Neriah touched a control on the side of the receptacle. Its top half slid aside, revealing Jeremy lying there on his back, arms folded, earphones cupping the sides of his head, dark goggles covering his eyes.

"This seems primitive," Mike said. "Why can't he just be on a holodeck?"

Neriah said, "Those are fine for training or if you're immersed in something that takes place within a single room. But if you're supposed to be traveling cross-country or just inside a large building or a starcraft, you need more space. In this case, it's virtual space."

"Should we wake him?"

"Opening the receptacle closes the virt program. He'll come around in a moment."

Sure enough, Jeremy began to stir; even through the darkened goggles, Mike could see his eyes fluttering. His hands fell to his sides for a moment, then Jeremy groaned and he took off the headphones and goggles. He looked up at Mike and Neriah. "The hell with both of you! You have no idea what I was experiencing in there—no right to interrupt it."

Neriah said, "This is important."

"It had better be—" He sat up expectantly. "Is it Julia? You've heard from her, haven't you?"

I really didn't want to witness this, Mike thought. As much as I dislike the man, I wouldn't wish this pain upon anybody.

"Jeremy," Neriah said. "We haven't heard from her. We've heard about her." "That means... she's dead, isn't she?" Neriah cleared her throat. "Yes. I'm afraid she is."

Jeremy clasped his hands over his eyes and began to weep. "I knew it," he muttered. "The goddam Jenregar. I knew it. I... I was with her just now. In the virt. It was our honeymoon— on the Moon. Watching the Earth go through its phases in the same spot in the sky day after day..."

"I'm sorry," Neriah said.

"And—in the goddam virt, I was so happy— but none of that happiness carries over once you leave it. It's as if it's all a wonderful dream—but nothing more." Jeremy fell silent for a moment, then asked, "How did it happen?"

As Neriah explained the circumstances of the discovery of Julia Sheffield's body, Mike stood silently. He couldn't find any words, and didn't want to intrude upon Jeremy's grieving, anyway. After a time, Jeremy swung his legs over the side of the receptacle. "I want to hurt them," he said. "I want to kill them all."

"Then think, " Neriah said. "Is there anything you saw while you were on that Jenregar ship that might help us?"

"I... had to wonder how they were getting Human and Jenregar genetic material to bond together. I don't know much about biology, but wouldn't they be pretty different?"

Mike said, "We still don't know that much about their biology. We don't know if it uses some analogy to our own DNA, or whether there's another way of transferring characteristics down to the next generation."

Jeremy slid down to the floor and stood on shaky legs. Neriah started to grab his arm, but Jeremy waved her away. "Why are you here, Mike?"

Mike hesitated, and Neriah broke in: "I asked him to be here."

"Have a look at the freak, huh, the virthead?"

Mike said, "Jeremy, I'm here for the same reason as Neriah—is there anything you know that can help us fight the Jenregar?"

Jeremy said, "The only thing I can think of is to copy what they're doing. They're becoming more Human in a way. We have to become a bit like the Jenregar."

"I was saying the same thing with Damian and Luisa. We have to figure out how to use their abilities against them."

"You make it sound so academic, Mike. What do you know of real suffering?"

It was all Mike could do to keep from reciting a litany of his own life's tragedies, large and small, from being targeted for a beating by a group of three other seventeen-year-old boys at school, to being sentenced to death in absentia from countless pulpits of various religions to going on an exploratory mission to witness two star systems colliding that ended in the death of his longtime lover. But I won't be that petty, Mike thought. To Jeremy, he only said, "This isn't about what you think of me."

Jeremy said, "What do you know of real sacrifice? What would you ever be willing to commit to, to save the world—or at least, the world that matters most to Humanity?"

Sacrifice, Mike thought. That's it! He looked at Jeremy, then Neriah, and said, "That's exactly right. That's what it's going to take to really hurt the Jenregar."

Neriah asked, "What do you mean?"

"Sacrifice. Listen, Damian and Luisa suffered tortures almost beyond understanding—not just the pain and suffering, but being made into something that's almost not Human."

"Damian's mouth," Neriah said. "Luisa's arm."

"Exactly right. We have to sabotage the Jenregar's most distinctive feature—how it uses pheromones to communicate with itself and adapt its surroundings."

Neriah said, "Like somehow giving its individuals a message telling them to retreat from Earth, or something?"

"When I took them on at Korolev Habitat, we sprayed some of the Jenregar individuals with pheromones that signaled all the others that they'd died. They ran all over themselves, half of them trying to carry the other half into the recyclers."

"They won't fall for that trick again," Jeremy said.

"You're right," Neriah said. "We have intel that shows us they've taken precautions against any attempts to spray their mounds— plenty of sensors, force screens—we have to come up with a different way of delivering those pheromones, or whatever we use."

Mike said, "And I'd bet we could sure come up with plenty of new ones—dozens or hundreds, maybe—keep the Jenregar guessing, and so busy that it can't adapt quickly enough to fight us effectively."

Neriah asked, "But how do we target them?"

"We know the Jenregar are looking to experiment on more Humans. But what if we, say, infected some of those Humans with bio-weapons—something that could spread through a Jenregar hive before they could stop it?"

Jeremy said, "Like a disease, or at least one of those pheromones—something that would damage them or keep them from fighting."

"The only problem," Mike said, "is that you're looking at a suicide mission—in fact, worse than that, because you're essentially going to be tortured and mutilated before you die."

They stood in silence for a moment, among the virtuality receptacles. Then Mike noticed Jeremy was looking all around, as if seeing those long rows of receptacles for the first time. Jeremy said, "Hear me out. It seems to me that what would make a lot of people hesitate to take one of these missions is the part about the torture. Doesn't that seem right?"

Mike said, "The part about dying makes me hesitate. But I take the point. There are things I might die for. But I'd want it to be quick and painless if at all possible."

Jeremy slapped the side of his virt receptacle. "Here's your answer. You don't have to have a big chamber like this to lose yourself in a virt. We do it this way because people spend hours and days in them. We monitor people's vitals, we make sure they're hooked up to food drips and that their waste flows away from them—don't look at me with that disapproving expression, Mike, virt addiction isn't what we're talking about here."

Neriah asked, "So what are we talking about?"

"We can implant chips inside people that can run virt programs. You said it yourself, Mike—it's a suicide mission, so we don't need them hooked up to a receptacle to monitor their vitals or take care of them. They can be running the most intense virts we can give them, and they'll never realize where they are or feel a bit of the torture. We take volunteers—"

"It's still a suicide mission," Mike said.

"But it's not a suicide plus torture mission. Even so, I don't suppose you'd want to volunteer."

"I have to admit, I don't. I hope to live a little longer. And I'd like to think we can find an other way to do this—one that doesn't require people to sacrifice their lives."

"Maybe you can," Jeremy said. "Or maybe you just have to find people who don't have that much to live for."

"You can get past this, Jeremy," Neriah said. "I know it's difficult to lose your wife, but—"

"No, it's more than that." Jeremy looked at Mike. "I guess you were right, Mike. It looks like I've been fooling myself. The greatest virt tech in the world, making me feel like Julia was right next to me—I could see her, smell her, touch her—but when it ends, it isn't enough." He tapped the side of his head. "In fact, I found it pitiful. I found myself pitiful."

Mike said, "But Jeremy, Neriah's right. I've been through this, myself. Given time—"

"No," Jeremy said. "Time's up. And I'm going to show you how a real Human reacts to a threat against his homeworld."

Mike and Neriah stood on the tarmac of an out-of-the-way corner of the Brussels Starport, watching from about two hundred meters away as a line of thirty people waited to board a large personnel shuttle. The wind whipped across the wide expanse of the landing pad, roaring just loud enough that Mike leaned in close to tell Neriah, "I can't believe you found this many people for a suicide mission."

These volunteers, along with hundreds of others launching elsewhere, were to be dropped near selected Jenregar mounds to be "captured." Once the Jenregar started working on them, their bodies would begin to release pheromones that would give various commands to the Jenregar individuals—instructions to dismantle their hives, or to consider other Jenregar individuals as sick or damaged, and dispose of them. As Mike had suggested, those and dozens of other commands would bring chaos to the otherwise unified Jenregar hive mind—or so it was hoped.

Neriah looked stricken. "I can't believe I proposed it to the Unity—and that it accepted the idea. Or that a few of these volunteers decided to forego the virt chip."

"Are they so desperate?" Mike asked as the line moved forward to enter the shuttle. "Do they have so little to live for?"

"Some are that way. Damaged somehow. Others consider it their patriotic duty to their homeworld."

"Then they're better than I am."

"Don't say that, Mike," Neriah told him. "You've risked your life plenty of times. Look, there he is."

Jeremy Sheffield moved forward slowly as the line advanced. He looked toward Mike and Neriah and gave a casual salute. Neriah waved back and, after a moment's hesitation, so did Mike. Though I doubt my gesture provides him with any comfort, he thought.

Mike told Neriah, "I wonder what his Julia would've thought about him doing this."

"I don't know anything about her. Maybe she'd be horrified. Maybe she'd be proud."

The final person boarded the shuttle, and within moments its gravitic drive lifted the craft from the landing pad. As it arced away to the west, Mike said, "We all come to an end eventually. At least Jeremy won't suffer. I wish I could be so certain of that whenever my time comes."

(EDITOR"S NOTE: Mike Christopher has appeared previously in"The Unfinished Man"[January/February 2011], "No Traveller Returns" [May 2008], and "Some Distant Shore" [September 2007].

Cryptids

Alec Nevala-Lee | 10606 words

I.

A wisp of white smoke rose up from the carton as Amanda Lurie removed the lid. Reaching inside, she pulled out the specimen that had been packed in dry ice. "What can you tell me about this?"

Karen Vale accepted the package, although she also kept one eye on the younger woman seated across from her at the table. Through the plastic, she could make out the stiffened remains of a dead songbird, its plumage orange and black. She indicated the sealed top of the bag. "May I?"

When Amanda nodded, Karen undid the flap and slid out the bird's tiny body. She had recognized it right away, but just to be certain, she peeled off one of her gloves and ran a hand gently along its feathers. When she lifted her fingertips to her mouth, her lips began to tingle at once.

She saw that Amanda was looking at her curiously. "It's the only way to be sure. There are a number of mimics with similar coloration, but they lack the poison in the skin and feathers. It's a hooded pitohui."

"Correct," Amanda said. "We found it outside Port Moresby. Have you caught any in your nets?"

"A few. We release them after taking blood samples and swabs. But you haven't explained why you're asking me this."

"It's very simple," Amanda replied. "I want you to catch more of them for me."

Instead of responding, Karen glanced down the darkened beach. Her team had set up camp near the cottages by the water, where children with sandy eyelashes were playing with the dogs that wandered freely through the gardens. At the moment, the two women were seated apart from the others, but she could tell that Emily, one of her graduate students, was watching them closely.

Sliding the bird into the bag again, Karen handed it back to Amanda. "I'm sorry. But we have work of our own to do. And I imagine that someone like you has plenty of other resources."

Amanda put away the songbird's remains. "You don't remember me, do you?"

Karen paused, studying the other woman in the candlelight. Amanda had approached them that afternoon with her colleague, a slim, bespectacled man named Patrick. The strangers had introduced themselves and ventured a few polite questions, but they had clearly wanted something more, and Amanda had finally asked if they could talk privately.

At first, Karen had nearly declined, but there had also been something familiar about the younger woman's face. Looking at her now, she finally recalled where she had seen it before. "You were a student of mine."

"Yes," Amanda said. "I took one of your seminars ten years ago on evolutionary biology.

Three weeks on Umboi Island. It was just before you cut back on teaching. I always thought that was a great loss."

Karen began to remember more. The woman here was older and more confident than when they had last met, attractive and fit, thirty or so, her hair pulled back in a blond ponytail. She looked, in fact, a great deal like Karen did in photographs from twenty years ago, although a number of important differences were also evident at first glance. "I'm sorry I didn't recognize you. But I can't say I expected you to end up in drug development."

Amanda set the carton down on the sand by the table. "What gave me away?"

"The logo on your bag," Karen said. "What brings Allelon to New Guinea?"

"I came here to find you," Amanda replied. "You weren't easy to track down. But I've heard you've been having some funding problems. And there may be a way for us to help each other."

Karen didn't care for the look in her eyes. "Maybe it's time for you to explain exactly what you want."

"You've already gathered what I do for a living. The hooded pitohui is of considerable interest to my company. It's one of four known bird species that use a chemical defense to repel predators, an alkaloid called batrachotoxin. The poison is present in minute quantities in the bird's feathers and skin, but it's also one of the most potent neurotoxins in the world."

As Karen listened, she found herself less interested in the words themselves than in the woman who was saying them, whom she was starting to remember now as ambitious, bright, and competitive. "The locals call it a rubbish bird. You can't eat it unless you pluck the feathers and cook it in charcoal."

"And the same toxin also occurs in frogs in Colombia. The natives use it for arrow poison. At first, no one knew how the same alkaloid could occur in two unrelated species on opposite sides of the globe. Later, it was discovered that neither the birds nor the frogs produced the chemical in captivity, which meant that they had to be getting it from somewhere else."

Karen knew the rest. "Melyrid beetles. They're eaten by the birds and frogs."

"Yes. Except that the beetles don't produce the toxin on their own, either. They can't synthesize steroidal skeletons, so they must be deriving it from another unknown source. A host plant."

Karen began to see where she was going with this. "And you want to find it."

Amanda nodded. "We know very little about the life cycle of these beetles, let alone where they feed. But Allelon has an interest in finding the source of batrachotoxin. It's an attractive candidate for drug development."

"I still don't know what this has to do with me. I'm not a botanist or entomologist."

"But you know birds as well as anyone in the world. And birds are easier to follow."

Karen weighed this for a moment. "It isn't that simple. Even if we can tag and follow birds to where they roost, there's no guarantee they'll lead you to the beetles, much less the underlying toxin. They're likely to nest in one place and feed somewhere else. You'd end up chasing them from island to island."

"I'm aware of this," Amanda said. "But I'm willing to take that chance. And there are ways in which it could work to your benefit as well, give some of the issues you've been facing." She glanced at the graduate students seated on the sand. "They don't know, do they?"

Karen didn't reply at once. Looking over at Hitoshi and Emily, who were talking with Amanda's colleague Patrick, she reflected that she had never wanted to be in this situation. She had been counting on one final grant to come through, and for much of the last week, she had been in frantic touch with the university, scrambling for funds in precisely the way she had once hoped to avoid.

It was the price, she knew, of spending so much time in the field. She had never been good at the political side, and in the past, she had survived by scaling back her work as much as possible. In the end, however, the grant had been declined, and it was looking increasingly likely that this trip would be cut short, halfway through its survey of birds in Milne Bay. "How did you know?"

"Allelon keeps an eye on all grant applications in its areas of interest," Amanda said. "When I saw your name, I flew out here at once. If you're willing to help us tag and follow these birds, we'll fund your work to the end of the project. Even if you can't find the birds we need, we're happy to compensate you for your time. All we're asking is a few days."

Karen considered this proposal in silence. Finally, she looked back toward the others. "If I do this, there can't be any confusion. I'll remain in charge of this team. All decisions will be mine."

Amanda smiled again. "But of course. We wouldn't have it any other way."

Karen rose from the table, her eyes on Hitoshi and Emily. "They won't like it."

"I've seen how they look at you," Amanda said, standing as well, the carton tucked under one arm. "If you lead the way, they'll follow."

When morning came, however, the survey team kept to its usual routine. They had set up camp on one of the largest of the six hundred islands in Milne Bay, a region off the southeastern tip of Papua New Guinea that remained largely unknown to naturalists. As always, they had strung several sites in the forest with mist nets, which consisted of stout webs of black nylon, three meters by ten, with horizontal pouches to catch any birds that flew into the mesh.

Karen had not told the others about the arrangement. After returning to the tents the night before, she had revealed only that Amanda was one of her former students, with an interest in tracking pitohuis. "There's no point in disclosing the rest until we're sure it's possible," Karen had said to Amanda. "First we need to see if we can get these birds at all."

Amanda had agreed that this made sense. Later, however, Karen saw her engaged in a tense conversation with Patrick, her colleague, who did not seem entirely convinced by the approach, and as the day went on with no sign of pitohuis, Amanda grew visibly restless.

Shortly after lunch, however, they were called over by Hitoshi. The older of the two graduate students had been monitoring a net lane along a slippery ridge, and as Karen approached, she saw a bird struggling in one of the pouches, its bright plumage recognizable at once.

Karen crept forward, moving quietly so as to avoid panicking the pitohui, and carefully extracted it, wrapping her first two fingers around the bird's neck and cradling the body in her palm as she untangled its feet with her other hand. Holding the pitohui by the upper leg, she lifted it out, mindful of its beak and claws, and wrapped it quickly in a towel.

A table had been set up at a tarp under the trees. Emily was there already, seated on a folding fabric stool, with Amanda watching from nearby. As Karen carried the bird over, it struck her that the two younger women could almost be sisters, although they were a decade apart in age.

As Amanda looked on, Emily prepared the isoflurane, which was administered from a portable vaporizer. Keeping the bird in her hands, Karen held it steady as Emily slipped a mask made from a syringe case over the pitohui's beak and started the flow of anesthetic. Once the bird had grown limp, they took a blood sample and swabs from the mouth and cloaca, then attached a transmitter using a suture and subcutaneous prong. The transmitter itself weighed less than three grams, with an antenna four inches long extending between the bird's wings.

A few minutes later, the pitohui recovered and flew away. Amanda remained by the worktable, watching the bird until it had disappeared into the trees by the ridge. "So what happens now?"

"We wait," Karen said. "If we want to find where it roosts, we'll take our first reading after sundown."

Amanda turned aside. "Good. You can tell your crew that we're heading off tonight."

Hiroshi, who had been packing up the samples, seemed surprised. "Heading where?"

Karen glanced at Amanda. As her students listened, she explained the situation, saying only that they would help the new arrivals follow the pitohui to its roosting site. They seemed doubtful, but in the end, as Amanda had predicted, they trusted her enough to accept it.

Later that evening, they triangulated the bird's position with a directional antenna and receiver. Plotting the lines, they found that they intersected at an outlying island a considerable distance from where the bird had been released. Karen explained that birds often roosted on small offshore islands, commuting to the main island during the day, and that if they wanted to find more pitohuis there, they would need to arrive at their destination before dawn.

Before their departure, she asked around the village about the island in question, knowing that it would be necessary to obtain permission from any landowners. According to the lo cal headman, it had never been inhabited, with a rocky shore and poor soil that discouraged farming or settlement. He also insisted that they take his nephew Bulisa, a sleekly muscled youth of twenty, as a guide.

They set out shortly after midnight. For the last three weeks, they had traveled on a sail-boat, the Rosalind, crewed by a retired couple eager for the chance to visit these unfrequented islands. The only other crew member was a deckhand, Jesse, who was taking a year off from college.

As they headed across the darkened water, the wind began to rise, and the team spent most of the journey below deck. When Amanda left to place a call to her firm, Karen turned to Patrick, hoping to learn what he thought of his colleague's proposal. "What do you make of all this?"

Patrick smiled. "Amanda thinks highly of you, and I've learned to trust her judgment. In any case, we both want the same thing."

He reached into his pocket and removed a plastic vial. When he handed it over, Karen saw that it contained a melyrid beetle preserved in ethanol, its orange and black coloration remarkably similar to that of a hooded pitohui. When Emily pointed out the similarity, Patrick nodded. "It's interesting, isn't it, how the same colors appear when batrachotoxin is present. You see it in frogs in Colombia as well. It's a distinctive warning sign. And it's one we've learned to pursue."

He took back the vial, warming to his subject. "I've always been surprised that so few companies take this approach. Countless firms are trying to develop botanical drugs, but the trouble is knowing where to start. It simply isn't practical to screen every plant in the rain forest."

"That's why local information can be helpful," Hiroshi said, leaning against the bulkhead. "We're very interested in ethnobotany."

"As are we. But we also go even closer to the source. For the last few years, we've been focusing on aposematic animals, especially insects. Warning coloration advertises the presence of promising chemicals. Plants produce complex molecules that insects can put to use. To see them persist further up the food chain, as we do here, is especially striking."

He slid the vial back into his pocket. "And that's why I'm willing to go along with Amanda. The approach may be untested, but the colors are worth following. Batrachotoxin occurs in three other bird species, but the ones with the most potent poison are also the most brightly colored. Assuming, of course, that you can tell the real thing from the mimics."

Karen glanced up as Amanda returned to the cabin. "Yes. And it can be hard to know the difference."

A minute later, Jesse, the deckhand, appeared at the door. He was lanky and tan, with an easy smile, and Karen had gathered long ago that Emily had eyes for him. "We're close."

They went up the ladder to the aft deck, where a light swell was visible on the waves. Beneath the full moon, Karen got her first glimpse of their destination. Through her binoculars, she saw a small island of uplifted coral, its rocky beach giving way to forest and interior peaks of limestone.

It soon became clear that there was no suitable anchorage, which meant they needed to take the dinghies. As the sailboat made a wide tack along the surrounding reef, the team obtained another set of readings. Karen was triangulating the results when Hiroshi approached with Bulisa, the villager who had offered to serve as a guide. She glanced up from her laptop, which indicated that the bird's transmitter was still on the island. "What is it?"

"I've been talking to Bulisa," said Hiroshi, who spoke passable Yele. "He says he can take one of the dinghies closer to shore to look for a place to land. I'd like to go with him. We can't do much from this far out."

At first, Karen thought he was trying to impress her. A second later, she caught him looking at Amanda, who was listening from nearby, and realized that there might be other factors at work here. "Go ahead. But I want you to bring Jesse. And if you run into trouble, don't take any chances."

Ten minutes later, the three men climbed into the dinghy and set out across the water, with the sailboat holding station a kilometer from the island. For the next hour, Karen remained on deck, keeping an eye on the weather as the wind turned the boat slowly around on its anchor chain. Finally, she saw a gleam of light on shore, and word came over the radio that they had found a potential landing site. After loading their equipment into the second dinghy, Karen headed out with Amanda, Emily, and Patrick, the water choppy but bearable.

They followed the flashlights to a clear stretch of beach, where they pulled the dinghy onto the sand. As Hiroshi came up to meet them, Karen saw that the first dinghy was nowhere in sight. "We couldn't find a place to land, so we anchored at the reef, put on the cover, and swam the rest of the way," Hiroshi explained. "We were going to go back for it, but we can't until the waves settle down."

While Jesse and Bulisa went looking for a sheltered campsite, Karen took another set of readings, which indicated that the transmitter had not moved. She turned to the rest of the team. "Amanda and I will head into the forest. Emily and Hiroshi can set up the net lanes."

As Hiroshi unloaded the nets, Emily remained where she was. "Actually, if you don't mind, I'd like to come along."

Karen glanced over at Amanda. For a moment, she hesitated, although she would have found it hard to explain why. Finally, she nodded. "Fine. Bring whatever you think you'll need for the day."

Looking down the beach, she saw that Patrick was unpacking his own gear, which included a light trap and a portable generator. Then she set off with the others toward the signal, the sky brightening overhead.

From his place on the sand, Patrick watched as the three women went into the forest, then turned back to his own work.

For most of the trip, he had been watching Karen, as well as her interactions with Amanda. Anyone who survived for as long as she had was obviously shrewd and resourceful, but she was evidently still coming to terms with the new arrangement. He also suspected that she didn't know the whole truth behind the proposal, or how much of a hunch Amanda was really playing.

Once his own equipment was ready, Patrick went in the opposite direction, heading for a dense line of forest. Bulisa had indicated that he wanted to come as well, and as they passed into the trees, Patrick had trouble keeping up with the guide, who carried nothing but a bush knife and a rope of tobacco.

Moving out of sight of the beach, he found that the canopy blocked out nearly all the morning light. After hiking for a quarter of an hour through thorns and scrub, he paused in an area dense with shadow. As Bulisa watched, smoking, Patrick set up his light trap, stretching a white sheet across a folding frame. From his bag, he unpacked the generator and hooked it up to three mercury vapor lamps, which he trained on the sheet. Then he settled in to wait.

After a few minutes, he could see that Bulisa was growing bored, chopping aimlessly at the brush with his knife. Using hand gestures, Patrick managed to tell the guide that he could leave. Bulisa rose at once and headed into the trees, his footfalls all but silent, and disappeared.

Patrick sat back against a pandanus tree, keeping his eyes on the illuminated trap. The glowworms came first, followed by butterflies and locusts, landing on the fabric or falling to the dropcloth below. He made a note of each species he observed, but held off on collecting specimens for now.

A moment later, he rose. Moving closer to the dropcloth, he saw an insect with familiar coloration. He picked it up gently, turning it over in his gloved fingers. It was a melyrid beetle.

As he examined it, he began to grow excited. Until now, he had been skeptical of Amanda's proposal. She was talented but impatient, and he had spent enough time in the field to know it never paid to hurry. As he looked at the beetle now, however, he sensed that her approach might be worthwhile after all.

He let the beetle go, marking which way it flew. Shining his flashlight on the ground, he turned over leaves and checked the undergrowth. A few yards from the light trap, he saw more of the melyrids at his feet. They had gathered near a shrub at the base of another tree, its tall spikes covered with tubular orange flowers just large enough to fit over a fingertip.

Patrick was about to examine it when he heard something in the tree overhead. It was low and resonant, like the hooting of an owl.

He pointed his flashlight up. For an instant, he thought he saw movement there, but as he passed the beam across the branches, he could make out nothing but the knifelike network of leaves.

A second later, he heard the sound of hooting again. This time, it was behind him.

Patrick turned back toward the insect trap. Something was moving on the other side, sil houetted by the lamps against the fabric. He caught a momentary impression of a dark, winged shape, then saw the sheet billow inward as whatever was there climbed rapidly up the frame.

When it reached the top, he saw it clearly for the first time. Then it came for him, and he screamed.

II.

Karen moved carefully along a fallen log, making her way across the river. The bank here was slippery, hedged in by sago palms, and the decomposing vegetation created a smell like that of fermenting beer.

Amanda knelt by the river's dark surface. "Black water. That's a good sign. The soil is poor, so plants evolve lethal defenses to protect their nutrients. When the leaves fall, the toxins are leached out by the rain and flow into the river. White soil, black water. It's a clue we've learned to follow."

Karen sensed that she was showing off for Emily's benefit. Over the last few hours, as they picked their way through the forest, she had noticed the graduate student listening intently to everything Amanda said. She descended to the far side of the bank, where the two younger women were waiting. "Keep it down. We don't want to frighten the birds away."

Amanda looked up at the canopy, which was broken at intervals by shafts of curdled light. "Should we get another reading?"

Karen nodded. "You can take one here. I'll pace off a hundred yards and do another." She glanced at Emily. "Are you coming?"

"I think I'll stay," Emily said. "I'd like to get a closer look at the riverbank."

Karen only headed off without a word. Glancing back, she saw the two women bending over the receiver, their heads close together, and felt a curious pang of jealousy. Then she turned aside.

So far, their progress had been slow, and she expected that they would not return to camp until nightfall. The forest was full of barbed ferns and long tunnels of rattan, which they had to hack through with machetes, clumsy in the long sleeves they wore against mosquitoes. At fifty, Karen was in excellent shape, but as she watched Amanda and Emily move with comparative ease through the undergrowth, she was reminded that she was no longer as young as she had once been.

When she was one hundred yards away, she took a reading, noting the direction of the signal and her own coordinates. Then she raised her binoculars. She had often heard birds flying overhead, but it was hard to get a good look, and she had not observed any pitohuis.

Karen passed the binoculars across the crown of a pandanus tree, then brought them back to the same spot. For a second, she thought she had glimpsed something moving in the leaves. She studied the tree without result for another minute, then shouldered her pack and retraced her steps.

The walk back was easier, since she had left a clear path through the scrub. When she drew close to the others, she heard them talking, and for reasons she didn't fully understand, she paused to listen. Amanda was halfway through a response to a question: "—ten times more poisonous than curare. One hundred and fifty micrograms is enough to kill a human being within minutes."

Emily's voice carried easily under the trees. "So why are you so eager to find it?"

Amanda had evidently given this answer before. "The most potent poisons often lead to the most useful drugs. Look at digitalis. Digoxin will stop your heart, but it can also start it again. Batrachotoxin has similar properties. It locks the sodium channels in nerve and muscle cells so they can't reset or fire, which may have applications in treating heart failure. But we need to find the plant first."

Karen heard Emily moving back toward the river. "Can't you just synthesize it?"

"Yes, but it's expensive," Amanda said, her voice coming closer to where Karen was standing. "Most alkaloids are easier to extract from the source. But the plant alone may not be enough. The beetles seem to modify it, so we need to look at the whole system, as far up the chain as it goes."

From behind the tree where she had halted, Karen saw Emily kneel on the bank. "It sounds like an interesting problem."

"It is. That's why I joined Allelon. It allows me to keep doing the work I care about."

As she listened, Karen sensed that the mood was shifting. Making her way toward the others, she reflected that although she had tried to pass her values and experience along to her students, it would be harder for them than it had been for her. She had always been concerned with the problem of survival, and by keeping her head down and spending more time in the field, she had lasted for longer than anyone could have expected. In the end, however, she had outlived her usefulness, with nothing left but a spotless reputation and a diminishing circle of influence.

When they triangulated their readings, the results pinpointed the signal to a region of forest half a kilometer away. As they moved on, Amanda picked up the thread of the earlier conversation. "Of course, the real danger is deforestation. These islands have never been completely surveyed, and they're full of undescribed species that run the risk of being destroyed."

"I can see why you'd be worried," Karen said, stepping over a row of pitcher plants that gaped up like mouths from the ground. "If the forest disappears, your business model goes with it."

Amanda smiled tightly. "Allelon takes these issues very seriously. The more we learn about what we have here, the greater the incentive to protect it. It's the most powerful argument for conservation I've found. And we could use your expertise. Your example would mean a great deal to what we're doing—"

Karen noticed that Emily was watching for her reaction. "I'm flattered. But I'm afraid I'm too old to change my ways now."

According to their global positioning unit, they were close to the location where the transmitter had been detected. Karen signaled to the others to be quiet. Except for the rustling of wind in the branches above, the forest was silent, but as she scrutinized the canopy through her binoculars, she was struck again by the sense that something was lurking just out of sight.

A second later, Amanda called her over. She was studying something on the ground. "Take a look at this."

Karen made her way to where the other women were standing. Bending down, she saw a small object in the undergrowth, nearly concealed by the ferns. It was the body of a pitohui.

As Emily pulled the ferns to either side, Karen got a better look. The bird had been partially eaten, the soft tissues of its belly hollowed out and its hind legs gone, with glossy brown ants crawling across the ruin of its wings. Using a latex glove, Karen extracted a tiny device from the remains. It was the transmitter. The antenna was bent, but it was still working.

She showed it to the others. "Looks like something got to it first. A lizard, maybe."

Emily frowned at the pitohui. "So why didn't the poison in its feathers protect it?"

"Even the best defenses can fail." Karen photographed the remains. "Bag it up."

As Emily collected what was left of the bird, brushing away the insects and wrapping up the rest, Karen raised her binoculars again. Amanda spoke quietly at her side. "What do you think?"

"I think we should head back," Karen said, keeping her lenses trained on the canopy. "Hiroshi may have caught other specimens. Hopefully they'll be luckier than this one was—"

She broke off. Looking up, she saw branches tremble as something moved through the trees. She kept the glasses steady, focusing on the spot where she had seen the disturbance, but whatever had caused it had already vanished. Karen lowered the binoculars. "Let's go."

Their hike back to camp was conducted in relative silence. As they neared the beach, rain began to fall, a drumbeat that began as a rumor in the canopy and grew into a steady downpour.

When they emerged from the forest again, it was dusk. Leaving the shelter of the trees, Karen found that the wind had continued to rise, the water combed by dark swells. Hiroshi and Jesse had made camp in a sheltered area beneath a limestone cliff, a hundred yards from where they had left the second dinghy, with a groundsheet and worktable under a canvas awning. She noticed that two members of the team were missing. "Where are Patrick and Bulisa?"

"I haven't seen Patrick since this morning," Hiroshi said. "He went into the forest to set up a light trap. Bulisa came back on his own, but he took off an hour ago. Any luck on your end?"

"Not exactly." Karen quickly explained what they had found. "What about the nets?"

Hiroshi fished out his field notes. "A slow day. Two specimens. A black sunbird and shin ing flycatcher, but no pitohuis. There are fewer birds here than on any island we've seen so far. And we need to take down the net lanes."

Karen knew that he was right. Under most circumstances, dusk would have been a favorable time to catch birds, but the nets could not be used safely in the rain. "That's fine. Amanda and Emily can give you a hand."

Amanda seemed less than pleased about the delay, but she finally joined the others at the nets. As Karen got out her laptop, Jesse radioed the Rosalind. According to the captain, with waves rising and winds over twenty knots, it would be safest for the team to wait out the storm. Jesse glanced at Karen, who nodded. "We'll manage. Let's circle back in the morning."

After signing off, Jesse went to make dinner, while Karen started to organize her own notes. Spreading a map across the worktable, its corners held down with small stones, she tried to lay out what she knew so far, listening to the rain beating against the canvas. The relative absence of birds was surprising, but she knew that island rules governed the distribution of species, which rarely consisted of a random sample from the mainland. There were countless factors involved.

As she considered this, Karen thought back to the dead pitohui they had discovered in the forest. Taking out the remains that Emily had collected, she glanced at them briefly, and she was about to pack them up again when her attention was struck by something else.

She put on gloves and opened the bag, withdrawing the object that had caught her eye. It was a long flight feather that had been gathered up with the others, but as she looked at it now, something about it seemed strange. It was black, iridescent, and considerably larger than the rest. Frowning, she removed one of her gloves and ran a hand across the barbs, which were stiff and resilient. When she touched her fingertips to her mouth, she felt her lips go numb.

A second later, she heard a shout. Turning, she saw a man emerge from the trees. It was Bulisa. He had something flung over his back, and as he came forward, she realized that it was a body.

Karen rose from the table, the feather fluttering from her fingers to the ground, where it was carried away by the wind. She ran toward Bulisa, who saw her coming. Halting, he laid the dead man on the sand. It was Patrick. As Karen looked down at his open eyes, they began to fill up with rain.

Hearing footsteps, she saw Amanda racing up the beach, white with shock. "What happened?"

Karen only took the dead man by the arms. She motioned to Bulisa. "Help me."

With Jesse's assistance, they took the body and laid it beneath the awning. Examining it more closely, Karen saw bite marks on its face and shoulders. Rain had washed away most of the blood, but it was clear that scavengers or predators had been at the remains for some time.

Then she saw that the body's arms were bent inward, the fists clenched, as if Patrick had convulsed before dying. She looked at Amanda. "I think he died of batrachotoxin poisoning."

Amanda stared. All the color in her face had drained away. "That's impossible."

Karen saw Emily and Hiroshi approaching with the nets. Bulisa was standing apart from the others, the rain pouring down over his shoulders. She motioned to Hiroshi. "Ask him what happened."

Hiroshi turned to Bulisa and spoke in halting Yele. Bulisa replied in a low voice, with Hiroshi translating as best as he could. "He says he left Patrick alone in the woods to go exploring. When he saw that Patrick hadn't returned to camp, he went looking for him. It took him a long time to find the spot again. The generator had gone out. Patrick was on the ground, and there was something on his chest. Before he could get any closer, it flew off. He says—" Hiroshi broke off abruptly and looked at the others. "He says it was a ropen."

Karen noticed that only Jesse seemed to know what this meant. "That's ridiculous."

Amanda was still looking at the body. The band that held back her hair had come undone. "What's a ropen?"

"It's a cryptid," Karen said sharply. "An unknown animal. It's supposed to live on islands in New Guinea. The stories claim that it's some kind of flying creature with wings like a bat."

Jesse was already nodding. "I've heard the villagers talking about it. They see it flying over the reefs and beaches at night. It eats fish and birds, but also robs graves and carries away children and animals. And it glows in the dark. Some people think it's a kind of pterosaur—"

"Which is absurd," Karen said. "It's more likely to be a frigatebird or flying fox."

"A frigatebird didn't do this," Emily said, pointing at the teeth marks. She turned to Hiroshi. "Ask him to describe it."

After hearing the question, Bulisa knelt, using his body to shield the ground from the rising wind, and drew something with the tip of his bush knife in the dampened sand. Hiroshi translated what he was saying. "He says the ropen had claws halfway up its wings. A tail with a diamond at one end. A bright patch, like fire, on its body. And a head like a crocodile."

Karen looked at what Bulisa had drawn. Under his knife, a sketch had taken shape of a creature with wings and a long tail, and it did look something like a pterosaur. "How big was it?"

When the question had been translated, Bulisa held his hands about four feet apart. Karen turned back to the body. "It could have been a hawk or eagle. They'll sometimes feed on carrion—"

"But we haven't seen any," Emily said. "And those bites weren't made by an eagle."

"They also weren't what killed him." Karen looked at Amanda. "What are the symptoms of batrachotoxin poisoning?"

Amanda's eyes remained fixed on the dead man. "Muscle contractions. Cardiac arrest and convulsions. But you can't get a lethal dose by handling birds or beetles." She turned toward Karen. "What am I going to tell the firm?"

"I don't know. But we can't stay here." Karen tried to take things one step at a time, sensing that the others were waiting for her to tell them what to do. "We need to bring the body back to the main island. If we leave now, we should be able to get to the boat before the storm gets worse. Jesse, tell them we're coming. Hiroshi and Emily, help me pack up here."

She looked up the beach, where a few mist nets were still visible in the rain. "Amanda, go with Bulisa and take down the rest of the nets. I'll see after this. But we need to leave soon."

After a second, Amanda tore her eyes from the body and headed off with Bulisa. Karen watched as she went up the beach, then glanced back down at the ground. The wind had erased the drawing in the sand.

Moving as quickly as they could, they wrapped Patrick's body in a white groundsheet and tied it with nylon cord. As Jesse and Hiroshi carried the bundle to the dinghy, Karen began packing up the rest of the equipment, starting with the laptop and satellite phone. Sensing that Emily was shaken, she touched the younger woman's arm. "Listen, it's going to be all right."

Emily nodded, but in the fading light, Karen saw that she was barely holding herself together. Once the first bag had been packed, she gave it to Emily to bring to the dinghy. As she did, she noticed for the first time that the sun had gone down, and it was growing too dark to see clearly.

Taking the bag, Emily switched on a flashlight and went to join the others. Karen kept an eye on her as she walked away in the rain, the wind blowing her own graying hair to one side, and was starting to fold up the worktable when she saw something in the trees by the sand.

Karen turned. Something dark and winged was crawling up a sago palm less than ten yards away. Her first incoherent thought was that she knew exactly what it was. And it was nothing like a pterosaur.

Before she could react, she heard a scream. Karen spun to look up the shore. Through the storm, it was hard to make out the dinghy, but the shriek could only have come from Emily.

Karen picked up her own flashlight and ran into the rain. Up ahead, she could see the glow from the other lights. When she had covered close to a hundred yards of beach, she found Emily standing by herself, backing up slowly, her flashlight clutched loosely at her side.

Following her eyes, Karen saw something on the ground. It was Jesse. He was on his back, his flashlight lying a few feet away, and at first glance, it seemed as if a misshapen black lump had risen from his chest. Next to the dinghy, where the body in its plastic shroud had been placed, Hiroshi was swinging a machete, fighting off something in the darkness.

Then the lump on Jesse's chest straightened up. For an instant, Karen caught a flash of something orange, framed by feathers of black, and then it flapped its wings and came for her.

Karen ran. As she did, she saw more creatures detach themselves from the dinghy. A few went for Hiroshi, who fell in a hail of dark bodies, but more flew her way on their heavy wings.

The flashlight was still in her hand. Without thinking, she threw it to one side and saw one of the winged things detach from the others to follow it. When the pinwheeling light hit the sand, it caught the creature briefly in its beam, giving her a glimpse of claws and a mouthful of needlelike teeth.

Behind her, there was another scream. Karen turned her head and saw that one of the creatures had landed on Emily's back, making it seem as if a pair of inky wings had sprouted between the young woman's shoulders. Emily cried out in disgust, flinging it away, but the blood was already running down her arms, and Karen realized that it had bitten her.

The others were still coming. Karen continued to run toward the campsite, the wind driving the rain against her face. When she looked back again, she saw Emily take two steps forward, then fall convulsing to the ground, her legs kicking up divots of sand before the paralysis took hold. The creature she had flung aside flew forward again and perched on her back, tearing at her with its claws as Emily spasmed once more, then grew still.

Karen had just enough time to see the other creatures circle back to feed on the fallen. Then she ran for her life.

III.

As Karen neared what was left of the camp, she saw Amanda and Bulisa racing forward, their flashlights shining in the darkness. She gestured at them urgently. "Turn them off. They're drawn to it."

When they were slow to respond, Karen pulled the flashlights from their hands herself and looked back toward the dinghy. Through the veil of rain, she saw the creatures, which she had already begun to think of as the cryptids, tearing at the victims on the ground. A pair of abandoned flashlights lay in the sand, illuminating the bodies. None of them were moving.

She turned to the others. "Get back to camp now. We don't have much time." Taking Amanda by the shoulders, she all but pushed her toward the campsite. "Move. If they bite us, we'll die—"

This broke the spell into which Amanda had fallen. They ran through the rain toward the awning, with Bulisa following close behind with his bush knife. When they were under the canvas again, Karen ventured another look at the cryptids. The bodies up the beach were keeping them busy, but she didn't think they would ignore the rest of them for long.

Looking down, she saw the emergency kit that Hiroshi and the others had carried from the dinghy when they swam ashore. She tore it open, rooting through its contents, knowing already that she would not find what she needed. They had no guns or weapons. Except—

Her hand closed around the flare gun. Pulling it out, she loaded it with shaking fingers and gave it to Bulisa. "Stay here. Shoot anything that comes close. But don't pull the trigger unless you have to. You understand?"

Bulisa seemed to grasp what she was saying. He tightened his grip on the gun and turned toward the dinghy, standing beside the awning in the rain. A pile of mist nets lay at his feet. Karen scooped up one of the bundles and thrust a pole into Amanda's hands. "You remember how to do this?"

Amanda stared blankly at her for a second, then nodded, her face pale. Karen took the other pole and pushed it into the sand, keeping an eye on the cryptids. Remembering the claws she had seen, she sensed it would not be nearly enough, but it was better than nothing at all.

After driving the pointed end of the pole as far into the ground as it would go, she slid the loops over it, then helped Amanda extend the net so it stood between the awning and the dinghy. Taking a mallet, she drove in the four stakes, securing the pole, then tossed it to Amanda as Bulisa remained on guard. When they were done, she tested the net with one hand. It wasn't much, not by any stretch of the imagination, but with luck, they could reinforce it later.

Amanda had already picked up a second net. "Two more. We can make a triangle."

Karen heard a tremor in her voice, but saw that she was keeping herself under control. She took up a second pole. A minute later, they had strung three nets in a triangular barricade around the awning, the cryptids by the dinghy continuing to feed. In case they had to leave in a hurry, Karen left a gap between the two poles at the rear, propping up the folded table to cover it.

Finally, she turned toward the water. The waves were still swelling violently in the wind, but she could just make out the lights of the sailboat anchored a kilometer away. With a stab of dread, she remembered that the satellite phone and laptop had already been taken to the dinghy, and there was no way they could retrieve it now. But they still had the radio.

Crouching under the canvas, she tried to raise the boat. For a minute, there was nothing but static. She tried again, the panic she had fought away threatening to rise, and finally the captain answered. "What's going on?"

"We're in trouble," Karen said, swallowing hard. "Four of us are dead, including Jesse. Amanda and Bulisa are the only ones left."

There was a disbelieving pause on the other end. "What the hell happened?"

"It's hard to explain." Karen took a breath, then looked out at the cryptids at the other end of the beach. "There's a predator here. We're pinned down at the campsite. You need to put out a distress call."

"I'll radio the mainland," the captain said, his voice creased with static. "And we'll take the boat as close as we can. But there's no anchorage here. And even if we can get a rescue copter out in a storm like this, it may not be for hours. You'll need to use the dinghies."

"That may not be possible. One of them is out of bounds. The other—" She glanced at the guide. "Talk to Bulisa. Get him to tell you exactly where the first dinghy was anchored."

She motioned to the guide, who had a short exchange with the captain in Yele, pointing toward the reef to the southwest. When she got back on the radio, the captain's voice was tense. "He says they anchored it half a kilometer from the beach. They were able to swim the rest of the way, but that was before the storm. What are you dealing with there?"

"I haven't seen it before," Karen said. "Nobody has. All I know is that they'll kill anything that gets too close. I'll take another look and see if I can tell you more. Just place that distress call."

When Karen signed off, she saw a hard look on Amanda's face. "We'll swim for it."

"I don't think so." Karen turned to the ocean, where the wind was blowing the rain in nearly horizontal sheets. Years ago, she had been swept overboard from a research yacht in a gale, and she knew how easy it would be for the waves to pull them under. "Once the storm ends, we'll go. But not now."

Amanda looked out at the carnage at the dinghy. "I'm not just going to wait for them to come for us."

"We're not going to wait," Karen said. "We're going to get ready. Come on."

As Bulisa continued to stand watch, the women took stock of their resources. Most of their equipment was still there, along with an assortment of camping gear. Looking at the stove and its containers of white gas, Karen realized that she needed a better sense of what they were up against. "Wait here."

Her binoculars were lying by her pack. Picking them up, she went to the edge of the awning, where Bulisa stood in silence, and trained them on the scene up the beach. The rain was coming down hard, but the moon had risen, and in its milky light, she got a good look at the cryptids for the first time.

Through the binoculars, she counted seven creatures by the dinghy, feeding on the dead and tearing at the shroud with Patrick's remains. When she compared them to the human figures on the sand, she estimated that they were the size of harpy eagles, with wingspans between three and four feet. Their feathers were black, but where the wings met the body, she saw patches of iridescent orange, so bright that they seemed to glow in the moonlight.

Karen studied the nearest cryptid, which was crouching over what was left of Emily. It had wings on its fore and hind legs, trimmed with slender black pinions. When it raised its head from the girl's body, it revealed a long neck, balanced by a stiff tail with a fan of feathers at one end. Along with the clawed wings that Bulisa had described, it had talons on its hind feet, including a recurved sickle claw on the second toe, which it used to perch on its prey.

She watched as they tore at the bodies with their sharp front teeth. They were clumsy on the ground, keeping their forelimbs raised to avoid dragging their wings on the sand, but seemed to have no trouble flying in short bursts in the rain. As she looked on, two of the cryptids on Jesse's body began to fight, hissing, with the larger one driving away the smaller, which flew several yards to where Hiroshi had fallen, his machete still clutched in one hand.

Karen saw that Amanda was watching the cryptids as well. "What are they?"

Instead of responding, Karen went to her pack. Opening it, she fished out her camera with its long lens, then rejoined the others, taking photographs through the mesh of the net.

As she framed the cryptids in her viewfinder, she found that it helped to put things into words. "They don't look like pack hunters. I think they're just being drawn to the same kill. They have large eyes, which means they probably hunt at night, but at least one got Patrick before dark, which means we can't count on them leaving when the sun rises." Using her zoom lens, she took a picture of the closest cryptid. "And they have iridescent feathers. You only see those on birds that are active during the day. It's warning coloration—"

Amanda seemed to understand what she meant. "Like the feathers on the pitohuis."

Karen lowered the camera. Despite her horror, she felt a strange exhilaration. "Yes. The same colors. I think they feed on them. Maybe on the beetles as well. The poison is moving up the food chain, like Patrick said, but there's another level we didn't know was there. It's in their bite, and probably in their skin and feathers. They use it to kill prey and defend themselves from threats. Like us."

Amanda continued to stare at the cryptids. "You think they're territorial?"

"Maybe. They aren't monsters. This whole island could be their territory, a nesting ground, and we invaded it. Which is all the more reason for us to clear out when we can. It's only a matter of time before they come after us." Karen slid the camera into her pack again. "But even if the storm dies down, once we head for the water, we're exposed. And I doubt we can outrun them."

"So we need a distraction," Amanda said. "You said they were drawn to the light?"

"Yes, I think so." Looking into her eyes, Karen began to sense what she was thinking. "They're like birds of prey. Eagles and hawks are drawn to wildfires to catch fleeing animals—"

"Then we'll give them something to go after. But not until we're ready to run."

Amanda quickly explained her idea. Glancing around the camp, Karen observed that they had everything they needed, and when she saw the metal cylinder at the edge of the awning, something else occurred to her. She picked up the vaporizer. "All right. But it has to be fast."

As they put their plan into action, more cryptids arrived from the forest, drawn by the promise of carrion. Bulisa kept watch as Amanda reinforced the nets, piling equipment boxes at the base of each pole. Beneath the awning, Karen laid out a set of aluminum rods that she had obtained by taking apart a folding stool. Each had a plastic bag wrapped around one end.

Amanda knelt beside her. "You still haven't told me what you think they are."

Karen saw that talking would keep both of them calm. "They look like dromaeosaurs. We know from the fossil record that they were related to birds. They were feathered, and at least two species may have been capable of flight. It's consistent with descriptions of the ropen. There's also evidence that some were venomous. It's controversial, but some of the remains show signs of fanglike maxillary teeth, along with skull cavities that may have been venom glands."

Amanda turned back to the growing flock by the dinghy. "You think they're getting batrachotoxin in their diet?"

"That's how it looks. It's possible the glands evolved for some other purpose, then adapted to incorporate batrachotoxin. But I can't say for sure, any more than I know how they managed to survive here for so long. They kept out of sight, stayed on an island that didn't draw attention, and protected their territory. At this point, you know as much as I do."

Amanda did not reply at once. For a long moment, she kept her eyes on the creatures, and she seemed about to say something else when a cryptid came shrieking out of the darkness.

It hit the mist net three feet from where they were seated, rocking it on its poles, and clutched the net in the claws of its hind feet. As Amanda screamed, Karen saw its talons tearing at the nylon, slicing the mesh, and realized that it was on the point of bringing it all down.

The aluminum rods were lined up on the groundsheet. Karen seized the one closest to her, tearing off the bag at the top. Underneath, a rag had been tied to one end and doused with isoflurane.

As Bulisa stood ready with his knife, Karen came forward and pressed the rag against the cryptid's face. She kept it there, holding her breath, as the creature hissed and fought. Within seconds, it began to slow, sliding down the net to the ground. She continued to push the cloth into its feathered snout, her heart going like mad. It took a long time for the anesthetic to take effect, but at last, it ceased writhing and lay motionless on the white sand.

Karen stared at it. It was a small cryptid with a wingspan of three feet, strangely beautiful, its black tail and neck shot through with bands of orange. A few strands of nylon were entwined in its claws.

She heard footsteps. Looking up, she saw that Bulisa had squeezed through the gap at the rear of the enclosure, his bush knife in one hand. Before Karen could warn him away, he was kneeling by the cryptid, the blade flashing in the moonlight as he brought it down again and again, stabbing at it until the blood flowed.

The cryptid opened its eyes. Hissing, it turned and bit Bulisa on the inside of the forearm. Bulisa shouted in rage, shaking his hand free. He stabbed the creature again, nearly taking off its head, then looked down at his own skin. The marks of the fangs were clearly visible.

Bulisa turned to face the women, who were staring at him through the net. Then he rose slowly to his feet, holding the cryptid by the legs, and staggered up the beach. As Karen watched, he began to convulse, but he kept going, trying to put as much distance as he could between himself and the others. He was very strong. After fifty paces, he fell and did not move again.

The two women waited behind the nets for the rest of the night. As several cryptids flew out from the dinghy to feed on Bulisa's body, as well as that of their own dead companion, Karen stood watch with the flare gun, keeping one eye on the waves. The rain was steady and unyielding, the wind still strong, and the latest transmission from the boat had only confirmed what she already knew. There would be no rescue until the storm had passed.

After repairing the torn net as well as they could, the women fell into an exhausted silence. They had each stripped down to a shirt and shorts, and Amanda had tied together two pairs of empty water jugs, allowing them to be worn in a rough harness. Once all the preparations were in place, Karen took a final set of pictures, then buried her camera and notes.

Feeling her eyelids drooping, Karen remembered that she hadn't slept in over twenty-four hours. She looked at Amanda, who seemed equally drained, and saw that they had to keep talking. "Are you married?"

Amanda glanced up, then smiled faintly. "No. There never seemed to be any time."

"I was married once," Karen said. "Years ago. I wish I could say it ended well."

"I know." Amanda looked out at the ocean. "I know a lot about you. You're the reason I'm here. And I'm not just talking about this island. You didn't recognize me, but when we first met, years ago, you were the woman I wanted to be. It's why I decided to pursue this kind of work. Then I woke up one morning and realized I was nothing like you at all."

Karen kept her eyes on the waves. "I think we're more alike than you know."

Amanda shook her head. "No. Not where it counts. I was always playing it safe, looking out for myself, until I forgot why it seemed so important. It was the only way I'd ever found to keep myself going. That's when I knew I had to track you down. I wanted to see if you were what I remembered, if you still existed at all. And I wanted to convince you to become part of what I was doing, which would tell me I'd made the right choice. Even if—"

She hesitated, then continued in a voice that was almost a whisper. "Even if it meant forcing you to pay attention. So I arranged for the funding for your survey to be cut off. One of our advisors is on the board of the foundation that denied the grant. I knew it was the only way you would agree to help us. It was a test. An experiment. And it's because of me that we're here."

Looking within herself, Karen found that she was beyond anger. She wanted to tell Amanda that she had been driven by her own needs, an ambition so great that it fled from recognition, while always secretly hoping to be found. In the end, she only turned toward where Emily and Hiroshi were lying, thinking again of how they had trusted her, even as she could barely hold together her own life. "It isn't your fault. The decision was mine. I didn't want to admit I had no choice. And I knew that if I said the word, the others would follow. It's the only power I had left—"

Even as she spoke, Karen saw that the wind was dying down, and the rattle of rain against the canvas had ceased. A second later, she noticed something else. On the sand before the awning, closer than the bodies, several birds were pecking at the ground. They were hooded pitohuis. "Look."

Amanda lifted her head. For a long moment, they regarded the birds, not speaking, and Karen realized that it was almost time. If they were going to go for the dinghy, it had to be now.

She was about to say this when she saw the pitohuis take wing and fly away. Feeling her dread rise, she got to her feet, and even as she did, a chorus of hooting erupted from the trees.

Karen turned and saw the cryptids coming. There were seven or more flying out from the forest, and although their movements did not seem coordinated, they were closing in together on the enclosure. Amanda scrambled up beside her. For a second, her eyes met Karen's.

Then the cryptids hit the net. Karen saw several bounce back, falling to the sand, but others clung to the webbing, swarming against it and tearing at the strands with their claws. The largest began to climb to the top, and as she watched, it began to haul itself over, its talons scrabbling at the mesh.

Karen ran to the rear of the barricade. Pulling down the table that leaned against the gap, she squeezed through and yanked Amanda after her, seeing that the cryptids were already flying their way.

Amanda took off for the water. As the cryptids closed in, Karen raised the flare gun and fired at the equipment they had heaped on the groundsheet. Earlier, they had doused the gear with white gas from the stove, and as soon as the flare struck the pile, the mound went up in flames.

Karen let the gun fall and ran for the waves, aiming for a point ten yards from where Amanda had gone, hoping to divide the attention of the cryptids. It was fifty long paces away. Out of the corner of one eye, she saw the cryptids detaching themselves from the bodies by the dinghy, most of them flying toward the fire, but a few bearing silently in her direction.

She saw Amanda reach the water. A second later, she was running into the surf. As the water rose around her legs, it slowed her down, but she forced herself to push onward, not daring to look back.

When the ocean was up to the level of her chest, she began to swim. The plastic containers around her shoulders gave her some buoyancy, but the waves were still rough, and she fought to keep her head above the surface. A wave swept across her body, nearly turning her over, but she managed to right herself and kick into deeper water. Amanda was nowhere in sight.

Karen closed her eyes, her arms and legs working in the salt sea. From behind her, she heard what might have been hooting, but it might also have been the thunder of water in her ears. She swam on, trembling at the edge of exhaustion, and when she opened her eyes again, she saw that the sky had begun to brighten. After all she had endured, she told herself, she would not die here.

Before she knew what was happening, a wave bore her forward, and she nearly collided with the dinghy. She clung to the side, feeling herself rise and fall in the water, and breathed. Then she worked her way around to the stern, releasing the cover as she went. Taking hold of the gunwale, she pushed herself up, arms straining as the dinghy tipped under her weight, and slid on board.

A second later, Amanda appeared, fighting her way through the waves. Karen went to the bow, taking up the sculling oar, and extended it so Amanda could grab the blade. For a second, she felt the tension on the shaft that joined them together, equally balanced on each end. Grasping the handle, she pulled, leaning back to keep the dinghy stable, and hauled her in.

The motor started on the first try. Before moving away, they sat for a moment in silence, soaked and panting. Amanda was the first to speak. "I can't believe they were still there."

In the gray false dawn, Karen could make out the shoreline. The remains of the camp were smoldering, sending a column of smoke into the sky, the bodies of the dead ranged along the sand. All of the cryptids were gone.

"Some things can survive for longer than you'd think," Karen said. Then she turned the dinghy around and headed for the Rosalind.

In Perpetuity

Ellis Morning | 6014 words

"Don't you love a hint of slag on the evening breeze?"

Ali Nazari raised an eyebrow at his colleague, Victor Talbot, even though his mirrored visor hid the gesture. The pair bounded along the dusty lunar surface toward their rover, carrying a loaded rectangular container between them. Gravity was more suggestion than imperative, which helped. On Earth, there was no way the lanky pair would have managed it.

"What breeze?" Nazari asked. "If you smell anything in there, I guarantee it's not slag."

Talbot cackled over Nazari's transmitter. With his free hand, he pantomimed tugging at the collar of his environment suit. "You buffed my poetic streak right out of existence. Congrats. What's the fate of this batch?"

"Probably nothing we haven't already seen," Nazari replied. "I can think of so many better things."

"Like what?"

"Well... like building a fort."

"Complete with slag-snowballs?"

"Seriously. Shape bricks, make a slag-based cement, see how it works. When pyrolysis takes off, slag will be cheap." Nazari hefted his end of the container for emphasis. "It's the building material of the future."

"Lunar suburban sprawl. I can hardly wait," Talbot grumbled.

They reached their skeletal vehicle, added their burden to the existing stack of containers in the rear, and secured it for the drive home. Each lock slid into place without a sound. Plastic panels beside the locks shifted from red to green to confirm they were fastened.

"Don't want your own place to call home?" Nazari asked.

"Negative. Once one schmuck has a house, everyone's gonna want one. That leads to neighborhoods and, worse, homeowners' associations." Talbot pounded a fist against a stubborn lock. "Then we'll need roads, parking lots, traffic signals, enforcement... you might as well go back to Earth."

"We might not have a choice on that count," Nazari reminded him in a subdued tone. "The budget-axe drops any day now."

Talbot pointed toward the rolling horizon. "Give me stark barren pioneer country any day!"

Nazari allowed the evasion, only to revert to a different sticking point with a teasing grin Talbot couldn't see. "If you stay in colony dorms, how will you ever get time alone with that programmer you're always ogling? Samantha?"

"Oh, can it," Talbot snapped. "It's not like I stand a chance."

The men inspected their rigging one last time. Before climbing into the passenger seat, Nazari turned back the way they came. He faced a shallow depression in the mare, where suited chemists hovered like bees around a vacuum pyrolysis apparatus, the largest and most efficient to date. While Nazari and Talbot hauled away the byproducts of their experiment for analysis, the chemists harvested their end goal: pure oxygen.

Nazari raised an arm to wave farewell to whomever might be watching. That was when he noticed something unusual upon the ground, not far from his feet. To most, it would have been a mundane rock, one of millions littering Oceanus Procellarum. To Nazari, it stood out like obsidian in a riverbed. He drifted over for a closer look.

"Drop something, Ali?" Talbot asked.

Nazari knelt and retrieved the rock. He held the football-sized, pockmarked specimen close to his visor, trying to get a feel for its texture through his gloves. "I thought this whole area was titanium-poor... but this looks like pure ilmenite," he mused.

Talbot was at Nazari's side in an instant. "Hey, that's something! Don't tell the chemists, they'll want to torch it. Mind if I look it over?"

"Negative, I insist."

Talbot lifted the rock from Nazari's hands, and returned to the rover to prepare it for the return trip and its eventual exposure to air. Meanwhile, Nazari knelt again. With the palm of his hand, he smoothed the patch of lunar dust where the rock had lain. He then used a finger to trace an X, along with his initials and the date. If left alone, the markings would last as long as the Moon did.

Nazari and Talbot huddled before the glow of a terminal monitor in the Lunar Science lab. Ambient lighting had shifted into night mode hours earlier, prompting the men to balance battery-operated lamps atop the clutter on their workbench. They were alone; the hum of power supplies and the ventilation system filled their ears. This was the only time during which one could pursue matters of personal curiosity without absorbing flak from one's superiors.

Talbot squinted and fiddled with dials, his angular neck craned to its limit. Nazari sat behind him, occasionally remembering to sip from a thermos of tea that had cooled long ago. His gaze never deviated from the monitor, which displayed the fractured crystalline patterns of the sample they analyzed with a scanning electron microscope.

"You sure that's a low-titanium region?" Talbot asked. "The chemists'll be thrilled to hear otherwise."

"No map I've seen shows that high a concentration at that spot," Nazari replied. "Granted, the maps we have are pretty old."

"No erosion, no water... no wind, quakes, microbes, volcanism, or continental drift," Talbot rattled off. "Selenology: geology for the dead lazy."

Nazari shrugged. "Maybe a meteor impact in a titanium-rich mare sent over some ejecta. I'll show this to the boss. What are the odds he'll put us on point for an investigation?"

"About as likely as shedding gofer detail for something dignified," Talbot answered.

Nazari frowned. "Think if we do enough homework ahead of time, it might convince him otherwise?"

In a rare display of restraint, Talbot waited for him to continue the thought.

"When we go back out for slag, we can scout for more ilmenite, try to establish a pattern of distribution," Nazari explained. "Meanwhile, we can hunt through old data for meteor impacts that might have thrown the ilmenite that far."

"Think it would've been that recent—as in, recorded-history recent?" Talbot asked.

"Probably not, but there's a recorded history on the Moon's surface that's a lot older," Nazari said. "We can look for craters that indicate a collision with the requisite force, at least narrow it down to a specific region."

"Big region, I'm guessing."

"Information Science ought to have something to get us started. I'll leave a note." Nazari darted from his chair. The action lifted him off his feet for a moment, but he quickly regained his balance. His terminal rested on the opposite end of the same workbench. He tapped it awake, then flipped to a messaging client. Its readout made him blink in surprise. "The IS main desk is still online. At this hour?"

"You don't think we're the only night owls in the Luna-Bin, do you?" Talbot asked.

Nazari sent a brief message to the main desk. The response appeared in an instant: BY ALL MEANS.

"Might as well head over now." Nazari doubted he would get any sleep otherwise. He logged out of his terminal.

"That's right, leave me to clean up," Talbot grumbled.

"You mind?"

The false annoyance disappeared behind a smirk. "No, but when I finally get to work out why there's so much thorium in Compton-Belkovich, you owe me."

Exiting the lab deposited Nazari into a metallic corridor with a high ceiling and walls lined with labeled doors. This was the Lunar Science pod, in which he spent the majority of his days. At either end of the pod were openings to tunnels branching to other pods. He opted for one of these.

Unlike the pods, the tunnels connecting them were lengthy and transparent on all sides, offering a view of the colony, the mare in which it rested—and, often, a phase of Earth. During colony night, one could bound through these halls without fear of discovery or collision, challenging himself to leap ever higher and farther. Nazari supposed he hadn't grown up yet, and never would. He arrived at the Information Science pod within minutes, but had to pause to catch his breath before proceeding to the door labeled MAIN DESK.

The still of colony night evaporated as soon as the door slid open. Nazari took one step inside before halting with confusion. Before him spread a maze of papers, books stacked ankle-to eye-height, half-packed storage containers, and torn posters left to spill wherever the meager gravity took them. He heard the faint, persistent whirring of a herd of printers, deep in the back of the room.

"Hello?" Nazari called.

A head of thinning ginger hair shot up from behind one of the shorter book piles. It belonged to Dr. Swain, the colony's chief information scientist. "Ah, yes. Dr. Nazari." Swain deposited a thermos atop the stack, and navigated the labyrinth toward his visitor.

The younger man knew everyone in the colony, but hadn't had much chance to acquaint himself with Swain before. "Something keeping you up this evening?"

Even in reduced gravity, Dr. Swain barely reached Nazari's shoulder in height. He offered Nazari a weather-worn hand and a genuine, if harrowed, smile. "Please, pardon the mess. I'm afraid my office is starting to look the way my brain must." He tugged at his collar.

"It's no problem," Nazari dismissed, shaking firmly. He didn't miss the dodge, but didn't press either. "I'm sorry, I know it's late."

"Yes, well, good science rarely adheres to a schedule. Your, uh, your timing's very good, actually. What can I help you find?"

"Information on meteor impacts near Oceanus Procellarum," Nazari explained. "I know that's not very specific, but I'll be able to refine it soon."

"Ah, yes, I'm sure. New project?"

"Side project."

"How interesting. Well, even if I don't have what you're looking for, I can get it." Swain retreated through the maze, reclaiming his thermos en route and running a hand over his scalp. "Want to wait here while I check? Not out there, I mean. Here, let me clear off a chair. Come on back—unless you were planning to be elsewhere, that is. This could be a long wait. Did you want any coffee?"

Nazari quirked an eyebrow. "Are you sure this isn't a bad time?"

"No!" Swain called back. "No, not at all. Make yourself comfortable."

Nazari was anything but comfortable as he inched through the mess. Books, magazines, pictures of family, juggling balls, fictional star-ship models, tin wind-up robots... and the chaos bloomed even more colorfully around Swain's desk. His nerves rivaled his curiosity, but he felt he should mind his own business.

He lowered himself into the chair that had been cleared for him. Swain sat at his desk, squinting at his terminal. A coffee maker with a full carafe waited on a ledge behind him.

"I don't know about you," Swain said, keeping his eyes on the screen, "but I do all my best thinking at night. Here, the sky always looks like night. I can't tell you how grateful I've been for it."

Nazari chuckled. "I admit, I miss sunny days. Real sunny days, with light scattering through an atmosphere."

"Well, give the chemists another few centuries. They might figure out how to keep an atmosphere from running away," Swain replied. "Though, I doubt it. Just easier to keep it caged... like everything too good to share." Emotion crept into Swain's voice, but he dismissed it and plowed on. "I'm finding plenty I can print out for you."

"You can just email—"

"Printing's easier at this point, believe it or not." Swain's eyes finally found Nazari's, while he tilted his head toward the source of constant noise. "It'll be a bit of a wait, though. I'd hate to make you sit here."

"I don't mind," Nazari said.

"You will in another few hours."

Nazari frowned. "That's some print job."

"Don't I know it." Swain smiled, but the expression was as distracted as the rest of his demeanor. "Tell you what: you'll find something to get you started in your mailbox tomorrow. I'm sure you'll want to review that much, and we—well, I, or maybe someone else, can meet with you afterward and talk about narrowing your focus. How does that sound?"

"That's great," Nazari said. "I appreciate it."

"Of course. If you need anything else, Dr. Nazari, make sure you let us know."

The men stood and shook hands again. Dr. Swain forgot his visitor almost at once, but the snub seemed less rude and more... necessary. Nazari hesitated before turning to leave.

The alarm buzzed at 0600, two hours after Nazari had drifted into his bunk. He forced himself up, prepared for work, and left his quarters. Talbot was waiting outside the door, leaning against the wall with a bitterness that wasn't directed at his friend. "Just in time, sunshine."

Nazari scowled and rubbed a bloodshot eye. "They haven't sent you home yet?"

"No, but you might soon get your wish. The axe has dropped."

"On us?"

Talbot shook his head. "Scuttlebutt's weak. There's a general assembly in twenty minutes."

Nazari swallowed. "After you."

The assembly room housed row after row of long desks, packed with murmuring scientists and the cloud of nervous static hanging over them. Painfully white writing boards plastered each wall, none bearing a single mark. In his two-year stint at the colony, Nazari had entered this room only a handful of times. While he normally enjoyed socializing, the tension in the air forbade it; besides, it was too early to think past "Hello." He and Talbot claimed chairs, nursed tea and coffee respectively, and waited for their brains to awaken. Nazari also kept an eye out for Samantha the programmer, debating whether to wave her over and force Talbot to introduce himself. However, she remained unseen amid the din.

Out went the call for quiet. Seats filled, conversations halted. The only person left standing was a sour woman at the front of the room, hugging a clipboard against her torso. She was Dr. Hirsch, colony director.

"Good morning." Hirsch's voice was strained. Her perpetual scowl rendered the words more dressing-down than greeting. "Let's begin with the good news. EvoFirma Industries has licensed the enhanced protein crystallization technique patented by our Exobiology team, affording us a much-needed boost in capital and exposure. Congratulations to Dr. Goldman and..."

"Don't forget: your research means squat unless some well-connected jerk can vacuum up dollars with it," Talbot sniped under his breath as Hirsch ran through her acknowledgements. "I wonder how many Congresscritters own EvoFirma stock?"

Nazari communicated his mutual displeasure with a tch of his tongue, not wanting to draw Hirsch's ire with chatter—especially as her demeanor darkened.

"As for our main point of business: I don't intend to repeat the messages you'll find in your inboxes. Rather, I will be supplementing them. I ask that you hold all questions, and refer them to your supervisors after this meeting is adjourned." Hirsch pursed her lips. "The new administration's budget cuts have finally been released. We're some of the hardest hit by this veneer of frugality. Several projects have been canceled, especially those of lengthy or indefinite duration."

Murmurs rose through the gathering.

"Quiet, please. The one loss I wish to elaborate on this morning affects everyone in this room." Hirsch paused. "It's with considerable regret that I announce the end of Project Alexandria, and the closing of the colony's Information Science department. If there's any need for research assistance, seek it now before we're left to fend for ourselves. Dr. Swain and his staff will be returning to Earth in one month, and the Alexandria vault will be sealed off permanently. During this transition phase, Dr. Swain is the only person authorized to enter the vault and make preparations for its closure. Again, please refer all questions to your supervisors. Thank you."

Rows of scientists shot out of their chairs with bitter exclamations as Hirsch marched toward the nearest exit, dispassionate. Neither Talbot nor Nazari moved to join the bobbing tumult. During the latter announcement, Nazari's throat had dried and constricted. His fingernails clawed into the rim of his thermos.

"Dr. Swain was the one manning the IS desk last night," he spoke, almost inaudible. "He was completely off. The news must have shell-shocked him."

Talbot glanced to Nazari, frowned, and sat up straighter. "It'd devastate anyone. After walking on water to earn a berth here?" He shook his head in confusion at the angry crowd plowing out of the room. "I'll hover in uncertainty for a while longer, myself. Not exactly intrepid pioneer behavior, but..."

Nazari nodded, distracted.

The pair waited in reflective silence for the exits to clear before returning to Lunar Science. Their colleagues had already torn into their email, and were shouting out names of personnel and projects of close personal interest.

"What? No!" Talbot exclaimed when one of these fragments grabbed his attention. "I just got approval on the proposal!" His reluctance evaporated at once, and he dove for his own terminal. Nazari stuck with him, unable to bring his eyes toward the screen.

"They killed my Compton-Belkovich survey. Five years of fighting, I finally get a damn wheel to turn, and they blow up the engine!" Talbot clenched a fist and released several more choice words, directing both rant and glower at the screen.

"I'm sorry, Vic," Nazari muttered. "Are they shipping us back?"

"No." Talbot paused to collect himself from this perspective. "But they're sure trying to make Earth appealing by comparison."

Their supervisor made the mistake of appearing at the threshold of the lab, and soon vanished amid chaos. While Nazari should have checked his own email, he found himself drifting toward the physical mailroom instead. Within his inbox rested a thick stack of paper, with a handwritten note clipped to the top: Glad to be of help. Good luck always.

The stack contained maps, lists, tables, and articles. Swain had also compiled a bibliography and suggestions for further study. Nazari sighed, then returned the stack to his mailbox for safekeeping.

Losing so many parts of the team imbued a grim survivor's guilt upon the colony. However, life—whether Earth-or Moon-based—had to go on. For Nazari, this meant long days in Lunar Science devoted to routine core analysis. His supervisor had conceded interest in the ilmenite discovery, but noted the ore wasn't about to get up and walk away. He'd felt it more important to hold his subordinates to their scheduled assignments. However, he'd promised to drop the chemists a note. When the chemists inevitably broke down his door, perhaps he would allow Nazari and Talbot to assist them in whatever followed.

While Nazari wasn't one to complain about his job, especially in light of recent events, the monotony wore on him. It seemed he wasn't alone in this. A week after the announcement, while preparing an umpteenth slide at his workbench, he caught whispers and stifled laughter behind him. A glance over his shoulder confirmed the source: Talbot and a few of their research partners, huddled around a table for an impromptu break.

"Section Eight!" one of them declared.

"It's a protest," another said, "like handcuffing himself to a radiator in a condemned building."

"You think it's funny?" Talbot chided with a scowl, then noticed Nazari glancing his way. With a strained expression, he hurried to his friend's side. "Ali, you hear about this?"

Nazari glanced around. The coast was clear, no supervisor in sight. "What?"

"Dr. Swain. Flipped his lid. After Hirsch's assembly last week, he locked himself into the Alexandria vault and hasn't come back up since."

Nazari gaped, flinching at a twinge of guilt. "Where'd you hear this?"

"From the rest of IS. Hirsch is trying to keep a lid on it, and they're not happy." Talbot's expression darkened. "Neither am I. If word of this gets back to Earth, they'll use it to paint us all as lunatics and shut down the colony."

Nazari blinked. " That's what you're upset about?"

Talbot sighed. "Look, I sympathize with Swain, but whether he means to or not, he's dragging us all down with him. It's out of line.

My pet project got put down; you don't see me holding a chisel to my throat."

Nazari made a tch with his tongue in rejection of what he considered a poor comparison. "Has anyone tried talking to him?"

"He doesn't answer—just flips his radio off and on," Talbot said.

"What about going down to the vault to check on him?"

"No one's authorized for that."

"They'd let authorization stand in the way on something like this?"

"It's stood in the way of far less."

"Yeah, but this is a man's life we're talking about!" Nazari snapped. "He was not all right when I saw him. He shouldn't be alone—"

Talbot wiped his face of emotion, clapped a hand on Nazari's shoulder, and walked off. Instinctively, Nazari returned to his own work. Sure enough, their boss drifted through moments later, tracing out his supervisory orbit. Nazari pretended to be captivated with his slide, then darted to Talbot's station once it was safe.

"Doing something about this, fast, is the best thing for Swain and the rest of us. I think we can agree on that much," Nazari muttered.

"What can we possibly do?" Talbot asked.

"We can talk to Hirsch."

Talbot looked at him sidelong.

"It can't hurt to try," Nazari pressed.

"That remains to be seen."

The door to Hirsch's office was the only piece of finished mahogany on the Moon. Upon entering the colony's administrative hub, Nazari made a beeline for it.

"Shouldn't we find an assistant first?" Talbot asked, hurrying to keep up.

Undeterred, Nazari rapped on the door with a knuckle. There was no response for several moments. Talbot moved to pull Nazari away, but just then the door opened, revealing Hirsch in all her severity.

Nazari greeted her on behalf of himself and Talbot. "Sorry to interrupt you like this, but we're here about something urgent."

Hirsch arched a thin eyebrow.

"Dr. Swain," Nazari elaborated. "We've heard he's locked himself in the Alexandria vault."

Vexation surfaced, but Hirsch was quick to stifle it. "Perhaps if we talk about this, Doctors, you'll be willing to explain it to anyone else caught up in gossip-mongering? Step inside, please."

Hirsch's entire office stood in tribute to Earth: wood and granite fixtures, potted plants, a poster of a photograph of a window, displaying a sunny spring day. Two leather chairs sat before her desk, which she gestured to with a wave of her hand as she returned to a third on the other side.

For the launch that had conveyed them to the Moon, the junior scientists had been allotted ten kilograms of personal items, no more; it was expensive to free matter from Earth's gravitational pull, after all. Nazari had never given it much thought. Now sensitive toward the subject, he had to wonder how many tens of thousands had been spent transporting Hirsch's furniture alone.

Once everyone was seated, Hirsch folded her hands in her lap, and appraised Nazari and Talbot with a long stare. "Dr. Swain has been away for several days, yes. He'll be back before he wants to be. If someone was pulling the plug on my work, I know I'd be keeping late nights."

"But wouldn't you at least let someone know what you're doing?" Nazari asked.

"I would, but Dr. Swain isn't known for the same courtesy. You haven't worked with the man for years. I have." Her steel gaze softened. "Doctors, if I had cause for concern, I'd act on it. As it is, I'm afraid I'd only be interrupting work there won't be time for later."

"Or you might be saving a man's life," Nazari said, failing to keep his voice level. Talbot squirmed in his chair.

Hirsch scowled. "What grounds do you have for presuming Dr. Swain is in danger? If that's what you've heard second-or third-hand, you ought to know it's sensationalist nonsense."

"Is it true he doesn't respond to anyone's calls?" Nazari pressed.

"He acknowledges our messages the same way he always does when caught up in something," Hirsch said, then sighed. "Dr. Nazari, Dr. Talbot—" she nodded to Talbot, although he hadn't spoken in her presence "—your concern is noted, but there's no issue here, aside from the lack of foresight back home."

After a sleepless night of deliberation, Nazari had decided upon two things: he wasn't interested in waiting for the month's end, and he could worry about his career later.

His pulse had raced double-time ever since he'd sneaked away to suit up and run outside, briefly tripling during the depressurization phase. Conducting seal checks on his environment suit without a partner inspecting his back made as much sound sense as diving into a pool naked holding an electrical appliance that may or may not have been plugged in. A day earlier, Nazari would never have dreamt of attempting it. That day, he sought to isolate any and all fallout to himself.

Bounding across the lunar surface did little to calm his nerves. He didn't have much ground to cover, at least not horizontally. The smooth, raised platform rested close beside the colony that had installed it there. In the middle of that platform yawned a vertical tunnel several meters wide, a lengthy drop into darkness. A lift had been planned, but had never materialized. The only way down was via the four sets of ladder rungs spaced out along the circumference.

As Nazari knelt at the mouth of the tunnel, he abruptly recalled his first spelunking excursion as a child, one downward climb in particular. A rope had snapped; rocks and dirt had given way under his boots. He'd screamed and driven his fingers into any available crevice, bloodying skin and cracking nails. In those awful seconds between danger and safety, the sun had dug into his eyes, while unfathomable blackness had lurked beneath his feet, waiting for the strain of his own weight to get the better of him. No pain had registered until after his father had hauled him up by the wrists, and his mother had pulled him against her and kissed his hands. Eh Khoda! Dast-ha-ye jahn-am! she'd wailed in their native Farsi. Nazari hadn't thought about that day in years, but the memory triggered a cold sweat.

He took a deep breath and glanced over his shoulder at the colony he'd left behind. The pods and tunnels glittered in the ever-present Sun, a string of diamonds amid piles of dust. The intervening mare bore the occasional boulder and a wide worn path of overlapping footprints that might have been made years earlier. Nazari couldn't banish a sense of dread. With nothing but the sound of his own breath to keep him company, his imagination raced unchecked.

"All you're doing is making things worse, you know that?" Talbot's harsh rebuke burst through the transmitter in his ear.

Nazari gave a start and nearly fell into the tunnel, but managed to catch himself in time. "Keeping tabs on me is the least any of you can do for the luxury of sitting on your hands." He wanted to sound angry, but his friend's voice brought a measure of reassurance.

"Ungrateful turd. If anyone finds me talking to you, I'm in for an epic reaming." Talbot tried to maintain a head of steam, but his concern botched it. "You're lucky you got as far as you did before Hirsch could order your backside stapled to a chair. Better hole up with Swain until the feds send the party-crashers. It's looking like the safe bet."

Nazari took another deep breath, resisted the useless urge to wipe his forehead with his sleeve, and started down one of the ladders. The cylindrical passage bore lighting that activated upon sensing his movement. He took the rungs two at a time, floating through the spaces between. The rhythm soothed his nerves further. "Is anyone following me?"

"Negative—not yet, I should say. Listen, Ali, how're you gonna get in there?"

Nazari glanced up at the circle of starry sky shrinking from view. "I'll use the magic words I eavesdropped from the forty thieves."

There was a pause. "You are the right person for the job." Talbot's voice told of the tension-breaking laugh he hadn't radioed. "I'd better get back to the lab before I'm missed, but I'll keep an ear to the rail as long as I can."

Nazari nodded, out of habit rather than necessity. "Thanks, Vic."

"Be careful. If you can't, don't leave me a mess."

Nazari smiled, but the mirth evaporated quickly. Anxious thoughts returned amid his isolation, reeling at what tragedy might lie in the depths. He hated to think he'd ever be afraid of this place, nestled within the rocks he knew better than nearly anyone on the Earth or Moon.

By the time Nazari reached the bottom of the tunnel, it felt like he was halfway to the Moon's core. A lit passage awaited him there, horizontal and stunted: a decontamination chamber. Microbes were not as much of a threat on the Moon, but dust was. He switched his transmitter to a different channel, that of the work-study area lying somewhere beyond.

"Dr. Swain?" he chanced, forcing a casual tone. "This is Dr. Nazari—Ali. Selenology. I've come to see how you're doing."

Nazari paused. No clicks, no static. No response at all.

Maybe Swain's not in the work-study right now, he thought to himself. It wasn't a reassuring prospect. If Swain never heard him, and Hirsch had time to rally, this excursion might prove a life-changing waste of time. They weren't booting him off the Moon before he gave his all, though.

"I'm not here to drag you out, I just want to make sure you're okay. I'm hoping we can talk before you have to leave." With a note of levity, Nazari added, "I could use some help with those maps. I'm no Magellan—ask Dr. Talbot. I needed a sextant to find my way out of Copernicus crater."

Nazari fell silent, mulling further words, but none were necessary. An indicator over the door ahead of him lit up green. Awash in relief and buoyant with triumph, he switched channels again. "Vic! Dr. Swain's letting me in. I'm entering the vault now."

Silence. Talbot was likely listening, but unable to respond.

The decontamination chamber was a white cube studded with vents. Once Nazari was sealed in, gas vented from the walls, which powerful fans pulled toward the floor. He rotated in place, shaking out his limbs. This wasn't a pressurization chamber; he would have to keep his suit on while visiting the airless vault.

The whirlwind ceased, and the wall ahead slid aside. Nazari sucked in a sharp breath. It wasn't a reaction of horror, quite the contrary. The utter vastness of the vault weakened his jaw and knees. It spanned several football fields in length and width, with a ceiling looming stories high. Ahead of him rose five massive shelves, stretching far into the distance. Each housed hundreds of metal cabinets labeled with decimal numbers. Ladder rungs lined their support struts for ease of access. To either side of the massive quintet sat the footprints and stunted framework of fledgling shelves, which should have been swarming with construction specialists. The vault could have hosted dozens more of those giants, but most of it lay empty. Those that did exist, whole or otherwise, abided like the lonely pillars of a forgotten ruin.

Standing a few meters from Nazari's entrance was a slab of black marble. He read the engraved bronze plaque mounted upon it.

BIBLIOTHEKA ALEXANDRINA SELENES

HUMANITY'S VOICE—IN PERPETUITY

DAVID R. SWAIN, PH.D., HEAD LIBRARIAN

A host of dedications appeared in smaller script beneath.

The vault's curator awaited him in the work-study area. Nazari didn't know where to find it, but a temporary map—hand-written, posted to the marble slab with masking tape—outlined the planned contents of the unfinished chamber. The work-study abutted the huge room's rear wall.

Nazari stepped past the dedication and entered the realm of monolithic shelving with tentative steps. He opened a random drawer at waist-height, an action that produced no sound. Inside was a neat stack of clipped printouts, with labeled dividers interspersed. He flipped through it with his clumsy gloved hand, glancing through the contents of books in scripts familiar and foreign. Shielded from air and the surface radiation from the Sun, they would endure for thousands of years. Millions, maybe.

Nazari glanced up, gazing over the multitude of drawers yet to be examined. His breath caught in his throat.

"Have you found him?" Talbot's voice returned in a furtive hush.

With a jolt, Nazari remembered his primary objective. "Not yet. I'm sorry you can't see this, Vic. Quite the treasure they're about to bury."

He launched into a practiced bounding jog that seemed to last an hour. At the end of the journey, Nazari paused to catch his breath. Much smaller shelves sat along the rear wall of the vault, reminiscent of the card catalogs libraries used to have when he was a child. There were several doors too, each with portholes cut out of them. Only one of the portholes was lit. Nazari approached this door, peeking in. Past a decontamination and pressurization chamber, he saw yet another porthole. Shadows danced in that meager view.

Nazari proceeded through the gauntlet. At the other end was a sight much like the one he'd stumbled upon in Information Science a week prior: towers of stacked papers, a horde of printers whirring full-tilt, and a highly caffeinated jumpsuit-clad librarian striving to make sense of it all.

Dr. Swain seemed in good health, if overwhelmed. He paused by the threshold to await Nazari, and summoned a wistful smile once the younger man had removed the helmet from his environment suit. "A dream in hiatus," he greeted.

Nazari blinked. "Excuse me?"

"That's what you just walked through." Swain glanced back the way Nazari came with a faraway look. "When the original Royal Library of Alexandria was destroyed—not by fire, as many claim, but by complacency and ignorance—human progress took a giant leap backward. Things well understood by the ancients, like the heliocentric model of the Solar System, had to wait a thousand years to be rediscovered. Countless great works of literature were lost forever—plays by Sophocles, for instance. We know he wrote over a hundred, but all we have are Oedipus Rex, Antigone, and five others. Just imagine where mankind might be today if that knowledge had been protected, cherished?

"That's why I fought so hard to make this place a reality, to archive everything— everything —that way." He pointed to one of the myriad printout stacks. "No digital copies, nothing that requires power sources or technology that might not be available thousands of years from now. Just paper and ink, available in Mandarin, Spanish, and English to start, with further translations printed over time."

Swain backed himself into a seat upon a cluttered desk. "We could have brought artifacts and historical documents here, too. The Rosetta Stone, Cleopatra's Needle, Constitutions defining dozens of nations—all spared further erosion. Earth is too volatile, nothing lasts there. Your discipline grants you an acute appreciation of this fact. On the Moon, time stands still. Hiatus."

He swigged at his thermos in lieu of a sigh. "Well, for another few weeks, at least. Before I gathered the smallest fraction of what I'd hoped to house here, people back on Earth looked at a spreadsheet and decided a handful of temporary numbers were more important than a permanent legacy for humanity. Where's that spreadsheet going to be a million years from now?" Swain looked toward just such a spreadsheet printout lying beside him on his desk, and let out a sad chuckle. "Maybe I should be glad they're only sealing it. No one's coming with torches and rope. Still, it feels like a victory for ignorance. I can't let it happen that way. I won't let Alexandria's library decay again. The night you came to see me, I had an idea. It's consumed my attention ever since."

Swain gestured to the computer terminal on his desk. "I went to the widest public forum ever devised. I wrote to the world about this place, about how it'll soon be sealed up like a time capsule. I asked for submissions, things that might tell future explorers something about us. The response?" He shrugged, this time with genuine amusement. "Anecdotes, fiction, poetry, jokes, letters, artwork, photographs, biographies, auto biographies... I won't possibly put a dent in it, but I'll leave a note with the unsorted material to explain the situation. Yes, for all the lovely submissions, there are plenty of things that may be considered offensive or just plain wrong, but it's not my aspiration to play censor. Everything I receive, I print."

Swain turned back to an awestruck Nazari. "I'm glad someone defied the rule-makers to see this. I'm going to miss you all dearly. Can you think of anything you'd like to contribute, on behalf of yourself and the colony?"

"Me?" Nazari asked once he'd found his tongue.

"Yes. Actually, now I insist. Your voice is every bit as important."

Nazari frowned, racking his brain. He pointed to a stack of blank paper on Swain's desk.

"May I?"

"By all means."

Nazari sat before the pile, removed his gloves, and corralled a pen. He did indeed have a crucial tale to write down. Before he got started, he messaged Talbot again. "I'll need a few hours to immortalize us. Should I use your real name, or would you rather remain anonymous to the future?"

Bodies in Water

Sarah Frost | 4955 words

Illustrated by Zelda Devon

Kay cast her line through a hole that some long-forgotten storm had punched in the bottom of the derelict starship's hull. The two strong fingers on her right hand held the old plastic fiber steady as her hook fell through the derelict's skin and into the sea. It sank down into the deep black currents, where fish with sweet meat could still be found. By noon, she would have something nice to take home to her father for supper. Kay leaned back on one of the starship's stainless metal ribs and let the wind whistling through the dead behemoth's portholes sing her to sleep.

She dreamed of flying through endless water lit by living stars, of reaching out and catching hold.

A tug on the line woke her. She leaned back, pulling with the pad of her left hand and guiding the line with her good fingers and her thumb. The line vibrated in her hands. She drew it in by scant degrees, imagining the sleek silver hunter fighting for its life with a hook lodged in its throat. She licked her lips, imagining white flesh and crackling, fire scorched fish skin.

Gold flashed in the black water. Anchoring her line against her left arm, she leaned down, feeling for trembling gills or a gaping mouth. She caught cold flesh and she pulled.

What flopped onto the behemoth's honeycomb skin was not a fish. Eyeless, it thrashed like a fish, but plates of yellow metal slid over its sides, more like insect armor than a fish's scales. A knot of greenblack algae grew where its tail should have been. Mouthless, it had two ports in its head. Kay's hook had stuck in the mess of barnacles that choked one of them.

She pulled her hook free, coiled up her line, and pushed them into the plastic bag tied to her belt. She wrapped both arms around the struggling fish-thing and lifted. It thrashed and hummed, vibrating her bones, but it was lighter than it looked and Kay was strong. She would take it home. Her father would know what it was. He was always the first one on the beach after a storm, naming all the strange things that the ocean vomited up.

Chickens ran in the streets of Silvaplana, on the coast of what was left of Florida. A feral bird-of-paradise tree cast dappled shade over the porch where her father sat, sucking a bottle of homebrew beer. The sound of her mother's hammers rang from the workshop in back. Her father perked up when he saw what she was carrying.

"What's that you've got there?" he said, setting his bottle down on the scarred concrete patio. He took the fish from her delicately; he always handled her delicately, as though she were made of seashell and might shatter. Kay shrugged. She didn't know what it was. That was why she'd brought it home.

He steadied the thrashing thing against the palm of one hand and picked at the barnacles in its head-port. "I bet you've never seen anything like this," he said, not looking at her. "Where did you get it?"

Kay took a deep breath. Squared her shoulders. Time to speak. She said, "I caught it," forcing her mouth around the big round 'aw' in 'caught' and lifting her tongue for that so-difficult 't.' Still, what came out of her mouth sounded more like, "Ah caud ih."

Her father smiled and smiled but didn't look at her. "I haven't seen one of these in years. Wow. I can't believe it's still running."

Kay nodded. In her father's hands, she could imagine it: Hundreds of mechanical fish schooling in the deep water off the old spaceport, keeping an eye on the wild currents and rogue submarines. She blurted out, "What is it for?" Her father sat down, cradling her catch in his lap. Kay sat on the ground. She tucked the pad of her left hand against her belly out of habit, to keep it out of sight. Together, they considered the machine.

"They had these when I was your age. Things were built to last, back then. Ah, here." He massaged one of the golden plates that articulated the machine's skin, then pressed it, then squeezed. It popped open. He stuck his fingers inside and the machine went limp. "See here?" He lifted the fish, pulling the plates that formed its underbelly as far apart as they could go. Kay leaned in, reading the symbol for trademark and the kanji for fish. The kanji for device. She snorted. So it was a mechanical fish. She could see that. With two fingers, Kay unfurled one of the golden fins. Membranes as smooth and light as eggshell flexed between shining struts as fine as pins.

She coughed to clear the plug of phlegm out of her throat and took a deep breath. Pointing at the missing tail, she said, "Can you fix it?"

Her father's eyes dimmed. "Sorry, sweetie," he said. "I don't think anyone makes parts for these anymore." His long fingers picked at the clot of algae on the fish's stump. Puckered scars twisted the topography of his hands. Sometimes, on long nights, they would sit together and she'd point at the scars. One by one, he would tell her stories. "Why You Don't Take Bones from a Dog," or "Collecting Barnacles With Your Mother," or "The Night the Pump Broke." Once, she had asked about the round, white dimples in his chest. He wouldn't tell that story, so she got it from her mother: "When the Looters Came and Shot Your Daddy." That had been before she was born, and one of the last times anyone from out-of-town came to Silvaplana.

She gestured at the open panel in the fish's side, meaning that he should turn it back on and give it to her.

"Do you know what these were designed for?" he said. She shook her head. "They tracked shipping. Monitored the boats coming in and out of the harbor, before the breakwater washed away in a big storm. They made sure that no terrorists came to blow up the spaceport." He chuckled, but his eyes slipped away to the horizon. She looked, too, trying to see what he saw. Ships as big as the derelict that sheltered her fishing hole. She imagined ships too big for the harbor, ships attended by swarms of smaller ships, and those attended by ships smaller still, all the way down to dinghies manned by one sailor apiece. Perhaps those would be attended by swarms of sailing rats.

Kay laughed, a soft sound that bubbled past her twisted lips and stubborn tongue. Her father's eyes made the long trip back from the horizon. He looked at her, and his face crumpled just a bit, in that way that he'd never been able to hide from her. Her eyes, at least, worked perfectly. Before he died, the town's doctor had said that Kay would never need glasses if she stayed out of the sea.

The ringing of her mother's hammer paused. Her father said, "Go show that to your mom," and ruffled her hair, the one part of her that he wasn't afraid to touch.

"Can you turn it back on?"

"In a minute. Go on."

Dutifully, Kay picked up the fish and walked around the house to her mother's workshop. The tall woman stood at her forge, shirtless, her face set in an ecstasy of concentration. Sweat ran over her small breasts and down the long pink scar that divided the brown skin of her belly and dove under the waistband of her char-stained shorts. The corded muscles on her legs stood proud as she worked the foot pedal on the forge's leaf-blower. Impeller blades whirred, drawing air over the charcoal and the bar of cherry-red steel buried in it.

Once, Kay had asked why the machine was called a leafblower if it only blew on the fire. Her mother had laughed and explained that the machine hadn't always been attached to the forge. She had shown Kay how she had taken the old engine off when the gas ran out, and how she rigged belts to move the blower's driveshaft with manual power.

Her mother glanced up from the forge. "Not now, sweetie," she said. Kay lifted the fish over her head. With its trailing streamer of algae, it was almost as long as she was tall. But light, so light.

"Cool," her mother said, the way she and the other adults did when they weren't really paying attention. Kay knew that nothing good could come from disturbing her mother when she was immersed in a project; she and Kay were just alike, that way. So she tucked the fish back under her arm and went to show it to someone who would appreciate it.

She left through the broken wall that was the forge's back door. The path of cinderblock rubble behind her house let her avoid most of her neighbors. She took the trail around the two old tanks. The rusty smears that dripped through their peeling paint always looked wet to her, even during the hottest days of summer. Kay's mother had warned her to never, ever touch the tanks. Even the most tenacious barberry vines wouldn't grow next to them. Aside from the derelict, they were the tallest things that the hurricanes had not yet knocked down.

The Claytons lived just past Silvaplana's unofficial borders, where barberry and eucalyptus swallowed the ruins of old houses and where tall grasses fought to choke the sandy ruts that passed for a road. The Claytons burned charcoal (which Kay's mother bought), kept a herd of goats smart enough to graze in the swamp without sinking (unlike the Peñas' goats, which gave fine wool but were too stupid to find their way home), and ran a still (which everyone thought Kay didn't know about).

From the road, the Clayton house looked like little more than a pile of broken road signs and scrap steel gone to rust and rainbows of old paint. The family was out, probably tending their goats or gathering wood or both, so Kay circled around the house to a little hummock of dry land where Matthew lay under his cairn of stones.

The measles had taken him during last year's outbreak, burning his skinny body down to nothing but pain and raw bone. Kay still shuddered to remember his parents' weeping. She had visited him then, defying the quarantine, and she visited him now. Good friends didn't let each other get lonely.

"Look what I caught," she said. She didn't struggle to speak correctly. Matthew had never pretended that he couldn't understand her. She told him all about the fish while she bent its body and spread its fins, testing the limits of its motion. She picked the algae off of the stump of its tail with her good fingers. The golden flesh beneath the algae was sealed off, impenetrable. She told Matthew that her father was drinking again. She said, "He gets bored," as if it was an excuse. "He says there isn't anything to do anymore but drink and fuck," which she admitted that she didn't understand but also didn't want to ask about, since her father hadn't realized that Kay was listening when he said it.

She missed Matthew.

The bleating of goats warned her of the Claytons' return. She didn't wait to see who it was. Kay bolted away, holding her fish tight, determined not to let one of Matthew's spiteful siblings ruin her prize. She was not fast enough.

"Whatcha got there, Kay-tee?" A girl's voice. One of Matthew's sisters must have been ranging ahead of the goats, which meant that someone was staying back to drive them. Kay shrank back as two girls stepped out of the tall grass by the road. They wore dresses that they had made themselves, the way the older girls in town liked to do, vying with each other for the most stylish design, the most cunning use of scavenged fabric. Kay couldn't sew. Her right hand could draw a needle, but holding fabric in the cupped flesh of her fingerless left hand made her arm cramp unbearably. After a few miserable failures, she'd given up. She decided that she'd rather fish, anyway, or help her mother at the forge.

"It's a fish," Kay said.

"What did you say?" The older sister leaned down to look in Kay's eyes. Her voice dripped sugar syrup and her smile shone as bright and hard as glass. Kay glared at her, and refused to repeat herself.

"Is it a toy? Did your mommy make that for you? Let me see."

Kay shook her head, and squeezed the fish more tightly to her chest. The golden scales gave slightly under the pressure of her arms, feeling not like dented metal, but like coiling springs.

"Come on," the other sister goaded. "Don't be so selfish."

"Yeah. Didn't your mommy teach you to share?"

Kay glared at them. She would not speak any more until they acknowledged what she had already said. Goats surged around them, bleating in irritation at being made to move through the grass without stopping to eat. Some wore bells that Kay's mother had made.

"Brandeen! Mikarthy!" A woman's voice sliced through the bedlam of goats and bells. The girls flinched. Their mother, the Missus Clayton, shouted, "Come here, and leave her alone." She grabbed the younger girl's arm with her free hand. Her other hand held a willow-switch. "It's not like she can understand you, anyway."

Kay watched them go, dancing a little to keep her feet out from under the goats' hooves. She almost never tried to correct people who made that mistake anymore.

She skirted the edge of the town, past empty buildings and across crumbling streets. Rebar protruded from broken concrete like the roots of storm-tossed trees. Kay followed the road until the dunes swallowed it, then she followed the line of broken walls that stood proud above the sand until they marched into the sea.

The water shone blue in the late morning light. The sun touched the edge of each wave, turning them into knives of silver fire. She stopped just beyond the reach of the ocean. The mechanical fish she set down in front of her, facing the sea, as though the sight of its home would revive it. Of course, nothing happened. Kay picked at the barnacles clogging the port in its head. She would need a tool to clean them, she decided. Waves ran up the beach, edged in oilslick rainbows.

As she watched, a line of ribbed clouds crept into the bowl of the sky. She frowned at them, and at the wind blowing inland from the sea. She picked up the metal fish and turned for home. Hopefully she wasn't the only one who had seen the stormclouds.

She spotted one of the Peñas' long-haired goats chewing a mouthful of grass in the shade of a stunted tea tree. Listening for a moment, she couldn't hear any voices or the bells of other goats. A stray, then. Kay set her fish down. She slipped off her belt and coiled it around her left hand. Hiding her belt behind her back, she held out her other hand in the universal sign for, "I have a handful of goat food."

The goat stared at her with yellow keyhole eyes. It ambled forward a few steps, then a few more. She shook her empty hand at it temptingly. When it was close enough, she lunged, looping her belt over the goat's head and cinching the slipknot tight. The goat bleated in outrage at her betrayal. Soon she had the goat trailing behind her and the fish under one arm as she walked back toward the inhabited parts of town.

The eldest Peña daughter, along with two smaller girls and one boy, were carding wool in the shade of their palm-frond porch. Kay's heart swelled with pride to see the intricate metal carding brushes that her father had made, though he had needed instructions from the Peñas' grandfather. The old man knew everything about raising his long-haired goats, but Kay's father knew where to find wire of the right stiffness, how to draw it through a mesh, and how to attach the mesh to handles. The eldest daughter, whose name was Mary, looked up from instructing her siblings when she heard the goat's bell.

"I found your goat," Kay said.

"What?" Mary said. Kay waited.

"Oh, the goat," Mary said. She looked down at her lapful of wool and tools, then poked one of her sisters with her toe. "Trisha, go put Ammy back in the paddock." The little girl leaped up and snatched Kay's belt from her hand, then started to lead the goat away. The animal sighed heavily at the injustices of its life. "And say thank you!" Mary called.

Trisha spun around, scuffing her feet in the dirt. She looked down. "Thank you, Kay," she said. Then she ran, dragging the goat behind her. Kay sighed. She would get her belt back later, probably. She did not want to drag the conversation out long enough for Mary to get annoyed.

Kay waved to get Mary's attention, which had slid back to the other children. Eventually, Mary sighed and put her brush down.

"Yes, Kay?" she said, sounding exactly like her mother. Kay pointed up at the sky, where rows of white clouds now marched from the horizon up to the zenith.

"Storm coming," Kay said, enunciating as clearly as she could.

"Hm," Mary said, squinting up at the sky. She shrugged with one shoulder, and looked back down at Kay, smiling. "Thanks for bringing Ammy back. She's trouble."

Kay shrugged and smiled back. She waited until Mary began packing her things before turning and running for home. Mary would tell her parents, who would warn the rest of the town; it was better to let them do it. People would believe them. Everyone knew that the Peñas could predict the weather.

The wind picked up. Kay's throat constricted. She coughed and spat, which would have made her father scold her if he'd seen. But with the weather sending cold spikes of fear into her gut, she couldn't stop running to clear her throat like a good girl.

She found her father out on the front porch, staring up at the sky through a pair of glasses with black plastic lenses and one missing earpiece. Sunglasses, she reminded herself. It was one of the words that her father didn't like her to forget, even though he was the only person in town who had them.

"Where have you been?" He snapped. "Your mother has been looking for you everywhere." He moved as though to cup her around her waist and hurry her along, but stopped just a hairsbreadth away from touching her. She did not reach for him. If she was in trouble, she didn't want to make it worse. She tucked her fish in the corner of the front room and then dashed out the back door to where her mother was clamping a cover over her forge.

"Bring me the wrench, please," her mother said, sharp and distracted. Kay unlatched the little box that held the precious implement. It caught the light that filtered down through the racing storm clouds, shining as bright as the first time Kay had seen it, years ago. Only its serrated jaws showed any sign of wear. For all her mother's cleverness, she had never been able to duplicate the old trick of making metal shine forever, like the wrench and the ribs of the starship.

Kay handed the wrench to her mother and then stepped back to watch. Her mother spun the worm gear in the wrench's head with one thumb, barely glancing at it before she set about tightening the mismatched bolts that held down the forge cover. With the forge secured and all of her fuel and tools sealed into a box made of scavenged bricks, Kay and her mother retreated into the house proper.

Kay slid her feet across the concrete floor and waited for her eyes to adjust to the mid day darkness. Her father had already brought the chairs inside and closed the storm shutters. He banked the hearth fire, but the air still felt over-warm and heavy. She felt the heat of her father's body beside her, and in the gloom saw him reach out and take her mother's hand. Kay's mother wrapped one long arm around Kay's shoulders. Their sweat mingled. They waited.

The storm flung itself against the walls like a maddened animal. It howled. It tried to claw the shutters loose from the windows and moaned through the cracks it found in the walls. Lightning exploded over their heads. Kay imagined the sea rising up, sucking sand away from the foundations of her house, washing away the street and swallowing Silvaplana the way it had swallowed the old city.

Sometime during the night, she fell asleep. Kay dreamed of the golden fish. She laid it on a bed of ashes. Its metal skin peeled back. The flesh underneath glistened like cut glass. She scooped out handful after handful—somehow there was always more, and her hands did not burn—slurping down the fish's flesh. It tasted of salt and strawberries.

She woke hungry. She struggled against her father's grip for a moment before she remembered where she was. Cold sweat trickled down her back where her mother had been. She heard the grunt and thump of sandbags being moved. She could not stop the thick-voiced whimper that squeezed its way out of her throat. The silence outside only meant that the worst was yet to come.

The storm roared. Kay sobbed, pressing her face into her father's chest. She felt him yelling, felt the throb of his voice in her bones. He started to push her away so she clung harder, pawing his skin with the stubs of her hands. Lightning illuminated everything for one instant. Her mother, scrambling toward them on her hands and knees. Her father's arms flung out towards his wife. The hole in the roof. The rent in the wall. The old bird-ofparadise tree, flying.

Then darkness, and her father's heartbeat, and the scream of hurricane winds long into the night.

She woke again, lolling across her father's chest as he slowly stroked her hair. Kay sobbed when she saw her mother standing in the doorway, silhouetted against the morning light that slanted through the rain. Kay rose and went to her. Together, they went to see what the storm had left for them.

A few sheets of corrugated steel had been torn from their roof. Maybe they would turn up, and maybe not. The seaward wall was in worse shape, but at least the forge had survived. Kay's mother shook her head.

Soon, their neighbors, the Castanedas, arrived with cold breakfast for both families. They ate together as the rainclouds drifted away. By noon, Kay and her father (her mother and the Castanedas were left to plan the mending of Kay's house) made their way to the main road through down, which the storm had transformed into a canal of green water. A perfect black triangle, a fish's tail, broke the surface of the water, then vanished. Kay frowned, thinking.

The water receded. The Claytons arrived with strips of metal (dull silver on one side, iridescent green on the other) to make a patch for Kay's roof. She helped her mother relight the forge, pumping the bellows while her mother fussed with her antique Zippo and carefully-hoarded tinder. That night, the town came together for a bonfire and a feast. Some of the goats had panicked during the storm, and it would be a shame for all that meat to go to waste. The bonfire lit up the night and turned the swarms of insects drawn to its light into flecks of fire.

Kay sat in the sand, a little way back from the rest of the children. Hours after sunset, the sky cleared. Licking grease off of her hands, Kay looked up at the stars. The bright splash of the Milky Way looked close enough to touch. She reached up.

Her father settled himself heavily in the sand beside her. "Hey, kiddo. What do you see?"

"The big dipper!" she said, pointing.

"Big dipper?"

"Ursa Major," she corrected herself. She pointed at the pairs of stars that made the bear's toes. "Alula, Tania, Talitha." Her tongue almost didn't stumble around the words she'd practiced for so long.

"Wow, you're good at that," her father said. Kay beamed.

"If I have a daughter, I'm going to name her Alula," she said. And teach her all the names of the stars, she thought.

Her father's face crumpled in the way she hated so much. He patted her head once, hesitated, and stopped. "You're a good kid," he said. Then he stood and walked away.

Kay snuck back to the house early and pulled the golden fish out of the hidey-hole where she'd stashed it. Using a blunt screwdriver that her mother had modified to fit her hand, she cleaned as much of the sea-scum out of the fish's head as she could. In the light of the forge, she could see the glint of an impeller buried deep inside the fish. Carefully, she prized flecks of grit out from the blades.

She fell asleep on the floor of the workshop and only woke for a moment when her mother carried her to a bed in the neighbor's house.

Kay woke up before sunrise. The sky was clear and lavender-gray. She snuck away from the sleepy household and found the fish where she'd left it in her mother's workshop. Peering into the access panel that her father had opened, she tried to figure out what he had pressed to make the fish shut off. She saw a few likely candidates, but decided to check on them later.

With a piece of scrap aluminum and the hammers that her mother had made for her, Kay fashioned a new tail for the golden fish. It was ugly, dull silver on one side and yellow on the other. She thought of all the fish she'd seen, and the curve of a black triangle flicking the air. As she set the last pin cinching the fish's new tail tight to its stump, the machine became something not quite so artificial. It looked, she thought, like an ancient armored creature dredged up from the deepest ocean.

She flipped the access panel open and prodded at likely-looking nubs until the fish jerked in her hands and thrashed its new tail.

She hadn't heard her mother come in. The tall woman smiled down at her. "Looks good," she said. "Come on. Let's go down to the beach."

Her father was waiting for them on the porch. Kay held the fish aloft. "Look!"

"Did you make that?" He said. Kay nodded. Her father said, "Cool," like he always did, but he smiled as he said it and looked her in the eye. He fussed over the fish as they walked, asking her how she'd made the ring that held its new tail and how she'd picked that shape over any other.

The sun hung just below the horizon, and the tide was out. The landscape looked wrong. Kay saw why right away, and stopped. Her parents took one more step before they noticed.

The behemoth, the old starship, was gone. Beyond the twisted remains of its fence, the shelf of black runway that stuck out over the water had crumbled away. The storm had taken the derelict on its final voyage into the dark. Across the waves, boundless and empty, no sign remained that this place had once been humanity's first and last stepping-stone to the stars.

Her father said, "Oh," and took his wife's hand. They stopped walking to gape at the empty horizon. Kay slipped around them, the fish wriggling impatiently under her arm. She walked down to the sea and waded out until she was knee-deep, then lowered the fish into the water.

Its eggshell fins spread out, steadying it. Its tail thrashed uselessly, making no progress.

"What're you doing, kiddo?"

"My fish won't swim," Kay said. Her father splashed into the ocean next to her.

"Won't swim, huh?" he repeated. "Won't swim. Have you... why don't you try push-starting it? Like this," He pulled his hand through the water. Then, quietly as though he were alone, he said, "My father taught me how to push-start a fish, back when I was a kid... younger than you... and we used to go fishing."

Kay pushed the fish through the water, harder and harder, until a vibration ran down its back and shook it out of her hand. The fish surged forward, aluminum tail slicing through the waves. Its scales shone as it vanished back into the sea.

Her father leaned down and kissed the top of her head. "Good job, kiddo," he said. "I wonder what you'll catch next time?"

Kay shook her head. "Can't fish," she said, and pointed to where the starship had been.

"Can't fish? Oh. Oh, your old fishing hole." He frowned, and then turned to shout back up the beach. "Sweetie?"

Kay's mother looked up from the piece of scrap that she and a few latecomers were excavating from the sand. "What?"

"Do you think you could make me a boat?" Her mother cocked her head to one side. "A boat? I don't know... yeah. Probably. I'll give it a try, once I'm done with the house. Why do you need a boat?"

Smiling, Kay's father put an arm around her strong shoulders, and if he flinched, she didn't feel it.

Snapshots

Kristine Kathryn Rusch | 4408 words

"Let the people see. Open [the coffin] up. Let the people see what happened to my boy."

—Mamie R. Bradley, mother of Emmett Till, quoted in "Mother Receives The Body of Her Slain Son," The Atlanta Daily World, September 7, 1955

Snapshot: 1955

The church was hot. Last of summer in Chicago. Cleavon didn't hold his mama's hand. At ten, he was too big to cling, but he sure wanted to. He ain't never seen so many people all in one place, and they was cryin and moanin and carryin on, even though the preacher ain't started yet.

Mama didn't want him sayin "ain't," but he could think it, at least today.

Mama was draggin him here, not Papa, not his older brother Roy. Roy was the same age as Emmett Till. They'd been friends, and Papa said it just be cruel to make him go, but Mama said she would anyways.

Roy ain't been home since. He probably wouldn't come back till the funeral was over.

Cleavon never knowed anybody who'd been on the news, and Emmett'd been on the news for days now. And in the Chicago Defender, too. Papa kept staring at the headlines, but the only one Cleavon kept looking at was "Mother Waits In Van for Her 'Bo." Ain't no one outside of the South Side knowed that Emmett wasn't Emmett to the folks what knowed him. Emmett was Bobo, and he hated it.

Cleavon didn't talk to him much, couldn't call him a friend. He was too big a kid for that—nearly grow'd—which was why, Mama said, them Southern white boys thought he was whistling at that stupid white woman. The idea of it all made Cleavon shiver whenever he seen white folk, and there was a lotta white folks near Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ today. They was all reporters, Mama said, and ain't none of them gonna beat up little black boys.

"Not with all these people watching," Mama said.

Cleavon wanted to correct Mama. Emmett wasn't beat up. The papers said he was pistol-whipped, then shot in the head. Cleavon had a whipping before, more than one, with his Papa's belt, but never at the hands of white boys. Whippings didn't scare him so much as guns. It was hard to run away from guns.

He'd said that to Papa, and Papa'd given him a sad look. You ain't never had a true whip ping, son, Papa'd said, and I hope you never get one.

It was after Cleavon said that Papa stopped arguing with Mama. Papa said it'd be good for the boys to know what them whiteys was capable of. 'Cept Roy was too scared to look.

Cleavon come'd here in his best Sunday clothes, the collar of his starched shirt too tight on his neck, and stood in line near to an hour now, right beside Mama, so they could pay their respects to Emmett. That's what Mama said to the pastor, but that's not what she said to Cleavon. To Cleavon, she said he was gonna see something he wouldn't never forget.

They finally made it past the pews up front, and Cleavon could see the open coffin a few yards ahead. Grown-ups looked in, then covered their mouths or looked away. Next to it all, Emmett's mama sat on the steps, tears on her cheeks, men Cleavon didn't know holding her shoulders like they was holding her up.

Last night, Mama said to Papa after she thought Cleavon was asleep that she didn't know if she could live without her boys, and he said, You go on, Janet. You just go on.

So Cleavon was watching Emmett's mama, not the casket, as he come up. Papa told him 'fore they left, he said, What you're gonna see, son, it's not pretty. But it's the way life is. It's what death can be, if you're not careful.

Mama yelled then. She said there wasn't any proof that Emmett wasn't careful, that whiteys killed us anyway just for breathing funny, and especially down south. Papa said, Now Janet, bad things happen in Chicago too, and she stood taller like she did when she had a mad on, and she said, Not as many bad things, and Papa soft like he did when he didn't want no one to hear him, You're dreaming, honey. You're just dreaming.

Mama stopped in front of the coffin. She made a sound Cleavon ain't never heard before. She grabbed Cleavon's shoulders tight with her black gloved hands and said, "Never mind, Cleavon. You don't have to look. We've paid our respects," but now he was determined. She'd dragged him here, and he was gonna see what Emmett's mama wanted the whole world to see.

He yanked himself outta his mama's grasp and faced that coffin. Something was in there, dressed like him. Black suit, white shirt. But he didn't recognize the rest of it. It had a chin and sorta mouth and some black hair what might've been Emmett's. But there weren't no eyes at all, and the skin was peeled back in places. Plus there was holes in his head.

Cleavon stared at them holes. Gunshot holes.

"Come on, Cleavon," Mama said, but he wouldn't move.

That was someone he knowed. That was someone he talked to. That was someone he liked.

"Holy Gods, Bobo," he said real soft, like his Papa done just that afternoon. "This ain't right. This ain't right at all."

"There are more senseless, irrational killings," First Deputy Police Superintendent Michael Spiotto told the Tribune for [a 1975] series [on Chicago's high murder rate]. "There are more cases of murder for which we can't determine any motive."

—Stephan Benzkofer, "1974 was a deadly year in Chicago," Chicago Tribune, July 8, 2012

Snapshot: 1974

The traffic light turned red half a block ahead. Cleavon Branigan's shoulders tensed. Kids—reedy, thin, maybe ten-twelve years younger than him—ran into alleys, away from the glass-strewn sidewalks. He was on a cross-street heading toward Sixty-fifth, and if he didn't stop, he'd probably get hit.

If he did, he wasn't sure what the hell would happen.

It was his own damn fault, really. He'd been the one to take this route home after shopping down on East Seventy-first. He wasn't sure why he'd left the Near West Side anyway. The idea of good fried chicken for lunch and a black birthday card for his roommate, not one of those Hallmark pieces-o-crap, had seemed like a good idea.

Not good enough to stop here, right in the middle of the gang wars.

He slowed, foot braced over the brake, hoping the light would change before he got there. He scanned, left, right, back again, but there was oncoming traffic. He swallowed hard, deciding he'd punch it after the last car left.

He eased to a rolling stop—a California stop, his roommate called it—and all hell broke loose. Gunshots ricocheting, exploding at impact, those kids shooting at each other, not caring about him.

He eased down in the seat, peering over the dash, and slammed his foot on the accelerator. Oncoming traffic could fucking avoid him.

Someone swerved, brakes squealed, and then he was through the intersection, still driving like a crazy man. He didn't stop until he was halfway up Martin Luther King Boulevard, almost out of the South Side, as far from the projects as he could safely get.

He pulled over into a vacant lot, his heart racing.

Then he saw the bullet holes in the side windows, rear window shattered, glass on the backseat. He hadn't heard that. He'd thought all the explosions were outside the car.

He started shaking.

Enough. That was enough.

He was done with this Godforsaken town.

He was done, and he was never coming back.

"I love Chicago because it made me who I am.... But it's the city I hate to love, and I won't go back—especially now that I'm raising a son. I don't want to lose him to the streets of Chicago."

—Tenisha Taylor Bell, CNN.com,

February 15, 2013

Snapshot: 1994

"You don't get a say, Dad." Lakisha Branigan grabbed her book bag, the beaded ends of her cornrows clicking as she moved. "What part of 'I got a scholarship' do you not understand?"

Her dad put his big hand against the big oak door, blocking her way out of the house. "The part that ends with 'to the University of Chicago,'" he snapped. "You're not going."

She flung the bag over her shoulder. He was getting in her way, getting in the way of her opportunities, opportunities he had said he wanted for her.

"Do you know how hard it is to get a full scholarship to the University of Chicago?" she asked.

"I'm proud of you, baby, I am," he said, moving in front of the door, nearly knocking over her mother's prize antique occasional table as he did. "But you haven't been to Chicago. I grew up there—"

"And left when gangs were shooting at you, I know," she said. She'd heard that story a million times. Her dad hadn't done anything, he hadn't gotten out of the car, he hadn't shot back, he just fled. Reggie, her boyfriend, said that made her dad a coward.

She didn't like the word, but the sentiment made her uncomfortable. It always nagged her that her dad ran away.

"It's not like that any more," she said. "The crime rate is going down. You want to see the statistics?"

"I want you to go somewhere else," he said. "Dartmouth is in the middle of nowhere—"

"And my scholarship there is tuition only," she said. "Do you know how much that'll cost?"

"We'll get loans—"

"I'm not going in debt," she said. "University of Chicago or nothing."

That threat always worked. Except this time.

Her dad sighed and shook his head. "Then it's nothing," he said.

She stared at him, shocked. All her life, the lectures: education lifts you up; education is the only way our people can compete; education will make you equal when nothing else will.

"Baby," he said, "the school is on the South Side."

"No, it's not," she said. "It's in Hyde Park."

"Bullets don't acknowledge neighborhood boundaries," he said.

"And you're paranoid." She flounced away from him, threaded her way through the heavy living room furniture and hurried into the kitchen. She'd wasted fifteen minutes she didn't have fighting with her dad. She'd take his car, then, and drive herself to school.

She was an adult now, whether he liked it or not.

"Hadiya Pendleton, who performed at President Obama's inauguration with her high school's band and drill team Jan. 21, was shot in the back Tuesday afternoon as she and other King College Prep students took shelter from a driving rain under a canopy in Vivian Gordon Harsh Park on the city's South Side."

—Judy Keen,

"Chicago teen who performed at inauguration fatally shot," USA Today, January 31, 2013

Snapshot: 2013

Five black SUVs stopped in the alley beside Greater Harvest Baptist Church. Thin serious men in somber suits got out, cleared the snow away from the tires, nodded at other black-clad agents holding back the crowd. Not that anyone was cheering, like the last time Lakisha Branigan had seen the First Lady.

Only Michelle Obama hadn't been First Lady then. Just First-Lady-elect, if there was such a thing. That cool night under the klieg lights in Grant Park, the Obama family tiny on a tiny stage, a quarter of a mile from where Lakisha and her nine-year-old son Ty stood. She couldn't even get her father to visit that night, the night the first African-American got elected President of the United States.

An African-American from Chicago. So there, Daddy, she'd said that night. And he'd said from his suburban Southern Illinois home, only three hours away, I don't want you near Grant Park, baby. And I don't want my grandson in downtown, ever. You hear me?

She'd heard. She never listened.

She helped Ty out of their own SUV. He was taller than she was now and had already outgrown the suit she'd bought him for the science fairs he specialized in. He'd been the only kid from his school to participate in the First Robotics Competition and he'd been busy with his team for weeks now.

Normally, he complained when Lakisha wanted him to do something extra. His time was short these days. But coming to Hadiya's funeral had been Ty's idea. He'd known her all his life.

One of the Secret Service agents bent over, picking something off the ground. His sports coat moved slightly to reveal his gun.

"No," Ty said, stopping beside the SUV's open door.

Lakisha almost slid on the ice. She was wearing the wrong shoes for standing in the cold. And nylons. Her legs were freezing.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

He shook his head. "I can't go in."

He looked at the weapon, then at the side doors. Someone had set up metal detectors. Security protocols, because the First Lady was here. Lakisha's stomach turned. Normally there weren't security protocols at this church—at any church.

"You go through that stuff every day at school," she said.

Ty held onto the open door like it was a shield. "I changed my mind."

"Why?" Lakisha asked.

"No reason." His voice shifted from its new tenor range to soprano. He didn't even blush. He usually blushed when his voice cracked.

He slipped back into the SUV, and started to pull the door closed. She caught it.

"What aren't you telling me?" she asked.

He threaded his fingers together. "Those men have guns."

"To protect the First Lady," she said. "You've seen that before, too. It's okay, Ty."

"No," he said. "It's not. I want to go home."

She sighed. Hadiya had been his friend. It was his right to mourn how he wanted.

She rounded the front of the SUV, and climbed into the driver's side. She shut the door, and was about to turn the key in the ignition, when she hesitated.

"What else, Ty?"

He bowed his head.

"Ty," she said in the voice she always used to get his cooperation, the voice that still worked, even though he was getting bigger than she was.

"I was in that park, Mama," he whispered. "And I am not going near anyone with a gun ever again."

"Since the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, we at Slate have been wondering how many people are dying from guns in America every day.... That information is surprisingly hard to come by.... [For example] suicides, which are estimated to make up as much as 60 percent of gun deaths, typically go unreported..."

—Chris Kirk and Dan Kois, Slate,

February 21, 2013

Snapshot: 2019

His grandfather smelled of mothballs. He hunched in the passenger seat of Ty's car, clinging to the seatbelt like it was a lifeline. In the past year, his grandfather had become frail.

Ty hadn't expected it. His grandfather had always been so big, so powerful, so alive.

"Your mama said I'm bothering you." His grandfather stared out the window at the neat houses on the old side street. Half the lawns were overgrown, but the others were meticulously cared for. "You're too important to bother."

"But she wouldn't come," Ty said.

"I didn't call her. I just called you." His grandfather shifted slightly, then looked at him sideways. "This is man-stuff. She'd yell at me for saying that."

Ty nodded. Man-stuff. No one talked like that any more. But his grandfather was from a different generation, and in that generation, each gender had a role. His mother hated it, but sometimes Ty thought such strict definitions made life easier.

"Besides, she thinks I'm worrying too much," his grandfather said.

Ty did too, but he didn't say that. He'd made his first argument on the phone. Gramps, everyone's entitled to go dark now and then.

But his grandfather had insisted: his friend Leon never failed to answer his phone. The police wouldn't check and Leon hadn't set up any health services, so no one was authorized "to bust into his house," as his grandfather so colorfully said.

I'm worried, his grandfather had said. When Laverne went, she took part of him with her.

Leon, his grandfather's best friend for as long as Ty could remember. Both men laughing, teaching him cards, giving him his first beer, teaching him to be a man, because, they said, his mother never would.

It was only a three-hour drive to his grandfather's house. Ty hadn't seen him enough anyway.

Ty pulled into Leon's driveway, thinking about all those marathon movie sessions on Leon's big TV in the basement, Laverne bringing popcorn, then pizza, and then grabbing the remote so they would get some sleep. Her funeral had been one of the saddest Ty had ever been to.

"I'm sure it's nothing," he said. "Leon'll be mad at us."

"I hope you're right." His grandfather opened the car door and got out, fumbling in the pocket of his plaid coat for keys. He found them, and grabbed the one marked with blue dye.

Then he walked to the garage door, and unlocked it. He'd already let himself in by the time Ty got out of the car.

The garage smelled of gasoline, even though Leon hadn't had a car with a gasoline engine in five years. The door to the kitchen stood open.

Ty frowned. It was too quiet. There should've been shouting or laughing or some kind of ruckus. That was what he always thought of when he thought of his grandfather and Leon. Ruckus.

He climbed the two stairs into the kitchen and the stink hit him first. Something ripe mixed with an undertone of sewer. But the kitchen was spotless like usual. The table clean, no dishes in the sink.

Ty rounded the corner into the living room, stopped when he saw his grandfather crouching. At his feet, some kind of gun.

Ty took one more step, saw Leon on his back, eyes open, half his face gone.

"Fucking son of a bitch listened to me," his grandfather said.

Ty's breath caught. "Excuse me?"

"I used to say, you don't use a gun to kill yourself. What if the shot goes wrong? What if it only wounds you? He used the right bullets, made sure there was no risk of living."

His grandfather stood, knees cracking. "Shoulda known when I seen Bobo. It don't always happen in Chicago."

Ty didn't understand him, but he didn't have to. "Let's get you out of here, Gramps. I'll call the police."

"Because," his grandfather said bitterly, "calling the police always does so much good."

"Because while there is no law or set of laws that can prevent every senseless act of violence completely, no piece of legislation that will prevent every tragedy, every act of evil, if there is even one thing we can do to reduce this violence, if there is even one life that can be saved, then we've got an obligation to try."

—President Barack Obama,

January 16, 2013

Snapshot: 2025

"I don't see how this could work," Deputy Chief of Police Hannah Fehey said, holding a small tablet in her left hand. She rested against the windowsill in her office, the skyline of Chicago behind her, blocking all but a bit of blue from Lake Michigan. "Guns are still mechanical. No virus will shut off every single gun in the city."

Ty smiled. His lawyer, Robert Locke, stood beside him, arms crossed, trying not to look nervous. Everyone expected Ty to be arrested by the end of the meeting.

He didn't care. He had spent years thinking about this—ever since Hadiya and those bullets whizzing over his head in that park. Ever since his grandfather telling the same kind of stories. And Leon. Ty still didn't want to think about Leon.

Ty had found a way to stop the violence. It would be slow, but it would work.

"I didn't send a virus to the guns," he said. "I sent it to the phones."

She looked up from the tablet. "Phones?"

"Cell phones," he said, trying not to treat her as if she was dumb. "And that tablet. And watches, glasses, clothing, and anything else computerized with a wireless or cell connection within a fifty-mile radius."

If he had any hope of staying out of jail, he would need her on his side. Because he had already done it. He had hacked every possible personal system in the Greater Chicago area.

But she didn't seem to notice that he had broken the law. She was still frowning at him, as if she couldn't quite understand his point.

"So what?" she said. "You still can't shut off a gun."

"No," he said. "I can't. But if one fires, the phones nearby automatically upload everything to the nearest data node. Numbers called, texts sent, fingerprints from the screen, retinal prints, voice prints. The phone closest to the shot fired sends the information first. If you can't identify someone from all of that and arrest them before the gunshot residue leaves their skin, then the Chicago Police Department isn't as good as it says it is."

Her mouth opened.

He didn't tell her the rest of the details. All he had done was tweak already-existing technology to make it work for him. His little virus, which he sent through all the major carriers, turned personal devices on, and made them record everything in the immediate area— sound, video, location—everything. All of that data went to a series of dedicated servers, rather like those every major police department had now to scan all the traffic cameras and other security devices littering city streets.

Only those public security cameras didn't activate when a shot rang out. They ran all the time, collecting too much useless data. These phones activated inside a house or a car, showing everything nearby. His servers instructed the personal devices to contact the police, all in a nanosecond.

It was the servers and data storage, his lawyers had told him when he came up with the idea, that made this action so very illegal.

So he wasn't going to admit to all of his illegal acts. Just some of them.

"Check the tablet," he said. "I'm sure someone has fired a gun in the last fifteen minutes."

She glanced down at the tablet he had handed her at the beginning of the meeting. Her frown deepened. Then she set the tablet on the desk, leaned forward, and tapped the screen on the desk's edge. Ty heard the chirrup as someone answered the Deputy Chief's page.

"Any report of shots fired near the Art Institute?" she asked.

"Yes, ma'am," said the male voice, sounding perplexed. "How did you know?"

"Anyone injured?"

"We're dispatching someone to the scene now." Now the male voice sounded businesslike.

"Thank you," she said, and tapped the screen again.

Ty nodded toward the tablet. "You have the information you need. You know who fired the first shot. If they have a criminal record, you already have their name and address."

She picked up the tablet. Its light reflected in her eyes. "There's more than one name here. Two of them belong to me."

It took Ty a moment to understand. Police officers. "Everyone carries a personal device, ma'am," he said. "You get reports of every shot."

She clutched the tablet to her chest, like a child hugging a stuffed dog. "Criminals will stop carrying devices."

"We don't broadcast this," he said. "We don't tell anyone. We just arrest whoever takes a shot."

"It's not legal," she said. "It won't hold up in court."

"Forgive me, ma'am." Ty's lawyer spoke up. Ty gave him a warning glance. Robert wasn't supposed to speak unless Ty was arrested. "But under the revised FISA laws, you only need to notify the Federal Court that you'll be doing this. You'll have to do it under seal, but it should work."

Ty let out a small breath. They didn't know that for certain. The damn laws changed all the time, generally in favor of the government. But of course, he was talking to the government.

"My God," she said.

For a moment, Ty had hope. She was going to try this.

Then she shook her head. "It's one gun at a time."

"One gun user at a time," Ty said.

"We'd have to exclude firing ranges," she muttered. "And weapons training facilities."

"You can do that by location, ma'am," Ty said. "Any guns fired in a sanctioned area wouldn't trigger the alerts."

The Deputy Chief blinked at him. "You're giving this to us?" she asked.

"I want it tested here," he said. "But it's mine."

She nodded once. "This might work," she said. "My God. This just might work."

"The data is dirty; it is not valid or reliable, there are all sorts of missing information," says David Klinger, a former Los Angeles police officer who is now an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. "When I and other researchers compare what is there with what is in local police internal files, it just doesn't add up. So we don't have a national system for recording deaths at the hands of police. And we don't have information about police who shoot people who survive or who shoot at people and miss."

—Pat Schneider,

The Capitol Times, February 19, 2013

Snapshot: 2025

"You did what?" Cleavon asked.

Ty was sitting in his grandfather's kitchen, nursing a cup of coffee. "I gave it to the police."

"You gave it..." Cleavon sat down heavily. His body hurt. His head hurt. He could barely catch his breath. "And you think they'll use this technology to make the world better?"

"Of course they will," Ty said. "You know that."

Cleavon thought of his own grandfather, clutching a rifle on the rooftops of his South Chicago home in that hot hellish summer of 1919, fending off the police as they tried to destroy anyone with black skin, in the middle of the worst race riots of that horrible century.

He thought of the white police officers, who shot first and asked questions later in the gang-ridden Chicago neighborhoods where he grew up.

He thought of Emmett Till's mother, sitting beside her son's coffin, tears running down her cheeks. Of the bullet holes in Emmett's head, done by two white men who would never have been arrested by the police of their day.

Of the bullet holes in Leon's head, and of the arrest that would never happen, because it would have been too late.

Cleavon had no idea how to tell Ty that. How to convey all he'd seen, all he knew.

"Science won't save the world, son," Cleavon said.

Ty's cheeks flushed, like they always did when he was angry and tried to hide it. He wanted his grandfather to praise him, not to criticize him.

"Mama said you would be negative," Ty said. "She said I shouldn't tell you anything I've done well because you always take the pride out of it."

Cleavon looked at him. "It's not about you."

Ty raised his chin. "Then what's it about?"

Cleavon started to answer, maybe quote some Martin Luther King, some Ghandi, words about changing men's hearts. And then he stopped, smiled, leaned back.

His grandson believed that people were inherently good. Black, white, purple. His grandson didn't care.

Yeah, the boy was naïve, but he was a new kind of naïve, one that didn't even exist in Cleavon's day.

"Never mind," Cleavon said, getting up to pour himself another cup of coffee. "You done good, Ty. You done real good."

Repo

Aaron Gallagher | 6294 words

It took concentration to perform delicate work in the cumbersome gloves of the suit. The rounded fingers were metal-tipped, and bulky. Elise painted the tips of her gloves with luminous paint for ease when working outside.

The octopus found the wires and shorted the alarm. The device glowed green and she triggered the manual release. The door popped, expelling a breath or two of oxygen.

Elise slipped into the airlock and closed it behind her, shutting the door on the endless black of space. The inside porthole looked into the cargo hold. She glided through the cargo room with three kicks.

The head-up on her helmet showed schematics in blue. She found the environmental control room.

She flipped open the airtight seal on a container holding a large slab of green gel. She snapped open a metal vial and sprayed dark liquid onto the slab. She sealed the container, turned the machinery to full, and crouched by the door out of sight.

At thirty minutes, Elise headed upstairs for the cockpit. Empty. She looked for the captain's cabin. In the cabin's refresher, she found his body slumped in a large rubber bag.

Great. He passed out in the shower.

Elise wrestled the naked man out of the rubber shower. Round globules of water drifted around them. She pulled a sedative pad out of her bag and slapped it onto Holland's arm. The chemicals seeped into his bloodstream.

He'd sleep twenty-four hours in a chemical coma. She left him in his bunk pouch, cinch closed around his neck. His balding head bobbed in the breeze from the vent.

Back in the environmental control room, she worked the O2 scrubbers at full blast for thirty minutes. She broke the seal on her helmet and sniffed the air, ready to clamp the helmet down the moment she felt dizzy.

Clean.

The ship was hers.

Elise floated through the ship to familiarize herself. It didn't take long. It was a small Beech Skimmer, cargo capacity of around five metric tons. The craft was cylindrical, with two floors. Cargo, environmental, and engine room below. Main floor above was one long corridor, sixty meters long, with the cockpit at the fore, two staterooms to each side, a combination kitchen, dining room, and recreation area at the other end. The ship was roomy for one, comfortable with eight, rated for a maximum of sixteen.

Down below she examined the engines, because no pilot she knew ran a ship within recommended specs. The big Beech was tuned up to 122 percent efficiency. She studied the specs to learn what he had done. She shook her head. Sure, he'd managed to coax more power from the big engine, but it would need an overhaul twice as often. She shut off the display with a shrug. They never thought of the bottom line.

She finished her inspection and sealed her helmet. As she kicked out of the airlock, she paused to admire the view. It was worth ad miring: Pluto, with her single, sickly colony. The dock in orbit, half-full of ships in port, lit like Vegas, and shining like diamonds on velvet.

She slipped under Adage to where her Betty was Remora'd to the hull and went inside. She plopped into the pilot's couch. All her controls were custom, larger than normal. She spent a lot of time in her suit. Only two hours had passed since she used thrusters to come alongside the bigger ship. She watched the displays as she worked the controls by feel. Her deft touch meant hardly a small thump when she triggered the electromagnet and sealed to the hull of the bugger ship.

She looked around the small cabin, dingy with use. The Betty was a work-ship and looked it. She kept it neat, but it was still messy in that lived-in way.

After a last look around, she grabbed her bag and thumbed the power-down sequence, keeping the power plant only alive enough to keep the electromagnet on and her wine unfrozen.

In the cockpit, she entered her flight plan and engaged, then she removed her suit. She shook herself out, tugging the simple grey shipsuit straight. It was a relief to scratch. She scrubbed her fingers through her brown free-fall short hair. Her eyes itched from the low-humidity atmosphere of her suit.

Twenty days from Pluto dock to Lunar orbit. It took 140 minutes to get to full thrust.

Elise rooted through Holland's stores. Among his other qualities, Efram Holland had surprisingly excellent taste in both wine and coffee. While the plastic didn't improve the flavor of either, it wasn't intrusive.

She opened a box of 2105 Chateau d' Yquem. She put a clip in the reader and stuck herself to the wall. She squeezed a globe of wine into the air and leaned forward to sip from the bubble. The reader displayed the text of Jane Eyre.

"Chapter nine," she said, and the reader skipped ahead. She crossed her legs and arms and got comfortable.

"Whu..."

"Holland. Holland!" She slapped his cheek.

"What... what?" Mumbles and grunts.

"Wake up, Holland." She patted his cheeks again.

"Where? What?" His voice was slurry, drunk.

"You're in the bathroom, Holland."

His eyes fluttered open. They flicked around the room. Sink, toilet, the bag shower, and Elise.

"What am I... what?" His eyes were starry.

He had blue eyes and shaggy blond hair.

"You have fifteen minutes. Take a shower. You need that. Use the refresher. Drink some water. I'll give you some food. Then you go back to bed."

He blinked at her.

"I... do I know you?" His burry throat ground out the words, roughing their edges like freshly-hewn pine boards.

"Nope. You gonna make good use of the time, or what?"

"Wait. Just will you wait a second?" He thrashed as he awoke more fully. "Just wait."

"No. Fifteen minutes," she said.

"Will you wait a sodding minute? Who the hell are you?"

"Elise," she said. "Why do you care?"

He stared. "Never mind. I don't care who you are. You turn me loose right now, or so help me—"

She rolled her eyes. "Yeah, you're scary. Do you need the refresher or what?"

Holland tried to raise his fists. His bound hands were not threatening. He looked down at them. He was cuffed. He was also naked. He looked up.

"It's easier to clean up if you mess yourself,"

Elise told him cheerfully.

"You... you stripped me?"

"Nope. You were already naked. I found you in the shower." She looked at her chronometer. Looked at him.

"Fine. Fine. Bitch," he said to the bulkhead.

"Watch your mouth. Hurry up." She floated backward out the door. "And keep something in mind, Holland."

"What?"

"My job would be far easier if I stuffed you in the recycler." She shut the door in his face.

Fifteen minutes later she rapped on the door.

"Come on out. Slowly."

The door opened and he drifted out.

"There's a pack of soup here, if you want it." He grabbed the bulb.

When he finished she said, "Get in your pouch."

"Wait a minute—"

She showed him a double-shot holdout, loaded with low velocity soft-nose ammo. It wouldn't pierce the walls, but it would do fine on him. Holland swallowed. He kicked to his pouch and climbed in. After he cinched the bag closed, she held out another sedative patch. He narrowed his eyes, but said nothing.

"Good boy. See you tomorrow."

She slapped it against his neck. In seconds, his eyelids drooped.

She went back to the kitchen panel. He did stock good stuff. She wouldn't take from his ship—she was honest—but she would eat it while on board. Cost of business, she figured.

"Lunar Control, this is outbound 625, Luas, ready for departure." Wilder sent his all clear to the station.

"Copy, Luas, you're cleared. Safe one."

"Thanks, Lunar. Luas out."

He nudged the drive and pulled away from the dock lane, eased the ship into exit vector, and hit the go-button. The five-second countdown gave him time to settle back. The thrusters fired and an invisible hand pressed him into the plush seat. After an hour of hard thrust the engines pulled back to a whisper. Gravity backed off his chest and he checked his board. All green.

The cabin air was cool on his skin. He always launched naked if he could help it. A wrinkle at five gees was a knife in your kidney, and you'd piss blood for a week.

After fixing a drink he studied the documentation. His target was a light freighter last seen out near Pluto. The intelligence being days old, the ship was likely gone by now, but that was the place to start.

As he floated in lotus, the screen on the wall displayed a picture of the Beech-Aerodyne private freighter Adage.

Nine days in, Holland made a break for it.

He managed to cut the plastic cuffs on the folded metal edge of the sink. He had been scoring them a little every day, and Elise hadn't seen the wear. When she left him to his business, he started the shower but did not get in. He twisted his wrists, grinned with pain, and the cuffs snapped. He tried hard not to pant. He played the water wand over the inside of the rubber shower bag to cover any sounds. He was out of shape. His muscles were slack, and his belly had gone a little round. Most pilots practiced isometric exercises—the only kind that work in freefall—but he hadn't kept up. It was too easy to float around. Dangerous. By the time you realized how much bulk you had built up, you were stuck in orbit. You went down a gravity well and your heart stopped from the sudden strain.

He braced against the wall and propelled himself through the door, hard. The plastic panel banged outward. He reached out for—

For what? Elise watched him, startled, having just come from heating his meal in the kitchenette. Before he could orient on her she drew on him.

He glowered at the pistol.

She dug into her pocket and tossed him another cuff.

He had the sense to not fight. He cinched his wrists together, showed her how tight they were, and went to his pouch. She waited until he sealed in before she flew over with the new patch.

"Hey..." he said, "hadda try, you know?"

"No hard feelings, Efram. Good night."

In a perverse fit of pique, she slapped the patch to his forehead. His eyes rolled up to stare at it as he drifted off.

After he was asleep, she fashioned an ankle cuff and a lead out of scraps in his repair bay. She floated his pouch to the refresher and secured the lead to the wall with pseudo-metal epoxy. At least he wouldn't be able to cause any more trouble.

She kicked to the cockpit to check the radar. Ten days left until she pulled into Lunar Dock's orbit.

There was a blip on the radar. She stared for a second. She zoomed in, tried to isolate the ident number. The speakers crackled, and a voice said faintly, "Emergency. Emergency."

The word set her teeth on edge and spiked her blood pressure. "Emergency" is a dirty word in space.

She thumbed the transmit button and said, "Unidentified pilot, this is B—" she stumbled over the name. "This is private vessel Adage, what's the nature of your emergency?"

Static.

"Repeat: private vessel Adage—"

A feedback whine cut her off, then: "... peat, emergency. My oxy unit's screwed. I can't... I can't repair it, me. Anyone out there?"

She sent again, "I hear you. Can you squawk ident?"

A hopeful voice responded, "Is... are you there? I—I thought I heard someone, me." It was tinny, but clear. She couldn't place his accent.

"I'm here. What's your situation?"

"Thank God. My ship is the Luas. I'm out of Luna headed for Pluto and the belt, me. About two hours ago, my oxygen unit malfunctioned. I'm in a bad way. I don't suppose you're a mechanic?"

"Not that kind. What happened?"

"I'm not sure. I think my algae colony died."

"What? What happened to it?"

"No idea, Adage. I changed it out at Callisto base a week ago. Now it's dead."

"Sounds bad. I've never seen that happen. Guess there's a first time."

"Copy that, Adage. I don't suppose you have a spare?"

She scrolled through the ship's stores.

"Your lucky day, Luas. I have a spare colony. You have to evac yours and purge the tank, in case it's a virus."

"Well, I'm already suited. I can dump it and scour. I can pay for it, me, I'll be happy to pay for it."

She could afford to be generous.

"Don't sweat it, Luas. Call it goodwill. Your best bet's gonna be exposing it to vacuum. Got any perishables?"

"Not that I'm upset to lose under the circumstances, me."

"All right. I'll pull along. You do what you have to, and afterward I'll tether. You can wait it out in here. I'd suit up and help, but..."

"No problem, Adage, I understand. You've already stuck your neck out. I'll stop and prepare for a hard dump, me."

"Roger, Luas. Keep me posted."

She thumbed off the link and watched the radar. The Luas killed speed. She did the same. Adage slowed and came to a stop off his port side.

She pulled up what she could from the computer. Luas was registered out of Luna, a rental, just like her mysterious visitor said. Rated for prospecting. No red flags, no warrants.

She never expected company out here, but no way could she cruise past someone with a life-threatening emergency. Many would, but she had to sleep every night. Holland wouldn't complain if she raided his stores. She'd have to explain right off who she was but that was okay. She had the warrant and the badge.

Wilder watched the ship, just in visual range, from inside his emergency suit.

He hadn't planned on luck. Running across the Adage en route like this was pure, blind luck. His information showed that Efram Holland was captain of the Adage. Maybe he brought a woman with him. It was a long way to Earth. Quill hadn't said. Maybe he hadn't known. Didn't matter. He wasn't here to write a biography.

He knew the oxygen plant story was thin, but he had been caught short, and forced to improvise.

Every ship carried an oxygen plant. Superaccelerated algae converted carbon dioxide and produced breathable oxygen. The generators were automatic, and generally trouble-free. When trouble happened, most pilots never get beyond the "check the manual" stage. Wilder was not "most" pilots. He knew how the plant worked, how to change the colony out, and what kinds of chemicals to keep away from it. Most ships carried a caustic epoxy puncture sealant he could use to kill it.

He knew the setup seemed fishy. The pilot was wary, but willing to help. Wilder waited until the conversation was over before he injected the sealant into the slab of algae. It started to blacken at the edges as the chemical colony died off. By the time he was ready to eject the mass, it was almost all black. He recorded it with his suit cam in case it came up in conversation.

He scrubbed out the tub with a sterile cleaner. It was ready for a fresh colony. He double-checked the computer to make sure the ship would stay parked.

He tugged the bio bag full of dead algae to the airlock and cycled out. He kicked the bag away toward deep space.

He didn't admire the beautiful, empty space around him. He fixed his gaze upon the Adage and crossed the gap.

She floated well back from the door as the airlock cycled. Her sidearm wasn't pointed at him, exactly. He peeled off his suit. His face was ruddy and rough with a week of reddish beard. He wore a tight blue jumpsuit. He was a thin, muscular man and she couldn't see a gun anywhere. His green eyes had circles under them.

"I'm Elise," she said. "Elise Rosemonde."

"Wilder. And thank you, Elise. You saved my life." Wahlder. An'thank ya, Eleeze. Y'saved mah lahfe. She smiled. His accent turned a simple phrase into something akin to a song, tempo rolling gracefully between soft syllables. He stared at the gun but didn't comment.

"Welcome, and glad I could help. Where you headed?"

He grinned. "I was headed out to Charon. I saved for two years to get that boat. I'm out to be a prospector. Hope to strike it rich, me." His thickened accent distracted her. The trick served him well in the past. Some stereotypes died hard.

"Rough life in the belts," Elise said.

"So I hear. But I leased a ship, arranged for a dock, and I'm gonna keep on till I hit, or I have to go home."

"Or you die?"

He frowned. "Well... yeah, I suppose."

Elise put her gun back in the clamshell holster at the small of her back. She kicked toward him with her hand out. He took it gratefully.

"Welcome aboard, Mr. Wilder."

"Just Wilder is fine, me. Thanks."

"It'll be a minute while I dig out the new slab. Meantime, you hungry?"

He nodded. "Yes, ma'am. Funny; two hours ago I was sure I was gone. Now I'm famished."

"Come on." She led him to the galley. She displayed several food packets and a bottle of wine. He chose, and she set them cooking. While they waited, Wilder said, "You've got a nice ship."

"It's not mine," Elise said.

"Uh..."

"I've got the owner tied up in his bathroom."

"Uh huh." He eyed her warily. He held very still.

She smiled. "It's okay. I have a warrant."

"What?" It threw him off. He almost lost the accent.

"I'm a property retrieval technician. I'm licensed to intercept and apprehend."

Wilder blinked. "You're a bounty hunter?"

"Kind of." The machine chimed and she pulled out their meals, parked them in the air, and sipped from her bulb.

"Wow. So... that's why the gun?"

"Necessary precaution. Never know, do you?"

"Yeah. I see what you mean. What did the guy do?"

"Does it matter?" she smiled. "It was enough to get me out here and I don't work cheap."

"I see," he said.

"Try the wine. It's not bad."

He sipped from his clear bulb of wine. He nodded in appreciation.

"Good." He looked around. "Where's the guy?"

"Like I said, refresher in his cabin. He'll sleep anesthetized for the rest of the trip."

"Anesthetized?"

She nodded. "I used a surgical disc. It induces chemical unconsciousness."

Wilder ate some beef stew.

"That's pretty handy."

"I think so."

"Can I see him?"

"Why?" She nibbled a pastry.

"I don't know. Curiosity?"

"About what?"

"Well..." he said. "You say you're here to get the guy. I never heard of that, me. It sounds fishy, you know? A little... creepy."

"You're welcome to go back to your ship," she said.

He put up his hands. "No, no! I'm not... I didn't mean to offend you. I'm just... this is weird, you know? I'm a dirt-buster. I took a six-week course in piloting and survey. I'm not really a space man, me."

Elise said, "Yeah, well. I have a warrant. I'm a duly-appointed representative."

"Appointed? By who?"

"Never mind," she said. "What's with all the questions?"

"Nothing. I got time to kill, me."

Elise finished and tossed the containers into the recycler. She said, "Come on, then."

Wilder followed. He watched her go, eyes on the gun. Grabbing it was risky. Try it? Or wait for another opportunity?

They hovered in the air before Efram Holland. She watched Wilder poke the man.

"Wow. He's out."

"Yep." She didn't move.

"Well, okay." He turned to look at her appraisingly. "So, can I get some more stew?"

"Sure," Elise said. "Come on."

She turned away. He caught her from behind and encircled her neck with one arm, pressed the tip of a small knife against her throat. It lived inside the sleeve of his suit, which looked cheap and disposable, and was neither.

"No sudden moves," he said. "I don't want to hurt you, but I will." The patois was gone.

She smiled, though he couldn't see it.

"I could say the same to you," she replied. He felt movement at his belly as she cocked the pistol. He had been so busy at her neck he missed the draw.

They rotated in the air.

"Well, well. You'll shoot me?"

She nodded. "If you cut my throat, you die. If you don't get that knife off my neck, you die. Either way, you die. Which would you prefer?"

"Tough call."

"You have five seconds to get that knife off my neck, mister."

Wilder said, "Seems like a bad deal. I let you go, you shoot me anyhow."

"I won't if I don't have to," Elise said. "One—"

Wilder pushed off. Elise spun, the gun never left his midsection.

"Toss the knife here."

He floated the knife to her. She grabbed it. It was hardened ceramic hull shielding, small and permanently sharp. The hull material from which it was constructed repelled micrometeors, and diamond couldn't score it. She put it in her belt.

"That was ballsy. You stupid?"

"Calculated," Wilder said. "You don't seem the type to shoot me in cold blood. You said so."

"You're sure?"

"You wouldn't have stopped to help if you were. You could have ignored me, or waited until I ran out of air and salvaged the ship."

"I'm not interested in what you have." She nibbled her lip. "What are you really out here for, Wilder? Is it Wilder?"

"It is. I'm here for the same reason you are." Elise shook her head.

"No way. They don't double-book a job like this."

"I don't think it's a double-book. I think we're just two working stiffs with different bosses who want the same package."

"That's too bad for you."

"So it seems." Wilder crossed his arms. "Now what?"

"Is your oxygen unit shot, or was that a line?"

"Had to make it look good," Wilder said. "Killed the colony myself, though. No accident."

Elise nodded. "The stamp of verisimilitude."

"Right," Wilder said. "I like to cover my bases."

"So you have a spare?"

"No," Wilder admitted. "I don't. This was a last-minute plan."

"You either don't think ahead, or you have an over-developed sense of optimism," she said.

"I prefer to think of it as motivated self-interest," he said. "If I had a back door, I might be tempted to use it."

"Ship stores are two doors down. Get your slab and get off this ship."

"Really?"

Elise nodded.

"Why?" he asked.

"Does it matter? I don't want to kill you. Besides, I said I would. I keep my word."

"Thank you for that," he said. She didn't know whether to trust his sincerity.

"Let's go," she gestured. He set off down the hall. She kept distance between them. He pulled the slab out of the storage rack and turned to look at her. She motioned for him to come out. They floated back to the airlock. He let go of the slab to pull on his suit.

She wasn't surprised when he drew a pistol from his suit. Over the barrel of her pistol, she watched him aim.

They both laughed.

"Doesn't change a thing," she said.

"Maybe. Maybe not. You might not hit me."

"Same goes for you."

"Look," he snarled, "this is pointless. Let it go and walk away. You seem a nice girl. I don't want to have to kill you. I guarantee my bosses are a lot nastier than yours. I'll go all the way to the wall. If you do kill me, then what?"

"Who's to know? I clean up, jettison the trash, and continue on my merry. Over, done with, gone."

"Never happen," he said."You're soft."

She laughed at him.

"Wilder, you don't know me. A judgment based on a single day's knowledge, like to get you killed." The gun never moved. "I was happy to help out someone in distress. I'm just as happy to remove a threat. Or competition.

Now get in your suit and get the hell off this ship before I shoot you for the hell of it."

Wilder didn't blink; she didn't flinch.

"Look..." he stopped, embarrassed. He raised eyebrows at her.

"Elise," she supplied.

"Right. Elise. I'm sorry. I won't forget again." He looked pained. "But you're in an untenable position. I'm about to lose my patience. You don't want that to happen."

"Make your move, tough guy," she said.

"You don't want to piss me off, girl," Wilder said.

"Jam your condescension," she said.

He was certain he could put two through her, but he wasn't close enough to the wall or floor to kick out of her way. He estimated maybe a ten percent chance to avoid a fatal shot.

She watched him nerve himself for the shot. Her attention focused on his trigger finger. One twitch, and she would put a bullet in his head, followed by two more.

"Don't try me," she warned.

He laughed. "I've had enough of your mouth."

"Zip it, jerk."

"Harpy."

"Sleaze."

"You don't get it," Wilder said. "You don't win this, girl!"

"And you don't get away with all your brain cells, boy!"

Their patience broke at the same moment.

"I'm taking this ship!" she snapped.

"I'm taking Holland!" he snarled.

A long, quiet moment passed.

"What?" they both said, and laughed again.

"You're here for the ship? I'm here for him. Holland," Wilder said. "We're all bollixed up because of a miscommunication."

"You drew first, Wilder. That's no miscommunication." Elise said. "I'm here for the ship. Holland decided he didn't have to pay the rest of his lease."

"Are you serious?" he guffawed.

"Yes."

He lowered his gun and tossed it to her. She snagged it with her left hand. Her pistol never wavered from his head.

He put up his hands.

"If I'd known, I'd have just said, no games," he smiled. "I don't see any reason to fight."

She didn't move.

"You can put yours down now," he said.

"Why?"

"Because I gave you mine. I would have—"

"Why do you want him?" she clarified.

"Does it matter?" he countered. "You don't need him. It has to be a pain to keep him quiet."

She allowed that it was that.

"So let me have him. I slagged my oxygen unit because I thought I'd set a beacon on my ship and fly his back. Give me Holland and the replacement slab, and I'll be on my way. Everyone wins."

She considered.

"It would solve some problems," she replied. "But what did he do?"

Wilder shook his head. "Even if I knew, that wouldn't be part of the deal. Client privilege. As it happens, I don't know. My interest began and ended when my boss said 'fetch.' I don't know what he did and I don't care."

"Cold-blooded, aren't you?"

"Elise, it's a job. I'm sure you've done things you didn't want, just because the money said so. No difference here. They sent me to find Efram Holland, and I did. The question now is, what'll it take for you to hand him over? Money? I have some."

She sniffed. "I won't take money. Not for a person. That's not what I do."

"You draw the line in strange places, you don't mind my saying," Wilder said.

"It's my line to draw."

"So it is," he replied. "I didn't mean to offend you. It was a legitimate offer."

Elise lowered her gun.

"I want some wine. You want some wine?"

"What's your deal with wine?" he asked.

She shrugged. "You know what gets recycled on a small ship. I don't drink the water unless I have to."

"Reasonable. I knew a pilot once who wouldn't eat food that wasn't artificial. He didn't trust real food. Everyone's got a bug about something," Wilder said meditatively.

"What's yours?"

"Oh," he said. "I have a problem with rice."

"Rice?"

"Yeah. When I was a boy, I had a dog used to sleep under my bed. You know how little kids are. Slipped my mind. Two or three days, I remember I used to have a dog. I looked under my bed. Not there. Under the porch. I thought he was moving. Thought he was maybe sick. I pulled him out and realized he was dead. Maggots." Wilder shuddered. "Since then, I have a problem with rice."

"Sorry."

"Don't worry about it."

They passed a globe of white wine back and forth in the kitchenette. She handed him his pistol.

"You're trusting," he said. "But thank you."

"Not that trusting," Elise shook her head.

"You don't get the clip until you leave."

He looked down. Sure enough, she'd palmed the ammunition. He laughed.

"Nice move, that."

"Thank you."

"Listen," he started, "earlier, we got a little rough with each other. I wanted to apologize. I try not to be rude unless it's necessary."

She smiled. "It was all an act intended to intimidate the helpless little girl, is that it?"

"You're not helpless. Yes, though. I don't have hard feelings." He stuck out his hand.

She thought about it for a second, and shook with him. They both had firm grips.

"Thank you for the apology," she said. "I meant every word I said, by the way."

He laughed and she smiled.

After a moment or two, she said, "What happens to him?"

"I told you—"

"I know what you told me," She cut him off.

"Don't bullshit me."

"Probably he'll die," Wilder said. "I don't know the particulars."

She rolled her hand in the air.

"If it were simple, I'd be here to kill him. Wouldn't need to get aboard for that. I could kill him anywhere or hire it done wherever he stopped. They send me, or men like me, when they're particular about the how."

"You don't strike me as a thug."

"I'm whatever my employer needs me to be."

"So the question is, can I live with that?" She toyed with her wine.

"That's the question," he agreed.

She drained the bulb.

"Yeah," she said. "I'm pretty sure that I can."

"All right," Wilder said. "Good deal."

"First thing, we need to get your life support up. You want to start that? Or don't you trust me here alone?"

Wilder shook his head. "That's fine.

Shouldn't take me but an hour."

"I'll get our boy suited and ready to go. Let me know when, and I'll float him over."

"Good enough," he said. At the lock he slipped into his suit. He dogged the helmet, grabbed the sealed slab, and cycled the airlock.

She watched him go. The moment he was out the lock, she kicked for the bedroom, moving fast.

The radio crackled as Wilder pressed the chin plate in his helmet. "Installed. I'm activating the colony now."

"Roger that. Holland is suited."

He waited until the board went green. As soon as he confirmed the algae would bloom he headed for the airlock.

Outside, he jetted toward the Adage. He rounded the hull to find Elise was already outside the airlock, with Holland's suit trailing along behind her. She hadn't seen him approach, exactly as he intended. He emergency-burned his suit jets and collided with her. She bounced toward the aft of the Adage with a scream. He stopped his momentum.

"Sorry, but I decided I want the ship too," Wilder said. He snagged Holland's tether. Breath fog obscured the man's faceplate. He watched Elise drift across the hull. She swore as she bounced.

"Sorry, sweetheart, but I won't drag this guy back only to find that what the boss is after was in the ship the whole time."

He tapped a control on the suit sleeve. He had preprogrammed the Luas to activate thrusters and put more kilometers between itself and the Adage, out of reasonable range of Elise's suit thrusters. The Luas pulled away.

He shook his head. Bad luck for her.

"You shouldn't have trusted me," he said.

The channel crackled and her calm voice said, "I didn't. The suit is empty."

He grabbed for Holland's suit. He could tell as soon as he shook it that it was true. She must have stuffed a damp cloth in the helmet to fog the glass.

"Where is he?"

In a muffled voice, Elise said, "I told you: I didn't need him. I jettisoned him without the suit."

Wilder thought hard. She'd be trying to get back inside the Adage, of course. He thrust toward the airlock. He sealed it from the inside so she couldn't follow. He headed for the second airlock, aft. When it was sealed, he covered the inside of the vessel as thoroughly as he could. She wasn't in the ship.

He went into the cockpit. He hoped he could put a quick end to her; she had shown him mercy. He couldn't let her live. Out of the question. A quick scan showed the Adage carried no weapons. Maybe he could orient the engines and crisp her. It was a quick death, preferable to asphyxiation. He said as much.

"You're all heart, you son of a bitch," she spat. "But I'll take my chances."

"Please yourself," he said. "It's a dead-end either way. I thought I'd give you a quicker way out."

Com static.

"No smart-ass comments?"

No reply.

"No begging? Good," he smiled. "I like a woman with dignity. It's just bad luck, Elise. Believe me, I am sorry."

Silence.

"I'll record a message for someone back home, if you want." The silence grated. "Come on, Elise. No last words? I thought you had more pluck than that."

The speaker crackled.

"Nice ship you have here, Wilder," Elise said. "Not sure about the décor. A bit cramped, weren't you?"

He ground his teeth. Somehow, she had made it to the Luas! No matter. Even with Holland dead, he might still salvage the mission.

"Don't see many ship-to-ship missiles on runabouts this small. By the way... how far do you think you'll get before I blow you apart?" Elise's voice gave away her smile.

Wilder growled. "What do you want?"

"You know what I want. I want the ship. I couldn't care less about you. I don't want to destroy the ship and I don't want to kill you. But you have what I want, and that drops your stock significantly. We work it out, or I blow you to atoms and sell this ship on Phobos. They're always looking for ships.

"Even if I felt like it, what makes you think I won't just blow you up after the exchange?"

"I'll shut down all your non-essentials except life support and emergency power. You'll have to power up before you can get to the weapons systems. That gives me, minimum, twenty minutes to get gone."

"We're seriously going to do this?" he asked.

"I'm almost back now. I'll meet you there."

"Fine." The woman had been fair with him.

Even he would admit she had been fairer than he deserved. So much the worse for her.

She was waiting outside the airlock, well out of combat range.

"Get a move on, Wilder," she said, "and you'd better make sure I don't see you on my screens again."

"Don't worry," he said. "You won't see me coming."

The implication hung there.

She gestured, and he activated his suit thrusters.

"Sooner or later," he said to himself. "Sooner or later."

Elise watched him go. She didn't trust him as far as the end of her nose. Once he was aboard the Luas he'd see her bluff. She hadn't been aboard his ship at all.

She scrambled into the airlock. She needed to move. She readied the ship. Time was short.

As soon as he reached the Luas he realized something was wrong. The cockpit was dim, but the readout panels glowed with full power.

The systems were fine. Checking the main screen, he saw he had full power and a clean atmosphere. She hadn't powered the systems down. She hadn't been in his ship at all!

He laughed aloud.

"I can't believe I bought that!"

"Okay, so I was bluffing," her reply came over the open channel. "Sue me."

"What's to stop me now, Elise?" he asked. "I've got all the marbles."

"I don't know. Good will?" she replied. "I've been straight with you, Wilder. You could just walk away."

"Sweetheart, you don't know me very well." Strapped into the pilot's chair, he reached out and readied his weapons.

"Oh, I know you better than you know me."

"That so?"

"Yes, Wilder, that's so." She sounded distracted.

"Well then, tell me what you know?" He turned off the safeties.

"You just powered up your missiles," Elise replied.

"Good guess."

"Thank you. Now it's your turn. Want to guess what I'm doing?"

Wilder narrowed his eyes.

"Go ahead. Speak." Elise's voice was playful.

"What? What's your game?" Wilder sounded startled over the open com.

"Oh, sorry," Elise said. "That wasn't for you, Wilder. Go ahead, Holland," Elise said. "Say 'hi.'"

Wilder clenched his fists as the hesitant voice, slurred but intelligible, said, "H-hello. Hello, Wilder. Did Mr. Quill send you?"

"I'll be a son of a bitch," Wilder said. "How...?"

Elise retorted, "Does it matter? I've got Holland, I've got the ship. You blow up the ship, you lose. You need him alive, right? You raised on a busted flush, Wilder. Call it a learning experience and let it go. Turn your ship toward Pluto, and burn hard." Her voice tightened. "You have ten seconds."

"Don't try to bluff me again. Adage has no weapons. Sure, you fooled me with the suit trick, but you can't fool your way around a missile."

"If you're so sure," Elise said, "fire."

"You've got no chance," Wilder said. "I can do whatever I want. You're out of this."

"If you're sure, then make your play. Five seconds, Wilder."

"No deal, bitch," he said, and heated up a missile. Quill wanted Holland alive, but would settle for his death. He could still count this as a success. He readied the missile.

Before he could launch, the com relayed her last words to him.

"Watch your mouth."

As he reached for the firing stud, the Betty shot around the hull of Adage. She closed the distance and fired her own missile at Wilder's ship.

He had just a moment to realize what happened.

"... jesus..."

The Luas was a fireball.

In the cockpit of Betty, Elise shut down her weapons systems. She craned her head to look at Holland. She had taken the sleep inducer off him and slapped him awake to speak to Wilder. She gambled on that, but it paid off. It kept Wilder stunned long enough for her to get the Betty moving. Holland clung to the wall.

"Ready to head back?" she said.

"I have a choice?" He was very still.

"You have two choices. Go home or stay here." Elise gestured at the debris field. The cloud of scrap didn't resemble a ship at all.

Holland had made his choice already. There were times to press your luck, and times not to press your luck. It seemed to him that all the recent times not to press his luck involved this woman.

"Ma'am, if it's all the same to you, I'd like to go home."

She smiled and tossed him a fresh patch. He slapped it on his neck without comment and went limp.

She brought the Betty back around and reattached to the underside of the Adage. Elise shut down again. She walked Holland through the airlock and sealed it.

Once he was back in bed, she resumed course for Lunar orbit. After the initial burn, she drifted into the kitchenette, liberated some more of Holland's wine, and settled in to finish Jane Eyre.

Eight days later, she guided the Adage into a private facility on Luna's far side. After docking, she transferred Holland to the Betty and eased her ship away. She backed out of the hangar, swung around to the bright side, and pulled into her berth.

Two men dressed in military blues met her at the dock. They took Efram Holland from her.

"Welcome back, Elise," the older man said.

"Good to be home," she replied. "The ship's delivered. And he's alive," she said. "Make sure I get the bonus."

"Absolutely," Smith said.

The younger of the two said, "Any trouble out there?"

"Naah," she said with a shrug. "Nothing to speak of."

Another Man's Treasure

Tom Greene | 6973 words

Illustrated by Vincent DiFate

Maggie and her kids threaded their way between the mounds of garbage toward home. They wore baggy CBRN suits and rubber boots. Their hoods were thrown back, and their respirators dangled loose around their necks. Juno carried the salvage bucket and swung it with each step. Alex was talking.

"I found an article about groundhogs. Also known as woodchucks or whistlepigs."

"Whistlepigs?" Juno said. "You're making that up."

"Nuh-uunh," Alex said. "It was a printout from an old online book."

"What else did it say?" Maggie said.

Alex hitched up the waist of his hand-medown hazmat suit—he was only eight and hadn't grown into it yet.

"It said groundhogs are North America's largest ground squirrel. Up to sixty cee em long and weigh four kay gee. How much is that in English, Mom?"

"Juno can tell you."

Juno rolled her eyes. She had just turned twelve and hence found everything annoying.

"About two feet and nine pounds."

"Go on, Alex," Maggie said.

"Let's see." He paused to remember the exact words the way he was supposed to.

"Groundhogs are wonderful diggers, using their powerful claws to break through the earth and their paddlelike back feet to shove dirt out of the burrow behind them. An adult groundhog can move as much as one cubic meter of earth when digging a burrow. "

"Almost as much as you, Mom," Juno said.

"Enough chatter from the peanut gallery," Maggie said. "I didn't hear about any useful information you dug up today."

Juno waved at the mounds around them. "All the trash up here is about celebrities I never heard of. Can we go back down to the nineties where people still printed stuff?" "Yeah, the nineties," Alex said.

"I don't want you kids going near the pre-'85 lifts. Too much lead in the newspaper ink. We'll stay in the upper layers for now."

Juno kicked a twist of scrap metal off the path and swung the bucket higher. "I don't know why we have to read about all this stuff anyway. We're never going to see a groundhog."

"You mean a whistlepig?"

Juno smiled at that.

Maggie said, "I'm always telling you kids, you never know when some little piece of information is going to save your hide—"

They rounded a corner and stopped. Three men wearing clean CBRNs and respirator hoods stood in the path ahead. Two of them scraped the side of the garbage trench with tools while a third supervised. The supervisor saw them and waved.

"Stay behind me," Maggie said, and moved closer.

"Margaret Tyler Moreno?" the stranger said. "Widow of Jacob Moreno?"

Maggie could see through the clear plastic of his faceplate that his eyes were hidden by a pair of those chunky black goggles that linked him to the Globnet. His breast pocket had a corporate logo she didn't recognize.

"This is our stake," Maggie said. "You're not supposed to dig here without permission."

"Forgive me, Ms. Moreno," he said. "The men aren't taking anything away. They're just sampling the air. My name is Beausant."

"I heard of you. Building those methane stacks down by the old recycling sheds. You looking for landfill gas?"

"Yes, but not finding much here." Beausant gestured up and down the sides of the trench. "Plenty of organics, but not much decay."

"Haven't been in the garbage business long, Mr. Beausant?"

"I'm in petroleum," he said. "I'd appreciate any help."

"Well I can tell you the same thing any miner in the landfill can tell you. When they buried this stuff, they thought it would all sort of rot away down there. Just one problem."

"What's that?"

"No moisture for the bacteria. They squeezed out all the water, so the waste just mummified down there. I've seen a newspaper from 1979 with clear type. Bags of lawn clippings from the '80s, still green. Once I found a fifty-year-old purple cabbage that looked good enough to eat. On one side at least."

"I see," Beausant said. "So that's why there's not much outgassing?"

"You could do a bioreactor here. Pump down a slurry of genemodded bacteria. But it might cost more than the value of the gas."

"I wonder that you find anything at all of value here," Beausant said. "These mounds have been picked over for years."

Maggie held her hand out and Juno gave her the bucket. Maggie took the lid off and showed the slivers of fluttery black plastic inside.

"Number seven HDPE," Beausant said.

"You are a petroleum man," Maggie said.

"The Mexicans call it siete. It's what's left of the tarps they used to keep the rats and fire out of the lifts."

"So you must use some kind of bulk mining equipment?"

She clapped the lid on the bucket and handed it back to Juno. "Just a shovel and a fifty-gallon crank tumbler. It isn't glamorous, but it's steady money."

"I see. Thank you for your help, Ms. Moreno. May we have your permission to take more air samples?"

Maggie resettled her hardhat and glanced back at the kids. They were getting bored.

"All right, but stay away from the pit on the southeast side. That's where my late husband's uncle and his family died."

"Something hazardous?"

"They hit a patch of cat litter. A mountain of it, like out of a kennel or something. A week later they were all dead, which is how Jake inherited the place."

Beausant nodded. "Thank you for your help, Ms. Moreno. Clearly your expertise is comprehensive. Please take my card and contact me if you think of anything else we should know."

Maggie took the Maizeolite plate and stuck it in a pocket, then led the kids past the three men. When they reached the next turn in the trench, Beausant called out.

"Just one thing, Ms. Moreno?"

She paused and turned back.

"You said your husband inherited the claim from his uncle. I assume that your marriage was officiated?"

Maggie swallowed. "Of course."

"Naturally. Thanks again for your help."

Maggie turned and led the kids on.

"What was that all about?" Juno said.

"Just a man looking to do business," Maggie said. "Nothing personal."

In a little while they came into a small yard where a tilted shack stood. Maggie took the bucket and sent the kids to check the traps. She pitched the day's haul of siete into the handcart, checked the pressure on the biogas reactor, and fed it a stack of computer printouts—somebody's PowerPoint presentation from the '90s.

Her headset keyed and Juno said, "Mom, come quick." Maggie rushed around the house.

The kids crouched at the edge of the yard, huddled around something on the ground. Maggie ran up and saw fluttering wings. A young barn owl had tried to take a rat caught in a snare and gotten tangled in the wire. It beat its wings.

"Can we help it, Mom?" Juno said.

Maggie took off her hard hat and pulled out the bandana inside. She dropped the cloth over the owl's head. "Gently," she said. "They have very light bones."

The owl raked a talon over the back of Juno's hand when she grabbed it, but the heavy garbage picker's gloves didn't tear. Maggie took the wire cutters off her belt and made three deft cuts, then pulled away the bandana. Juno let go, and the owl took off, unharmed.

"Thanks, Mom."

"Help your bother with the rest of the traps," Maggie said. "Don't dawdle if you want supper quick."

There were only two other rats in the snares—little guys, smaller than squirrels— and another rat they didn't take because the other rats had gotten to it first. Maggie looked over the carcasses for signs of disease or toxicity, but they were clean as far as she could tell. She skinned them while the kids hung up their CBRNs and took turns in the solar shower. Once the kids were inside, she pulled off her own suit and stepped into the shower.

She scrubbed the day's grime off. She checked for cuts, scrapes, and rashes, but she was clean except for the one dark patch on her thigh that had showed up a week ago. It was still tender, but starting to fade, so maybe it was just a bruise. She tugged on her short-cropped hair to check if it were coming loose, but it stayed in.

Inside the house, she put the headsets into the solar recharger. The kids sat at the table and chattered while she lit the biogas ring and melted some Soylio in the frying pan. Everything in the house was reclaimed from the landfill, battered mismatched furniture, no two boards the same, lots of beat-up books that were still readable and mostly complete. Hanging from the ceiling were trinkets that Jake had called his "whimsies"—small, bright things he'd dug out, cleaned up, and hung as decoration. Most of the house ran on Jake's contraptions: the biogas fermenter, the gray-water cistern, the salvaged datafly and radio headsets, the roof garden and composting outhouse. His presence was still everywhere.

And so was his absence. When things broke, Maggie didn't always know how to fix them.

Maggie made dumplings from TVP and the last of the Soylio and fried them with the quartered rats. She added in a chopped onion from the roof garden. Everything was cooked in a few minutes, and she gave the kids each two dumplings and three pieces of rat, while she took less for herself. The kids ate every scrap, crunching up the bones and sucking the tender bits from the heads.

After dinner Maggie cleaned the dishes, and the kids climbed into their mismatched beds. Juno wanted a story from the Arabian Nights, but it was Alex's turn and he picked the Irish folk collection with its leprechauns and pots of gold. After they'd fallen asleep, Maggie dimmed the biogas sconce and went outside.

The moon had set, and some horsetail clouds glowed with the light spilling up from the Vegas strip in the distance. Down by the recycling sheds, the methane flare stack flamed softly blue. She took the broom from the porch and went to the edge of the yard where a door-sized concrete slab lay flush with the ground. She swept away the windblown trash that covered where his name was scratched in the cement, above where she and the kids had pressed their handprints.

The first time she'd seen Jake, he'd been driving the Public Assistance water truck that serviced the Leisurewood Mobile Estates where she lived with her mother. She hadn't liked him much at first. He'd seemed arrogant, full of facts, too proud that he was self-educated. Maggie couldn't even read back then. He'd called on her every week at her mother's house—if you could call a FEMA-surplus extruded foam shelter a house. Like an old-fashioned suitor, he'd brought her little presents and sat with her in the parlor, teaching her how to sound out letters and words.

After he'd inherited the stake and convinced her to elope, he'd taught her everything she knew about mining. She'd helped him work the hills, carrying Juno, and then later Alex, in a backpack carrier. He named the kids after characters in the Greek history books he loved. Jake had been the first to volunteer for the hunting party to deal with the feral dogs menacing the south end lifts last spring. What they'd brought back of him was buried under the concrete.

Looking out over the hills of trash and the desert beyond in the twilight, Maggie's thoughts ran back to what she and Jake had always talked about in the evenings: How to get a chance for those kids.

Maggie had taken Juno to town outside the fence to register for school when she was six. The principal pulled Maggie aside and explained that Juno was a "discipline problem" and would have to be homeschooled. Meaning—Maggie found out later—that Juno's landfill address told the principal she was poor, and so might threaten the test scores that his job depended on. All the landfill kids were "discipline problems."

They also died a lot. Toxic residues, heavy metals, infections, tetanus, diseased and toxic animals, and things even more mysterious, outgassing, genemodded microorganisms, biomedical waste, even radiation. Only by constant vigilance, drilling them on safety, hygiene, and thoughtfulness, had Maggie and Jake been lucky enough to get them this far.

Now it was just Maggie.

And now this petroleum man sniffing around. Surely, even if he could prove anything, the kids were still the legal heirs to their father's property, right?

Maggie kicked a can and watched it arc into the side of a pile of trash, setting off a cascade of broken glass and bits of rock.

There had to be a way out.

The next day was market day. Maggie made the kids TVP mush and powdered eggs. While they were suiting up, she opened the hatch under the stove and looked in the cashbox. Only two clinkers left, their New Apex Landfill logos glittering. She stuck both coins in a pocket on her CBRNs.

She dropped off the kids at the Mortensen's house next door, warning them not to waste all day watching the vidfeed with the Mortensen kids (they ignored her), and joined Bill Mortensen on the path. Bill wore patched CBRNs and had a shotgun slung by a rope over his shoulder. Like Maggie, he towed a cartload of salvaged plastic and empty water jugs.

"How's it going?" Maggie said.

Bill grunted. "One of the kids put a whole phone book in the bug tank, clogged it up."

"I'll send Juno over with a bucket of sludge to get you going again."

They walked for awhile. Bill said, "Did you hear about Frankie Farad?"

"No."

"Dug down into the '80s. Found a pair of welder's goggles mostly in one piece."

Maggie nodded. Twentieth-century welding goggles contained cerium, lanthanum, and other metals that had become rare.

"He get a good price for 'em?"

"Enough to buy that membership in the Neolatter Days he wanted. But then he went blabbing around Park's, and some thugs rolled him."

"Some thugs, eh? He gonna be okay?"

"He'll limp a bit now." Bill spat expertly at a tin can beside the path. "Rivits probly has a shiny new titanium lip ring or whatever."

They walked on. After about twenty minutes, they crested a ridge and came out over the squat buildings of the transfer station, the only gate in the perimeter fence that ringed the landfill. They went down the path, past the stalls that sold tools and useful junk, through the wide, rolled-up garage door of the old scalehouse. There was no line yet—most diggers weren't the type to get up early—so they split up and each went to a different scale. Maggie tipped the plastic into the hopper. The clerk looked down at the black slivers.

"Still digging the siete, eh Mags?"

"That's what miners do, Reese." He nodded and tapped his handpad, checked the scale, then reached into the cash-box and dropped three clinkers on the table.

"That's it?" Maggie said.

Reese shrugged. "There's a glut of number seven on the market."

Maggie leaned forward and stabbed the table with a finger. "There's no glut. You're just trying to squeeze me."

Reese spread his hands. "Word is there's a glut. What can I say?"

"You can say you'll pay a fair price."

"Maybe you think you can get a better price somewhere else."

"You know goddamn well there is no fucking where else."

A shadow fell across the table. Maggie looked up saw a huge man with military-cut hair and splotchy brown and pink skin. In front of him stood a normal-sized young man with pale skin and a smooth, shaved skull. The smaller man had piercings all over his face and head: spikes and studs and rings of gold, platinum, rhodium, an ostentatious fortune in scavenged metal. Both men wore tailored silver suits, as though they were actual businessmen and not corporate thugs in charge of North America's largest garbage dump.

The pierced man said, "Is there a problem, Ms. Moreno?"

"You bet your ass there's a problem, Rivits." She pointed to the clinkers on the table.

"What are you trying to pull here?"

He glanced at the scale. "This siete is shit."

"I can read a commodity report. I know the market price on number seven hasn't changed."

Rivits twitched one shoulder in the smallest possible shrug. "Everybody says you know more about what's buried in the 'fill than anybody, Maggie. This is the price you get for your plastic. You want to make better money, maybe next time you bring better salvage."

Maggie opened her mouth to say something, but the huge man behind Rivits shifted slightly. He was a genomorph, bred for the Unwar, working—like many veterans—as a freelance tough. She glanced up at his impassive face, took the three clinkers, and hauled her cart away.

In Park's General Store she waited her turn at the counter. Mister Park was usually chatty, but he'd obviously already heard what had happened, so he gathered her groceries in silence. A little Soylio, TVP, and salt, and the tokens to fill her government water jugs at the potable cisterns. No powdered egg or cornmeal this week. They'd be lucky to make it through three days on what she got. She handed over the three clinkers plus the two from the emergency stash, took her groceries and was about to leave when Mister Park stopped her.

"There's a registered letter you have to sign for," he said.

Maggie froze. She'd only seen two paper letters her whole life—one telling her mother that she'd lose her public assistance if her father didn't move out, and one from the insurance company saying they wouldn't pay on Jake's policy. She fought the urge to run out the door. She signed for the letter and opened it. It was from a lawyer representing New World Petrochem. She couldn't understand most of it, except the part about her marriage records not being found and new probate court proceedings on the homestead. Beausant hadn't wasted any time.

The next morning, Maggie woke up hours early and lay in bed staring at the ceiling. They still had the house and the gear. But once you started selling tools, giving up your ability to mine safely, you were on a slippery slope to starvation. Outside the 'fill there were no honest jobs for much of anybody, much less a single mother with no real education.

When the sun rose, she got the kids up and made them soy porridge for breakfast.

"Aren't you going to eat, Mom?" Juno said.

"Already ate while you were still in bed," Maggie lied. "Quick, now. There's a long day ahead."

While they ate, Maggie went outside and unlocked the tool shed. She brought out the full respirator rig and Jake's heavy-duty military surplus CBRNs. She suited up, checked everything again, and went back inside.

"I'm going down toward the pit today," she said. "You two will have to take care of yourselves."

"What's wrong?" Alex said.

"Nothing," Maggie said. "I'm going a little deeper today, and I don't want you kids digging down there."

Juno's eyes narrowed, and Alex rocked a bit in his seat. They knew she hated leaving them home alone. Maggie wondered how much they had figured out.

"Stay on the radio, check in every half hour." She managed a bit of a smile. "Don't worry. I feel lucky today."

Maggie walked south and downward, past the dug-over twenty-first-century lifts, down to the cells in the lowest layers: before the Unwar, before recycling, before hazmat regulations. She put on the respirator, sealed the hood, and turned on the suction. The rig had a built-in air supply, but that was only good for about an hour, so the filters would have to do for now. She carried only her entrenching tool and a sack. Anything of value that had been overlooked down here was going to be small anyway.

She walked until she was able to reckon by the number of sun-baked disposable diapers in the surrounding working faces that she was well down into the '80s. She checked in with the kids by radio, and started digging in the least picked-over lifts. The amount of glass and cardboard packaging was astounding. There was more metal than usual, corroded twists of iron and pot metal, and the cigarette filters were absolutely everywhere. In some places the mounds had been neglected so long that cactus and grass had recolonized, and some bugs and lizards had come back. In the afternoon she hit a pocket of soaking-wet newspaper, and quickly covered it up again. Wet paper that hadn't decayed in sixty years meant something toxic enough to kill the microbes.

The sun was settling toward the mountains and Maggie stumped around, whacking the ground with her shovel wondering whether to give up, when she saw something flutter at the edge of her vision. It was a young barn owl, perched on an outcrop. She put her hand on her hip, and the owl turned its heart-shaped face toward her. Its black-marble eyes shone. Then it launched, swooped, and snatched something from the ground. The owl flew off, and Maggie saw two more brown shapes scamper along the edge of a garbage face and vanish.

"Pack rat," she muttered.

After a few seconds, her headset keyed on. "Did you say 'baccarat'?" Juno said over the radio.

"Oh," Maggie said. "Forgot my mic was on."

"Like that card game we read about?"

"No," Maggie said, moving toward where the rats had gone. "Pack rat. Most of the rats in the 'fill are Norwegian brown rats. But there are also some native kangaroo rats and pack rats."

Maggie found the burrow entrance and started digging.

"And this is interesting because..."

"I always tell you kids that you never know when some little piece of information is going to save your hide. Pack rats collect things. Shiny things. And stash them in their burrows."

Maggie's shovel knocked something loose, and a cascade of garbage slid down around her boots, revealing a cavity with little brown shapes vanishing down its several passages. She turned on her headlamp and leaned in. The burrow was scattered with bits of fur, chewed up paper, rat turds, and a small heap that sparkled with crystallized rat urine.

She stuck her fingers into the midden, grateful that her respirator saved her from what must be a truly horrific smell. Then, it popped out—white, graceful, and glossy, and whole as the day somebody illegally threw it away.

The three of them sat in the kitchen staring at the object that Maggie had put in the middle of the table.

"What is it?" Alex said.

"It's called a compact fluorescent light bulb," Maggie said. "A CFL. I never expected to see one."

"What's it for?" Juno said.

"It's what they used for light before Bio-LEDs."

"Is it worth a lot?" Alex said.

"Dysprosium, Yttrium, Europium. It's like a little treasure chest of rare earths."

"How much?" Juno said.

Maggie leaned back and crossed her arms. "Intact? At current prices? Enough to move out of the 'fill. We can get cash for it instead of clinkers. Down payment on a house. School vouchers for you two. Med insurance. If we're careful, we can live on the leftovers for years."

They all stared at the bulb and Maggie felt her throat tighten, admiring the graceful white twists, the still-shiny spiral of the aluminum cap. Now there was just the problem of getting it past the fence without attracting Rivits's attention.

A scuffing sound—somebody's shoe in the dirt—came from outside. Maggie grabbed a dish towel and threw it over the bulb. She picked up the nearest heavy object, which happened to be a crowbar, and opened the door.

"Who's out there?" she called into the dark.

A tall, skinny figure stepped into the patch of light from the doorway.

"Is that you, Judd Mortonsen?" Maggie said.

"Yes, Ma'am."

"What are you doing lurking around in the dark?"

"Hunting." Judd held his rifle up slightly.

"Night is when the coons come out."

"Did you see any coons in our yard, Judd?"

"No, ma'am. But my dad said he thought you might be short after the price you got on your plastic today." Judd unslung the sack he carried and held it out. "He sent me over with this."

Maggie put the crowbar down and stepped into the doorway. "Tell your dad thank you, but we're doing fine on our own."

Judd nodded. His long neck made him look like a goose giving a greeting. "He said you'd say that, Ma'am. So I'm supposed to bring back some sludge for our bug tank in trade."

"Well I suppose that'd be all right." Maggie held out her hand and Judd handed her the sack. She glanced inside and saw a hunk of skinned raccoon.

"Juno," Maggie said, "Can you please show Judd around to the biogas tank and give him a bucket of sludge? Take a crank light with you."

Juno went out with Judd, and Maggie grabbed the tea towel with the bulb wrapped inside and stashed it under the hatch by the stove. When Juno came back, the three of them stood around the kitchen facing each other.

"How much do you think he heard?" Juno said.

Maggie sighed. "There's no help for it now. Tomorrow I'll go to the station and try to slip out. Look for a buyer in town. We'll see if our luck holds."

The next morning, thunderclouds swelled on the horizon. Maggie fed the kids pretty much the last of the food except for the raccoon. They wanted to come along, but Maggie didn't want to attract attention. She told them to stand by the radio and be ready with their go bags.

About five minutes' walk from the house, Rivits, his g-morph bodyguard, and two station toughs stepped out on the path in front of her.

"Well," Maggie said, "Looks like the party's over."

Rivits frowned. "What?"

"Nothing," she said, turning off her headset. "How can I help you boys?"

"You found something," he said. "Something that belongs to me now."

"Somebody been telling you stories, Rivits?"

He came closer. "You know how it is. Thirsty kid comes into Park's after a long night of hunting. Coonskins don't buy much, so a friend spots him a few drinks. He gets to talking."

"You're not even going to pretend that you're not robbing me?"

He moved fast, and she hadn't been swung on in so long that she forgot to get out of the way.

"I'm not screwing around. Give me my property."

The blow had knocked her hard hat off, so she bent down and picked it up. Her cheek stung, and she thought maybe his rings had cut her. She put her hat on and looked him in the eye.

"I don't have it on me."

"Take us to it."

She led them back to the house. On the way, she had to remind herself over and over again that a piece of salvage wasn't worth her life. When they got there, thank God, the kids were gone. They had heard her code phrase over the radio and gone up into the hills to hide. Their bags had clean water, respirators and tools. They knew how to survive up there, and they wouldn't come down for anybody until she radioed them.

Maggie led Rivits and his thugs into the house, to the trapdoor by the stove. She started to open it, and—in a motion almost too quick to follow—the bodyguard whipped a gigantic pistol out of his jacket. Maggie recognized it from pictures in the salvage guides: a military.56 recoilless. The muzzle seemed to blot out about half the world.

"Slowly," he said in a voice like broken gravel.

Slowly, she lifted out the towel and moved it to the table. She unwrapped the CFL and backed away.

Rivits looked at it and gave a single bark, which Maggie took to be laughter.

"How stupid do you think I am?"

Maggie was too confused for a snide answer.

"Do you know what it is?" she said.

Rivits rubbed a bony hand over his shaved scalp. "You scavs always think you're so smart. Think I don't know a piece of junk when I see it? The Mortensen kid said you were talking mansions and sending your kids to Harvard." He brought his face close to hers. "You think I'm fool enough to believe a piece of twisted glass can buy all that?"

For the first time, she saw his spikes and studs and rings up close. They were all junk. Cheap electroplate and counterfeit finishes.

"Rivits, I think your buyer is ripping you off. You really don't know what this is?"

"I know it's shit!" He grabbed the CFL and flung it against the wall. It exploded and the shards scattered across the floorboards. He turned back to Maggie.

"Now are you gonna show us where the real shit is, or do we have to tear this place apart?"

Maggie's hands had involuntarily gone up to cover her mouth. She couldn't do anything but point to where the CFL had hit the wall.

"That was it."

Rivits nodded to his men. The g-morph's huge hand fastened around Maggie's arm, and he led her outside.

When they finished wrecking the inside of the house, they started on the outside. They overturned and broke up the carts, pushed the composting outhouse off its stilts, shoved the onion garden off the roof and sifted through the dirt. They knocked over the bio-gas tank and spilled the sludge everywhere. Maggie watched it all, helpless with the bodyguard's hand on her arm. Then a fire started— small at first, but it spread until the whole house blazed. The house where her kids were born. Their crayon drawings and baby teeth. The books and tools. Jake's whimsies. Even traces of rare earths left in the CFL base would vaporize in the flames.

Rivits watched it all, his eyes darting to follow every movement of his thugs. When they didn't find anything, he came over to Maggie.

"It wasn't in the house, was it?"

"I told you. You don't believe me."

"Shut up!"

"You know, I think my neighbors might see the smoke and come looking—"

"I said shut up!"

Rivits put his face right in hers and spoke quietly.

"Okay, you're going to take us out to the place where you found this shit, and you're going to show us where it's hidden."

Maggie didn't flinch. "I can show you where I found it, but I need my tools."

Rivits backed off and the giant hand released her. She went to the wrecked shed, moved some of the fallen boards, and pulled out the heavy CBRNs.

"Stop stalling," Rivits said. "You don't need any of that shit."

Maggie touched her fingertips to her cheek, then held the bloody fingers out for Rivits to see.

"You're the one who cut my face open. With the stuff in the air where we're going, I won't get far walking around with an open wound."

She suited up, and Rivits said nothing. She clipped the respirator pack on her tool belt, and picked up an entrenching tool. The big guy was suddenly there grabbing it out of her hand.

"Okay, then you carry it," she said.

She walked off toward the south, and they followed.

Maggie reviewed her options. She probably couldn't outrun any of them, especially the g-morph. He could run all day at twice her speed and snap her neck with his fingers. The cannon in his jacket could take her head off at a quarter mile. She'd have to go along with them for now and hope something came up. She led them through the trenches to the deep cells near the south fence. When they got deep enough, she sealed her hood and turned on the respirator fan. The thugs exchanged glances. They'd heard the stories and probably seen some bodies. But Rivits and his bodyguard were stonefaced.

The thunderheads in the distance rolled closer. She led them into the broad-sided pit and stopped.

"This is where I found it," she said, her voice muffled by the mask.

Rivits took the entrenching tool from the bodyguard and dropped it at her feet. "Dig," he said.

"What's the point?" she said. "There's nothing here."

"Dig now, or we put a bullet in your skull. Then we'll track down those little rats of yours and make them tell us where it is."

She almost went for his throat right then. But she forced herself to think rationally. If she got herself shot, there would be no help for the kids.

She took the shovel, picked a spot, and started digging. She dug a trench almost straight down, hoping she'd either find something Rivits would accept as valuable, or knock loose something toxic and fast-acting. After a while she realized that even if she found something, she wasn't coming out of the hole alive. Rivits couldn't take the chance that she'd report him to the real police. She was digging her own grave.

The sky darkened, and the rain swept in like a solid curtain. Thunder cracked overhead, and Maggie turned on her B-LED headlamp She was shoulder-deep in the trench. Water pooled around her boots. Then the shovel hit something. She hacked out a channel to guide the water away and saw curved terra cotta pierced with rows of quarter-sized holes.

"What is it?" Rivits said. He looked like a waterlogged rat in his dripping silver suit.

"Clay pipe. The leachate system," Maggie said.

"What the fuck does that mean?"

Maggie shook her head and muttered inside her mask. She yelled to be heard over the noise of the storm. "The bottom of the landfill." She hit the pipe with her shovel, and it cracked open. The water rushing into the hole sloughed away chunks of clay, leaving the jagged end of the pipe exposed.

Rivits cursed and moved away, and over the noise of the storm she thought she heard the words "waste of time" and "pop a cap." When the bodyguard started to turn, Maggie did the only thing she could think of. She flung her shovel at his face, then dove headfirst into the pipe.

It was tight, but with the rainwater making the pipe slick, she was able to wiggle in. She stuck her arms out ahead and squirmed down maybe twenty feet, then her hands hit something. Her headlamp beam showed a wall of silt blocking the pipe. Water dribbling from above pooled in her face. The filter inlets would be submerged in a minute. She groped down to her belt and flipped on the dedicated air supply. The mask wasn't designed to be watertight, but it would give her a little more time.

She shined her headlamp on the blockage ahead. Sludgy muck with jutting sticks and bits of construction waste. The water washed up around her ears, and between the thuds of her own pulse she heard voices from outside. If they started shooting, she'd be a smear on the walls.

Then faintly in her memory—but almost as real as if he were speaking in her ear—she heard Alex's voice piping.

Groundhogs are wonderful diggers, using their powerful claws to break through the earth and their paddlelike back feet to shove dirt out of the burrow behind them.

"Oh, fuck me," Maggie said.

An adult groundhog can move as much as one cubic meter of earth when digging a burrow.

"Fuck," she said. She sank both gloved hands into the sludge and shoveled it aside. She grabbed more of the stuff as quickly as she could, pushing and kicking and squirming her way down like a worm burrowing in mud. She tried to control her breathing to conserve her air while keeping her head up out of the mix of rainwater, mud and debris. After a while, she had wiggled her way into the sloppy black mess enough that it was all around her. Except for a small airspace around her head, it pressed her on every side and blocked off the pipe behind her.

She kept digging, shoving the sludge aside and wiggling forward, keeping her breathing as regular as she could. How long would her air canister hold out? As long as Rivits thought she might come back up, maybe he would wait—which would mean he wasn't looking for the kids. But what was to stop him leaving somebody to watch the pipe while he went after them anyway?

Big chunks of crap came out—broken metal and pipe—and she shoved all that aside and squirmed past, praying nothing would tear her suit. She tried to remember everything she knew about the leachate system. The collection pipes led down to massive underground tanks. Since she was facing down, that meant a sump was somewhere ahead. But it could be miles away. Or the pipe could be narrowed or collapsed ahead. And even if she got there, what then?

She noticed her breathing was getting faster. Was she running out of air? No, it was panic. She was feeling the weight of the earth pressing down on the pipe just above her shoulder blades, realizing there was no going back through the plug she'd already made behind her, worrying she'd hit a blockage too hard to dig through. Frustrated sobs caught in her throat. She would die in this pipe. She would never see the kids again. Rivits's thugs would hunt them down and kill them.

She stopped digging, planted her mask in the mud, and squeezed her eyes shut. The tears ran over the top of the respirator cup and dripped onto the inside of her faceplate. She wanted to thrash around, to kick and flail, to try to break free of the tons of earth surrounding her. She held very still, fearing the slightest movement would set off the panic.

After a few minutes, she felt a stillness come over her. She thought about how she could just stop here. It wouldn't be peaceful at the end, but the bad part would be pretty quick, especially if she turned off the air. Then she'd black out, and it would be over. No more fighting and fighting and never getting anywhere.

She took a deep breath. Or, she thought, she could just keep going.

She grabbed two more handfuls of silt and shoved them back behind her. Then she was digging again. Ten minutes went by. The air inside the mask tasted stale. Twenty minutes. Pain shot through her shoulders and arms. Her lungs had expanded from hypoxia, and it felt like the pipe was crushing her. She wiggled forward bit by bit, wondering if she was moving at all.

Then her fingers punched through. The silt in front of her slid away, and she kicked forward. She fell through an echoing blackness, hit something hard, and all was freezing and the roar of blood in her ears. She was underwater. "Watch the bubbles," she remembered reading somewhere. The beam of her headlamp picked out the glistening beads traveling past her feet. She rolled and kicked up to the surface.

The headlamp didn't show anything but blackness, but the shadows and the echo of trickling water told her the tank was huge. She didn't dare take off her respirator, even though her air was more stale than ever, because who knew what kind of toxins were blowing around down here. She paddled forward until she reached a wall, then moved along it until she found a pipe going up. It was iron, rotted away below the water's surface, and big enough for her to pass through. She dove and surfaced inside the pipe. Then, by bracing her back against one side and her feet against the other, she pushed herself up. At the top, the pipe leveled off, and she clambered up and in.

She crept through the pipe for ages until finally, her air gauge flashing red, she punched out a sheet metal panel somebody had screwed over the end of the pipe. She crawled out, collapsed onto sand that was still damp from the rain, tore off her mask and gulped the air.

After a bit, she sat up and looked around.

The sun was high. The storm had moved off. There was a rainbow. In the distance she saw the silver ribbon of the 'fill's perimeter fence. She was outside, sitting in the old leachate collection pool. The pumping equipment was long gone. She glimpsed a bright patch on her forearm, and when she looked closer she saw that the strip clipped onto the arm of her CBRN suit—her military-surplus CBRN suit— glittered with bright blocks of color.

"Well bless my soul," she said.

There weren't any guards or fencing at the methane plant, so she went unchallenged almost all the way to the office trailers. A man in a hardhat with a New World Petrochem patch on his coveralls stepped up and looked at her muck-encrusted CBRNs and blood-smeared face.

"Beausant," she said. "Margaret Moreno to see Mister Beausant."

After a brief radio exchange, Beausant came from between two trailers and crossed the sand, the tails of his suit jacket flapping in the wind. When he got within earshot, Maggie said, "Can we deal?"

Beausant, his eyes inscrutable behind his dark goggles, gestured to hardhat, who left them alone.

"So here's what I need from you," Maggie said. "First, send one of those corporate SWAT teams to get my kids out of the 'fill. That's not negotiable. I'll provide the code phrase to bring them out of hiding. Second, obviously I need one of your fancy high-tech doctors. There's probably enough toxins in my system to wipe out a city block."

Beausant smirked. "Anything else?"

"Yeah, I want a fair price for my husband's stake, a one-year contract as an extraction consultant with full benefits, a fat salary, and two points on the take. On second thought, make it three years and two and a half points. Gross."

"And what are you offering?"

Maggie brought out the hazmat indicator strip she'd pulled off the arm of her suit—the forgotten hazmat strip that warned soldiers about exposure to exotic substances. She held it up for Beausant to see what had activated the color blocks. Heavy metals, rare earths, radioactives, all in bright, neat rows. A fortune collecting for decades in the bottom of the forgotten sump.

"I'll give you the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, Mister Beausant."

He paused, and the muscles around the edges of his goggles clenched while he referenced current prices on the Globnet. Gradually, his smirk spread into a genuine smile.

"We'll get that SWAT team airborne."

Our New Overlords

Probability Zero

Jerry Oltion | 941 words

When the aliens took up orbit around the Moon, no one knew whether they would attack us, enslave us, eat us, or what. We flooded them with communications, from radio to modulated lasers to flashing lights to stamping out geometric symbols in corn crops, all to no avail.

The aliens didn't respond to anything for nearly a month. People were growing frantic, expecting doom to rain out of the sky at any moment. Others expected largesse once the aliens figured out what we wanted most. Half a dozen countries went to war in an attempt to ensure that their rivals didn't benefit from alien technology at their expense.

Then on day twenty-eight, exactly one lunar month (sidereal) from the moment they'd arrived, they broadcast a video message on TV, taking over every channel that was relayed via satellite.

"As you probably suspected by our presence here," said their spokesman—a greenand-brown hexaped with a bulbous, quivering head, big, sail-like ears, six tiny eyes on stalks, and a mouth like a knothole in a board, "there is a galactic federation of spacefaring worlds. We came here to invite you to join, after receiving signals depicting your voyages to your moon, but in the time it took us to get here it looks like you've pretty much given up any meaningful attempt at continuing your progress. That puts us in a bit of a bind, because we can't invite a species to join the Federation if they can't actually reach the Federation, which at the moment means us here in orbit around your moon. We have a rule against providing advanced technology to primitive worlds, you see, and the ability to travel from your home planet to other bodies within your own solar system is the bare minimum criterion for an equal trading partner. But we've been examining your landing sites here and we find clear evidence that you did meet the test half a century ago, so we're willing to make this compromise: If you can do it again before we're refueled and ready to head back, we'll take one of you with us as an ambassador. That ambassador can plead your case for membership with the Grand Council, whose decision will be final. The first one to reach us will be that ambassador, so choose wisely." The hexaped turned its big head partway around, then swiveled back. "Oh, right. We'll be another two months fueling up. No pressure. Ha ha. Little joke."

He sat there for a moment like a TV news anchor waiting for the red light to go out on the cameras, then the picture swirled into static, to be replaced by the normal programming it had preempted.

If their mere presence had sparked wars, the conflicts their offer set off can only be called jihads. Nobody wanted the wrong people to become the ambassadors for all of humanity. Imagine what might happen if a Muslim or a Mormon made it there first. Or, God forbid, a Baptist.

The Japanese coolly prepared one of their H–2B rockets for a one-way flight, strapped a pair of solid cargo boosters to the main stack, selected their most trusted and venerated statesman to ride into orbit and sent him off within a week.

The Chinese, of course, shot him down with one of their antisatellite weapons.

The Chinese sent up their secret clone of Deng Xiaoping, but his capsule ran afoul of the debris from the Japanese attempt.

Russia tried to modify a Soyez originally intended for the International Space Station, but someone (everyone suspected the CIA) hacked its guidance computer and sent it tumbling out of control. The aliens rescued it and delivered it to the ISS with the terse message, "Nice try, but no gork."

Israel tried one of its Jericho ICBMs with an astronaut in place of the warhead, which not only proved that they had built one capable of reaching the U.S., but also that they had a saboteur somewhere in the system when the rocket blew up in the silo.

The European Union, Iran, Bolivia, even Cuba gave it a whirl, all to no avail.

The United States, of course, deliberated fiercely in congress for a month and a half before giving NASA the authorization and a budget of a dollar thirty-eight.

That left private enterprise, which had been busy blowing up rockets one after another for weeks. Humanity was coming right down to the wire when one of the last remaining players realized they would never be able to keep a human alive all the way to the Moon, so they sent the one thing they figured they could keep kicking: a cat. It was an eight-month-old kitten, healthy and curious and playful and resilient as only an adolescent cat can be. They padded its capsule with sacks of cat food and water, gave it one final noogie on the forehead, and sent it to the aliens to show them that somebody, at least, could send something alive to the Moon.

"We've received your Ambassador," the alien spokesman said when it arrived. "What a delightful little creature. You're smarter than we thought."

We all breathed a sigh of relief and stopped killing one another, at least for a few days. The alien ship finished fueling up, then roared off into interstellar space, somewhere in the direction of Boötes. We awaited their return with eagerness, sure the kitten would charm them into accepting us with full trading status.

Well, they did come back, and imagine our surprise to learn that cats have a language all their own, one that the aliens could learn. And our little kitten was apparently quite a negotiator. There've been some changes around here. Let's just say I'm glad I was never a dog person.

Lockstep: A Possible Galactic Empire

Science Fact

Karl Schroeder | 3992 words

Traveling to the stars is a grand aspiration. But is it the right problem to solve?

In January 2012, DARPA and NASA announced a grant to establish the 100 Year Starship Foundation. The grand aim of the Foundation is to develop the technologies, systems, economic plans, and sociology that might get us to the stars. It's a fantastic endeavor, which has already caught the imaginations of some of the best thinkers of the age. I think it's a great and worthy endeavor, and I hope they're successful.

When I was seven years old, I watched Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon, so I grew up on the vision too. Or—well, no, that's not entirely true. I grew up on stories of easy, nearly-instant star travel, mostly Andre Norton's tales of galactic civilizations: I grew up on the dreams of space opera. In space opera, we don't just have star travel; we have aliens walking our streets, we have Free Traders, Scouts, and the uniformed Patrol carrying blasters at their hips. We have extinct Forerunner civilizations that have scattered their ruins and mysterious artifacts across the galaxy. And our heroes and heroines can board a starship, travel to exotic and far-distant worlds, have adventures, and return before dinner—or at least, before New Year's.

That is not quite the same vision that the 100 Year Starship Foundation is pursuing. You see, back in the early twentieth century—just at the time that science fiction writers were beginning to write about those mysterious alien worlds and empires spanning multiple star systems—Einstein showed that nothing could travel faster than light. This little problem would henceforth hang over the head of any science fiction reader who dreamed about the grand vision of space opera.

A universe in which you can board a star-ship, sail to a planet light-years away in a matter of days, and then return to find no one back home aged any more than you... that wouldn't be our universe. Despite the theorizing of generations of physicists (most recently Alcubierre), FTL travel remains pure speculation.

I think the grand epic mythology of space opera was early twentieth-century science fiction's greatest gift to humanity. It was a vision of hope, of endless growth and discovery made possible by our technological civilization. That vision has inspired generations of young people to take up careers in science and engineering, and try their hand at actually improving the world they live in. I'm pretty sure it inspired most of the people working on the 100 Year Starship project. I think covertly (or, quite openly) many of them still hope that, even if they don't succeed in building the space opera future, that somebody, perhaps standing on the shoulders of their work, will. And they think that the big problem to solve in order to make that future possible is the problem of star travel.

After all, the enabler for space opera is faster than light travel; or, if not FTL, at least, star travel of some kind. And when you frame the problem this way, it's a hard problem. You'll probably need one hundred years to crack it, if it can be cracked at all. A lot of people are working very hard to solve this problem.

But is it the problem we need to solve? We want the space-opera future of unlimited galactic travel to exotic planets. That's what we want. Is there a way to frame that goal that doesn't require faster than light travel?

I've been thinking about this for a while. In 2002 I took a stab at solving the problem with my novel Permanence. That book was based on the premise that brown dwarf stars were far more common than had been suspected. If there were dozens of brown dwarfs for every lit star, then they could serve as way stations, and even destinations in their own right. The stars might be as far away as ever, but exotic and colonizable planets might be closer than we'd thought.

It turns out that brown dwarfs are not that common. Permanence didn't quite solve the problem of how to have a space-opera future in the universe we've got. I always felt I was on the right track, though: the question we want to answer is not how to travel faster than light, but how to create the kind of future that faster-than-light travel would give us. In other words, FTL would give us a particular kind of civilization; but what else could give us that civilization?

(Less than) interstellar travel

In late 2011, I stumbled across an astronomy preprint on Arxiv.org, called "Nomads of the Galaxy," by Louis E. Strigari, Matteo Barnabé, Philip J. Marshall, and Roger D. Blandford—and I thought I might have what I needed. The paper is simple and direct: the authors estimate that there are one hundred thousand free-floating "nomad" planets for every star in the galaxy. This estimate is based on microlensing studies; basically, we keep seeing stars blink as something tiny passes in front of them, and it's become clear that the vast majority of those little eclipses are not caused by planets bound to the star in question. They're full-scale worlds that were ejected from the stars that gave them birth, and now they wander rootless and invisible through the galaxy. We'd never know they were there if they didn't occasionally pass in front of something else.

At about the same time, several other astrobiology papers were suggesting that some nomad planets, if they existed, could provide life-sustaining conditions, usually deep underground. Superearth planets in particular could retain habitable conditions under a thick blanket of atmosphere for billions of years, without needing energy from a nearby sun. Even an Earth-sized planet, frozen over at the surface, might nurture a Europan-style subsurface ocean, kept alive by the residual heat of the world's formation. This, along with the Strigari et al. paper, implied there could be dozens, even hundreds of potential targets for human colonization between our world and the nearest star.

The size distribution of these planets almost certainly follows a power law, meaning that the smallest worlds will be by far the most common, and Earth-sized or larger worlds pretty rare. Still, out of a population of one hundred thousand, there might be dozens that could provide sustenance to earthly life without terraforming. It was a dazzling idea—but not quite good enough to invent a whole civilization around it.

Aside from the rarity of truly habitable worlds, there was the little problem that no matter how many of these worlds there might be in our vicinity, they're still separated from one another by vast distances. A thumbnail calculation suggested that there's about 1/10 of a lightyear between them. The first human-built object to reach interstellar space and until recently the fastest artificial object ever made, the Voyager 1 space probe, would take 1,700 years to travel between two of these nomad worlds.

So, in a sense this puts us back to Square One: how to solve the problem of distance.

Lockstep time

Solving the problem of distance, though, is not the same as solving the problem of speed. Speed (or velocity), distance and duration are related, but not identical issues. A space-faring civilization with the resources of an entire solar system at its disposal can probably solve the problem of speed. We can probably eventually build gigantic starships that travel at some respectable fraction of lightspeed—if we all pull together. In the space opera universe, though, families, companies, religious splinter groups, and criminal organizations buy or build their own starships. Anybody can travel between the worlds. Because I'm a storyteller, that was the particular future I wanted to enable.

What was needed was a truly crazy idea— something completely possible and utterly ridiculous, that would solve the problem. The truly ridiculous but possible solution I'd like to propose is something I call locksteps.

Locksteps don't involve faster than light technology because they don't have to. In my novel of the same name, no ship travels at more than a couple of percent lightspeed. The lockstep empire's seventy thousand worlds are separated by huge distances, but the entire civilization is less than two light years across. I assumed that the capital planet, Destrier, is in the center of this rough sphere of worlds. In that case, ships heading out from Destrier at 1.5% of the speed of light could reach a substantial fraction of the worlds in only thirty years.

We haven't built the engines that could power a ship to such velocities, but we know how they would work. The simplest design for a lockstep-quality drive is something called a Fission Fragment Rocket (FFR). Its power source is a small dense cloud of uranium powder held together by magnetic fields and allowed to reach a near-critical chain reaction. In this state the cloud throws off shattered bits of uranium atom at high velocities, and you just deflect these out of the back of the engine using magnetic fields. The FFR is so simple, in fact, that you can imagine little colonies on the smallest and poorest lockstep worlds building their own.

Thirty years between planets is still nothing like the hours or days pictured in your average SF movie. This is not our space opera future. So, here's the ridiculous part: what if those thirty years could be made to seem like a single night, both to the travelers and to the people back home and at the destination?

Some ideas are impossible and loony. Some (like faster than light travel) seem reasonable but are impossible. And some, like the lock-step empire, are loony and (just) possible.

In Canada we have these tiny wildflowers that grow during our brief Arctic summer. They're the most fragile things imaginable, and they winter over in negative-fifty-degree temperatures, under blasting winds and air as dry as any desert on Earth. They've thrived in conditions like this for millions of years because they don't try to fight the cold. They work with it.

It wouldn't be enough for a human civilization to cower under the ice of a few frozen-over Earth-sized nomads. A true interstellar empire—one that actually prospered between the stars—would have to have the same attitude toward resources as Arctic life. It would have to gather and use energy and material in those brief periods when it could, and it would have to be able to hibernate the rest of the time. So, imagine colonies on far-flung nomad worlds, whose citizens spend most of their time in a difficult-but-not-impossible state of artificial hibernation, while their machines patiently gather the energy and resources needed for a brief flowering of activity. The longer you can hibernate, the more time your machines have to harvest and build, and the more extravagant a lifestyle you can have during those times when you're awake. The Arctic summer is extravagant; why shouldn't the interstellar one be as well?

This is the idea of lockstep time: use hibernation to solve the problems of distance and duration, rather than trying to solve the problem of speed. It's not just travelers moving between the worlds that spend trip-time in cold-sleep: the worlds themselves, both origin and destination, do the same. Do this ridiculous thing, and the problem of speed goes away.

Turns, frequencies, and jubilee

The decisive element that turns these far-flung worlds into a true interstellar empire is synchronization. If you and your neighboring planets adopt the same hibernation frequency—for instance, a ratio of hibernation-time/awake-time, expressed in months, of 360/1—then hundreds or even thousands of planets are literally one night's sleep away. You'll have to wait a month to come back, but when you do, only a month will have passed back home as well; there's no relativistic "twin problem" in the lockstep worlds.

From here, the logic of the locksteps becomes pretty direct. Those worlds that synchronize their turns experience the same passing of time. The longer you sleep, the more worlds are "next door." And those worlds that operate on different frequencies are separated from you by a barrier more fundamental than distance.

A lockstep is my name for a group of colonies—be they individual space stations, clusters of buildings dug into the depths of comets, planet-bound cities or whole worlds—that sleep and wake on the same frequency, ratio, and schedule. Lockstep 360/1, for instance, collectively sleeps for thirty years at a time (except for its robotic sentries, resource harvesters, and factories). When its worlds wake, they all wake simultaneously and are awake for a month. Travelers who set out thirty years ago, if they are not still in transit, have been at their destination for perhaps years. They've been hibernating too, waiting for this moment. Now they wake and disembark, and at the end of the month new travelers set out, entering cold sleep at the same time as the rest of the lockstep. In this way, simultaneous time is experienced throughout the entire region, regardless of its size.

Far-flung destinations may require more than one hop to reach. Some ships will cruise for centuries before reaching the more remote worlds. This, however, is no different from travel in the age of sailing ships, when some ports of call were weeks away, and some many months. Global empire was possible under those conditions in the 1800s; it will be possible between the stars in a similar mode.

The longer you sleep, the smaller this problem becomes. A lockstep that slept for a million years at a time could experience a galaxy's worth of planets as right next door. Of course, those planets would change unrecognizably between turns, so you might not want to go that far. But, a frequency of thirty years... that's within the lifespan of trees, and certainly rivers, hills, and the buildings on them would not normally crumble overnight. And on frozen-over worlds like Pluto and the Kuiper planets, the landscape really won't change over the lifespans of people, even if those lives are stretched out over hundreds of thousands of years.

The price you'll pay is that time on worlds like Earth will seem to accelerate. A version of the twin paradox does exist in the lockstep worlds: if you leave your twin on Earth to join 360/1, they will have died of old age less than three months (turns) after you arrive. Stepping into lockstep time means leaving Earth, and all other realtime worlds, behind. There is no going back. If you pay this price, however, you get in return more worlds to explore than any realtimer could dream of. Those poor souls from Earth may in their lifetimes travel to other worlds—eight or ten of them. You can experience thousands.

Strangely, the most inaccessible places may be right next door. If your neighbors are lock-steps that operate on a different frequency, then you'll rarely if ever see them. Two cities might exist side by side, whose inhabitants never meet because they live at different frequencies. Those frequencies might never match up exactly, but most will go in and out of phase: locksteps 360/1 and 372/1, for instance, will both wake simultaneously once every 960 years. I call the simultaneous waking of two or more locksteps a jubilee.

Jubilee is a special time among the lock-steps. Then, diverse cultures come together—parallel worlds that seldom meet catch a glimpse of one another. The rest of the time, the dormant fortresses and cities of locksteps of different frequency are as mysterious to one another as they are to those who live their lives in realtime.

If you think about it, having multiple lock steps can be beneficial. No matter how meager its resources, you can carpet a planet with lockstep cities because only one lockstep will normally be awake at any one time. If it's a rich planet—a habitable Earth-like world, for instance—it could sustain a population of tens of billions with minimal impact to the biosphere, because only a fraction of that population would be drawing on its ecosystem services during a given period.

Scale

One obvious objection is that if you are actually able to stay awake all the time, you can harvest resources and manufacture much faster. Isn't it obviously to your advantage to do so? For instance take two planets, one where the colonists hibernate for a decade and then awake for one month at the end of that time; and another where they are awake all the time. Surely the second world will be 120 times as productive as the first?

Firstly, we're assuming that there is no limiting factor among all the resources that will slow World Two's productivity rate (fundamental scarcity of some critical element or of energy etc.). We're also assuming that World One doesn't have a machine economy that is always awake even when its human population sleeps. This is an important idea for lock-steps: the tiniest of comets might not have enough energy or accessible elements to sustain a human colony, but if a population of energy-sipping robots slowly but constantly mines and manufactures for decades at a time, they may be able to produce enough, in a few years, to enable the brief awakening of a sizeable city.

Even so, let's assume that World Two (our always-awake world) can mine and build and harvest as fast as it wants. It has an advantage in those areas. But does this advantage hold for trade as well?

If it's using simple FFR rockets, World Two can exchange trade goods with its neighbors on a sixty-year round-trip schedule. For it, the benefits of one trade exchange are diluted across an entire human lifetime (give or take). For World One, which collectively sleeps for a decade at a time, one trade exchange is diluted across only six months of subjective time. World Two may mine and manufacture 120 times faster than World One, but it also uses those resources 120 times as quickly, while in absolute terms both worlds trade at the same rate. If you look at the lives of people living on these worlds, the difference is dramatic: across the lifetime of an individual, they experience the same productivity. They may appear radically different from an outside observer, but from within, these worlds feel the same.

World One, however, benefits from an enormous advantage in trade—again, looked at from within. A citizen of World One who sleeps for ten years at a time doesn't experience those ten years, only the brief summers that follow. Chained together, those summers make a life similar to that of World Two's citizens—except for the constant flood of trade goods that World One (subjectively) experiences.

Actually, the difference is even more dramatic, because while World Two may increase its productivity by spreading out across its (flat) landscape, World One can increase its trade capacity eight times faster by increasing the (three-dimensional) volume of space in which it trades. The longer World One sleeps, the more worlds its ships can reach during... let's call it a turn. Double the geographical hinterland of World Two's planet-bound economy, and you increase its economic power by roughly four times. Double the distance in three-dimensional space that World One's ships can travel during a turn, however, and you multiply its potential trading partners by eight.

For hibernating worlds, trade scales faster than the exploitation of local resources.

Hibernation vs. FTL

The most important word in science fiction is if... if Einstein was wrong, or if Alcubiere was right, and somebody discovered a miraculous technology to travel faster than light... if it took less than the energy of an entire galaxy to use it once... the ifs pile up pretty fast when we're talking about FTL. There are little issues like navigation, and what happens when an FTL ship encounters a large immovable object like, say, the Earth. The time-honored science fiction technique known as 'hand-waving' usually comes into play to deal with issues like this.

In order to imagine an FTL civilization, we have to pile on the ifs and hand-wave like crazy. By contrast, what do we have to do to imagine locksteps? We have to imagine near-perfect hibernation technology.

Humans can't hibernate. So far, attempts to develop hibernation technology for unmodified human beings have failed. There are promising avenues and hints of avenues to explore. Right now, cold-sleep is impossible.

But, in contrast to FTL, we know of no reason why hibernation would be impossible, provided we allow some biological alterations to human physiology. It's a bit of a transhumanist cheat to redesign the human genome to give us an inbuilt hibernation reflex—but not much of one. In Lockstep, I've imagined a combination of extremely meticulous and careful external mechanisms—devices that monitor you down to the cellular level and do repair on individual cells if necessary—and genetic alteration. Nanotech in the body coordinates with the hibernation chambers I call cicada beds to allow humans to slip into cold sleep, and even be frozen solid to await resurrection after the thirty-year sleep. That reawakening could actually take months, as the machinery carefully repairs cumulative damage, tones your muscles for you, and so on. It doesn't matter to the sleeper.

There are actually lots of ways to do it. If you believe in the possibility of uploading or backing-up the human brain, then the lock-step citizens could have their neural patterns stored while the physical body is recycled; then, when waking is required, a new body is printed and the mind inserted back into it. I don't like this idea, though; it's almost as hand-wavy as FTL. The cicada beds are pretty conservative by comparison. But maybe there are other techniques, like some sort of quantum-level flash-freezing, or insanely powerful magnetic fields that lock every atom in the body in place. For Lockstep I invented the denners, genetically and cybernetically altered animals similar to cats that can take over the role of the cicada bed, making it possible for humans to hibernate anywhere at any time. Biological as well as mechanistic solutions are possible; and you can set a lockstep frequency to account for any amount of recovery time that might be needed between sleeps. Maybe a month is too brief a period to be awake, and maybe thirty years is too long to sleep. Doesn't matter—these times can be adjusted according to what's actually possible.

The point is that the more you look at FTL, the less likely it seems, while the more you look at hibernation, the more avenues to it open up. I take this as a hint about where to spend my mental energies.

Redefining our way to the stars

It's true that the locksteps are a bit of a cheat. They exemplify the idea that there are few problems that can't be solved by redefining them. In this case, the problem was never the impossibility of faster-than-light travel; it was the difficulty of imagining how to have a space opera, Star Wars -type future in the universe we've been given. And unlike FTL, this is a solvable problem.

People have thought of lots of other solutions, too. Uploading and virtual universes can give us countless worlds to explore. The locksteps are for people who want those worlds to be real, physical places. The price is that they'll almost all be frozen iceballs; and, of course, that you'll be leaving your own era behind forever if you join a lockstep.

All of which makes me wonder: what have I missed? Is there an even better solution that will give us the space opera future science fiction promised us? Are there other clever redefinitions even better than locksteps?

One thing that's clear is that we're not done learning. Maybe FTL will turn out to be possible; but even if not, discoveries like the one hundred thousand free-floating planets per star will continue to come. Even if we can't do FTL, we may discover technologies that make it unnecessary—clever reality-hacks that give us the future we wanted, just by another route.

The point is that we needn't abandon reality for fantasy. Aspirational, exciting futures are still possible, provided we use a little imagination and stay open to the possibilities of the real. I'm a bit of a curmudgeon in this regard. I think that a fantastic future that is nonetheless possible is infinitely more worthy of our attention than a fantastic future that's just a fantasy. Call me crazy, but there it is. There's more than one way to go. Who needs FTL, when you've got all the time in the world?

God May Love Us Today, But What About Tomorrow?

177 words

Our species' high position as the current culmination
Of Darwinian Selection is a spot we doubtless savor.
But let us add reality into our meditation,
Since Evolution's future may not grace us with such favor.

The arguments fly thick and fast concerning global warming,
And one point in particular has everybody storming:
It is maintained by experts whose credentials we revere,
That a global mass extinction is about to take place here.
Some think this cycle's "natural," does little harm, and passes,
So we need not concern ourselves with excess greenhouse gases.
And since some mass extinctions made us what we are today,
"Then let it come! It's good for us!"They thoughtlessly will bray.

It's true we're here 'cause dinosaurs, (the former top bananas),
All ended up as food for ants (or maybe for piranhas).
Mass extinctions, one may argue, aren't so artificial.
But that does not imply that for us they're beneficial.
Before we cheer for "progress" we should think, and maybe stop,
For mass extinctions don't bode well for species at the top.
Just because we rule today, will that be true forevermore?
Why don't we ask a trilobite, therapsid, or a dinosaur?

—Robert Lundy

ARE WE THERE YET?

GUEST EDITORIAL

Edward M. Lerner | 1870 words

Despite "predictions" in early science fiction of flying cars and robot servants, of cheap, limitless fusion power and colonies on the Moon, we have none of those things. That doesn't stop us from looking: when I Google "Where is my flying car?" I get 133 million hits. When I Google "robot servant" (or maid or butler), I get more than 15 million hits.

What happened to the future?

It arrived unannounced—and will continue to do so—because (a) science fiction's job is not predicting the future and (b) the nature of chaotic systems is to surprise.

We'll consider both explanations before looking at what I believe to be the deeper reason that some of us are disappointed.

Many SF stories are set in a future. It's the natural place for considering the implications of technologies not yet deployed and of possibilities that science has yet to prove (or disprove).1 Having said that, pondering "What if?" hardly qualifies as a prediction about the future. And, of course, SF authors sometimes ask no more of an imagined future than that it plausibly support an entertaining storyline, humorous parody, or biting satire.

But disclaimers aside, SF is a forward-looking genre. Shouldn't we be enjoying at least some of the future tantalizingly dangled by our literature?

Well.

As Yankees philosopher Yogi Berra astutely observed, "It's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future." And that brings me back to my second disclaimer. The future is hard to predict because so very many factors—and often subtle factors—shape it.

Recall the most famous (fictional) prognosticator of our genre: "psychohistorian" Hari Seldon of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series.2 Seldon, for all his success in forecasting and charting the fall and rise of galactic civilization, worked from the aggregated characteristics of worlds' populations. His science could not foresee the monkey wrench that would be thrown into his plans by the psychically enabled mutant individual known as the Mule.

In a familiar example from our place and time, I'll venture that few people anticipated whole industries upended by one individual: Steve Jobs. (Music distribution shifted from CDs to downloads. A marginal computer company turned into one of the world's premier cell-phone manufacturers. Tablet computers are on track to replace laptops and desktop PCs.) Which other industries might Jobs have disrupted but for the rare variant of pancreatic cancer—or his idiosyncratic decision to forgo conventional cancer treatment for nine months—that led to his early death? 3

I referred earlier to chaotic systems. Chaos theory, of course, is the mathematical representation of dynamic systems that are sensitive to even very slight variations in initial conditions. In common metaphor, it's the butterfly effect. Does a hurricane taking form today— or failing to form—depend upon whether last week some butterfly in a distant jungle flapped its wings?

Consider a sharpened pencil balanced on its delicate tip. Most observers will, with confidence, predict that the pencil will topple. Few would undertake to predict the direction in which that pencil will fall. Why? Because how the pencil falls will depend on the molecular minutiae of the pencil point, the molecular minutiae of the surface on which the pencil balances, and the countless randomly jostling gas molecules in the surrounding air.

Are those molecular-level details knowable? And then, knowing them, cannot an accurate solution be calculated? Perhaps in theory. But in practice?

And that teetering pencil is a comparatively simple forecasting problem. What about the variables within a system of people?

Ponder the number of neurons in the human brain (about one hundred billion), synapses in the human brain (tens of trillions, varying with age), and humans now living (about seven billion). Even barring mutations like the Mule, predicting the consequences of human behavior seems impractical.

And that's before factoring in our interactions with our environment. What chaotic systems might affect human behavior? As a surrogate for the number of networked computers, we'll take the set of assigned Internet Protocol addresses. About five billion IP addresses have been assigned, their number growing daily. Then there are the myriad factors that impact weather and climate. There's the chance meeting of gametes to produce new individuals. There's the health of the food chain, down to plankton. There are cosmic rays influencing not only our present health and unborn offspring but also the formation of clouds.

It's a long list....

Consider the many pathogenic organisms always around us, and the vagaries of wind and human interaction that distribute those pathogens, and the vagaries of environmental stimuli that activates (or doesn't) one's unique genetic susceptibility to a particular pathogen. Consider the countless factors that influence the availability of disease treatments, from researchers' personal interests to patients' financial conditions, from Big Pharma's research funding priorities to the legislation to steer funding to rare/orphan diseases.

Because who knows when a particular microbe will rewrite the future?

The Great Plague of 1665 shuttered Cambridge University, dispatching an undistinguished science student into the countryside. For two years of self-study the young man puzzled over what were to become the calculus and a theory of gravitation. Matters might easily have gone another way: 15% of London's population died in that outbreak of bubonic plague. A chance encounter in the streets or even a cough borne on a slightly different wind pattern might have cut short that young man's career.

The future of that time (aka, our history) would have been very different if Isaac Newton had succumbed to the plague.

(Despite the world's inherent messiness, some predictions do pan out. Take Cleve Cartmill's 1944 Astounding story, "Deadline." Cartmill's extrapolations of atomic-bomb technology were accurate enough to set the FBI to investigating both author and editor (John W. Campbell) for leaks from the very secret Manhattan project. 4 Or take Neal Stephenson's 1992 cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, whose shadowy hackers so presciently anticipated modern hacktivist/anarchic groups like Anonymous and LulzSec. 5)

In our guts, we know how unpredictable the world is. Then why do SF fans often feel shortchanged?

Because something deeper is at work than our denial that writers—or scientists, or the most powerful supercomputers—can forecast the future. Recalling the many dystopias, apocalypses, post-apocalypses, and existential crises we encounter in science fiction, the average reader is probably glad to be missing out on many of the look-aheads.

Then what is the thing that we do miss?

I'll assert it's something subliminal.

Let's look closer at oft-mentioned inventions associated with the yet-to-arrive science-fictional future:

•Robot servants responsive to our every command. Instead we have Siri 6 to place our calls, make our appointments, and run Internet searches—if our wireless connection to remote servers doesn't hiccough. If we overlook her penchant for sharing our utterances with Apple. If we don't confuse her with homonyms, talk with an unsupported accent, have a speech impediment, or object to her preprogrammed, canned humorous responses. And while she may find a recipe for us, she still can't cook.

•Limitless fusion power, too cheaply generated to bother metering. Instead, we obtain our electrical power from an ever-changing mix of fossil fuels, nuclear fission, solar farms, wind farms, and other. None of that power comes cheaply, even the forms subsidized by our taxes. The electrical grid to distribute our power becomes by the day more antiquated, fragile, and overloaded. As consumers, we're invited to choose among power-generating companies, prodded by time-and load-sensitive pricing schemes to alter our power consumption by season and time of day, urged to cede to our power company permission to switch off our appliances whenever demand peaks, and nagged to conserve.

•Flying cars. Rather than effortlessly flying over obstructions ("free as the birds," as the idiom would have it), each year we spend more of our time creeping about in earthbound traffic. We need a GPS to navigate, and it needs real-time updates to route us around congestion. Rather than choosing our own way through the limitless sky, we take toll roads for the chance to move; then, absent a transponder and periodic funds replenishment, we still queue up at—if there is one—a toll plaza.

•Colonies in space. Far from settling more spacious (no pun intended) environs, we pack ourselves into ever more crowded coastal strips and urban areas. Instead of enjoying gleaming new cities, we rely upon aging, ill-maintained infrastructure—like the Interstate bridge recently sent crashing into a river by the nudge of an errant truck. Rather than soar into space, our travels are disrupted by an antiquated and overloaded air-traffic-control system, the eruption of an Icelandic volcano, a Nor'easter, and the latest federal budget squabble.

What much classic science fiction hinted at—and hence, the future that we often sorely miss—was not technology as much as simplification. Setting aside whatever twists and traumas drove exciting plots, science fiction once gave us a glimpse of a future made easier through new technology.

And the future that did arrive? No one can say we've been shortchanged with regard to amazing new technology—but it's not simple:

•We've got the Internet—and with it, updates, upgrades, and once popular services gone obsolete; a torrent of malware and phishing attacks; digital rights management and piracy; endless ways to distract ourselves—and waste our time.

•We have wireless almost everything— hobbled by spectrum shortages, vendor near monopolies, and near religious wars over mobile operating systems.

•Liberated from network schedules, we stream video when we choose—while that entertainment is splintered across an ever-changing set of websites, reliant on sometimes competing software, requiring individual memberships and purchases.

•We carry a thousand books or dozens of movies in the palm of a hand—and as part of the entertainment-from-the-cloud bargain, come to rely on mysterious recommendation algorithms ("readers who liked X also liked Y") to find our next diversion.

•We take more pictures than ever with cameras becoming digital—only to face the semi-Herculean undertaking of editing, arranging, and backing up thousands of images.

Don't get me wrong. I like those gadgets and systems. I believe that most people do— suspecting that they, too, resent the amount of time consumed by the tech; and the many choices the tech demands of us; and the realization there will never be enough time to choose in an informed manner among our many options; and that after we make our choice—often on the basis of the mysterious aggregation of opinion in a social network or strangers' reviews on an etail site—we'll soon be faced with re making our choice.

Because the future will keep coming....

Psychologist Barry Schwartz wrote in 2004 about The Paradox of Choice:Why More Is Less. His critique worried more about choices among jeans and types of coffee than such modern conundrums as committing to a cell network or to a particular e-content ecosystem (e.g., iTunes vs. Amazon). Schwartz's thesis nonetheless applies: at some point, an increase in our number of options elicits overload and stress rather than improved outcomes. Rather than satisfaction.

In the future that we once glimpsed as background to SF stories, I don't recall that anyone struggled with their choice of cell-phone provider. They weren't locked into one e-reader over another by incompatible file formats.

In that bygone, beckoning future, technology was going to simplify our lives.

And that is why—deferring once more to Yogi Berra—"The future ain't what it used to be."

Footnotes:

1 But not the only place to explore such possibilities, as alternate histories and time-travel tales demonstrate.

2 Much of that series first appeared (in prebook form) as stories in this magazine (in its Astounding incarnation).

3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_jobs

4 See "Reflections: The Cleve Cartmill Affair," by Robert Silverberg, http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0310/ref.shtml

5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_%28 group%29 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LulzSec

6 Siri is Apple's voice-recognition service for use with iPhones and iPads.

Edward M. Lerner worked in high tech and aerospace for thirty years, including stints contracting for NASA, the DoD, and the FBI, before becoming a full-time author in 2004. He writes science fiction, technothrillers, and technology articles.

KARL SCHROEDER

BIOLOG

Richard A. Lovett | 489 words

Karl Schroeder, whose novel Lockstep concludes this issue, always knew he wanted to be a writer. "My mother published a couple of novels when I was very young," he says. "I grew up with books on the shelf with the name Schroeder on the spine."

This taught him early what he wanted to do. "I started writing when I was 14," he says, "and never looked back"—so much so that he never bothered to finish traditional studies. "I am a proud high school dropout. I was already writing my first novel when I got into high school and didn't pay much attention to anything else."

By 16, he'd sold his first story. After that, "I went the way of the starving artist and did the usual things, living in a garret, eating Kraft dinners, and supporting myself however I could." By the time he was in his early thirties, he was selling short stories on a regular basis. A few years later he sold the first of what are now ten novels.

Serializing them in Analog, he adds, is fun. "It's like getting the book published four times." But also, he says, Analog readers "are kind of my tribe. I've always liked hard science fiction. For me, the game is to imagine the most fantastical, amazing futures, while obeying all the laws [of nature]."

Others might find the exotic in fantasy, but Schroeder prefers more-possible worlds. "The Universe is more fantastical than we can imagine," he says.

Like many other Analog writers, he also likes to do his bit to steer the world toward a hopeful future. "That's the great task for our generation," he says. "I want to see my fiction contributing in some tiny way."

Fiction writing, however, is no longer what occupies most of Schroeder's time. For years, he's been consulting as a "foresight analyst"— essentially a type of futurist. Not that he sees himself as a conventional futurist. "I [can't] say I can make predictions. In strategic foresight, you try to develop strategies for dealing with what you can't predict." His clients have included the Canadian government, the Canadian army, and large corporations, which he now serves through his daytime employer, Idea Couture.

Central to all of this is Canadian. "I'm from a southern Manitoba Mennonite community," Schroeder says. The Mennonite background tends to show up in themes of nonviolence in his works, but it also contributes to his science fiction roots. "It's the same community A.E. van Vogt came from," he says. "My mother knew his family when she was growing up."

There's also a subtle difference between his Canadian perspective and the U.S. one of most Analog readers. From his side of the border, he says, "it looks like a much bigger, much more complicated world—and a much messier future constructed of compromises, ad hoc solutions, and misunderstandings." Perhaps that's part of why his stories bring a breath of fresh (northern) air to his more southerly readers, resonating not only with "fantastical" futures, but also thought-provokingly different perspectives on the world we know.

WHEN WIMPS COLLIDE

THE ALTERNATE VIEW

John G. Cramer | 1687 words

The standard model of cosmology tells us that some 26.8% of the mass in the Universe is in the form of dark matter, while only about 4.9% is the normal "baryonic" matter that forms all the atoms, stars, planets, and us. The dark matter clumps around galaxies, promoting their formation, and shows itself by making stars orbit faster around the galactic center and by its gravitational-lensing effects on starlight. The nature of dark matter is one of the leading unsolved mysteries of contemporary physics, a secret that Nature has not yet revealed to us.

Physicists have developed several ways of searching for dark matter and trying to understand its properties: (1) by looking for direct production of previously unknown particle species at accelerators like the LHC; (2) by attempting to detect dark matter particles when they scatter from normal matter as the Earth and the Solar System move through the galactic dark-matter halo at about 0.1% of the velocity of light; and (3) by searching for the products of annihilation as the matter and antimatter forms of dark matter find each other, collide, and annihilate. My December 2009 Alternate View column (AV 150) provided a snapshot of the state of dark matter searches at the time. Today there is still no conclusive solution to the dark matter mystery, but I want to review the current evidence, considering the states of the three lines of investigation.

Direct production of dark matter candidate particles has so far produced no results. The LHC has been in operation since 2009, and one of the missions of the major detectors there is to search for new weakly interacting massive particle species (WIMPs) that might constitute dark matter. Of particular interest are particles associated with the extension of the standard model called supersymmetry (SUSY), which predicts that every known fermion particle (having half-integer spin like electrons, neutrinos, and quarks) has a yet-tobe-discovered SUSY twin with integer spin. Similarly, every known boson particle (having integer spin like photons, gluons, and W and Z bosons) should have a SUSY twin with half-integer spin. Thus, SUSY predicts that quarks should have "squark" twins, leptons should have "slepton" twins, a photon should have a "photino" twin, and so on. None of these particles have yet been observed in collisions at the LHC, meaning that (1) they have more mass than can be produced in LHC p+p collisions; (2) interactions with them are suppressed for some unknown reason; or (3) they do not exist at all. In any case, no new dark matter candidate particles have turned up at the LHC or other accelerators.

Attempts to detect the scattering of dark matter particles streaming by the Earth has proved a bit more promising. The one element of the search is the idea that the Earth should move faster through the galactic dark matter halo when its orbital velocity around the Sun adds to the orbital velocity of the Solar System around the galactic center, than when the two velocities subtract, making collisions with dark matter particles more likely in June than in December. My December 2009 column described the DAMA/LIBRA observation, results of June/December seasonal variation in the just-above-threshold counting rate of well-shielded sodium iodide detectors placed in the Grand Sasso tunnel east of Rome. Since that time, another Grand Sasso experiment, CRESST–II, has reported observation of similar apparent seasonal variations. The germanium-detector-based CoGeNT experiment, located in an underground facility in the USA, has also provided some support for the observation of seasonal variations. On the other hand, the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment, using 368 kilograms of cryogenically cooled liquid xenon and located in the newly recommissioned Sanford underground facility in Lead, South Dakota, has recently reported that they see no evidence of dark matter collisions. The observing and non-observing experiments are now attempting to reconcile their differences. If the Grand Sasso dark matter scattering observations are to be taken seriously, they imply a significant scattering probability (a cross section of about 10-41 cm 2 ) for dark matter interacting with normal matter.

This brings us to the third approach, the search for evidence of WIMP + anti-WIMP annihilation products. Since we do not know what kind of particles are annihilating or what forces and interactions may be involved, the details of such annihilation events must be modeled based on theoretical assumptions. As the "weak" part of WIMP implies, it is assumed that WIMP particles, like neutrinos, are electrically neutral and are not affected by the strong or electromagnetic forces. They must be affected by gravity and possibly by the weak force, and they are presumed to come in matter and antimatter forms so that pairs can annihilate. The products of the annihilation depend on the masses of the WIMPs, but the ultimate result of the annihilation and possible subsequent decays should be to create fairly energetic photons (i.e., gamma rays), electrons, positrons, and neutrinos. The likelihood of WIMP annihilation depends of their concentration, and they should be most concentrated in deep gravity wells like the center of our galaxy and perhaps the center of the Sun.

There are some observations that are consistent with WIMP annihilation. First, there is evidence from the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope of energetic gamma rays coming from the center of our galaxy and also from the Virgo Cluster. The measured energy distribution can be fitted with models based on WIMP annihilation (see below). Second, a byproduct of the measurement of the cosmic microwave background radiation by the WMAP and Planck satellite experiments was the observation of a radio "haze" and a filamentary radio-wave structure near the galactic center. These radio waves can be explained as synchrotron radiation produced by electrons and positrons from WIMP annihilation. Analysis by Hooper, Weiner, and Xue (HWX) indicates that the annihilation rate implied by the gamma and radio radiation matches the thermal inverse annihilation rate (the rate of dark matter pair production by heat) required to produce the observed quantity of dark matter in the early Universe.

Another signal of dark matter annihilation that has received increasing attention is the spectrum of positrons present in cosmic rays. The PAMELA (Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics) experiment is a collaboration of institutions from Russia, Italy, Germany, and Sweden, attached to a Russian satellite in a polar elliptical orbit and designed to measure the antiproton and positron components of cosmic rays. The ongoing experiment has produced a surprising result: There was a steep rise in the positron-to-electron ratio with increasing energy, up to 90 GeV, but there was no corresponding rise in the antiproton-to-proton ratio. In April 2013, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS–II), a permanent magnet precision tracking device mounted on the International Space Station, has confirmed this result and produced a high-quality spectrum of the cosmic ray positrons from 0.5 GeV up to about 300 GeV. There are two competing explanations for the observed positron excess: WIMP annihilation products or positron production in pulsars. More modeling and more data on whether the positrons come from particular directions (e.g., pulsars) will be needed to determine which of these explanations is more consistent with the observed positron excess.

Thus, there is a collection of observations pointing in the direction of dark matter annihilation, but the question is: can they be put together in a consistent picture? To do this, one must provide a description of the WIMP particle: its mass, its interactions involving the four known forces (strong, electromagnetic, weak, and gravitational), its annihilation products, and possibly its interactions involving new unknown forces. This is tricky, because one must not only explain the existing observations (the cosmic ray positron rise with energy), but also explain the non-observations (the lack of any increase in antiprotons with energy or any WIMP candidates at the LHC). One problem seems to be that PAMELA and the Alpha spectrometer observe too many positrons to accommodate many such models.

The HWX group has proposed a model that seems to fit all the criteria. It hypothesizes that dark matter and antimatter particles having a mass of around 10 GeV are affected by a new fifth force that is ignored by baryons and leptons. This new force has a mediating particle (the equivalent of the gluon for the strong force and the photon for the electromagnetic force) that has a mass of around 1 GeV. The dark matter annihilations produce pairs of these intermediate particles, which in turn decay to mesons and leptons. This two-step scenario explains the lack of an antiproton enhancement in cosmic rays and, with a suitable choice of interaction strengths, can fit the gamma ray spectrum from the galactic center, the presumed synchrotron radiation from the WMAP and Planck data, and the scattering that could produce the seasonal variations observed by the Grand Sasso experiments.

This, of course, is not the end of the story. The new LUX results place the Grand Sasso seasonal variations in some doubt. The cosmic ray positron rise could be coming from pulsars. Some other astrophysical phenomena could be producing the gamma rays and the synchrotron radiation haze coming from the galactic center. Several new dark matter searches are currently being mounted, and the ongoing experiments are being improved and are gathering more data. Watch this column in times to come for further results.

SF Novels by John Cramer: my two hard SF novels, Twistor and Einstein's Bridge, are newly released as eBooks and are available at: http://bookviewcafe.com/bookstore/?s=Cra mer&submit=Search.

Alternate View Columns Online: Electronic reprints of over 160 "The Alternate View" columns by John G. Cramer, previously published in Analog, are available online at: http://www.npl.washington.edu/av.

References:

•Grand Sasso Seasonal Variations:

"New results from DAMA/LIBRA", R. Bernabei, P. Belli, F. Cappella et al., Eur. Phys. J. C67, 39-49 (2010); arXiv:1002.1028 [astroph.GA].

"Results from 730 kg days of the CRESST-II Dark Matter Search", G. Angloher, M. Bauer, I. Bavykina, A. Bento, C. Bucci, C. Ciemniak, G. Deuter, F. von Feilitzsch et al.; arX-iv:1109.0702 [astro-ph.CO].

•Alpha Spectrometer positrons:

"First Result from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on the International Space Station: Precision Measurement of the Positron Fraction in Primary Cosmic Rays of 0.5—350 GeV", M. Aguilar, et al., The AMS Collaboration, Physical Review Letters 110, 141102 (2013).

•Theoretical Model:

"Dark Forces and Light Dark Matter", Dan Hooper, Neal Weiner, and Wei Xue, Phys. Rev. D86, 056009 (2012); arXiv: 1206.2929 [hepph].

IN TIMES TO COME

148 words

Advances in training and technology help sports to evolve, but they can also help people looking for an unfair advantage over their competition. Our lead story for June, Jay Werkheiser's "Field of Gravity," is one such tale, looking at a possible future of American football.

The fact article is the next installment of Edward M. Lerner's continuing series on classic science fiction tropes, this one about a once-popular subject now largely considered pseudo-science: psi powers. Look for "Alternate Abilities" next month.

Then a journalist on an alien planet finds a hot lead on a story, but the details don't quite add up, and trying to fill in the missing pieces may pose more than just an occupational hazard in J.T. Sharrah's "Homecoming."

Of course, we'll also have other short fiction, like Jennifer R. Povey's "A Star to Steer By," Bud Sparhawk's "Forgiveness," and more.

See you next issue!

All contents subject to change

THE REFERENCE LIBRARY

Don Sakers | 2356 words

It's no secret that written science fiction, especially in print, has for many years been in what economists call "a contractionary phase." There are many theories about the cause, but in today's publishing market, the fact is that the many flavors of fantasy dominate, while SF (and particularly SF with a heavy science component) is definitely a minority taste.

This isn't terribly new; since its inception, the SF field has gone through periods of expansion and contraction, starting with the mid-1920s expansion that resulted in the birth of the commercial SF field as we know it. The relative proportion of "hard" and "soft" SF has fluctuated as well, not always in synchrony with the larger boom-and-bust cycle.

Previous contractions in the field have been accompanied by a sort of retrenchment, in which writers and publishers concentrate more of their efforts on the genres and styles of the past. (I deliberately say "accompanied by" because the direction of causality—if any—is uncertain.) During the slowdown of the mid-1960s, for example, there was a resurgence of Frederik Pohl type cautionary tales; the doldrums of the early 1970s brought a surge of Burroughs-type science fantasy and E. E. "Doc" Smith style space opera; and the slowdown of the late 1990s came with an upswing in both hard SF and British imports.

In the last few months, I've seen increasing evidence of a looking-to-the-past phase in science-based SF. I'll present some examples below; certainly the "retro SF" subgenre that I identified last issue is part of this phase.

So just what's going on here? Do publishers respond to contracting sales numbers with a kind of "back to basics" mentality, going with what's sold well in the past? Do writers and editors react to a bust with nostalgia for the kinds of SF they enjoyed when they were younger? Do readers husband their dollars, preferring to buy that which is more familiar and comforting?

Or is this whole phenomenon a statistical illusion? Perhaps a certain amount of nostalgic SF is steadily published each year, and it's only the reduction of other SF that makes these books seem to stand out, the way submerged rocks stand out when the tide recedes?

Perhaps a doubt-ridden field turns its attention upon itself, looking to its own roots to find new inspiration or new ways forward, as if the collective unconscious says, "Hey, remember all this cool stuff we used to do? Why don't we do that anymore?"

Then again, maybe the move to electronic media is responsible for this apparent retrenchment. Maybe the epicenter of "soft" SF is moving online and into e-book-only spheres, while us old "hard" SF fogies stay behind in print? (But I don't feel like a print-bound old fogey, and I'll bet you don't either.)

It's also possible that there's no retrenchment or back to basics movement—that we're all getting older, and the ever-present market for nostalgia is expanding; that "retro SF" is the new popular flavor of the month.

I suspect the answer is "a little of each," plus factors I haven't identified.

Assuming this nostalgic phase is a real phenomenon, what does it mean for the field?

I'd like to say that previous nostalgic phases have been followed by an expansion of the field, that this is a sign things will soon be getting better, that science-based SF is on the brink of a new resurgence, and that we're headed for happy times with a Clarke in every pot and two Asimovs on every Kindle.

I'd like to say that... but I can't. Yes, this current nostalgia will be followed by an expansion of the field—but only in the sense that every bust is eventually followed by a boom. And if history is a guide, the eventual boom in science-based SF won't have anything to do with today's retro visions.

In the late 1960s, SF boomed because of Star Trek, not social science fiction. In the late 1970s, it was Star Wars, not science fantasy and space opera, that brought more readers to the field. No expansion at all followed the "hard SF renaissance" of the early 2000s. The next big expansion of the field will almost certainly spring from something other than modern nostalgia and retro SF.

At least, that's how I see things.

Raygun Chronicles: Space Opera For a New Age

edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

Every Day, 360 pages, $29.95 (hardcover)

ISBN: 978-0-9881257-5-9

Genres: Anthology, Retro SF, Space Opera

Raygun Chronicles contains stories (and one poem) "influenced by and written in the style of old classics by contemporary authors," which certainly makes the anthology's retro nature obvious enough. Nine of the 24 stories are original to this book; the other 15 are reprints from the 2006–2013 magazine Raygun Revival, which was edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt and Johne Cook and which had a similar mission.

Don't worry about the claim that these stories are "in the style of" the classics—the writers (wisely) didn't attempt to echo the purple prose of earlier ages. Instead, they've done a fine job of evoking the spirit of those earlier tales, and the technology is drawn from today's science rather than that of the 1920s and 30s. The casts of characters are more diverse, women appear in positions of agency and authority, and the modern reader doesn't have to take a deep breath and ignore the casual racism of the period (although one story does tread uncomfortably close to Arabic stereotype). All of these things are improvements.

These 24 stories are a varied selection, running the gamut from melodrama to humor, adventure to parody, and tender to ruthless. There's alien invasion, stories of colonization, time travel tales, and super-science yarns.

Among the standout stories is Sarah A. Hoyt's "Around the Bend," which mixes adventure and espionage with a revolutionary new spacedrive. Robin Wayne Bailey's "King of the Galaxy Knights" has a heroic protagonist the equal of "Doc" Smith's Kim Kinnison. The late A. C. Crispin's "Twilight World" is a first encounter story, expanded from the first novel in her Starbridge series. And Mike Resnick's two tales of the redoubtable Catastrophe Baker will leave you laughing.

Beyond the Sun

edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt Fairwood, 300 pages, $17.99 (trade paperback)

Kindle, Nook: $5.99 (e-book)

ISBN: 978-0-933846-38-5

Genres: Anthology, Retro SF, Trips in Space

If you want to return to the roots of science fiction, then you're talking about space travel. No other theme goes back further; in fact, we're able to define some of the travel tales of the ancient world as SF because they deal with voyages to other worlds.

Space travel is a great springboard for all kinds of SF stories. It's the way we view the wonders of the Universe, settle other planets, meet alien races, fight interstellar wars. Space travel is so much more than a way to get from A to B: it's journeys of internal and external discovery, the challenges of shipboard life, explorations of new frontiers... and more.

Beyond the Sun contains 18 stories on the theme of travel beyond the Solar System. One—Robert Silverberg's "The Dybbuk of Mazel Tov IV"—is a classic from 1974, and two others were published in the mid-2000s... but the rest are originals.

Besides Silverberg, there are some other familiar names here, Nancy Kress, Cat Rambo, Mike Resnick, Jamie Todd Rubin, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and Brad R. Torgenson among them.

Kress's story "Migration" is a powerful tale of animal protection and the nature of freedom on an exotic colony world. "Chasing Satellites" by Anthony R. Cardno is a different kind of colonial independence story. A unique spin on the urge to travel is at the heart of Jason Sanford's "Rumspringa."

Taken together, the stories in this collection are a multifaceted look at all the things that make space travel and other worlds such fundamental themes in this literature that we all love.

Treecat Wars

David Weber and Jane Lindskold

Baen, 376 pages, $18.99 (hardcover)

Kindle: $8.59, iBooks, Nook: $9.99 (e-book)

ISBN: 978-1-4516-3933-9

Series: Star Kingdom 3

Genres: Adventure SF, Animal Companions, Young Adult SF

If you want to talk science fiction nostalgia, sooner or later you'll find yourself talking about what we now call young adult SF. Many of today's editors, writers, and readers first found written SF between the covers of young adult books, many of them by Andre Norton.

Norton, I believe, would approve of David Weber & Jane Lindskold's Star Kingdom series.

It may have started as a way to get a share of the lucrative YA market with stories of a teenage ancestor of Weber's mega-hero Honor Harrington... but somewhere in the execution, Stephanie Harrington and her friends took on a life of their own and the series has blossomed into a modern saga with the feel of those great old Andre Norton tales.

In this third volume, Stephanie and her friend Karl Zivonik—along with Stephanie's telepathic treecat, Lionheart—are sent to far-off Manticore for an accelerated forestry training program. It's a great opportunity and adventure for the two, but it's a particularly bad time for Stephanie to be leaving her home planet of Sphinx.

Following the devastating forest fires of the previous book (Fire Season), the treecats of Lionheart's clan are left homeless with winter coming on. Surrounding clans are in no mood to take on the refugees, and a group of off-planet biologists come to study the treecats are acting like they have ulterior motives. Since Stephanie is Sphinx's leading advocate for the treecats, her absence is keenly felt.

Her friends Anders Whitaker and Jessica Pheriss cope as best they can, trying to find a solution for the refugees... but they have their own problems, in terms of a friendship that's developing in a decidedly romantic direction—a bad idea, since Stephanie and Anders are supposed to be a couple already.

Like the best worlds of science fiction, part of the fun of this book is spending some more time with these characters we've come to know so well. We want to know what comes next for Stephanie, Karl, Anders, Jessica... and particularly for the delightful treecats.

The Hunter

Giancarlo Genta Springer, 130 pages, $19.99 (trade paperback)

Kindle: $9.99 (e-book)

ISBN: 978-3-319-02059-4

Series: Springer Science and Fiction

Genre: Hard SF

The New Martians

Nick Kanas Springer, 123 pages, $19.99 (trade paperback)

Kindle: $9.99 (e-book)

ISBN: 978-3-319-00974-2

Series: Springer Science and Fiction

Genre: Hard SF

Alien Encounter

Dirk Schulze-Makuch Springer, 236 pages, $19.99 (trade paperback)

Kindle: $9.99 (e-book)

ISBN: 978-3-319-01960-4

Series: Springer Science and Fiction

Genre: Hard SF

John W. Campbell would have loved these—and so, I suspect, would Hugo Gernsback.

The Springer Science and Fiction series is a new venture designed to bring real-world science and science fiction together. The authors are practicing scientists (and, one presumes, SF readers). Giancarlo Genta is a professor of mechanical and aerospace engi neering at Politecnico di Torino in Italy and member of the International Academy of Astronautics. Nick Kanas is an emeritus professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco and author of Space Psychology and Psychiatry. Dirk Schulze-Makuch is a professor at Washington State University focusing on evolutionary adaptation strategies of organisms in extreme environments.

Each book in the series comes in two parts: The Novel, and The Science Behind the Fiction. In the first part, the author presents a short novel dealing with a particular science fiction theme; the second part consists of essays explaining the scientific basis of elements of the novel.

I know, I know, it all sounds dreadful. You might be thinking that Analog readers aren't exactly the target audience for these books. Other scientists, perhaps, or the kind of popular science audiences who watch Discovery and the Science Channel, who want their science fiction well tamed and under control.

To be fair, there's a bit of that. And yet... don't we do the same sort of thing in Analog from time to time? In the Brass Tacks section of this issue, I'll bet there's a reader discussing some point of science behind one of the stories in a previous issue.

You owe it to yourself to take a second look at these books. To begin with, there are real SF writers on their editorial board: Gregory Benford, Geoffrey Landis, and Rudy Rucker. Second, the writing isn't what you'd expect from working scientists—the novels are quite readable, and the nonfiction essays are in language appropriate for an educated layperson.

The Hunter is set in the interstellar human civilization of the twenty-fourth century. Humanity has yet to encounter true alien intelligences, but they have run across giant alien machines. Like Fred Saberhagen's Berserkers, these self-replicating machines are inimical to organic life.

Mike Edwards, robotics expert, is a Hunter—a freelance adventurer who tracks and destroys the replicators for the sake of lucrative bounties paid by the colonies. But Mike, of course, learns the secret of the origin and ultimate mission of the machines.

The New Martians is set aboard the first expedition to Mars on the crew's long return to Earth in 2035. Something is menacing the expedition; is it an alien organism, a malfunctioning computer... or a member of the crew? It's actually a taut psychological thriller that would be at home as an Analog serial.

Alien Encounter is an expanded version of the author's previous title Voids of Eternity. Set in the 2070s, it deals with the classic situation of alien artifacts and organisms coming into the Solar System... and the astronauts who are sent to investigate them.

Analog readers are definitely among the intended audiences for these books.

Past Masters and Other Bookish Natterings

Bud Webster Merry Blacksmith, 385 pages, $19.95 (trade paperback)

ISBN: 978-0-61584-282-8

Genre: Nonfiction

While we're talking about revisiting the roots of the field... here's Bud Webster, one of the best and most informed critics of the field, to give his views on the subject.

The individual essays that make up Past Masters appeared in a number of venues during the last decade, mostly in the late, lamented magazine Helix SF. Most of the essays deal with "classic-but-no-longer-famous authors" of great importance to the field, authors such as Nelson Bond, Zenna Henderson, Phil Klass, Cyril M. Kornbluth, Murray Leinster, and H. Beam Piper. But Webster also goes afield to consider such topics as research methods, e-books, and "the good old days." The essays on individual authors are packed with comprehensive bibliographies.

Witty, thoughtful, and informative, Bud Webster couldn't write a dull sentence if his life depended on it. If you care at all about the history of our field, you'll want this book.

And that's going to have to be my last word on returning to the past. Looking toward the future, I'll see you next issue.

Don Sakers is the author of The Eighth Succession and Dance for the Ivory Madonna. For more information, visit www.scattered-worlds.com.

BRASS TACKS

1934 words

Dear Mr. Quachri,

I'm in a good mood today because I'm going to write you a letter about grammar. I'm a... I believe the word is "wonk." I am a grammar wonk.

I don't get very concerned about little random grammar mistakes that show up inevitably from time to time. Perfection is unattainable, and we do our best and move on. What does interest me is an author who violates the rules systematically, either on purpose or out of ignorance. If out of ignorance, I get giddy and love to shout, "Hurray! I know more than this professional writer guy does!" But if on purpose, that's even better. It means the author knows a grammar rule but is violating it for an artistic purpose, or, even better, because he doesn't like it and is trying to change the world (or at least the language). That's exciting. Which one is Martin L. Shoemaker ("Murder on the Aldrin Express," September 2013) doing? Maybe a little of both.

He's messing up his tenses. Fiction can be written in the past tense or the present tense, but an author must make up his mind about it. Mixing past and present in a passage is simply wrong (and, I might add, easily avoidable). Right on the first page: "Nick had broken more men than any three other commanders in the Corps. He loves to push a crew in drill." Sorry, it has to be "loved." Later: "I would have told him what a lousy dancer he is." Nope... "lousy dancer he was" is correct.

I think I can identify a purpose behind these seeming errors. It could be that Shoemaker is trying to communicate that the circumstances in the story, particularly the relationship between the captain and his executive, have persisted beyond the time of the events of the story up to the moment in which the narrative is being uttered. Well and good, and furthermore if Shoemaker dislikes the tense-consistency rule and wants to contribute to its demise, I can respect that, too.

But enough about grammar. It's a great story! I love how the characters draw motivation from the fact that they are stuck in an endless slingshot poly-orbit between Mars and Earth and would of course much rather be exploring Mars. The plotting is outstanding, with a sneaky puzzle cleverly solved by means of a little scientific knowledge. Love it.

So although it pains me to say it, grammar obviously doesn't really count. Please keep publishing outstanding stories like "Murder on the Aldrin Express." And if you can find authors that are good at grammar also, that would be, as they say, gravy.

If I lived in New York, I would pop by there and do a little pro bono proofreading for you (I think I could spare about six hours a week), just because I love Analog. Maybe we're all lucky I don't live in New York....

Christopher Myers

Lovelock, NV

Mr. Myers,

You're not wrong about some of that tense confusion. I can sometimes be a tad lenient in instances where a character's voice contains irregularities, like in dialog or first person narration (per Aldrin Express), but you make a good case that we should have tightened it up a bit more. ("Two unusual phenomenon"? That's totally on us.)

Dear Mr. Quachri,

As a longtime subscriber I have considered writing to you several times recently with my thoughts on recent issues, but I am considering this a "shakedown period" so I don't want to jog your elbow too much as you settle in. (If you would like specific feedback, let me know.) I do have one question, though. For many years now the cover protocol has been that if a story title is featured on the cover, the cover art illustrates that story. If the art is not associated with any of the stories in that issue then there is no story title. That has held true for as long as I can recall. But it has not been true for the last few issues, and it's very disorienting. I kept waiting for the plasma chambers in "Sixteen Million Leagues from Versailles," the organic spaceship in "The Whale God," etc., only to have them never appear. This lessened my enjoyment of the stories as I went into them with false expectations. Please either return to the previous policy or make a clear statement that you have changed it so those of us who have gotten used to the established protocol will not be continually confused. Thank you, and I look forward to seeing your selections for future stories.

Elka Tovah Davidoff Malden, MA

P.S. Okay, one comment: Please try not to have too many depressing stories in one issue. The real world is depressing enough. Analog has for many years stood for the ability of human beings to triumph over adversity. I know you are limited by what is submitted, but please try not to lose that enduring value. Thank you!

Ms. Davidoff,

You're completely right. We experimented with the cover copy for a few months, but I ultimately agreed with you: the old method is still the way to go, and we'll be returning to it shortly.

Trevor,

Dr. Stratmann's well-detailed problems of the health care system in the November issue neglected one very important point. Health care is a business, no different from any other. Once this is understood, most problems are resolved. No one has a right to health care. One must purchase as much or as little as one can afford.

In a true free market system, health care would be more affordable and therefore more available to persons of limited means. Hospital monopolies would be reduced as "certificates of need" would be eliminated. Hospital emergency rooms would be able to refuse service. Suicide by lifestyle wouldn't raise rates for the rest of us. Insurance companies could keep rates low by returning to actuarial pricing. Competition for insurance customers would increase as state regulations disappeared. The doctor monopoly would cease as lower price professionals could handle minor problems without state imposed licensing. Drug prices would fall as Food and Drug Administration approval would be eliminated. Lawsuits would decrease enormously in a loser-pays-the-legal-fees system.

In such a system, some persons with very expensive illnesses would certainly die. But that is no excuse for taking money from others to pay for it. If you want affordable health care for the most persons, the free market is the only way to go.

Al Westerfield, Crossville, TN

The author responds:

Limited space precludes addressing all your conclusions. I agree that the health care system has aspects of a business and that, within appropriate limits, free market forces can increase efficiency and decrease costs.

But patients are much more than just "customers." The primary goal of the health care system should be to provide for their medical welfare. Reducing costs, though important, should not come at the expense of preventable human suffering and what is in a patient's best medical interests. Ethical and public health considerations must take precedence over economic ones such as how much health care someone can afford.

For example, if an ER refused service to a seriously ill child because her parents had a "negative wallet biopsy," health care professionals would have failed in their moral duty to put the patient's needs first and money second. The Food and Drug Administration's regulatory process is, like all human endeavors, imperfect. But screening new medications and monitoring those already approved significantly increases the likelihood they will be safe and efficacious. This process has costs and may delay availability of what turn out to be effective new drugs. However, given the risk of disasters such as occurred with thalidomide before its dangers were recognized (see my fact article in the September 2010 Analog ), the FDA's strong emphasis on safety is reasonable and its activities help maintain public health.

Both the private and public sectors have profound weaknesses. I am doubtful that competition alone would adequately curb the tendency of insurance companies, HMOs, etc. to enroll only the healthiest individuals and decline those who—through no fault of their own—are less healthy, or to refuse to pay for needed but costlier treatments. Government programs and laws can owe more to politics than rational analysis of their real-world effects, and overregulation can impair delivery of care and unnecessarily increase costs.

No health care system devised by us fallible human beings will ever work perfectly. Determining exactly how to provide the best medical care currently possible while reducing and fairly distributing its costs is difficult, with no simple answers. We must continue to study and discuss what inevitably complex blend of free market principles, government involvement, ways for patients to take (as best they are able) financial and personal responsibility for their care, and other factors will bring us closest to that goal.

Dear Dr. Stratmann,

I enjoyed your article on health care and some of the issues it faces ("Does Medicine Have a Future?" Nov. 2013), which are often glossed over in SF. Health care is a hot-button issue for many today, and you explained many issues facing it without really wading deeply into the political debate, which I think was appropriate considering the premise of your article. One interesting issue I wish you had delved more deeply into is the obesity epidemic. You state that it is "partly due to poor nutritional habits and lack of exercise." I'm not saying that this is untrue, and you still have a valid point that poor choices made by individuals adds complexity to the health care situation. However, I have read some very interesting articles lately that describe many other potential factors in weight gain, such as sleep patterns, ambient temperature, stress, chemicals that disrupt the metabolism, light pollution, viruses (like Ad-36), and bacteria (such as Methanobrevibacter smithii). I've seen a few articles recently that discuss these issues and call into question the assumption that our weight problems are just thermodynamics. Daved Berreby's article, "The Obesity Era," on aeomagazine.com is a fairly comprehensive survey that discusses all the factors mentioned above. I don't think that a lengthy discussion like Berreby's would be appropriate for your article. However, these factors in the "obesity epidemic" point to the negative impact of technology on our society (and on our physical bodies). They also highlight how much medical research has yet to be done, meaning there is a lot of work for medical science going far into the future. I would have welcomed a brief discussion of this in your article.

Thanks, R. M. Ambrose Loma Linda, CA

The author responds:

Your comments touch nicely on reasons why unhealthy lifestyles are only partly responsible for the recent increased prevalence of obesity. At the level of society as a whole, poor dietary habits and unnecessarily reduced activity are indeed significant causes for this issue.

But as with other medical problems, whether a specific individual develops obesity can also be due to causes outside that person's control. Genetic, physiological, metabolic, environmental, and other factors as well as aging and concomitant health issues (e.g. those that limit activity, such as arthritis or cardiopulmonary disease) may collectively, in particular people, be significantly greater contributors to their obesity than merely what or how much they eat.

The task of physicians, nurses, dieticians, and other health care professionals is to counsel patients who are not obese about what they can do to maintain a healthy weight. When obesity is present the goal is to identify its causes as best as possible and formulate a treatment plan based on what the individual can do and what can be done via medical and, as a final resort, bariatric surgery. There is certainly a need for research to better identify the underlying mechanisms for obesity and improve its prevention and management. Perhaps these issues can be discussed further in a future Analog editorial.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Anthony Lewis | 372 words

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ANALOG SCIENCE FICTION AND FACT

367 words

TREVOR QUACHRI........................................ Editor

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